There’s nothing more juicy to a network news producer than something funny happening on a rival network. And it turns out the recent occurrence on Channel 9 News in Melbourne was not only reported on other networks, but even their sister station in Perth got in on the action:
Birds are just awesome!
It’s been quite a while since I’ve been on any outing where the norm is to drink cocktails from plastic cups and the bathroom stalls are inscribed with such musings as, “Your heart is a dark forest” and “I am a slave to the wage.” Deep. . .man. Anyway, that’s how we spent our Saturday night this weekend.
Most people here in Australia still don’t have cable television, which is a completely foreign concept to me. I don’t recall a time in my life where we didn’t have cable. Still Joel McHale’s lone Sydney show managed to sell out within a couple of hours of the announcement on last week’s episode of The Soup. We were lucky enough to get in early (we actually acquired tickets before the announcement was made- long complicated story that involves Bret Micheals) and had great seats in the fourth row. It was very funny, and we actually found the most enjoyable bits were the ones about his kid, rather than all the intro Soup-related stuff.
Though the story about his grandmother being embarrassed because he works for E! Entertainment Television made me laugh because when I was at E! my grandmother was so mortified by the specific show I worked for that telling people I worked at E! became the classier preferred alternative. Ah. The times how they change. 
We followed up the show with some Vietnamese food in Marrickville, and I almost fell asleep on the way home. Going out two nights in a row certainly took its toll. I think I’m getting old.
“Shiver me timbers” is one of those stereotypical things that more than likely no one ever actually said, though if they did, it is definitely a historical saying. Assuming pirates of yore really did say it, I think we can safely assume that they don’t any more. I can’t see Somali oil-tanker-nappers saying it can you? So, it was with some surprise that we heard one of our favourite idiots on one of our favourite American idiot news shows – Fox and Friends – genuinely ask:
Do they still say ’shiver me timbers?’
Pretty dumb right?
Wrong. It was seriously idiotic, because she wasn’t asking it about pirates. She was asking it about the Irish!!?! Seriously – you couldn’t make this stuff up! For St. Patrick’s Day they had a live link with a correspondent in Belfast, and the host seriously asked if they still said “shiver me timbers.”
You have got to love Fox and Friends. News doesn’t get anymore entertaining (or exasperating).
If you’ve never seen them before (and if you’re outside the US you probably don’t keep up with Superbowl ads) the Budweiser Clydesdales have become synonymous with great commercials for a sub-par beer. The latest in a solid family of shorts attempts to explore the history of the Clydesdale – the clue is in the name.
Now if only they’d used a REAL Scot for the voice over (to me at least that aspect was pretty jarring), it would have been a superb ad!
Having worked in/for network television on a few continents now, I can say that I seriously doubt the story of why/how this was censored for so many years, but I’m thrilled that it was eventually released. For your enjoyment and perusal: Bill Hicks on Letterman.
We don’t really follow it too much, but here are the Australian Idol finalists for 2008. . . Any thoughts?
Picture borrowed from news.com.au.
Any good comic book fan will have come across the term retconning. For everyone else, retroactive continuity in comics – and other fiction – is the deliberate changing of previously established facts. In order for something to be true now, you just change what happened in the past.
This happens a lot in comics – and soap operas – when it turns out that someone previously believed to be dead turns out to have miraculously survived. One of the most well known, and worst, examples of this was in Dallas. Bobby Ewing was dead for an entire season, but they wanted to bring him back so how could they do this? With the same strategy we were always told never to use at school writing stories – someone wakes up, and it was all a dream.
Imagine if someone you’d never met before told you they went to school with you. They could photoshop a year book picture to place you both in, and you would believe them. They just changed your past. Which brings us back to the question in the title of the post.
André Rieu is a well-coiffed, supposedly world-renowned violinist. I first becase aware of him about a year or so ago when I saw a few CDs in the post office. Recently, the post office’s Rieu supplies have grown to something like 30 CDs and 20 DVDs. But more than just merchandise, he’s bringing his show to Australia – the world’s biggest touring production complete with an ice rink and life size Viennese Castle. There are TV specials, and they are even showing the concert on PPV – “the biggest event of the year!”
I truly believe André Rieu is one of the world’s first non-fiction examples of retconning. I very much doubt that he has been around for more than a couple of years – but an instant back catalogue and a page on wikipedia is clearly all you need to convince an entire country that they’ve always loved him.
No, no. . .it’s exactly what you think it is:
Tis the season as they say, and indeed Xmas is the season for the gift of boxsets. Both Amanda and I received our top choices for boxsets this year – Harry Potter films 1-5 and Heroes season 1 respectively. We’ve only dipped our toes into the wealth of material in these (19 DVDs between them!) but already we are seeing some interesting new features.
In Heroes, as with many TV DVDs, you get the unaired pilot. I don’t know how many of you are Heroes fans (I know the UK is seriously behind the rest of the world for airings) but the pilot sets up the series quite differently. I don’t want to spoil it for anyone planning a purchase, but while the main characters are all there, it was clearly felt that the addition of a big 9/11-related plotline and the removal of a limb were unnecessary.
And then there was Harry Potter … all Potter fans are aware that book/film 1 was changed from the Philosophers Stone to the Sorcerer’s Stone for the US market. For the most recent film, the first DVD we watched, the changes are more subtle. The first thing we noticed was in the Xmas with the Weasleys scene: Santa Claus has never been a part of Christmas in the wizarding world until now! This is forgivable, however, compared with the other addition we spotted: picture a Hogwarts breakfast scene, long tables with a magnificent spread of toast and sausages and eggs and clearly branded boxes of one of America’s favourite breakfast cereals!! I understand the increased use of product placement in movies, but honestly I would not have imagined there was a place for such a thing in the Potterverse. How sadly wrong I was.
This is probably only amusing to anyone who has spent a significant amount of time in the UK, has had a glass of wine and is still feeling the long term affects of global travel … but we flicked onto one of those real life crime documentary shows only to find that the murder victim was none other than Vickie Beckham.
Obviously not that one, this was in the sleepy town of Newberry, South Carolina … but it was funny to hear about when Vickie “discovered her husband’s double life of strippers and drugs.”
…
I guess you had to be there. 
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