Ramblings & ephemera
From Reuters’ “Mummified body found in front of blaring TV” (17 February 2007): Police called to a Long Island man’s house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set. The 70-year-old Hampton Bays, New York, resident, identified as Vincenzo Ricardo, appeared to […]
Posted on April 1st, 2013 by Scott Granneman
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From Alex Mindlin’s “Room to Grow as Homes Add HD TVs” (The New York Times: 21 November 2010): High-definition televisions have entered American homes with startling speed; 56 percent of households now have at least some HD channels and an HD set, according to Nielsen. Among consumer technologies, that speed of adoption is rivaled only […]
Posted on November 24th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From Adam Begley’s interview of Don DeLillo in “The Art of Fiction No. 135” (The Paris Review: Fall 1993, No. 128): Film allows us to examine ourselves in ways earlier societies could not—examine ourselves, imitate ourselves, extend ourselves, reshape our reality. It permeates our lives, this double vision, and also detaches us, turns some of […]
Posted on November 19th, 2010 by Scott Granneman
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From David Wiley’s interview of David Foster Wallace, “Transcript of the David Foster Wallace Interview” (The Minnesota Daily: 27 February 1997): But Plato and John Stuart Mill both take books to talk about different types of pleasure. In my own personal life, I like really arty stuff a lot of the time. But there’s also […]
Posted on November 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Steven Berlin Johnson’s “Old Growth Media And The Future Of News” (StevenBerlinJohnson.com: 14 March 2009): The first Presidential election that I followed in an obsessive way was the 1992 election that Clinton won. I was as compulsive a news junkie about that campaign as I was about the Mac in college: every day the […]
Posted on July 5th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, politics, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Larry McCaffery’s “Conversation with David Foster Wallace” (Dalkey Archive Press at the University of Illinois: Summer 1993): One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of “form.” The interesting thing […]
Posted on May 23rd, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009): The somewhat more surprising force was one specific type of innovation: social applications. The average teenage kid has a pretty much infinite capacity for talking to their friends. But they can’t physically be with them all the time. When I was in high school the […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, history, social software, tech in changing society | No Comments »
From Paul Graham’s “Why TV Lost” (Paul Graham: March 2009): About twenty years ago people noticed computers and TV were on a collision course and started to speculate about what they’d produce when they converged. We now know the answer: computers. It’s clear now that even by using the word “convergence” we were giving TV […]
Posted on March 17th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Graham’s “PHPBB Password Analysis” (Dark Reading: 6 February 2009): A popular Website, phpbb.com, was recently hacked. The hacker published approximately 20,000 user passwords from the site. … This incident is similar to one two years ago when MySpace was hacked, revealing about 30,000 passwords. … The striking different between the two incidents is […]
Posted on March 10th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: language & literature, security | No Comments »
From Richard Alleyne’s “Black and white TV generation have monochrome dreams” (The Telegraph: 17 October 2008): New research suggests that the type of television you watched as a child has a profound effect on the colour of your dreams. While almost all under 25s dream in colour, thousands of over 55s, all of whom were […]
Posted on February 12th, 2009 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: cool stuff, science | No Comments »
From Christopher M. Fairman’s “Fuck” (bepress Legal Series: 7 March 2006): The PTC [Parents Television Council] is a perfect example of the way word taboo is perpetuated. The group’s own irrational word fetish – which they try to then impose on others – fuels unhealthy attitudes toward sex that then furthers the taboo status of […]
Posted on November 30th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Marc Ambinder’s “HisSpace” (The Atlantic: June 2008): Improvements to the printing press helped Andrew Jackson form and organize the Democratic Party, and he courted newspaper editors and publishers, some of whom became members of his Cabinet, with a zeal then unknown among political leaders. But the postal service, which was coming into its own […]
Posted on October 6th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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From Robert Sam Anson’s “Birth of an MTV Nation” (Vanity Fair: November 2000): Now watched by more than 340 million viewers in 139 countries (among them, Russia, China, and Vietnam) …
Posted on August 11th, 2008 by Scott Granneman
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I was interviewed twice in the last couple of months by two local TV news channels, both times on the same subject: the cool stuff that even ordinary cell phones can do nowadays. Google features prominently, as does Flickr, Wireless Amber Alerts, and Cellfire. Best of all, the later one has Libby, my dog, in […]
Posted on July 20th, 2007 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: overheard, technology | No Comments »
From Chris Suellentrop’s “Scooby-Doo: Hey, dog! How do you do the voodoo that you do so well?” (Slate: 26 March 2004): The Washington Post‘s Hank Stuever concisely elucidated the “Scooby worldview” when the first live-action movie came out: “Kids should meddle, dogs are sweet, life is groovy, and if something scares you, you should confront […]
Posted on October 2nd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: art, commonplace book | Comments Off on What can we learn from Scooby-Doo?
From Stephen Lawson & Robert McMillan’s AT&T plans CNN-syle security channel (InfoWorld: 23 June 2005): Security experts at AT&T are about to take a page from CNN’s playbook. Within the next year they will begin delivering a video streaming service that will carry Internet security news 24 hours a day, seven days a week, according […]
Posted on June 16th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, security, technology | Comments Off on AT&T’s security tv station
From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44): The gift-dropping missions had ended in 1996. There was still no television set on North Sentinel; it remained, like Prospero’s island, a place where the air shimmered with invisible signals, with unseen Hindi soap operas and Thai music that drifted, […]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, technology | Comments Off on TV signals passing through the Stone Age air
From The New York Times‘ “Lew Anderson, 84, Clarabell the Clown and a Bandleader, Dies“: Lew Anderson, whose considerable success as a musician, arranger and bandleader paled before the celebrity he achieved as Clarabell the Clown, Howdy Doody’s sidekick on one of television’s first children’s shows, died on Sunday in Hawthorne, N.Y. … “Well, his […]
Posted on May 17th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, history | Comments Off on Clarabell the Clown’s final – and only – words
From “NBC: iPod Boosts Prime Time“: NBC’s “The Office” delivered a 5.1-its highest ratings ever-last Thursday among adults 18 to 49, a bump the network credits in large part to the show’s popularity as an iPod download. … Such a connection between podcast success and broadcast ratings success is particularly significant because the NBC data […]
Posted on March 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: business, tech in changing society, technology | Comments Off on More distribution channels = more viewers
From Yahoo! News (March 2004): Andy Rooney certainly knows how to stir the passion in his viewers. The ’60 Minutes’ curmudgeon said Sunday he got 30,000 pieces of mail and e-mail in response to his Feb. 22 commentary, in which he called ‘The Passion of the Christ’ filmmaker Mel Gibson a ‘wacko.’ It’s the biggest […]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: commonplace book, on writing, true stories | Comments Off on Now that is one good insult
