Television
drorzel | May 19, 2007Jennifer Ouellette is coming to campus this week to give a talk about her book The Physics of the Buffyverse. Having never been a Buffy fan, and not seen more than snippets of a few episodes here and there, I figured I should at least watch a few representative episodes before the talk, just to have some context. Accordingly, I got the first two discs of Season 1 from Netflix, and asked a colleague who is known to be a huge fan for recommendations (he loaned me his Season Five DVD's, and particularly recommended Episodes 5 and 12).
Kate and I watched the first two episodes last night. She…
drorzel | March 26, 2007I was pretty beat after returning from Boston yesterday, so I ended up watching bits and pieces of the much-ballyhooed Planet Earth tv show on the Discovery Channel. I can't really assess it in detail, as I was flipping back and forth to the Dresden Files, but they certainly had some impressive footage of various animals doing interesting animal things.
They did one thing that bugged me, though: The voice-over in the actual program talkked explicitly about how unique the footage was. There were numerous mentions of the fact that nobody had ever filmed this or that thing before, or that some…
drorzel | February 20, 2007As Kate and I are planning to attend the Worldcon this year, we're eligible to nominate for the Hugo Awards, which are sort of SF's version of the Oscars, or maybe the Golden Globes (the Nebula Awards being the other). This is only the third time I've had this opportunity, and it's always kind of difficult, given that I end up having basically no opinion in so many of the categories.
I do have a few ideas about works to nominate, but I'd like to hear suggestions from other people. So, what should I be putting on my nominating ballot this year? I'll put the list of categories below, with my…
drorzel | February 15, 2007One of those only-on-the-Internet, adventrues-in-D-list-celebrity videos: A YouTube clip of a hair metal cover band joined onstage by one of the teachers from "Saved by the Bell" and Dallas Cowboys snap-dropper Tony Romo, singing "Somewhere in the Night" by Journey. Romo really gets into it, and Mr. Belding drops the F-bomb a few times, and, well, it's not for the faint of heart.
It's like somebody accelerated the Eighties to a good fraction of the speed of light, slammed them into a wall, and now we're looking at the spandex-and-hairspray clad particle tracks.
drorzel | January 30, 2007I meant to post a comment on the new SciFi Channel series of The Dresden Files yesterday, but really, it's hard to work up much enthusiasm. It's not that the show was bad-- if it was bad, I'd have no problem writing something saying that. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't all that good, either.
The series, for those not aware of it, is based on a popular set of fantasy novels by Jim Butcher, following the adventures of Harry Dresedn, the only wizard listed in the Chicago phone book. Dresden ekes out a living as a sort of mystical private investigator, doing jobs for members of Chicago's…
drorzel | November 22, 2006Kate and I have a Netflix subscription that we've mostly been using to obtain various anime series. We're running a little low on Japanese cartoons, though, having recently finished Martian Successor Nadesico, and with only four discs left of Trigun (two of which will probably be polished off while lolling around Friday after hosting Thanksgiving dinner).
I've got other stuff on the Netflix queue-- various movies, season two of The Wire-- but I'm always looking for suggestions. So, recommend some DVD's: what movies, tv shows, or foreign cartoon series should I be adding to the Netflix queue…
drorzel | November 21, 2006There's a nice article in the Times today about Mythbusters as science television. As is typical of the Times, it sort of overreaches with some of the conclusions:
Their delight in discovery for its own sake is familiar to most scientists, who welcome any result because it either confirms or debunks a hypothesis. That sense of things can be corrupted when grants or licensing deals are on the line. But the Mythbusters get paid whether their experiments succeed or fail.
but it's generally a good piece.
The show is somewhere on the good side of "guilty pleasure." Scientifically, a lot of what…
drorzel | November 20, 2006Over in LiveJournal land, there's this "meme" going around about describing fandoms as relationships. It's not really my sort of thing, but it did lead Rachel Manija Brown to ask why so many people are so mad at The X-Files:
I had a different experience: I drifted away slowly, I think during the sixth season (around "Post-Modern Prometheus," the episode where Mulder repeats a bank robbery day, the baseball alien episode, etc.) The show and I just seemed to be going out of sync with what had made me love it in the first place. So I had stopped watching long before whatever led to everyone else…
drorzel | November 11, 2006I spent a while idly channel-surfing after we watched the final couple of episodes of Martian Successor Nadesico last night, and ran across the new Battlestar Galactica on the Sci-Fi Channel. Lots of smart people like the show, but I didn't get into the premiere, and the occasional attempt to watch it in sub-optimal circumstances hasn't really convinced me of its brilliance. The few clips I saw last night didn't really help, either, though they might be considered spoilers, so I'll put them after the cut:
On the first pass, I saw them explaining that there's some virus infecting the Cylons,…
drorzel | August 1, 2006Today is the 25th anniversary of the launch of MTV, back in 1981, with "Video Killed the Radio Star." Blogdom is, appropriately enough, full of people offering tributes and soliciting fond recollections of the days when they played music videos on MTV. See, for example, posts by Abel and Scalzi.
Just to be contrarian, here's a space for a different sort of reminscence: When, in your opinion, did MTV pass the point of no return on the path that led to the current nearly-music-free channel?
My personal feeling is that while it became irretrievable with the launch of "The Real World," the…
drorzel | July 27, 2006Via Dave Sez, Ed at the Sports Frog wants a divorce from ESPN:
I have carefully thought this through and I believe a divorce is our only resolution. I have been loyal and faithful to you and you have shit on me, cheated, lied, took 5 months to send me a check and you won't let me see some of my friends anymore.
You took away David Aldridge and foisted Screaming A on me. From a thoughtful, insightful, coherent reporter to a screaming clown who is nothing less than a thug wannabe.
[...] SportsCenter went from a highlight show to an hour of self-promotion of the preening anchors. Trey Wingo now…
drorzel | July 24, 2006Via a comment by Anton Sherwood: Have you ever seen an episode of Star Trek with a particularly bad bit of technobabble, and said to yourself "You know, I'd be willing to fact-check their scripts for a few hundred bucks..."
Well, Dave Krieger did just that, and it wasn't all it's cracked up to be. I'm going to be charitable, and assume he wasn't there for the episode where a planet's temperature is reported as "-290 Celsius" (or seventeen degrees below absolute zero...).
It beats what I used to do for extra money in grad school, though. I used to proctor the MCAT's, among other standardized…
drorzel | July 19, 2006Speaking of fictional science, was there a sci-fi cliche that Eureka (new show on the Sci-Fi Channel) missed last night? Shows like this really make me question whether Battlestar Galactica can be as good as people insist it is (the one episode I watched didn't sell me on it).
(I'm also kind of apprehensive about the Dresden Files show that's in the works. The one commercial they showed was such a mess of jump-cuts that I couldn't really make sense of it, but I rather like the books, and hope they don't screw it up too badly...)
drorzel | July 18, 2006The article about physicists in movies cited previously had one other thing worth commenting on: the fictional portrayal of the practice of science:
All these films illustrate a fundamental pattern for movie science. Rarely is the central scientific concept utterly incorrect, but filmmakers are obviously more interested in creating entertaining stories that sell tickets than in presenting a lesson in elementary physics. They also know that scenes of scientists at a lab bench do not generally make for gripping movie moments. Indeed, the need for drama often pushes the basic scientific idea to…
drorzel | June 6, 2006I've been watching Netflix DVD's of the late, lamented Homicide: Life of the Street lately, and a little while back, I went through the DVED's of the first season of The Wire, which shares some of the same creative team. In particular, both series were based in part on work by David Simon, whose Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets tracked the Homicide unit of the Baltimore Police for a full year.
I've been curious about the book for a while, and finally checked it out of the library a couple of weeks ago. It's a fascinating story in its own right-- Simon had unprecedented access to the…
drorzel | April 4, 2006With hoops season having wound down, we're slipping into that time of the year when I don't have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there's very little on regular tv that's worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD's from back before basketball season started, and I watched a bunch of episodes of The Wire.
Well, most of a bunch of episodes, anyway. The third disc for Season One had a glitch, right at the very end of Episode Nine. Just as things were reaching a climax, the picture went all pixelated, and the sound disappeared, and…