I know I mentioned this show here a few months back, but it premieres tonight at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, and I don’t think anyone realizes it.

GAMESHOW MARATHON features Rikki Lake hosting a series of classic game show set-ups with celebrity guests playing along. Tonight’s episode features Leslie Nielsen, amongst others, playing “Let’s Make A Deal.”

The show is so shrouded in secrecy that it doesn’t even have a page on the CBS web site. CBS disavows any knowledge of it already, save a cursory listing in their programming guide. That’s it.

That’s likely not a good sign.

Google it up if you want, but you’ll only get links to the British version of the show hosted by POP IDOL’s Ant and Dec.

Technorati Tags: GAMESHOW MARATHON, Leslie Nielsen, CBS

* Microsoft’s Vista will blur your high def DVD movies, unless you buy a new monitor they like. Blame the usual DRM jerks.

* How to make a paper airplane. 5 minute Google video. I haven’t tried this design yet, myself.

* Perhaps you’d prefer this design? (Both airplane links via Reddit.)

* Griffin has updated their website, but still haven’t released the FireWave. Oddly enough, there’s a support link and troubleshooting FAQ up there — for a product that hasn’t been released yet! Weird.

* It figures. The newer version of the TV tuner I use with my Mac has a special switch for “low latency,” so you can plug your console video game system into it and not worry about delayed reactions between your key presses and the action on screen. ARGH!

Technorati Tags: Vista, DRM, paper airplane, Griffin, FireWave, Eyetv, Mac

Hey gang,

I woke up to 900 comment spams clogging this blog this morning. I’ve re-adjusted the filters for them, but –

I wasn’t about to read 900 comments to approve or delete them. I caught a couple of honest posts and was able to approve them. If you’ve left a comment in the past 15-20 hours and it hasn’t shown up on this site, it’s likely been deleted. I’m really sorry about that, but please repost your thoughts.

Also — don’t bold-face (with either the “B” or “STRONG” tags) anything in your comments. That’s blacklisted now. If you do that, your post won’t even see the moderation queue. It’ll be deleted immediately with prejudice. All the spam comments I received last night followed that pattern, so I’m blacklisting them.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I think I liked it better when I was in a more exclusive club. . .

Significant increase diabetes prevalence in US

More than one out of every three individuals in the United States have diabetes and another 26 percent have impaired fasting glucose, which increases the risk of developing diabetes, new study findings suggest.

The prevalence of diagnosed diabetes has increased in recent years, while undiagnosed diabetes and impaired fasting glucose has remained constant over the past decade.

Technorati Tags: diabetes

This is the 72nd DVD podcast. Six minutes, roughly, and 2.7 MB.

Listen directly to the MP3 file.

Show notes: Mostly TV shows again, including lots of ALF, more Avatar, new packages for Buffy; plus, Numb3rs, NightStalker, Joey, Roller Girls, and more.

Subscribe via iTunes, or use this RSS feed for your other podcatching client of choice.

Vote for this podcast:
PodcastAlley.com
Podcast Pickle

Read about this podcast in PODCASTING HACKS.

Where to find release lists:
DVDJournal’s release list
TVShowsonDVD.com - monthly release list

Where to find more information on these movies:
Internet Movie Database

E-mail me at AUGIEDB *at* GMAIL *dot* COM. Or leave your comments in the comments section of this message.

Technorati Tags: podcast, dvd, ALF, Avatar, Buffy, Numb3rs, Joey

Holiday week or no, the new DVDs arrive on Tuesday. Hey, that’s today!

Some brief highlights, with a full podcast coming tonight:

ALF, Season 3
ALF: The Animated Series: 20,000 Years In Driving School
AlfTales: Alf & The Beanstalk

It’s All-Alf, All The Time this week! Ha!

Avatar: The Last Airbender: Book 1: Water, Volume 3

I know it’s a great series, but I need to watch SAMURAI JACK first.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer gets all seven seasons re-released in the new slimcase packaging this week.

Joey: The Complete 1st Season

I admit to being one of the five people in America who enjoyed this season.

The Kids in the Hall: Season 4

I know some of you enjoy this kind of thing. . .

Night Stalker: The Complete Series

It didn’t last long last season, so now it gets burnt to the world of profitability.

Numb3rs (Numbers): Season 1

Math nerds rejoice! There’s some good stuff in there.

The Tomorrow People: Set 3

I need to rent one of these discs sometime. I have fond memories of the series from its Nickelodeon reruns in the early 80s. I’m sure it’s awful, but I’d like to see what it was really like.

And from the movies department:

Date Movie (unrated) (2006)
Date Movie (R-rated) (2006)

I’d go unrated, if I actually picked it up.

Platoon: 20th Anniversary Edition (1986)
Smokey and the Bandit: Collector’s Edition (1977)
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?: Special Edition (2-disc set) (1962)

More Unnecessary Special Editions. Next week’s release list is HUGE, and most of the highlights are repackaged movies already available on DVD. I’m beginning to think that it’s only the saps who buy major (and most not-so-major) movies on their first release. Wait for the sequel, pick up the better edition.

Next week: Lots of Unnecesary Special Editions, and more seasons of X-FILES in new packaging. That’s about it.

Technorati Tags: DVD, ALF, The Tomorrow People

* I liked X-MEN 3.

* They took the open sourced QUAKE 2 source code and made it into a paintball game that’s free for downloading. Available for Windows and Linux.

* Behind the scenes at one of my favorite websites, the IMDB.

* I haven’t linked to a web color wheel in a while, have I? This one allows you to mix and match text and background colors on the fly to find just the right mix.

* The U.S. Marshalls go Linux! I feel safer already.

* Guitar Hero’s lead developer discusses the Nintendo Wii. Wow, it’s two of the games stories I’ve talked about the most on this blog have joined forces. It’s uber-gaming linkage! (We also learn that there’s no exclusive deal between the GH people and Sony. It could be ported to another system.)

* Here, go watch people drumming with the Wii.

Technorati Tags: X-MEN, IMDB, color wheel, Linux, Nintendo, Wii

Meat Loaf participates in his fan forum over in the UK. He wrote recently about his experience on American Idol, particularly in response to those that said he sounded awful. Interesting stuff here:

My thoughts
Thought: the 1st verse was shaky : why ? I changed from singing it big , to using a soft voice and My vocals in the ear monitors were not on until ” I finished cryin”, and if your going to sing it in hushed voice you have to hear. I wasn’t sick and my voice was great after the first verse listen to the Baby baby’s everything was on on pitch, tone, and support were all there, and anyone who says different is an idiot except for the first verse where wind and body were alittle flat and I rushed the beat a hair. Also they had me a little low in the mix( I wasn’t holding back) and on the last big note look how far I have the mike away as to not over power her. Thank you for all your postive remarks next time it will be perfect.
meat

I need to go watch the video again. . .

Myspace is to blogging what the BLINK tag was the good web design.

Technorati Tags: Myspace

Here’s the You Tube exclusive trailer:

A 17 year old student is facing expulsion because of something he wrote on the blog. The article here is so poorly written that it’s tough to tell just what’s going on, or what he wrote that got him in trouble.

I just needed to quote this:

Student faces expulsion for Web post

On a second post on May 2, without mentioning the school the student wrote: “I feel threatened by you, I cant even have a public Web page with out you bullying me and telling me what has to be removed. Where is this freedom of speech that this government is sworn to uphold? … Did you ever stop to think this will start a community backlash? The kids at Columbine did what the did because they were bullied. … In my opinion you are the real threat here. None of us ever put in our xanga’s that they were going to kill or bring harm to any one. We voiced our opinions. You are the real threat here. you are depriving us of our right to learn. now stick that in your pipe and smoke it.”

This kid needs to be sent back to 7th grade for remedial grammar lessons. They should expel him for being too dumb to write something approaching decent English.

I counted at least eight errors in that paragraph. Nobody’s depriving this kid of a right to learn anything that he hasn’t already chosen not to learn.

Thanks. I feel better now.

Update: No, wait, it gets worse. Check out the kid’s full site. First, it’s interesting to see what the news article above chose to quote and what they chose to ignore. Second, his skills with the written word are even scarier than I thought. It’s a shame that as we move into an era where people read and write more than ever — thanks to the web — that our kids don’t get any education on the written word, anymore. They need to have The Grammar Hammer hit them upside the head more often, I think. I dno’t want to live in a world where people think “your” and “you’re” are interchangeable, or that “u” is a proper replacement for “you.”

Yes, it’s a blog. Yes, I’ll relax the requirements of proper grammatical english for that. I do it around here all the time. But I have a tough time following this kid’s train of thought, because he’s managed to build a set of tracks that barely go straight. . .

(Internet Rule #1 is in effect here: The second someone picks on someone else’s poor grammar or spelling, he’ll make a similar error in his post. Yes, I know it well.)

The MacBook Pro has a motion sensor embedded in it, which is meant to lock the hard drive in case the laptop falls off a table or desk.

This person hacked it to do something else. Pretty cute.

* At about the 2:40 mark on this video, you can watch a pilot pour himself a glass of iced tea inside the cockpit during a barrel roll.

* Rumor: POLICE SQUAD to DVD in October. This is the classic short-lived TV series that gave us the NAKED GUN trilogy of movies. It’s about time!

* Play Battleship on-line. For the tech geeks: It’s in AJAX. How Web 2.0!

* I’m getting older, because I feel the need to write this: Kids today are getting dumber. Here’s the well-linked story of a kid who became an intern at Comedy Central and then spilled all the behind the scenes gossip onto his blog. The sad thing is, this kind of career suicide can also lead to book deals. The world is upside-down.

* PC World ranks the 25 Worst Tech Products ofAll Time. What tops the list? AOL! BWAH HA HA Yes, AOL is even worse than Microsoft’s BOB.

Technorati Tags: POLICE SQUAD, DVD, intern, AOL

Spoiler flag flies high!

OK, I watched the two hour finale last night, so we can open this up for all your discussion and question needs.

But I don’t want to hear anyone whine that they didn’t answer anything, and all they did was ask stupid questions. That’s just factually inaccurate. This was a big reveal of an episode.

That said, the four-toed foot was pretty weird and wild.

But, still, I thought it was a great finale for the season, if only because I picked up on the electromagnetic pulse knocking down the plane way back at the beginning of the season after we saw the initial Orientation movie. ;-)

Poor Locke just can’t find a thing to have faith in. He keeps getting it wrong.

Next season looks to unlock even larger mysteries of the island, as we’ll get to know “The Others” or “The Hostiles,” and find out what’s going on with the Hanso Foundation and Widmore.

And, remember, “you can find anyone if you have the money.” That’s not an exact quote, but it does explain the final scene.

No, it’s not happening anytime soon. This is a column where the author interviewed some tech people to ask them what would happen if Microsoft dried up and blew away tomorrow, taking all their software with them.

Surprisingly, nobody predicted mass suicides from the XBox 360 crowd.

Answers ranged from the humorous-but-true:

Josh Greenbaum, principal at Enterprise Applications Consulting, says, “Downloads for [StarOffice] would bring the Internet to a screeching halt.”

– to the downright delusional:

We would also find out how bad the Linux and Apple vendors are at providing patches, compared to what [customers] got used to from Microsoft,” Pescattore says, adding that Microsoft is much better than Apple and Linux at delivering security patches. “If you keep getting into car accidents, you know how to fix dents.”

Yes, MS is good at delivering patches — six months after the damage is done. Linux patches itself just about daily. Apple might not be quite as responsive, but it certainly updates its OS and associated programs faster than Microsoft. Sheesh.

Microsoft’s problem is that it keeps getting into car wrecks and failing to either (a) buy a new car or (b) take lessons in how to drive.