Mythbusters Banned From Discussing RFID By Visa And Mastercard
Host Adam Savage of Mythbusters tells how Visa, Mastercard, and Discover had the Discovery Channel put the kibosh on an episode that would have revealed just how “trackable and hackable” the RFID chips found in many credit cards are. It’s a telling example of how corporate advertisers serve as the gatekeepers of mainstream media/entertainment:
‘Soul Train’ Moments: Young Al Sharpton (Video)
In the news because Soul Train creator Don Cornelius died today. This nineteen-year-old would run for president (see Al after Mr. James Brown, around the 2:30 mark into this clip):
Julian Assange, Television Series Host
Julian Assange. Photo: Espen Moe (CC)
Common Dreams reports:
Wikileaks founder, Julian Assange, has announced plans for a new television series. The program will launch mid-March and will include ten weekly half-hour episodes featuring “in-depth conversations with key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world.”
Should things go accordingly for Assange, the show will “explore the possibilities for our future in conversations with those who are shaping it. Are we heading towards utopia, or dystopia and how we can set our paths? This is an exciting opportunity to discuss the vision of my guests in a new style of show that examines their philosophies and struggles in a deeper and clearer way than has been done before,” Assange states.
The theme of the show will be “the world tomorrow”. The Wikileaks press release adds:
Upheavals and revolutions in the Middle East have commenced an era of political change that is still unfolding. In the…
Living In A Real World House Of Lies
If you go to the corner of 8th Avenue and 42nd Street near Times Square in Manhattan, just down from the Wax Museum and around the corner from the bus station, and look up, you’ll see an oversized billboard for Showtime’s fast -paced “House of Lies,” a new cable TV series that is more like a realistic docudrama about the world of hard-charging management consultants.
Don Cheadle stars in this tightly written challenge to the popular “Mad Men” glorification of Madison Avenue in the 1950’s, spiced with the insertion of pretty graphic hot sex that makes Janet Jackson’s Superbowl moment seem like it belonged on the Disney Channel. An actor on the series laughingly downplays the explicit physical grappling as “naughty.”
At a time when Mitt Romney, a former management consultant himself in his years at Bain, is running for president, this show offers insight into just how vulgar vulgar capitalism can be.
In one…
Weed Wars: Medical Marijuana Hits Reality TV
From www.reason.tv:
“Most of our patients and our staff were really skeptical about doing a reality TV show because they were watching Jersey Shore and The Kardashians,” says Andrew DeAngelo, general manager of Oakland, California’s Harborside Health Center, the largest medical marijuana dispensary in the world. Andrew and his brother, Harborside’s Executive Director Steve DeAngleo, are co-stars of Weed Wars, a new show by the Discovery Channel that looks into lives of those who run Harborside, the patients that seek out their services, and the politicians looking to shut them down.
“There are a lot of stigmas about medical cannabis patients, that we don’t work hard, that we’re a bunch of stoners…
Dutch TV-Show Hosts Appear to Dine on Each Other’s Flesh
Alyssa Newcomb reports on ABC News:
Two Dutch television-show hosts said they had their flesh cooked by a top chef and then dined on each other before a studio audience.
“Nothing is really that special when you’re talking about the taste of the meat,” host Dennis Storm told ABCNews.com. “But it is weird to look into the eyes of a friend when you are chewing on his belly.”
Part of Storm’s left butt cheek was carved out by a surgeon, while his co-host, Valerio Zeno, opted to have a piece of his abdomen removed, they say.
“We went to the butcher, the surgeon and the studio, then we looked at each other and just ate it,” Storm said. “The special thing is, it was his flesh, of course.”
Fox News Becoming More Liberal?!?
According to Gabriel Sherman at New York Magazine there are moves afoot to move Fox News Channel to the political center … I guess we’ll see.
When six GOP primary contenders descended on Fox News’ midtown headquarters for a “candidates forum” with a trio of red state attorneys general on Saturday night, the candidates probably expected tough questions about their positions. But they certainly didn’t expect to find a New York Times reporter roaming backstage.
Fox’s decision to allow Times scribe Jim Rutenberg into the building to confront the candidates in person threw campaign aides off guard, especially in the Romney camp, which went into “defensive mode immediately, insisting that the reporter stay far away,” as Rutenberg later wrote.
But the decision was just the latest example of what Fox head Roger Ailes recently called a “course correction” in an interview with Howard Kurtz of Newsweek. The Romney team’s debate-night tussle was the second embarrassing episode…
Sesame Street Introduces Poor Muppet To Teach About Poverty (Sponsored by Wal-Mart)
The special episode is sponsored by Wal-Mart. Ain’t that a kicker? Gabriela Resto-Montero writes in the NY Daily News:
There’s a new kid on the block on “Sesame Street.” The long-running children’s show will debut a new muppet, Lily, in a primetime special that highlights childhood poverty and hunger, Entertainment Weekly reported.
Lily’s family background reflects the bitter economic reality of the 17 million American children who live without regular access to affordable and nutritious food, the magazine reported. Country music singer Brad Paisley and his wife, actress Kimberly Williams Paisley, will host the hour-long show, titled “Growing Hope against Hunger.”
“We are honored that Sesame Street, with its long history of tackling difficult issues with sensitivity, caring and warmth, asked us to be a part of this important project,” the couple said in a statement. The show will air Sunday, Oct. 9. It is sponsored by Walmart.
Rick Perry Bad Lip Reading Speech
“What’s good is to get these goats for our computer industry.”
Finally an inspirational candidate with something exciting to say emerges in the presidential race.
Jim Henson Was America’s Greatest Surrealist (Video)
Alex Pasternack writes on MotherBoard:
In 1979, Henson showed “Limbo (The Organized Mind),” on Johnny Carson’s show, bringing the Muppets into his bizarre equation. The music was scored by Scott.
Read the entire article on MotherBoard
Jesse Ventura Back With More Conspiracy Theories
Like him or loathe him, Jesse Ventura has achieved the mostly impossible: giving national TV airtime to conspiracy theories (of the unofficial variety). TVByTheNumbers regurgitates the press release that a third season of conspiracies is coming soon, with Jesse’s son and Oliver Stone’s son joining the team:
If there’s an urban legend or Conspiracy Theory out there, Jesse Ventura is determined to get to the bottom of it. The soldier, wrestler, politician and best-selling author is hitting the road for the third season of truTV’s hit series Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura. The new season promises even more mystery and mayhem as the rebel and freethinker investigates secrets “they” don’t want people to know. Upping the ante against alleged cover-ups, Jesse and veteran team member June Sarpong will be joined by a “new generation” of conspiracy busters: Jesse’s own son, Tyrel Ventura, and Sean Stone, son of controversial Oscar®-winning filmmaker Oliver Stone…
Star Trek Background Scenery
The Space Trek tumblr is a collection of lushly colored, eerily beautiful establishing shots from Star Trek episodes — the brief moments on the show during which the actors were out of frame. It presents a vision of a calm, pristine, simultaneously alluring and foreboding distant future, and supports my theory that most television programs would be better minus the characters.
Wannabe Vampire Arrested For Bloodsucking Assault
Why didn’t anyone tell the guy that you can buy Tru Blood from the HBO Store? Reuters reports:
The arrest of a Texas man who broke into a woman’s house, threw her against a wall and tried to suck her blood over the weekend has sparked discussion over the impact of vampire books and movies on U.S. youth culture.
Whether pop culture played a role in the attack remains to be seen, as 19-year-old Lyle Monroe Bensley awaits a psychiatric evaluation in jail on burglary charges in Galveston, Texas, southeast of Houston.
Found growling and hissing in a parking lot and wearing only boxer shorts, the pierced and tattooed Bensley claimed he was a 500-year-old vampire who needed to “feed,” Galveston Police Capt. Jeff Heyse said.
Vampires have been a focal point of literature since Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula”. But fascination, particularly among young people, has peaked in recent years with the popularity of…
Every Hour Of TV Can Shorten Your Life By 22 Minutes
And after the age of 25, watching 60 minutes of television is like smoking two cigarettes! From MSNBC:
Watching an hour of TV after the age of 25 can shorten the viewer’s life by just under 22 minutes, according to researchers in Australia.
The AFP news agency said scientists at the School of Population Health at the University of Queensland studied 11,000 Australian adults who were aged at least 25 in the year 2000.
The academics checked their data against an estimate from 2008 that Australians aged 25 or above watched TV for 9.8 billion hours. This was associated with the loss of 286,000 years of life, the AFP said.
An extrapolation of these figures found that a single hour of TV was responsible for the loss of just under 22 minutes of life, the news agency reported.
Smoking two cigarettes has approximately the same effect.
The problem is not actually TV itself but the lack of…
Why Is No One Watching Porn On TV Anymore?
![[PORN]](http://disinfo.s3.amazonaws.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/PORN-210x300.jpg "[PORN]")
The TV networks are hurting because their most profitable customers – viewers of pornography – just aren’t watching enough. Sam Schechner and Jessica E. Vascellaro report for the Wall Street Journal:
Cable and satellite television companies have a pornography problem: Their customers aren’t watching enough of it.
Companies’ revenue from highly profitable adult video-on-demand and pay-per-view services has been slipping, as the genre’s consumers spend more time browsing porn on the Web.
The trend is prompting TV executives to pull back the curtain on how porn contributes to their businesses, a topic they have been loath to discuss publicly.
On Thursday, satellite provider DirecTV cited “lower adult buys” as a cause for weaker pay-per-view revenue in its second quarter earnings. That followed Time Warner Cable Inc.’s admission last week that shrinkage in the adult category was responsible for more than a third of a $14 million drop in video-on-demand revenue. While only a sliver…
Afghanistan Getting Its Own Politically-Charged Version Of ‘The Office’ Sitcom
The Office was a hit in England before it became a hit in the States. With the mock-documentary, hand-cam style of filming, Afghanistan is now getting it’s own version entitled The Ministry. Daily Mail reports:
Rather than being set in a Slough paper manufacturing firm, ‘The Ministry’ is based in the war-torn country’s Ministry of Garbage. The mock-documentary has been filmed in exactly the same way as Ricky Gervais’ BBC comedy.
Footage of the characters addressing the camera directly, as if being interviewed, is interspersed with scenes of them apparently going about their working lives. The comedy, which will be broadcast on Afghanistan’s largest commercial television station Tolo TV later this year, features a sleazy manager, a dozy security guard and a man-hating female secretary.
Television Networks Rewrite History Through Product Placement
There sure is a lot of time traveling on television these days. The Consumerist provides an example of the subtly unsettling practice of messing with cinematic/cultural/TV continuity by digitally inserting advertisements from the present into old shows and movies. Just wait until they start slipping “Zookeeper” billboards into footage of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech or Nazi stadium rallies:
For the past few years, networks have been digitally inserting ads and product placements for new products into old reruns. Shannon just noticed one in a rerun of a 2007 episode of “How I Met Your Mother.” In the background on the shelf is a magazine with an ad on the back for the new “Zookeeper” starring Kevin James.
