I’m looking at my website stats this morning and I see something interesting:

There are no less than a half dozen episodes of the Various and Sundry DVD Podcast that are being downloaded about 200 times apiece this month.  To me, the podcast was always disposable — it’s meant to be listened to the week it comes out.  That’s about it.  After that, there’s very little use for it. It’s not even worth archiving for historical purposes.  I don’t get it.

But someone is listening.  About 200 - to a podcast that died a couple of months ago.

Should I bring it back? Maybe it’s worth doing a trial run of four weeks or so.  Since DVD listings are available far in advance, I could even record them all in one shot and release them weekly from there.

No promises, but let me know what you think.

In other podcasting news, I’m doing another interview with a pro this evening for next week’s Pipeline Podcast.  And no, I’m not naming names yet, but I’ll try to put out an excerpt over the weekend on that feed.

First, they lay off half the performers on tour for economic considerations, and now a quarter of the band is out. OK, so I’m likely overselling the situation, but this is rather unfortunate:
edmontonsun.com - Music - Supernova loses bassist to freak mishap

Tommy Lees supergroup Rock Star Supernova is back on the hunt for a star performer.Bassist Jason Newsted has been sidelined by injuries to his left shoulder, right bicep and right rotator cuff, the band said yesterday in a release posted on its website.

The former Metallica member, who was injured trying to catch a 40-kilogram piece of equipment that had fallen from atop his amp, is scheduled for immediate surgery and a rehab schedule that could last up to nine months.

• That’s a pretty nice Nintendo Wii display. It’s coming soon to a Best Buy near you, maybe.
• The Janice Dickinson Modelling Agency is returning for a second season in an hour-long format. All five of us who watched the show may now rejoice.
• Dilbert’s Scott Adams lost his voice a year and a half ago. It just came back, sort of. Interesting story.
• Firefox recommends some extensions add-ons. (I hate the new name.) The WebDeveloper tool bar is a must have if you’re into that kind of thing. I’ve learned more about how this blog is set up from that than anything else.
• And I recommend Googlepedia, which returns Wikipedia results alongside Google searches.
• Have you downloaded Firefox 2.0 yet? It’s slightly more Web 2.0-ish.
• Is the irony mark punctuation a necessary convention in this day and age of written internet-based communications? Or just another stupid idea, like the question mark/exclamation point combination, the interrobang?

Last night’s episode had it all, didn’t it? Pants-fittings, little people visual humor, Gina Gershon references, a reference to a blow up doll that looks like Candace Bergen, Lake Bell in various states of undress, William Shatner smoking a cigar, Coho nearly going loco, and — oh, yeah — a pretty cool legal case that took some icky twists and turns. The only thing it lacked was a three minute monologue delivered by James Spader as a closing statement.
And next week - Hands returns!

I love this show. And I love this poster, too. I wish I had a dorm room wall upon which to hang it.

Full list over here

Some highlights/lowlights:

• Batman Beyond: Season Two (4-disc set)
• Justice League Unlimited: Season One (4-disc set)
• Krypto the Superdog: Vol. 2

I sense a theme there.

• Body Heat: Deluxe Edition (1981)

More Brian DePalma goodness.

Lawrence Kasdan directs.

• Creature Comforts: Season Two (2-disc set)
• Creature Comforts: Merry Christmas, Everybody!

Lotsa animation this week, but who can deny the charm and hilarity of Aardman Animations?

• Monster House (widescreen) (2006)

It’s a big week for animation, isn’t it?

• Nacho Libre (2006)

Have I previously mentioned my distaste for both Jack Black and Mexican wrestling? I don’t know where the sudden popularity of the latter comes from. This movie never stood a chance from me.

• The O.C.: Season Three (7-disc set)

Also known as: The season everyone gave up on it.

• The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

Wait, is there an election coming up? Must be a coincidence.

• SCTV: The Best of the Early Years (3-disc set)

In case the music rights issues kept you from being able to afford all the episodes, just buy the best of… In case you didn’t hear, by the way, a boxed set of the complete first season of SNL was recently announced. All episodes, 90 minutes each.

• Slither (widescreen) (2006)
• Slither (full-frame) (2006)

If only they had slithered on a plane, someone might have blogged about it.

• Porky’s: Special Edition (1982)
• Reservoir Dogs: 15th Anniversary Edition (1992)
• Saw II: Uncut Edition (2005)

There are plenty of movies out there that haven’t been released to DVD yet, but the format is now old enough that it’s more lucrative to keep re-releasing last decade’s movies in better and better formats. I just don’t think people are buying the same movies multiple times anymore. We’ve caught on to you, movie companies. Give it up!

Next week features new DVDs from Paul McCartney, Bob Dylan, and Barry Manilow, not to mention a 14 disc megaset collecting the entire ELLEN series! And a little low-budget production named MISSION IMPOSSIBLE: III.

• With a little bit of practice, you could play Donkey Konga with four bongos all by yourself.
• Weird Al credits the internet for his recent success. This has been your daily Weird Al link.
• National Novel Writing Month begins next week, and it’s official: I will never ever find the time to participate. Not ever. I’m already writing 2500-3000 words a week, on average, for Pipeline. Isn’t that enough? Maybe If I did the novel over three months of insanity, I could pull it off?
• Latest Apple rumor: A 50 inch monitor in 2007 to go along with the iTV.
• Latest Apple reality: The MacBook Pro is now available with a dual core chip and lotsa RAM.
• Great TiVo offer: $125 for the box and a year’s worth of service. It’s a single tuner Series 2. I guess they’re blowing them out now. It’s a great machine.
• Barenaked Ladies are making good money off the digital downloads of their latest album. Sadly, the album is mostly crap, but at least they’re finding a successful alternate business model that doesn’t involve DRMs or record labels taking huge cuts.
• Men, be warned: Kevin McClurg once slept with another man’s girlfriend. And that man created a website. BWAH HA HA
• Cool pictures of the space shuttle launch taken from the air.
• THE SHIELD to spin off Dutch? I like the character, but I don’t think we need a full hour of him, weekly.
• New DVD releases to come this afternoon.

The color of next-gen gaming is brown - Joystiq

Aeropause compiled a montage of next-generation screenshots and found the overall color tones to be dull; mostly browns and greys. From the article: “Console developers have 16.7 million colors to choose from! Why are they still using predominantly greys and browns? This color scheme even seems to have spread outside of first person shooters and into other genres.”

I used to have a game a few years back that was, basically, Animaniacs playing paintball. Very crude little 2-D shooter, played from an overhead view. Very simple, but colorful.
Has anyone done a first person shooter using cartoon characters in a full-blown 3D FPS style? I imagine that might be colorful. If The Simpsons can have a crazy car race game, why not an FPS, even if it’s “paint ball” to keep from having cartoon characters killing each other? I remember an early mod for the original DOOM that had Homer shooting donuts at demons.
Or there’s probably already one out there that I’m missing. Help?

• Microsoft does Photocasting! I’m sure they’ll claim it’s an innovation, too. But ask yourself this — does that website look more Apple or more Web 2.0?
• My odd question for the day: Are there places that offer free FTP sites? I have a program that helps automate eBay sales, but you need an FTP site to upload images to for eBay display. My website uses sFTP protocol to upload images, which the program doesn’t support. (Stupid.) I need to be using either straight-up FTP or a .Mac account. I don’t feel like spending $99 to sell $5 DVDs on eBay. It’ll take way too long to make that money back to justify the cost. So I’m looking to see if there are free FTP sites somewhere on the web. Sounds weird, I know, but this is Web 2.0. Isn’t there something for everyone now?
• It would also be nice if .Mac had a la carte purchasing, as TUAW suggests.
• These are heady times for Weird Al Yankovic, as his latest album is a certifiable hit. Why, it’s so important to the world that I’m even going to review it here eventually. (Sadly, it’s currently stuck in my car’s CD player. Literally. I can’t force it out.) In the meantime, check out the two writeups on the career of the great musician at Slate and The Boston Globe. I like the term “Troubadork.”
• Ken Jennings is critical of 1 vs. 100, for all good reasons. I only made it halfway through Friday’s second episode. There’s very little suspense. The show needs more of something, but I’m not sure what.
• Update: Speaking of eBay and DVDs: I owe two of you e-mails on DVDs you saw for sale here.  I’ll get back to you on those tonight, I promise.

I really shouldn’t bother showing this, but I have nothing else to blog about today. Lucky you.

I’ve mentioned in the past here that I’ve been working on a redesign of the blog for a month or more. Well, I haven’t worked on it much lately, and am scrapping the whole thing. I’m starting over from scratch, but I’ve learned so much in the last month that the next attempt should go much more quickly and look much better.

I’m going to show you a screenshot here of the first attempt at a redesign. There’s a lot still wrong with it. (The blue border is supposed to be white, for starters.) There’s a lot of temporary place-holders I threw in there while I worked on the code. This is a work in progress, in other words, and never would have been the final design. But it gives you an idea of some of the things I was playing with.

My next design attempt will stay away from the brown, and likely trend back to a blue color theme.

And if you think this looks ugly - you should see how IE rendered it. Forget the standards non-compliance of the browser for a moment; Even the colors looked different. Bizarre.

Screen grab is available after the break, due to non-compliant IE coding crap:

(more…)

Here’s the first that I’ve found. The writer gives it four out of five stars, and the writeup is hilarious.

Guardian Unlimited Arts | | Meat Loaf, Bat Out of Hell III

For what it’s worth, there’s a loose narrative thread (the “monster” - war, famine, pestilence - is on the loose, so you might as well stay at home with a Meat Loaf album), but that’s peripheral to the record’s main purpose, which is to indulge Meat’s love of gothic vaudeville. He pours on the melodrama from the start, and if “melodramatic” could just as well describe the first two Bat albums, the difference here is that the hysteria is notched up to a barely feasible degree.

Meat is 58, and as he blasts out the bell-ringing, choir-filled arias entitled Blind as a Bat and Bad for Good (the latter featuring a hell-for-leather Brian May), you fear for his blood pressure. Those, however, are nothing compared with Land of the Pigs (The Butcher is King) - five Olympian minutes crying out for a full production at Glyndebourne - and the duet (with Norwegian singer Marion Raven) It’s All Coming Back to Me Now, ostensibly a reflection on love, but imbued with the delicacy of aircraft carriers colliding at sea.

If you e-mail me a job description that you think is a perfect match for my on-line resume, it would make you look so much better not to address it to “August V.” That just shows me that you’re spamming everyone in your database. It’s blatantly obvious to someone in the IT field, idiots.

Also, jobs located in Idaho, Kentucky, and Maine are not the ones I want to commute from NJ to.

Sincerely yours,

August V.

I mention the guy twice in recent times on this board and then — BAMMO! — he shows back up on TV. Good news for this weekend! STEVEN WRIGHT IS BACK!
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Doug Elfman :: Seriously funny, Wright on

Wright has a new batch of insane, weird, deadpan, absurd and utterly logical things to say in his first stand-up video in 16 years, “Steven Wright: When the Leaves Blow Away.” It shows on Comedy Central (at 8 and 10 p.m. Saturday and 9 p.m. Monday), then comes out on DVD next year. Here’s one of those things:

“I bought an iPod. It can either hold 5,000 songs or one message from my mother.”

THE RUMORS ARE TRUE! Fraggle Rock Feature Is in the Works!: Financial News - Yahoo! Finance

The untitled film will for the first time take Gobo, Wembley, Mokey, Boober and Red on an adventure outside of Fraggle Rock where they will interact with the strange beings in “outer space” (also known as humans). The treatment is being written by author Ahmet Zappa (The Monstrous Memoirs of a Mighty McFearless) who will also executive produce the project with Brian Henson and Jason Lust. Lisa Henson will produce.

They’re baaaaaaaack! This weekend!

PBA.com - Official site of the Professional Bowlers Association

For the first time since 1998, the finals of the Japan Cup will be aired. The final round – which takes place Sunday, September 24 in Tokyo, Japan – will be replayed on ESPN Sunday, October 22 at 1 p.m. ET.The first live telecast of the season will take place one week later on Sunday, October 29 at 1 p.m. ET with the finals of the 2006 USBC Masters in Milwaukee, Wis., the first of four Major events. Each of the first 12 telecasts will begin in the same 1 p.m. ET time slot.

The Japan Cup turned out to be something special, though I’m not going to spoil it here. Just watch and enjoy. I know I’ll be doing that.

• Tangerine is a new program that helps you create iTunes playlists by analyzing the beat patterns of all the songs in your library. This’ll help you isolate the upbeat or slow songs on your collection if you’re in a particular mood. Right now, this is just a beta release.
• The Slingbox is coming to the Mac.
• So that’s why we need to buy Windows Vista: electricity costs! I kid you not.
• Pic of the day: The moon as seen from orbit, with the earth to the side. Pretty cool!
• Here’s a beautiful mod: Someone took their Series 3 TiVo to 1 terrabyte of hard drive capacity. That’s 52 days of standard recording, or 130+ hours of HD.
• The Pokemon Wii game will allow you to use your DS as a controller, including the touch screen.
• Pac-Man has been recreated using every language, OS, and platform known to man. But did you know you can now play Pac-Man on an Excel spreadsheet?