dying to get in

The recent spate of celebrity deaths has me thinking about two segments I did on the Comedy World Radio Network. I had the first interview with Tony Orciuoli about his then-new website, CelebrityDeathBeeper.com. Tony wrote a program that will automatically email you when news of a celebrity death crosses the wire. Longtime blog readers might recall me writing about this in February, 2006. I sent a copy of the interview to Tony right after it aired. He put the mp3 file on his website, which I downloaded so I can post it here for your convenience.



My interview with a guy named Death Pool Dave helped me land a job in Knoxville. Of all the airchecks I sent to my potential future bosses at 100.3 The River, the one they mentioned to me was my conversation with Death Pool Dave. He would register with several death pool websites including the Lee Atwater Invitational. Dave won quite a bit of money by guessing which celebrities would die in a calendar year. The younger the star, the more points they were worth in the game. To determine the point value, subtract the celebrity's age from 100. I looked through some old discs last night and found a copy of the CD I had sent to The River. Here's the interview with Death Pool Dave from late 2000 or early 2001.

higher than the sky, deeper than the ocean

The double funeral for Nancy and Peter Feist on Wednesday was one of the most impressive I've ever attended. One archbishop and three bishops were present in addition to dozens of priests and religious. Nancy was the executive assistant to both the current and the previous bishop of Knoxville.

Nancy collapsed on Friday at the Concord Farragut baseball field while her son was at bat. The CPR they performed on her may be what kept her unborn baby alive long enough to be delivered at the hospital. Fr. Augustine Idra gave the child an emergency baptism. Little Peter died shortly thereafter. Fr. Ragan Schriver held Peter's body as the family dealt with the tragedy.

The Rose Mortuary was packed with people on Tuesday night. The line to get into the chapel snaked through every hallway. Inside the chapel, Archbishop Joseph Kurtz led a rosary service from a podium behind the open casket containing mother and son. There were pauses between decades for Archbishop Kurtz and others to offer reflections on Nancy's life. Fr. David Boettner told how Nancy would edit letters and speeches for the priests, always changing the text into the Footlight font. Fr. David said the font, like Nancy's editing, gave the text "a theatrical sparkle." Fr. Peter Iorio said Nancy had named him one of her "apostles of joy." He read some messages she had written on the religious calendar she gave him.

Bishop Richard Stika was the main celebrant of the funeral Mass. Archbishop Kurtz, Bishop James Vann Johnston of Springfield and Bishop David Choby of Nashville concelebrated. The highlight was a poignant, eloquent, articulate reflection by Nancy's daughter. Hope Feist brought almost every mother in the church to tears with her recollections of her Mommy. She spoke directly to her siblings, her father and her grandparents about the boundless love her mother had for all of them. She told each of them that "Mom will never stop loving you." Bishop Stika said it was the best eulogy he had heard in his 24 years of priesthood.

Considering how big a deal this was in the Catholic world, I was surprised that I didn't see any cameras or reporters from the mainstream media at the funeral home or the church. Deacon Patrick Murphy-Racey took pictures, which I hope will be posted online soon.

After Mass, Archbishop Kurtz told me that my blog entry about Nancy had turned up in the Google Alert he has for his own name. I told this to Bishop Stika and suggested that he too sign up for a Google Alert. I think it's a helpful tool for everyone in this day and age, but a necessity for public figures like them.

as the fire popped and crackled...

The combination of words demanded my attention. I saw "free book" followed by "crime scene." Dozens and dozens of copies of the same title were arranged on a table just inside West Town Mall last night.



The freebies were from Harlequin Books, which is celebrating its 60th anniversary. "Crime Scene at Cardwell Ranch" is part of the Harlequin Intrigue series. The author, B.J. Daniels, has at least five more books being published this year.



I don't know if there were more books at any of the mall's other entrances or if I stumbled upon the whole supply. The inside cover of "Crime Scene at Cardwell Ranch" says that sixteen free books are available for download at www.HarlequinCelebrates.com.

ella ella ella

Every time I hear Rihanna's song "Umbrella," I'm reminded of an acoustic cover version I heard a couple of months ago when my wife and I were shopping at Kohl's. I actually liked the acoustic version better. No offense to Rihanna, who now has her own line of umbrellas from Totes. I meant to do a little Google research when I got home and kept forgetting. Until now.

My best guess is that the song we heard over the speakers at Kohl's was by Marié Digby. She has a YouTube channel and pages on Facebook and MySpace. I guess I'm a little late coming to the party, since Marié's cover of "Umbrella" has over 13 million views. My son and I also enjoyed her cover of Linkin Park's "What I've Done." Marié is described as another YouTube sensation, not unlike Julia Nunes, who my wife and I met last month.



In a recent video, Julia mentioned that her Knoxville audiences were "packed with the friendliest people who gave me cake and marshmallow guns and a zombie crocheted version of myself. It was insane!" Last year Julia was the opening act for four shows with Ben Folds. In the middle of those four shows, he went off to play at Bonnaroo. This year Julia will be performing at Bonnaroo and returning to The Square Room in Knoxville just before that. According to her latest video, she needs to choose a local opening act for her June 9th gig and is open to suggestions.

Ben Folds was mentioned in USA Today on Wednesday. The article was about the increase in popularity of a cappella groups on college campuses. He put out an album of his songs that were covered by 14 different student a cappella groups. It's called "Ben Folds Presents: University A Cappella!" The article also has me wanting to read a book titled "Perfect Pitch: The Quest for Collegiate A Cappella Glory" by Mickey Rapkin. I'll start by reading his blog.

and three in Crossville

A 16-second video on Facebook got me laughing last night. It combines local news and dancing in a different way than the recent "Star 102.1's Dancing with the Knoxville Stars."

Eric Foxx may be everyone's favorite person at WBIR. He's the floor manager for "Live at Five at Four." I see him there every time Einstein Simplified appears on the show. He's there every time I go to the Children's Hospital Telethon. He's also there every year at Boomsday when I stop by the pre-fireworks broadcast.

Brittany Bailey introduced herself to me on St. Patrick's Day. She and Alison Morrow had stopped by Patrick Sullivan's just as our improv show was ending. She promised to come back to catch a performance from the beginning some day.

The video I'm enjoying so much is on WBIR's Facebook page. It shows Brittany and Foxxy getting their "Let's Groove" on during a commercial break. It reminded me of some mostly deleted YouTube videos from a TV station in Philadelphia. They used to have a segment called "Mascot Monday," in which local costumed characters danced with Jennaphr Frederick. Let's try to convince WBIR to add such a feature to "Live at Five at Four."

community swing

The Brad Walker Orchestra rocked the Kerbela Temple on Saturday night. Brad, whose grandfather was Cas Walker's cousin, invited me to attend the swing dance party during our conversation at "Star 102.1's Dancing with the Knoxville Stars." I would have gone just to hear the big band music, however after my participation in the contest, I promised my wife that I would attempt to learn some social dancing skills. I need more lessons.



Most of the chairs were taken when we arrived. We found a table with some room and introduced ourselves to the people already there. The couple next to us was Tony and Joan DeDominick. As it turns out, Tony teaches dance courses on Wednesday nights through the University of Tennessee Outreach & Continuing Education program. He suggested we take his lessons but they conflict with my wife's choir practice.

One of the first songs we heard was "Sing, Sing, Sing," a favorite of mine. I quickly realized that I was in way over my head on the dance floor. During the "Tennessee Waltz," I wanted to stay in one place with my little box step. We got bumped repeatedly by others traveling around the floor.



We saw a few familiar faces. Charlie and Jackie Goodreau both take lessons at Academy Ballroom and they've come to several Einstein Simplified shows. Jackie asked me to dance and helped me with the foxtrot and the traveling part of the waltz. She said she could tell I was very tense. Jackie also suggested I check out some of the instructional dance videos offered by Comcast On Demand. Academy Ballroom owner Richard Bull and his wife were in the crowd too.

Radio personality Eddie Beacon sat at a table across the dance floor. He was using a laptop with a webcam to offer live streaming video of the event. He told me about LiveVideo.com where anybody can do the same. I saw Brad and Eddie today as they were recording their weekend radio show with Marshal Andy on WKTI. Brad said the orchestra will be at the Temple again soon. Sounds like a plan.

tawt I taw

The New York Times article on Twitter compared its appearance on "The Oprah Winfrey Show" to the Beatles' first performance on "The Ed Sullivan Show." It also listed several little-known tricks for Twitterers and instructions on how to find the nearly hidden advanced search page.

My daughter does the Twitter and posted something today that made me laugh. She put a link to a URL on CNN.com and commented that she would now have to re-alphabetize her entire collection. I clicked on it and was most amused.

My friend Bean has started Twittering too. Last week he posted vacation updates from the graves of dead presidents. Bean has suggested that I read the feed of "KingsThings," which purports to be written by Larry King. I've heard there are a lot of celebrity impersonators on Twitter. Maybe Larry really did write, "i am entertaining the crew w/ stories about Frank Sinatra and Don Rickles. almost showtime!"

An emailer pointed out that the video of my rumba with Emily Loyless has way more views than any of the other performances from "Star 102.1's Dancing With the Knoxville Stars" fundraising event. I would like to think it was due to my own blog posts but I strongly suspect that Don Geronimo's Twitter feed had a lot to do with it. You can still make an online donation, by the way.

better than hot water and ketchup

A video on Funny or Die appealed to my inner child. In it, Adam West has fallen on hard times and is having a garage sale outside the Batcave. I wish I had looked for the Bronson Caves in Griffith Park when I lived in California. What if he really was selling stuff there?

If money were no object, I would buy memorabilia from my favorite show, much like KROQ's Ralph Garman has done. The first thing on my shopping list might be the bust of Shakespeare from Stately Wayne Manor.

Batman Garage Sale with Adam West from Adam West

fungus tingly duck sheets

Richard Cheese knows that I enjoy cover songs. He usually sends me a copy of his CDs, like he did with "Viva La Vodka." RC took a moment after his sold-out show in DC to send me a message about the artist who will be opening for him on Saturday in New York because she'll be in Knoxville on Friday.



Julia Nunes (rhymes with tunes), plays ukulele and sings cover songs on YouTube. She does originals too but I haven't gotten to any of those yet. I've watched and re-watched her amusing videos for "Build Me Up Buttercup," "Baby Now That I've Found You" and "Baby It's Cold Outside." After the songs end, Julia often talks to the camera. Her comments are as much fun to watch as the singing.

If time allows, I will try to catch Julia's performance on the WDVX Blue Plate Special at noon. I assume that she will open for Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere rather than the other way around. Obviously I can listen on the radio, however I hope to get there in person. Besides, I have a coupon for a free cupcake at the adjoining Café 4.

Attending the Blue Plate Special means two trips downtown for me the same day. I already have tickets to see the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra at the historic Tennessee Theatre on Friday night. Since my wife will be on stage singing with the Knoxville Choral Society, I'll have an empty seat next to me. Know anybody who might want to go hear the Polovtzian Dances on short notice?

paleoriffic

Once again, Paley Fest has made me a bit homesick for Los Angeles. Every year the organization formerly known as the Museum of Television & Radio puts on a series of seminars with the casts and creators of quality television programs. This year's festival starts Friday.

If I were still living in the Southland, I would try to get tickets to see Tuesday's presentation on "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" and next Friday's panel on "The Mentalist." My kids got me to watch "Dr. Horrible" while they were here for the holidays. "The Mentalist" is a show that truly entertains me. In fact, I'm watching the most recent episode as I type this. Coincidentally, the plot centers on an investigation at a Hollywood studio.

During week two of Paley Fest, I would want to see "Fringe" and the unaired "Pushing Daisies" episodes. I got hooked on "Fringe" while watching for "Fish Bait's" Darby Totten. She appeared as an FBI agent in several episodes. "Pushing Daisies" was chock full of clever dialogue that often made us hit the replay button. It looks like I will be able to see the last three "Daisies" from the comfort of my own home. ABC plans to burn them off on Saturday nights in May and June.

dance dance revolution

The whole point of "Dancing with the Knoxville Stars" is to raise money for East Tennessee Children's Hospital. I have been updating my fundraising page so people (like you) can donate online. While the dancing is important, the winner of the contest is actually the team that collects the most dollars. As of this writing, Lori Tucker has taken an early lead.



So far I've had two lessons, the first on Monday and the second on Thursday. On Friday evening my wife and I went to Academy Ballroom for their weekly dance party. Carol Scott, the most recently ousted chef from "Hell's Kitchen", had urged us to go so she would know somebody there. Both Carol and I thought we could squeeze in some practice with our pro partners during the social event however we also spent a fair amount of time chatting with instructors Richard Bull and Jeremy Norris. It seemed like all the guys, pros and students alike, wanted to dance with Carol and her friend Crystin.



My partner, Emily Loyless, made the rounds and danced with several of her students. Just for fun, she taught me the most basic of foxtrot steps. When a rumba came on, I practiced a simple box step with my wife. While the whole experience is still a bit daunting for me, my wife is trying to contain her excitement about finally getting me onto the dance floor. She's happy that Emily has the patience and the know-how to get me started.

typecasting

One of my Google Alerts dragged in an interesting tidbit from the Internet. I can add it to my collection of people who are not me. Apparently I share a name with a video game character from Space Siege. According to the blurb I found, he is known as "alcoholic mechanic Frank Murphy."

kick it

Something in the News Feed on Facebook intrigued me last week. One of my acquaintances posted a note titled "Memphis Bucket List" containing items such as "been to Graceland" and "met Justin Timberlake." There were also dozens of things that would only make sense to a Memphis resident. Technically, it is a meme for other Memphians to mark off their own accomplishments.

It got me started writing my own Knoxville Bucket List. It's not groundbreaking or anything, it's just for fun. All of the 25 items listed so far are things I've already done. I deliberately kept the focus on Knoxville, although it certainly would be worth writing an East Tennessee Bucket List too. Also, I have only listed things that could still be accomplished in the future. In other words, I left off "met Cas Walker," even though I think it would have been interesting to have met the man. I invite you to add to the list via the comments section and to help me think of the things I haven't done yet. If you want to turn it into a meme, copy and paste the list into your own blog or Facebook note and put an X next to the things you've done.

my Knoxville Bucket List

• been inside the Sunsphere
  
• can pronounce Krutch Park
  
• eaten at Regas
  
• eaten at Calhoun's on the River
  
• written your name on the chalkboard at Litton’s
  
• been to Feast with the Beasts
  
• been to Boomsday
  
• been to Sundown in the City
  
• been to the Dogwood Arts Festival Parade
  
• been in the Dogwood Arts Festival Parade
  
• followed a Dogwood trail to look at the blossoms
  
• been to the McClung Museum
  
• seen Einstein Simplified perform (14½ years, c'mon!)
  
• been to the Clayton Holiday Concert
  
• been to the Living Christmas Tree
  
• seen a show at the Tennessee Theatre
  
• seen a show at the Bijou Theatre
  
• been to a UT football game
  
• been to the Tennessee Valley Fair
  
• met David Keith
  
• met Tina Wesson
  
• seen a forensics slide show by Dr. Bill Bass
  
• worn a Medic Blood t-shirt
  
• sold some books or movies to McKay's
  
• not been bothered by the closure of I-40 through downtown

Okay, your turn!

the writing on the wall

Facebook has been getting a lot of media attention in the past few weeks. The "25 Things" meme was featured in USA Today and several other mainstream outlets. More recently, coverage has centered on the revelation that Facebook owns all the content you upload to it. I also found several articles about the sudden surge of older members like, uh, me.

Some of my former co-workers and I have been exchanging messages via the Inbox on Facebook. Much of it was about the WAVA Alumni group I set up. There was no use of "regular" email, just Facebook messages to book another radio interview with "Hell's Kitchen" contestant Carol Scott. As I read and replied to those emails, I was reminded of my early days online. Back then, Prodigy users could only send email to other Prodigy users. The same held true for America Online and CompuServe. Facebook feels a little bit like a return to those days. You have to be on Facebook to reach other Facebookers. Here's hoping the site figures out how to overcome the problems of its popularity.

bicentennial minute

Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin should each get two jars of Smuckers as they both turn 200 years old today. How amazing is it that two men born on February 12, 1809 would have such an effect on world history?

Thanks to the HD DVR, I have been working my way through the fascinating "Looking for Lincoln" that PBS aired last night. It was hosted by Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates, Jr. The show repeats Sunday night (Monday morning) at 3am or you can watch it online.

While the PBS show makes a compelling case for visiting the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library & Museum, the fun website Roadside America has compiled a list of more unusual Lincoln-related tourist attractions. One is a tribute to the girl who urged Abe to grow a beard. Another is too gross to be true.

Three years ago I wrote a blog entry about the annual Darwin Day celebration. A couple of months back, I posted an interesting interview with the author of "Thank God for Evolution." This morning, I heard most of a Robert Krulwich report on NPR that examined why Darwin waited so long to publish his theory. Fortunately NPR, as usual, made the text and audio of the report available online.

radio ga ga

The message I got yesterday from David Edgar said, "Well, you know we always have some sort of contact around February 12th!" He is referring to the anniversary of WAVA's last day as a Top 40 station. I'll be sure to make time tomorrow to listen to the final hour that David produced in 1992.

Two years ago I wrote about WAVA on the 15th anniversary of the end. In the time since then I've kept in touch with some former co-workers, made contact with some and lost contact with some others. Knoxville readers know that I work with another WAVA alumni, Marc Anthony. It's also obvious to regular readers that I keep in touch with Bean, who was known on WAVA as "Flash Phillips."

Sandy Weaver met me at a Waffle House on her way through Knoxville last year. Loo Katz sent a nice holiday card with a photo of his kids. Mark St. John comes to Knoxville a couple of times a year in his capacity as the consultant to the cluster of stations where I work. By coincidence, Mike Beach turned up on today's installment of Knoxville Radio History 101.

Last year I got several invitations to join Facebook, including one from Don Geronimo. I signed up and have also connected with Janet From Another Planet and Susan Raider. The message I got from David Edgar was through Facebook too. I will try creating a WAVA alumni group and I already made an event listing for the anniversary. The social networking site has helped me communicate with some co-workers from KPWR, KROQ and KLOS too. However I have been ignoring friend requests from about ten people I don't know. No offense, of course.

codswallop

If my website were in England, it might be called "Frank Murphy Dot Co Dot UK." Is there such a site? Why yes, there is. That means there's another Frank Murphy to add to my list. And this guy has a blog!

Yesterday the British Frank Murphy posted an old joke that still got a laugh from me. I scrolled through his older posts and found one labeled "Psychopath Test." Expecting another joke, I read on. It posed a simple question with an obvious answer, or so I thought.

A woman, while at the funeral of her own mother, met a man she did not know. She thought he was amazing. She believed him to be her dream partner so much, that she fell in love with him right there but never asked for his number and could not find him. A few days later she killed her sister. Question: What was her motive for killing her sister?

According to Brit Frank, I'm psychopath because I knew the right answer. Thanks, bloke but I think I'll check with Snopes.com to make sure I'm not crazy like that.

this site won't harm your computer

The news that Google accidentally broke the Internet came as a great relief. I was glad it was them and not me. I was one of the many people using the search engine around 10:00 a.m. on Saturday. Everything I searched for came back with a warning that clicking the links would hurt my computer. The stumble by the mighty Google surprised me so much that I didn't even try another search engine. I might have thought to save a few screen grabs if I weren't worried that I had been infected with a virus or spyware or whatever the next bad thing will be called. Or that maybe Google had been hacked. Fortunately others did save their weird results. Depending on your political views, you can choose to be amused by the idea of a dangerous Pentagon website or a harmful New York Times homepage.

the best medicine

The Christmas gift that my friend Bean gave me is the companion book to the PBS miniseries "Make 'Em Laugh." The first two segments aired last Wednesday but I didn't get to them until the other day. Make sure you set your DVR to catch the rest of the episodes.

The series runs for six hours. There's another half hour available online, appropriately titled "Teh Internets." They also link to five classic viral videos. If you haven't already seen all five, you should have your Internet access revoked.

Last week on TV, they did an hour on "Nerds, Jerks & Oddballs" followed by an hour of "Breadwinners and Homemakers." This week's topics are "The Knockabouts" and "The Groundbreakers," which are about slapstick and freedom of speech respectively. The TV episodes are arranged in a different order than the chapters of the book. Some excerpts from the book can be found online, including most of the section on early radio comedy.

For someone like me, the show is fun piece of nostalgia. As a kid, I watched a lot of famous comedians from well before my time, so I was already familiar with Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton and the like. "Make 'Em Laugh" shows clips that remind me of the movies and shows I've seen throughout my life. I'm not sure that I would be as entertained if I didn't know the source material. I find it interesting when they dissect the humor, but like frogs, the jokes get killed in the process.

guaranteed gasoline fail

"Have you seen the Censored Count?" asked my kids. Over their Thanksgiving and Christmas vacations I truly enjoyed talking with them about their current favorite websites. We watched the great "Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog" and scrolled through okay sites like I Can Has Cheezburger and better sites such as Totally Looks Like. After getting Rickrolled by the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, we got a chuckle from the Barackroll.

We were passing laptops back and forth in a flurry of Internet activity as each of us brought up various viral videos and other content to share. The site that kept coming back into our conversations was the very funny Fail Blog. For example, as the family was decorating Christmas cookies, Frank Jr. cracked us up by making the Gingerbread Man Fail that you might have noticed in my December 25th post. While we were in St. Louis, I spotted a real-life example that could have been on Fail Blog. I snapped these pictures at a QuikTrip and added the text myself.

what brought you here

There's no question that 2008 was a pretty good year for my blog. I won the "Best Local Blogger" award in the Knoxville News Sentinel readers' poll and had a couple of days with big readership spikes. So, which posts were the most read this year? Not surprisingly, a 2006 post about Abby Ham was the number two ranked entry. If I filter out the old stuff that still turns up in people's Google searches, here are my most viewed posts from 2008:

1) Jimmy Kimmel mentioned me when I sent him a funny obituary from the News Sentinel

2) Stacy McCloud's boots will turn up in my search results for years to come

3) This December entry about Julianne Hough's concert in Knoxville made a strong late-year showing

4) Gentlemen's Top Cuts has gone out of business but it got a lot of attention when it first opened

5) Oh and Paris Hilton showed up in Pigeon Forge

6) Fans of Randy Rhoads linked to my post on their message boards

7) Game on! The Osmonds are competing with the Houghs to be the most popular Mormon showbiz family among my readers

8) Fans of American Idol's Ace Young lit up their message boards too

9) Of all my posts about Dr. Bill Bass and the Body Farm this year, this one got the most views

10) Stacy McCloud got promoted to evening anchor but didn't give up the noon news

11) A lot of clicks from Derek & Julianne Hough fans came via the ABC.com message boards, take that Osmonds!

12) People looking for this post could have been Natasha Henstridge fans, "Lost" fans, WATE news fans or maybe even George Michael fans

13) We're back where we started with a follow-up to the most-viewed post about Jimmy Kimmel mentioning Knoxville

14) I think readers of this post about local news were mostly interested in diamond rings or the lack thereof

15) Mmm... cupcakes

16) Melinda Doolittle may not have as many fans as Ace Young but they found this post

17) Who do you think the readers of this entry were searching for, Chef Walter or Stacy McCloud?

18) Like everyone, I was surprised and saddened by Tim Russert's passing

19) It looks like the Knoxville Symphony Orchestra will have a successful blogger night in January

20) My recent story of a young girl's Christmas wish for a styrofoam penguin got mentioned on the local news

21) Pope Benedict XVI might have ranked higher if he visited Knoxville

22) DSRL!

23) The last Haunted Cave might have inspired people to read about Cherokee Caverns

24) Sam's Club gets me hooked on raspberry chipotle sauce and then cuts me off

25) Wasn't it great when the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade Rickrolled us?

Happy New Year! See you tonight?

perpetual light skype upon them

In this Internet era, everyone could benefit from having a Google Alert for their own name. I've had one in my name for a while and I've recently suggested that my wife and kids set up some for themselves. This past January, Stacy McCloud got a laugh when a Google Alert showed her name in my blog post titled "local news anchor on pot."

When I first set up my own Google Alert, I would get a lot of links to pages about the late politician and judge Frank Murphy and to news stories mentioning the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice. The famous Michigander turned up recently in a story on George Mason University's History News Network. Sometimes I got news of former NFL player Frank Murphy. Lately there have been even more Frank Murphys turning up on the Alert.

There's a Frank Murphy who is a "streetwise scrum half," whatever that means. In Florida, there's a Frank Murphy who is the president of Catholic Charities, Diocese of St. Petersburg. A Dr. Frank Murphy is vice-president of the South Carolina Animal Care and Control Association. However it was yet another Frank Murphy who gave me reason to write this post.

He's a funeral director in Salem, Massachusetts who has started using the Internet to help grieving families. He sets up video streaming to allow far-off relatives to view funeral services online.

The process requires only a single camera, a laptop and an Internet connection. There is a 40-second delay, but viewers are essentially watching the proceedings in "real time" through a link to a secure page or by logging in to a password-protected portion on the Murphy Funeral Home Web site.

The biggest challenge was practical, not philosophical. The church lacks an Internet connection, and Murphy is not ready to take the service wireless — at least not yet. Fortunately, a benevolent neighbor of the church allowed a cable to be run from his router, enabling the broadcast to happen.

As an aside, I thought it funny that the website for the local newspaper in Massachusetts is called WickedLocal.com.

cyber is the new black

Several news shows over the weekend had advice on how to shop on Cyber Monday. They mentioned comparison shopping sites like PriceGrabber and PriceSpider and other helpful sites like WalletPop, CouponMountain, DealNews and Shopzilla.

Just in time for Christmas, my mother and some other relatives have purchased some beautiful hand-crafted jewelry from Lillydaisy Boutique, a new online shop run by another one of our family members. In addition to making the earrings, necklaces and bracelets shown on the site, they can make custom pieces to order. I got a kick out of the cleverly named "Hooked on Onyx." The set in the picture has already been sold but don't worry. They'll make more.

rambling with Grambling

FutureMe.org is a website where you send messages to yourself in the future. I have inadvertently done the same thing with my blog. The other day I was looking at my reviews of the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade from past few years when I stumbled upon a post that reminded me to record the Bayou Classic this afternoon.

The game between Grambling State and Southern was not the main attraction. As soon as we got home tonight, we fast forwarded right to the halftime show, better known as the Battle of the Bands. The drum majors for both schools began with an incredible limbo-like backward bend. The tops of their hats actually touch the ground.

Unfortunately NBC's audio mix was atrocious. In the background we could hear that each school had an announcer introducing the performance to the crowd in the stadium. Home viewers could not make out a word of it. The television microphones were placed so that only a portion of the instruments could be heard at any given time. Because the band members are constantly switching directions, it would be just about impossible to capture all the sound.

From the letters they formed on the field it looked like both bands might have been wrangling for an invitation to the Inaugural Parade. One of the bands also spelled out the letters BCFX. It wasn't until the commercial break after the halftime show that we saw how it referred to a new video game called Black College Football Experience, the Doug Williams Edition. In addition to the football, the video game has halftime shows and drumline competitions.

never gonna give you up

The Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade will always be a major part of my holiday. We could vary the dinner menu and I could miss a football game (as long as the Redskins aren't playing) but I cannot miss the parade and have it still feel like Thanksgiving.

Why does CBS bother to cover the parade each year? Better yet, why do I bother to watch? The broadcast is not in high definition, the camera angles are terrible, none of the bands or singers perform and the anchors often give erroneous information. For example, they said that Horton the Elephant was from Whoville, when everybody knows that all the Whos live in the speck of dust on the clover Horton carries.

Actually I do know why I tune in. I always hope to see additional coverage of the giant helium-filled balloons. This year CBS replaced Hannah Storm with Maggie Rodriguez who, like Hannah, referred to the balloons as "floats." She referred to the floats as "floats" as well. When a balloon did pass by, Maggie and co-anchor Dave Price would turn their backs to the camera to get a look. Can't say that I blame them for that.



Maggie and Dave seemed to spend more time interviewing random guests than describing the parade. Some of the celebrities who dropped by were Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Broadway star Roger Bart and singer Clay Aiken. A soap opera actress named Julie Pinson brought photos of the European vacation she and Maggie took together about eight years ago. Maggie revealed that she and Julie have blackmail-able photos of each other that were snapped on a beach in the south of France. I think we know what she means.

To truly enjoy the parade, you needed to watch the good-looking HD coverage on NBC and not pay attention to the corny scripted lines that Meredith Vieira and Matt Lauer were reading. They deviated from the script twice today that I noticed. Meredith got the stuffing scared out of her when the Keith Haring Heart balloon got too close and brushed their broadcast booth. We only heard her distress because the camera was already focused on the next entry. Later, there was some confusion over what paragraph to read when Andy Williams was about to perform. How come my man Andy didn't get a float or even a car to ride? I doubt they made an almost-81-year-old walk the parade route. If Andy did have a float that broke down, it might explain the mistake in the NBC booth.



Without question, the greatest moment of the parade was when the "Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends" float Rickrolled us viewers. NBC tried to spoil it twice by listing Rick Astley's name in the opening credits and by having Matt Lauer say, "watch carefully, we hear there is a special musical surprise." I had just called my wife into the room to hear the Friends' version of the theme from "The Courtship of Eddie's Father" when Astley interrupted with his '80s classic.



For the uninformed few among us, Rickrolling is an Internet sensation where you expect one thing but get Rick Astley. My friend Bean did a great job of explaining it on March 31 and then executing it on April 1 of this year.

I feel for the guy in the photo below. The good news is that he gets to be in the best parade in the country. The bad news is that he had to wear the most ridiculous costume and ride on the Jimmy Dean sausage float with some country singer. What's he supposed to be, a pat of butter?



Let's "dot dot dot" our way through the rest of my notes... my daughter heard that the Rockettes must all have the same length inseam... James Taylor's electric guitar looked like a really thin acoustic guitar... the NYPD band got ripped off when the network ran a recorded drum track instead of the band's audio... Shontelle almost fell off the Rhino Mountain float twice... the Clique Girlz send the exact opposite message I would want my children to get from a group targeting kids... there's an "Internet phenom" named Charice?... when these same balloons appear in the Macy's Holiday Parade at Universal Orlando Resort, do they get deflated and re-inflated every day?... did Varsity Fanclub take the place of the Cheetah Girls in the line of march?... my wife is happy because the best sounding band in the parade, the JMU Marching Royal Dukes, is from her alma mater... Al Roker apparently pulled some strings to get his kid aboard the Santa float... did I mention that the fools at CBS wasted the first ten minutes of their broadcast talking about nothing?

limited time only

Oprah may have cheated her studio audience out of all the usual goodies during her "Favorite Things for a Thrifty Holiday" show today but at least she put some freebies on her website for us all to download. Because I was napping, I didn't watch the show. Instead, I saw an online blurb mentioning that there was a Brian McKnight Christmas song available on Oprah.com for a 48 hour window after the broadcast. I was pleasantly surprised that there were actually eight songs I could download. In addition to McKnight's "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year," I grabbed holiday music from Faith Hill, Tony Bennett, Il Divo, Josh Groban, Amy Grant, Harry Connick Jr. and Aretha Franklin. Bennett and Connick also make a free iTunes song available on their websites until Monday.

And, as Ironside would say, "Happy Thanksgiving, Eve."

short and sweet

In the days leading up to Thanksgiving, it's a fun time to watch Food Network and to click around sites like Cupcakes Take the Cake. Today I watched part of a TV show about desserts that I had recorded over the weekend and looked online at a collection of holiday cupcakes.

Some of the turkey-shaped cupcakes looked great, some were laughable and some were just plain weird. What really struck me as funny was that the turkey cupcakes being held up for ridicule on the very entertaining Cake Wrecks blog looked better than many of the examples on the cupcake tribute site.

strings attached

Somebody fixed the Wikipedia entry for the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. When I looked at it a couple of weeks ago, a contributor had mistakenly written that one of this year's new balloons would be Bolt, the dog in a new animated Disney film. I think they got the idea from a poorly worded press release that has since been rewritten. It's also possible that they didn't know the difference between a balloon and a float. Bolt is part of a new float.

The major balloons that will debut on Thursday are Buzz Lightyear, Horton the Elephant, and a Smurf. I found a good web video that shows some of the steps in creating these giant helium-filled creatures. The returning balloons are Abby Cadabby, Beethoven (the dog, not the guy although that would have been amusing), Dora the Explorer, Energizer Bunny, Kermit the Frog, Pikachu, Ronald McDonald and Shrek. Hmph. Still no Underdog.

light bulb factory

Maybe this week I can clear out a few things that have been sitting in my drafts folder for a while. The clever blog called We Have an Idea and Then We Write It Down came to my attention back on September 27 when they used the words comedy and improv in the same sentence. I have a Google alert for that phrase. They were hoping for a live comedy radio station, just like we were trying to do at the Comedy World Radio Network, which as I've said before, was ahead of its time.

You could spend hours scrolling through the archives at We Have an Idea. I like that they spell idea with an r in their URL. That's the way my dad's old boss, Nelson Rockefeller, pronounced the word. The idea bloggers want a button to bookmark songs on the radio for later download. My friend Sandy recently wrote on her blog that such a thing is on the horizon. I especially liked their ideas for pressure sensitive brake lights and model roller coaster sets.

Tonight's post has me thinking of two different tangents, one about improv and one about radio. You might recall that the members of Einstein Simplified were cast in a partially improvised horror film called "Fish Bait." Our co-director Darby Totten was recently cast as an FBI agent on three episodes of the Fox series "Fringe." And, of course, our live show happens on Tuesday nights at Patrick Sullivan's. Come see us before we take time off for Christmas.

While looking for a link to include with tonight's first paragraph, I discovered that the Internet Archive Wayback Machine has much of the old Comedy World site online. The page that they saved for my show mentions some of my favorite interviewees including Miss Yvonne, the Armenian Comedian and Billy Bob Thornton.

stench fry

Fans of the Body Farm books will be glad to know that the writing team of Jon Jefferson & Dr. Bill Bass have finished their fourth novel and that the publisher has added two more books to their contract. A story in today's News Sentinel adds some detail to what we learned in the Oak Ridger article that I told you about in May. The story, set in the Secret City, will involve Dr. Arpad Vass and his work to identify the chemicals in the odor of human decomposition. The release date of "Bones of Betrayal" is February 3, 2009. Go ahead and add it to your Wish List now.



Last month I wrote about the Body Farm's appearance on the BBC series "Stephen Fry in America." I was disappointed I couldn't see the show on these shores. But thanks to YouTube, I don't have to travel to England to see the footage after all. The episode was divided into six segments and uploaded by a Fry fan. The Body Farm visit spans two of the six clips. The first part picks up during Stephen's haircut in London, Kentucky. Freshly shorn, he takes in some bluegrass music in Blount County before driving his cab to Knoxville and meeting up with Rebecca of Body-brook Farm, I mean Rebecca Wilson of the Forensic Anthropology Center. The remainder of his tour is in the next clip, which also contains the beginning of his balloon ride over North Carolina as he tries to forget what he smelled here.

classic roq

A former colleague from KROQ recently emailed me to say that he was digging through some old stuff for his Facebook page and found an archived copy of kroq.com on a floppy disc. Can you imagine an entire radio station website fitting on a floppy disc nowadays?

Gary Cohen was the computer whiz kid in the KROQ engineering department. He's gone on to bigger and better things, of course. You can read more about him at LinkedIn and IMDB. Gary put much of the old KROQ site on his own server. Clicking through it brought me back to the early days of the World Wide Web.

Gary wanted me to see a photo on one of the Kevin & Bean pages. It shows the late Calvert DeForest posing with Kevin & Bean and Jimmy Kimmel and me.



I remember being present when most of the other pictures were taken too. I was the one holding the camera for some of them. The photo of Air Supply reminded me of the story I told here about the concert they did for us. I submitted this same picture to the trades with the caption: "Kevin & Bean with either '80s pop icons Air Supply or Mark & Brian, we're not sure which."



I wish I could remember exactly why we needed to make a video of Kevin & Bean on the beach with Jenny McCarthy and Ed McMahon. It might have been for an awards ceremony that they couldn't attend, perhaps at a radio convention or a Starlight Foundation banquet. Because nothing says helping the kids like Jenny McCarthy in a bikini.

goodness gracious

Here's a safe prediction: Derek and Julianne Hough could become the greatest brother and sister act since Donny & Marie. Their jive to "Great Balls of Fire" was the best performance in the history of "Dancing With the Stars." Even the music was better than normal. I loved all the horns in the arrangement. I've watched it several times and have not tired of it.

Julianne's triumphant return from surgery was made all the more impressive by the way she appeared from behind the lid of a grand piano. In fact the piano was a great prop, especially when Julianne danced on top of it and Derek slid under it. At least two people have posted the dance on YouTube (here and here) until ABC has it removed. The network does have the entire episode online in HD. I wish they would put up clips the way NBC does with "Saturday Night Live."

Julianne has become a celebrity in her own right. I think she's a bigger star than her dance partner this season, Cody Something. My guess is that Cody avoided elimination because viewers wanted to give Julianne another chance to dance. I felt similarly about her partnership with Adam Carolla.

I'm not a fan of country music but I will make an effort to swing by Target soon to pick up a copy of Julianne's Christmas CD. And yes, I am thinking about going downtown to the Christmas parade in which Julianne is scheduled to appear.

come out to socialize

The antique hearse out front reminded me of a display outside the Haunted Mansion. However I wasn't back at Walt Disney World or Disneyland. I was at Stevens Mortuary in Knoxville. The hearse is inside a gazebo-like structure with glass walls and doors.



The Internet has many more photos of horse-drawn hearses still in use today. One site states that Roy Rogers was a collector of horse-drawn hearses. Too bad Trigger predeceased him.

Inside the mortuary I picked up a magnet commemorating Stevens' 50th anniversary. The magnet got me thinking about other promotional products for funeral homes. I found places online that sell euchre score cards, hand fans, tote bags and other miscellaneous items.

son of glitch

Here's a suggestion for the NFL and DirecTV. Next year, add some preseason games to your fabulous NFL Sunday Ticket subscription package. It's not that I particularly need to see second and third-string squads battling for a place on the roster. Every year the first Sunday of the football season means that it's time to work out some technical problems before being able to watch a game. Why not let us fans get our bugs fixed during the preseason?

The DirecTV Supercast came in handy last year. I often watched games online while at work on Sundays. My first several attempts to log in today failed. The error message told me that the Supercast was only available between noon and 8:15 p.m. There was no way for me to tell it to check its watch and see that it was just after 1:00 p.m. This year, the Supercast uses its own streaming video player powered by Adobe AIR technology. They say it's still possible to watch the feed through a web browser with the latest version of Macromedia Adobe Flash. Unfortunately the computers at work don't have the right software and I don't have the administrative privileges to do anything about it. Once I got home from work today, I gave the Supercast player a test drive and was duly impressed. There was no delay between the video on my television and the video on my computer. The picture quality was very good in the small player, not so much when expanded to full screen. I could easily click between games and the Red Zone Channel. At least next week my son will be able to use my password to watch the Redskins game in his dorm room. During our practice run today, neither he nor I had any trouble viewing the games that were also being shown on broadcast TV in our respective areas.

NBC's "Sunday Night Football Extra" player was less impressive. The bells and whistles are a great idea. It's cool to be able to switch camera angles at will. However the stream was choppy and the picture was a little blurry. During commercial breaks, the NBC feed was replaced with other game highlights presented by studio hosts from the NFL Network. Those hosts and highlights had a much better picture quality than the live game. After a while, the video player tried to cut me off. I had to click "yes" to continue watching. On top of all that, the Internet feed was sometimes delayed from the broadcast by up to ten seconds. I was hoping that NBC would give us picture quality as good as we saw online during the Olympics. Instead I was left wondering if some network executive gave the order to keep the online stream inferior for fear of losing his television viewers to the Internet.



An online promo for Notre Dame football reminded me of something I heard during yesterday's NBC telecast from South Bend. Knoxville Catholic High School standout Harrison Smith is a red-shirt freshman for the Irish. You might remember reading my blog entry when he was being recruited by both Charlie Weis and Philip Fulmer two years ago. When Harrison made a good tackle in yesterday's game, the announcers revealed that the other players call him "Hayseed."

man with the Midas touch

Last nights 4 x 100 meter freestyle relay will go down in Olympic history alongside the famous "Do you believe in miracles?" hockey game of 1980. The race was on close to midnight, Eastern time. My wife had gone to bed only a few minutes earlier. I called out to her and convinced her to get up and come watch the TV in my office.

This morning she urged our son to go online and find some video highlights. First he tried to watch it on an older laptop, choosing the option to watch without downloading Microsoft Silverlight. That didn't work. He then found that it wouldn't work without updating the version of Firefox on that machine either. I sent him upstairs to get my laptop. We downloaded the application and finally watched the race. It was well worth it. In fact it was even better the third time around. If you haven't already seen it, click here to watch the race. And then watch it again a couple of times so that we'll be caught up.

To win more gold medals than Mark Spitz, Michael Phelps needed to be on a winning relay team. Obviously he could not do that on his own, especially against the heavily-favored, smack-talking French team. Phelps swam an American record time in the first leg and still got beaten by the Australian competitor. His teammates took the lead, lost the lead and then came from behind to win the race. Jason Lezak's anchor leg was amazing. Equally outstanding is the jubilation of the American team as they celebrate their victory.



All the teams were so good that even the fifth place finisher came in ahead of the old world record time of 3:12:23. Imagine explaining that one to the grandchildren. "Oh yeah, we broke the old world record. Yet somehow we came in fifth!"

listen freely

Maybe one of these days I'll get an iPod. I've gotten by with the mp3 player on my cell phone and by listening to an occasional podcast on my TiVo or my laptop. Over the weekend I went along on one of my wife's many shopping trips during the sales tax holiday. While our son picked out a silicon cover for his iPod, I looked at the other accessories and got to thinking about how convenient it would be to use a little FM transmitter to listen to podcasts in the car or on my clock radio. I'm not really interested in using the earbuds.

Today I started downloading a free audiobook from Project Gutenberg. Last month I had the idea to listen to something by Mark Twain during our upcoming road trip to Arkansas. At the suggestion of blog reader Clay, I limited my search to only human-read books rather than those done with a computer generated voice. Although the selection wasn't as good as I had hoped, I thought "Chapters from My Autobiography" might teach me about my distant relation. I downloaded most of its 25 chapters today. Tomorrow I'll get the rest and start burning them to a stack of CDs. I hope the disc player in my wife's car works better than the one in mine. Months ago I burned a CD of a podcast by a GMU economics professor. The disc is still in my car's player, unwilling to play. I think it's too long for the machine to read.

Reader John suggested I pry open my wallet and buy some of Chris Addison's CDs. Perhaps next year. For this trip I'm sticking with the free downloads. John's idea did remind me to look for some NPR podcasts for the show "Radiolab" that I discovered in June. There's still time for you to nominate a free download for my travel playlist.

connectivity

An article about the Smithsonian caught my attention a couple of weeks ago when the new exhibits "The Truth About Crystal Skulls" and "Jim Henson's Fantastic World" opened to the public. The writer wonders how the pop-culture inspired displays are in keeping with the museum's mission for the "increase and diffusion of knowledge."

The crystal skull is at the National Museum of Natural History, which may explain the problem the writer has with it. Usually all the pop culture stuff goes in the National Museum of American History, which is closed for renovations until November 21. That's where my daughter saw Jerry Seinfeld's puffy shirt almost three years ago.

The Smithsonian has some radio artifacts including a microphone used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Jimmy Kimmel recently emailed me a link to the site for a new radio that could end up in a museum someday. It's easy to use like a table radio but has the brains of a computer that can play both terrestrial and Internet stations. The two places I listen to radio most (on my own time) are in bed and in the car. It would be great to wake up to some of my favorite stations from around the country but it's not worth spending $650 for the convenience.

Most of the time I have the TV on while I'm reading and writing on the Internet. I do it in an effort to keep up with the accumulated shows on my TiVo and my HD-DVR. I would like to make time to listen to a few radio podcasts and maybe I can now that I know how to increase the playback speed on Windows Media Player.

winz, losses and ties

Nicole Sandler and I know a lot of the same people. We were competitors when I was at KROQ and she was at KLOS. A couple of years later, I got Nicole's old job with Mark & Brian. Despite our common acquaintances, we had never met or spoken until today. Nicole emailed to see if she could call me on her Miami radio show to talk briefly about the tragic church shooting in Knoxville. A podcast of the show is available. I'm on at the end of hour 3.

The accused killer had books by Bill O'Reilly, Michael Savage and Sean Hannity in his home. I said that I had heard Catherine Howell on WNOX wondering if the suspect was one of their listeners. Nicole supports a return to the Fairness Doctrine so that people like the shooter might be exposed to other points of view. I countered by telling how we talked about tolerance and freedom of religion on Monday morning on Star 102.1. I told the Miami listeners that East Tennessee is not all gun racks and confederate flags. We have many different houses of worship along Kingston Pike and plenty of well-educated people at UT and ORNL.

It was nice of Nicole to call. I'm not sure why she thought of me but my best guess would be that she saw one of the links I submitted to Perry Simon's Talk Topics column at All Access. When I find a local story that might interest Perry (like this one), I send it along. I've been doing that since he and I worked in neighboring trailers at the Comedy World Radio Network.

tin roof rusted

By the look of this rustic shack, you might think that I was in a rural part of Tennessee like Byron prefers. Instead I was on Dutchtown Road, very near the entrances to the upscale Christian Academy of Knoxville and Webb School of Knoxville.



I think it took me longer to find the shack on Google Street View than it took to drive to the Waffle House on Lovell Road. My wife and I were on our way there when we spotted the picturesque structure. We had breakfast with some old friends who were passing through town. I'll tell you all about that tomorrow.

it felt so wrong, it felt so right

First my local Sam's Club gets me hooked on Original Roasted Raspberry Chipotle Sauce by offering free samples of it with cream cheese on a cracker. Then they run out of it and don't restock. Same with my bottled water. Now they have replaced the salad I eat every day with a more expensive gourmet version.

Because of all this, I have a confession to make. I cheated on my regular Sam's with the Sam's Club on the other side of town. We were over that way on Friday to see an ABBA/Batman double feature at the theatre inside Knoxville Center Mall. It didn't take long to discover that the other Sam's also carries Taylor Farms Garden Gourmet Salad (now with green leaf lettuce and radicchio) instead of the more affordable stuff I had hoped for. Things got better fast when I found plenty of Raspberry Chipotle Sauce and Deer Park one liter bottles. I put three bottles of one and two cases of the other in my cart. The different Sam's had done well by me.

No sooner had I gotten home from stocking up on my current favorite condiment when an email arrived from Fischer & Wieser. They are offering one free bottle of their newest flavor, Roasted Blackberry Chipotle Sauce, with any online purchase until July 31. Maybe I can make a little more room in the pantry.

meow mix

Susan Olsen wants your clicks. The actress who played Cindy on "The Brady Bunch" sent out an email tonight to a bunch group of her friends and family members with the news that she is in the cast of "Gimme My Reality Show," which will air on the Fox Reality Channel starting October 11. The show is filming now. As part of the competition, Susan needs as many of us as possible to click on a YouTube video she made. Whoever gets the most clicks over the weekend wins the challenge. It's a faux PSA called "Kittens In Peril" that could be analogous to the hazards faced by former child stars. Or maybe it's just about kittens.

Susan and I worked together at the defunct Comedy World Radio Network (which was way ahead of its time in online audio and video streaming). Previously she had a talk show at KLSX. Susan did a radio interview earlier this month in Colorado that made the news when she got sick. Rather than fabricate a story about having the flu or something, she knew from her past radio experience that it was best to be honest and tell the morning deejays that she was hungover from a few glasses of wine the night before. The altitude and an oncoming migraine didn't help either. The deejays were quick to get a video of the interview to CNN and other outlets, saying it was the weirdest thing that ever happened to them. Funny, it's happened to me plenty of times. Someday I should try to make a list of all the different celebrities who showed up hungover to morning radio interviews that I had booked.

won't harm a balloon

The electronic sign at Walgreens flashed the news that they have Ped Eggs in stock as I was driving past the other day. The first I heard of the Ped Egg was last weekend when my wife paused the TiVo and called me into the room. She was watching The Weather Channel and thought she recognized the couple in a Ped Egg commercial.

My wife and I have been fans of "The Amazing Race" since day one. However I can only recall a handful of the contestants. I don't know how my wife does it. She took one look at the Ped Egg couple and knew that they had been on the Race. But what were their names? That's why she asked for my help.

Not only did The Smoking Gun verify that the two on-screen were Kelly and Jon from season 4 but it also revealed that they are suing Ped Egg for putting their commercial on TV. Apparently they thought it was going to be an Internet-only deal. Best of all is their claim that a makeup artist added some grossness to Kelly's feet for the "before" shot. I wouldn't be surprised if Ped Egg's defense lawyers make use of a sentence from Kelly's "Amazing Race" biography: "Kelly admits to being high-strung and obsessive, 'athletic, bossy and silly.'"

what would Simon say?

"American Idol" finalist Ace Young got slammed on TMZ.com for performing in Pigeon Forge on the Fourth of July at StarJam 2008 while some of his castmates played nationally televised gigs. The fun would be spoiled for Harvey Levin and his crew if they knew that the crowd at StarJam numbered somewhere around 75,000. The fans were pressed in so tightly that the fire department had to hose them down. Oh yeah, Paris Hilton was there too.



As Terry Morrow mentioned in his blog, he and I talked with Ace in his tour bus. He had heard about the dig on TMZ but didn't mind because it meant that he was "on their radar."

During our conversation, the satellite TV in the bus was tuned to the Macy's 4th of July Fireworks on NBC. We saw Katharine McPhee singing "Save the Last Dance for Me" under an umbrella in Brooklyn. The fireworks were visible behind her. Earlier in the telecast Jordin Sparks sang her next single, "One Step at a Time." It was fairly obvious that Jordin's performance at Times Square was recorded on a night without rain.

When we got home from Pigeon Forge, my wife and I watched "A Capitol Fourth" on our HD-DVR. Taylor Hicks looked more like one of the congressmen in the audience than one of the performers. We cringed when he mugged into the camera like a cheesy lounge singer during a song called "Soul Thing." When he wasn't looking at the camera, we caught him looking at himself on the jumbotron several times. It got worse when he messed up the lyrics to "Dancing in the Dark" and went into the audience to select a dance partner in a pale imitation of Bruce Springsteen and Courteney Cox.

Of the four performances by Idol contestants that I saw on the Fourth, Ace's was easily the best. He won over the crowed with his original songs like "Addicted" and with one or two covers including a great version of "Dream On." Ace stuck around to meet his fans and sign autographs long after the post-concert fireworks. He is doing it the hard way by financing his own CD. I hope this nice guy finishes first, especially after what they wrote on TMZ.com.

did you mean lookalike?

Before writing Thursday's post, I Googled the word hookalike and got only nine results, most of which were typos for "lookalike." There was only one tiny reference that was similar to mine. As of today, there are ten results. My site is listed second!

When I saw myself in the list, I tried clicking on "similar pages" to see what Google thought was related to my site. Here are the highlights of what they came up with:

• By Ken Levine - fair enough, his site is on my blogroll.
• AllAccess.com - the site of record for radio professionals
• Blogger.com - owned by Google, used by me
  
• FW Murphy - manufacturer in Oklahoma
• rosie.com - huh? can't figure that one out
• New York Post Online Edition Gossip - or just say Page Six
  
• Blog Flux - where I see how many (or how few) hits I received
• Paley Center for Media - a favorite place in N.Y. and L.A.
• Tournament of Roses - I've mentioned their parade a few times
• Frank Murphy Real Estate - I often get his email by mistake
• Access Hollywood - a show I watch every day
• Tampa Bay Buccaneers - used to have a Frank Murphy
• I'm Just Sayin' - for fans of Kevin & Bean
• jack.fm - a bit of an insult since it's an anti-deejay format
• Jefferson Bass - should be higher on the list, don't you think?
  
• Life In The Office - fan site for the best comedy on TV
• Metro Pulse - Knoxville's alt weekly
• Starlight Bowl - one of my favorite places in Burbank

There's one site on their list that I won't include here. It's got a bunch of Asian characters and the words "Credit Card." Why is it in my results? Because it has the same URL that my friend Bean used for his first blog. He posted every day for ten months and then deleted his blog, which is too bad because it was quite good and it would have been fun to re-read. Somebody swooped in and grabbed his user name and Blogspot address. After a year-long hiatus, Bean resumed blogging at his new site, Strongly Worded Letter.

hoping for the movie

TV Squad is showing the love to "Arrested Development" this week. I just spent 22 minutes watching one of the episodes they featured in their Retro Squad department. They started on Monday with a review of the pilot and continued with a top ten list of recurring characters and the top five GOB moments.

I can get in the mood for the Bluths pretty easily. "Arrested Development" was a frequent blog topic of mine back in 2005. I often flip over to HDNet to catch a commercial-free rerun at 12:30 p.m. in high definition. Even if I turn it on late, I can jump right back into any of the complicated plotlines.

The other day I revised my Amazon.com wish list. I replaced the separate entries for the DVDs of each season with the complete set. It's more cost-effective to buy all three seasons together. With the episodes available on Hulu.com, I may not need the DVDs but I still have an urge to collect them.

feet in the air like you just don't care

Back in the olden days, we would look in the newspaper to see what movies were playing at our local theaters. Yesterday my son and I watched Roeper & Phillips (or whatever it's called) and then wanted to check the opening dates for some upcoming movies like "Get Smart." Nowadays, we go to the Internet for movie times and locations.

I already had a million tabs open on my laptop and was in the middle of researching yesterday's blog entry. Since my TiVo is also connected to the Internet, it was easy to use it instead. On the list of movies opening this weekend was one we've heard nothing about. It's called "Miss Conception" starring Heather Graham. From the trailer, you can tell that it's a biological clock comedy and that it won't win any awards. Not even for Heather's fake British accent. My son and I laughed when we saw that TiVo had it listed as a "horror" film. Maybe they've already seen it.

animal instinct

The Body Farm turned up on my radar again last night when I caught a few minutes of "Nature" on our local hi-def PBS station. I plan to record the whole show when it is repeated on Thursday on channel 15-1.

The "Crime Scene Creatures" episode is about animals and plants that offer clues to forensic investigators. Footage shot at the Body Farm included some raccoons filmed with night vision cameras. Apparently when raccoons find a corpse or carcass, they make a hole in the skin, giving flies an inviting target to lay their eggs. Once the eggs hatch, the raccoons return to feast on the maggots.

A couple of you have graciously emailed me the link to a profile of Dr. Bill Bass on truTV.com. The first several chapters serve as a good introduction to beginners. I especially liked chapters 9, 10 and 11 in which the author takes a short forensic anthropology course and visits the Body Farm.

In other forensic "news," I watched "Bones" tonight as promised. It wasn't bad although I got a little distracted by the obvious green-screen shots when the main characters were supposed to be sitting on a bench on the National Mall.

the darndest thing

Art Linkletter is alive and kicking, as far as I know. Although I had my doubts yesterday when I saw an online obituary for the very talented Harvey Korman. Some fool put Linkletter's photo alongside Korman's obit.



eFluxMedia has been turning up a lot lately in the Google News headlines that I scan. Dumb mistakes like this will keep me from clicking on their links in the future.

everybody loves Philip

Everybody gets into a bad mood occasionally. I was having a particularly cranky day about a month ago. I wanted to take a nap before going downtown to the Dogwood Arts Festival Parade. As it turned out, I needed to take care of some family stuff that involved going to Loudon County, waiting for two hours and coming back. Right before we left, I grabbed a book off my nightstand that turned my day around.

Earlier that week, I had only just started "The Road." It was not the right day for me to dig into something that dark and heavy. Instead I picked up something light and frothy to read in the car while I waited. My mood improver was "You're Lucky You're Funny: How Life Becomes a Sitcom" by Phil Rosenthal. The book kept me entertained through my tiredness that day. It stayed on top of the stack until I finally finished it about a week ago.

Rosenthal describes many of the real-life anecdotes that got turned into episodes of "Everybody Loves Raymond." There's some autobiographical stuff too. Phil doesn't name too many names as he mentions the bad shows he worked on before "Raymond." He has enough credits on his IMDB page to keep me guessing which show was which.

The term "sitcom" has gotten abused by half-hour comedies that are just a series of setups and punchlines. The great thing about "Raymond" is the way they put the emphasis on the situation part of a situation comedy. The characters are so well defined that the audience could get a laugh by knowing what Marie or Debra must be thinking as they walked in on Ray, Robert or Frank. Rosenthal's description of the process gave me a feeling of "oh that's what I thought he was doing" when I wrote a brief essay about characters back in the pre-blog days.

Reading the book was made all the more enjoyable by the bargain-basement price I paid for it. Back in March, I was ordering a Jane Austen-y DVD as a birthday gift for my wife. It cost about $20, which is five dollars under Amazon.com's free-shipping threshold. So I clicked over to my personal Wish List and sorted by price. Rosenthal's book rose to the top because it was on sale for just over $5. Bingo! If you are similarly stymied, Les Jones has posted about a site that will help you find super-cheap items to get to the $25 mark.

ridin' the whip

The opening weekend crowds didn't deter us from going to see "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull" yesterday. It may not be the best in the series but it is certainly not the worst either. I think it's just as good as "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." The new movie is a feel-good thrill ride that hits all the points you would expect. The plot twists didn't surprise me but they didn't disappoint me either. From big ants to atom bombs to UFOs, it is filled with nods to science fiction movies of the 1950s. Many of reviewers who had no problem with the supernatural elements of the first three movies found the plot of this fourth movie to be far-fetched. Without giving too much away, it shouldn't shock anyone that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg are big believers in space aliens. They probably read "Chariots of the Gods" back in the '70s too. I thought it would have been funny if the creature in the body bag at the beginning of the film looked just like E.T.

I went to my TiVo to see what Roeper & Phillips (a/k/a Not Siskel & Not Ebert) had to say about the latest Jones saga. Unfortunately some basketball game ran late and WATE joined the show in progress. Naturally, Indiana Jones was the first movie they reviewed, so I missed it. The episode is still not on their website as I write this. For what it's worth, I think Michael Phillips should get the job as Roger Ebert's permanent on-camera replacement, even if he didn't like "IJatKotCK." There is a review of "The Last Crusade" in the Siskel & Ebert archives. I didn't expect Gene Siskel to give it a thumbs down.

After watching the new movie yesterday, I tried to think about how it compared to the first three. That's when I realized that I had absolutely no recollection of "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." The synopsis on IMDB.com didn't help either. Thuggees? Doesn't ring a bell. It's like I have amnesia. I'm positive that I saw "Temple of Doom" in a theatre. I'm pretty sure that it was a midnight screening on the day it first opened. Did I fall asleep? Last night after dinner we popped in the DVD of "Temple of Doom." It was really bad. No wonder I had blocked it out. Did you remember that "Temple of Doom" was a prequel to "Raiders of the Lost Ark"? I didn't.



My friend Richard Cheese sent an email plugging his version of the Indiana Jones Theme, now available on iTunes. I heard it on his MySpace page. The instrumental tune sounds like something from the soundtrack of "A Charlie Brown Christmas."

My matinée ticket cost $6.50 at West Town Mall, 25 cents cheaper than a ticket at the Pinnacle at Turkey Creek. Evening tickets cost two dollars more at each place. An article in the Kansas City Star points out that many theaters raise their ticket prices on Memorial Day weekend. An executive at the AMC Theatres chain said that their most recent ticket price increase was due to the rising cost of corn. Corn! An executive with Regal Cinemas says that movie tickets would cost $20 if not for the concessions. I don't buy popcorn and therefore I don't mind that high concession prices help keep my ticket price lower. But I don't want my ticket price to go up just to keep the popcorn price from rising. It's a double standard, I know.

pick it and click it

Tonight seemed like a good night to try the new DirecTV DVR Scheduler. I only learned of it recently when a short training film about it turned up in my list of recorded programs.

I was upstairs and online while my wife, son, mother-in-law and brother-in-law were all downstairs watching the HD screen. I thought I could schedule the DVR to record "Last Comic Standing" without disturbing whatever movie they had on. I logged on to my DirecTV account, chose My TV Schedule and clicked on "Last Comic Standing." Here is a screen shot:



The only choice for WBIR was the satellite-delivered channel 10. There was no option to record channel 10-1, the over-the-air digital channel that I use. The local channels have been giving me some trouble lately. Last night I recorded "American Idol." The first hour is mostly unwatchable due to digital drop-off and pixelization. I adjusted my antenna around 9:00 p.m. and at least got the second hour. I remembered to add time for the traditional Idol finale overrun.

Back to tonight. As it turned out, I had to ask my son to pause "Transformers," go to the on-screen guide and record channel 10-1 for me. After all that, "Last Comic Standing" wasn't even in HD. C'mon NBC. Get with it.

that time again

Several more of the television shows I enjoy have gotten their cancellation notices this week. The LA Times Show Tracker has an updated list. Good-bye to "New Amsterdam," "Welcome to the Captain" and "Miss Guided." We already knew that "Journeyman" was done. I found out about "Back to You" and "Aliens in America" on Saturday.

This is the week that the networks announce their new fall schedules. As in the past, I will be clicking daily on various sites for updates. In addition to Show Tracker, I like TV Squad and the coverage by The New York Times, USA Today and The Hollywood Reporter.

Today's big story was the formal announcement that Jimmy Fallon will replace Conan O'Brien when Conan leaves "Late Night" to take over the "Tonight Show." Many people are wondering what will happen with Jay Leno when his "Tonight Show" run ends. My friend Bean came up with a great idea months ago. NBC should put Leno on at 10:00 p.m. Why not?

fragility of life

A tragic car crash claimed the life of a woman whose son goes to school with my son. My wife and I accompanied our son to the funeral at Holy Ghost Parish on Saturday. Even though we didn't know Mary Lynn Hurley, we wanted to show support for her children, Jacob and Caitlin. Years later, I still remember which of my friends came to my father's funeral even though they didn't know him.

The News Sentinel's website has two versions of their article about the crash. The early version of the story was updated to be the same as the article in Friday's paper. As the story developed it was revealed that the other driver had a suspended license and a medical condition which may explain why he was seen slumped behind the wheel before the crash. What now differentiates the two postings are the comments that were left on Thursday vs. those left on Friday.

Thursday's comments include several responses to a deleted comment that suggested the other driver should have died instead. Another reader felt it necessary to post the office hours of the deceased woman, which drew an angry reaction a few hours later.

On Friday morning someone posted a comment that will affect your emotions. It appears to have been written by Jacob Hurley about his late mother. It serves as a powerful reminder that the reader comments posted on local news sites will be seen by the families of the people involved in the corresponding article.

how 'bout a monster for breakfast

The rain today made it feel right to stay in my pajamas and plop down in front of the TV with a bowl of cereal. The only difference from childhood was that my bowl now contained exactly ¾ cup of Kashi GOLEAN instead of something with marbits. And that I was watching EWTN instead of Saturday morning cartoons. I had another childhood flashback last week when I saw a box of Quisp at Dollar General.

After finishing breakfast, I clicked around the Internet for a while. Coincidentally I found more cereal reminders. First I saw a funny movie poster that wonders what it would be like if they made a live-action film about Count Chocula. Then I saw an older Count at an imaginary cereal mascot reunion.

Last Halloween Jimmy Kimmel dressed as the Count while the rest of his on-camera staff dressed as other cereal icons. Together they looked like Chris Burney's arm. A couple of years earlier my friend Bean wore a Count Chocula costume to the KROQ Halloween party.

Before last Tuesday's Einstein Simplified show, Dave Snow and I thought of a new twist for the "Race for Coffee" game. Instead of sending someone across the street for coffee during a guessing game, we can send them to the Knoxville Pearl for a bowl of cereal and milk. I visited the place when it first opened and saw the images of the General Mills cereal monsters painted on the wall.

blogic: the gathering

What do you call a group of bloggers? Several of us got together tonight for hot wings and conversation. Perhaps we could borrow a term from the animal kingdom. A pride of bloggers makes sense for obvious reasons. So does a parliament of bloggers. A gaggle could fit too. Or maybe even an exaltation. I suppose we could try making up our own term. A blaggle of bloggers reminds me too much of the Bob Loblaw Law Blog. Actually, a boggle of bloggers has a nice ring to it.

Most of the bloggers present were people I had already met. Rich, Lissa, Doug and Cathy used their various handheld devices to work on their posts from our table at the Wild Wing Cafe. Doug has already published his recap. He's not exaggerating when he says that the loud TV audio was a conversation killer. It was on just long enough to get us to leave. Once we got to the exit, the play-by-play was replaced with music.

Victor and his brother Joseph were, I think, first time attendees. Victor works for AOL, helping to maintain their Weblogs, Inc. Network. He often writes on the DIY Life site. I told him that I regularly read TV Squad, Engadget HD and Slashfood.

I forgot to ask my fellow blogateers if they had seen my post yesterday about Googlegängers. My former improv brother (now in the USAF) Lance Harwell turned it into a meme by posting a comment with a list of his own Googlegängers. Why not post your own list there too?

done that

The recent New York Times article on Googlegängers seemed like it could inspire a good blog topic for me. Then I remembered I had already written about the same thing almost two years ago. Googlegängers are people with your same name who turn up when you Google your own.

Within the past couple of weeks, I have received emails intended for Frank Murphy the real estate agent and for Frank Murphy the factory owner. As always, I forwarded them along to the right Frank. The real estate emails often come with a PDF attachment about a home inspection or a sales contract. I almost deleted the last email for the factory. It came from Jakarta, Indonesia and was in broken English. Here's an excerpt:

Dear sir,
With your respectfull and consider please submit and advise our inquiry as your lowest price,delivery time and total estimated weight for material as follow:

The Frank Murphy who was in the NFL is now with the Toronto Argonauts. Tonight I learned that there's another Frank Murphy who plays rugby for the Leicester Tigers. I also discovered a Frank Murphy who is a watercolorist in Florida. He looks pensive in his self-portrait.

Self-Googling is a good idea for everybody, especially college students about to enter the work force. In a Wall Street Journal article, the co-founder of Naymz.com says to "clean your space and wash your face." By that he means remove anything untoward from your MySpace and Facebook pages. A former co-worker asked me to join Naymz and give him a reference. The site promises to help propel the real you to the top of the search engine results. The experts also suggest starting your own blog and maybe even getting your own web domain. Check and check.

beginning of the end

If WNBC-TV is really "for New York" like the song says, they should post their excellent half-hour special about the doomed Shea Stadium. At least a two-minute clip of "The Amazin' Shea" is available online. Maybe they could post fourteen more of them.

A producer's blog gives some background on the interviews they conducted with members of the 1969 World Championship team. A review in the Daily News and an entry in a Shea fan's blog describe the show too.

Of course Shea Stadium isn't only about the Mets. The TV special also covers the Jets, the Beatles and Pope John Paul II, who all made history there too.

Sadly, Rick Astley will only be a footnote in the Shea Stadium lore. An online vote to choose an eighth inning song was Rickrolled, in a way. The fans booed. Want to see a great example of Rickrolling? Read my friend Bean's April 1st blog entry.

tip of the iceberg

The "Stuff (blank) People Like" phenomenon hasn't grabbed my full attention. I had heard about the original site, Stuff White People Like but didn't spend a lot of time looking at it, much less the various copycat sites.

Today I found that I had been added to the blogroll on Confessions of a Worshipper (thanks!). One of their recent entries linked to a list of Stuff Christians Like. On the flip side of the coin, All Access posted a link to Stuff Radio People Like. Comparing the two is somewhat reminiscent of the old Goofus and Gallant cartoons in Highlights Magazine.

exhibitionists

Two of my former hometowns are hosting exhibition baseball games today. One game is in a brand new stadium, the other in a throwback venue. The Nationals play their first game in Nationals Park while the Dodgers return to the L.A. Coliseum, where they played when they first moved to Los Angeles 50 years ago. Meanwhile my Mets are playing today in the Civil Rights Game in rainy Memphis. I'll watch the beginning of each game on TV. The Mets game came on ESPN at 5:00, the Nationals game started on MASN at 6:00 and the Dodgers game is on NESN at 10:00. The Nationals game is also available for free on MLB.TV. I clicked on to it just in case MASN was blacked out on my TV. The video is the same but the computer stream is using audio from the visitors' radio broadcast.

While the architects and environmentalists are gushing over the new stadium's design and eco-friendliness, I am most excited about the food choices inside Nationals Park. They will regularly have menu items like Milwaukee brats and Philadelphia cheese steaks that honor National League opponents. Some food items will only be available when the corresponding team is visiting, like knishes when the Mets are in town and California rolls when the Dodgers visit.

As a former Washingtonian, I think it is fantastic that local restaurants will have outlets inside the stadium. Who needs a brat when some Red Hot & Blue BBQ or a Five Guys burger is available? My wife will be able to reminisce over some Gifford's Ice Cream. She and her family used to get Gifford's on the way home from the airport.

My next scheduled trips to the D.C. area will be too short to take in a ballgame. When I finally do get to the new stadium, even I should be able to resist the temptation to bring in my own food.

virtual refrigerator door

At any given time, my "drafts" file has a dozen or more ideas that could possibly be turned into blog entries. The paragraph below has been stuck in there for a while waiting for me to get back to the topic of fine art. I almost included it in a post that mentioned Jackson Pollock but I ended up taking that entry in a dessert direction.

In December my daughter spotted a Picasso-style doodle that resembled me. Soon after I posted the photo of it, she found the Mr. Picassohead site that lets anyone make an electronic drawing. She made one of me and another of three of my favorite movie stars, the Marx Brothers.

one and done

"If it weren't for bad luck, there would be no luck at all." That's what one of the announcers said about GMU with sixteen minutes left in tonight's debacle in Denver. The George Mason Patriots couldn't keep pace with the Notre Dame Fighting Irish in the first round of the NCAA tournament. Many of their shots found the rim but not the basket. The game was so lopsided that CBS bailed out and switched to the Cal State Fullerton game.

The NCAA is offering live streaming video of all the tournament games over the Internet. When I was researching the links for my March 10th post, I saw that fans had to register in advance for the video feed. Thinking that there was a pretty good chance Mason's games would be on regular TV, I had not registered for the stream. I stuck with CBS for a little while tonight, hoping they would switch back to the GMU game on my HD screen. Nope. By the look of the scoreboard at the top of the screen, they weren't going to be returning any time soon. At halftime, I checked the March Madness on Demand website to see if maybe I could still register. After all, I was ready to root for my alma mater, even though the game started so late. I took a nice long nap today and I put on my GMU sweatshirt.

To my surprise, the website had a button that said I could watch without registering. The video player looked great on my computer. Unfortunately the Patriots did not. The second half was just as bad as the first. Game over, tournament over, 68-50. What did I expect on Holy Thursday?

beware the Ides of March

The hat worn by the Wicked Witch and the whip used by Indiana Jones are getting most of the publicity of all the items in next week's huge pop culture auction in Vegas. In my opinion, any memorabilia collection worth its salt must include some "Batman" props. This one does. It didn't take too many clicks to find one of the ultimate collectibles from the show. If I had as much money as Bruce Wayne, I would take $50,000 to $100,000 and buy the William Shakespeare bust that held the hidden switch to access the Batcave. If you don't know where the switch is, you'll never get past the front page of the great website The Bat Pages.

egos checked at the door

As soon as the news leaked out that Jimmy Kimmel had booked Ben Affleck on his post-Oscar show, we could all guess that they would do a response to Sarah Silverman's hugely popular Matt Damon video. However nobody could have predicted exactly how fantastic Jimmy's Ben Affleck video turned out to be. It's the talk of the entertainment blogosphere this morning on sites like Best Week Ever and Pop Candy.

The best place to find clips of "Jimmy Kimmel Live" is on visiontellie2's YouTube page. He/she/they make it easy to see the whole progression of the Matt Damon feud, the Silverman video and the Affleck response.

Not surprisingly, visiontellie2 also has the most complete list I've found of all the celebrities making cameos in the new video, even catching some that Best Week Ever missed. It makes me wonder if visiontellie2 has some inside information. In addition to Ben and Jimmy, look for Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford, Joan Jett, Robin Williams, Don Cheadle, Meat Loaf, Pete Wentz, Dominic Monaghan, Macy Gray, Perry Farrell, Lance Bass, Huey Lewis, Josh Groban, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, Joel Madden, Benji Madden, Dicky Barrett, Rebecca Romijn, Christina Applegate and Cameron Diaz.

When I needed help trying to post the video of Jimmy mentioning me, I wrote to visiontellie2 for advice. Better than advice, I got back a link to the video that he/she/they had uploaded for me!

l'chaim

A young couple with whom I share a GMU connection are having a blessed event. They sent me the good news via email with a screen grab attached. Here's what they wrote, with hyperlinks added by me:

Ok, so we’re having another baby in July and found out last week that it’s a boy. Woo hoo. So imagine my surprise when, while researching about the bris ceremony and trying to find a mohel in Knoxville, you show up in the search results. Go figure.

party hat

How great is this? Jimmy Kimmel mentioned me on his show last night. It was a very pleasant surprise. If you read Saturday's post, you know that I emailed Jimmy about a funny photo in the obituary section of the Knoxville News Sentinel. He then had someone on his staff track down a copy of the paper. I figured he would use the picture but I didn't expect him to credit me. By the way, I got a spike in readership on Sunday thanks to a nice plug by Jack Lail on knoxnews.com.

I am trying to figure out how to make a YouTube clip of Jimmy's shout out to Knoxville. I don't think that I have the right software to convert the file on my TiVo to anything usable. I sent a message to visiontellie2, who posts a lot of Kimmel clips online, in the hope that he or she can help me.

As a radio guy, I know how to make an audio file off the TiVo. I had some great editing software on my old computer but I needed something for my current laptop. My friend Kathy (of the cream-filled cupcakes) sent me a link to a free program called Audacity. I downloaded it today and it worked great when recording and editing this mp3 file of Jimmy's comments:



The best way to actually see Jimmy display the News Sentinel is via the streaming video on ABC.com. Go about 8 minutes and 20 seconds into the second segment of the February 20th show.

Hearing my town talked about on late night television is something I was involved in once before. You might also want to read about the time David Letterman said hi to Washington.

brings all the boys to the yard

Pop culture obsessions, although fleeting, are fun while they last. My current PCO is the "I drink your milkshake" scene from "There Will Be Blood" even though I haven't seen the Oscar-nominated movie yet.

My enthusiasm was fueled when a guy named Brandon Hardesty did his reenactment of the scene on "Jimmy Kimmel Live" last week while wearing a Mr. Potato Head mustache. Then on Friday night, "Best Week Ever" had a segment on the catch phrase. I was sucked in, as if by a straw that reached across the room.

Hoping that others had seen Brandon's funny take, I referenced the scene during my opening remarks at last night's improv show (it was my turn to emcee). I quickly got the feeling that most of the people there had no idea what I was talking about. Oh well. Maybe I'll try again next week, after the Oscars.

check out those horns

When my first alarm goes off at 4:00 a.m., I tune my clock radio to 87.7 to hear the audio of ABC World News Now. I sometimes drift back to sleep until the second and third alarms go off. For the past week or so I have been startled awake by a disco-ish song with the lyrics "only you can make me feel so true."

I thought that maybe the overnight newscast was using the tune as bumper music or as a bed while they showed the weather map. One morning I heard it twice within half an hour, which made me think that it was being used as something else. I jumped up, ran down the hall to my office and turned on the television. The music was the audio track to a Vermont Teddy Bear Company commercial for Valentine's Day.

With the song hopelessly stuck in my head, I looked on the Internet for more information. I know from experience that people do it all the time. I still get hits from computer users around the globe searching for details about a song they heard on "C.S.I."

The teddy bear song is "Only You" by a Europop group called Captain Jack. The marketers must know it will make people curious. The commercial is currently showing on their website. A search for the song's lyrics showed me that they wisely chose to edit out the part of the song that says "all the hootchie mamas throw your hands up."

poll vault

Internet traffic must have been busy tonight at OnTheIssues.org. I repeatedly got error messages when I tried to load the page during prime time. I finally got through but not until late in the evening. My son told me about the site as he and I were talking about next week's election and about his AP Government class, which I mentioned here two weeks ago.

Because I don't know how I'm going to vote, my son suggested that I answer a brief questionnaire to see which presidential candidate best matched my views. Since I couldn't connect to OnTheIssues, I sought out some similar sites. A Sacramento Bee article listed several.

The various quiz results weren't quite as helpful as I had hoped. USA Today's Candidate Match Game was perhaps too simple. With only eleven questions, it omitted some issues that are important to me. It told me that my best match was a candidate who has already dropped out. Glassbooth had me assign points to issues, which was an extra step I didn't want. As a result, it pointed me to a long-shot candidate. Once I was able to get to OnTheIssues, it was hard to find the link to their survey. The Sacramento Bee article said their quiz was actually hosted on SpeakOut.com, so I just went straight there. My match scores there were pretty low. I think it's because my views don't line up neatly with either political party. I would be considered to be liberal on some issues yet conservative on others. Too bad I can't vote in both primaries.

what the chuck

Occasionally the Web Watch column in the News Sentinel describes a website that piques my interest. When that happens, I wonder why I haven't remembered to read the column every week. Then I click through the archives until I lose interest and the cycle begins again. Friday's column had two sites that I may spend some time exploring.

TV Series Finale is "devoted to the last chapter of your favorite shows." It will take me several visits to get through their list of shows.

Chuck Cunningham Syndrome describes a phenomenon that drove me crazy when one of the kids on "Life With Bonnie" vanished without explanation.

advanced molecular chemistry

The last thing I needed to do was add another series to my television viewing repertoire. But that's what happened after watching the first two episodes of "Breaking Bad." I almost let this one slip by. Fortunately, Terry Morrow's review persuaded me to give it a try. Now I'm giving it a TiVo Season Pass so I don't miss an episode. The first two episodes will be repeated on Super Bowl Sunday.

Part of my initial reluctance came from feeling that I had missed the boat on another of AMC's original series. "Breaking Bad" got many favorable reviews that also mentioned "Mad Men." I had sampled the first episode of "Mad Men," fully expecting to be enthralled. Something about it just didn't click. It seemed a little put on or forced to me. Also, instead of enjoying the story, all I could think about was whether the IBM Selectric II Typewriters in one scene were an anachronism or not. (They were.) I know I didn't give it a fair chance but I felt that they were more interested in making a social commentary about today than telling a story about a time, place and topic that interested me.

"Breaking Bad," however, has hooked me on several levels. Bryan Cranston gives an outstanding, Emmy-worthy performance as Walter White, a desperate man who made a very bad choice. He's a chemistry teacher working a terrible second job at a car wash. He has a teenage son with cerebral palsy and a wife who is at least ten years younger and pregnant. The combination of going on a police ride-along to a drug bust and learning that he has terminal lung cancer give Walt the motive and opportunity to team up with a reluctant partner, a flunked student who cooks crystal meth.

Another level is the pairing of teacher and failed student. I loved the way Walt insists on applying proper lab technique to his meth making, over the objections of his drug-abusing accomplice, Jesse Pinkman. Lastly, there is the level that appeals to my interest in forensics as the two must dispose of a body. Jesse fails to follow Walt's instructions with disastrous results. The episode dovetailed nicely with the chapter I'm currently reading in "Dead Men Do Tell Tales."

The AMC webpage for the show pointed me to an Amazon Unbox free download of "The Making of Breaking Bad." In the short documentary, creator Vince Gilligan said, "The audience doesn't have to agree with anything Walt is doing but they have to understand why he's doing what he's doing. If you have sympathy for him as a human being you can hate his choice but maybe you can kind of understand how he would come to make that choice." He summed up the show by asking, "What if we take Mr. Chips and turn him into Scarface over the course of 40 or 50 episodes?" I can't wait to find out.

too soon

Some audience members at the Einstein Simplified show tonight wanted us to joke about Heath Ledger's sad death. Fortunately we ignored their suggestions.

I heard the news about Heath from my daughter, who knew I would want to know as soon as she saw the breaking news on CNN and Fox News this afternoon. When she called, I was watching our local stations, which were reporting only on the winter weather.

By odd coincidence, my friend Bean posted a blog entry early this morning about the rash of celebrity deaths so far in 2008. My friend Lisa Burks has an entire blog about (mostly celebrity) deaths.

When I turned on my cell phone this morning, I had a voice mail from Terry Morrow. He said he wanted to ask me something about Brad Renfro. Terry wasn't there when I called back so I don't know for sure that he wanted to try and talk me into going to Brad's funeral, which was yesterday or his burial, which was today. But that's what I suspect.

The Associated Press made news with their decision to prepare an advance obituary for Britney Spears. The concept of updating the obit files was even the plot of a "Mary Tyler Moore Show" episode. Yet, the most recent deaths of the young and famous caught the wire services unprepared. Some writers feel they should only keep obituary files on older, more accomplished stars. With instant news on the Internet, readers now expect to see complete obituaries as soon as a celebrity dies. The news services will have a hard time keeping pace with Wikipedia.

jell-o shots and pillows

Tonight was the first Einstein Simplified show of the year. A larger-than-usual crowd showed up to watch us knock off the cobwebs after a month-long Christmas hiatus. We have to get the audience back in the habit of voting for us in the Improv Top 50. A high school group from Huntington Beach has been challenging our number one position lately.

One of the bigger tables at tonight's performance was occupied by a singles group who had organized their night out on Meetup.com. Two of the singles told me they would get the group to come to our show again.

When I'm downtown, I'm more likely to get recognized from the improv stage than from the radio. It happened about a month ago at Regas Restaurant when we had a waiter who used to work at Patrick Sullivan's. That's not to say I don't sometimes get recognized from being on the air. On the day after Christmas, a sales clerk at the Eddie Bauer outlet in Pigeon Forge told my wife that she knew it was me from my voice. She listens enough to know my wife's name too. My favorite story about being recognized happened the other day at Sam's Club. Neither my job nor my hobby meant anything to the lady who serves fresh fruit samples. She just knew that I was a regular shopper and sampler.

read of the dead

The stack of books on my nightstand has several new additions as of late. Perhaps this could be a good time to accept my friend Jessica's invitation to join Goodreads, a social networking site that lets you see what your friends are reading and lets them see what you're reading. Before I go rushing into an online commitment, I want to know a little more about it. Have any of you joined? PC Magazine picked it as one of its Top 100 Undiscovered Web Sites and as its Site of the Week last July.

If I do join Goodreads, Jessica will see that the next three books on my reading list share a common theme. For Christmas, I received "The Book of the Dead" by Patricia Cornwell and "Dead Men Do Tell Tales" by Dr. William Maples. I had just started on the Maples book earlier this week when I was interrupted by an overnight package from HarperCollins.

The publicity department sent me an uncorrected proof copy of "The Devil's Bones," the new Jefferson Bass novel. Like the last proof they sent, I need to finish it before my next interview with the authors, Dr. Bill Bass and Jon Jefferson. Right now, I'm in the middle of chapter 8 where the main character, Dr. Bill Brockton, is gathering information at a local crematorium. He just learned about the special steps that must be taken to cremate an obese person. They burn hotter. The chapter reminded me of a link to a newspaper story I saw last week in Perry Simon's Talk Topics column on AllAccess.com. The article says that larger dead people require bigger autopsy tables, morgue drawers and other equipment. I'll have to bring it up in the interview.

welcome to the key club

To get me to watch "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles," Fox sent me an interesting promotional item today. It was a key in a shiny fake chrome case along with a note that read: "Dear Frank Murphy, Very soon, the future is coming to Knoxville. You'll need this key." The case is imprinted with Take Back the Future .com.

What I like about the key as a promo item is the risk of it failing. I know plenty of deejays who would probably open the case, look at the key and then throw it away. I will save mine on the assumption that another piece of mail will eventually arrive with a lock that the key opens. I did a little Googling to see if I'm right. Someone at TVgasm got the same key but a different note. Meanwhile someone at SF Universe got a lockbox but didn't mention what was inside. My guess is that it will be a DVD of the pilot episode. I hope they go with something more futuristic. For the short-lived show "Drive," they sent the pilot on a 1GB flash drive, which I still use all the time. I could always use another one.

the adventures of ottoman

Fortunately the negative review by Tom Shales didn't discourage me from watching "Pioneers of Television" on PBS the other night. The episode about sitcoms has been airing throughout this week. I took it at face value and found it to be enjoyable.

The clips from "I Love Lucy" and "The Andy Griffith Show" were okay. The scenes from "The Dick Van Dyke Show" made me want to watch more often, like I did with "The Beverly Hillbillies" a couple of years ago. According to my TiVo listings, nobody is showing the reruns at this time. The clips showed Laura Petrie to be the perfect wife, fun and flirty. By coincidence, the scenes were from two episodes that my perfect wife received on a cheapo DVD for Christmas. Those will have to do unless I want to either invest in the boxed set or download individual episodes at $1.99 each.

Next week's "Pioneers" is about late-night talk shows. I found a couple of web-only clips on YouTube featuring Dick Cavett and Betty White each reminiscing about Johnny Carson. The remaining two episodes are about variety shows and game shows. Sounds like must-see to me.

poly want a cracker?

The Apostrophe Abuse website has a never ending supply of plural words that are made possessive by the erroneous insertion of an apostrophe. I enjoyed looking at it back in October. On our recent walk through Gatlinburg, I spotted a sign for a shop called God's Corner. Given that it's in the Bible Belt, they probably meant for the sign to be possessive, not made plural by the omission of an apostrophe.



Earlier that day we went to a shop in Pigeon Forge called Country Clutter. They sold a line of Willow Tree figurines that were missing faces. I was reminded of the stained glass windows at All Saints Church, which have faceless figures to allow the observer to imagine themselves in the scene. You may recall that a columnist for the local Catholic paper didn't like the windows (or anything else). The figurines were okay but the creepy keepsake boxes looked like they belong in a columbarium.

exchanges and returns

When relatives are separated by many miles, Christmas shopping is easier with the help of a wish list. My wife and I like to use them to send gifts that we know our siblings, nieces and nephews will truly enjoy. She and I each have Amazon.com wish lists of our own that our relatives can view. I also use mine to keep track of books, CDs and DVDs that interest me, often adding them to my list before the items are released. I recently got a gift certificate and will shop for myself from my own wish list. Unfortunately my wife no longer has the password to the wish list she made four years ago. She attempted to update it earlier this month. Instead of simply sending her the forgotten password, Amazon made her start a new list. She now has two wish lists linked to the same email address. When she logs in, she can only access the new list. You can probably guess that one of our generous relatives saw the old list before doing their shopping and sent my wife a couple of items that she already has. There must be a way for her to delete the outdated wish list. Any suggestions?

the spirits up

Whitney Matheson of USA Today doesn't miss an opportunity to point out the lameness of Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime." Yesterday she linked to another clever list of the worst Christmas songs ever which ranked "WC" at only number eleven. They put "Do They Know It's Christmas?" as their number one. By the way, Whitney has a Knoxville connection. She graduated from UT.

Meanwhile, my friend Bean seems to be on board too. On his Christmas Music Everyday blog, he posted a cover version of "Wonderful Christmastime" by Jars of Clay. He writes that "the only listenable Paul McCartney songs of the 21st century can not be sung by Paul McCartney." Hey, it looks like Jars of Clay will be performing in Pigeon Forge on January 26 and Gatlinburg on February 1. They probably won't play any of their Christmas songs though.

As I type this, I'm watching "Christmas in Washington" on TNT in HD. Dr. Phil and his wife returned as hosts for the annual event. Robin McGraw's reading of the teleprompter was very stiff and almost too uncomfortable to watch. Both Katherine McPhee and Ne-Yo sounded good. Colbie Caillat looked nervous in what they said was her national TV debut. Vanessa Hudgens sounded weak, especially when attempting the "Gloria in Excelsis Deo" part of "Angels We Have Heard on High." Then Heather Headley came on to show them how it's done.

where's Brookshier?

Andrew Siciliano sounded almost as surprised as I was to hear Pat Summerall calling today's Rams at Bengals game. I thought he had retired two or three times by now. Because the Redskins had already played this week, I was free to enjoy Andrew's amazing expertise on the Red Zone Channel on DirecTV today. Well, technically I watched it on DirecTV.com because I was away from home during football time. A couple of times Siciliano switched to the game in Cincinnati when things got slow in all the other games. I think it was just to listen to Summerall. They don't normally flip to a game just as the announcer wraps up the first half and tosses it to commercial.

it's surreal thing

The face at the restaurant looked familiar to my daughter this past weekend. She wrote, "Look! It's you! I saw this at Macaroni Grill." I'd somehow been Picasso-ized by a stranger with a crayon at a restaurant 400 miles from here.



Maybe somebody should start up a website that lets you convert a photo of yourself into a Picasso masterpiece. Over the summer, my daughter ran my photo through the SimpsonizeMe website and tweaked it to come out with a fairly accurate result.



While we're on an artistic bent, you might recall the time I posted a doodle drawn by my daughter.

fundays

Monday nights bring a plethora of TV choices. On my upstairs TiVo I record "How I Met Your Mother" and "Aliens in America." I have a large backlog of episodes of both series that will help tide me over during the writers strike.

On the HD DVR, I record four other series. My wife and I watch "Dancing With the Stars" together and sometimes vote for our favorites. To do that, we make sure to watch it on Monday nights as soon as she gets home from the weekly Knoxville Choral Society rehearsal. It's funny to see random celebrities in the audience. Florence Henderson has been there a lot. On tonight's final show, I saw Gloria Allred sitting in the front row. You don't think they'll turn up as dancers on a future season, do you?

My wife and son watch "Chuck" and "Heroes" with me. We try to stay current with both shows, meaning we usually watch them within seven days. "Chuck" has been consistently enjoyable while "Heroes" has gotten better, except when Maya and her brother are on screen. When the others are out of the room, I get to watch "Journeyman," which I have previously described as a guilty pleasure.

During the past few episodes, I felt like I missed something on "Journeyman." It's as if they left out scenes in which Dan explains his time travel to his brother. I looked online for reviews that would explain the episodes and ended up finding yet another guilty pleasure. The reviewer on a site called "The Recapist" hates "Journeyman." Absolutely hates it. But that's why M. Wilson Burdorff's reviews are so much fun to read. He eviscerates the show, pointing out all the plot holes and timeline inconsistencies. The negative reviews give me all the more reason to tune in. I don't want to miss a single reference in the recap. On last night's show, Dan traveled back to 1980 after being shot. The emergency room doctor was intrigued by Dan's iPhone. The Recapist posted a photo of that scene with the clever caption: "Steven! It's your cousin, Marvin! Marvin Jobs!"

hankey-panky

Kathy's husband Keith told me that they've never seen "South Park." Although known for his good sense of humor, he was being completely serious. This means that Kathy truly had no idea that her chocolate-covered marshmallow men looked exactly like the Santa-hat-wearing character from the show. The fact that she didn't know makes the coincidence all the funnier. Weird Ralph must have agreed. He submitted the blog entry to Digg.com

After reading the post, Kathy and Keith felt compelled to bring me some of her cream-filled cupcakes with ganache icing. It was absolutely delicious.

hi-tech peekaboo

Videoconferencing brought our nuclear family together for a chat this evening. After a lengthy internal debate, I signed up for a Skype account and then arranged for my daughter to do the same from her dorm room. It was great to see her during our conversation. We experimented with a few visual effects like "fish eye" that had us laughing. Once in a while the image would freeze for a few seconds and then go back to normal. During one freeze, the three of us on this end ducked out of view of the camera so that when the video stream resumed it looked like we had disappeared. Another time, we replaced ourselves with a pair of CPR dummies that my son had borrowed for a demonstration speech at school. My daughter almost fell off her chair when the dummies appeared on her screen. Now I need to convince some of my friends in faraway places to Skype with me. I promise not to repeat the dummy gag.

closed circuit to bloggers

The blog template has been giving me fits. The slightest error while cutting and pasting HTML can ruin everything. In the past few days, I have updated the sidebar to add a few bells and whistles like the "Recent Comments" list. I thought it might encourage more of you to post comments. As always, I prefer non-anonymous comments. Part of the problem I'm having is that several of the sidebar elements disappear on the post pages and/or archive pages. Another part of the problem is that the changes I made looked fine in my Firefox browser at home but were messed up in my Internet Explorer at work. I think that I made my Google search box too wide, causing the sidebar to appear below all the blog posts. Changing the size of the search box was easy enough. The hard part has come trying to upload the new template to my server. I keep getting a message telling me that the upload is taking longer than expected. It usually stalls after uploading 12% or less of the files. Also, this very blog post has been resisting my repeated efforts to upload it. At this point I would be surprised if anyone ever gets to read it.

I know that some of you will suggest I switch to different blogging software. In fact, I got an email from a reader over the weekend inviting me to try WordPress. When my friend Bean relaunched his blog, he switched to TypePad. I'm not ready to think about that right now. I have written 922 posts using Blogger without any major problems. My current difficulty is probably a minor hiccup.

Something else came to light in my sidebar updates. I put in a newer Technorati widget, which announces to the whole world that my "authority" number is 9. How lame. Unless, as my friend Chris suggested today, Technorati numbers are like golf scores. Most of the other blogs I read have much higher numbers. For example, Left of the Dial has a 28, Knoxville Trivia Blog has a 42, Reality Me has a 54 and The Kat House has a 581. I don't even know where to begin to up my number.

Maybe posting a link to my RSS and Atom feeds will help. Shortly after the Knoxville Symphony's Blogger Night, Tish from the aforementioned Kat House pointed out that my RSS feed wasn't listed on my site. That's because I didn't know how to do it. I've been occasionally skimming through the help topics, trying to figure it out. Now I think all you do is post a link to http://www.frankmurphy.com/rss.xml right?

pipa trip

Many Los Angeles viewers missed "Live with Regis & Kelly" this morning due to KABC's coverage of the fires in Malibu and elsewhere in Southern California. My excuse is that I forgot to set the TiVo for it, despite all the hype over Jimmy Kimmel's bicoastal hosting. Fortunately, we can watch the "Host Chat" segment online. At the beginning of today's show, Kelly displayed a newspaper clipping from The New York Times. It was a feature article about Jimmy and the relatives who work on his late night show. It's nice to see "Jimmy Kimmel Live" getting some recognition in the "newspaper of record." Most guys are jealous that he gets to spend so much time with Kelly Ripa this week. She flew to L.A. to be on his show tonight. Then they'll take a red-eye back to New York so they can do the morning show tomorrow. I remembered to set up the TiVo for that. In other Kimmel news, Pop Candy had a link to his show's search for the funniest college student in America.

auction ends Sunday

The same guy who is building his own Batmobile asked if I had an extra $44,000 laying around. I had met him last June in Morristown and was very interested to hear how he had stripped down a Lincoln Continental and was using it to hold a fiberglass Batmobile body. His finished product will look very similar to the real deal that I saw in 1993.

Since I will never build my own Batmobile, the guy from Morristown wanted to let me know that I could buy one on eBay for a mere $44,000. Unlike the original, this car has a back seat for the Batkids. The auction listing says that the car has been in many parades and that it is currently housed in Burbank. I wonder if I've ever seen it.

pluggin' along

The funny and talented Larry Wachs sent me (and probably everyone else he knows) an email today announcing his new project "What's Your Story?" on SuperDeluxe.com, one of the Turner Networks websites. Some promos are online now. The first episode debuts on October 19th. Each week, Larry will comment on the news stories suggested by his viewers. He is a radio personality who used to be on the air in Atlanta, Los Angeles and several other cities.

Another recent email came from a well-meaning filmmaker, offering me the opportunity to book a Los Angeles radio interview to promote "The Junior Defenders." The movie's concept intrigues me:

A crazed fan who goes on a mission to kidnap the former cast of a 1970s kids superhero show in order to produce his own episode. He steals a Winnebago, brings the show's ex-child stars back to Hollywood, takes over a soundstage, and then forces them to act in a new episode of the show.

Watching the Junior Defenders trailer, I was reminded of the "Underdog" themesong and of the way "Batman" was canceled fairly quickly without a series finale. A Boston Globe article describes the ten year odyssey to this weekend's midnight screening at the Landmark Regent Theatre in Westwood Village. Ally Sheedy is the best known name in the movie, which was filmed in 1997 but was re-cut with some new material a couple of years ago. It comes out on DVD and Video-on-Demand on October 23.

now you know the rest of the story

On August 23rd, a big crowd at The Comedy Zone had to be evacuated due to a fire in the back building. Einstein Simplified did a show there this past Saturday. Before the show, we walked around back to do some warm-up exercises and I finally got to see the damage. How long does it usually take for the insurance money to arrive and repairs to get made? I went back today with my camera phone:




The most recent Metro Pulse had a paragraph about the fire. No, they're not a month late covering the news. The paragraph was included in the September 30th edition of the nationally syndicated column "News of the Weird." The story was also mentioned in the August 24th edition of "News of the Weird Daily."

Before "News of the Weird" was a newspaper column, it was a newsletter sent to a few "kindred spirits." Its creator, Chuck Shepherd was a professor at The George Washington University. He must have listened to the morning show on WAVA because I started getting a copy of "News of the Weird" in the mail. And by mail I mean the USPS. It was still a few years before email would take over the world.

My "before they were stars" moment with Chuck Shepherd reminds me of an encounter I had after moving to California. I liked to go to the CBS Studio Center store to do some Christmas shopping for the relatives back East. When I told the talkative sales clerk that I would be sending my purchases to the DC area, he told me that he was from suburban Maryland. He remembered me on subsequent visits and eventually offered to put me on the distribution list for his fairly new email newsletter. His name? Matt Drudge.

that is the question

To Skype or not to Skype? I haven't joined even though my wife's brother has been spreading the Skype hype throughout the family for some time. I figured that I didn't have anybody to Skype with. As it is, I barely talk on the phone with anyone other than my wife. Who would I talk with over the Internet? Maybe if some of my friends from DC or LA had the Skype, I could chat with them during the hour that I struggle to stay awake each day before picking up the carpool at school. Not only does my wife seem interested in the Skype, she might even want to get a webcam to go with it. While her brother visited this past weekend, they used his computer to Skype all the way over to England for a video chat with their sister. Do you have any recommendations for an inexpensive webcam that works well? Are you one of my old friends interested in talking over the Internet? Is the Skype really free or is there a catch?

green hornet and the big apple band

The only Monday Night Football game I'll probably watch all year was played earlier this week. My family and I didn't mind staying up late to watch a well-played Redskins win. Thanks to the NFL Sunday ticket, we'll watch the Redskins in their throwback uniforms this weekend while our local Fox affiliate shows the Panthers at the Falcons.

One of my all-time favorite artists, Brian Setzer and his horn section made a noticeable improvement in the Monday Night Football opening song. I almost always like songs with lots of brass. The horns get a good workout on the clips I've heard from the new Brian Setzer Orchestra album. "Wolfgang's Big Night Out" comes out Tuesday. This time around they give the big band treatment to familiar classical melodies. Tonight I took advantage of the free download of "Take The 5th" available through the Setzer website. It's a twist on Beethoven's Fifth Symphony. The concept (but not the execution) reminds me of the disco hit "A Fifth of Beethoven."

The BSO MySpace page has more clips. I especially liked their interpretation of "Flight of the Bumblebee" called "Honey Man." Starting tomorrow night at 9:00 p.m., we can listen to the whole album online for 48 hours. You'll need to click here and then enter the passcode WOLFGANG

If money were no object, I would hop on a plane and go see one of the shows on the 6th Annual Christmas Extravaganza Tour. Listening to the classical variations and last year's speculation that he might retire the BSO made me wonder if someday Brian Setzer would play the local symphony circuit. He would have to bring the Gretsch and the Fender amp with him while the symphony in each city plays all the other parts. It might be the only way we get him to come to Knoxville.

buy 'em before you can buy 'em

Not that you needed one but here's yet another reason to attend tonight's Einstein Simplified comedy improv show at Patrick Sullivan's in the Old City. Street team members from the Tennessee Theatre will be on hand to distribute invitations for you to buy pre-sale tickets to "An Evening with Colin Mochrie & Brad Sherwood." Their two man improv show was originally scheduled for October. The date has been changed to Sunday, December 2. Tickets go on sale this Friday at 10:00 a.m, unless you have the pre-sale invitation password. The pre-sale tickets will be sold Thursday but only through the Tennessee Theatre website. If you can wait until Friday, you can save some money on service charges by buying your tickets in person at the box office. The show description on the Colin & Brad website gives a good reason to buy seats near the stage:

The show is all about audience participation. Everything in the show is based on audience suggestions and many audience members are brought up on stage to be part of the craziness. The entire evening is completely improvised, and best of all, the show is never the same twice.

are you ready for some

Today was my first day with the NFL Sunday Ticket in HD. At 1 o'clock I started flipping through channels 718 and up in eager anticipation of glorious high definition football. Just like on Wednesday, I got the dreaded error message, "channel not purchased." When I tried to call DirecTV, all I got was a busy signal. Repeatedly. Maybe I wasn't the only one having problems. I made myself some lunch and put on one of the blurry SD channels to make sure I was at least getting those. By the time I finished eating, most of the HD channels were working. The problem returned at 4 o'clock. Gradually the channels started coming on but by 5 o'clock I was still not getting channel 721. Coincidentally, the error code for "channel not purchased" is 721. I grabbed the phone and called DirecTV to find out what was happening. First I talked to a woman in the Philippines who had me reset my set top box. When that didn't make a difference, she transferred me to a guy in Montana who thought that the problem was somehow related to the September 19th rollout of more HD channels. The engineers were working on it, he said. People on the West Coast will get the new channels first. I was told to be patient as it may take several days (or longer) for them to work their way Eastward.

This was the perfect week for me to work out the bugs with my Sunday Ticket subscription. The Redskins don't play until tomorrow night. Instead of sticking with one game, I was in the mood to watch them all. They have an easy way to do just that on the ADD Channel or as they call it, the Red Zone Channel. Somebody at Sunday Ticket headquarters keeps an eye on which teams are nearing the goal line and flips from game to game for you. You end up seeing most of the scoring plays live. The rest are shown on replay very shortly thereafter. If nobody seems about to score, they show you whichever game is most interesting. There are no commercials. During today's action, there was no halftime break either. By the time the last game ended its first half, other games had already started their second half.

On Sundays that I can't be at home to watch, I can still see most games over the Internet by using the DirecTV Supercast. The games broadcast in my home market (on WVLT and WTNZ) are blacked out on the web, just like they are on the satellite. The flaw in that plan would occur if the game I want to see is on broadcast television in Knoxville while I'm traveling in an area that gets a different game. For example, I wouldn't be able to see a Redskins game on the computer if it's available on WTNZ. If I happened to be in Atlanta and if the Falcons happened to be on at the same time, I would be out of luck. Maybe there's a way to contact DirecTV if I need to travel on a Sunday and all the other chips have fallen into place. Here's a screen grab of what it looked like toward the end of today's Bengals at Browns game, except that I saw the actual game in the empty black box.

trend setter

An article in this morning's USA Today describes something I did yesterday. My TiVo Central page had a new menu item: "Download NBC Pilots for FREE!" The shows are available through Amazon Unbox and would be sent directly to my TiVo via the Internet. I used the remote control to click through the various steps of entering my Amazon.com log-in information. Even though I was only interested in the free downloads, I had to go to the computer and link a credit card number to the Unbox account. That part was easy. Amazon had remembered the credit card number I used the last time I bought something from them. I could have gone back to the television to choose my downloads. Since I was still online, I just did it from the laptop before taking my nap.

When I woke up, the pilot episodes of "Bionic Woman" and "Journeyman" were waiting for me. I didn't get to them right away because I had some other stuff I wanted to watch with my family last night. Today I had time to watch "Journeyman" while I was reading my email. "Bionic Woman" can wait until tomorrow when I can watch without distractions.

"Journeyman" wasn't bad. I don't know that I'll give it a Season Pass, but I might leave it on if I'm watching "Heroes" in real time. In the pilot, Dan Vasser has to figure out that he travels back in time but has no control over his quantum leaps. His family, friends and co-workers assume he's on drugs when he goes missing for days at a time. He'll be lucky if he can keep his wife from throwing him out and his boss from firing him. It was fun to see the 1987 technology in contrast with today's. In one scene, Dan flashes back while wearing his goofy looking Bluetooth earpiece. He looks like a weirdo to a guy talking on one of those brick-sized cell phones.

Something else turned up on my TiVo Central menu today, a preview of "The Big Bang Theory." I didn't have to do anything, it was just there. I was curious to see how much of the episode they pushed to my machine. It appears to be the whole thing. They completely redid the opening scene in the genius sperm bank. In the new version Sheldon and Leonard leave without making a donation. In the earlier preview I had seen, they have second thoughts and try to get their donation back from the nurse. They changed at least one other scene too, about halfway through when the lead characters are driving. The new dialogue is a bit better.

Last night my family and I started watching DVDs of the new Fox shows that our local affiliate was kind enough to send me. I'll write about them in the days ahead. So far, my high expectations for one new show have been exceeded but I was disappointed by a returning favorite. Here's a hint: I might be able to alleviate some Monday congestion.