television

I watched a couple of movies over the weekend where Macs were prominently featured, "Independence Day," which holds up better than you might think, and "Office Space," which gets funnier with time, and with every viewing.

(BTW, I watched "Office Space" in HD on my DVR. Not on Blu-ray yet, suckas. More on that in another post, but the general rule of thumb is, no format has arrived until "Office Space" has arrived on it.)

Both of these were pre OS X of course, so the screens had our pal the Chicago font prominently on display. 

Neither movie featured the System 8 bomb, but if you remember the days of the Power PC transition from System 6 to 7, and 7 to 8, we all saw it plenty. Mac was wall-to-wall crashes for a couple years BS (Between Steve).

I bring this up because neither movie had the Macs acting much like Macs. They basically used some kind of animation playing on the computer screen, or composited into it, that allowed the designers to make the machine do what they wanted it to -- without being limited by what applications or behaviors were actually available.

You certainly see this with Windows machines too, on shows and movies everywhere you turn. Clearly identifiable machines, doing things clearly not happening in any real application. Or doing ridiculous things like "enhancing" parking lot security tapes to read license plates or something. Sorry bro, if the pixels ain't there, they ain't there. 

"House" is one of my favorite shows, and they're sponsored by both Apple and Dell. You see plenty of monitors from both companies, but rarely see applications do anything. And no matter how many Macs you see, there aren't any meaningful Mac apps in the medical world, so if you see software at all, it's going to be on Windows.

But think about something like a James Bond movie with all these crazy overlays and colors. It's like those computer virus movies in the 80s, before most of us had actually seen or used a computer, and before we learned that the worst that most viruses do is load your machine up with porn.

Although you remember the Love Bug? I may not have the name of it exactly right, but it basically sent a message that said "I love you" to everyone in your contact book. My wife was working with a lot of folks in the Army Corps of Engineers at the time, and it was pretty funny. "Hey, I don't love you. Ha ha ha. Wait -- it's not that I don't love working with you...or not that I don't LIKE you...just not that...ha ha ha...just not that way." I sympathize, but I'm still not buying that a virus on a floppy is going to start dropping satellites from the sky.

And for that matter, have you seen the ridiculous things that people supposedly find on the internet? There's a lot of Hollwyood OS going on there too. They're just making up the kind of things that are online, and the ease of finding them. It's just not so. 

Mike Cohen made a very interesting post on commercials and product placement. I commented on it there, so won't repeat it here. So when he began by mentioning "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" – which I like a lot – I was reminded of a recent episode where the actor Brian Austin Green stepped out before the show began in his character costume and makeup, and announced that Dodge was sponsoring that episode. I liked this a lot too. It took what can be a very cynical arrangement and put it front and center, where we could evaluate it ourselves. Of course it also helped underscore the Dodge presence in the show. Now I was looking for it!

Terminator's approach was pretty straightforward: just an extra truck in the show.

(Mike mentions exasperation with new models. My exasperation is that virtually EVERY vehicle on TV, new or old, is spotlessly clean. No way, man. On the other hand, the first use I saw of a car sponsoring an episode was on "Alias," a show with the distinction of blowing itself up and starting with a new story every season. (The went at least one too many.) There, the gleaming new surface was played as sinister. And in last season's premiere of "Heroes" (a show that has really, truly hit the rocks I'm afraid), a high-school cheerleader received a "sponsored by" car as a graduation gift.

But there have been examples that are far more extreme, and the Writer's Guild has been upset about it for years. In a June letter to the FCC, "the western division of the Writers Guild of America called for real-time notification whenever product placement occurs in a scene. It said a text message, or crawl, should appear at the bottom of the screen alerting viewers to the fact that a paid ad has appeared in the program.

"Since crawls are used with relative frequency, and viewers are accustomed to this practice, such a crawl would be no more intrusive than the warnings required for pharmaceutical ads or the network identifiers, or 'bugs,' that are now a mainstay of our TV visual field," said division President Patric Verrone."

Is he on crack? Because I have to tell you, that struck me as really, truly stupid, and genuinely offensive. Do they think that I don't know about product placement? More important, do they think I care about it one way or another because THEY do? Do they not know that we don't like crawls and animated bugs? Fooey on 'em.

The guild has been insisting on a code of conduct that governs how they can be pressed into service as advertising copy writers since at least 2005. Look, writers are paid to write. They have a long list of network instructions about what they can and can't write, frequently making changes on a scene-by-scene basis on the day of shooting. I don't see how being told what to write isn't part of the job. People on every job get told by bosses to do things they don't like, or think makes the boss look like an idiot. You suck it up and do it anyway. That's why they call it "work."

Actors may sometimes have a legitimate beef, noting that they typically get paid for product endorsements. Among the issues in the looming actor's strike is a demand for actors to have some say in the matter, especially when they're being paid for straight-up offscreen commercial endorsements for competing products. I also think their suggestion for exposing product placements can be the right one: announcing it up front, just the way Fox did, and others do.

I still think the "individual endorsements" argument is weak. There are very, very few character-specific placements – one notable exception being TNT's "The Closer," another show I like, but whose main character is frequently the only one eating Keebler cookies, or the one with the T-mobile phone, ringer always turned on. In general, though? Products are placed in the shows, and woven throughout. Actors are not typically the target of the placements, or the sole ones executing the plan.

I've enjoyed the main placement for Sci Fi's "Eureka," now on mid-season hiatus, Degree antiperspirant. The placement is very, very much front and center, in two directions. One is that there are Degree logos spread around in creative ways, such as on the jackets of scientists in the lab. This plays into Eureka-specific ads running during commercial breaks touting Degree as hyper-engineered by geniuses in Eureka.

The writers of Eureka host their own blog, which has some great stuff on it. One of the truly great entries in September 2008 came from Eric Wallace. It's a long entry, and worth quoting from at length.

It all began way back in October 2007 when the Sci Fi Channel announced to the Eureka staff that 1) we would have an official commercial sponsor this season, one that was kicking in a lot of dough and would therefore 2) require tons of product placement throughout Season Three. We were also told that 3) ONE EPISODE in Season Three would have to incorporate a storyline in which the actual product HAD to save Eureka somehow, or at the very least, be INDISPENSABLE to Carter's Act 5 solve.

Oooooookay…

That product turned out to be Degree Absolute Protection For Men (deodorant) and "Here Comes the Suns" (originally entitled "Little Miss Sunshine") would become that episode.

And how did the staff feel about writing an episode of Eureka under so many pre-existing conditions? Well, on the one hand… Degree money meant a higher budget, which would hopefully translate into a better-looking show. On the other hand, there was the danger that this much product integration could throw our story off balance. Needless to say, great care was taken along the way during this one. Never before has any episode of our show been so scrutinized on all levels.

I'd be lying if I didn't say it wasn't just a bit nerve racking. But, man… it was also fun as heck, too.

When Showrunner Charlie Craig asked for volunteers to write this episode, there wasn't exactly a huge show of hands. In fact, there was dead silence. Except for me.

Along the way we got tons of Network notes about the "Degree"-ness of things. The funniest one involved the ending. Originally Carter and Zane used a spray-on Degree deodorant to protect themselves from the heat in Act 5. However, it was then pointed out that Degree is a roll on. So the spray quickly got changed to a roll-on-esque fireproof goo.

Once we had come to terms with the "Degree-ness" of things, there was another challenge to tackle: what was the biggest, best story we could tell? If we had extra money, then let's spend it. Concepts involving blowing up the sun quickly appeared, but even we thought that was too big, so we ultimately settled on a little girl's class project that creates a second sun.

A couple of things to note. One is that Eric has his head screwed on right. The word comes down that this is the way it is, so he gets it done. The other is that he made sure that the extra money was used to raise production values, by telling a story that was going to make more money to produce. Eric goes on to tell about the last minute changes to the script to accommodate the notes – quite a tale, so be sure to check it out.

A funny quote about the whole thing: "It's less about stopping you from sweating, but more about saving the world," says Blake Callaway, Sci Fi's VP-brand marketing.

Which means that there's a vice president more or less responsible for product placement.

Eureka has spun off all of this marketing energy into a "Made in Eureka" mini-site, largely devoted to selling obviously fictional products, presented with tongue firmly in cheek. This is part of a pitch for a cell phone built into your hand: "Talk to the hand."

The little bubble there is what I got when I tried to find the product in my zip code. Pretty funny...although my IQ was measured at 170...although that was when I was much younger. I'm much less smart now, I'm certain of it.

Needless to say, as is the case with just about everything, some people don't find this funny. A coalition of 23 consumer groups is pressuring the FCC to come down even harder than the writers want, on the grounds that product placement is that "[t]he hijacking of content by marketers...threatens public health."

Now THAT's offensive. It trivializes the work of consumer advocates everywhere by overstating what doesn't actually threaten anyone at all as far as I can tell – certainly not public health. This foolishness make it easier to dismiss anyone who, say, protests fouled water or poorly designed air bags or alcohol addiction or [insert your favorite cause here] as a threat to public health. Those are. Nothing that happens with marketing in a TV show is.

Here's why product placement isn't going away: $2.9 billion in revenue in 2007, on track to be $3.1 billion in 2008. (Quoted from the same LA Times article cited above.) Over the past 2 years, revenues are up roughly 50%! There are now dozens of agencies specializing in product placement. Google has a short list in their business directory. (Did you know they even had a business directory? Much more helpful than a raw search return.)

With this much money at stake, these agencies are being called on to provide the same kind of audience measurement data that programmers and networks are. But because product placement is more varied, and can be more fleeting, the measurement is much more refined. ITVX, "Measuring the Evolution of Product Placement," doesn't do placements, they just measure 'em, with an amazing variety of metrics – including the ability to predict recognition and response to specific placements, and equivalent value of a product placement to a straight ad buy.

They recently featured the placement of the children's game toy Simon on The Family Guy. I'm not sure "Simon" is even being sold anymore, but their analysis tools offer a remarkable insight into where this is all going. Check it out.

(You'll also see "Top Design" and "Dancing with the Stars" featured. I could do a whole entry on product placement in non-scripted television, where it has been going on for decades, and far more pervasive than anything in narrative television..)

You'll click on the link for the Play Report, which will open a player window with frame-by-frame analysis of the "presence and clarity" of the placement, integration, the awareness it generates, its equivalent dollar value, and more. Seriously, one of the coolest things I've seen on the web in years.

Below is the right half of the player. You can see the clip, the player controls, and, notably, the cumulative value of the segment, updated in real time as the clip plays. You really have to see it.

Here's the left half of the player, which is a bit more technical. You can see what it's doing in general, but note the timeline at the top of the window. You get a graphic representation of exactly where in the clip the placement exists and doesn't, and how "big" the placement is.

Once again, seeing this in motion, in real time, or stepped through frame by frame, will make your jaw drop.

There are also now news outlets in addition to ITVX that cover product placement, including Product Placement News (catchy, no?) and Brandchannel.com, which tracks not only product placement but (surprise, surprise) brand placement as well. They recently posted the Brandcameo Product Placement Awards which sometimes even noted especially annoying placements in both TV and film. The Film Whore Award, for example, went to the Sex and The City movie. Gotta love that -- although only 900-ish people voted, so not exactly statistically significant. Of course, these are people who do product placement for a living. If THEY say it's annoying, it probably is.

Brandchannel.com is run by Interbrand, "Creating and Managing Brand Value" with offices in 40 countries.

Big, big business, friends.

I've also noted a trend for product placements within ads themselves. For example, our pals at Dodge Ram Tough who sponsor Sarah Connor? Their ads on NBC are sponsored BY NBC, who promotes their shows withing the Ram Tough ads, offering a chance to win a truck if you watch a given show.

Taco Bell has been promoting baseball's World Series on Fox, with the promise of a free taco for everyone in America after the first base was stolen in their "Steal a base. Steal a taco" award. No kidding either. There are rules of course, but they're no big deal, and they really do result in a free taco. Which means that every story about the World Series the next morning included a mention of Taco Bell.

Dr. Pepper has been in on the act for a while. They've promised a free can of Dr. Pepper for everyone in America in the year that the "new" album by Guns and Roses, "Chinese Democracy," promised since 1994. Needless to say, nearly every mention of the record includes a mention of Dr. Pepper. The stories also mention Best Buy, which is the only place you'll be able to buy "Chinese Democracy."

For a wonderful example of the whole machine in motion, check Billboard magazine's story on the album release. That's all the headline says it's about, but toward the end: "We're waiting to hear about 'Chinese Democracy' just like all the other GNR fans," Dr Pepper VP of marketing Tony Jacobs tells Billboard. "But if the rumors are true, we're putting the Dr Pepper on ice."

Our boy Axl Rose has apparently been having plastic surgery in his free time.

Before:

After:

Not that I have Axl's ear the way I used to, but I highly recommend getting back to the music business, my friend. Hey, and who ever knew that the music business would be the HEALTHY alternative?

By the way, the new AC/DC album, "Black Ice," is available exclusively through Wal-Mart and Sam's Club. It debuted at number one this week (October 28, '08 as I write this) with over 787,000 copies, the first time AC/DC has ever occupied the top spot in the US. Guess how many times Wal-mart has been mentioned in stories about the record, the band and the sales. Wal-mart's own press release on the subject notes that overall music sales in the store were up for the first time in a while, as were clothing sales to young men. The system is working. Stay tuned for AC/DC themed games for your favorite console, also available exclusively at Wal-mart.

Aside from misguided watchdog groups and guilds, there are plenty of viewers who don't like how visible these product placements are. Sorry kids, that's the way it goes. Not just for TV either, but for movies too. At the other end of the spectrum sits another favorite movie, "Repo Man." In it, every product had a generic name on a white label, and a bar code – that's it. See Emilio Esteves, below, with the can labeled "Beer."

Your "Sex and the City" ridiculous extremes notwithstanding, product placements have at times played a critical role, especially in independent productions that are truly strapped for cash.

Remember "Longtime Companion"? It was one of the first movies to treat gay couples as couples, not hustlers or closeted timebombs waiting to explode. The title refers to the euphemism used in obituaries when one member of the couple passed away. Although the movie was made in 1990, it was set in the early 80s when the New York Times refused to use the word "gay" and President Reagan refused to use the word AIDS. Both eventually came around of course, but the early 80s were a long hard ride into visibility.

As the first movie to treat homosexuality in a non-exploitive manner, and to deal with AIDS at all, funding was an absolute nightmare. The producers couldn't find one single vendor willing to step up and help pay for the thing with a product placement...until Miller Lite. When the bottles showed up in the movie, crowds in theaters literally cheered.

"Longtime Companion" was nominated for an Oscar, and won the audience prize for drama at Sundance. I don't especially care how you feel about homosexuality. I love the story of product placement coming to the rescue.

I'm all for it, especially when done creatively, even for fun. And even when it's ham-handed and boneheaded, it's no big deal. Unless you're one of the parties buying ads or taking the money, in which case it's a very very big deal.

The move "Once" was one of my favorites from 2007, and against all odds, a song from this lo-budget indie WON the best song award. It led to the most magical moment I've seen in over 35 years of avid Oscar watching. Too bad you're never going to see it. It only aired ONCE, and Oscar is trying to make sure that you never see it again.

"Once" is the story of two musicians who accidentally develop an intimacy that ultimately, very gently, pushes them back to their previous loves. It's sweet and beautiful, and has GREAT music. Hence the Oscar nom and win.

Among the reasons the movie itself felt so fresh is that the two lead actors are actually musicians who've never acted before. Glenn Hansard is a member of The Frames, another member of whom made his directing debut with the movie. Marketa Irglova, a classically trained Czech emigre, plays a...classicly trained Czech emigre. The Oscar-winning song is "Falling Slowly," and was written together by both the actors and the characters. Check it out on YouTube while you're waiting for Netflix to deliver Once to your doorstep. You HAVE to see this DVD.

When they won the Oscar, you've never seen two more surprised or grateful people in your life. And in typical Oscar fashion, they cut to commercial after Glenn's speech, and before hers. Grrrrr.....

Coolest Oscar moment EVER: host Jon Steward comes back from commercial AND BRINGS HER BACK OUT to give HER speech. It was an amazing speech, and the audience went nuts over the whole thing. It was no wonder that the whole thing, both speeches and Jon putting them together was YouTubed all over the place.

No wonder Oscar made them yank it down. This is the same industry that fought home releases believing FIRMLY that it would be the death of the movies. They fought rentals because it would undercut the money they started to make from home sales.

And here we are. While rentals boom, home sales are now BIGGER than box office sales...which are actually bigger than ever, and still trending upward.

SEE??? The more people can see good movies, they more they WANT good movies.  Even though plenty of movies bite (like books, music, TV, etc.), people find their way to good ones, and go to theaters hoping for more.

This was the lowest rated Oscar telecast since Nielsen started tracking it in 1973. You think that if people could see a moment of such overwhelming joy and surprise that they might tune in next year hoping for more? The history of movies says ABSOLUTELY ENTIRELY YESSSSS!!!!

And yet, they're determined that it air only ONCE, and you never get to see it. It will have the opposite effect than they hope....which, if the music business is capable of learning anything (still up for debate), is learning right now. Guard the gates, and guess what? PEOPLE DON'T GO THROUGH THE GATE.

While they don't have the video, at least Oscars.com has the speech in print. It doesn't give you ANY of the flavor, but worth checking out despite Oscar not wanting you to to ever get any of that flavor, EVER.

Fer pete's sake, why don't they at least sell DVDs of the thing? Again, following the experience of the movies, they'll make more from the DVD sales than they do from airing the Oscars ONCE. Even the NFL, who puts on the Super Bowl -- a MUCH bigger event than the Oscars -- re-airs the game on the NFL Network, and sells DVDs of it. Why? Because they want to MAKE MONEY, both from the people who didn't see it the first time, and more important, from people who DID see it, and want to see it again.

And Oscar, if you sell a DVD of the show with the award for ONCE, I'll be first in line to buy it, because I want to see the award-winning performance from ONCE, and the amazing speeches from the award-winners, more than ONCE.

The fact is that you can still find this Oscar moment online now and again, by searching "Marketa Irglova Oscar." You can also find pieces of the funniest host gig EVER, by Jon Stewart by searching "Jon Stewart Oscar."

And to end with a legit search, check out thedailyshow.com for some of Jon's stories about the Oscars. One of the best is him telling that Czech girl Madeline Albright, humbly but firmly, There was NO WAY Marketa Irglova was NOT coming back out.

You can also find the actual performance from Once at YouTube. Why? Because Glenn Hansard has been using the net, including YouTube, for YEARS to build an audience. You'll find plenty of other results for other live performances of it.

Too bad that the most uplifting, unpredictable moment in Oscar history only aired ONCE, and you'll never get to see it again. Maybe they'll eventually see that they'll make MORE money by giving people an opportunity to see moments like this more than ONCE.

As I write this, it's Oscar eve. Just like Christmas eve, only more exciting. At least to my wife Nora and me. In fact, our primary celebration of Christmas is going to the movies, preferably a movie where things blow up. A festival of bright lights if you will.

It's not really the contest aspect of the thing. Most years we see a significant number of the nominated films. This year, we haven't seen a single one of the movies nominated for a major award. A lot of the movies look wonderful, especially Juno, but we just haven't gotten around to it.

One reason is that we keep upgrading our home theater - most recently with an upconverting DVD player. I can honestly say that our viewing experience is every bit as satisfying as a trip to the movie theater...

...with one obvious exception. There's something tribal about sitting in an audience of strangers, being moved by the same story in our own ways. It can be startling to have the same experience, including those rare occassions...though not as rare as you might think...of rising in a spontaneous ovation at the end.

The main reason we no longer experience that is, quite simply, that we don't live within walking distance of a theater anymore -- one of the great pleasures of living in the city, but not enough to outweigh the much greater pleasures of living just a tad further out.

The other reason we don't go to movies as often is Netflix, but that's for another blog post.

We love the Oscars because we like being surprised.

Last year, it was the appearance of Pan's Labyrinth, a movie with a luscious look. The REAL surprise for us was the film that won in the Foreign category was Children of God. It featured an amazing performance by Clive Owen, who has become one of our very, very favorite actors, and by far our favorite performance in Michael Caine's long career.

We're thrilled that ridiculous musical numbers are gone -- reason enough to be glad that Billy Crystal isn't the host. Instead, we love presentations like the short film by Errol Morris that I wrote about here.

We've also been caught off guard by the musical performances by real musicians. For example, the Oscars were where we first heard Elliot Smith.

(This is in contrast to the travesty of 1984, when, instead of Phil Collins, the original performer, the Academy had Ann Reinking perform it instead. The Academy apparently didn't know who Phil is.)

Another rare pleasure is seeing people earn long-desrved rewards. Last year's Martin Scorcese win, as well as Speilberg's win for Schindler's List, were as much awards for earlier films as anything else...and there's nothing wrong with that.

(re: Scorcese, I wrote about that award last year, praising the third Oscar for his editor, Thelma Schoonmacher...while also arguing that Scorcese may not have been as overlooked as one might think.)

I don't really go in for predictions anymore. It's not because I don't go to as many movies. Magazines like Variety and Entertainment Weekly, as well as their excellent websites, are among the sources that give us all we need to track momentum, which is ultimately more important than quality. And seriously, when have either awards or box office had anything to do with quality one way or the other?

That said, there's one race I'm especially interested in. Kevin O'Connell has this year been nominated for his TWENTIETH nomination in the Sound Mixing category. EW has been waging a campaign on his behalf since last year. It would be really cool if he won.

Even though most of this post doesn't have much else to do with this year's awards, I'll still swing by for an update. Otherwise, it's Oscar and me and Nora, joined this year by her sister Roxanne and their mother, all tuning in more for this than we do for Christmas.

To be specific, my cable system just added the HD feed of the Food Network. Walter handles the HD editing, color grading for Good Eats, among the most popular shows there. Walter also handles both HD and SD animations for Good Eats, among the most distinctive parts of the show.

Wally and I have the Red Sox postseason to thank. Okay, and to a much, much, much lesser extent, the Yankees, Cubs and Phillies.

The Red Sox were pioneers of local sports programming - among the very first to own their own cable network (New England Sports Network, NESN), the VERY first to build schedules of major pre-game and post-game coverage (usually an hour, often 90 minutes), as well as extensive original programming, ESPN-style studio newscasts, talk shows, documentaries, etc.

This was a model followed by YES, the Yankees network, among many others, and is fantastically profitable.

When the current ownership bought the team in 2002 for $700 million, they were widely derided as insane. The business of baseball was in a shambles, with the entire league combined posting a $14 million loss that year. But the ownership team believed that -- even apart from a fanatical fan base coming to the park -- they could turn a profit on the NESN part of the package alone, and that it could more than offset potential losses by the ball club itself.

The club became far more profitable of course, and the $700 million investment is becoming, remarkably enough, one of the great bargains in sports history.

One of ownership's big investments was in HD. Every Red Sox game (and hockey too, which NESN also carries) is carried in stunning HD -- the best picture and VERY best sound of any sports broadcast I've ever seen. This includes the Super Bowl, whose sound and picture ass the Red Sox kick 162 times per year.

Here's where the baseball playoffs come in. This year, MLB wisely distributed the playoffs to TNT and TBS, preserving the World Series for Fox (alas, baseball coverage heinous beyond description.) We have a tiny regional cable network...whose other markets just happen to include New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, all of whom had teams in the basebally playoffs....

...and NONE of whom got TBS in HD. The outcry was so overwhelming -- and they'll be the first to say that the screaming was loudest from Boston, which had the longest heritage of all-HD coverage. They responded with TBS in HD on the very first day of the playoffs, October 3.

The news was so big, and the revenue impact so great, that it was reported on the cable company's INVESTOR INFORMATION page.

Comcast and Verizon had the same problem, btw, and also responded by bringing TBS HD online just in time for the playoffs, and not one day earlier.

Ours was the only system, however, to add FOOD NETWORK HD at the same time. (You knew I was going to back to this, right? Or maybe you'd given up hope.)

Nora and I used to watch the Food Channel all the time. We enjoy food, enjoy cooking, and our favorite show from day one has been Good Eats, hosted by Alton Brown. Many of the recipes we've picked up have become staples. The sweet potato pecan waffles are now a holiday tradition for us.

But the show is about far more than recipes. The Monty Python-inspired graphics are a hoot, and reflect the show's REAL draw, which is a smart, funny approach to food science, with history and anthropology thrown in. A recurring cast of characters, puppets, great music, and unusual approaches to shooting are all part of the mix.

And some cooking. Even when we weren't cooking at all -- and not doing much these days either -- we find Good Eats one of the most entertaining shows on TV, and highly recommend it to anyone who likes smart, funny TV.

You can get an idea what I'm talking about by heading to the Good Eats page at Food.com.

You'll find clips there (heads up: Windows Media) that show off Good Eats style. The very first sample video: the history of cans. Short version: it started with Emporer Napoleon in 1794. Like I said, not an ordinary cooking show. 

I've known that Walter has been doing the HD post on Good Eats for a while, but it wasn't until Monday that I got to see the show in HD for the very first time. In a word, stunning, even by HD standards. 

The episode was on deep-frying turkey. Perfect example of why Good Eats is such a great show: I don't eat turkey, and even if I did, I'd never deep fry it. Yes, it's the best-tasting and fastest way to cook...but building my own winch to lower the turkey into 400 degree oil is more than I'm up for.

One of my favorite parts of the show is when Alton demonstrated what might go wrong with deep frying a turkey. He was in front of an Atlanta-area fire station, and as he lowered the turkey into the oil, it literally exploded into flames. Not caught on fire. No, burst into a tower of flames that poured out of the pot into a genuine inferno 15-20 feet across.

Cool!

And it looked truly amazing in HD. The shot ended as firefighters stepped forward to extinguish the flames, and the screen filled with the white blast. Dissolve from white into the next scene. Perfect.

There were other great things in the show. You could see every single hair on Big Foot, every spike in Alton's own hair, every ripple on the giant plastic ice cream cone, and razor-sharp display in the hardware store. Again, not your typical cooking show.

Walter and I have known each other for the better part of ten years now, and I've known for a long time that he's a talented dude. But this was my first time to see his latest work with Final Cut Pro and Color, in its full HD glory. I gotta tell you, I was really, truly impressed.

So even if your town doesn't have the rabid fever for the Red Sox that can force the addition of Food Network HD, pester your local cable company anyway. It's worth it just to see Walter's work on Good Eats alone.

Since the issues surrounding rights and fair use come up at The COW all the dang time, from various perspectives, here are some of my very favorite web resources.

The Stanford Copyright and Fair Use Center has a heavily scholarly orientation, maybe moreso than you'll find useful. But the coverage here is certainly exhaustive.

One of the coolest things about it is a free, digitized version of Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, called Free Culture. He's been a pioneer on rights in the electronic age from pretty much the beginning, and has fought vigorously against the rapidly diminishing rights that we have, both as creators and consumers of media. Gotta love this:

As more and more culture becomes digitized, more and more becomes controllable, even as laws are being toughened at the behest of the big media groups. What's at stake is our freedom--freedom to create, freedom to build, and ultimately, freedom to imagine.

Like I said, you can download a free copy of the book with rights to reuse and remix for non-commercial purposes, so he's putting his money where his mouth is.

If you're going to get into a fight about rights, definitely better to know the real lay of the land. Even if you're not a scholar, definitely a site worth checking out.

More oriented toward practice than legal underpinnings or broad social examples, the Center for Social Media at American University is amazing. They offer what they call "Fair Use and Free Speech Resources." Note that they, like Lessig, equate the two.

Some great articles for documentarians in particular. Although this one is from 2005, it's got great information on efforts to expand the rights of documentary filmmakers wrt copyrighted materials. In the meantime, this article describes best practices for fair use as defined today.

People ask all the time about where copyright fades into the public domain. The guidelines are pretty clear, and you can see them here.

I could continue, but you get the idea. There's no reason for you to have any major questions about rights, and certainly no excuse for crossing the line. These two sites will help shine a light on the right path forward.

Hacking was a term originally coined at MIT to descrive such classic pranks as emptying the deans office and reassembling it -- complete with rug -- in the middle of the frozen Charles River. (That illegal software thing is more properly called "cracking.") Hacking Apple TV is an entirely legal activity that makes it truly useful, starting with a bigger hard drive -- child's play for anyone reading this. A blog by the fine folks at makezine.com offer a fully illustrated tutorial called "Violating my Apple TV warranty in 4 easy steps."

Legal yes, warranty-voiding, yes, but seriously, dude. If you can find your way around a ribbon cable, you can do this. You should do this.

If you want to get really serious about hacking, like adding other applications (start with Firefox for browsing, Joost for free TV, and Quartz for added performance), the fine folks at the Tutorial Ninjas blog will happily help you out. Not child's play for everyone...but definitely a breeze for anyone who can use a command line in OS X.

This is just the very, very beginning of what's available from Apple TV hacks, with many more coming I'm sure. One of many blogs to keep up with Apple TV Hacks is (naturally enough) Apple TV Hacks. Another good one is AwkwardTV.

Note that ALL of these are blogs. When I tell people that virtually all of my time online NOT in The COW forums is at blogs, this kind of information is one of gazillions of reasons why. Blogs are where you'll find the best information breaking fastest -- one of gazillions of reasons why I'm so happy to see blogs at The COW.

Okay, final example of brilliant hacks presented via blogs, this time the Hack A Day blog. Decide in advance what you want to be drinking when you visit this page, because when you play the movie, you're going to laugh so hard that you'll eject said liquid through your nose. Appropriately enough, this hack is the robotic beer launching refrigerator. The movie takes a while to get interesting, but the accuracy tests will blow you away. THIS, friends, is a useful hack!

PS. re: MIT: you can get MIT's ENTIRE CURRICULUM, both undergrad and graduate, onine for free. It's the whole magilla: required reading lists, examples of student work, some (not all) classroom lectures, and more. Here's my pass/fail grading: the curriculum is awesome, but because MIT FAILS by only offering lectures in Real Media, you should PASS on those. But the curriculum is way cool.