5.12.2006

Careful What You Ask For - Friday Randoms

1. Saw this pic posted somewhere:















My Reply: "and your point is....?"

Submit your own caption now via comment...

2. Edmonton Oilers finally showed up to play the other night - they won the third game of their series in the third overtime period - it was almost 1 AM local time. Oilers player Smyth took a puck to the chops and they had to stop the game to scoop his five teeth off the ice with a small snow shovel, to which I loudly observed, "Cool!" Incidentally, it was another Oilers player na
med Smith SEVERAL years ago, who took the puck behind his own net to set up an offensive drive, went out from behind the net, AND SHOT THE PUCK OFF HIS OWN GOALIE'S ARSE AND INTO THE NET, SCORING FOR THE OTHER TEAM. The oilers lost that game, that series, and I dare say Steve Smith never recovered from that unfortunate happening.

3. My big black nasty toenail finally fell off the other day.












A dude the size of a fridge stepped on it at the beginning of December last year, when I was playing in a three-on-three basketball tourney with two of my kids. By the
time I took off my sock, it was already black like (your euphemism here).

When it finally came off, the new toenail had grown about halfway under the old one, but it's shiny and new.

I broke that toe, in another basketball game, when I was 12 years old, and ever since then, that toenail has had a cleft running from front to quick. We are holding a family pool to see whether that cleft will still grow there, or whether my toenail will be cured of its ailment and grow like a champ toenail for the first time in 30 years.

Interesting side note, Big Black Dog, otherwise known as Cinder, otherwise known as "95 pounds of four-legged hairy human", ATE THE TOENAIL. "Mmmm, chips!!" she said to me. We found it a couple of days later on the kitchen floor, in a "non-regular" state of matter.











4. You would think that with the contraction and consolidation in the mortgage industry in the last 12 months or more, that it would be the INCOMPETENT ones that are weeded out and go back to selling cars. Unfortunately it seems the opposite is the case. We have more barnacles than ship, it seems right now.

5. Observations shared with the lovely wife this morning over coffee and newspaper: It seems ABC has hit on a nice solution to the TIVO problem. Background: The advent of TIVO has made it so people who want to watch TV don't HAVE to watch commercials anymore. Great for the TIVO people, lousy for the Cascade and Tide people, and consequently bad for the ad revenues of network TV outlets. As more people watch TV through TIVO, burning past the commercials (we watch our TV alm
ost EXCLUSIVELY through TIVO, never through LIVE broadcast - we NEVER watch commercials - and I don't think we are unique in that way), advertisers are less willing to pay top dollar for ad spots, because there are demonstrably fewer people who watch them. Broadcasters don't like this. In the past, the audience was "captive" to the ads if they wanted to watch the TV show in question, allowing a network to charge top dollar for those ad spots.

Anyway, LOST is now running SHOW-SPECIFIC ads during the broadcast as well, making the entire hour (and not just the 42 minutes of actual programming) part of the show. It's just starting to take shape, but it looks like a possible wave into the future of broadcast media (TV, WEB, etc.), combining to blur the perceived boundaries of each. This should be good news for both advertisers AND the networks who have been scrambling to find a way to convince advertisers to spend money with their companies, in spite of the TIVO generation.

BRILLIANT. Now viewers look for show-related commercials mixed in with the regular commercials, making the broadcast TIVO-Proof, and turning the experience into a multi-layered, multi-faceted story development vehicle. If you watch LOST, you know what I mean. If you watch LOST and don't know what I mean, you're missing something - check here for more info.

If you need more, check out:

www.thehansofoundation.org
www.sublymonal.com

That should do it for now.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

"no immigrants - no burritos" perhaps we could all benefit - wouldn't it decrease all of those "methane gas emissions" (farting) that is eating away at our ozone. Just a thought.