Link Banana

A very interesting daily chart from The Economist. The basic analysis:

Those [children of international parents] craving an unhealthy diet should make for America, where more than half of the expat parents said that their children had eaten more junk food since relocating. Keen gamers should consider China and Canada, whereas telly addicts should nag their parents to move to the United Arab Emirates or India.

There’s nothing too remarkable in Gizmodo’s interview with Alton Brown. They breifly discuss his new show — Feasting on Waves — and talk at length about the technology he used while filming it. So, I guess the point is that I’m mostly just linking to this because Alton Brown is cool.

If, like me, you’ve always wondered what technological wizardry allows for The Daily Show’s impressive ability to amass clips of political and media foibles, the answer is: very little. An explanation from a former researcher:

It’s literally 15 rack-mounted TiVos of various models, many from the pre-Series 2 era. Some Philips boxes, some Sonys. And because there’s a limited number of remote codes, when a staffer operates one, he has to hold the remote directly against that box’s IR receiver so that the beam doesn’t hit any of the other boxes (i.e., so he’s not inadvertently controlling multiple boxes at once). No joke!

(via Boing Boing)

PBS is planning to drop Mr. Roger’ Neighborhood from the list of programs it regularly beams to member stations (who themselves decide when and if to air it). This fact yielded a good bit of nostalgia among those over 20, and a petition based primarily on that nostalgia.

(via Metafilter)

Noticing the undeniable fandom of the critical class, Vulture has added AMC’s Mad Men to their list of television shows you should watch:

…by now you’re feeling that oppressive sense, delivered by critics and laysnobs alike, that if you aren’t watching Mad Men you’re out of touch with all that is good in our culture. That means Mad Men is officially a Show You Should Watch™ (or SYSW for short), following in the proud footsteps of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Arrested Development.

I’m ready to name this the craziest thing I’ve heard all day:

The remains of a woman have been found sitting in front of her TV - 42 years after she was reported missing.

(via Gizmodo)

America’s favorite streaming television site, Hulu, just announced that they’ve now got The Daily Show and Colbert Report. Soon, they’ll also have these great PBS programs:

• Scientific American Frontiers
  
• Wired Science
• Carrier
• Nova

(via TV Squad)

Over at Salon, Megan Dolls points out that any fans of City of God will probably be interested in the related television series — now available on DVD — from the same director:

In “City of Men,” a televised miniseries that ran in Brazil from October 2002 until December 2005 and is now available on DVD, Meirelles and his collaborators add dimension to “City of God’s” gory view of Rio’s other half, depicting domestic life in the favelas — shantytowns cobbled together from concrete, corrugated tin and cinder blocks by their poor inhabitants. Whereas “City of God” followed its characters through the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, “City of Men” looks at contemporary life. Preserving the gritty, neorealist aspects of Meirelles’ film, the TV series offers glimpses into the homes, schools and shops where daily life in the favelas unfolds.

I’ve never been a fan or Mr. Rooney, but in small doses he’s decidedly more tolerable. As BuzzFeed explains the thing:

Cutting down Andy Rooney’s 60 Minutes monologues — keeping only his first and last sentences — changes them from windy rants to haiku-like gems. It’s got the same bizarre impact as Garfield Minus Garfield.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, but one wouldn’t have to squint very hard to think that the New York Times is waging a publicity campaign against Oprah in favor of Ms. Banks. Earlier this week they reported Oprah’s decline, and now they’ve made Trya Banks the Magazine’s cover girl.

Every once in a while, something leaps out of this boring part in the election cycle and makes me pay attention. Today, it was this line from John Harwood on Meet the Press. He says it at the very start of the round table, at about 27:30 in the web video.

If we found out that there was a secret poker game when Tony Rezko was paying Barack Obama to write Jeremiah Wright’s sermons and to organize Muslim English professors form a new Weather Underground chapter, maybe Barack Obama could be stopped.

I’m generally a sucker for lists like this. I’m especially a sucker for lists like this when they feature childhood favorites like Full House.

It appears that the few-commercials honeymoon that TV-on-the-internet has enjoyed is closer to ending:

“Disney-ABC Television Group will begin conducting research next week on inserting multiple commercials into ad breaks for primetime series on its broadband player,” according to The Hollywood Reporter. “Upping the ad load would amount to the most aggressive move yet from ABC.com in its quest to draw as much ad revenue.”

Clay Shirky’s pedaling some of the most interesting ideas about the internet and collaboration I’ve ever heard. This speech/essay is probably nearly as good as his Bloggingheads appearance.

Did you ever see that episode of Gilligan’s Island where they almost get off the island and then Gilligan messes up and then they don’t? I saw that one. I saw that one a lot when I was growing up. And every half-hour that I watched that was a half an hour I wasn’t posting at my blog or editing Wikipedia or contributing to a mailing list. Now I had an ironclad excuse for not doing those things, which is none of those things existed then. I was forced into the channel of media the way it was because it was the only option. Now it’s not, and that’s the big surprise. However lousy it is to sit in your basement and pretend to be an elf, I can tell you from personal experience it’s worse to sit in your basement and try to figure if Ginger or Mary Ann is cuter.

And I’m willing to raise that to a general principle. It’s better to do something than to do nothing. Even lolcats, even cute pictures of kittens made even cuter with the addition of cute captions, hold out an invitation to participation. When you see a lolcat, one of the things it says to the viewer is, “If you have some fancy sans-serif fonts on your computer, you can play this game, too.” And that’s message — I can do that, too — is a big change.

EDIT (4/28/2008): If video’s more your thing, Blip.tv now has that.

Tim Goodman, a confessed snob, stoops to reconsider CBS’s plebeian Monday night comedy lineup and finds it rather enjoyable. His consideration of snobbery:

The problem with sophisticated comedy — be it anti-obvious in nature, keenly observed absurdities or ironically dumb by choice — is that it creates its own little laugh ghetto from which you never get out. You don’t want to watch “Two and a Half Men” because, well, it’s “Two and a Half Men” with Charlie Sheen, for God’s sake. What more need be said?

And yet, there’s a smugness - almost a righteousness - to people who can only tolerate “30 Rock” or “Weeds” and sit around lamenting the death of “Arrested Development.” Hey, it takes one to know one.

It’s true that CBS is awash in laugh tracks and anyone unfortunate enough to end up in hell will find pretty much the same sound there. And that tired sitcom pacing - setup, punch line, setup punch line, big bang before the commercial break - is enough to make you really do damage to a free-standing TV set. But it’s also true that funny is funny. It answers to no specific genre or network. From Milton Berle to “Flight of the Conchords,” if you laugh, then it’s funny. It worked.

(via TV Squad)

I’ve heard report’s that Mr. Letterman has been “phoning in” his performances recently, but this is a little over the top. Last week he repeated, nearly verbatim, four jokes he’d used just the night before.

(via Fimoculous)

Well, for Democratic candidates at least. Not so much for Republicans. The methodology (PDF) is here. There’s also an old-ish LA Times Op-Ed which explains the results. (How’d I miss that?)

Alex Koppelman’s essay isn’t exactly new news, but he says it admirably and it’s a point I like hearing:

The new season of Fox’s reality show “Hell’s Kitchen,” starring Ramsay, kicks off Tuesday night. It’s a show that seems deliberately designed to waste Ramsay’s considerable talents both as a chef and as a television personality by having him send inexperienced, talentlesscooks through a particularly dull meat grinder. Ramsay and Fox give these poor saps simple kitchen tasks that are obviously way above their skill level, presumably in the hope they’ll fail. And then, joy of joys, Ramsay gets to turn insincerely red-faced and yell.

For the record: despite it’s massive, glaring, almost intolerable, flaws I do have a season pass to Hell’s Kitchen on the TiVo.

Since you probably don’t watch this show — which, by the way, is the only reason this is news-worthy — you may not care. But I do, so “YAY!”

(via TV Squad)

Finally back on the air, the show has no one to play the most popular politician in America.

So far, the only time SNL has featured Obama in a skit was a cameo performance by the man himself, just before the writers’ strike began. Now that the strike is settled, the show, three days from airing, finds itself with no clear candidate to play the Democratic front-runner. … Which is why Kenan Thompson, SNL’s only black cast member at the moment, was often mentioned as a possibility. But apparently producers have wisely decided that would be like asking William Hung to play Chiyo in Memoirs of a Geisha, and, yesterday, the Post announced that Lorne Michaels was holding auditions outside the cast for the role.