SuperWonderBang

I have been disconnected recently from the political scene, the daily news, and really any sort of ongoing topical interests. It’s mostly due to being really busy with work during the day and trying, unsuccessfully (despite lots of time and effort), to make some progress with a freelance project I am working on.

With this pressure, I’ve turned to the digital crack of this day and age: Madden on the Xbox360. I am finally revisiting my Cincinnati Bengals franchise which I started over a year ago. I’m also shredding on Guitar Hero, though I am not very good at that game at all.

In addition to these distractions, the weather seems to be putting a damper on just about everything. It’s hot. It’s dry. It just makes me want to sit on the couch with a book or else watching Vanilla Ice trying to ride a bucking bull on that Ty Murray TV show.

So, what I am looking for is some sort of rejuvenation. Any recommendations?

I’ve watched quite a few episodes of ABC’s American Inventor. There are plenty of people whose stories are touching or sad. There are plenty of weirdos as well. What’s rare on the show are the people whose story seems genuine and whose invention isn’t just some improvement on another product.

Maybe none of that applies to Bobby Grissett from Conway, SC. He invented a large cross-cut knife that is used to cut large pans of cakes, brownies, and other baked goods. His years of experience in industrial kitchens lead him to seek out something to make his job easier. The panel might have been right in pointing out the product’s lack of mass appeal, but what they seemed to miss was the real American part of Mr. Grissett.

A military veteran who now runs the cafeteria in a school district in South Carolina, Mr. Grissett really embodies both the greatness and the disparity in America. Mr. Grissett seems to be a man who might not have had all the finest things in life, nor all the greatest opportunities. Yet, he has worked hard all his life in what is surely an almost thankless job. He has provided for his family to the best of his abilities. There are a lot of people in America doing that. What makes him uniquely American is his lack of whining and his seemingly constant striving for even better.

Mr. Grissett hasn’t rested on just the hard work he has done, but he has vision and hope and desire. What’s more, he honestly believes that he can achieve all those things. That makes him one of the more compelling people I have seen on the show. It surely makes him a great symbol of an America that far too often gets hidden behind our minor differences. Mr. Grissett serves as a great reminder that we should never give up and never quit working for better for our families.

Technorati Tags: american inventor, abc, capitalism, entrepreneurship, american dream

According to Chris Dodd’s blog, these are the amounts of time the different candidates have had to speak.

Looks to me like some of the candidates are getting short shrift. This chart looks a lot like the one of dollar amounts raised by the candidates and that’s troublesome. One surprising note is the lack of time Biden received. He was fired up and he seemed like he couldn’t find the rhythm for his message. Gravel’s problem is that his messages are very nuanced, so they never work for the ADD television audience of today’s America.

I’m watching the IRL race on TV today and I see that Joost is sponsoring one of the vehicles. I have been using Joost since the first beta invites were handed out. Even now that it’s in a larger beta, I still can’t figure out why there’s so much great press about it. My major question is: What is there to watch on Joost?

I’ve flipped through every channel and watched a lot of the crap that’s on there and none of it is compelling. It’s all just generic music video style content. It seems like maybe they are only programming for 14-year-old boys. I just don’t see the appeal.

I look at the channel list online at Joost’s website and it seems like most of those channels don’t show up when I actually use the application. Is there some secret here?

UPDATE: Yes, I’m the idiot. I see that you have to go to the “Channel Catalog” and “Add Channel”s to “My Channels.” This seems very counter-intuitive to me. There is a lot more content than I originally thought. The commercials are still amazingly obnoxious.

Well, it’s official. CBS has canceled the only show I like on their entire network. The problem here was the midseason hiatus. When you have a show that is extremely serial, making those who are into it wait two months to continue the story is unacceptable.

The show started off strong. Good acting, nice direction, great storyline, but then just when people were really getting into the story, the show disappears. Of course, there is tons of great TV, so those same viewers moved on to other shows.

How does an executive not see this happening? I don’t work in TV, but I know enough about the sheep in America to know that if they don’t get what they want when they want, they will flock to another pasture.

After two episodes, Fox has decided to cancel the drama series “Drive.” It starred on of my favorite actors, Nathan Fillion, who made his name in the sci-fi series “Firefly” and its film version, “Serenity.” He was also in the the comedy-horror movie “Slither” which I thoroughly enjoyed.

Now, I’m not really writing to lament the show’s demise or beg people to save it. Instead, I want to examine how I, a person who thinks he has decent taste, could have so enjoyed a TV show that is apparently so bad, it hurt the ratings of the show after it, the inimitable “24.”

I really liked the show “Drive” and looked forward to seeing the next episodes, but apparently my judgment is totally flawed. I could see falling into a show that lasts 10 episodes and just never finds its audience. But I fell into a show that apparently only attracted the most dull of mind and bereft of taste.

How bad does a show have to be to last only 2 episodes and be universally lambasted because it brought down the ratings of superstar shows around it? That’s a bad TV show, and yet somehow I was glued to the TV when it came on. Surely, it must have been my wanting to see what Nathan Fillion was up to, but I don’t want to cop out here.

Yes, I liked a horrible TV show and Fox makes me feel dirty for it.

For some reason, I have found myself watching a lot of the Military Channel lately. It’s mostly because of the show 20th Century Battlefields which uses some cool computer graphics to really explain a particular battle in each show.

However, I wonder why such a channel exists. Why are people interested in hour long detailed explorations of the rifles of the Japanese army? Why would anyone want to sit and watch crane shots of German tanks while a narrator spouts statistics about its capabilities?

It’s war porn and for some reason it is mesmerizing. I suppose because there is so much danger and power in those machines and weapons that they necessarily require our attention. Everything about them is designed to kill other humans and there’s some sort of energy bound up in that.

I wonder if other countries have anything like a Military Channel.