Breaks and promises

A few thoughts on one of my current favorite webcomics:

Okay, Sortelli is on a break. That's fine. But why progress reports on the next comic if you're on break, especially if it's supposedly inked already? A few points:

• Duke/Nimoy Forever. Or, less caustically...
  
• "A speckled axe is best." -Ben Franklin.
  
• Real artists ship.
  

Good thing I have no actual readers, or I'd be blackballed from the EOI forums for this.

UPDATE: Sortelli posted a teaser on the comic forums. Looking good.

My recipe blog

The Off Season Blog, named after my sporadically produced cooking show, is going to be my site for posting recipes, and hopefully also the official website for my cooking show when I get around to putting it back on the air.

HDTV and the shovelware problem; in praise of The Tube

The plan for HDTV, I had always assumed, was to provide flagship programming in as visually striking a manner as possible. By and large, the main network broadcasters and the sports stations do a fine job of this, and the sports stations in particular have made what I think is the most compelling case for going hi-def. It is possible, mind you, to make some very nice eye candy, and you do see it here and there in travel documentaries and the like on PBS-HD. But if flagship programming is what it's all about, why are the cable stations by and large doing such a half-assed job of it?

Comcast just picked up Food Network HD and HGTV HD in my local area. While it's nice to see that Scripps and Comcast came to an agreement (I believe those two stations have been on the big dish systems for some time now), I'm kind of having a problem with their implementation. It seems like Scripps is just the latest in a line of HD providers who have put out an HD product that is little better than a random feed of programming from other stations that happens to have been taped in HD. The hi-def content is fine as far as it goes, but to look at the HD channel's presentation on foodtv.com, you do get the sense that it's an afterthought, something that's farmed out to a junior exec to be done in one's Copious Free Time. And a lot of stations are like that; I think MTV Networks' MHD is probably the most egregious, given that it seems to have entirely too little original content to sustain it, though Discovery HD isn't much better, and PBS-HD seems to do at best a half-assed job of being a flagship.

Hey, HD folks, can we get on the ball here? HD isn't that expensive to produce anymore, with decent-quality cameras available in the $1000 to $1500 range (and that's just for consumer gear; a Sony HDR-FX1 isn't drastically more expensive than a Canon GL-2). I realize overhauling the Emeril Live studio would be a huge undertaking, but c'mon. Not everything has to be done in a full studio setting. I did my show with a single camcorder in my kitchen.

And another thing: I like The Tube. It's carried over-the-air on WLVI 56 and on channel 296 on our local cable system, and it's pretty much the Jack FM of television, with a remarkable profusion of videos from the last thirty years or so of music video history, along with an equally remarkable library of live concert footage that goes well beyond anything MTV ever put on the air, ever.

Jerry Falwell: Good Riddance

And the conservative blogosphere is already wringing their hands about the outpouring of glee and schadenfreude at this shameful, disgusting man's death.

Look, no one deserves death. And inasmuch as I have any sympathy at all, it's for his family, not him. The thing that is being celebrated here is his exit from public life, and the only thing I see wrong here is that he went out by death rather than the total public shaming he truly deserved.

Sadly, there are many of his like still out there. I hope they change their ways, but that's pretty much a pipe dream.

Oooh, tomatoes

My little San Marzano seedlings are getting big. I have to replant them into pots soon...

When you get slapped

I don't know anyone personally who is a student at Virginia Tech. But what happened today is horrifying beyond measure (and if you can say that about the deaths of 33 with no irony at all, imagine how much more so 9/11, the Spanish train bombings, the London transport bombings, or any given day in Iraq...). The odd thing about it is that it happened on Marathon Monday, where two Japanese wheelchair athletes and a Russian woman took their races and a veteran marathoner from Kenya took his third Boston. If this sounds like a strange juxtaposition, I mention it only because things like this have happened on Marathon Monday before, specifically the Waco debacle. I still remember, years later, seeing shots of the burning Branch Davidian compound intercut with the Marathon coverage, and just sort of looking at it incomprehendingly until it finally hit me in mid-afternoon that the siege had ended, and ended badly.

I had to go out and buy the papers tonight, hours after the massacre had ended. I couldn't help but remark to the person at the newsstand register that it was weird picking up a paper that had been printed early that morning in light of what had happened later today. The newspaper is, literally, yesterday's news. Imagine picking up a newspaper on 9/11 -- less than an hour after you picked up that paper on the way to work, the World Trade Center was in flames. If you kept that newspaper as a memento, you might put it away and forget what it said for a while, until a few years later you pull it out... and there is nothing extraordinary at all in there. It's an inherent thing in newspapers, not really a flaw when you can get your news practically instantly on the radio or net, but it's still a strange feeling.

A lot of people are talking about gun control in the wake of this mass murder. That's a perfectly understandable thing. I'm very unsure on the subject of gun ownership and the Second Amendment, so I don't know that I have much to contribute. I will say that by and large I think gun control is a good thing, but it's really very hard to find a happy medium, since the pro-gun and gun-control positions, like so many others in the United States, are extremely polarized. So what do you do when something needs to be done but there is no reasonable hope of compromise?

Thirty-three dead people on a college campus would like to know the answer to that. I fear there is none.

Alanis, you magnificent bastard

Take one of the most embarrassing backfires in hip-hop history and turn it over to one of the best-selling female singer-songwriters of the 90s, and you get this. Words fail me. (Incidentally, although I don't think anyone's ever called Alanis Morissette a beauty queen, she's still prettier than butterface Fergie. Not to mention a much better singer.)