New Favorite TV Curmudgeon - House

Did you ever notice that the best characters on TV are curmudgeons? From Archie Bunker and Lou Grant (on the Mary Tyler Moore Show), to Andy Sipowicz (NYPD), and even Ted Dansen's sitcom doc Becker, it's the unhappy people that are so much more interesting. Maybe it's a corrolary of Tolstoy's observation that while all happy families (people) resemble one another, every unhappy family (person) is unhappy in their own way.

My new favorite curmudgeon, discovered in reruns this summer - Dr. Gregory House, M.D.. From telling a kid to Google "hemorrhoids" after listening to some particularly loud groaning in the hospital men's room, to answering a question relating to the meaning of life with something along the lines of "I take comfort in the belief that it isn't a test.", the show's creators and actor Hugh Laurie have created a classic curmudgeon.

Show Me the Science

Good question...

"Since there is no content, there is no 'controversy'' to teach about in biology class. But here is a good topic for a high school course on current events and politics: Is intelligent design a hoax? And if so, how was it perpetrated?"

...and answer...

"First you misuse or misdescribe some scientist's work. Then you get an angry rebuttal. Then, instead of dealing forthrightly with the charges leveled, you cite the rebuttal as evidence that there is a "controversy" to teach."

...from philosopher of science Daniel Dennett on Edge.com. Read the whole thing.

I tend not to get overly involved with issues of current events, but this "unintelligent design" thing really has been sticking in my head, living, as it does, at the intersections of rationality and superstition, and of meaning from without and meaning from within, and with its implications for the education of future generations. More later, I suspect.

From Ernie Kovacs to The Lovin' Spoonful

I'm so used to getting visitors and comments over on my business blog, and so unused to getting them here. I really appreciate the cross-blog interplay. To that end, responding to a comment on a previous post from Lisa...OK. I've opened up the comments to "Anyone". I just got tired of comment spam, although it was "open." You just had to register.

Anyhoo...Two things.

(Actually, three.) The Way Things Go - an episode of the late lamented Live from Off Center - is available at Amazon. (Oh, and it had to be an inspiration for this Honda ad.

There was also another act from Live and Off Center that I wish I had a video of. It was about 20 or so people passing balls back and forth up and down back and forth up and down in amazing sychronicity. Wish I had it when I was touting synchronized production and project management in my old independent consulting days.

Finally, as a proud New Jerseyan also proud to share Hungarian lineage with the creator of the Nairobi Trio, I often feel compelled to point out that his name is actually pronounced Ernie Kovach.

(Let's make it 4 things while I'm on a roll...)

A mention of "hoi-polloi" over in Lisa's comments was driving me nuts while writing the first version of this post, knowing that somewhere in the deep recesses of my memory were song lyrics containing the phrase. Gave in to it and Googled, and found...

I was floatin' in the ocean greased with suntan lotion
When I got wiped out by a beach boy
He was surfin' when he hit me but jumped off his board to get me
And he dragged me by the armpit like a child's toy
As we staggered into land with all the waiters eatin' sandwiches
He tried to mooch a towel from the hoi polloi
He emptied out his eardrums, I emptied out mine
And everybody knows that the very last line
Is "the doctor said, 'Give him jug band music
It seems to make him feel just fine'"

Courtesy John Sebastian and The Lovin' Spoonful.

Crazy Talk or Terrorist Talk

If someone called for the death of the US president or other US governmental official, he'd probably get a visit from the Secret Service.

Oh yeah...He did, but he probably didn't get that visit.

Hedgehog Babies

I guess I'm not immune to cuteness.

Global Virtual Classroom: A Free Online Educational Program

Looking for a little blog love out there to help promote a worthy non-profit endeavor I'm involved in.

The Global Virtual Classroom is a free online educational program to promote communication, collaboration and understanding among students around the world. Combined with cross-border and cross cultural interaction, these are all skills necessary for success in our flattening world.

We're entering the third year of the GVC's current incarnation. (It used to be the AT&T Virtual Classroom in the late 90s, but is now run by my sister and brother-in-law's Give Something Back International Foundation.) The cornerstone of every year's efforts is a contest in which teams of three schools (ideally from three different continents) collaborate online to build websites of their own design.

If you've got kids, maybe their schools/teachers might be interested in participating. Send them to the GVC site, in which they can find an application for participation in the contest.

If you've got a blog, and if you've appreciated some of the things you've read in my Focused Performance "business blog" or here in Unfocused, you can help by passing this info along to your readers.

If you live in South or Central America, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, or Asia, your support in spreading the word to your local network is all the more valuable in helping us achieve a greater diversity of participation than last year.

OK. Enough begging. Please, just check it out via the links above and see if you think it's worth your support in the form a simple post or pass-along. Thank you.

Tagged: K-12, High School, Education, Flat World, Teachers, and Students.

Getting Chilly in August, Courtesy of the FCC

The Lexington Herald-Leader reports that the University Of Kentucky's WUKY cancels radio program over offensive content. And who was the offender? Howard? Bubba? Mancow? Obie? Anthony?

No. It was that heinous purveyor of filth, Garrison Keillor of Prarie Home Companion fame. Apparently, Keillor's little 5-minute interlude of poetry and things literary, The Writer's Almanac, has crossed someone's line.

"I don't question the artistic merit, but I have to question the language," WUKY General Manager Tom Godell said. "It's not that he's behaving like Howard Stern, but the FCC has been so inconsistent, we don't know where we stand. We could no longer risk a fine."

Reaction to the cancellation has been minimal so far, Godell said. WUKY managers decided to stop carrying the Almanac after a recent spate of language advisories, although they were tracking the content for about a year, Godell said.

The warnings, issued by the program's production company, came about Curse of the Cat Woman by Edward Field, which contained violent themes and the word "breast"; Thinking About the Past by Donald Justice, which also used the word "breast"; and Reunion by Amber Coverdale, which contained the phrase "get high."

It's getting chilly.

Don't you feel it.

Read more about censorship, indecency, free speech, and poetry. (pointage via Jeff)

Saw this coming...

From Wired News: Mac Hacks Allow OS X on PCs.

Rolling Into ITMS

Guess which wrinkled rockers' whole catalogue can now be found in the iTunes music store.

You can tell you're getting on when priests and police look young and rockers from your youth look like this.

Let it bleed.

Favorite TV

Over at Buzzmachine, Jeff is asking for top 10 favorite TV shows. In no particular order...

CBS Sunday Morning (Great way to start a lazy Sunday morning, since 1979.)

West Wing (Jed Bartlett is my 21st century POTUS.)

The Daily Show

OK, that's enough for the recent crop. Gone but not forgotten are...

WKRP in Cincinnati (With God as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly. This is the only sitcom that I've stuck with for its full run. Seinfeld only lasted one season before it lost me. Friends, one show. Third Rock kept me around for three seasons. But KRP -- it's whole too short run. Remember, Red Wigglers, the Cadillac of worms. Available in fine worm shops everywhere.)

The fine first dark season (and only the first season) of The John Larroquette Show - a superb sitcom about an alcoholic, for those of you who missed it before the network wrecked it by sobering it up.

Oz (Far outstripped the AWOL Sopranos, as does Deadwood and The Wire, but one for HBO is enough)

Prime Suspect (The Brits know how to do cop shows - there's also a great one called Wire in the Blood, with honorable mention to Homicide, the first series I know of with an apparent arc across multiple seasons - showing the effects of the stress over time on Pembleton and Bayliss.)

Live From Off Center (an old PBS downtown arsty variety show, often featured Laurie Anderson and her clone as MC, introduced me to Bill Irwin, and mesmerized me with a strange chain reaction involving fire, tires, and foaming liquids)

Northern Exposure (Along with WKRP, one of the few shows that would be on both my list and one by my wife, who is hooked on TV Land and Nick at Night, thinks there are very few great shows since the entry of color, and has convinced me of the merit of the next one on the list.)

Leave it to Beaver

Babylon Five (An adult space opera with a coherent 5-season arc and a range of compelling characters both human and alien. Londo's a tragic figure of Shakespearean stature. If I had to put these in an order, this one would be at the top.)

And since I can't seem to stop at 10, once I got thinking about my life as a couch potato...

Ernie Kovacs (Groundbreaking effects and humor that reeled between the classic and the kitsch, but superb in bits and pieces.)

The Great American Dream Machine, Marshall Efron's 1971 hippified PBS precursor to...

Saturday Night Live - with the original "Not Ready for Primetime Players." (Sorry if I'm showing my age)

And since I once won a set of Armitron watches for coming in third (out of three, the observant of you out there will notice), I'll agree with Jeff on Jeopardy.

Tagged: 10shows, Culture, TV (If you make up such a list, be sure to tag it with the link 10shows.

Measure Your Life In Love

(Quicktime)

Mighty Mouse

While I've been waiting for Apple to give up its too-long-held loyalty to the one-button mouse, then watched them come up with a no-button mouse, who would have expected a new apparently (but not really) one-button mouse. Now if only there was a wireless version. Never satisfied.