The Network Should "Tighton" Up Its Training in the Graphics Department

Just saw a nice closed-caption fail, as it referred to the NFL team from Tennessee as the "Tightons."

Good Grammys/Bad Grammys

Good Grammys: Having Chick Corea, Stanley Clarke and Kenny Garrett doing a Brubeck tribute. Bad Grammys: Having that tribute last about 2.5 seconds.

Good Grammys: Their support of music education and the announcement of an outstanding music educator recognition award starting next year. Bad Grammys: Of all the musicians in the "in memoriam" montage, the studio audience applauds the loudest for MCA of the Beastie Boys. (Not slamming his skills in the genre, but more applause than Brubeck or Andy Griffith?)

It Was a Good Game; How Did You LIke the Ads?

As always, the commercials that run during the Super Bowl get as much attention as the game itself. While there weren't as many memorable ads last night as there have been during previous years, there were still some good ones.

My personal favorites? The NFL Fans commercial that seamlessly mashed up all the different TV series, from Happy Days to The Simpsons would be tops in my book, followed by VW's Little Darth Vader spot (which almost doesn't count as a Super Bowl ad, because it went viral on YouTube nearly a week before the game), and the Bridgestone beaver would be #3 for me.

So what were your favorites? (If you need to review them, because you missed one on a potty break or the place you were watching the game was just too loud, go here.) Cast your votes in the comments.

Say It Ain't So, Jack!

This will be a very busy weekend, with Jazz Festival coming up tomorrow and Saturday and yet another gig on Sunday night. But I'm chiming in just long enough to note today's announcement that the current season of 24 will be its last. Here's the announcement, via MySpace:

In a joint decision made by 24’s star and executive producer Kiefer Sutherland, executive producer and showrunner Howard Gordon, Twentieth Century Fox Television, Imagine Entertainment and Fox Broadcasting Company, it was determined that the acclaimed series will end its remarkable eight-season run. Jack Bauer’s last day on FOX will conclude when the final two hours of “Day Eight” air Monday, May 24 (8:00-10:00 PM ET/PT). As the countdown to the series’ climactic conclusion races on, the final 11 hours will air uninterrupted Mondays (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on FOX.

Multiple award-winning series star Kiefer Sutherland reflected on the show’s run: “This has been the role of a lifetime, and I will never be able to fully express my appreciation to everyone who made it possible. While the end of the series is bittersweet, we always wanted 24 to finish on a high note, so the decision to make the eighth season our last was one we all agreed upon. This feels like the culmination of all our efforts from the writers to the actors to our fantastic crew and everyone at Fox. Looking ahead to the future, Howard Gordon and I are excited about the opportunity to create the feature film version of 24. But when all is said and done, it is the loyal worldwide fan base that made it possible for me to have the experience of playing the role of Jack Bauer, and for that I am eternally grateful.”

I started watching 24 in its fourth season (and I'm sure I'll catch up on the first three via DVD eventually), and I've been hooked ever since. The writing has had its ups and downs over the years, but the action (not to mention the roller coaster-ish pace of the show) has never failed to provide enjoyment. I've taped the show every week (yes, I'm still in my old-school pre-TiVo era over here) and even gotten to watch it as it aired recently, and this news will make me even more vigilant about setting my VCR properly (to catch things such as the two-hour episode set for April 5).

Congrats to Keifer and company on a job well done. I look forward to the conclusion of this seasons and the eventual movie.

The Latest Roadblock (Road-Blog) to Blogging

I've been really bad about starting posts and not finishing them lately (because of sleepiness, overscheduled days, catching up on work, or a combination thereof), but I have to say that the Winter Games have created a logjam of, well, Olympic proportions on this blog. I like the WInter Games a lot more than their summer counterparts (Michael Phelps notwithstanding, of course), so it seems like there's always something cool to watch. But the end result is, once again, more unfinished posts at the blog. Hopefully, I can catch up in the next few days.

But in the meantime, I've been tweeting quite a bit about the Games and some other stuff, so if new material is slow to come up here, please feel free to visit me there.

Rating the Ads

Now that the big game is over, it's once again time to ask you, my readers, to chime in on which Super Bowl ads you liked the most. I"m having to catch up on some of them, as I didn't quite get home in time for the beginning of the game, but from what I actually saw, the Budweiser Clydesdale commercial that showed the protagonist horse's great-grandfather faltering his way through a series of jobs before settling in with the beer company is probably my favorite so far; those ads are always good.

As for other ones that I liked? Here are a few that stand out:

• the "Forever Young" spot for Pepsi


• the Crystal Ball ad for Doritos


• the takeoff on the Mean Joe Greene Coke ad, this time for Coke Zero and featuring Troy Polamalu (incidentally, they still show the original spot at UNT games, since that's Mean Joe's alma mater)


• and the one where all the bugs collectively steal a Coke from a sleeping picnicker

All the ads can be seen at this MySpace page. Which one did you like the best? And if there are any that you thought were particularly bad, you can talk about them as well.

UPDATE: After going through some of the ones I missed, another Clydesdale ad--the one with the stick-fetching--earns high marks from me as well.

He got pretty Jacked up: Another commercial (that aired regionally, because I don't think Jack in the Box has a presence across the country) makes us wonder: Will Jack be OK? It's not every day that a company shows its spokes-CEO getting hit by a bus. Like many on the site, I blame the maniacal Burger King...

Six years later: We still remember the Columbia Seven. It came up in conversation several times this weekend, because the previous time our workshop took place in Commerce--which allowed us to unwittingly witness the horrendous event as it as happening--was that weekend in '03.

Blowing out the candles: Happy birthday to my friend and fraternity brother James.

A Blast From TV's Past

Inspired by the passing of George Carlin last weekend, NBC aired the original episode of Saturday Night Live last night--the one from October 11, 1975, featuring Carlin as the inaugural host.

I'm pretty sure I'd seen this one before, but it was fascinating to look at a show this old (that's still on the air) and compare and contrast with modern editions. Here are some of my observations:

• It was odd to see the show aired under its original name, NBC's Saturday NIght. The reason for this was that rival ABC had a show on at the time called Saturday Night Live with Howard Cosell, if you can imagine him doing a variety show. According to Wikipedia, NBC bought the rights to the name in 1976 after Cosell's show tanked, and they started using it a year later.


• It was funny to hear the venerable announcer Don Pardo mess up the intro; he referred to the cast as the "Not For Ready Prime Time Players." (And Pardo is still doing the gig at age 90, flying in from his retirement home in Tuscon each week; he did the voice-over at the beginning of the show explaining how this rerun was a tribute to Carlin.)


• There were actually two musical guests on this first night: so-called "Fifth Beatle" Billy Preston and one-hit wonder Janis Ian. It's rare to have more than one on any given show, but they both got two segments apiece.


• While Preston's first song, "Nothing From Nothing," can still be heard today, his second song, "Fancy Lady" (which Pardo called his "new hit"), may not have been heard since; Wikipedia says it made it only to #71 on the Billboard chart. (The other song that Ian played besides her signature "At Seventeen" was also something with which I was unfamiliar, but that didn't surprise me, since she's pretty much associated with that one song.)


• I was also squinting at the screen to see what kind of keyboard Preston was playing. Turns out it was a Hohner--that's right, the harmonica company. (Evidently, they haven't made keyboards for quite some time now, but I had no idea that they were the ones who made the Clavinet.)


• Carlin himself got a lot more time in front of the audience than is usual for the host, doing three separate monologues throughout the show. It was funny to see him with long hair and wearing a vested leisure suit over his usual long-sleeved henley shirt. (Last week's Reuters article on Carlin notes that he was high on cocaine while doing the show.)


• Just like in nearly every episode of SNL that has followed this one, there were some sketches that were funny and some that left the viewer going "Huh?" at the end. (You would swear that some of the sketches just stopped randomly because they ran out of time or something.)


• In light of the Supreme Court's Heller decision of a few days ago, it was interesting to watch the short sketch where a truck full of people drove around and invited passersby to "Show Us Your Guns."


• It was really funny to see one of their gag commercials touting a three-blade razor--a strange idea back then, but a part of reality nowadays (there's one on my bathroom counter, as a matter of fact).


• I taped the show last night and watched it this evening (something that few people could have done in 1975). Normally, that would mean that I would fast-forward through all the commercials, but I let some of them roll, just to experience the juxtaposition of modern ads with a 33-year-old show. A person from 1975 would indeed be amazed and confused to see those commercials; they'd probably pass out upon seeing the list prices for cars and trucks, and they'd surely wonder what this "dot com" thing was all about.

I'll admit that it's been quite a few years since I'd watched SNL; looking at the current cast, I only recognized two names (Darrell Hammond and Amy Poehler). I'm sure I'll check it out at some point again (if I'm actually home on a Saturday night and remember to get off the Internet for a bit), but it's seemed to be not quite as good recently.

SNL seems to have had a "jumped the shark" point for a lot of people, just as rock fans can often tell you after what album Rush or Metallica started to not rock anymore. If you're also one who used to watch SNL in the past but don't do so regularly anymore, answer me this: When did it stop being good (or at least when did you stop being a regular viewer)? For me, it started to fall off around the mid-'90s, I think, and I stopped watching regularly sometime around the turn of the millennium. (Still, my proverbial hat's off to a show that's still going after such a long time.) Feel free to leave your own answers in the comments below.

Time-Wasting 101; This post took several hours to actually go up, as I got sucked into reading the entire history of the show on Wikipedia. Good thing it's summer...

Rating the Ads

Since the Super Bowl game itself wasn't all that interesting until the last quarter, it makes even more sense to talk about the commercials, like we did last year. I'd say that my favorites would be:

• The Budweiser ad with the Dalmatian training the Clydesdale, a la Rocky


• The Bridgestone ad with the computer-animated squirrel (actually, their other commercial was pretty funny too, even if it would be scary to run into the likes of Alice Cooper and Richard Simmons on a darkened road)


• The ad with Shaq playing a jockey (as often happens in the Super Bowl, the ads have little to do with the products, so I had to think for a moment to recall that it was for Vitamin Water)


• The Coke ad with the Stewie and Underdog parade balloons fighting over a Coke bottle balloon


• And of course, I liked the NFL promo about the football player who started out playing the oboe.

And which ones didn't do anything for me? The ones with people dancing--the guy trying to start the car, the dancing iguanas, and the Pepsi one where everyone ended up doing the head-jerk like in A Night at the Roxbury. I also was puzzled by the Salesgenie.com commercials; I'm pretty much the polar opposite of a fan of political correctness, but I was surprised that a company that I'm guessing few people had ever heard of before tonight made its national debut with some cartoons that exaggerated ethnic stereotypes like that. But if you could get past the "can they really do that on TV anymore?" mode of thinking, they were kind of funny, and the animation on the one with the pandas reminded me of John Kricfalusi of Ren & Stimpy fame, and that would explain the "edginess," I suppose.)

And I missed the silent commercial; I was reading a magazine during the less-interesting parts of the game, and I guess it just slipped by me unnoticed.

If you missed one or all of them, or just want to see one again, MySpace has them all in one place. Which ones did you like best?

Is It Just Me...

...or were the Super Bowl commercials not as good this year? (Feel free to list your favorite[s] in the comments. I haven't decided which one really stood out for me, though some of the Coke ones were decent enough, and I liked the one where the dog got to pretend he was a Dalmatian and ride in the parade.)

UPDATE: If you missed some of the commecials (or just want to see one again), they can all be viewed from this MySpace page.

Friday Night Lights x 3

At least once a year, I go to a high school football game in my area to see as many of my students march as possible (which can usually be accomplished by watching my two biggest [as in the most students of mine] play against each other. Last night was that game, so I took advantage of the situation and made my appearance. As always, I had a few observations:

• The band on whose side I spent the second half did crazier stuff in the stands than we ever did in my high school days. Not only did more than one section do wacky dancing during all the drum cadences, but pretty much everyone participated.


• That being said, the other activity in the stands was far more regimented than when I was in school. After halftime, we had the third quarter off to go walk around and grab refreshments; this school had to pretty much sit in an orderly fashion (OK, except when dancing) and needed an adult chaperone to escort small groups of people to the restroom.


• As I said a year ago, it always amazes me how much marching band has changed since I was in high school, and how little drill team has done so in that same period of time

All in all, spending a Friday night under the lights in Texas is a good way to spend one's time (though I'll concede that I'm glad my job doesn't require this of me on a weekly basis). The game I saw was exciting and actually pretty close most of the time. If this ends up being my only stadium visit this year, I picked a good one.

And on the same subject, when I got home from the game, I watched a show that I'd taped earlier in the week: NBC's Friday Night Lights, based on the book and movie of the same name about West Texas high school football (in this case, moved from Odessa to the fictitious town of Dillon). I've heard that it hasn't been doing so well in the ratings, but I was drawn in immediately; the story and characters seemed pretty realistic. I'll definitely be taping it on a regular basis. (And if you're questioning the wisdom of showing a program with "Friday" in the title on Tuesday, remember that most of the people who would watch this show would be attending an actual high school football game on Fridays.)

Reality meets TV: Following the episode of FNL on my tape (yes, I'm so ancient that I don't even have TiVo yet) was the season finale of a similar show, MTV's Two-A-Days. The premise is similar, except this show documents an actual team, Hoover High in Alabama. The Bucs won a state championship last year, and I for one would definitely pay money to see them play the mythical national chamipion from here in the Dallas area, Southlake Carroll. That would probably be a great game...