Strongly Worded Letter

Kwyoo Vee See

I'm not what you would call the target shopper for the QVC television shopping network. A) I'm a man and B) I'm way under their average audience age of 54. I've bought maybe two things from them ever and do not make that channel a destination on my  DirectTV.

Having said all that I was still fascinated by the newspaper profile on QVC this week in USA Today. Did you know the channel was founded in 1986 by Joseph Segel, who also founded the Franklin Mint, a direct seller of collectibles, in 1964?

Here are more fun facts from the article. See how many you know:

1) What does QVC stand for?

2) Sales in 2007? Take a guess.

3) Orders typically received per hour?

4) Units delivered to customers worldwide last year?

5) Number of products offered on air annually?

6) Number of people who auditioned to be a QVC  host last year?

7) Number of new hosts selected?

8) Unique visitors to QVC.com in March?


Answers:

1. Quality, value, and convenience

2. $7.4 billion dollars

3. 15,000

4. More than 166 million

5. About 60,000

6. More than 3,000

7. Three

8. 4.2 million


Happy shopping!! Oh, and what have you bought from QVC? 

Becky, Quick!

So I'm watching the NBC Nightly News the other night and somehow a split screen appears that makes it difficult for me to hear or care what Brian "Haircut" Williams is even talking about. He's handing off the  story to Becky Quick,  whom I have since come to learn is a correspondent for CNBC's Squawk Box program.

Apparently I am late to Rebecca's fan club.  She joins a long line of News Babes with quite a following online these days including Fox News's Laurie Dhue,  CBS's Lara Logan, and of course, French TV's legendary and incomparable Melissa Theuriau.



Here she is later in the story  interviewing  investment guru Warren Buffett. With the billions of dollars of disposable income he has, he should be making Becky an offer she can not refuse right now.



Wait, she is throwing it back to Brian now. But who just walked into the frame behind her? Who is distracting me from my sweet Rebecca?

   

I'm not kidding. It's a...shall we say, older and plumper woman who I swear to God is eating a cupcake on TV during the national evening news. I hope Becky will order her killed.   

Million Dollar Idea #3

You could surely do a lot worse with just three dollars than going to Amazon.com and buying a copy of Bill Carter's book The Late Shift: Letterman, Leno & The Network Battle For The Night.

If you haven't already read it, then maybe you saw the HBO movie that was made of it featuring an actor with a huge, obviously fake chin playing Leno and another guy playing Letterman who inexplicably kept throwing a ball at an archery target. (?)

"But, Bean," you are exclaiming, probably internally because nobody talks out loud to a blog, "that topic is so 1995. Why bring it up now?"

Because the Network Battle For The Night Part 2 may be happening behind closed doors in Hollywood and New York right now.

Peep out the latest article from Mr. Carter, who writes about television for the New York Times here.  If you don't care to read it, here is the gist of it in the opening paragraphs,

"The Jay Leno chase is on.      

Four years ago, NBC made the comedian the lame-duck host of “The Tonight Show,” announcing with fanfare that he would be succeeded by Conan O’Brien in 2009.

Today, Mr. Leno is still the champion of late-night ratings, with no apparent desire to do anything else but continue on top. “What I do,” he has said on several occasions to colleagues, “is tell jokes at 11:30 at night.”

And so, nearly two years before he can officially be courted, suitors including two networks, ABC and Fox, and at least one television studio, Sony Pictures Television, are beginning to circle, doing everything they legally can to make sure Mr. Leno knows that they will make it possible for him to continue doing just that..."

Me now: Okay, so if I'm NBC and I've already announced that Conan takes over the Tonight Show in 2009 and now have to worry about the King of Late Night ending up being new competition against me on Fox or ABC, here's what I do. Put on The Jay Leno Show every weeknight at 10:00.

You get a guaranteed hit in prime time five nights a week. which raises the ratings for the affiliate 11:00 news and, in turn, the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien too. NBC has already proven, more than any of the major networks, that they can't come close to fielding 15 hours of prime time hits a week. With this plan they wouldn't have to anymore. 

Sure, there are a few niggling details that you could counter and some legal and logistical snags that might have to be worked out but it sounds like a winner to me. Networks are bleeding viewers. New hits are hard to find, afford, and promote. It counter programs well against anything else on the dial at that time.   

Boom goes the dynamite.

 

   

House Of Wachs

Have you just about had an ass full of this Writer's Guild strike? Are you going through major Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert withdrawals?

Well, until those shows return on Monday, here's a 5 minute band-aid. My friend Larry Wachs* has hooked up with a comedy site called SuperDeluxe to present the weekly webisode  What's Your Story?  Here's his latest episode.

I have known Larry since Air Supply were popular and believe him to be one of the funniest guys in America. It is endemic to the decline of radio in recent years that a talk show host as talented as he has been out of work for over a year at the same time the industry moans and whines about losing audience share to ipods and satellites.

Do yourself a favor and bookmark Larry's blog here. I see that he has recently implemented a new feature that is new to me called Ether. It looks like it is a third party application that can put two people on the phone together without either being able to see the other's phone number. Interesting. 

*Readers in Los Angeles or Atlanta will remember Larry's many years on the air as the more obnoxious and more right-wing half of  The Regular Guys.

Come On Down!

Ballard, Washington. The most Scandinavian place in the United States, outside of Minnesota.

I love that neighborhood of Seattle. Two of my favorite places in town are there: the Nordic Heritage Museum and the Archie McPhee novelty store, home of the  Electronic  Yodeling  Pickle.

Today I read about a pub on Market Street in Ballard called The Old Pequilar.  Once a week they hold a Quiz Night there and the place fills up with trivia teams who compete in 8 rounds of 10 questions each on topics from geography to movies to whatever. Apparently there is a nice haul for the winning team each week.

Three things I learned in the newspaper article about Quiz Night:

1) "Skepticisms" is the longest word that alternate hands when typing.

2) Slugs have four noses.

3) And one in every four Americans has appeared on television.

That's the one that got me to thinking. One in four? Wow! I mean, there have been 80,000 contestant so far just on American Idol, but still...

I was on TV once while living in San Francisco back in the eighties when CNN interviewed me on the street about the World Series in which the Giants were appearing.

Donna just appeared last year as a guest on the Tyra Banks program. I think it was "I Regret My Choice In Spouses" Week.

So we're two-for-two in this house. How about you? If this post gets 20 comments, five of you will have appeared on television. Let's see.

The Funeral

I'll admit it caught me by surprise a couple of Sundays ago while watching football on the TV when I first saw the commercial for the Ford Edge and recognized the music as being by the Band of Horses, a group I like very much.

It shouldn't have. These days, as many people, and virtually all fans under 25, believe "music should be free, man!" it is harder and harder for any musician to make a living. The band has already made something off of that song by licensing it to an episode of Criminal Minds too.

I don't have a problem with it. They created it. They own it. And they are free to do what they want with it. Do I wish i could make my own visual image instead of seeing an iPod commercial in my mind every time I hear those songs by The Fratellis, or U2, or Mary J. Blige? Sure. But even though I believe music is art, it is also has to be commerce if that's how you earn your paycheck.

A quick Google search, by-the-way, finds many music fans not willing to accept the way Band of Horses chooses to exploit  promote their songs. I found blogs that called them, "Sellout!" "Band of Hypocrites!" and my favorite "Band of Whores!"

Here's the song, video-free if you care to hear it.

Something To Be Really Thankful For

Thank you GQ Magazine for the pictures. And thank you  Mr. & Mrs. Panetierre for making Hayden. You are the real Heroes and have earned the thanks of a grateful nation.

You Don't Do Heavy Metal In Dubly, You Know...*

Okay, it's not the world's most pressing concern. but just because something isn't Darfur crisis bad, or even Dane Cook in another movie bad, doesn't mean it shouldn't be addressed.

You know how you're watching, say, The Office, and the segment ends and you're chuckling to yourself that Jim and Dwight and Michael are all wearing fake mustaches in a botched Silly String raid of the Utica branch of Dundler Mifflin? And then a commercial comes on for, say, Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowls, and instead of enjoying the guys in the ad dressed up in their wacky  costumes and maybe thinking about how delicious a Jimmy Dean Breakfast Bowl might be you are instead diving for the television remote to turn the volume down before  your ears bleed and and the dog wakes up?

Well, finally someone is addressing the absurd volume disparity between the shows and the commercials/station promos. Our old friends at the Dolby Corporation are preparing to announce which TV sets and A/V receivers will have this new feature, called Dolby Volume, and will also be licensing the technology to third party manufacturers as well.

I am a technical zero so can't begin to explain how it works but here's what GizMag says about it, "In dynamically adjusting audio output the system applies principles of psycho-acoustics – the science of how the human brain perceives sound. At higher volumes the brain hears 'flat' sounds with the bass, treble and mid-range leveled out, but at lower volumes your brain misses bass and treble elements and your ears become sensitive to only the mid-range. This is where Dolby’s modeling technology steps in to compensate for the brain’s natural tendencies and continue to deliver all the nuances of the soundtrack based on what we actually hear."

However it works, it's a Hallelujah technological breakthrough in my opinion, and long overdue.

 

* "You don't do heavy metal in dubly, you know." - Jeanine Pettibone, This Is Spinal Tap, 1984

Those That Can't Do, Teach.

James Lipton, that bearded blowhard  from Bravo TV's  Inside the Actor's Studio   has just published his autobiography, called Inside Inside. If you haven't seen the hit cable show, now in its thirteenth year, Lipton sits for an hour or more with an actor as his guest and he asks him to tell stories about the movies and television shows he has appeared in.

At the end of the interview he pulls out the list of questions he says are inspired by French television host Bernard Pivot. Here are those questions, along with my answers:


What is your favorite word?    Dogloo

What is your least favorite word?  Nuclear, when it is pronounced Nookyuler 

What turns you on, creatively, spiritually, or emotionally?   A  beautiful photograph inspires me to try to take one as well.

What turns you off?   I get discouraged when I realize I do not have enough time to pursue most of my creative interests. 
 
What is your favorite curse word?   Heavens to Mergatroid!

What sound or noise do you love?   My Tater Tot makes 100 different sounds that I love.

What sound or noise do you hate?  Like everyone else, the alarm clock. It's not really the clock's fault as much as how early it is set to go off.

What profession other than your own would you like to attempt?  Easy, I want to be a runway model farmer.

What profession would you not like to do?  Assembly line work. Toll taker. Anything boring and repetitive.

If Heaven exists, what would you like to hear God say when you arrive at the pearly Gates?  There's been some mistake with the paperwork. We'll send you back down to live another 100 years. And say hi to the models for me.

P.S. To my fellow blogger friends, this list would be an excellent meme, no?

Million Dollar Idea #1

Here it is: Extreme Spelling Bee.

Nerdy 9-year old white boy steps up to the microphone and misspells   "vivisepulture." Instead of just a buzzer and a walk off, he gets pelted from the audience with rotten fruit.

Tiny home-schooled Mexican girl is next and misspells  "xanthosis." She gets shot in the forehead with a paint gun.

Indian pre-teen with fuzz on his upper lip correctly spells "prospicience." From the side of the stage come a litter of puppies to lick his feet.

Another home-schooler can't figure out "appoggiatura" and when she misses, a trap door opens up on the stage and down she goes into a tank of sharks.

And so it goes....warm Mrs. Fields cookies for the winners,  Montecore from the Siegfried and Roy show for the losers.  Spell it right and get a lap dance from Hayden Panettiere. Miss your word and out comes a needle full of smallpox.

Who could turn that show off? it's TV magic and it is yours for the taking!

      

I'm Not Asking You, I'm Telling You....

I haven't been impressed with any of the new fall season television offerings so far. 

Three of the shows, and they're the ones with some of the biggest buzz so far, all seem like the same show to me: Chuck, Reaper and The Bionic Woman.  Each is about a regular Joe/Jane who has something unexpected and fantastical happen to him or her and has to learn to deal with it. Watch their friends and family be amazed as they start fighting crime/capture souls for the devil/run really fast.

I feel like I already get all that and more that each week on Heroes, a much better show than any of them. 

But as excited as I am to have The Office, 30 Rock, House and Family Guy back, the debut I have been waiting for is tonight at 9:00 on NBC.

Friday Night Lights is the little show that won't quit. This is its third night on the NBC schedule and maybe the lack of Tuesday and Wednesday competition will being in some more eyeballs.

Critics and a small but fanatical following got the show renewed for a second season. Last year It ended up on almost every magazine's top ten list (Entertainment Weekly, Time, etc.) and was named by the American Film Institute as the best TV show of the year.

I could go on and on about the superior acting, the story, the music, how unfreakingbelievably hot actress Minka Kelly is, but I'll close with the most important thing to remember: IT'S NOT REALLY ABOUT FOOTBALL!  Just in case that is what has kept you away....

Just watch it! Mkay?