Christmas aftermath
"The Star Wars Holiday Special" has become a subject of show business legend over the three decades. The broadcast product of combining a hit science-fiction film in theaters in 1978 with the entertainment format and sensibilities of "Donny & Marie" was apparently just as awful as one might think. Thirteen million people tuned in to watch the show during that holiday season of '78, but today, only bootleg video recordings from the period still exist, and they're difficult to come by. January's Vanity Fair describes the catastrophe of that variety hour, which seems to have orbited beyond even the galaxy of satire-- performances ranging from a 10 minute skit with no dialogue involving a wookie holiday party to a lip-synched, special effects-muddled musical performance by Jefferson Starship to a Bea Arthur dance number performed in an alien-inhabited cantina.---
So amusing it's true anecdote from this holiday season: My lady friend sold her Nintendo Wii early this month so that she could buy me a new motorcycle helmet for Christmas, and I sold my motorcycle so that I might buy her a collection of games for her Wii console. We laughed and laughed...
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Salon television critic Heather Havrilesky declares 2008 the year the medium collapsed. She declares, "The TV industry is badly run, and there's far too much big money flashed around every corner for sustainable efforts to take root."
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Follow-up note on a previous post about the lack of African-American hirings in the coaching ranks of college football: My alma mater, Iowa State, introduced its new gridiron coach on Saturday the 20th, five days after being abandoned by its former coach, Gene Chizek. The new man, Paul Rhoads, is a white Iowa native with no previous head coaching experience. Iowa State Athletic Director Jamie Pollard told the Des Moines Register that minority coaches were considered for the post, but he neglected to provide the paper any names of the candidates considered, and university president Gregory Geoffrey said only that it was "(his) understanding that Jamie did it." Is it possible for the hiring process of a six-figure-salaried public position to have any less transparency than this?
posted by CM @ 6:30 PM
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