Fall TV

Took me a few days to get to it, but I finally pulled "Flash Forward" off the DVR last night. I was pretty impressed. I haven't read the Robert Sawyer novel it's loosely based on, but was skeptical. I'm generally nuts for Sci Fi shows (or is it SyFy now?), but have been unimpressed with ABC's efforts in that direction.

I simply can't make heads or tails of the video morass that's "Lost." Nothing against dense plots, I mean I loved the way Babylon 5 set up plot points in Season 1 that weren't resolved till Season 3, but gimme a break. I understand this season, someone may go back in time to insure the airplane crash never happened. Does that mean we'll get back the hundreds of hours we've wasted trying to make sense of this show?

I had high hopes for Live on Mars, so, of course it barely lasted one season. I was a huge fan of the original BBC series. And I do have to give ABC credit for letting the producers give the show a real ending, and for cooking up an original spin on the "it was a all dream" plot device.

Way better than how Fox left the 8 viewers of "The Sarah Connor Chronicles" hanging, stranding young John Connor in a future where no one had ever heard of him. Of course, by my count, there couldn't have been that many people left in the future. Connor had sent them all back to torture his younger self.

"Daybreak" was another good show that never got traction. So, I guess I should be pleased that ABC continues to swing at Sci Fi shows, and has invested some pretty heavy promotional time in Flash Foward.

Which largely delivered. Since the Flash Forward happened to the entire world, we get to bypass the tired "I've seen the future but no one believes me" device. The Flashes we've glimpsed thus far represent the kind of variety in experience you'd expect from a random sample of viewpoint characters. Hopefully, each of them won't end up carrying around a vital (& obvious) piece of the puzzle. And, having one character whose entire Flash consisted of him taking a crap was too great for words.

I have high hopes, and will keep watching. I am also increasingly intrigued by the promos for "Stargate Universe," not normally being a fan of Planet of the Week shows, and am looking forward to the return of Sanctuary.

Although I do think the person who suggested the normally-excellent Amanda Tapping adopt that atrocious British accent should be forced to listen to an Ipod whose entire contents are recordings of Carrie Fisher's similarly-inflected lines from Star Wars: ANH.

I Got Your らどうぞ Right Here...

So, over on the Jazz 88.3 Blog, a post I made several weeks ago has been the subject of dozens of comments, way more then usual for any conversations about KCCK.

All in Japanese.

All nonsense in both Japanese and English.

The original posting dealt with the installation of our new 106.9 translator, which improves our signal coverage in Iowa City, and also extends our new HD Radio service. So, imagine my surprise when I open my email a few days later and read...

素人 has left a new comment on your post "The New 106.9 - Dennis":

さびしい女性や、欲求不満な素人女性たちを心も体も癒してあげるお仕事をご存じですか？女性宅やホテルに行って依頼主の女性とHしてあげるだけで高額の謝礼を手に入れる事が出来るのです。興味のある方は当サイトTOPページをご覧ください

Now, because of our webcast, we do actually have a few listeners in Japan, (one contacted us just today. Hi, Erin!) but most of them communicate with us in English, and it's difficult to believe they would have anything substantive to say about a transmitter in Iowa City.

So, ever the curious type, I pasted the characters into Babelfish and not surprisingly, discovered the posting had nothing to do with us. It was vaguely pornographic, but mostly nonsense. So, I deleted it moved on to more important work.

But, they kept coming. One or two every few days, till deleting become a daily task.

In case you're curious, here is a translation of one of the cleaner ones:

The man with the amateur host of the leading part, just healing the body of the woman can receive large amount reward. The frustration human wife and the man the woman who does not have the coming out meeting seeks the man with this site and others the [tsu] plain gauze is. The one which has interest please from the TOP page.

Well, I'm glad we cleared that up.

So, I'm tired of cleaning them up, so they are probably just going to keep coming. I still have no idea what their purpose is, whether this is a live person generating the text or a robot of some kind.

Maybe it's code. Perhaps even now foreign agents are logging on to our Blogger account to receive the secret instructions for their nefarious missions. Homeland Security, are you listening?

My Brush with Hayden

With Fry Fest coming up Labor Day Weekend, I'm remembering how I learned first-hand what a caring person the Coach is, in addition to being an outstanding leader.

It was 1980, Coach Fry's second year as Iowa's coach. These were the days before there was one Hawkeye radio network. Instead, there were several stations that originated the game and fed their own small network. WHO had Jim Zabel, WMT Ron Gonder and KXIC (AM 800 in Iowa City) had Gene Clausen.

I was a sophomore at Iowa, working my first radio job, a part-timer at KXIC. One of my jobs was to help with the football broadcasts. This entailed running the board back at the station during the game and also producing a weeknight call-in show that featured Coach Fry answering questions posed by Gene and the sports directors of the other stations in our network, mainly stations in Southeast Iowa towns like Burlington and Muscatine.

Gene and Hayden were in the conference room, wearing headphones so they could hear the questions posed by the other sports directors. Everyone was connected by an open network loop. They could hear each other as well.

We taped the call-in show on Tuesday nights, which was the hardest practice of the week, the last time the team went full speed before tapering into the game. So, Hayden was usually tired after a long day and his conversations with Gene after the show ended were pretty free-wheeling. Listening in from the production studio was, shall we say, educational. But, that's another story.

One Tuesday, there was an equipment glitch in the conference room, none of the microphones worked. So Hayden and Gene had to come into the tiny production studio with me.

To fully understand the story, you need to know just a little about radio studios are designed (Radio folks: Please feel free to skip to the next paragraph). In a radio studio, speakers are always automatically muted when the microphone is turned on, to eliminate feedback. This is why you always see DJs wearing headphones when they're talking.

So, here's the scene. Hayden and Gene are squeezed into two chairs in front of the control board, sharing the studio's only microphone. I was perched on the edge of the counter. There was only one headphone jack, so my job was to keep the mic off so Hayden could hear the question, then turn it on so he could answer. And, that was how it went for nearly the full hour of the show:

Mic off: Hayden listens.
Mic on: Hayden answers.
Mic off: Hayden listens.
Mic on: Hayden answers.
Mic off: Hayden listens.

Then for some reason, I lost the rhythm, and turned the mic ON while the away SD was speaking, and clicked it off just in time for the three of us to hear:

"..at do you think about that Hayden?"

Oh, crap. I have just screwed up Hayden's call-in show. My career is over.

Hayden signaled for me to turn the mic back on, and said "Y'all mind repeating the question? I guess I wasn't paying attention."

The guy repeated his question, obviously a little annoyed, but we managed to survive the show. Neither Gene nor Hayden mentioned my gaffe, and I wasn't even fired. It obviously never occured to Hayden to blame technical problems, or the idiot kid who didn't know how to do his job. He took it on himself. It was a little thing, but it was taking care of the little things that made him a great coach and a good person.

Hayden Fry went on to take the Hawkeyes to three Rose Bowls, become the dean of Big 10 coaches and this weekend will be celebrated by the entire state of Iowa at a festival in his honor.

But I will always remember the coach who took the blame for an error made by a green producer whose name he didn't even know.