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Is Eric a bearded piano player? Why, yes; yes, he is. But two months ago today, he revealed two other personal characteristics both of which are big parts of who I am, he says. Neither is his Defining Characteristic, but they may be surprising to some of his readers. What are they? Click on Snidely Tweeting 3 if you dare!
DECEMBER 4, 2024 TOYS TOYS TOYS FOR TOT
On the radio this morning, the conversation was about toy overabundance. Anytime someone visits, they bring along something for the kid, who plays with it that day. Is it thrown away afterwards? No, it's left within easy reach on the floor. Eventually it finds its way into a leaf-bag of small objects out in the garage, to be discarded after the kid has grown up. (No wonder our oceans are becoming polluted with plastic.)
Last holiday season, NBC aired a live broadcast of The Sound of Music. This year theyre doing Peter Pan. It airs Thursday. Of course, there have been many other versions of Pan over the 110 years since J.M Barrie first wrote a play about Peters adventures in Neverland. I remember especially the 1953 Walt Disney movie.
It was near the end of the last B1G Network football telecast of the regular season. According to the closed captioning, the announcers thanked their replay colleagues who were working in the tapeworm.
You may not be interested in the details, but my professor had earned his PhD in applied statistics from Syracuse in 1956 during the waning days of network radio. Therefore I proposed a procedure with which he was familiar: a telephone coincidental interview. Each call would begin with the old-fashioned question, This is Marion Audience Surveys; do you have a television set? (Not everyone did in 1956.) Then, Is it on right now? Then, Could you tell me what channel you're watching? After I was hired in Marion, a related method found a 7% rating for our morning talk show in 1972. But this technique doesn't work very well nowadays. Brian Klaas writes: In an age of caller ID and smartphones, along with persistent junk and nuisance calls, few people answer when they see unfamiliar numbers. Take, for example, a 2018 New York Times poll within Michigan's Eighth Congressional District. The Times pollsters had to call roughly 107 people just to get one person to answer their questions. What are the odds that those rare few who answered the phone are an unskewed, representative sample of likely voters? Zilch. At Marion in 1970, I optimistically assumed we might be able to get responses from 400 cable subscribers, but even then there would be a significant margin of error. I remarked, The users of this survey should be cautioned not to take the results too literally. That figure showing three thousand people in the total audience really means that the total audience is between 2,000 and 4,000. For the 2024 Presidential election, while most of the polling industry was wrong, we got it right, James Johnson and Tom Lubbock of J.L. Partners boasted in the Wall Street Journal. They claimed their firm was one of only two of the top 10 major pollsters to predict a Donald Trump victory. Traditional polling methods rely on random-digit phone polling and online polling, but these are biased toward college-educated Democrats who are more likely to be politically engaged, work from home, and have free time to chat with pollsters. Our mix of text message surveys and in-app polls that survey voters as they shop or play games were better fit to capture the opinions of people who are largely disengaged from politics. Later on in the 100 Moons article, you'll see the results of a non-coincidental opinion survey that I conducted in 1973. This yielded some interesting results, such as a 15.7 rating for local country singer Smiling Eddie's weekly show: 20 of 127 respondents said they watched, at least sometimes. However, as far as I remember, these numbers led to no actual programming decisions.
When I was a boy, a television program was brought to me by a single sponsor. For example, Dinah Shores variety show was sponsored exclusively by Chevrolet, and the closing credits ran over Chevys theme song. When I was a young man, advertisers realized that not everyone watched Dinah, so it was better to spread their message around to different audiences by buying spots in several different programs. But there were rules. For example, no more than one competing car company could buy time in a given show. Also when I was a young man, CBS decided viewers deserved to be updated about news that broke between Walter Cronkite at 7 pm and their local newscast at 11. The network introduced, right in the middle of prime time, a 30-second headlines update. It was anchored by Connie Chung, as I recall. Almost immediately, however, the local stations claimed this time. At first, like CBS, they used it to inform us about stories that would be covered in more detail at 11. But then they stopped giving us any facts at all. The newsbriefs became merely teases promos to whet our curiosity so we would tune in at 11 to find out what was happening. Now that I'm an old man, the automotive sector is very competitive, and every car company wants to buy advertising. On a show last night, when the two-minute window for local commercials came along, I first saw the stations weatherman. Theres a big storm coming. Will you have to change your Thanksgiving travel plans? Join us at 11 to find out. And then an announcer said, This news update is brought to you by Chrysler, imported from Detroit. Fair enough. That was immediately followed by a car commercial, which I assumed would be for Chrysler. But no, when they finally got around to identifying the product it turned out to be Infiniti. Then there was a commercial for Chevrolet. And then there was a commercial for Nissan. Four competing advertisers, back to back! How is a viewer supposed to know which car to buy?
NOVEMBER 24, 2024 MORE ILLUSTRATED SPORTS I found another picture that could depict me calling my first football broadcast in 1965. Actually, the photo is from a later season. But I did once take my tape recorder up to the roof of that high school pressbox. My contemporary recollection is here.
NOVEMBER 22, 2024 TALES OF '62
I remember reading a review of the TV show in the next day's newspaper. The writer mostly liked it, although he thought that the choice of a nursery rhyme for Julie's big solo was a waste. The other problem, he said, was Carnegie Hall. With an audience much larger than one would find in a TV studio, there were enormous waves of laughter and applause rolling in all night long. I can still recall a few details. In a medley of Broadway tunes, the singing of I Cain't Say No from Oklahoma! ended with the English half of the duo confessing I cahn't ... say ... cain't.
I always wondered about the slogan used by an Ohio jam maker: With a name like Smuckers, it has to be good. #1 Do they mean that theyre saddled with a founders name so unimpressive that they have to overcome that handicap by producing a superior product? With a name like Wurst, well never be able to sell anything unless its the best. #2 Or do they mean that their company has earned such a high reputation that they have to meet that expectation of excellence? With a name like Rolls-Royce, we cant afford to let our customers down. Those schmucks at the company claim the original connotation was #1 but has now grown into #2.
NOVEMBER 17, 2024 EJECT THEM BOTH
I can imagine Carter lowering his helmet to make an illegal tackle. The referee announces, Personal foul. Roughing the passer, with targeting, defense #0. Fifteen-yard penalty, first down. #0 is disqualified. And then later when Clemson sends in its offense, because #0 has been disqualified I can imagine Williams also being barred from the field.
NOVEMBER 16, 2024 SPORTS, ILLUSTRATED Lilly Householder is a good student at a high school near me tall, athletic, and the captain of the girls soccer team. According to the Valley News Dispatch, she's been offered an athletic scholarship at a Division I college, Eastern Michigan University, and she's accepted.
But
it's for the rowing team, and she's never pulled an oar!
Lilly said she has learned that it's common for college rowing
coaches to recruit athletic students who are non-rowers, because it's
easier to teach the technique of rowing instead of breaking the bad
habits a rower might have picked up before college.
I highlight their detailed mosaics in an article called The Games at Nennig.
NOVEMBER 13, 2024 WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? Decades ago, studies seemed to show that a little alcohol was better for you than none at all. The French Paradox refers to the notion that drinking red wine might explain the relatively low rates of heart disease among the French. But a new analysis confirms what many scientists have been saying for years: The old theory is bunk. Researchers looked at 107 published studies comparing alcohol intake and longevity. The questionnaires asked, Do you drink? How much? Setting aside the heavy drinkers, the other replies could be sorted into three categories:
Its often been thought that wine is something special, that alcohol in wine somehow has magic properties. It was just a publicity coup for the wine industry three decades ago. The evidence doesnt hold up.
NOVEMBER
11, 2014 The TV behind me was tuned to a college football game. I heard a commercial come on, but there were no words, only a mournful dirge being played softly by a brass choir. I wondered who died. Later, I heard the somber music again, and I bestirred myself to turn and actually look at the screen. The commercial turned out to be a recruiting spot for the United States Marine Corps. During the Vietnam War, I was in college. Soldiers and Marines, many of them my age, many of them drafted against their will, were being cruelly sentenced to suffer and die in the jungles of Southeast Asia. To me, therefore, the scenes in the commercial did not have the desired effect. I saw footage of serious-faced sweaty men and one or two women, swinging from ropes in basic training and handling deadly weapons on a battlefield. A row of young people, formerly individuals but now wearing identical dress uniforms, stood stiffly at attention. Armored personnel carriers tore recklessly across a meadow. Silhouetted helicopters flew toward an apocalyptic sunset. As noted, this peaceful senior citizen was repulsed by these scenes. I have never wanted to sweat, nor stand at attention, nor kill, nor destroy. I have never wanted to go to war. But I am not the commercials target audience. Its aimed at young people who aspire to be proud Marines. Fortunately for our country, there have been more than a few such brave souls, now veterans, who have been inspired to do the work that Im glad not to have to do.
There are a few additional Biblical references to nose rings, not all favorable. In particular, Proverbs 11:22 tells us that A beautiful woman without good sense is like a gold ring in a pig's snout.
NOVEMBER 5, 2024 THOSE ENIGMATIC CLOCKS As a retired graphics guy for televised sports, I know there are many numerical parameters that attentive fans like to know.
But these are digital clocks, a relatively recent technology. How were such times displayed in the old analog days? I've seen photos from the third of four New York City arenas called Madison Square Garden, namely the building that was in use from 1925 to 1968.
They look like clocks. I haven't found a written explanation of them, but by careful examination of the photos I believe I've figured out what was going on. I think each dial had a single hand which made a circuit in four, one, twenty, two, two, and two minutes respectively.
The first clock on the left appears to be a late addition, numbered 3 2 1 0. But what sport needs to time four-minute periods? Boxing, of course. After each three-minute round there's a one-minute break, and the hand can just continue moving counterclockwise.
The other has a minute hand numbered 15 10 5 20. It circles once during a 20-minute college basketball half or a 20-minute hockey period. That makes it three times easier to read than a traditional 60-minute hand. In the large photo above, we can see (more or less clearly) that there are eight seconds and ten minutes, or 10:08, remaining in the half. The remaining three clocks are numbered 1½ 1 ½. I assume they're for timing hockey's two-minute minor penalties. So these circles can display the various times involved in boxing, basketball, and hockey. But that still doesn't make them score boards. Where's the score?
NOVEMBER
2, 2024 This election season, Bloomberg reports that Pittsburgh TV viewers have been subjected to more political ads than viewers in any other TV market in the United States. Also, we Pennsylvanians have found many cards like this in our mailboxes. The cards don't influence my choice of candidates, and they usually go straight into the trash. But this one that arrived yesterday caught my eye due to its utter negativity. On November 5th vote against the worst candidate for Attorney General, it screams. The three complaints against him include that he's a career politician. He might put that another way: he's devoted his life to public service.
On the back, the card proclaims that another candidate should not be our Auditor General and a third is unfit to be Treasurer. All are Democrats. The card denouncing these radical progressives was paid for by the Commonwealth Leaders Fund. It does not mention the opponents whom the Fund prefers nor explain how they would be better. Remember when candidates optimistically pledged to do good things for us if elected? Remember when they spent their money telling us why we should vote for them, not why we should vote against the other guys? Times have changed, it appears.
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