Daniel Premo’s Brain
Fox has the Yankees-Red Sox game today. Jeanne Zelasko has a different haircut, just like every year. You just know that there are a couple Fox executives somewhere deciding what her hair should look like.
But really almost everything about Fox’s baseball coverage sucks. Kevin Kennedy is scary. Tim McCarver is freaking old. Joe Buck is okay. I like the graphics. But the music is a little over-the-top. And if I see that talking baseball explaining a slider to me one more time I’m going to yack.
ESPN has started this new thing where PTI airs in its normal time slot from 5:30 to 6 PM, but instead of ending the show at 6, Wilbon says, “See you in six minutes.” Then SportsCenter starts, recaps the latest big thing, previews the 90 (ugh) minute show, then says, “Coming up after the break, PTI.”
So at about 6:12 we see the last two minutes of PTI. Stat Boy actually points out mistakes before 6 PM. I haven’t seen the 6:30 ESPNews replay of PTI, but I’m curious to see how it ends there. Perhaps the final two minutes are just tacked on the end of the first thirty.
I never published my massive ESPN post, but it’s still saved and I still think about it sometimes. In it, I mention how basically every show on ESPN at one time or another has tried to emulate PTI, most noticeably SportsCenter. I did not enjoy when they brought in people like Mitch Albom and Dan LeBatard to give op-ed pieces. I don’t think anyone else did, either, or they would have stuck around. There used to be head-to-head stuff on specific sports, but “Fact or Fiction” seems to have evolved out of that, which is much less confrontational but still entertaining to a point.
Moving the final two minutes of PTI to 6:12 appears to be a very weak attempt by ESPN to get people to watch ninety minutes of SportsCenter. At 6:14 I turned the channel.
For a while now I’ve said that I don’t watch regular television programming anymore because I’m turned off by the need to watch every week on a schedule, and that my interests have turned to sports and news.
As of the last two years or so, my habits have expanded.
I mean, I catch MTV now and then, and MTV seems to cater to my schedule disdain because they often show, say, this week’s The Real World at 9:30 PM on Tuesday, and they’ll show the previous three episodes, in order, starting at 8. It’s great. You can watch once a month and never miss a thing.
To be honest, I also watched a marathon of the entire Las Vegas season (had to record the last couple episodes) and watched the Paris season every week, but at that time I was watching a lot of stuff every week. The latest thing I enjoyed was Inferno 2.
Back to now. X-Play. It used to be called Extended Play, and it started on TechTV. I have posted about TechTV before. Back in my senior year of college I would watch Call For Help on TechTV with Morash. It was very dorky, and most of it was stuff that wasn’t new to me. But about once a week there was something interesting that I had never seen before, and even the stuff that was familiar was attractive because programming like that was available nowhere else.
I remember watching Extended Play when it was new (during senior year) and Adam Sessler was the host. I remember thinking how awful the show was. Then a few months ago I realized that I enjoy the program, and I respect its opinions. At some point (maybe when they changed the name), X-Play added Morgan Webb as Adam’s co-host. You might have heard of Morgan when Madonna’s website got hacked a couple years ago — one of the hackers posted a marriage proposal to Morgan Webb on Madonna.com. Also, Morgan was one of Maxim’s 100 most beautiful women or something.
Now because of X-Play I find myself watching other G4 shows. I can’t stand Cheat!, but Attack of the Show is sometimes bearable and there is a drift racing show that I find interesting if for nothing else its unique content. I’ve never seen G-Phoria, but I’d like to.
With the praise, I have to bash a little. The other game review shows on G4 suck. All of them. X-Play is the only good one.
I’ve been working on a post called “ESPN Hardcore” for days. It’s so long and it’s taking so much thought that I’m thinking about breaking it up.
It’s occurred to me that the Trifecta may be an attempt to address some of the issues I have with ESPN, but I don’t really like the Trifecta. So I’m stuck in the mega-post on the “solution” part. Right now my solution sounds suspiciously like Trifecta, but I dont’ like how that’s turned out, so …
I’m still working on it.
This November, Microsoft will release the new Xbox.
This Thursday, MTV will air a half hour program to present the new Xbox to the public for the first time.
Look for the new Xbox to be smaller, silver, and offer an optional hard drive. Controllers will likely be wireless by default. I expect that Xbox 1 games will play on the new system, just like PS1 games play on the PS2.
The name of the new console almost certainly will be Xbox 360.
The PS3 won’t come out until 2006, probably May at the earliest.
The new Nintendo system? No one is sure yet.
As you might recall, the PS2 came out in fall 2000, and the Xbox and Gamecube came out in fall 2001. The PS2 got a lead that it never gave up in this generation of consoles. Microsoft is betting that the because of the head start, the last console war was effectively over before it started.
Let me get this straight — as part of the Trifecta, Baseball Tonight gets twenty measley minutes … but Sportscenter gets ninety?
Regarding Sportscenter: First off, they throw in stuff like WNBA draft news to fill ninety minutes. Second, yesterday at 6 PM before the first commercial break, around 6:15, they previewed a story about the new Buffalo Bills quarterback, JP Losman. I wanted to see the story, but for all I knew, it was an hour away!
Regarding BBTN: I want the full hour. I want to see a multiple hit outline of every game that day. Both leagues, top to bottom. I want to see one or more of the following: Harold Reynolds, John Kruk, Peter Gammons, and Tim Kurkjian. And preferably Karl Ravich. Larry Bowa’s okay, but I really don’t want him unless he’s next to Kruk.
By the way — whatever happened to Dave “Soup” Campbell?
Regarding “The Trifecta:” I don’t care about Between the Lines. I don’t want it for twenty minutes, I don’t want it for sixty minutes, and I sure as hell don’t want it cutting into my BBTN. And I don’t even know what the last part of the Trifecta is. NBA 2Nite? Who cares. Give me the Rockies recap. And give me 6-10 Web Gems every night. Five isn’t enough, and everybody knows it.
In Summer 2003 I talked up a TV show: the CGI Spider-Man cartoon on MTV. It was hot. I loved it. It was cel-shaded. That means it looked like a traditional cartoon, but it was done with computers. The first time I saw that effect done on TV was the ship on Futurama. Nowadays you mostly see it in video games like Jet Set Future Radio on Xbox and The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker on Gamecube.
So anyway, sometime between Summer 2003 and … two days ago — let’s split the difference and call it Spring 2004 — I spotted a Spider-Man: The New Animated Series DVD at Wal-Mart. Only problem was, it contained only three episodes. I found another disc containing an additional three episodes. But I wanted the whole first season.
I have to interject here. If you go to the archive page and read my 2003.07.25 23:34 post [UPDATE: link], you’ll see that I spoke about the show and actually said, “When they put out a DVD, I’m gonna snap it up.”
So I was at K-Mart two days ago and came across this. The whole first season, two disc set, audio commentary, special features, widescreen. I nearly soiled myself right there. $19.99. The three-episode discs were like eight bucks a pop. So I snatched it up. I give it five stars out of five.
So I just looked at some real old Historical Context entries that are sitting at the really old site. I can’t get over how … good … they are. They’re short and there are multiple entries per day. I talk about drinking coffee, waking up early, and studying for exams.
Nowadays my entries seem more like articles. Well, they are more like articles. I plan them at least a few minutes in advance, sometimes a few days in advance. They’re longer. They’re … less personal? Is that possible?
The Olympics are on. I’d say the best web site to read about the Olympics is NBC’s page. It’s so strange … the Internet allows us to take in information as it occurs; Yet I personally avoid pages like ESPN.com and CNN.com because I don’t want to read the results of Olympic events before I see them on TV. During the next Olympics or even the 2012 games, Americans may be allowed to view on-demand clips of event finals before they are shown on NBC. But when you’re at work, you might not want to spend two hours or even five minutes streaming that race to your computer.
This really brings up several interesting conflagrations: Sports as both news and entertainment, and the damned frustration that no matter where on earth the Olympics are held, the time of day is inconvenient for somebody.
First, sports. When it’s news, we want to find out about it immediately. Whether it’s a political election or a major event in a war or the latest on a hurricane, we don’t want to wait to see it on TV; we want the results right now, even if it means that we have to read them.
On the other hand, when it’s entertainment, we want to see it with our own eyes. If your friend tells you how The Village ends, you’ll poke their eyes out. You’ll record tonight’s episode of 24, but again, you don’t want to know the surprise ending in advance. The same applies to books, whatever.
And then you’ve got sports, which are mostly entertainment, but are covered more or less as news. Some people will record their alma mater’s bowl game and refuse to read or hear anything about it until they sit down and watch the tape themselves. But then some people will get on the Internet and watch the box score numbers update live. Here there is a distinction based on the importance of that day’s match. But I think a lot ties into personal preference. Personally, I would rather watch a gamecast of the numbers of the Yankees in the playoffs than record the game and watch it later.
The importance of the event relates directly to the Olympics. Also, the Olympics serve as the ultimate example of why you might want to watch an event later than read about it live. If it’s a baseball game, you might miss the broadcast of the game that is played while you’re at work, but hey — you can catch a game this weekend or next weekend or even Wednesday night. You might not see another World Series game until next year. Or another bowl game. And the Olympics … you won’t see them for another four years.
So Olympics seem to be more like entertainment than other sports, but in a kind of backwards way. Just like you wouldn’t want to read ahead of time that Rachel and Ross got back together, you might not want to read ahead that Paul Hamm won the individual all-around gymnastics gold medal. One is weekly fiction, the other is quadrennial nonfiction. Well, sports, anyway.
Oh … was I going to say something about how someone, somewhere is screwed because the Olympics are held just far enough away from their timezone? I don’t think any additional commentary is needed on that one.
I found the AC charger. Turns out I took a suitcase and a backpack to Buffalo. I put the charger in the backpack for the trip home, and never took it out. Dammit.
Spider-Man really just gets better and better every week. Even if MTV is only showing one new episode per week.
I downloaded and installed Mozilla. I’ve got 1.4 running, but I couldn’t get Firebird 0.6 to work on my system. It freezes on launch. Version 1.4? … It’s good, but all I hear is how quick it is … for me, IE is quicker. Hopefully when Firebird finally goes gold (probably as Mozilla 1.6) it will compete with IE’s speed on my machine.
Let me hit upon MTV’s Spider-Man cartoon one more time.
It seems to be getting better. I originally said that it was very good, but maybe not excellent. Now … I think I can say that it’s excellent. Today I caught last week’s episodes (I missed them because I was busy in B-lo) and tonight’s new episodes. It’s hot shizzle. They’re showing episodes out of order, and I sort of assumed that would happen from the start. I think the plan was to put out some on-par episodes while people adjusted to/got their socks blown off by the technology, and then to cue up the really impressive episodes. I liked the Lizard episode from last week, but I thought tonight’s stuff was top notch. Maybe it was just the whole MJ thing … I don’t know; everything is awesome. There’s so much more depth than you’d find on a Saturday morning cartoon. Again people are getting killed, there is actual relationship exploration, things aren’t always simple … when they put out a DVD, I’m gonna snap it up.
Short Take: Have I mentioned Doggy Fizzle Televizzle before? Some of the skits are a little weak (like the Braided Bunch), but most of them are well worth watching, so all in all I’ve enjoyed every episode I’ve seen. It’s on Sundays, right before Who’s Got Game … There’s a guy on this show whose nickname is White Chocolate (He’s a white guy) … Once he’s off the show, can we all (and by we all, I mean Western Civilization) just pretend that he never existed?
