• În cele ce urmează vom analiza ale cui sunt cele mai mari şanse de a câştiga trofeul de “vedetă” a fabricii de staruri. Bineînţeles că ne este greu a ne pronunţa, întrucât în concurs rămân tot mai puţini. Şi pe săptămână ce sunt eliminaţi, se întâmplă şi să rămână chiar cei mai buni (mă rog cu excepţii, poate).

Deci să revenim la ale noastre. La prima vedere, se pare că, pe un forum de discuţie, vizitatorii spun că reale şanse de câştig le are Alexandru, Vasile, Dibo şi Adriana, Gloria, Stela. Pe de altă parte, şansele, se pare le surâd şi lui Stela, Vasile sau Fatima. Chiar dacă ar părea oarecum straniu, fiindcă fusese condamnat la eliminare de nu ştiu câte ori, alţii îi oferă şanse şi lui Nicon. “Dima, Alexandru, Gloria, dar dacă sincer acum mă gândesc că şi Nikon poate ajunge în finală, cu toate că primul concert a fost dezastruos, se observă o creştere majoră şi nu se ştie ce va fi până la sfârşit” spune Andrei Ţurcanu.

Svetlana Prigală, fidelă emisiunii “Fabrica de Staruri” menţionează că “pe locul I i-aş pune pe Alexandru şi Gloria, iar pe Stela, Adriana şi Dima pe locul II. Aceştia trebuie să muncească mult, mai cu spor”.

“Cu siguranţă că în final va rămâne Alexandru Manciu” spune Maria, fiindcă, crede ea, acesta este unicul care are cea mai mare experienţă “de scenă” şi asta contează cel mai mult pentru a susţine un concert sau a face show pe scenă. Tot după Maria, “Stela, Gloria, Vasile, Dima sunt cei care au cele mai bune voci din concurs şi, cred eu, au falsat cel mai puţin până acum”. Cristina Bejenari crede şi ea că Alexandru are cele mai mari şanse de a câştiga, dar ea personal nu este de acord cu acest lucru. “Să fim serioş, de la începutul proiectului a fost clar că câştigător va deveni Alexandru Manciu. Cântă destul de bine, nu arată rău, dar ar trebui să ofere şansa şi altora. Nu-i este oare de ajuns anii petrecuţi la Tanti Ludmila Show şi la conservator? Ruşine Alexandre!”.

Pe de altă parte, mai mulţi sunt de părere că în acest concurs este totul de mult decis. Astfel, toţi arată spre Alexandru ca fiind preferatul tuturor, inclusiv al juriului şi al producătorilor.

Oxana Parasciuc la fel ne spune acelaşi lucru: “Şi eu cred că Sandu are toate şansele şi este practic unicul care nu a avut niciun eşec… Adriana, de asemenea, e bună! Dar Vasile? De acord, are voce bună, ştiu pentru că am avut ocazia să-l cunosc înainte de acest show… dar nu ştiu de ce îşi doreşte să rămână în umbră, atât în casă, cât şi pe scenă. Are nevoie de curaj şi  trebuie să-şi dea frâu liber vocii”.

Concluzionând, zicem şi noi că cele mai mari şanse de a câştiga grandiosul show “Fabrica de Staruri” de la Prime le are Alexandru Manciu, Vasile, Adriana şi Stela sau Fatima.

Well this is awesome news. In New Zealand Prime TV channel is doing a special airing of the Mythbusters MacGyver Special and are then following it with both parts of the MacGyver double episode “Legend of the Holy Rose”.

Of coarse the whole reason for this is because of the late start of the rugby game between New Zealand and Australia. So it’s very likely that this MacGyver “event” will get a bigger than usual audience as the rugby fans settle in to wait for the game to start.

I’m not sure Legend of the Holy Rose is the best episode to bait any new fans with, but it is one of the 2 major episodes mentioned in the Mythbusters special, and I would assume that and the fact that it’s a 2 parter, so fills the 2 hour time slot, was the reason it was chosen over the other major mentioned single episode “Pilot”.

Well Saturday again, and Adam is at his keyboard preparing the Saturday Rant, which appears a little later this week as Mrs Smith and Adam were away overnight celebrating Mrs Smith’s birthday.

Now there is as usual no shortage of matters to rant on about.

First up this week

Stupid 1:Prime TV and ourselves

Prime TV need their managerial heads examined to see if there are any brains inside.

Fancy running an advert such as they did on that billboard promoting a new programme, viz:-

“Advertising agency seeks clients — all business considered, even from Jews.”

Adam knows it was meant to be a lampoon, but in today’s politically correct world, especially in NZ which is amongst the most PC places in the world what were they thinking of?

Actually what makes Adam as cross as the crassness of the ad, which was in poor taste and not even with the virtue of being funny, is the fact that in NZ one would be unlikely to get away with swopping Maori for Jew, because of the PC way we behave.

The fact is in the 1950s and 1960s it is a regrettable fact that there was a noticeable thread of anti Semitism in parts of American business. The series the billboard is promoting is set in the 1960s. In fact such attitudes probably did exist.

Indeed, Adam can recall reading American newspaper articles in the 1980s referring to holiday resorts which found favour with ‘ a certain kind of new Yorker’ code for Jew – e. g in the Catskills.

It is hard to imagine anyone writing a book today on the advertising business as Jerry Della Femina did and titling it:-

From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor: Front Line Dispatches from the Advertising Wars

We have today become so precious and sensitive someone would be bound to complain, especially with a book cover like this:-

Secondly

Stupid 2:Electoral Commission and discretion

Now Adam does not agree with the EFA, but at present the EFA is the law of the land. It would appear that the Electoral Commissions interpreting the law in a manner which may not be within it’s purview. That is, it is exercising a discretion which it may well not have.

This has only come to light it would appear, as a result of the National Party court action, though it may have emerged later on.

Some days ago Adam selected this quotation of the words of Abraham Lincoln:-

Let me not be understood as saying that there are no bad laws, nor that grievances may not arise for the redress of which no legal provisions have been made. I mean to say no such thing. But I do mean to say that although bad laws, if they exist, should be repealed as soon as possible, still, while they continue in force, for the sake of example they should be religiously observed.

Abraham Lincoln – 16th President of the USA

Lincoln was absolutely correct. The law should be complied with whilst is is the law.

All cases which appear to be breaches should be referred to the police for action, not treated as technicalities or as part of a settling down phase.

It will then be up to the police to decide if discretion should be applied.

The actions taken by the Police should be scrutinised as well to see if there appears to be any apparent bias.

The fact that an unelected group of government appointees is interpreting the law is quite wrong.

The Electoral Commission should be asked to detail all instances where it has used discretion and all instances of non compliance should be passed to the Police for action.

Apart from anything else the resultant publicity from Police investigations of the probable myriad of breaches will likely hasten the demise of this very bad piece of law. Further, Adam is of the view that the majority of those pinged for breaching the law will be Labour MPs and party officials.

Thirdly

Stupid 3:NZ Herald labelling upgrade of National Library as pork

Adam has enjoyed the NZ Herald’s pork meter, but he thinks that some items it has labelled as political pork are not in fact pork.

It might be possible to quibble over prioritisation of some spend, but Adam is of the view that the money allocated to for example upgrading the facilities of the National Library is not political pork.

Adam considers that the pork meter would have more impact if the items on the list were chosen more carefully.

There is a danger that by putting some legitimate items on the list it is harder to attack the real pork.

Fourthly

Stupid 4: Wellington Councillor Iona Pannett

This woman wins the ‘Stupid of the Week’ Award for her insulting and ignorant remarks likening making a tagging vandal wear a pink vest to the indignities inflicted by the Nazis on homosexuals.

She brought down on her head a myriad of comments in the press, on blogs and a Dominion Post editorial today, which said:-

Likening the actions of those who make criminal offenders wear a pink vest, while they clean up their scribblings, to those of a regime that murdered millions because of what they were, diminishes the suffering of those millions and the evil of those who killed them.

Ms Pannett expresses much concern for the feelings of those who might make an association between pink vests and homosexuality but does not appear to see that any could be offended by her implicit linking of Constable Gommans and Heinrich Himmler.

If she is so well disposed towards these criminal vandals perhaps she can invite them to go and tag her home, as opposed to vandalising someone else’s property.

Fifthly

Stupid 5: David Parker

The hydro lakes are falling, an old asbestos ridden power station is brought back into service, business cuts back on power usage and David Parker appears to be in denial.

Murray Web – Stuff – 29 May 2008

Blind Freddie can see that there is a danger of power outages this winter. We should have started conservation measures weeks ago.

Adam thinks Parker has been grossly irresponsible in not starting a conservation campaign before now.

Of course, Parker has been desperately hoping for rain. Why, well he does not want to have to tell the public to save power in the winter of an election year, does he?

Actually Adam thinks this film is as biased in one direction as An Inconvenient Truth is in the other.

The reason Adam is posting this copy of the Prime ad from the HoS is because so many people have complained about the programme even before it screens.

That really gets up my left nostril with a vengeance.

Adam has seen the film previously.

I’ve long been an advocate for distributing TV over the internet. There are those that say there’s already a perfectly good medium for TV, it’s called “television”, and there’s no need to bother with this pesky new medium.

They’re morons and we should not bother ourselves with them any longer.

OK, that’s a bit harsh. What they’re talking about (as far as I can tell) is that watching TV on a computer is not a good experience and I’ll agree to that. They also seem to be people who, for the most part, don’t actually watch TV so they don’t see the point to downloading TV shows online.

That’s cool – it would be boring if we were all the same. But I do like TV. I spend a lot of time with my TV and I don’t like watching TV on my computer (small screen, annoying chair) either. So I don’t. I burn it to disk/download it to a thumbdrive/ wireless connect it to the back of my big screen plasma TV (well, I would if I had one).

The point about TV on the internet is not that I can watch it on a poky screen, it’s that I can watch any episode of any given TV show whenever I fell like it, rather than waiting for a TV network I can pick up to air it. With ads. And with edits. When it suits them. Y’know, later.

Case in point, TVNZ’s decision to break The Sopranos with four episodes of the penultimate series left to screen. Why? Who cares. I don’t, and I wasn’t alone in being outraged by this. So I voted with my mouse and watched them online.

A word about watching TV online – it used to be tricky with all those P2P file sharing apps to download and torrents to seed and so on. Not any more. First, who can be bothered and second, the ISPs are all busy blocking/shaping/throttling the ports that P2P run on.

Joox, on the other hand, does not use different software. It’s a highly illegal website that simply points visitors to illegally downloaded TV and movies. This is bad.

It’s also good, because it means I can simply stream the show I want, save it as a DIVX file and watch it with any free DIVX player I like. Because it’s just a website, it transmits data back and forth over the usual ports so suspicious ISPs can’t do much about it.

I have downloaded and watched the latest series of Doctor Who and Battlestar Galactica, and will no doubt get the new Bionic Woman (just for old time’s sake), Life on Mars series two (why wait) as well as The Professionals and The Sweeney (I was too young to watch it first time round). I’d do the same with The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio series if I could find it and, here’s the catch, I’d pay for it as well because frankly I think all these shows are worth watching and keeping and I can’t be arsed waiting for TVNZ or Prime or TV3 to get its act together, realise the AC Neilsen set-top box system of ratings for viewership numbers is fatally flawed and start branching out beyond games shows/cooking shows/reality shows/”blockbuster movies” we all saw years ago and the news.

Today I see this story in the New York Times and thought, “Almost, but no. Still getting it wrong.”

I don’t want to watch a show in eight minute segments on my PC via MySpace. I want to watch a full-length episode delivered to me by whatever means I want and watched from my over-stuffed recliner in the lounge.

Instead, I think the internet approach will work well for two extremes – shows like Top Gear which have a worldwide following and shows like Firefly which didn’t gel with the network.

Top Gear has around half a billion viewers worldwide. If everyone one paid a dollar an episode … well, let’s just say Clarkson could buy the Isle of Man and possible the Isle of Dogs as well and turn them both into his own personal race tracks.

Top Gear is an established brand that would not only survive but, I think, flourish in an online-only world.

The other end of the spectrum is Firefly, the show that Fox (bastards) cancelled after half a series because they didn’t get it. Joss Whedon went on to make a movie instead of season two but frankly I’d rather he’d gone online and made the shows to air via the ether. I’d have paid, and so would enough people (I believe) to have made it worthwhile. I’d even have bought the DVDs as well, because there’s something visceral about holding an entire series in your hands.

So, early days yet, but one thing’s for sure: the network’s hold over the viewer has gone the way of the dinosaur (much like the video shop). However, just like the dinosaur (and the video shop) network TV stumbles on, convinced it’s still alive and vital and completely oblivious to the fact that its head has been cut off.