Yes, I have been a bit quiet. I have been out all day. In Cardiff, actually. Maybe more about that some other time, but I did get to walk around the place a bit, worship at the Millennium Stadium, and be generally touristy. For the benefit of Mr. Garcia I have taken a photo of the River TAFF. I have also taken photos of a number of things that I am assured will be instantly recognized by people who watch Doctor Who and Torchwood. I’ll let you know when they are online.
TV
Translation Entertainment
Over dinner I have been watching the rugby match between the Ospreys and Ulster. To be honest, it wasn’t much of a game. Ulster were shut out and leaked 6 tries. But it was hugely entertaining. Why? Well it was on S4C, and as neither my mother nor I speak much Welsh we had the English language subtitles enabled. I have no idea how this is being done, but it is being done very badly. For example, when a possible try went to video replay it was pretty obvious that what the commentators had said was, “Ryan Jones thinks he’s got it,” but the subtitles said, “Ryan Jones thinks he’s God.” And then there was the point where the subtitles came up with, “The obvious thing to do is arrange loans to pass the ball to Shane Williams.” I knew rugby salaries were on the up, but I didn’t know that Shane had become that expensive!
Given that the subtitles often got the players’ names wrong (“James Fox” for James Hook, “Gamin Henson”) I suspect that there is some voice recognition software in there somewhere. I think what is happening is that someone with a Welsh accent is translating what the commentators say on the fly, and that audio feed in being put through voice recognition software that was trained on American accents. Either that or the whole thing is being done by a troupe of enthusiastic but very confused monkeys.
A Mad, Mad World
I’ve been refraining from commenting further on the current economic meltdown because I don’t know enough about the actual issues to know whether what the US Treasury is doing will fix them or not, and I have no desire to add to the mass of uninformed comment already out there. On the other hand, I’m not exactly how well informed the Treasury folks are either. Most of you probably don’t read Forbes.com, so you won’t have seen this:
In fact, some of the most basic details, including the $700 billion figure Treasury would use to buy up bad debt, are fuzzy.
“It’s not based on any particular data point,” a Treasury spokeswoman told Forbes.com Tuesday. “We just wanted to choose a really large number.”
Never mind, John McCain is apparently off to Washington to sort things out, presumably with a six gun and some well-aimed fisticuffs. I gather that the elitist intellectuals are upset (The Economist described it as “ridiculous”), but the rest of the electorate thinks it is a great idea because who cares about boring old debates anyway, right? On the other hand, it has given Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber a chance to resurrect a famous moment from my favorite TV quiz.
Stonehenge Was Ancient Hospital
Well, not quite. When they say “healing centre” the archaeologists are thinking more of somewhere like Lourdes than of a modern hospital. But you know what the media are like. I look forward to a new medical drama series staring Hugh Laurie as an irascible, drunken druid.
Going, Going, er… Not Sure…
Instant replay comes to baseball. So far it is only for home runs, but I suspect the ability to challenge base running calls won’t be far behind.
I’m tempted to make a joke about Bud Selig and Neanderthals not being stupid after all, but that would be very unfair to Neanderthals.
A TV Trailer
As you probably know, I don’t watch much TV drama, but here’s a series I very much hope gets made. It is called Resistance, and a movie-length pilot is currently being worked on in Australia. Why am I so interested in it? Because, as Mike Glyer reveals, the scriptwriter is a guy called Craig Miller.
Back in 1984 Craig was chair of L.A.Con II, the largest Worldcon ever held. More recently Kevin and I worked with him on the Hugo Marketing Committee, which he chaired for its first year. But he is perhaps best known as “the guy who accepts Dramatic Presentation Hugos.” Because he works in Hollywood, Craig is the regular go-to guy when it comes to getting Hugos to movie people. He has probably accepted more Hugos than anyone except Charles Brown and Martin Hoare (who accepts for Dave Langford). I’d love to see Craig make a success of script writing and be able to accept a Hugo in his own right for once.
Craig’s blog has a long photo-filled report of a recent trip to Australia than made me homesick for the place all over again.
Olympic TV
I’d been managing to ignore the Olympics for some time, but now that Kevin is back home we have the TV on. Something to do with pretty girls in tight, shiny leotards, I suspect. However, NBC’s coverage is pretty underwhelming. We are unhappy because they seem to think that human interest stories and infodump features explaining things like where China is to their audience are more important than the actual sport. On talk radio, on the other hand, listeners are apparently complaining about the focus on non-American competitors just because they happen to be winning medals or something. In order to get a better insight into the views of talk radio listeners I spoke to my old friend Tuff Dimbaugh.
Tuff, as you can imagine, is incensed by the NBC coverage. In his view, showing foreign athletes beating Americans is tantamount to treason, and he is planning to sue NBC for their “unAmerican activities”. He also has plans for a rival sporting tournament that he believes will appeal more directly to the talk radio audience. It will be called the World Series of Olympic Sport. Here’s a quick run-down on how it will work:
- The event will always take place in America to remove any time zone problems
- It will happen every year so that people don’t forget about it
- Only Americans will be allowed to compete; a medal table will be maintained by state
- Because most of the athletes have poor name recognition, celebrities will be added to the mix; Shawn Johnson and Nastia Liukin will be replaced by Britney Spears and Paris Hilton
- Boring sports, and those for which it is difficult to script the outcome in advance, will be replaced by more TV-friendly contests such as WWE wrestling
- In sports that are dependent on awarding points the expert judges will be replaced by Simon Cowell and online voting by the audience
- To make the event more family-friendly, new sports such as Barbecue Grilling and Car Polishing will be added
- The event will be sponsored by McDonalds and winner will receive golden arches rather than gold medals
Commercial Cuteness
I’m slowly catching up with the Tri-Nations action and I was delighted to see that MediaZone’s coverage of the weekend’s NZ-Australia game included the local advertising. Much of it is very local, but I did see the car ad below, which is so seriously cute I felt obliged to share it. (The music, by the way, is “Come to me” by the very wonderful Koop.)
That’s Mr. Doctor to You
Via my LJ Friends List, an interview with Russell T Davies in which he explains that Doctor Who can never be a woman because it would mean that fathers would have to explain sex changes to their kids.
So, I guess we should all call him just Russell Davies from now on.
Fraud Warning
Just in case any of you are tempted, please note the following warning:
Do Not Sign Up With Setanta
We originally signed up with them to watch the IPL. The coverage was pretty good, but after that tournament ended my mum decided that she didn’t want to continue with it, mainly because they put the price up by 30% after the first month. So last month she wrote to them canceling the service, and stopped the direct debit. This month the service is still available on our TV, so mum called them to see what was up. Firstly she was told that she was in debt to Setanta and was not even allowed to talk to anyone about her account until she paid for another month. That’s extortion. And when she finally got to talk to the finance people she was told that they won’t accept cancellation of accounts unless you write to a special address, which they don’t make public until you call and complain.
So basically we are getting charged for a service that we don’t want, and won’t be using, because the supplier of that service is making is almost impossible to cancel it. Doubtless there are all sorts of legal loopholes that allow them to get away with it, but I know they they couldn’t have done so in the US because I’ve been through this sort of problem with an ISP.
Anyway, you have been warned.
F.A.B.
Joe Gordon has an interesting post on the models used in Gerry Anderson TV shows. I was delighted to see XL5 heading the list.
SF Documentaries on YouTube
Interesting post on Crooked Timber pointing at BBC4 science fiction documentaries available on YouTube. Goodness only knows if this is legal, but they sound very interesting. One on John Wyndham, one on Nigel Kneale.
Galactica Theologica
I’ve already posted this to the BASFA list, but I’ve just been sent a web site so I thought I’d put it here too.
7:30pm on Tue., June 3, Rabbi Ari Cartun will present a talk and lead a discussion among BSG fans, at Congregation Etz Chayim, 4161 Alma Street, Palo Alto. (For those from the South Bay, Alma is the same as Central Expressway.)
All are welcome to come discuss the “theology” of Battlestar Galactica, and its perspective on the opposition between Polytheism and Monotheism.
Post Cultural Imperial Melancholy
I’ve been hearing even more whingeing than usual on this trip back to the UK. Most of it has come from cricket commentators. It is apparently not fair that India should have a high profile Twenty20 tournament when England doesn’t. And it is not fair that Manchester should be denied the right to hold test matches simply because their ground exposes the poor spectators to all of the vagaries of the local weather while newer grounds like Cardiff and Southampton have invested heavily in good facilities. Because cricket is a game played mainly by the upper classes (state schools generally don’t give kids the chance to play the game) it isn’t surprising to find that cricket people are a conservative bunch who think than if something has happened in the past it should always happen in the future, just because it is traditional.
This morning, however, UK newspapers are full of the same sort of nonsense over the Eurovision Song Contest. It is, apparently, not fair that the Russians should win. Those nasty Eastern European types all vote for each other and not for us. And it is not fair that the UK should finish last, even though most people seem to have agreed well in advance that the UK entry was hopeless. It is time, they suggest, for Western Europe to secede from Eurovision and set up its own song contest: one that Western countries will always win, just like they used to before they let a bunch of foreigners into the competition. (Here, as examples, are The Times and the BBC.)
Aw, c’mon. Firstly, Eurovision has always been a jingoistic nonsense. Before Eastern Europe joined in it tended to be a bit of a North v South affair (which the French, Italians, Spanish and Portuguese generally lost because they could never get past their love of overly-emotional ballads). If the UK always used to do well, that just meant that it happened to be in with the majority. Now it isn’t. Get over it.
Furthermore, of all the stupid things to get nationalistic about, why Eurovision? As the great John McEnroe used to say, “you cannot be serious, man.”
Look, if the Russians and their pals want to win Eurovision, that’s fine with me. Though I hope very much that the rest of Eastern Europe insists on getting a fair share of the spoils over the year. In the meantime, I want the West to engage in a little cultural imperialism of a different sort. I think we should stay in the contest, and vote resolutely for the Eastern European entry that gets the highest score on our gaydar. Let them compete amongst themselves, but make it it clear that we’ll support the countries that make the best show of looking open and inclusive and liberal. That will give them something to think about.
And if you think this is entirely a joke, I point you at this article that talks about how the Israelis have decided to require their contestants to have served in the military, a rule that would have excluded one of their three winners, Dana International.
Eurovision Update
Feorag has been watching the second semi-final so that I don’t have to. I have, however, checked out a couple of her recommendations. The young lad from Iceland is certainly mega-cute and will doubtless be lusted after of many gay men and teenage girls around the world. And the Latvian pirates certainly look like a fun group. Why is it that all of the songs still sound like Bucks Fizz?
Hys Booke
Not having a lot else to do while eating lunch, I have been gazing idly at the BBC’s reality show from Longleat. As a consequence I now know more than I probably wanted to know about giraffe pregnancies (including the fact that giraffes give birth standing up, dropping the poor babies out on their heads). However, there was also a brief feature on the Longleat library. Lord Bath has more books than I do – more than 40,000 in fact – and some of them are very old. So we got a look at a 15th Century hand-written book of Chaucer stories (specifically “The Knight’s Tale” and “The Clerk’s Tale”). People were not so different from us in those days. They would write their names in their books. And in this particular book was the signature, “Richard of Gloucester”. For the benefit of you not familiar with English history, that would be Richard III before he became king. Nice to know he enjoyed good books.
Congratulations, Mr. Sulu
With same-sex marriage now firmly on the agenda in California again, many couples are announcing their plans to get married. One such couple is George Takei and Brad Altman. Having grown up on classic Star Trek (amongst other things), I am thoroughly delighted for the happy couple and wish them all the best of the future. Official announcement here.
Ye Olde Vindalooe
Here’s something weird from my RSS feeds. It is an article about a forthcoming BBC4 program on Britain’s oldest cookbook. And the title of the book is The Forme of Cury.
Who knew that they had Indian restaurants in the 14th Century? I can just imagine a gang of knights going out for a curry after a tournament. Not before though, you wouldn’t want to have to get out of your armor in a hurry.
(Yeah, I know I’m getting silly, it is 2:00am here.)
Indian TV
I’ve been meaning to post about the ads we get with the cricket, but I see that Kevin has beaten me to it. The Vodafone ads he talks about are very well done.
Worlds of Fantasy III
I finally managed to get to see the final part of the BBC’s Worlds of Fantasy series (thanks Nadine!). The program was a bit mixed. There were a lot of good bits, including appearances by a very shaggy-looking Neil Gaiman, Michael Moorcock, and Guillermo del Toro. Much of the content focused on Terry Pratchett because he is, after all, guilty of literature. (He also has an amazing office – I wish I had a bank of screens like that.) And towards the end it actually mentions the term “New Weird”, thereby legitimizing the movement (anything that has been on the BBC being automatically “real”). Doubtless Jeff VanderMeer will be very happy.
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