Monthly Archives: July 2004

TV Creativity

This entry was posted in Television on by

Kudos to Fox for pointing out the obvious:

NBC and ABC have accused Fox of stealing their ideas, and Fox has fired back, saying it’s just part of the game.
Lawrence Lessig suggests that this copycat activity will make for better shows:
Competition over derivatives only makes the derivatives better.
I suppose there is something to this argument. Especially when considering the starting points:
NBC won the rights to “The Contender,” a reality show about boxing. Two months later, Fox launched a similar show called “The Next Great Champ.”
ABC has a program called “Wife Swap,” in which two wives switch houses. Fox then launched a series called “Trading Spouses: Meet Your New Mommy.”
And who can forget “Popstars” and “Making the Band,” which all came before the even-more successful “American Idol”?
Yes, the latter may have been superior to its precursors and some of you may like this stuff but I’m quite happy to have temptation so dramatically reduced by the fine quality of this material. It seems not that many years ago that I watched 2-3 shows every night (Saturday usually being the most difficult to find something interesting) and now its down to 2-3 shows per week and shrinking.
I must admit to a bit of prevarication here. Over the past two weeks I have spent a couple hours daily watching OLN’s somewhat flawed Tour de France coverage (of which, more in another post later this week).

Into the Mountains

This entry was posted in Sports on by

Following the lead of the Tour de France the Modulators will spend the rest of today in the mountains.
If you did not watch it live I recommend watching at least the last 30-40 minutes of today’s stage. It can be hard to appreciate the difficulty of cycling and watching a couple 12 kilometer (7+ mile) climbs demolish ~160 of the world’s elite cyclists does make the point.
Back tomorrow.

A Year in the Life of a Blog

This entry was posted in Blogging on by

A year in the life of a what? A blog?
Terry Teachout’s blog, About Last Night, was a year old yesterday and I am reminded that even though it is on my blogroll I do not read it often enough.
Terry reminisces a bit and reaches into the ether to find some representative material from the past year. This item reminds me both of Tyler Cowan’s discussion of the fame and merit of critics in What Price Fame? and the transitory nature of our being:

Few biographers and fewer critics long outlive their own time, and I doubt I�ll be one of them. More likely I will go down in history as the first known owner of Hart-Davis 631, and in 2104 some art historian specializing in the Edwardian era will click on that entry in a computerized catalogue raisonn�, scratch his head, and say, �Who was that fellow with the odd name? Did it ever occur to him that the only thing he�d be remembered for was having owned a Max Beerbohm caricature and edited an H.L. Mencken anthology?� Indeed it did�and let it be said, if not necessarily remembered, that the prospect made me smile.
Yep, if you can look at yourself a 100 years down the road and smile then I suggest that you are doing just fine.
Oh yes, the opening question. Well both Teachout and Baude both have some thoughts that are worth the time to read.