Press release
Syfy more clearly captures the mainstream appeal of the world’s biggest entertainment category, and reflects the network’s ongoing strategy to create programming that’s more accessible and relatable to new audiences. Syfy will continue to celebrate the traditional roots of the genre, while opening the brand aperture to accommodate a broader range of imagination-based entertainment.
Seriously? I’m not a huge fan of the term Sci-Fi because it connotes schlocky Lost in Space style entertainment as well as Klingon costume wearing losers. (This is one reason I don’t attend Norwescon.) But people also associate it with halfway decent science fiction and the like. It’s not that bad.
Syfy is awful. And I’m betting this is just an early move to get completely away from genre. Kind of like Court TV is now just edited scenes of cops arresting people called TruTV.
Syfy will flop. It will lose the few science fiction genre geeks still watching the channel, and it will not gain a general audience. Prepare for lots of bad reality television.
The Seattle P-I announced today that it will publish it’s last print edition tomorrow, March 17th. After that it will go online only. What the online version will look like, how Hearst will staff it, and what kinds of news they will cover in the online incarnation have not been announced.
On one hand, I am sad to see the newspaper disappear. The P-I has been a part of Seattle for years, longer than the surviving Seattle Times in fact. I delivered the P-I for approximately three years in the 1980s, spanning the standalone time and the beginning of the Joint Operating Agreement with the Times, when their biggest rival took over all aspects of the paper except editorial. My grandparents to this day only pick up the P-I on their morning walks. I always considered it the better newspaper of the two Seattle dailies.
That written, I think the city news is in dire need of a shake-up and this might be the needed catalyst. Both dailies are as bland and mediocre as local TV news. They appeared to be in a fight for the most milquetoast middle of Seattle’s culture. When I moved back to Seattle after a decade in Idaho, I did not subscribe to either paper. I continued my subscription to the New York Times. In Idaho it was necessity because the Idaho papers and the Spokane papers are so provincial that the only way to get any kind of non-wire-service coverage of the world was to get newspapers from outside the confines of the Palouse.
On returning I found my sanity still necessitated a New York Times subscription. Too many puff pieces. Too often getting the story wrong. What comes to mind is how the P-I blithely cast aspersions on a crane operator after his crane fell over in Bellevue several years ago. He’s a former drug addict! That must be a factor in the accident! Then when his drug tests turned up clean, nary a word from the P-I in apology. They didn’t even give the clean bill of health the same prominence that they did the drug accusations. Those got page 1 for several days. The exoneration got buried. That is typical television news style. Lurid tales of murder, sex, drugs, and anything that might shock and scare middle-brow Ballard. And lots of boring, bland stories about snow, or rain, and fawningMicrosoft coverage. Bleah. I couldn’t pay for that.
Instead, I subscribed to the P-I’s local news coverage via feed syndication. If the headline indicated something of interest, I’d read the excerpt. If that indicated something worthwhile, then I’d click through to the story. In the last 30 days, I only read 13% of the excerpts. And almost never about local politics, which should be a local paper’s forté.
Where did this news junkie get his news? The Stranger. The sad fact is that the local free alt weekly Stranger has hands-down the best news in Seattle. That’s partially because they are willing to have a point of view in their news pages, where the dailies have tried to be objective (maybe I’ll write about objectivity another time). But it’s partially also because they have dedicated reporters who really dig into our urban politics. The Stranger more often covers stories I care about than our other papers.
In it’s current form, the Stranger isn’t a substitute for a good daily. For one, they are too focused on politics and arts from a hipster perspective (despite the fact that they denigrate hipsters at every step, they are tied at the hip to them). They are also only once a week. They don’t have the numbers of staff to cover breaking news. They can’t do investigative journalism properly either because of their staffing levels.
The word I am hearing is that the online P-I will have greatly reduced staffing levels and will become something like Huffington Post, partially an aggregator. If that’s the case, I won’t bother paying much attention.
There are some experiments in news in Seattle. I am hoping one of them takes off. Perhaps The Seattle Courant, Publicola (awful name), or Crosscut (although anyone who publishes Knute Berger needs to have a CAT scan). Maybe something else.
With two bland dailies sucking up 90% of the news space in Seattle, I don’t think their was much room for these experiments. But over the last year as it became increasingly apparent that one or both would shut down, these online sources germinated (and the Stranger increasingly began using Slog as the vehicle for stories that later appeared in the print edition). Now that the P-I will be really emasculated, these perhaps can really thrive. It’s going to be scary, and ugly, and it’s sad that the P-I went. But something needed to die in order for something new to live.
The English half of the sign is printed correctly and says, “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.” Clearly enough, the point of the sign is to prohibit truck drivers from entering a residential neighborhood.
Since the sign was posted in Swansea, Wales, the bottom half of the sign is written in Welsh. The translation of the Welsh is, “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”
Sometimes I post recipes that worked for me. This one didn’t, though it’s probably my own fault. It came from Cooking Light Annual Recipes 2000.
As always, recipe below is what I made, not exactly what was in the cookbook.
2 tablespoons all purpose flour
¼ teaspoon salt
¼ teaspoon black pepper
4 boneless chicken breast halves
olive oil
2 sweet onions
3 granny smith apples
1 teaspoon marjoram
1+ cups apple cider
Cut onion vertically, into thin wedges.
Core and slice apples
Mix flour, salt, and pepper in a freezer bag.
Add chicken and shake to coat.
Brown chicken on medium high head in olive oil, then set aside.
Sauté onion in olive oil until lightly brown.
Add apples and marjoram.
Sauté 5 more minutes.
Add chicken and cider.
Bring to a boil.
Reduce heat, cover and simmer 10 minutes or until chicken is cooked.
This was flavorless and mushy. I think where I went wrong was a) using mayan sweet onions instead of regular yellow onions, b) using too much cider, and c) not paying attention until it had been boiling for a while.
I think it’s the first time I’ve ever cooked with marjoram too.
No picture, because the fail was just too much. It doesn’t even look tasty.
I forgot to say I saw the Wrestler. I thought it was a pretty good, but really depressing movie. Micket Rourke plays a broken down formerly popular wrestler reliving his glory years in independent wrestling shows around New Jersey. I thought Roarke did a pretty damn good job acting. Marisa Tomei was good as well, though I wouldn’t call the performance Oscar material. Roarke was deserving of an Oscar (not necessarily over the other nominees though).
Granted, it’s depressing, but what I liked about the film was the applause as a drug aspect. Randy the Ram just couldn’t let go of being the star, no matter how faded. Gives up family, a naked Marisa Tomei, and perhaps even his life, just for one more toke on the pipe. Though in his defense, Marisa Tomei gets her shit together to show up only when it’s really too late. Is he supposed to walk away when he’s already at the curtain and the rest of the show is out front? For his sake, probably best though.
Who doesn’t like pie? Two weeks from now will be the seventh anniversary Pie Night! Come celebrate seven years of pie with… more pie!
Where? My place. 2301 Fairview Ave E Apt 107, Seattle.
When? Saturday, March 14th at 3 pm. Get it? 3-14? Hahahah… Anyway.
The schtick: I make pie. A lot of pie. Attendees are welcome to bring homemade pies, but this is not required. Anyone may attend so long as they like to eat pie. It officially starts at 3 p.m., but really folks are welcome to come by any time. Children are also welcome if you don’t mind them being exposed to whatever licentiousness may come (last time folks were comparing bras, for instance). What are not welcome are cakes, cookies, latkes, or other non-pie items. Those are fine things, but they belong on cake night, or cookie night.
I am expecting a fairly large turnout, so I am requesting that folks who plan to come please so indicate (along with the number of guests coming with them and if they plan to bring a pie). This way I know how much pie I need to make. I would not want to run out of pie prematurely. To let me know, just comment here, or add yourself to the Π Night Facebook event.
I heart pie image by Flickr user cobalt, used under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial 2.0 license.
Did Doomsday
even make it to theaters? Laura raved about it, so we watched it when I hung out with her. I’m all for suspension of disbelief, but that only goes so far. The plot made no sense whatsoever. It stars Rhona Mitra (I’m going to use her picture instead of a DVD cover cause the movie was forgettable and she’s hot) as an orphan turned super-commando in Britain. In this future world, a virulent disease started turning Scotland into a nation of zombies, so the UK sealed it off. That’s when Mitra was orphaned; she escaped, mom didn’t. Years later, the disease has reappeared in Britain, but satellite photos show survivors in Scotland, implying the Scots must have discovered a cure. Mitra gets sent back to find it, battling Mad Max wannabes and medieval re-enactors for the privilege. As things go along, Mitra removes more and more clothing and ends up doing most of her fighting in a black tank top.
As high camp, I’ve seen worse. The director, Neil Marshall, uses every opportunity to show exaggerated gore. The Mad Max guys are over the top, as are their sworn enemies the guys who have reverted to medieval times. Apparently everyone likes to have gladiator-style arena fights for entertainment. Or at least Neil Marshall would if the world fell apart. What makes me wonder is why he included Bob Hoskins as a pseudo- good guy? Pretty much everyone else is a ruthless bastard. Why the exception I do not know, particularly when he gets almost no screen time or much of a part of the plot.
Rhona Mitra photo by Joits used under the GFDL per licensing here.
Back to posting, and I have some catching up to do.
A couple of weeks ago Jason and I went to see Eastwood’s new movie, Gran Torino. From the title, I would have expected a Fast and Furious type of car movie. And I couldn’t figure out how the hell Clint Eastwood would fit into that.
Anyhoo, I thought it was a pretty decent movie. Simple, well-told story. The characters ride a well-trod road, but they do it well.
By the way, it’s not a car movie. It’s a keeping kids out of gangs movie. You probably knew that already.
Christopher Mendes gets first link for saying he would bescumber me if I was already fimicolous. Which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but I suspect he typo-ed his entry by omitting the word not.
And I’ll give eliZZZa a link for saying I’m driven by larmoyance. My friends and I weren’t quite sure what she meant by that, as the definitions of larmoyant didn’t quite work in context. We think she meant to say I was a crybaby, but we are just guessing.
Anyway, here’s hoping you get some traffic for your efforts. Though it did seem like people weren’t even trying.
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