television

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It was one year ago today – on October 6th, 2006 – that the now-(in)famous first commercial from my campaign for Rockingham County Board of Education started broadcasting on WGSR in Reidsville…

I had just finished it that morning, and while the video was doing the final render I ran out to find Debbie Moore so that I could give her the check for a month’s worth of airtime. Then I got home, burned it onto a CD and drove it over to WGSR and handed it to Matt Smith. Right after that I had to go to Greensboro for an errand, then got back home and after seeing Lisa I went back to the station to see if the commercial was running yet.

Ooh-boy…

Y’know, this commercial, I had to make it. If I didn’t produce it for my school board run, I would have regretted it for the ...

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Yes the rumors are true: Monday Night Live now has its own page on Myspace! And it does a really good job of conveying the off-beat personality of Reidsville, North Carolina’s premiere television call-in show, too. On the page you’ll find a history of the long-running show, hilarious “in-jokes” like references to Commander Ashtar and Tom Wopat and Richard from Danville, pictures of hosts Mark Childrey and Ken Echols (and maybe a few other familiar faces), and even the show’s theme music – “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac – playing in the background… along with much more! The only thing missing is that Jaybird isn’t on the friends list… but maybe he’ll get a Myspace page of his own soon (hurry up Jaybird!)....

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We bought a 37-inch LCD high-definition television set last November. It’s specifically an LCD screen because when I was doing research before we went out to look at sets the widespread consensus was that LCD screens don’t “burn-in” like plasma screens do.

Well, guess what?

I can’t show what this looks like because it doesn’t show up well in photos, but there are two very fine vertical lines running down the entire height of the screen: one line running equidistant from each of the left and right sides of the image. They are exactly where the borders of the “pillars” are when you watch a standard (not high-def) image without “stretching” it to fill the screen. Since most of the interesting programming around here is standard definition and I don’t like distorted images, the tendency is to watch television “pillarboxed”. I guess that’s how the lines got in there: ...

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Well, almost a complete set. But it is the part that counts most!

As I’ve said here before, I’m not much of a television watcher. A show has to be very good before I invest my valuable time in sitting down to enjoy it on a regular basis. And it takes nothing less than storytelling of the highest caliber to keep me captivated and coming. That’s why I love Lost so much. And ten years before that, there was Babylon 5.

This was the standout science-fiction show of the Nineties. And easily one of the best shows of that era, period. Babylon 5 broke bold new ground and in my sincere opinion set the pace for all the good shows that have followed. I don’t know if there had been this kind of thing attempted before with American television that Babylon 5 pulled off: a broad, sweeping epic boasting ...

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Tomorrow night ABC will premiere Masters of Science Fiction, an anthology show featuring film adaptations of… well, science fiction stories! The show is being narrated by Stephen Hawking, which alone should say something about how classy this project is. And then there is the acting talent the producers have brought onboard: Malcolm McDowell, Terry O’Quinn (who also plays Locke on ABC’s show Lost), and Brian Dennehy are just some of the faces that we’ll be seeing during the show’s initial four-episode run.

The first installment has a lot of local interest because it originated with a professor at North Carolina State University. John Kessel’s short story “A Clean Escape” will star Sam Waterston and Judy Davis in a post-Apocalyptic tale of the near future about a psychiatrist who’s trying to help a man with curious lapses in memory.

I haven’t read the original short story yet, but my ...

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Remember a few weeks ago when we discovered that VH1 was featuring my first school board campaign commercial on its show Web Junk 2.0? Well, during that same show there was a… strange… clip showing a preacher on some local community access TV station. And he was swearing like crazy! It was like every two or three seconds, VH1 had to bleep out what he was saying.

Here’s the full video…

WARNING: This video is loaded with excessive profanity
I honestly don’t know what to make of this guy. Is this for real? The way he moves around the screen is something that I’ve never seen done with a video camera before. How does something like this even get broadcast without the FCC stepping in? He calls himself “Spirit of Truth” and there’s an article about him on Wikipedia that has much more about him, including more of these ...

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Unlike the past two years, I haven’t been downloading all of the new season’s episodes of Doctor Who after they aired in the United Kingdom. But the two that I have seen were remarkably good. Still don’t know if anything this season can compare to last year’s “The Girl in the Fireplace”: without a doubt one of the most beautiful and haunting stories that I’ve ever seen told in the television medium.

(Let’s look on the bright side: there’s no indication that there’s any episode this new season that will be as absolutely atrocious as last year’s “Love & Monsters”, either. Yegads… what the HELL was the BBC thinking when they let that one go into production?!?)

Anyway, tonight at 8 p.m. the Sci-Fi Channel will start the American run of Doctor Who Season 3 (or Season 29 if we’re counting the original series… as we should) with the ...

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