by Rodney Eric Griffith | Armour of Rod | |
It was obvious when Johnny Carson called it quits that an era had passed, but I don’t think anyone suspected at the time that the whole atmosphere of late night television had completely vanished into the ether. We were counting on Letterman to carry the torch, but he had already peaked a decade earlier. Conan O’Brien and Jon Stewart notwithstanding (and you could argue for Adult Swim as well), there’s not much point to late night television anymore. It’s just another hour of the day.
As a young person, the idea that people were awake, well-dressed and doing things at 11:30 PM was incredibly alluring. It was a secretive world that opened up in your living room or bedroom. Beyond The Tonight Show there were a lot of ultracool syndicated programmes buried in late night schedules on independent TV stations (independent TV stations have also gone the way of the dodo because of Fox, UPN and the WB). My first ITC exposure was a grainy rerun of My Partner the Ghost, more commonly known as Randall And Hopkirk (Deceased), running at 3:00 AM on WUAB sometime in 1982. Of course, SCTV was always shown in these obscure timeslots—I can remember the second season opener when it aired in Cleveland on WEWS at 11:30 on a Sunday night, and a third season episode or two at 1 AM or so on a Saturday morning. There’s nothing unique running in after hours now, even with a vastly-expanded number of channels and networks. It’s all infomercials or second showings from earlier in the evening. Even the station signoff is a distant memory. Now that I am an adult, I feel a bit let down. We always go to sleep instead.
Shout! Factory is reissuing the Herb Alpert/Tijuana Brass catalogue (one of the remaining famous ones that hasn’t been restored) including their infamous 1965 LP Whipped Cream & Other Delights, which is being released 19 April.
“…what (Madonna) needs is just 500 milligrams of LSD”
—G. Harrison (24 February 1943–29 November 2001)
The UK’s coldest day is like an average January day in Ohio.
Rodney | 7:31:00 AM [permalink]As a late birthday present (and in large part because of my mother-in-law’s generosity and kindness), I bought myself a 512 MB iPod Shuffle last night. Ironically, given my long advocacy of headphones as the sacred way to experience music, I was never really comfortable with portable cassette players—I didn’t own one until about 9 years ago and I haven’t used it since our England trip. Portable CD players were simply too cumbersome. I never cared greatly for MP3s, something about the deliberate loss of quality always bothered me. While I liked the iPod, I could never bring myself to drop that kind of money (which shows that I’m either more miserly or responsible than the old days when all CD component decks topped US$300). The accessories tend to inflate the price to the point where I could easily back away.
The Shuffle, at $99, was increasingly hard to resist. Finding one in stock was the trickiest part of the transaction (I didn’t even bother calling the Apple Store after hearing of long waitlists). One of the local Best Buys had a shipment come in, purely by coincidence. I don’t think I spent more than 5 minutes in the store, which is unheard of.
The speed of the USB sync is impressive (even using USB 1.1), the iTunes interface is flawless (no surprise there), and the rule of thumb of 120 songs for this model (using AAC) is modesty—my first selections included 48 Beatles tracks from the Revolver and Sgt. Pepper eras, the entire contents of the Edsel/Rhino Get Happy!! reissue, plus The Apple EP, Rialto and the Don Rickles Magnum Opus Hello Dummy! (still only 99 cents at the iTunes Music Store!) with over 100MB of space left. The sound quality is formidable, even when using a proper set of headphones (e.g. my Sony MDR-V6 Studio Monitor headphones).
The AAC compression seems to be a much more acceptable compromise (the Shuffles, because of the memory limitation, will not accept Apple Lossless or AIFF files) than MP3. Even after extended wear, I’m not experiencing any harshness in sound. As for shuffling, I haven’t indulged in it much—you have the option of playing the straight playlist, which I find more soothing.
Like many thousands of others, I admire Jason Kottke for making the decision to blog for a career. It raises the bar in interesting ways.
Rodney | 7:00:00 PM [permalink]I needed to excuse myself from Armour over the weekend. I have not been especially prone to protracted cold symptoms since becoming a vegetarian, so I am at a loss to explain why this particular illness was so difficult to shake.
I could skim through the news—Hunter, “Jeff”, Paris. But it’s all familiar ground.
