Category: On TV

I can’t say this surprises me.

CNN Reporter and British nutjob Richard Quest was recently arrested for meth possession in New York City’s Central park.

According to the report, Quest was arrested at 3:40 a.m. in the park, which is closed between the hours of 1 a.m. and 6 a.m. Upon being approached by police, Quest reportedly told the arresting officers: “I have meth in my pocket.” He was arraigned on Friday on a misdemeanor drug charge.

When I worked in TV, there was a newsroom monitor tuned to CNN all the time, and Quest’s segments were must-see TV for myself and a few co-workers. Quest reported regularly for CNN’s morning show on odd topics (many involving travel), wherein he would just go crazy reporting the story of the day.  Quest would do anything for a story, and delivered standups like a rabid squirell about to take a bite out of the camera.  However, the best part of hits reports were the interplay between Quest and Jack Cafferty (“Seinfeld is next“).  Cafferty hated Quest, and half the time seemed like he was about to “do a shoot” on the hyperactive Englishman. 

Well, here’s hoping that Quest can kick the habit and can remain entertaining off the meth.

A few years back when Gateway was closing all its Gateway Country stores, I got a good deal on a DVD recorder. Even though the price I paid for it was about double what DVD recorders are going for now, the machine has served the Civee and I well, also acting as our primary DVD player. If there’s something I want to keep for posterity, I use the DVD recorder, as our VCR is relegated to the guest room.

With the recent demise of the HD-DVD format, Blu-Ray is now the wave of the future. Standard DVD should still be around for a while, and I’ve heard that Blu-Ray players can also play standard DVDs, so I don’t have anything to worry about.

With the recent death of HD-DVD, Popular Mechanics recently wrote about the top 10 expired home video formats spanning the last 40 years. Two aspects of this article are interesting; first, in most cases, the magazine lists the costs of the machines, both what they sold for when introduced, and also what it would cost today, adjusted for inflation. Many of these machines, when first released, sold for upwards of $1,000, which seems ridiculous.

The second interesting aspect of the article was one of the machines, was favored by the DHARMA Initiative. Here’s the write-up on the U-Matic machine, one of which was foundin the Pearl Station:

These 0.75-in. videotape recorders used one of the first enclosed cartridge formats on the market. Debuting at $1395 ($7292 in 2008 dollars), the machines could record 60 minutes of color television at 250 lines of resolution with full stereo sound. Nevertheless, the price was too steep for mom-and-pop TV watchers, so U matic never really caught on with consumers. It did, however, catch on with professionals, and serves as a workhorse format in television production to this day.
-Popular Mechanics

The King was on television this morning.

Well, it wasn’t the first time I’ve been on TV, but it was pretty neat to have someone come up to me and say “hey, I saw you on TV!”

The story begins yesterday, after the Civee and I got home from work, I was shoveling some remaining snow and slush out from in front of our car. There was a cameraman from the local NBC affiliate (competitor of the station that was stepsibling to the cable news channel I used to work for) shooting tape of the quickly-melting snow on the streets. The Civee and I DVRed that night’s 11:00 news broadcast to see if they included the video. They didn’t.

So I didn’t think about it until this morning. I walked into the building I work in, and a co-worker, who was crossing the lobby shouted out to me “TOM! YOU WERE ON TV!” A few other co-workers mentioned that they saw me too on the morning nes broadcast. And from what I gather, while no one was paying attention to the content of the news broadcast at the time, all they saw was a few seconds of me shoveling snow.

This isn’t the first time I’ve been on TV or have had people comment about it. But I would like to know why.

What was the story about? Were they critiquing (or making fun of) my form? Were they talking about how a nine-year-old girl could shovel faster than me? (I’ve been sick, you know) Or, rather, were they talking about how my pasty complexion mixes in well with the snow?

Geez, this has made me pretty paranoid.