Head Cases

Part of me is sad. Less than 24 hours from now, I will most likely have seen Serenity, and instead of thinking about how great it will be to see the gang from Firefly again, it's got me thinking about how FOX cancelled it. Not being a contributor to political campaigns, it is rare that I spend my "money as speech" dollars. When I buy my ticket, I'll saying "FOX, you screwed up," much like I did went I put the DVD of Firefly on my Christmas list. And I see it's less than a month before the DVD of Point Pleasant comes out and I can see the end of that cliffhanger that was bumped when the American Idol phone lines got screwed up and they had to redo.

FOX takes the title of the first network to cancel a show this season, with the dismissal of Head Cases, after only two episodes. NBC won it last year for Hawaii which lasted six. But no one complains when NBC cancels a series. Wait, maybe I complained about the cancellation of Law & Order: Trial By Jury, I forget. Anyway, Head Cases's IMDb board is filled with guys ranting about how FOX has done it again. I must say though, that show looked terrible. I didn't see either episode, but two lawyers who met in an mental institution? C'mon, it's like parody of a TV show. It's what agents get fired for. I say this is one to congratulate them on.

As I've said before, it's hard to know what to do with FOX. They do seem to greenlight great shows at a much higher rate than the other networks. Indeed, I was prompted to check and see if Head Cases had been cancelled because I watched a lot of FOX this week, and I didn't remember seeing a commercial for it. Other than Head Cases and the alleged sit-com The War at Home (No one can carry a sit-com like Michael Rappaport.), I think I've seen all the other new shows on FOX this fall, and I like all of them:

• David Boreanaz's new show Bones, is just okay, but so far, I've found it worth watching. There is bad stuff in it, it has some redeeming qualities too.
  
• Congratulations to the producers (a "consulting" one is Marti Noxon) of Prison Break, which I see just got a few more episodes picked up. I like it a lot.
  
• Tonight gave us new Reunion and told us one more of the friends who is still alive. I love this wealth of shows with season long plots. Seriously, could this be the influence of reality TV? It's like someone said, "I like this idea of having a competition last an entire season. I wonder if we could script something like that."
  
• I've also really enjoyed new half-hour show Kitchen Confidential.
  
• I even watched the Jerry Bruckheimer show Killer Instinct about a detective in the San Francisco "Deviant Crimes Unit" (They're running out of names for those units.) for the sole purpose of being able to blog about how it was crap and how it made no since to replace The Inside with a poor copy of it. And I would have written that post were it not for the last two scenes. I think there could be something to this show. Maybe it's not that great, but it definitely surpassed my low expectations, and I'll give it another shot.
  

Odd lakes

If you've heard me ramble on about the Aral Sea and how it's gotten so much smaller over the last 40 years, then you know something of how strange bodies of water can pique my interest. This morning, the BBC called my attention to Lake Nyos and Lake Monoun in Camaroon. These two lakes in the volcanic region in the northern part of Camaroon are two of three known lakes (the other is in Rwanda) that sit on top of magma chambers that vent carbon dioxide into the bottom of the deep lakes. The bottom layer of the lake become supersaturated with carbon dioxide, and then if something traumatic, like a small earthquake, happens to upset the delicate balance, there is a sudden overturning of the water and a giant cloud of carbon dioxde is released into the air. This is called a limnic eruption. This happened in 1984 at Lake Manoun, and it killed 37 people. Two years later, however, when Lake Nyos erupted, nearly 1800 people died. This tragedy lead to the Lake Nyos and Monoun Degassing Project at the University of Michigan. This morning's BBC report said that they think Lake Nyos may be ready for another eruption and their efforts to vent the lake with pipes from the bottom have not had a large enough effect.

Lake Nyos apparently has an additional problem. It's a crater lake on the side of a volcano, and one side of it is held back by a natural dam of volcanic rock which some scientists think may soon give way flooding the valley below.

No respect

Well, with their 8-3 loss to the current Wild Card leading Houston Astros, the Chicago Cubs were officially eliminated from the National League play-off chase today. Eliminated today, one day after Major League Baseball did the annual coin flips to determine who would host the extra one game play-off in the event of a tie for a play-off spot. However, at least according to ESPN's reporting of it, MLB did not account for the possibility that the Cubs might tie for the Wild Card. The did six coin flips to accord the possible two-way ties between Houston, Philadelphia, Florida, and Washington. As I write, the Milwaukee Brewers and the New York Mets can still tie for the Wild Card but neither of them were coin flipped for either. Really MLB, how much effort is it to flip a coin 18 more times?

I just found out something I had wondered about for a while but never actively pursued the answer to: What happens if there are more named tropical storms and hurricanes than letters? With Hurricane Rita in the Gulf of Mexico right now, that leaves only Stan, Tammy, Vince, and Wilma as potential storm names for 2005 with several weeks left in the season. (No names starting with Q, U, X, Y, Z are used.) Once these four names are exhausted, the National Hurricane Center switches to the Greek alphabet, and so a fifth storm would be called Hurricane Alpha. Let us hope that the national media doesn't have to deal with trying to say Hurricane Xi.

Because our adults are watching...

...or would be, if they didn't cancel the shows we like.

In much the same vein as how the Southern Poverty Law Center's Intelligence Project tracks white supremicist groups, I sometimes monitor the Parents Television Council website to see what they're up to. There's also usually something I find amusing. Since the new television season is upon us, and there is no shortage of scripted dramas that I am at least somewhat interested in, I thought I'd see if they have anything new. While they are behind on the new shows, I did find a couple of things:

1. On their weekly schedule page, you can use the conviently color-coded table to look at the next week's prime time programming on ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, WB, UPN, and PAX, and look for the red boxes which "may include gratuitous sex, explicit dialogue, violent content, or obscene language, and is unsuitable for children programming unacceptable for your children's viewing." Y'know, shows like ER and Law & Order. If you ignore PAX, as I think most of us do, there are only two shows airing between 9/16 and 9/22 that receive the green block denoting a "[f]amily-friendly show promoting responsible themes and traditional values." One is the "reliably family-friendly" 7th Heaven. The other however is Wife Swap. Wife swapping is definitely a suitable topic for any first grader. Oddly enough, this show airs at 10:00 pm (10:30 in Newfoundland), which puts it in the time slot federally allowed to broadcast indecent material.

2. On their Ten Worst Shows of 2003/04, I see that Fear Factor moved up from #5 to #3. While it is indeed a bad show, I don't think that I would first cite it for "not depict[ing] healthy competition" but instead "depict[ing] a new low in Americans' endless pursuit of money." After describing a few sunts, they conclude with "Language continues to worsen, as does sexual innuendo, largely because more and more episodes center on scantily clad female contestants." The PTC must have really been glad when those full-body "shark-skin" suits started showing up in the Olympics a few years ago. On the other hand, those athletes aren't endlessly pursuing money, so maybe that's okay.

3. I am happy to see that of the 10 FCC Complaints actually filed by the PTC since December 2003, the one with the fewest number of complaints filed was this summer's complaint against an episode of The Inside. You can see some of the "Graphic Content!!!" here, although not the BDSM content that they really hated. Of course you can't see the context which I believe is used by the FCC to determine whether it is indecent. Two of the seven episodes of The Inside that actually aired earned the "Worst of the Week" sobriquet. It's nice to know that someone was watching it.

Yippie! Youppi! has found a new home

One of my precious memories of taking in the Blue Jays-Expos game at Olympic Stadium in Montreal in 2001 was that the rightfield bleachers were so sparsely populated that the orange mascot of Les Expos had to move two groups together so that there would be enough people in a row to hold up the letters in GO JOSE for second baseman Jose Vidro. (Of course they just spelled other things like GOOSE.) However, when Major League Baseball moved the Expos to Washington, DC, there was no use for this orange mascot named Youppi!. (I believe that name ends in an exclaimation point, not a postalveolar click.) But today comes word from Montreal that Les Canadiens have taken in Youppi!.

I wondered what the University of New Orleans was doing in regards to classes and things that a university does when their campus is not underwater, and so I went to their website. The first news item they listed was pretty disturbing in terms of trying to run a university:

"Would all Deans & Vice-Chancellors please e-mail [UNO Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs] Rick Barton at fredrick_barton@yahoo.com with your current location, land line phone number, and e-mail address. Thank you for your cooperation."

Not good.