Infospigot: The Chronicles

Berkeley Rockin'-Chair Eve

A quiet TV New Year's Eve with our friends Jill and Piero. Let's see: the New York Philharmonic at Lincoln Center, playing some Bernstein and Gershwin. Then "Portandia," Coldplay on "Austin City Limits" (most frequently heard comments: "what are they singing about" and "all those songs sound the same") and, God bless us, "Dick Clark's Rockin' New Year's Eve (with Ryan Seacrest)." Has anybody tried to get Dick Clark together with Lenin on Red Square to see who has more pizzazz? Maybe someone can get Kim Jong-Il to join the party.

We're back home now, and quiet prevails. Not even a lot of fireworks tonight. Happy New Year to all--have a great 366 days of 2012.

Weathermen of Yesteryear

I grew up in Chicago, meaning I grew up on Chicago TV. In our house, the local news was a staple, and I'm inclined to believe it wasn't bad though maybe it was also not as good as I sometimes tell myself it was. Anchor and reporter names I recall include Floyd Kalber, Frank Reynolds, Fahey Flynn, Bill Kurtis, Jane Pauley, Barbara Simpson, and Walter Jacobsen. Some of them went on to work with the national networks, for what that's worth.

And then there were the weathermen. (Yes, they were all guys.) I think of them not because they were great, although I again lean toward the view they weren't bad. I suppose there's a book or at least a long essay on how we have come to see and think of the weather in the electronic meda age compared to earlier eras going back to the time when we guessed at the day's conditions by looking to the horizon and sniffing the wind.

For better and worse, here are the weathermen who delivered the forecasts to my impressionable young mind:

P.J. Hoff, who cartooned the weather on the CBS affiliate, WBBM, Channel 2. He had a character named Mr. Yellencuss that I imagine he'd draw when bad weather was in the offing.

Harry Volkman, who worked on several Chicago channels and seemed to pride himself on (and was given credit for) the "professionalism" of his forecasting (he's the first TV weather guy I recall displaying a seal from the American Meteorological Society during his broadcasts).

John Coleman, part of the first "happy-talk" Chicago news team on Channel 7, WBKB (later, WLS). In my book, his claim to fame, which was a pretty good one, was to forecast Chicago's January 1967 blizzard (while he was doing weather on Milwaukee TV). According to his own account (in the comments to a post about Chicago's Groundhog's Eve Blizzard of 2011), Channel 7 hired him immediately after the storm, and I kind of remember him on Channel 7 by the time another storm hit two weeks or so after the first one). He went on to national TV and was a cofounder of The Weather Channel. And today, bless him, he's a loud voice in contesting the case for climate change.

There were others, but they've faded from memory if in fact they ever made much of an impression. I ought to mention Tom Skilling as a great Chicago weather guy--the greatest, for my money--but he is very much of the present era.

Takeoff

Part Two of our late summer family/friend visits: We flew out of San Francisco yesterday for the New York area. We started by sweating through long check-in lines (United is merging with Continental: "Hey, we can be *twice* as slow!") and a ridiculous wait at security (not enough staff on the checkpoint, and the guy reviewing IDs had a certain leisurely approach to his work). When we got on the plane, we sat on the runway for about an hour: weather in the East was causing delays. But then we were airborne, and the morning was beautiful. Above: Mount Diablo just under the wing at left. Below: Los Vaqueros reservoir in the Diablo range in eastern Contra Costa County (click for larger images).

Watched in Horror

KTVU's increasingly loathsome (or maybe just pathetic and strange) "The Ten O'Clock News" offered these items back-to-back tonight:

"Take a look at this surveillance video, and you will understand why a motorcyclist is thankful to be alive. Twenty-five-year-old Zach Perez was rear-ended on a Dallas freeway last month, and he went flying, but managed to roll away from other cars despite being in intense pain. Perez broke two ribs, four vertebrae, and lost his spleen, but he is alive. "

Last month? You mean March? That's news? Are you kidding me? Where's his spleen? Well, it's graphic video, and such an upbeat ending. Unlike our next story.

"A daredevil stunt at a county fair in England went wrong, and a man called 'The Human Cannonball' has died. Police in Kent say the 23-year-old man was fired out of the cannon 40 feet into the air, but the safety net failed to open properly and the man fell to earth as the crowd watched in horror. The stunt show has been canceled while authorities investigate."

Me, too. Watched in horror. No need to investigate.

The Lighter Side of Getting Nailed to a Cross

On Friday night's "10 O'Clock News" on KTVU, anchor Ken Wayne narrated video showing Christian penitents in Jerusalem bearing crosses through the streets amid throngs of faithful. What did the pictures show? Ken announced that people were re-enacting the "crucification of Jesus Christ."

Uprising, Meet Moon Rising

Nothing helps you relax after a long, hard week in the newsroom quite like another newsroom's misfortune. The above is from a live shot KTVU-Channel 2 was doing in San Francisco's U.N. Plaza tonight after a rally by supporters of the Egyptian uprising. The reporter, Amber Lee, was just wrapping up after a tape report when a passer-by dropped trow. In the moments following this shot, her camera operator tried to move to get this full moon out of the frame. He/she couldn't quite do it.

As KTVU News likes to say, "Only on 2."

Update: My friend Pete points out in the comments that KTVU still has the video of the report online. Watch for the last five seconds or so.: http://www.ktvu.com/video/26842640/index.html

Infotainment Tonight

Screenshot from the January 13, 2011, "10 O'Clock News" (a.k.a, "The Used-to-Be Really Good Bay Area News Show"). By way of explanation, whoever was in charge of doing this graphic left the placeholder label in place for all the audience to see. How does stuff like this happen? Staff cuts, mostly. I've heard that many of the artists and producers who used to make and oversee graphics like this have been reassigned or let go and that writers have been given this job--in addition to continuing to write the news and find, pull, and edit videotape. The unfortunate on-air result notwithstanding, cutting these corners makes the station owner's bottom line look great.

Two Mugs, One Shot

We were watching KTVU's "10 O'clock News" tonight--the Bay Area's erstwhile decent local news broadcast (all right, KTVU: go ahead and look up "erstwhile"; the rest of us will wait here)--when a story came on about Berkeley police announcing they'd solved several recent street robberies. In one case, involving a group who was holding up pedestrians with a shotgun, the cops said they'd picked up four locals. KTVU showed pictures of four young guys. Next, the anchor said the police had announced an arrest in another stickup, and then they put the above two pictures--or one picture--up on the screen. You just hope that this is a picture of a real suspect--for extra points, one of the two in this case--because based on the stupidity of using the same picture twice, you don't really have any reason to trust they got any of the pictures or names right.

In Theory, I Hate TV

I see a note from my sister on Facebook: "I HATE CABLE TV." In theory, I'm with her. The cruelest part of getting more channels than you can count is the joke whose punchline we all know: Now you get to watch 500 channels of garbage.

Why then, do I have a satellite dish installer on the roof right now, replacing our old DirecTV dish with a brand-new dish that will enable us to receive a high-definition signal? I think it's got to be more complicated than we want to see the garbage more clearly.

sLet me catalog the reasons.

--Curiosity: I've wanted to see whether HD television really is better--especially for the Tour de France in July.

--Weakness: I know that changing to HD isn't going to improve the quality of the programming. I know it's probably not worth whatever extra amount DirecTV will charge us. But we've been talking about getting new service for awhile and now I'm just giving in.

--Distractability: I'm as willing as anyone to slough off my chores and responsibilities in favor of a nice "Seinfeld" episode. (Do I still read? That seems to be the culturally correct alternative to watching the tube--as opposed to gardening, cooking, paying the bills, or going to work. Yes, I try to, though sometimes it takes me forever to get through stuff. Right now I'm reading two nonfiction works: a biography of John Brown and a first-person account of Robert Falcon Scott's last Antarctic expedition.)

--Keeping in Touch with the People: Here's a self-justification that often pops up in my brain: "I work in the media, so I need to know what's going on out there with the culture and with media consumers." That's partly true; but only partly. If this were really an exercise in keeping current with popular tastes and the concerns and fascinations of my fellow citizens, I'd be watching a lot more "American Idol," and I'd regularly check in with the crowd-baiters on Fox News. (In practice, I find about 15 minutes of "Idol" fulfills my annual requirement, and I'm so enraged and depressed by Fox News that the only way I can deal with its spew is the occasional Glen Beck deconstruction on "The Daily Show." Speaking of "The Daily Show," though, and "The Colbert Report"--I find I can live without them. Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann on MSNBC? Turns out I don't like left-directed pandering any more than I can stand the right-directed ravings on Fox.)

--The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name: Well, maybe it's time for me to come out. It turns out I actually like television. I think there's plenty of inventive storytelling on the tube. Some of it can be deep, compelling, and memorable. -"Lonesome Dove," anyone? Or "Band of Brothers"? "The Wire"? "Deadwood"? (I could go on.) A lot of the programming is superficial beyond a catchy gimmick--"24." Some shows are based on formula and gimmicky, but work the formulas and gimmicks well: the whole "CSI" and "Law and Order" franchises. But the point is: on occasion, there's real content out there that is--I hope this doesn't set off a sacrilege alarm anywhere--on the same level of all the popular entertainments of the past, from "The Iliad" to "King Lear" to "Wuthering Heights"--that we have been taught to think of as classics.

Enough said on that. The dish guy is still on the roof.

John Muir: 'I Asked the Boulders Where They Had Been'

We've watched most of the first two installments of the new Ken Burns public TV extravaganza, "The National Parks: America's Best Idea." The beauty of the show is exhilarating and the history is fascinating (Theodore Roosevelt--what a guy).

The first two episodes are closely entwined with the story of John Muir, and part two focuses first on his fight to complete the preservation of Yosemite and then on his unsuccessful battle to stop San Francisco from flooding Hetch Hetchy valley. Muir's voiceovers are done in a soft Scots burr. Occasionally, you hear about Muir from Lee Stetson, who has portrayed him for decades and who has even adopted the Muir look. But when Stetson appears on camera, he speaks in a plain old General American accent. At the very end of the second episode, though, he briefly introduces a Muir quote, then instantly transitions to the gentle and compelling Muir voice, then appears on camera to finish the quote. It's a moving performance. Here's what he recites:

"Muir said, 'As long as I live I'll hear the birds and the winds and the waterfalls sing. I'll interpret the rocks and learn the language of flood and storm and avalanche. I'll make the acquaintance of the wild gardens and the glaciers and get as near to the heart of this world as I could. And so I did. I sauntered about from rock to rock, from grove to grove, from stream to stream, and whenever I met a new plant I would sit down beside it for a minute or a day, to make its acquaintance, hear what it had to tell. I asked the boulders where they had been and whither they were going, and when night found me, there I camped. I took no more heed to save time or to make haste than did the trees or the stars. This is true freedom, a good, practical sort of immortality."