Al's Blog-o-Sphere

What do you get if you cross The 40 Year-old Virgin with James Bond?

The post title says it all.

I’m not sure why that works, but I can’t stop watching…

The television industry is once again, treating you as nothing but a consumer cash-cow, an open wallet for them to reach into.

I was indulging in one of my guilty pleasures, watching My Name Is Earl. I can’t help it, it’s such a stupid comedy, yet the characters are so endearing and when you come down to brass tacks, it’s really about someone doing the right thing, even if how it gets done is pretty ridiculous at times.

But tonight’s episode crossed a line, selling out bigtime to advertising and product placement. In the show, Joy, Earls’ ditzy Ex, sees a commercial on TV with Jane Seymour pushing some diamond necklace. Later she has a dream about it and sees Jane in her medicine cabinet. Seymour tells her that she has to disprove the theory of evolution so that she can have her own diamond necklace.

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about creationism to me. I think it’s hilarious that Joy sets out to disprove Darwin’s theory by putting a fish into an aquarium and putting food up on a rock. She says that if the fish grows legs and climbs up on the rock, then Darwin was right. The only problem is, she’s so stupid, she doesn’t know a pollywog from a fish and it does grow legs!

Continue Reading…

A conversation on the Reason talk show on WECK this morning about the trouble someone had getting Verizon to honor an offer they mailed to potential FIOS customers reminded me of a recent phone adventure with DirecTV.

I had DirecTV installed a year ago and they threw in all kinds of extras for the first year. But the year is now up and I’m paying full price for everything now, so I’ve been watching the bill a little closer than usual. I opened my last bill and was shocked. Continue Reading…

Well, today is the day that WIVB and WNLO will vanish from the sets of Time Warner cable customers. Time Warner took over in this area after Adelphia went belly-up a while ago.

From what I can figure out, the dispute is over LIN television, the parent company of WIVB and WNLO, wanting to charge the cable operator to carry their signals.

According to LIN Television, they want “less than a penny a day per station/per subscriber, for that ability to resell our station’s programming.” The also talk about “fair market compensation” for a signal that they make available over-the-air for free to individuals.

LIN Television’s side of the story is here and Time Warner’s side is here.

Now, I watch these channels either over the air (for free) or using DirecTV, neither of which is affected by this. So I have no axe to grind in this issue.

But I have an opinion. (Of course!) Continue Reading…