* Is Boston Legal coming to DVD?

* How a man named Augie royally screwed up the calendar.

* Play all your favorite Commodore 64 games on-line.

* Pictures of cities that make them look like models. Interesting technique.

* Google News is now out of beta.

Don’t mind me - just testing out some new software. There’s no story here.

Holy crap. This raises a lot of questions.

Reuters Business Channel | Reuters.com

CBS Corp. and Time Warner Inc.’s Warner Brothers on Tuesday said they will close their respective UPN and WB television networks and jointly launch a new network in fall 2006.

The new CW network will be a 50-50 joint venture of the two companies.

* Which channel will take the programming? Here in the NYC market, the WB is channel 11 and UPN is channel 9. Who gets the new CW and who’s left to stuff those 15 hours a week with movies and cable reruns and the scant syndicated offerings available today?

* Will this re-open the syndication market, that closed down so drastically when the two networks were created? This is what caused Babylon 5 to move to cable, and what effectively killed the Rush Limbaugh TV show, for two. The syndie market dried up and died when all those hours of TV were lost. How will they suddenly be refilled? Reruns of original-to-cable TV shows?

* How many less godawful shows will be created each year now?

* And for you Buffy fans, how will this affect the on-again/off-again talk of new Buffy movies? Will the combined might of the two corporations mean more money and an easier greenlight for such things?

Lotsa questions. And you thought NBC’s new scheduling announcement yesterday was big news. It was nothing compared to this.

This list comes courtesy of the folks at DVDJournal.com. See the full list there. See my highlights here:

The Aristocrats (2005)

It’s the dirtiest joke in the world, and you’re going to hear it over and over and over again. Sarah Silverman supposedly steals the show, but I think her real break came from “Tough Crowd with Colin Quinn.”

Backyardigans: Polka Palace Party

Because who doesn’t look a good computer animated polka DVD?

Benjamin Franklin: PBS
John & Abigail Adams: PBS

For all you history nuts. . .

Flightplan (widescreen) (2005)

Jodi Foster stars in a movie that never really gained traction. Looked interesting, though.

Hill Street Blues: Season One (3-disc set)

I never saw an episode of this in my life. I’m not about to start, but it is a noteworthy release, as one of the top dramas of the 80s and one of the late comers to DVD.

My Big Fat Independent Movie (2-disc set) (2005)

I’m guessing it’s a spoof movie. It’s almost perfectly timed, but the new special edition of MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING is coming out next week, not this week.

Repo Man: Special Edition (1984)

This will make a lot of people happy. It’s another movie I never saw.

Saturday Night Live: The Best of Alec Baldwin
Saturday Night Live: The Best of David Spade

I hate Alec Baldwin off-screen, but when he hosts SNL, there’s a glimmer of hope for the show. And his chocolate Christmas goodies sketch still goes down as one of my all-time favorite SNL bits.

Next week: The third season of MI-5, a couple of PINK PANTHER releases, CORPSE BRIDE, new X-FILES packages, and a ton more.

Here’s your chance. Discuss this week’s batch of Jack goodness below.

DO NOT DISCUSS THE COMING ATTRACTIONS.

Spoilers for the season thus far after the break and in the comments.

(Brief note: Best Buy has the Season Four DVD set on sale this week for $42.99 with an extra 15,000 points for the Reward Zone members.)

(more…)

Well, this certainly answers a lot of questions raised recently.

Variety.com - ‘Idol’ plans unwrapped

The one-hour, weekend series will be renamed “American Idol Rewind” and will premiere with the first season of “American Idol” episodes in September.

They just won’t look the same. The 26 episodes being refashioned for the first year in syndication will include never-before-seen footage shot during that first season — including winner Kelly Clarkson’s audition — and new footage that focuses on how key contestants lived through their ordeals.

Subsequent years in syndication will involve more than 26 episodes, since the subsequent seasons on Fox involved 30 and even as many as 45 episodes. There is also a lot of unaired footage that FremantleMedia will make available.

* Where did the hated Comic Sans font come from?

* I keep seeing links to the new Honda Civic ad, but I haven’t watched it yet. I post this here as a reminder to myself for later. It’s supposed to be really cool, on par with the previous Rube Goldberg device ad.

* I’m not entirely sure this is legally posted to a website, but it’s such a great story that I can’t help but point to it here: Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question.” It’s been reprinted in a couple of his book collections, but I notice less and less of those showing up at libraries and bookstores these days. It’s a shame. If this helps spur one person on to read more of Asimov’s works, then it’s worth it.

After that, can someone please find a publisher for Asimov’s Black Widower Mysteries stories? I love those, but had to buy ancient paperback versions of the collections off Amazon a few years back. They’re not going to hold up forever.

(Hey, comic hacks - those stories would be a great model for a comic book series, even one set in a superhero world. If I were clever enough, I’d do it myself. . .)

* Now that I’ve adjusted my RSS feeds to be more iTunes-friendly, guess what? Apple has updated them. There’s some handy info in there for podcasters, though.

Disney Buys Pixar for US$7 Billion

Pixar Animation Studios, whose films have garnered critical acclaim with both domestic and overseas audiences, is being bought tomorrow by Disney for $7 billion. Steve Jobs, as the CEO of Pixar, will become the largest shareholder in Disney.

Hunh.

In part one of this overly complete concert report, I traveled by train into the city for the O.A.R. concert at Madison Square Garden. I took my seat just after the opening act began at 8:00.

The opening act? Matisyahu. (Warning: Home page starts with music.) I had never heard of him before the concert was announced, but he’s apparently very big in some places. Picture a tall and lanky Hasidic Jewish man with long beard, black hat, formal white shirt, and long black jacket on stage with hands moving like Eminem to the beat. Picture him spitting out lyrics faster than a mile a minute — they could have all been in Hebrew for all I was able to recognize.

It was completely bizarre to me in some weird way. He had the crowd’s attention, though. I’ve never seen an opening act to a concert get this much love. Howie Day opened for O.A.R. a couple of years ago and made no fans. He’s a big shot on AC radio and has videos in rotation somewhere now, but even he couldn’t sway a crowd.

Matisyahu? Big hit, with people dancing and bopping all over the place.

And when he did the human beat box routine? The place was enthralled.

I wanted to laugh at the SNL-like moment of it all, but who am I to judge? I own the complete Weird Al Yankovic catalog. And if that ain’t a bizarre anthropological study waiting to happen, I don’t know what is.

(more…)

Welcome to part one. This thing looks like it’ll cover four parts in total. Get yourself a pillow. . .

I’m one of those “bridge and tunnel” people that New York City denizens loathe so much. Except I’m not the obnoxious kind that feels the need to scream at the top of their lungs on the city streets just to prove I’m cool or something. I don’t know what that’s all about.

I visit the city sparingly. A comic-con here, a friend up for vacation there, and the occasional acquaintance’s birthday party that I’m inclined to attend. I don’t go in just for the sake of going in. I don’t brag to my co-workers on Monday morning of the adventures I had in “the city.”

I hate the city: It stinks. It’s crowded. It’s loud.

But every now and then, it has something that cannot be missed. Last week, that was an O.A.R. concert. In case you’re just joining this web site, O.A.R. is a band I got turned onto in the summer of 2003 when I caught their appearance on the Conan O’Brien show on a cable repeat. They’re a band that formed in college and tour relentlessly. Taking their inspiration from everyone from the Beatles to Bob Marley to U2, they’re a continual work in progress. They allow — and encourag — fans to record their shows and pass them along. They recorded a couple of demo CDs in college and sold tens of thousands of them at concerts across the nation, growing an audience slowly over time.

In the past couple of years, signs of growth have been there. A band that once played in bars and backyards graduated to small clubs and seatless venues and festivals. Those clubs turned into smaller concert hall type places, and grew past 10,000 for the first time at the PNC Arts Center in Holmdel, NJ in 2004. It was my first concert. My second was the following summer at the same place — again, their biggest crowd.

With a big push behind them with their new album, “Stories of a Stranger,” they booked Madison Square Garden for a concert on January 14, 2006. 17,000+ attended it last weekend — a dream for the band made real through years of hard work and persistence.

(more…)

* Perfectly-timed photos. (Via)

* Stabilizing videos is all the rage. Now you can see the Bigfoot footage as an animated gif file.

* And now I’ll be the last blogger this week to link to this article about how reality show contestants are picked.

* I got 10 out of 18 right playing this Guess The Video Game Sound game.

Sometimes, I wonder if I’m too anti-trendiness. After years without wearing a watch, I finally caved in and bought one over the Christmas holidays. I had gotten used to using my cell phone or the computer or any of the other five thousand places around me (car radios, VCRs, microwaves, cable news channels) to find the time. But I missed the ease of always having that one place to look at the time. No matter where you are, there’s a clock right on your wrist. I wanted a nice one, though, and not another Timex special from the local pharmacy that would break after six months.

I thought I was being anti-trendy by sporting a watch until I read an article this weekend which said that nobody is wearing a watch anymore unless it’s a fashion statement. The article specifically cites Fossil watches. Those were the first I looked at. I passed them up because they were just too bulky for me. I wound up with a nice silver Swatch one (the “Twirl” from their “Core Collection”) that actually tells time without bright colors, and looks like an adult’s watch. But, it seems to be a “fashionable” watch, too.

Now I’m left to wonder if I am being trendy, after all. It’s tough being me.

* Tetris Plushies. (Via)

* This one’s for Tom: Lisp Is Sin. I did program in Lisp one semester in college for an AI course I was taking. It was an interesting language, but didn’t feel natural to me. I guess I just needed more time and encouragement to wrap my brain around it. (Maybe I could start with an on-line tutorial of some sort.)

* What is Perl 6? It’s scary, if you ask me. All the Perl books will need to be rewritten when the language is. All the neat little quirks will be gone, replaced with a brand new set that I’ll have to reteach myself after spending nearly a decade trying to figure out this set. I know it’s a necessary step in the language’s evolution, and I know all the Perl 5.x code will still run just fine on its own, but — man, I’m scared. On the other hand, some of the new commands I’ve read about are going to be tremendously useful and handy. I’m torn. (Via)

* 21 different ways to compute a factorial (n!) (Via)

* KDE 4 screen shots.

* Solve Soduku puzzles with Python. (Learn Python.)

Post all your thoughts on tonight’s episode in the comments section below.

My apologies if your posts get sent into the moderation queue. I’m not going to be around this weekend, so they might not get approved until Sunday.

BREITBART.COM - Clarkson Won’t Let ‘Idol’ Use Her Songs

Singer Kelly Clarkson, who vaulted to fame as the first “American Idol” winner in 2002, is not letting any of her songs be used by new contestants on the show.

A spokesman for Clarkson insisted it’s nothing personal, but the stance prompted a public scolding from “American Idol” judge Simon Cowell.