Month: January 2006

music

James Lipton recites K-Fed's PopoZao

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Even though this post is filed under “music,” PopoZao, Kevin Federline’s new soon to be hit single (because shit’s a hit if its played enough these days) should not be classified as music. Chris posted this MTV clip of K-Fed grooving to his own song at a sound board and while many in the blogosphere are full of schadenfreude about it, what the hell would you look like grooving to your own song at a sound board? I probably would look just as silly. A better thing to watch would be James Lipton reciting the words to this inane song on Conan.
In other related news, I love the K-Fed moniker because its the first non-hispanic usage of the “first initial first name, first syllable last name” type nickname I’ve seen in the entertainment world. K-Mart was the first in the sports world (A-Rod, I-Rod, K-Rod and F-Rod all came before him) and even though I only know of J-Lo in the show biz world, (P. Diddy does not count and not because he has a period instead of a dash, rather because Diddy is not short for Combs) K-Fed does break new ground. I’m mulling the switch to J-Lip as we speak.

tech

Comments are Shut Down Until Further Notice

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The spam barrage continues. I hope that by taking down the comments feature for a few days, the spambots will leave my little blog alone and I’ll be able to add comments back to my site. In the mean time, I am experimenting with a couple of different comment verification systems. I know that I’ve received less than 200 comments since my blog has been up but its not the amount, its the idea that someone can publicly respond to what I wrote. Now, I’ve had to change this because of fucking spammers. I hope every last comment spammer dies a gruesome death.

tech

Under Spam Attack

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My site is currently under a crazy comment spam attack. I have received over 1000 spam comments in the last 24 hours and if this continues, I am going to have to disable the comment feature which would fucking blow. All comment spammers should die a horrible death. As a short haired blond crazy woman named Susan Powter once said, “Stop the insanity!”

politics

State of the Onion

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This year both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fall on the same day. As Air America Radio pointed out, “It is an ironic juxtaposition: one involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a groundhog.”

Via Moeller

sports

Nikolay Valuev, aka the Beast from the East, aka the Russian Giant

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Nikolay Valuev is 7 feet tall and weighs 323 pounds. He’s also boxing’s tallest and heaviest champion (he controversially won the WBA heavyweight championship back in December, 2005) and punningly the newest next big thing to hit the boxing world.

Feel free to start the Andre the Giant comparisons now. While Nikolay reads Tolstoy and writes poetry to his wife, there is a big brew-ha-ha in Russia now as he supposed beat the shit out of a security guards that was hassling his wife about where she parked her car. You tell me – is he more Princess Bride Andre or WWF Andre? Regardless, he’s 43-0 and may be fighting in AC this year.

politics

"Kind of Muddled?" Try Indecipherable!

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This actual verbatim exchange between a citizen and our President comes from an appearance by Bush in Tampa on February 4, 2005 as he tried to save his Social Security Privitization plan:
WOMAN IN AUDIENCE: ‘I don’t really understand. How is it the new plan going to fix the problem?’
PRESIDENT BUSH: Because the — all which is on the table begins to address the big cost drivers. For example, how benefits are calculated, for example, is on the table. Whether or not benefits rise based upon wage increases or price increases. There’s a series of parts of the formula that are being considered. And when you couple that, those different cost drivers, affecting those — changing those with personal accounts, the idea is to get what has been promised more likely to be — or closer delivered to that has been promised. Does that make any sense to you? It’s kind of muddled. Look, there’s a series of things that cause the – – like, for example, benefits are calculated based upon the increase of wages, as opposed to the increase of prices. Some have suggested that we calculate — the benefits will rise based upon inflation, supposed to wage increases. There is a reform that would help solve the red if that were put into effect. In other words, how fast benefits grow, how fast the promised benefits grow, if those — if that growth is affected, it will help on the red.’

If you don’t believe that the leader of the free world could really say such gibberish, here is the support. Chalk up another point to the pre-senile dementia diagnosis.

Via Monty

tech

My NXT Robot

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Lego is currently developing an updated robot kit for their Mindstorms division called NXT and I am so pscyhed to get one. I have never built a robot before, though when I was a child I dreamt of doing so and even figured out all the pieces I needed to ad-hoc acquire. While I got some of the parts, I never got the tank tread that was needed for mobility and that in a sense stopped the development in its tracks. Now, many many years later, after reading the recent Wired aritcle about this project and seeing the demo on the Lego site, I for some reason have a burning desire to build my own robot. It comes out in the fall and I for one cannot wait until the leaves start a’fallin.

The really cool thing about the development process is how Lego has tapped the hardcore Mindstorms programming community for advice, testing and feedback which in turn is actually being incorporated into the product design. The original robot kit from 2000 was not that great but a lot of talented and smart people took those limited bits to amazing heights – sort of how we put a man on the moon with less computing power than what is in a regular cell phone. Now those same people are now working with Lego to ensure that the NXT kit is friggin fantastic. This is not an open source product and project though – Lego is keeping all proprietary data and knowledge and Lego is the one making the money here but that to me, and to the developers helping, is okay. Its better to have someone to turn to do, to own the factories, to handle packaging and shipping, etc. Sort of how RedHat sells Linux in a way. Everyone is just happy that the end product will be the best that it can be because the global knowledge base has been tapped in order to make it so. I have signed up to be a Lego Mindstorms NXT Pioneer and will find out some time in February whether or not I’m picked to write article, post entries and build robots as a beta tester. I am sure I have no chance, there are only 100 Pioneers, but as NY Lotto used to say, “Hey, you never know.”

music

Mr. Lawn Guyland Sets the Record

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Continuing on my recent kick of posting about LI, Billy Joel’s 11th MSG show breaks the record for most shows at MSG sold out on a single tour. The previous record, 10, was held by both Bruce Springsteen and the Grateful Dead. As a music fan and knowing the history of the Garden, I’m suitably impressed. Lawn Guyland’s home of rock n roll, WBAB, has some good info about the shows, the tour and other news about the Piano Man.

ramblings

Lawn Guyland History

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Newsday printed a cover that read “Welcome to Lawn Guyland” at the height of the Amy Fisher affair and I still am in love with that pronunciation – it helps me get peole to say Long Island the “correct” way. The Freeport Motel/Boatel, where she and Joey had a few of their illicit trysts, is around the corner from my grandparents’ house so whenever I visit them, I think of that magical time in LI history. It turns out the infamous trio have agreed to appear in TV reunion. I guess that since there were 3 different TV movies on the same night about this story, I’m not surprised that their reunion is televised – anything for a buck, eh?

After the jump, read the full text of a NY Times article about those movies.

Via Neu

Amy Fisher Story a Surprise Smash In 3 TV Movies

By BILL CARTER (NYT) 922 words

Published: January 5, 1993

Surpassing the expectations of network officials, each of the three made-for-television movies based on the Amy Fisher case and broadcast in the last week was a stunning success, and two of the three are likely to emerge as the most popular television movies of the season.

The NBC movie, which was broadcast on Dec. 28, had a 19.1 rating and was the highest-rated television movie of the season so far. The ABC movie, broadcast Sunday night, had a 19.4 in the overnight ratings and may top the NBC version’s when final figures are released today. The CBS movie, shown on Sunday at the same time as ABC’s, had a 15.8 overnight rating and is likely to be about the seventh-highest-rated movie of the season. (Each national ratings point represents 931,000 homes; overnight ratings are only from the top 28 cities, and each point represents 462,634 homes).

The average rating for a network show is about 12.

Executives from each network acknowledged yesterday that they were shocked by the strong showing for all three Amy Fisher movies, each of which told the story of how she shot the wife of the man she said was her lover. “I was stunned,” said Ruth Slawson, the senior vice president of movies for NBC. “I don’t know anyone in the business who wasn’t stunned.”

Never before had two television movies on the same subject competed head to head, and no subject had ever been covered in three separate television movies. “Like everyone else, I expected the two movies to split the audience Sunday night,” Ms. Slawson said. “I wasn’t sure how they would do after ours had been on, but I guess you could say Amy has become a cottage industry.”

And There’s More

Indeed, Ms. Fisher has been fodder for ratings-hungry programs all over television. (Last night, the tabloid syndicated magazine show “Hard Copy” ran a few moments from what it labeled an X-rated home video recorded by Ms. Fisher and a boyfriend before the shooting took place.) The CBS movie, called “Casualties of Love: The ‘Long Island Lolita’ Story” and starring Alyssa Milano, will be shown twice more this month on the USA cable channel. It will be the first time a network television movie has ever resurfaced that quickly on cable.

NBC has already been taking advantage of Ms. Fisher’s notoriety. The network’s weekly news magazine program “Dateline NBC” broadcast an interview with Ms. Fisher each of the past two weeks and scored the highest ratings in that program’s history. The first interview pushed “Dateline” to seventh place in the weekly ratings. It usually finishes about 45th.

“All of us perpetuated this,” Ms. Slawson said. “It became a media phenomenon.”

It has become common for network movie departments to seek to win the rights to the same well-publicized murder cases, especially if they involve some aspect of lurid sex. On several occasions, two networks have bought the same story and competed to get their version on first.

But this was the first case that brought all three networks into the action. NBC purchased Ms. Fisher’s side of the story for an undisclosed sum. CBS bought the rights to the story as told by Mary Jo Buttafuoco, the victim, as well as by her husband, Joey. Thus Mr. Buttafuoco was portrayed as Ms. Fisher’s adulterous lover in the NBC movie — “Amy Fisher: My Story,” starring Noelle Parker — and as an innocent victim of her obsession in the CBS version.

Many Viewpoints

The ABC version, called “The Amy Fisher Story” and starring Drew Barrymore, used multiple points of view without defining who was guilty and who wasn’t. Yet the ABC version may be the highest rated of all: a result, several television executives said, of the decision to cast a well-known actress, Drew Barrymore, in the role of Amy.

“ABC’s also had the most sex,” said one senior television executive, who spoke on condition of anonymity.

Nonetheless, executives could not easily explain why this story had such widespread appeal. Ms. Slawson said, “I don’t believe there was anything so unique or gripping to this story to make it that special,” though she did say that Amy’s age — 18 — seemed to be a factor in luring viewers. “Thematically, this is just another ‘fatal attraction’ story,” Ms. Slawson added.

It carried so much more interest, she said, because of the attention that surrounded the case from the first moment. “It helped that this was a New York story. It was constantly in the New York tabloids and those stories get picked up by the national tabloid television magazine stories.”

Timing Is Cited

The timing between the events and the movie was also unusually short because Ms. Fisher reached a plea bargain under which she went to prison for 5 to 15 years. “We didn’t have to wait for a long-drawn-out trial,” Ms. Slawson said. “It was a very fresh story. You also had the very fact that three networks were doing the same story. That was another way for people to keep talking about it.”
Ms. Slawson said she had serious reservations about the process through which Amy Fisher’s story became the hottest thing on American television. “I think it’s a really sad commentary about what people are interested in,” she said.

“It’s crazy,” she added. “It’s self-perpetuating. We all say we don’t want to keep on doing these true-crime movies but then these numbers come in and what choice do we have? Obviously the audience wanted to watch it, for whatever reason. I’m happy with the success of our own movie. But overall I’m not happy about the state of movies on television.”

Photos: The networks’ three Amy Fishers were, from the top, Noelle Parker (Shane Harvey/NBC), NBC, Alyssa Milano, CBS (CBS), and Drew Barrymore, ABC. (ABC)