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Month: November 2018

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The Great Disappearing TV Show Trick

Illusionist David Copperfield once made the Statue of Liberty seem to disappear in front of a live audience. Perhaps I should give him a call and see if he could make a terrific TV show reappear.

In this day and age of bargain-priced DVD sets of just about everything ever to grace or disgrace the boob tube screen, cable networks galore and streaming services offering up even old chestnuts like Green Acres and Dad’s Army for insomniac subscribers, you’d think a hit show from this century would be easy to find. Hard to avoid even, perhaps. Particularly if it starred one of the leads in one of this decade’s most popular shows, was created by TV “royalty” and kicked off the careers of a couple of movie stars plus the star of the most popular sitcom going these days. Sadly you’d be wrong.

Despite having Modern Family‘s “Claire’ (Julie Bowen) as the female lead, being the first place anyone saw Jim Parsons (now Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory) or Justin Long on the screen, despite being a product of David Letterman’s Worldwide Pants, and having the Foo Fighters do the theme song, Ed has become a ghost. TV’s equivalent of the Ivory-billed Woodpecker – well-loved but known these days only through rumors, memories of old-timers and grainy photos. That bugged me back in 2005 after it ended; it bugs me more now.

Ed (not to be confused with the similarly-titled movie, Ed TV) was a rather brilliant but hard to define show that ran for 83 episodes from 2000 through early 2004 on NBC. It was a dramedy before that term – or genre- was well-known. A drama with a sense of humor; a comedy that at times could be heart-wrenching at times. Lovable, Relateable. Quirky like Seinfeld but a version where the characters weren’t obnoxiously self-absorbed and were dropped into a small town. It was also could be seen as something of a male bookkend to The Gilmore Girls which debuted the same autumn. Just like Ed , Lorelei and Rory, those  feisty Gilmore Girls had oddball small-towners to contend with, lots of music and main characters looking for love. Unlike Ed, however, The Gilmore Girls live on in Walmart discount video bins, Sunday afternoon reruns and most notably, in a limited 4-episode resurrection from Netflix. All accomplished while averaging only a little over half the number of viewers as Ed in its first run.

Ed was several shows in one really, a somewhat risky proposition for TV of the day. Romance, workplace dramas, lightweight legal eagles.Sounds messy, yet it worked. Wonderfully. Continue reading “The Great Disappearing TV Show Trick”

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Mars? Meh.

I was just a tyke when Neil Armstrong got out of the lunar module and walked on the moon. If you believe. I don’t remember the actual event, but like most kids of my generation I was fascinated by space. My family visited the Kennedy Space Center when I was 8 or 9, I thought that huge rocket building was the coolest thing. For a number of years, I had a plastic model of a Saturn rocket similar to the Apollo ones in my bedroom on the dresser. And of course, I watched The Jetsons and perhaps thought that George and Judy’s life might be the one we’d all be rocketing into at some point.

But things happened and time went by. We watched the Space Shuttles go up, and come back. We watched one Space Shuttle blow up a mile or two off the ground, incinerating all the astronauts within. And one by one, as each Shuttle returned and smiling astronauts stepped out, it seemed like … there wasn’t much to show for it except a photo opp or two and a fancy-looking jet that goes up higher than your run-of-the-mill 747. I grew up. After a while there was no rocket on my dresser (railroad locomotive, perhaps, but that’s a story for another day.)

Which leads us to today as some sort of robot launced by NASA landed on – yawn – Mars. Headlines this morning said “Anxiety abounds at NASA as Mars landing day arrives.” It explained that the odds were decent but no sure thing that the spaceship was going to be able to decelerate through Mars’ atmosphere from 12 300 MPH to zero in all of six minutes, then land without destroying itself. But if it did, if it became the 8th successful American probe to land there (out of 9 attempts), we’d get photos of the “Red planet” . After about 8 minutes. That’s apparently how long it takes radio waves to travel the close to 300 million miles between our planets.

What’s more, it will pick up some rocks and run a probe to see if it feels “marsquakes”… presumably so if the rock is shaking, we know where to build a New San Francisco if we go frontier-a-making.

Which all makes me second Love It Or List It (an HGTV show) star David Visentin’s tweet : “one of our measuring tools is touching down on Mars…on Monday. Odd how I am so ‘meh’ about it. How did that happen?” Meh, Amen.

Do you really care if there are earthquakes on Mars? Do you really have a need to see some bare rocky ground millions of miles away? And if, to the surprise of everyone, the cameras found some E.T.s cavorting around and posing for space selfies, do you really believe the authorities would share that with us? My answer to all those is “I don’t.”

What actually bugs me about it though, is the cost. This InSight probe, today’s landing veseel, will cost us about $2.1 billion dollars. The scientists proudly point out that is some $400 million less than the similar one they sent back in 2011 – they perfected the technology a little and had a few spare parts clanking around in the garage.

To me, a few photos of a barren land years away for any of us and perhaps a bit of data about what the rocks are made of is hardly worth over two billion. In all, NASA has a budget of just a whisker under $20 billion this year, or about $65 for every adult and child in the U.S. Now, to be fair, they do accomplish more than send a few probes out into space. We all use satellites, many of which they launch, for things like our phones and TV service and the weather forecasts we rely on that in turn rely on satellite photos of our planet. Still, it seems like maybe we could trim that down a few pesos and not be any the worse for wear.

Perhaps the prevailing reason people want to get to Mars and beyond is uttered by Space X/Tesla CEO Elon Musk. The eccentric Texas billionaire is planning to offer space trips to ordinary people soon, and recently signed up the first candidate – a Japanese fashion executive who wants to go to the moon. Musk says “we should take action and become a multi-planetary civilization as soon as possible”, just in case some “event ends civilization.”

Well, this earthling likes Earth just fine. I don’t want to go and live on some distant, barren rocky planet. It seems like instead of fretting over how livable other (we’re told) entirely uninhabited, lifeless bodies out in space could be, we might do better doing what we can to make our planet better. More livable. Less succeptible to “an event” which would end civilization.

Two billion dollars could do a lot to help create renewable energy which wouldn’t despoil our planet. Or maybe buy and plant about 400 million trees, which could reforest about 6000 square miles, if my math is right. Which would go a long ways to adding oxygen to and cleaning our atmosphere. Or finance the top-quality university education of something like 20 000 smart kids. – kids who adults could probably solve a lot of problems if they concentrate on earth and humanity, not rocks hundreds of millions of miles away. And probably tell me in a second if my tree math was correct.

But that’s just “meh” talking.

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I Am Canadian, Eh

I’m Canadian, eh?

I’m proud of my homeland and of course, puff up a little every time something Canadian appears on the world stage, be it a Mike Myers movie, Joey Votto winning an award in baseball, a Sarah McLachlan or Guess Who tune on the radio in Texas, a bag of cookies on a Florida grocery store shelf saying “Product of Canada.”

I find we Canucks are pretty well accepted wherever we go, which is nice. I think that’s largely because we just don’t create a real strong impression on foreigners. Rather a double-edged sword, that – we’re dull but we’re not unlikable therefore. That could be rather a function of both our typically mild-mannered nature and the fact that our national culture is… well, not terribly colorful or unique when looked at on the world stage. Not that we don’t have a culture, it’s rather that it is primarily a mix of America-lite with a tip of the cap (or toque) to our British heritage. People who visit Toronto from other countries often leave with the comments of “that’s a whole lot like Chicago or Atlanta with slightly less trash on the streets and a few more Depeche Mode songs on the radio.”

Of course, what little we do have to make us “special” is played up to death in the media. We don’t have bagpipes, or haggis or stinky cheese to define us, but we do have Tim Hortons, toques, hockey and beer. Which is fine by me. With the majority of us, I find. We laugh along with Robin (a character played by an actual Canadian actress, Colbie Smulders) in the sitcom How I Met Your Mother with her Vancouver hockey-logo bedecked t-shirts, jerseys, sleep pants and her patter – indecipherable to most Americans – about back home with its hydro poles, curling bonspiels and Mark Messier, all the while being mocked/pitied by her American friends who point out how tough it must have been growing up with “America right there!” . Barney in that show visits her in Toronto and makes fun of the brightly-colored paper money and just about everything else, but does begrudgingly admit upon return to New York, “the coffee was excellent.” Or with Hank Hill on King of the Hill, when confounded with new Canadian neighbors who use a lawn mower with a maple leaf design on it and ask him things like “How come America still can’t brew a decent ale, eh?” … to which he responds to the effect of “because we’re too busy making Hollywood blockbusters and sending men to the moon”.

Yes, we do have a Tim Hortons coffee shop on just about every other street corner and in half the country they serve as more or less the social club, point of reference, beginning point to journeys and daily mid-morning work break. We do, it seems to me, like beer a bit more than other Americans, cola a little less. We do say “eh”,although a lot less than most TV shows might have you think. We do call electricity “hydro” even if it comes straight from a nuclear plant or solar farm. And a toque with a plaid lumberjack coat is as close to a national outfit as we have. We do as a people love hockey more than Americans not from Boston or Detroit, and have an indifference for football, particularly of the amateur high school variety that’s inexplicable to our neighbors south of the Mason-Dixon Line at least. But we’re not that different.

What’s more, we laugh at ourselves and seem to have a lassez-faire attitude towards those who behave differently or have their own cultures when they come over. Which I believe makes us easy targets for those wanting to make jokes… but also more accepted than a number of other nationalities. It’s difficult to sweepingly dislike a group of people who don’t stand out and who laugh at their own foibles anyway.

I think there’s a message in there somewhere. Be proud of who you are, where you come from, but realize that others are just as proud of where they are from, what matters to them. Don’t get too bent out of shape by a little ribbing – it just means you’re no different really. Part of the crowd. Or when it comes to Tim Hortons coffee, that maybe they’re a bit jealous, eh!

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The Journey Begins

Thanks for joining me!

Some of you may already follow my thoughts on baseball, particularly the Toronto Blue Jays,  my day-to-day music trivia notes on Sound Day,  or even my periodic attempts to uplift you and make your day something to be grateful for at 101 Thanks… but at times, there’s still more on my mind. Random thoughts, movies or TV shows I’ve seen or books I’ve read you might just enjoy, memories of growing up Generation X – perhaps even a word or two from my forthcoming novel, Grace, Fully Living.   So here we are! That’s a few of the things I will be jotting down here and I hope you join me. And feel free to comment. I love hearing your thoughts and memories as well!

Cheers…and let the journey begin!