Jim Connelly

That’s What I Like: The Lightwedge

May 26, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I don’t sleep very well. If the noisy neighbors downstairs aren’t slamming doors and scraping furniture at 1:00am, then something that I should have done at work instead of writing for Medialoper is bothering me.

So I read, hoping to distract my brain away from whatever is going on so that my body will drag me to sleep without my brain realizing it. That’s the theory, anyways. However, when Rox sleeps, she likes it dark. Vampire coffin dark. So there has always been a bit of a problem with me waking her up when I need to read in the middle of the night.

Until I discovered The Lightwedge, the bestest book light ever.

Why Not The NiPod?

May 25, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I am a runner. At least five times per week, I get up at an incredibly stupid hour and run several miles through the dark, quiet streets where I live. It’s just a thing I do; the one piece of order in an otherwise chaotic existence. Also, I get some of my best ideas through oxygen deprivation. (Some might say that all of my ideas seem to come from a place of obvious oxygen deprivation.)

Like the vast majority of runners, I listen to music when I run, and I also listen to the radio. I own an Nano (which I don’t use for running because they refuse to build in a radio receiver), and I certainly don’t have any animosity towards Nike, whose shoes I wore for several years. As a matter of fact, in just about every way, I would seem to be the target audience for the Nike+iPod Sports kit.

So why am I not more excited about it? Is it just because you’ll separate me from my New Balances when you pull them from my cold, dead feet? Or is it something else?

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The World Cup of Bad Music

May 22, 2006 by Jim Connelly

This week, millions of people will be participating in one of our most cherished democratic rites: choosing the next American Idol.

And unless there is another fluke of “Since U Been Gone”-like proportions, that winner will go on to have a completely inconsequential career, annoying us with hype far beyond even any actual sales.

And yet, and yet, as evil as Idol is, it’s just a swaddling babe in the woods compared to the grandaddy of all bad music contests — the Eurovision Song Contest. For a half-century, it’s been foisting upon the world acts such as Lulu, Abba and the Shivery Silvery Queen of Melisma herself, Celene Diononnwaoonnnonnnnwwwaaaoonnnnnnn.

It’s pretty much the World Cup of Bad Music. OK, the European Cup, anyways.

The Weekly ‘Loper – May 21, 2006

May 21, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were standing in line to see The DaVinci Code, here’s what we were looking at:

Why I Hate The Sunday Paper – And of top of all that, it’s 2006 and the LA Times still hasn’t figured out how to keep newsprint from melting in our hands.
Upfronts: Will Studio 60 Be The Greatest Thing Ever? – Is NBC hoping for too much from Aaron Sorkin?
See You Next Year! – With 45,090,999 shows on 98,909 networks (not an exact count), not to mention the Internet, DVDs, and all of the other choices for your ever-dwindling mindshare, Season Finale Season is becoming increasingly anachronistic.
Hillary Rosen vs. the RIAA – Though she’s currently on the side of the angels, it’s amazing how some people’s principles shift with their paychecks.
Upfronts: CBS? More Like CBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ – I was trying to remember the last time CBS put out a drama that I was interested in, and I seriously can’t. Is it me? Or is it them? It’s them, right?
No, No, Let’s Wait – Remember how Radio replaced Newspapers and how Television replaced Radio and how the Internet replaced Television? Me neither. So why do people insist on thinking that these choices are “either/or” instead of “and/or”??
BEA 2006: News Embargo Broken – A report from BookExpo America in Washington, DC., where oldest of old media is quite possibly having the most trouble adapting to the newest of the new media. Also, erstwhile National Nanny William Bennett? Whalelike.

Upfronts: Veronica Lives!! FOX, Not So Much

May 19, 2006 by Jim Connelly

I know, I know — we’ve all been reading for a few weeks now that the low-rated but critically-loved Veronica Mars was going to make the cut at the CW, but I wanted to wait until it was officially announced.

I’m so happy that I promise not to make fun of their name for at least a few months. Though I think, given all of the narrowly targeted shows that they offer — the aforementioned Veronica Mars, Smallville, Supernatural, 7th Heaven — their name stands for “Cultshow Watching.” OK, now I won’t make fun of their name.

It will be interesting to see where they go. More towards the WB than UPN, I should think. By the late 1990s, the WB pretty much took over the mantle from FOX as the network that would try just about anything. Yet anybody who actually watched their shows could see that there was much more going on than pretty white teenagers who happened to be aliens and/or superheroes.

Upfronts: CBS? More Like CBZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZ

May 18, 2006 by Jim Connelly

The original plan for this week’s look at the upfronts was to single out a single interesting thing that each network was doing with one of its more interesting shows.

That plan worked out fine for NBC, who are pinning their hopes on Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and ABC, who have responded to rerun-crazed Losties by putting the kibosh on repeats.

But when I got to CBS, I realized that from where I sit, they really don’t have any interesting shows.

Upfronts: I Was Lost And Now I Am Found

May 17, 2006 by Jim Connelly

ABC, who once was blind, now can see.

ABC has announced that Lost, a show that is either (take your pick):

intricately plotted by insidious masterminds
completely cobbled together by panic-stricken monkeys
both

will air next season with no repeats, the plethora of which this season has taken some of the wind from its sails.

Good! Of course, FOX has been doing this with 24 for a couple of seasons now. However, unlike 24 — which derives at least part of its adrenaline rush from the fact that the airing of its episodes is as relentless as the beep-boop! beep-boop! beep-boop! beep-boop! that powers it — next season of Lost will air in two disparate chunks.

Some people see that as a problem. I don’t.

Upfronts: Will Studio 60 Be The Greatest Thing Ever?

May 16, 2006 by Jim Connelly

It’s a rhetorical question, I know, but has any TV program in the history of Television been so overly publicized six months prior to its debut than Studio 60? Yeah, I’m looking forward to it, too, but this Wall St Journal headline might be a bit too much:

Can ‘Studio 60’ Save NBC?

No! No single show can save any network!! Period!! Well, except for Veronica Mars, that might save the CW . . . OK, that was just plain wishful thinking, which is what this is.

Serve This!!

May 15, 2006 by Jim Connelly

If you click on the links over to the right of this site, you’ve probably come across this page at some point:

Help Us Serve You Better.

These pages — which stand between you and the article you really want to read — ask you for three things:

ZIP Code (which they totally misspell: “ZIP” is an acronym).
Year of Birth
Gender

I dunno about you, but I always lie. Every single time. I type any five numbers in as a ZIP code; I use 1965 as my year of birth (because it is their example); and I say that my gender is “female.”

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The Weekly ‘Loper – May 14, 2006

May 14, 2006 by Jim Connelly

While you were wondering when the NSA was going to contact you about that “harmless” joke you made on the phone that one time, here’s what we were talking about:

Riding The New Innertube — Maybe not so much riding, but more like sitting in the water, waiting in vain for a current.
TiVo’s Ad Finder – Sometimes, people go looking for ads. No, really, they do.
What About eBooks? — While everybody else is rushing headlong into the digital era, the publishing industry is taking its own sweet time.
Ode To The Simple Television — Of course, the headlong rush by the nets to provide all of their content digitally means that they are creating foolish hobgoblins of their own UI inconsistencies. They should do well to remember how easy it is to use the device that their websites are trying to emulate/replace.
Requiem For Cody’s – Just another indie store biting the dust, that’s all.
When DVDs Are Outlawed, Only Outlaws Will Send DVDs — How much you wanna bet that the drug-sniffing dogs make fun of the dogs who have the job of sniffing out counterfeit DVDs?
That’s What I Like: TiVo — Kassia talks about the most revolutionary content-oriented invention of the new millenium, which is only now beginning to really take off. Hopefully TiVo itself will end up being more than just the verb.