Pampered Pets 2

I have an update on my earlier post about pampered pets:

The kennels that have a DVD/TV option also offer Posturepedic beds, sound-proof doors (so that vacationing pooches aren't disturbed by their neighbours), webcam surveillance, a daily 15 minutes' cuddle time and - for a mere $15 a day extra - a bedtime story.

Premature?

Today I was treated to a trailer for a television series billed as "the best show on TV".

Given that the series only premieres next Sunday, I'd say that was a tad presumptuous.

Adverts

Advertisements are the bane of our American life - or at least our televisual one. It seems that whenever you start getting into a TV programme, wham! here comes another set of adverts. 

The impression of constant marketing bombardment is not far from the truth. The rule of thumb is that there is an advertising break every seven minutes. But even this astonishing frequency doesn't begin to describe the omnipresence of advertising.

In Britain, a typical TV programme fills up approximately 27 minutes of every half-hour slot, the remaining three going to advertising, usually once in the middle and again at the end. By contrast, BBC America, which rebroadcasts - some would say regurgitates - "Auntie"-made TV for US consumption, has to schedule 40 minutes for each of its UK-format television programmes simply so that it can fit in the requisite advertising.

The Superbowl, the highlight of the American football calendar, a kind of cup final à l'américaine, clearly shows how much time is given over to advertising here in the US. The game itself consists of four 15-minute periods. OK, so there are lots of breaks because the players are forever being substituted on or off, but there are also deliberate pauses and time-outs built in purely to satisfy the "sponsors". As a result, although it has been estimated that there are only 11 minutes of actual play in an American football game, the Superbowl transmission (excluding pre- and post-game analyses, but including the halftime show) lasts well over three hours.

Advertising is also a huge money-spinner for the sport's governing body, the NFL, with 30-second slots (especially the coveted halftime ones) currently costing just under $3 million each. So if, as this year, you have a captive audience of 106 million representing more than two-thirds of the households in the US, why not take extra breaks for "a word from our sponsors"?

The Winter Olympics - exclusive coverage of which was bought by NBC for almost $900m - are another good if annoying example. Our evening viewing was recently interrupted so often that we found ourselves timing not only the length of "viewing time" between advertising breaks but also the length of the breaks themselves. And lo and behold, we found that there is, on average, a break every 7.5 minutes - after which you are treated to an average of 2.5 minutes of advertising.

In other words, you end up watching a minute of adverts for every three minutes of the actual programme!

But most odd of all, albeit only for non-American audiences, is something that happens during my favourite TV programme, The Daily Show (though undoubtedly elsewhere): coming out of the third advertising break in the space of half an hour, the host says, "That's our show. We'll be back tomorrow night. Goodnight!"

Cue closing credits ... followed by more advertising.

Local Crime

The following gems from the 'Crime Watch' section of our local newspaper, The Beacon, are too priceless to keep to myself:

Tire marks damage lawn
Police said a motorist damaged a front lawn overnight Dec. 20-21 in the 3000 block of Parkland Drive. The homeowner told police that a vehicle made deep tire tracks and grooves in the yard. Upon observation, police said a pickup truck might have sped too quickly into a curve and landed on the grass.

Police settle TV dispute
Police were called in to the 7000 block of Stonebrook Road Dec. 21 to intervene in a family dispute over whether to watch professional wrestling or football on television. Police said the wife called officers after her husband allegedly grabbed her wrist while struggling for the remote control.

The Daily Show

The Daily Show is a pure delight.

Broadcast on Comedy Channel at 11pm EST Mondays to Thursdays and repeated the following lunchtime, the half-hour programme is hosted by the exceedingly witty and knowledgeable Jon Stewart, a kind of funnier version of Jeremy Paxman.

Complete episodes and individual segments are available online (though maybe only accessible in the US).

The Daily Show is a hilarious satirical programme that excels at analysing and lampooning current news and in particular media reporting thereof. It is especially good at using media footage to reveal how personalities/politicians say or do one thing one day and then the exactly the opposite the next.

Recent "scoops" involved its outing of the fact that Fox News used footage from a demonstration in September to suggest a health care-reform protest in November was better attended than it actually was, and the revelation that popular radical right-wing radio and TV host Glenn Beck was urging people to put money in gold when he is actually the spokesman for Goldline.

Helping Stewart mock the news in inimitable fashion are his team: Wyatt Cenac, "senior black correspondent" Larry Wilmore, Aasif Mandvi, Samantha Bee and Britain's own John Oliver, who ably assist him in taking aspects of recent news to absurd extremes.

Ironically, given that The Daily Show is aired on the Comedy Channel and makes no attempt to be a proper news show (as topical as its reports and cynical barbs may be), Jon Stewart was voted "America's Most Trusted Newscaster Since Walter Cronkite" in a poll carried out by Time magazine.

Eat your heart out, CNN.

Alerted

I have quite a clever app on my iPhone called "i.TV". Among other things, this enables me to look up TV listings and reviews, consult and reorganise my Netflix queue, and if I had a TiVo DVR account, set up recordings of television programmes.

Yesterday afternoon, while consulting the blurb on a pilot show, I discovered a new aspect of i.TV: alerts. This is great because you can use this to be alerted about the airing of specific shows - single programmes or entire series - that you are interested in and might otherwise miss. And rather than having to painstakingly enter screening times and dates, you just click on the show and leave the app to do the rest.

Very chuffed at having discovered this function just hours before the screening of the new pilot, I set up an alert for the programme, although I was a little perturbed that there was no way of configuring when exactly the alert would sound.

Lo and behold, at precisely 8.10 that evening, my iPhone emitted a previously unknown alarm that, on extracting the phone from my trouser pocket, I was delighted to discover was my i.TV alert for the eagerly-anticipated pilot show - which began at 8pm.

Medical Abbreviations

It's one thing to have adverts for medicines on TV, especially since the manufacturers are required by law to state all known side-effects (how anyone ever buys that stuff is beyond me: virtually everything they advertise "may cause death"). But it also appears to have spawned a trend in medical abbreviations, for a variety of reasons.

One of these appears to be avoiding embarassment. After all, telling someone you suffer from ED sounds far less debilitating than admitting to an erectile disfunction. The same goes for ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder) and DID (dissociative identity disorder - itself a euphemism for what used to be termed multiple personality). 

Another is that it makes medicines sound more scientific and therefore more curative. Take NSAIDs, for example. Hands up if you've had one of these recently. No? Bet you have: they're non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (aspirin and ibuprofen to you and me).

A third reason is to make a serious illness sounds more harmless, trivial even. After all, wouldn't you rather have COPD than chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or prefer an SCA to a sudden cardiac arrest?

The list goes on an on.

In addition to the aforementioned afflictions, all of which I've heard mentioned on TV in their shortened, sanitised form, I've heard talk of HPV (human papillomavirus, one cause of cancer and genital warts), OCD (obsessive-compulsive disorder), PMDD (premenstrual dysphoric disorder: bad PMT) and DVT (deep-vein thrombosis).

I'm sure there are many, many more, but unfortunately I don't always have my iPhone on me to note them down while lounging in front of the television.

Which reminds me: I've got to go and watch TDSWJS (= The Daily Show With Jon Stewart).

TTFN.

Sports Presenters

America has a black president and has had a black foreign minister (Colin Powell). It has black senators and congressmen, and there are blacks at every level of society in both the private and the public sector.

It is therefore rather strange that in basketball, a sport in which about 98% of the best players are black (everyone knows that White Boys Can't Jump), all the TV presenters are white, while blacks are merely invited expert guests or commentators.

It is not as if blacks weren't good presenters. There are plenty of excellent black talk show hosts and news anchors. So why, I wonder, is there this glaring anomaly in sport?

Could Do Better

Much as I love CNN, I'm afraid it repeatedly shot itself in the foot tonight.

In advertising run throughout the evening, CNN claimed its election coverage had attracted "the biggest audience than any other network".

It also ran an opinion poll about the Obamas' new dog. The results were as follows:

(That's 107% by my count - not to mention the missing "the")

Come on, CNN: you can do better than that!

The Tonight Show

We first came across The Tonight Show - or more precisely Jay Leno - when we were in Berlin and had NBC piped through our cable. Needless to say, it quickly became the highlight of our evening's TV watching.

When we moved to France, we were robbed of this privilege, and subsequently spent the next 6 years pining for a Jay Leno fix, satisfied only with the occasional foray onto the show's online site (incidentally a great source of clips from current and previous shows).

Imagine our joy therefore when we learnt that we would be moving to Lenoland itself, and could watch the man himself live every weekday evening! 

Well, the joy was shortlived. The Tonight Show is recorded in Burbank, California, i.e. a completely different time zone, and primetime viewing on the West Coast is night-owl TV around here. That means we have to wait until 11.30pm to even get a glimpse of our comic hero, whose Monologues, Headlines and Jaywalking sections are televisual classics - not to mention his interviewing style.

Worse still, we found out about a month ago that NBC thinks Jay Leno is getting too old for TV (he's been hosting the show for about 20 years now), and was going to axe him next spring. Having waited so long for the pleasure of seeing him, this was truly a tragic blow.

Luckily for us, help is at hand: rumour has it that NBC has not only relented, but offered Leno a primetime EST show from May. O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! Now all we need is for Saturday Night Live to become Saturday Evening Live.

Wassup 2008

Remember Budweiser's hilarious "Wassup" commercial from the year 2000?

Well, some bright spark has come up with a contemporary sequel using the same actors as in the original ad:

Snuggie

It isn't very often that TV commercials have me laughing out loud. The following - for Snuggies, essentially a blanket with sleeves - had me thinking I was watching Saturday Night Live rather than Thursday lunchtime CNN:

Having seen the commercial, it's amazing to think that this is actually a genuine product someone has spent a lot of time, energy and presumably money developing. But I'm not alone in seeing the funny (haha and peculiar) side of this product. A cursory glance at the Internet reveals a veritable cacophony of protest, humour and general disbelief at this almost banal invention.

I know that winter is approaching and I always have cold feet, but a Snuggie will not be on my Xmas list. It would just make me look like a mad monk and frighten off the frolicking animals outside.

Cialis

It's refreshing to see that the commercials over here aren't only for boring old washing powder and suchlike. But I was amused to hear the following warning as part of an ad for anti-impotence drug Cialis:

"Ask your doctor if you are healthy enough to engage in sexual activity"