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A couple of days ago (yeah, I’m slow, shut up) BoingBoing did a post about a speech given by Edward R. Murrow (who’s very hip right now due to the George Clooney/David Strathairn movie about him, and hip is very important to BoingBoing) to the Radio-Television News Directors Association in 1958.

What he had to say has become a pretty standard loop over that past fifty years — TV is a bland, shallow swill-pit, and it ignores dire problems of our society, yada yada yada — but here’s the part that caught my eye:

I invite your attention to the television schedules of all networks between the hours of 8 and 11 p.m., Eastern Time. Here you will find only fleeting and spasmodic reference to the fact that this nation is in mortal danger. There are, it is true, occasional informative programs presented in that intellectual ghetto on Sunday afternoons. But during the daily peak viewing periods, television in the main insulates us from the realities of the world in which we live.

That made me curious as to exactly what the TV schedules of the day looked like, and it occurred to me that I new exactly where to look: my dog-eared copy of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network TV Shows 1946-Present, 1992 (pre-Internet edition).

I decided to scan in the schedule, so everybody could take a look, and I did both 1957 and 1958, since the previous year’s programming was obviously also a factor in his remarks.

So check it out: In addition to the common-knowledge stuff (“Donna Reed”, “The Rifleman”), you can find lots of now-obscure programming like Behind Closed Doors (a fact-based Naval Intelligence drama), Harbourmaster (about a crime-solving sailboat skipper!), and Turn of Fate, (later named “Alcoa Theatre”, which had such stars as Jack Lemmon and David Niven as regular star players).

In fact, a great deal of the TV schedule at that time was comprised of such anthology shows, game shows, and variety shows, with the rest of the time taken up with cop shows, westerns, and shows testing out the fledgling “situation comedy” format.

In all, the network fare of that time period doesn’t look much more shallow than what we’ve got now, and in some ways it looks better — at least they didn’t have a dozen clones of Law & Order.

Seriously, though: Go take a look at the schedule, and see what pops out at you. Information about most of the shows is available on IMDB.

Then go watch Apprentice: Martha Stewart or Freddie or The O.C., and tell me if you think we’ve come very far.

A few notes on last week’s show before tonight’s starts …

Lost has always made good — if sparing — use of songs, but this past episode and the season 2 premiere just blew me away with their opening scenes, set to songs playing on the ancient phonograph.

In the premiere, it was the Mamas & the Papas’ “Make Your Own Kind of Music”, as the soundtrack of the morning routine of who we now know as Desmond.

Last week also started with a needle lowering onto a vinyl record, to play a jaunty little reggae tune, as Hurley stares in wonder at the bounty of food within the storage room of the bunker.

I just had to know what the song was, so I did the standard lyrics search, and found the song (“Good Conversation”), but I was finding several thousand links to a cover done by a 90s Irish boy band named Boyzone.

First of all, if it was them singing, they were much too soulful to be a prefab boy band, and they were also unlikely to be on vinyl, especially circa-1980 vinyl, so I did another search with the “-boyzone” modifier, and bingo, there it was: It was originally done by Slim Smith and the Uniques, a pioneering reggae act of the 60s and 70s.

Problem solved.

Speaking of that scene in the storage room, the People With No Lives — those who go over every pixel of every frame of every scene — have discovered that on the milk carton from which Hurley was drinking (in a dream sequence), there was a Missing Child photo … and that it looked a lot like Walt.

I forgot to mention that D. J. Qualls made a guest appearance last week. You might not know the name, but he’s been in lots of movies: Hustle & Flow, Road Trip, Big Trouble, The New Guy, and the Hilary Swank/Stanley Tucci flop The Core.

He was also the featured psycho on the series premiere of Mandy Patinkin’s latest attempt at success (and CBS’s latest attempt at ripping off CSI), Criminal Minds.

Week before last it was Katey Sagal; that’s not bad star attraction for a series; this show might get to be like the Batman series of the 60′s, where B-list celebrities got into fistfights trying to play the villain of the week …

Anyway: Qualls plays Hurley’s pre-crash best friend. I just don’t understand why he got all bent out of shape when he found out Hurley hadn’t told him about winning the lottery — and why we were supposed to automatically understand why. After all, Hurley was still freaked out, and hadn’t even told his family. So why should the friend get all self-righteously ticked off about not being the first one told?

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Anyway: Stop reading this and go watch tonight’s episode …

The Wife had a couple of cancellations at her beauty shop for today, so she had me take the take off so we could do stuff around the house. We went to Home Depot, where she tried to find some curtains for over the vertical blinds at the back sliding doors, and I looked for a new cordless screwdriver,

My old cordless has been malfunctioning lately (I think it’s the switch) so I decided to spring for a new one. We got a Ryobi in a tool-drawer set (translation: it came with extra stuff) which was usually forty dollars but was on clearance for the same price as the model with the extra stuff.

Once back home, I spaded up the dirt in the shrub beds and put in fertilizer spikes, so I can water them sometime this week. In the meantime, I ran the soaker hose on the front lawn, since we’ve gone an entire month without rain, and temperatures are still in the 90s, even though its the middle of October.

At least the hot dry weather has made it easier to do one thing: Cleaning the gutters. Doing that when all the gutter debris is still damp is highly unpleasant, so I hauled out the ladder and got that out of the way for the year.

One more thing:

Since I’ve known about this day off for a couple of weeks, I was able to schedule around it, so that it wouldn’t be a big deal.

Then, at 4 o’clock yesterday, half an hour before my quitting time, The Boss put a stack of work on my desk.

That’s not too unusual, but he usually makes a point of saying that it could wait until in the morning to get it done. This time, though, I had reminded him I wouldn’t be there.

Oh, well, no problem, since I work fast …

Except that he had given it to me in memo form, and forgot to tell me that it needed to be in the form of an email …

Again, no problem: I can cut and paste, and the wasted time was minimal …

Except that he forgot to forward the attachments, and just as I was about to go in and ask for them, he struck up a conversation with New Boss in Training, and you know how those things go, so I started typing the six attachments from scratch, even though they had been forwarded to him and shouldn’t have had to be re-typed.

So anyway, to make a long and miserable story short and miserable, I left work almost a half hour late, which put me in heavier traffic and mean I got home almost a full hour later than usual.

If I hadn’t had the day off today, I might have taken it anyway.

Except that I wouldn’t have had to.

Oh well: The Circle of Life.

(What follows is a joint-blogging post from myself and Steve of Look at This, to be posted simultaneously, more or less, on both of our blogs.)

You are about to enter another dimension, a world between light and shadow, between rationality and insanity … a place called TEXAS … :

Only in Texas: A functioning barbecue grill shaped like a six-gun.

Buddy Holly, the Father of Rock and Roll, and inspiration for “British Invasion” bands such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, and of course The Hollies. Did you know that his last name was actually spelled Holley, but he was saddled with the alternate spelling due to a typo? You do now.

Anyway, here’s a picture of my cousin at Buddy’s grave in Lubbock.

Unfortunately, Dallas is best known to the world through two avenues: The TV series Dallas, and the assassination of President Kennedy, making Southfork Ranch and The Sixth Floor Museum at Dealey Plaza two of the city’s biggest international tourist attractions.

Texas community profiles.

The Plainview Cattle Drive Project.

Historic Texas Postcards. (via)

Colossus of Rhodes? Close: It’s Big Tex, the towering mascot of the State Fair of Texas.

Texas Trailer Trash – Lifestyles of the Southeast Texan. (via)

The slogan Don’t Mess with Texas started out 20 years ago as an anti-litter campaign, and has grown to seem like some sort of jingoistic battle cry — to the extent that a Croatian punk band has adopted the slogan as its name.

Now comes a new public service campaign that probably won’t be as politically charged: “Don’t Burn Texas Down”, an anti-wildfire anthem by up-and-coming country singer Jake Kellen, is hitting the state’s airwaves this week. And if you want to hear the song but have access to Texas radio stations, just click here.

Arch-ive.org — Photographically documenting and archive buildings and sites in Houston and surrounding areas.

Our global cultural influence: Steve’s favorite childhood candy bar, The Texan (which I, ironically, as a Texan, had never heard of) is about to be brought back on to the market in England.

Haunted House display getting complaints.

Butterflies of Texas.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

Texas images, Texas photography.

Pictures of Texas.

Wild Texas Guide to Texas Parks, Travel & Outdoors includes Texas Photography Web Guide.

Texas Bird’s Eye Views. Hand drawn panoramic maps of 44 Texas cities circa 19th century in high resolution. Aerial mapping minus airplanes and cameras.

Texas Beyond History. The virtual museum of Texas’ cultural heritage.

Texas Bigfoot Research Center includes 5th Annual Texas Bigfoot Conference.

How to Speak Texas English. Same story with added comments.

Texas Jokes. Lots of them.

There’s also a specialized type of Texas joke know as the Aggie Joke, in which the subjects are the students and alumni of Texas A&M University. Basically, they’re Polack jokes except that don’t make fun of anyone’s ethnicity. You can read lots of Aggie Jokes Here, here, here and here. And finally, a true story: How Aggies board up their windows in a hurricane, and the A&M newspaper reaction to the negative attention brought by the picture.

Dumb Texas Laws. Not sure if they are true though.

Music: The Texas Music Project, Lone Star Music, Texas Music Roundup, the Governor’s Music Office (!), SXSW, ZZ Top, Texas Music Magazine.

Bonus points: (Former Monkee) Michael Nesmith’s Video Ranch.

Famous Texans.

Texas Timeline (Key Events in early Texas).

Texas State Historical Association – The Handbook of Texas Online.

Texas History.

Texas recipes.

This past weekend, Kermit the Frog kicked off this national 50th Anniversary tour in Kermit, Texas.

Shiner Bock Beer, brewed in Shiner, Texas, which just this past Saturday celebrated Bocktoberfest. In 1983, The Spook & I went to the brewery to take the tour, but all we got was the Hospitality Room.

Which was still rather rewarding.

Then there’s Lone Star Beer, “The National Beer of Texas”. Note that their website is PureTexanBeer.com.

And don’t forget Pearl Beer, which, like Lone Star, has been absorbed into the giant Miller conglomerate. But while they were still independent, they did some cool things, like rebus puzzles under the caps.

Texas Instruments designed the first transistor radio and first integrated circuit

And finally: Texas on Flickr: Texas Hill Country, Texas, A Country Called Texas, Texas Tech, Texas Roads, Shiner beer, Lone Star, “It’s Texas, Dummy”.

I’m working on a major joint post with Steve of Look at This, so no time for a real post tonight, so for now check out something I found on Steve’s blog: The video of one of my favorite Monty Python skits, the Twit Olympics.

Also: Put this one in the “Duh” file: Gunman drives off after drive-by shooting.

And we’ll talk more tomorrow …

Who is Omar Shamshoon? Someone who’s more familiar than you might think …

I’m finally to the point where I’m going to start doing something I’ve been promising myself I’d get around to for years now: Getting serious about getting back into music.

Several factors are converging for this to happen, the most immediate being that the wave of Fall TV Season Premieres is over, so that’s that much less that has to be blogged about. I’ve also gotten the main stuff posted to Flickr that I need to, for now (did I mention the recent pictures I put up of Schotzy and Molly?), and I’ve gotten a good start on composing a resume, which I’ve also been promising myself.

The main factors, though, have to do with The Wife: I mentioned on Sunday that we picked up a great keyboard — I mean, electronic piano — that The Wife has wanted for a long time, and that I thus inherited her fairly new Casio LK-44 keyboard (replacing her pre-midi Kawai FS630 that I had previously been tinkering with).

So she has been practicing with her new toy this week, coaxing her long-dormant piano playing skills out of hiberbation. This, along with joining the church choir and taking voice lessons to get her singing voice back (she used to sing professionally, remember), has her in full music mode these days, and happier than I’ve seen her in a long time.

So, as she’s pulling out her enormous collection of sheet music, I have also been inspired to look over my old guitar lesson notes (which I fortunately brought back from my mom’s house in August). Even though I’m planning to concentrate on the keyboard instead of the guitar, for the most part, the old notes are giving me a refresher course in music theory.

My ultimate goal is not stage-musician keyboard skills, but just enough musical ability to compose loops for use in music programs like Acid. I’ve dabbled in loops music for some time now, but now I just need to dive in and knock out some files without shooting for perfection, just to get the hang of it, and to explore my current loop library in depth.

As I was telling Vickie last week (and I was surprised she didn’t know, seeing as she’s known me for over ten years now), I used to be in a band in my younger years, playing a guitar. I was never very good, and the band itself never made it out of the garage, but I still consider those times to be my Glory Days, and I’m really glad that being in a band is a part of my personal history.

What I’m attempting to do now is far different, of course, but it still provides an outlet for my long-supressed music leanings.

So stayed tuned in the comingweeks, and I just might have some songs to post …

Another great episode last night; here are some notes:

They finally revealed what the show is all about: That all the “survivors” are actually clones, and that the plane crash never really happened. The crash, like all of their previous life experiences, were implanted memories, and the flaming wreckage was scattered around the beach before the clones were “activated”. Only Jin, one of the scientists, sent to monitor the clones, was a “real” person — and yes, he does speak English.

There were some problems with the memory programming, though, since several of the people start hallucinating, like Jack, when the “memories” of his father started bleeding over into his conscious thought. There were also some malfunctioning with the bodies: Locke, in an experiment to see how clones would psychologically cope with disability, was supposed to be a paraplegic, but his physical responses were misprogrammed, and even he was stunned to find that he had the ability to stand up.

Okay, okay, I’m just kidding: None of that really happened on the show.

But if you didn’t see last night’s episode, I might have had you going for a second … again …

ANYWAY: If you didn’t see it, you might not want to read what’s below until you do:

You might remember that Hurley’s boss at the chicken restaurant had the same first name (Randy) as Locke’s boss at the box factory. That might not mean much, except that people in the message boards on the Internet (that’s right — the people with no lives) have figured out that the same actor played both Randys.

And that among Hurley’s financial holdings is a box factory.

Add to that the fact that the actress who played the girl that announced Hurley’s lottery numbers also played the girl in the hotel room with Sawyer, and you get …

Well, I don’t know what you get.

But I bet it gets even more tangled as it goes along …

Check this out: The website of the Hanso Foundation, creators of the grand experiment that yielded the bunkers.

Bonus: Explore the site to see if you can find the hidden Dharma Initiative link; it’s supposed to show last week’s orientation film when you click on it, but the site was running very slowly when I tried it earlier today.

Still, though, I found the link …

And look who else has a site: Hurley’s former employer, Mr. Clucks.

Don’t be fooled by clever, enterprising imitators … although their Lost blog is still pretty good, so you should probably bookmark it …

And speaking of a good Lost blog, check out 4eight15sixteen23fortytwo.

And finally, speaking of what was found by the people on the Internet who have no lives, read about the legendary (but possibly apocryphal) Montauk Project, and see if it doesn’t sound like what might have been going on at one time on the island …

The Darpa Grand Challenge this past week (yeah I’m slow, shut up), and was won by Stanford University.

The important thing is not who won the 132-mile race, but that three vehicles finished, and all but one got farther than the seven miles achieved by the best contestants in last year’s race.

In case you’re not familiar, all the cars in the race are unmanned: Not remote-controlled, but robotic. They have to make their way across the desert terrain with no post-starting-line help from their humans.

This is harder than it might sound, apparently, since every one of last year’s entrants got stuck, physically or navigationally.

This year, a lot of the kinks got worked out, and you can check out more than 300 pictures of the event on Flickr.

I’ve previously mentioned that I went to school with several family members of up-and-coming country star Jake Kellen.

It turns out that his debut album was so well received that the Texas Parks and Wildlife Commission hired Jake to write and record a song for an anti-wildfire PSA (Public Service Announcement), and the result is “Don’t Burn Texas Down”.

But here’s the best part: thanks to my ties with Jake’s Inner Circle, my blog is the only place on the Internet where you can hear this song right now, a full week before it hits the radio stations.

Exclusivity is sweet.

UPDATE: I’m finding out that my distribution of the song isn’t as exclusive as the album’s financier led me to believe — It turns out that Jake’s official site has it available for download too. “What we got here is fail-yah to commun’cate.”

Oh well — you’ll have more fun downloading it from me, right? Plus, you probably wouldn’t have known about it if you had to find out from his site. And his site is all Java and Javascript, so I wouldn’t be able to link you directly to the song anyway.

Plus, his site doesn’t have links to these cool pictures of this Giant Texas Pistol-Shaped Barbecue Grill. So there.

But seriously: Download the song and give it a listen. It won’t even be on the radio stations until next week, and even then it’ll only be played in Texas, so here’s your chance to eavesdrop on an authentic piece of purely Texan Americana.