(no subject)

Today's Doonesbury makes my eyes well up a little.

I wonder if he'll stretch this out all week or if it's a one-day hat-tip at the start of a "normal" Duke-centered week (I am betting on the latter).

Today's Channel 3 finds

All this week I'm going to write reviews of what I watch on Somerville's community access TV. I'm watching them all via TiVo, after going through the series schedule last night and choosing a swath of them to record. I picked shows solely by merit of their titles looking interesting, or their websites (when available) intriguing me. They are all listed on the SCAT schedule as series (as opposed to one-shot dealies).

---

"Democracy Now!": a daily news show by the Pacifica Network. I will sum up their whole angle by noting that they consistently refer to the anti-Coalition/anti-government fighters in Iraq as "the resistance".

---

"Joey Daytona's World of Adventure": Nominally a call-in show, but nobody seemed to call, and anyway the host -- the title character, apparently an amateur film and car archivist with a tendency to refer to himself in the third person -- stopped displaying the phone number five minutes in. Actually local, unlike the previous show; our man was using the "HOT (host-operated television) Set", a little do-it-yourself mini-studio that was among the things I was shown on my Saturday tour of the SCAT facility.

Mr. Daytona seems to devote much of the show to displaying examples of ancient film he's come across, with a preference towards those that involve race cars somehow. On today's show he showed a 1904 film made by of someone cruising around Boston, and then a piece of video marketing -- old enough to require intertitles -- from a long-ago stock car manufacturer. During both, he played apparently random music samples. (I thought that he might have been trying for a thematic match when he popped in Radiohead's "Everything is in its Right Place" while the video showed assembly line workers, but then he switched to the theme from "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" while we were still on the assembly guys, so who knows.)

After about 20 minutes, he interrupted what looked like some 1965-ish race car test footage to just get up and leave without saying another word. He did switch the video to a generic SCAT title card first, but forgot to turn the mics off. I heard the next HOT Set users come in and set up until one of them apparently noticed Mr. D's forgetfulness and pressed the button that dropped the station back into showing the old community-bulletin loop (now to the tune of bleeped-out hip hop).

(no subject)

From some WashPost thingy:

The Entertainment Software Association noted last year that the average age of a video game player is 30 and that the average age of a video game buyer is 36. Parents are involved in the purchase of games 83 percent of the time, the association said.

Those two sentences together present a weird picture. Um... so what you're saying is, the average video game player is a basement-dwelling manchild who has to hit mom up for $50 before taking the Metro down to the EB in his greasy sweatpants. And how the EB got into his sweatpants, he'll never know.

Actually, this statistic has got to be baloney all around, unless they're playing loose with what "average" means (or they mean it in a weaselly "conversational" non-mathematical sense). I really don't think it's remotely possible that there are as many video game players older than me than there are players younger than me.