A lot of folks are writing to ask how I like my new Pioneer DVR-810H — the unit that combines a TiVo with a DVD burner. I've been burning DVDs for a day and a half…and so far, I'm very glad I bought the thing. Still, it is not without its downsides. Here are some thoughts…

• You record shows on the TiVo and then you burn them to blank DVDs. You can put multiple programs on a DVD up to the capacity of the disk, and the machine will build a little menu on the DVD for you. The main way to get a show onto the TiVo is to record it off the air. Last night, I set my new TiVo to record a movie off cable. Then this morning, after it was recorded, I had the machine copy it to a DVD. Then, I erased the movie from the TiVo to free up space.
• The other way to get something onto the TiVo is to input it through the analog connection. I have a lot of things on old 3/4" videotapes so I hooked the output of my 3/4" player to the TiVo input, copied the shows over and then used the TiVo to copy them onto DVD. The resultant DVD has a picture quality only a teensy fraction below the original tape. You could input the signal from a Betamax, a VCR, a video camera or even another DVD player as long as it wasn't playing a copy-protected DVD.
• A home DVD burner like this one can only burn so much info to a DVD. If you want the top video quality, that means an hour. The next quality level down (a slower speed) will give you two hours. The next level down is three and so on, down to six hours. If you record a two-hour show at the top quality, you have to save it to two disks, and the machine will prompt you when to insert the second one. The speed at which you record a show onto the TiVo is the speed at which you have to burn the DVD. For instance, the movie this morning was 1:47 so I recorded it at the second level speed, the one that gets two hours onto a blank DVD. I could not have changed my mind and burned the DVD at a different speed.
• Obviously, we like the top quality. This makes it frustrating when a show is 62 minutes long. You either have to put the last two minutes on a second DVD or do the entire show at the second level speed.
• As we've mentioned here before, networks have gotten very sloppy about starting shows on time. Some start early, some start late. Ordinarily, if something's on that you simply must record, you pad the beginning and the end to make sure you get it. But this TiVo/DVD unit has no editing capability so if you start your recording five minutes early, what you burn to the DVD will have all that extra stuff at the beginning. If you record a film from Turner Classic Movies, you can't cut off the Robert Osborne intro. Eventually, I'm sure I'll get the software and hardware to do editing on my computer but for now, what you TiVo is what you get.
• Some folks have asked about getting a standalone DVD recorder without TiVo capability and linking it to TiVo when necessary. The advantage of the Pioneer DVR-810H is that its TiVo capability records a show off the air in digital format so it remains digital as it's transferred to the DVD. If you record on a separate TiVo and feed the output into a separate DVD burner, you're going from digital to analog and back to digital, and there will be some loss of quality in there. The TiVo also lets you build little libraries of stuff to burn to DVD as many times as you like. Mine holds 80 hours but that's at the lowest-quality speed. At the best speed, that's about 14 hours.
• I've also been asked about the price. The DVR-810H lists for $1,199 but can be purchased for $750 to $800 if you shop around the Internet. (By the way, here's a link to Pioneer's website about the machine. As you'll see, there's also a higher-end model.) You will also need to pay for the TiVo service. The machine comes with what they call "TiVo Basic," which is a stripped-down, bare bones version that is so simple as to be near-useless. They also give you a free 45-day trial of what they call "TiVo Plus," which is the next level up of TiVo service. I don't see how you can really use this machine without it. This will cost you $12.95 a month or $299 for "lifetime service." This refers to the life of the machine and cannot be transferred to the next TiVo you purchase. If you want to hook your TiVo (or TiVos) into a home network and make use of even more features, that's another $99. The TiVo website will tell you more. Blank DVDs run from a buck to about three bucks each, depending on whether you buy in bulk.

That's about everything that comes to mind so far. I'm going to do some experimenting with different speeds and with dubbing Beta and VHS tapes, and I'll report here after I do. I ordered 100 blank DVDs but I have a feeling I'm going to go through that many in a week. I've got a lot of old tapes, and there a number of good movies on TV in the next week or two.

This is great. William Saletan over at Slate has devised a little game you can play to find your candidate for the next presidential election. You'll need the latest edition of Macromedia Flash installed on your computer but you can get that over there. Go play Whack-a-Pol…and don't be surprised if, like me, you wind up with no one to vote for.

I haven't made up my mind about the Terry Schiavo case, except that I know too much of the public debate is directed by folks who don't have a clue as to the true medical condition of Ms. Schiavo. For a passionate defense of those who would keep her alive, read this piece in The Village Voice by Nat Hentoff. I'm not convinced he's right but he makes some good points.

If you're interested in how accurate the Reagans mini-series might have been (or still might be when Showtime airs it), here are articles by Eric Alterman and another by Timothy Noah.

And I am amused at a point that some are making about the outcry against the project. One of the big complaints of the far-right is that the film makes Reagan out to be insensitive to the plight of AIDS patients. But he would have been an even bigger hero to some in the far-right if he had been insensitive (or more insensitive) to the plight of AIDS patients.

There are reports (like this one) that say representatives of Iraq tried to make a last-minute deal to avert the U.S. invasion of their country but that the U.S. "rebuffed the overture." We may hear a lot more about this even though it seems unlikely that the Iraqi offer was sufficient. What I find troubling is this sentence in the story, referring to presidential spokesguy Scott McClellan…

McClellan refused to say whether the purported Iraqi effort to avert the war was brought to President Bush's attention.

It seems to me that if any sort of offer was made, even by agents whose authority was suspect, only one response is acceptable: That it was conveyed to George W. Bush and that he made the final decision not to pursue it.

It may well be that as a State Department rep is quoted as saying in the article, "We never received any legitimate or credible opportunity to resolve the world's differences with Iraq in a peaceful manner." That is entirely possible, maybe even probable. But if I were George W. Bush, I'd be royally pissed if someone decided to bypass me in that decision. I'm the Commander-in-Chief, let's remember. I would find the guy who decided to cut me out of that decision and fire him and anyone else who knew about it. If I'm about to send American men and women to war, knowing full well that some will come back maimed or not at all. A last-minute offer may be a ruse or a bluff but I'm the guy who ought to make that call.

And maybe he did, in which case he should be taking responsibility for it, right off the bat. One of the many reasons I wasn't a fan of Mr. Reagan was this notion that somehow, if things go wrong in the White House, we can't blame the president if he didn't know about it. That should never be an acceptable excuse. I doubt Bush will wind up making it in this case but there shouldn't even be the possibility that the President of these United States was "out of the loop" on such an important matter.

A lot of folks say that The Patriot Act and its curtailment of civil liberties have not been helpful in the war against people who plant bombs and fly planes into buildings. I don't know about that…but it seems to be working just fine to prosecute strip club owners. One suspects Mr. Ashcroft considers them the greater threat.

My pal (for longer than either of us can believe) Tony Isabella has a good column on inflation and the price of comic books. When we look at the downturn in our industry, where the definition of a "good seller" has gone increasingly down, we tend to talk a lot about distribution and retail access. But as Tony notes, the price of the product is a big factor, as well.

For comic fans: Here's a nice interview with long-time comic artist, Don Perlin. It's a nice overview of his career, and he even says something nice about Vince Colletta.

For about eight hours now, I've been playing with Pioneer's combination TiVo and DVD burner. This is a wonderful invention that will record a show off the air just like a plain ol' TiVo but it will also copy that show to a DVD-R or DVD-RW disc. You can also take your old tapes, import them into the TiVo and then copy them onto a DVD. I have a lot of old 3/4" U-Matic videotapes of TV shows I wrote in the seventies and eighties and I've started dubbing them over to DVDs since the tapes are starting to rot, plus they take up a lot of room. I also have a few things that are on Beta that I want to keep — and who knows how much longer my Betamax will hold out? So this is a cool thing.

Rummaging through my shelves, I just found a show I totally forgot I'd written. It was an episode of the Plastic Man cartoon show that only aired once — in prime-time on a Sunday night, opposite 60 Minutes and some blockbuster event on NBC. Our show was a preview of the new ABC Saturday morning cartoon lineup for 1979, co-starring an animated Plastic Man and an equally-realistic gent named Michael Young, who was then hosting a Sunday morning show called Kids Are People, Too. Plastic Man has an adventure which gets interrupted as Young introduces clips of that year's new ABC cartoon shows. There's also a long plug for a prime-time sitcom called Out of the Blue, which starred Jimmy Brogan and was cancelled around halfway through the first episode. The only thing I remember about the special I wrote is that its Nielsen rating was close to a negative number and at the time, I felt like the only human being on the planet who'd seen it. I may now be the only person in the world who has a copy of it, at least on DVD. Or wants one.

For around a quarter of a century, Walter O'Malley was the head honcho of The Los Angeles Dodgers. As owners go, he was more popular than Steinbrenner. But then, so is mange. O'Malley's family has set up a website about his life full of facts and figures and fotos. Of particular interest is a section of correspondence 'twixt O'Malley and various celebrities including Harpo Marx, Walt Disney, Frank Sinatra and Johnny Carson. And don't miss this letter from Milton Berle complaining about how he was treated at Dodger Stadium. Thanks to my old pal (since high school) Bruce Reznick for the pointer.

Wayne DeWald writes, "Mark, I hope you'll weigh in on The Reagans controversy" but I'm not sure I have anything to say that a lot of others haven't said. I've never been a fan of docu-dramas, especially those where the issues involved were still very much "in play," insofar as history is concerned. I didn't like the recent film that attempted to portray George W. Bush as John Wayne on 9/11. I doubt I would have liked this new one about the Reagans. But then, the actual content of the film is almost irrelevant, and I got the feeling that a lot of folks who weighed in on the content of the movie and claimed to have read the script or even viewed excerpts were bluffing, trying to avoid the charge that they were attacking or defending that which they had not seen.

Most of our past presidents exist in two forms, man and myth. Their partisans cling to the myths, not just out of denial but because the myth can be useful. Democrats sell the myth of John F. Kennedy, suggesting you should vote Democratic to resurrect the glory days of Camelot. Republicans put down their opponents by comparing Democrats to the mythic Reagan, not the real guy. To me, the real guy was either hopelessly out of touch with what his administration was doing with regard to foreign affairs and things like Iran-Contra, or was lying and shredding the Constitution. I have a friend who somehow believes Reagan was the former, but also a great president. I don't understand that except that we all have a powerful need to believe we have Superman in the Oval Office and some of us are willing to ignore a lot of reality to believe that. A lot of Republicans — especially lately, defending Bush tax cuts — insist Reagan never raised taxes. Or if forced to admit he did, they suggest that evil Democrats held Nancy at gunpoint to get him to do so…and by the way, Reagan gets all the credit for subsequent economic good news. I don't think any president, Reagan or Clinton included, deserves as much personal credit or blame for the economy during his watch as they often get. But when you're campaigning, it's useful to claim or assign responsibility.

I have no idea how slanted or wrong the CBS mini-series might have been. The examples of bias cited by its critics seemed rather mild — or, at least, nowhere near as bad as they might have been. I think Reagan's record has a lot of embarrassing and unethical blots that his fans are rabid to deny…but I also think that on a human level, a very strong case can be made that this was the wrong time to exploit/depict the former Chief Exec and his First Lady at all. A wholly-positive portrait that didn't mention the negatives would just be propaganda. But CBS should have known that including any negatives would incur the wrath of those trying to sell the myth, abetted by those who believe you don't speak ill (even the tiniest bit) of an Alzheimer's sufferer and the woman taking care of him.

The main problem of course is that by giving in and dumping the movie elsewhere, CBS has empowered a certain mob mentality and probably scared off a lot of more worthy efforts. Somewhere, there's a writer with an idea for a valuable and important docu-drama who won't bother to pitch it — or won't find producers receptive — because it might spark controversy. That's a loss for us all, but the parties celebrating their "win" over CBS probably won't see it that way.

Here's something I don't fully understand. Well, I guess I understand it in a pragmatic sense but not in a philosophical sense. A man named Gary Leon Ridgway just admitted that he killed 48 women. Let me write that out the long way for you: Forty-eight women. The courts have just made a plea bargain deal with him that will spare him the death penalty and commit him to life in prison with no chance of parole.

Now, if you're against the death penalty in all cases, that's probably the way it ought to work. But if you're not, and most people are not, this should be an outrage of the highest order. If a judge looked at a confessed murderer of 48 human beings and said, "I sentence you to life in prison," death penalty advocates would be demanding the judge's resignation and circulating recall petitions. If 48 murders don't get you the death penalty, what should? Maybe we ought to wait until the guy does something real nasty.

This article on the case suggests that the prosecutors made the deal because their county is short on funds and could not afford a costly trial. I think it would be interesting to poll the residents of that county and ask them (a) if they believe in the death penalty and (b) if so, if they believe in it enough to kick in a few bucks more in taxes to enforce it in a case like this.

Ridgway is white. I wonder if there'd be an outcry over the sentence if he were black. I wonder if he'd even have been able to make this deal if he were black. Do we think maybe that one day soon, that very same court is going to order the execution of a black man who killed only one human being, and who possibly had a little better reason than that he wanted to get out of paying his hookers for sex? Or is it that since Ridgway's victims were mostly prostitutes, that's not like killing 48 real human beings?

I'm not arguing here for any point other than that the death penalty in this country is enforced in an arbitrary, inconsistent manner. Its advocates advocate it in an arbitrary, inconsistent manner. I am enormously conflicted on the rightness of the government taking lives and I guess I can see the case for it if the implementation rises above questions of race and budget constraints…and of course, it would be nice if our court system did a better job of convicting only those who actually committed the crimes. In the absence of that, I find myself tilting towards the notion that there should be no death penalty, not necessarily because that's the right position but because it's the practical one.

A few days ago on this site, I posted the following line, just on a whim…

Is the economy really on a rebound? I'll believe that when more people start using Paypal to donate money to this site.

Posted it. Didn't think much of it. Thought it might net a few more bucks which I could use to pay the costs of maintaining this site and buy cat food for the Back Yard Menagerie. If there's any left after I do that, I sometimes snag a few oddments from the land of eBay. The spots on this and my other site that ask for donations (or for you to use our links when you buy from Amazon) provide a steady trickle of loot that I view as applause. I sure didn't expect my best 3-day period ever in donations.

Actually, I got about the same number of "tips" I usually get but the amounts jumped way up, including one for $200 (thank you), one for $300 (thank you, thank you) and one for $500 (thank you, thank you, thank you). And thank you to the folks who sent ten or twenty dollars, too. I know when people say "it isn't the money, it's the principle," they usually mean, "it's the money." But in this case, it's the principle. If nothing else, these donors have erased for now the occasional guilt twinge I have when I stop doing paying work and spend an hour or three fixing up my sites, writing stuff and tweaking HTML codes. I shall continue to do these things.

Brian Madigan called my attention to this one. Celebrity astrologer Joyce Jillson prints in her column little predictions for famous folks. Not long ago, she printed one for John Ritter: "Having a Virgo sun sign helps keep his career ticking." And of course, it came out the day after his heart stopped beating.

Did the Bush administration take us to war by claiming that Iraq was an "imminent threat?" Ben Fritz over at Spinsanity says no. Joshua Micah Marshall over at The Hill says yes.