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| It's Not Me, It's Him, Right... |
| The random musings of Riverview High School's most famous non-football-coach alumnus, Mike Burger... |
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4 December 2002 When I go nuts, I go *nuts*... When it comes to the voting for an All-Star game, I generally pick players with the highest Scrabble scores. So, for some reason I felt compelled to fill out an NHL ballot this morning. However, if I was going to fill it out based on tile values, I was going to do right -- using the values for that player's particular country. I was able to do this for all players except two -- Sandis Ozolinsh and Arturs Irbe -- whose countries do not play Scrabble (the horrors). For this purpose, they counted as Russians.
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2 December 2002 Why I have a sleeping disorder, or, why my dreams are so much weirder than yours... Running the local Sings, Inc. franchise -- Tina Yothers Observations from Riverview's 42-13 loss in the state championship...
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19 November 2002 The Nobel Committee for Music is pleased to bestow its 2002 award to who would be comfortable in a 1930's jazz quartet or a 1980's rock band. That man is Les Paul, who played in jazz combos in the 30's, became one of the leading session men and developed multi-track recording in the 40's, radically changed the electric guitar and wrote songs in the 50's and still actively plays club dates in the 2000's. Paul was able to accomplish this despite a near-electrocution in 1941, an auto accident in 1948 in which his arm became permanently disfigured, a stroke in 1975 and becoming one of the first quintuple-bypass recipients in 1985. The creation of the multi-track recording system is stuff of legend. Bing Crosby, looking to lighten up an already small work day because it took away from golf, wanted a way to record that could be small enough to fit in a home and not require trips to the studio. Paul reengineered a German paper tape recorder given to him and gave Der Binger his wish. In 1948, Les used his invention for his own recording of the song Brazil, which included a layered version of him playing six different guitars.In 1952, Paul either approached or was approached by Gibson guitars (there are several versions of the story) to help develop/lend his name to a new kind of guitar, one that would eliminate hum and could be cranked louder. The sound that eventually came out of that guitar became the rock standard and is still used today. Besides being an innovator, he was also an incredible musician, teaming up with then-wife Mary Ford for the hit How High the Moon, duos with Chet Atkins, and session work for Nat King Cole, Kay Starr and The Andrews Sisters. Paul, 87, resides in Northern New Jersey. |
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5 November 2002 The DSL is finally up and running. It took Earthlink/Ameritech/Covad only 70 days, 13 phone calls and 3 service visits. And you wonder why it's $40-$50 a month. If you know me well, you know I'm fascinated by broadcasting. Not the actual content of the program, but the art of how a broadcast is made and the absurdities that go along with it. I guess that's why my favorite TV genre is a game show, because it is mostly about broadcasting and not storytelling. Or why I like watching breaking stories on newscast, not for the news, but on how they gather and deliver it (and makes tons of mistakes because they can't think it through -- news is a very scripted process). Anyway, two sites of recent interest for your inner broadcast geek:
The last couple days at work I've been changing the back end to the feedback system, where users such as yourself can suggest corrections to our data. Of course, 90% of these submissions are crap, but there are some gems:
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30 October 2002 |
 The Nobel Committee for Television is pleased to bestow its 2002 award to the man who had an enormous impace on television and the way the viewer watches the medium. That man is former ABC News and Sports President Roone Arledge.Arledge first worked his way through television by way of NBC and the military, joining his longtime network home in 1960 as a producer. By 1961, he had conceived a show that would introduce Americans to sports outside the boxing/baseball/football panthenon -- Wide World of Sports. In 1970, he revolutionized football broadcasting by placing the emphasis on the personalities of the broadcasters rather than the single focus of the game itself including three person broadcast booths, crowd reactions and multiple instant replays.  In 1977, Arledge added President of ABC News to its portfolio. At the time, ABC was a distant third in the news race. The first major success for the division came in 1979 with the addition of Nightline to the lineup, giving ABC a full hour of network news presence. By the mid-1980's, World News Tonight had became the #1 nightly newscast. Arledge also brought news to primetime with the long running 20/20 and Primetime.Arledge, 71, retired from ABC News in 1998 and now serves as a trustee for Columbia University. He resides in New York City. |
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28 October 2002 With the death of Paul Wellstone, it has become incredibly obvious to me that God is in favor of term limits. On Saturday, I played in the Alumni Band for my...gasp...9th homecoming. And I missed the first three because of living out of Colorado so this means I've been a college graduate for...yikes...12 years. That's more than the combined ages of all of the San Francisco Giants' bat boys. And, it looks like officially I did not qualify for Pyramid, since they tape their last episode of the season this week. Oh well, try again next year. What I really need to do is go to The Price is Right during NAQT ICT with a whole bunch of NAQT people, get the coordinated t-shirts, and be a shoo-in to get on because practically everybody else in the group will be disqualified since they've been on a game show. I can hear the strains of Nothing But Furniture as I type this. |
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23 October 2002 Bring me the head of William Styron... I now have a difficult decision to make. Trashinals are on the same weekend as the NCAA Hockey Tourney. Last year, I had made a conscious decision that if it came down to NAQT Nationals or the hockey, it will always be the hockey. Now, it's a new dilemma. I had a really interesting vacation planned: Los Angeles-Winnipeg-Buffalo. Random thoughts (get a visual image of Larry King here...no, not that one, the one with those suspenders, oh yeah, that's it): If Match Game '75 used military test-taking techniques, would it have been "When In Doubt, Tinkle Out?". . .To whoever in the QB group deried Ann Arbor as a bad place for a tournament, which part of convienently located airport, lots of willing volunteers, reasonably priced hotels and proximity to gambling didn't you like?. . .The Game Show Round is probably going to get it's first game based on a dream I had, it will be a cross between Scrabble and the Intellivision cartridge Snafu. . .Was it me, or did Tim McCarver seem a little subdued and almost tolerable last night. And I thought voodoo didn't work. . .I gotta pee. . .Day 58 without DSL, if I remember my history correctly, D-Day was planned in less time. . .The satellite/digital cable service Trio announced that they will show a cadre of unappreciated shows during December, including The Ernie Kovacs Show. You don't want to miss this, almost every comedian that used sight gags from Laugh-In to The Simpsons readily stole from this innovator who died well before he could become truly famous in the early '60s. When Ernie's first TV show was cancelled in 1954, he ended the series by destroying the set live. . .The TV Nobel will be awarded early next week, followed by the others. I've only had three sets of nominations so far, I could use more. . . |
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14 October 2002Yet again, for the 101st year, the people in Norway have failed to give a Nobel Prize in television. I have been clamoring for this now, since, after all, nobody ever sits at home wondering whose going to win that medicine prize this year, but if they were offering Nobels in the categories people cared about, people would actually care for the prize. Since it looks like I have to bail out yet another international organization, the staff of It's Not Me... has decided to start awarding Nobel Prizes in the five trash disciplines: television, sports, music, movies and geek. Nominations will be accepted at mmb5@earthlink.net until 27 October 2002. Starting on the 28th, the individual prizes will be awarded. Remember, this should be awarded to those people who have contributed the most to the particular nominated discipline. Secondly, they must be alive at the start of the nominating period, which is today, 14 October 2002. Happy Thanksgiving to our northern brethren. And yes, they do play football on Thanksgiving, Hamilton plays Toronto and Montréal plays Edmonton. For those of you with Fox Sports World, the Edmonton/Montréal game will air at 4 PM today. |
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7 October 2002 Actually, Dennis, I do want to go on a rant here... Although many of you are enamored with the web site my employer offers, the web site is not the source of the company's income. Instead, it is the data behind the web site that we sell to other comapnies such as Best Buy or FYE who uses the data in the assistance of their retailing operations. One of my key jobs is to make sure that our data shipment, the end product of the work of hundreds of people, is available to our customers every day by 9 AM. In order to support this, we have dozens of servers each doing specalized tasks that have been programmed, optimized and tweaked for the proficient use by both the staff of my company and the algorithims necessary to distill gigabytes of data into a convienent form for our customers. Needless to say, my company is aligned with the recording industry. And right now, one of the banes of this industry is the extensive use of peer-to-peer file swapping to deliver unauthorized copies of their product. And today, this hurt my company. Not because of intellectual property issues, but rather the virtual hijacking of our servers. Over the weekend, our servers were pretty much rendered for the use to deliver Eminem streaming videos. Now, before you think this was a victimless crime, this is what this simple action cost us:
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6 October 2002 Hope you like the new format. Let's be honest, I'm not going to get to this everyday, so the calendar had to go. So I was in Eddie Bauer yesterday. I knew exactly what I wanted, one pair of black and one pair of khaki slacks. Pretty simple, right? Here's the fun once I get to the counter:
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