Waiting to levitate

Reality program: Hellholes, where contestants on a rapidly diminishing floor compete to see who can be the last one left alive while performing mental and physical challenges

via flickr.com

When people say that something "fell between the cracks" my mind rebels. Surely if a floor were cracked in certain places, the best place for something to fall would be in between the cracks, because that way the thing would not fall into a crack itself. One could say something "fell into a crack" or "fell into a space between the parts which are between the cracks."

Poor Poor Thing

I play the role of a scab scriptwriter

I think one could replace two, maybe three half-hour comedies (22 minutes each) with a bunch of guys sitting on stools issuing insults at one another. Maybe a little schtick here and there to keep things loose, and a (slightly judgment-impaired) live audience too, not a laugh track. No striking writers to pay, cheap production, and it keeps the people who hate reruns, imported programming, and reality shows off the studios' case.

Because when it comes to studio execs, you know their own stock of creativity reads like an eye chart.

Spinning screens

By now everyone has seen the Apple ads (Broken video link) showing off the iPhone's ability to sense its own orientation and display either in "landscape" or "portrait" mode, right? Well, why couldn't they make regular TV screens do the same thing? They could attach a remotely controlled motor to allow the user to twist the screen 90 degrees, and adjust the picture to suit. Some scenes, after all, work better in that vertical format (see the example), or if one is using the monitor to browse the web, one could accommodate webpages with vertical layouts comfortably as well.

Also, you could watch movies in a super-letterboxed format, with lots of empty space above and below to put lengthy captions.

All of Today

The easiest way to know when you've gone to far is to try going all the way and seeing what happens.


In a bid to cement their dominance over the television ratings in the morning, NBC's Today Show is soon to be expanding to a four-hour format, according to the network. It makes sense, given the name of the program, since "today" encompasses not only the early hours or the good morning period, but by rights the entire 24-hour period.

From their beachhead of 7 to 11 (Eastern, that is - and could there be a sponsorship opportunity there), they could occupy a chunk of the midday with a talk-show in the style of The View, putting their male hosts a chance to rest and putting the others around a table to exchange catty comments. Then in the early afternoon it would be so-called daytime drama which they could easily do by pushing a little bit over the edge of celebrity-obsessed non-news into more unreality-based speculative plots involving some familiar villains we know from their regular news factoid segments. In the later part of the afternoon, they could string some of their concert footage and entertainment features into a variety show. The easiest trick would be to rebrand the nightly news just by moving the set and subduing the lights a bit.

The rest of the primetime hours could be some thinly veiled true crime story recast as a police procedural slash courtroom drama. Then some fake news, simply ripping off Comedy Central material from the night before maybe, followed by the Today-Tonight Show and the Late Night/Early Today Show. After that, I figure they have enough personal electronics and cooking and home improvement gadget segments to populate a few hours of infomercial programming until it's time to begin over again with the Today Show proper.

Of course if some earth-shattering news event breaks, such as some forgotten aged official passing away or a war erupts or something, they could just cast off all their canned programming for marathon news update special reports the way MSNBC does. Obviously they must already have broken the bathroom-break barrier somehow, and can just apply that secret knowledge to these rare and ratings-enhancing circumstances.

If MSNBC goes ahead with this idea, remember, you read about it here first.

More on TV shields

Since I first blogged about the problem of fragile television screens last August, the problem has gained a lot of notoriety owing to damage sustained by players of Nintendo's Wii system. Of course, with these kinds of hazards, you have to have protection while the TV is on, so a fancier flying-object countermeasure (one that flips up in a fraction of a second? sonar activated? diamond-coated screens?) would be necessary. These gamers are flinging their handsets with some considerable force to be able to shatter glass that way, so a namby-pamby plastic film is just not going to work. Maybe we just have to rig up some anti-bombardment armament so an expensive TV can defend itself in a fair fight.

Opt-out campaign ads

If there's anything as annoying as public radio and television pledge campaigns, it's political campaign ads sprouting up on the airwaves every Fall. I know they work to sway the undecided voters, but for those of us who have their minds made up (for some time now, actually), they are a waste of time and money.

Couldn't a subscription model work there too? Once you've decided you don't need any more of the arguments they are proposing, really and truly for sure, you could flip a setting on your TV and radio and telephone and be spared any further pitches.

Maybe we could arrange things that the act of switching the setting actually registers your vote ahead of time absentee-style. That way the political interests would know for sure that there is no point bombarding you any further, since you have already made your choice, October/November surprises or no. So making your selection would have to be done only when you have a feeling of ironclad commitment, also telling the political powers that there is also no point in appeals to you attempting to affect the voter turnout (the second main function of political ads).

In order to get people to keep their minds open and to not opt-out, advertising consultants would have an incentive to make their ads interesting to watch and creative, the same way other advertisers have. The undecideds might want to withhold their commitment in order to enjoy the play of ideas and issues right up until Election Day. This, I think, would also be a good thing as something to help counteract voter apathy.

TV defense screens

(broken image)
Based on this post on an innocent light saber battle gone terribly wrong, I thought up the idea of a protective cover for your television screen. Why should the most fragile part of this expensive device be utterly unprotected from damage. Originally, I pictured something like the halves of a clamshell camera's protective case, but when I tried to picture this on a 40 inch plasma screen, it seemed just a bit ridiculously large and obtrusive. Instead, something like Roman blinds made of some tough, yet soft (on the inside) material, which would roll or pleat up out of the way when you wanted to watch the screen. Alternatively, the blinds could be vertical, in two halves, and roll up to the sides.

In the course of business, I've encountered the type of TV cabinet with swinging or sliding doors to conceal the entire television, the kind often seen in hotel room armoires. The advantages of a non-furniture-based screen protector are:

1. It would work with TV screens which don't normally sit in entertainment centers (such as wall-mounted plasma TV screens).
2. The material for the blinds could coordinate with the room window treatments. In the ultimate implementation, the flat-screen TV could appear to be just another window on the wall until the blinds are opened.


3. The mechanism to open the blinds could be connected to the power circuit, so that it would automatically swing open when the remote was switched. This would be cool and would provide protection at all times when the TV is not in use.
   


4. Some microfiber cloth could cover the inside of the blinds, so that every time they were opened, dust would be wiped away, helping the screen to remain clean.

It sure seems like a winning idea to me. Note that neither this scheme nor the entertainment center door protection would help if the television screen were menaced while it was being watched by someone, whether saber battling or throwing beer bottles at the umpire.