Saturday, 12 January 2002

Friday, 11 January 2002

[Julia Louis-Dreyfus'] new sitcom, Watching Ellie, which debuts on NBC at the end of next month, is innovation packed. In addition to nixing the laugh track, using a single camera that follows the characters around, inserting songs and ditching the three-jokes-a-page rule, the show takes place in real time, so each week a clock in the corner of the screen counts down 22 minutes in the life of lounge singer and Los Angeles single gal Ellie Riggs...

Originally the show was called 22 Minutes with Eleanor Riggs -- the running time of a sitcom without commercials -- but that turned out to be inaccurate, since the networks now run more than eight minutes of commercials in their expensive prime-time slots. "The network didn't want to point that out," Hall says.

1. Get back into making music, with an eye toward making more MP3s available.
2. Exercise more.
3. Get at least one of my secret cool side projects going for real.

Wednesday, 9 January 2002

[The New York Times] turning sports upside down and slapping it on the back of Metro ... did more than just iron out a production wrinkle. Unintentionally or not, it was also an astute commentary on a long-standing journalistic problem, which is that news about sports is not really news at all -- not, at any rate, in the sense that news about politics, economic and social developments, and international affairs is news.

Sports, after all, is essentially a subcategory of the for-profit entertainment industry ... The fact that one set of highly paid entertainers gets more points than another set of highly paid entertainers on a given day, while of surpassing and perfectly legitimate interest to many people, is not of great moment.

She frequently found that one twin would interrupt the other and claim ownership of the event being recalled. ... In all, 14 of the 20 sets of twins had at least one disputed memory between them.

Sheen says that disputed memories are common among twins because they tend to share so many of the same experiences at exactly the same time in their lives. (In a subsequent study of 69 college students who were not twins, Sheen found that six had a disputed memory with a sibling or close friend.)

Does the misremembering twin really believe that his or her memory is the correct one? Apparently. Sheen found that feelings of "ownership" were equally strong among the twins she studied. She said she didn't detect any hesitation or anything else that would suggest which twin was misremembering the event: "The twins got genuinely upset with each other..."

Tuesday, 8 January 2002

An already successful Canadian model exists: PrideVision, which launched last year.

According to the marketing publication Brandweek, research suggests that six percent of the adult population, roughly 15 million people, identifies itself as gay or lesbian, with combined annual spending in the $250-$350 billion range.

MTV and Showtime are undecided if the proposed gay network will be advertiser-supported like MTV or a commercial-free pay service like Showtime. Some industry observers believe the latter might minimize resistance from anti-gay groups against cable systems that would carry the network as part of a basic cable package.

Monday, 7 January 2002

Sunday, 6 January 2002

...the new iMac is built around a flat-panel display. But instead of taking up precious desk space like a typical flat monitor, the iMac's screen floats in the air, attached to a jointed, chrome-pipe neck.

Robert Metcalfe, the co-inventor of the Ethernet office networking standard, who is a friend of Mr. Kamen, told me via e- mail: "Some months ago when speculation was running high, I said that Kamen's It was more important than the Internet, but not as important as cold fusion, had cold fusion worked out. The It I was talking about, which I did not disclose, was NOT Segway. That's all I can say."