A calendar hangs crookedly on the side of a refrigerator. In the top flap picture, a wide-eyed kitten clings desperately by its two front paws to a tree branch. Below is the grid for February 2009. The 17^th is sloppily circled in what appears to be red lipstick.

Suddenly the front door to the house bursts open. Dick Cheney, dressed in his hunting vest and safari hat and carrying a shotgun, strides purposefully into your living room. He pumps, aims and fires. A deafening blast rings out.

Cut to an old boxy analog TV, its tube reduced to smoking, smoldering and sparking shards of greenish glass and wiring.

Cut back to Cheney. He's grinning his twisted grin that lo...Read More

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Anynet. Aquos Link. Bravia Theatre Sync. Easylink. EZ-Sync. NetCommand. Regza Link. RIHD. Simplink.

Brand names for unified multicomponent remote-control systems, right?

Nope. They're lies.

In case you don't recognize the names, they are company-specific schemes enabling HDMI-connected components to talk to each other. Press "play" on a compatible DVD player, for instance, and the HDMI-connected A/V receiver and HDTV automatically switch to their correct settings.

But these clever trademarked sobriquets imply that each is a proprietary system, that only connected components from the same manufacturer speak the same digital language.

But these are not proprietary systems. They all converse in CEC, Consumer Electronics Control, a standardized set of HDMI-enabled control protocols.

According to Steve Venuti, president of ...Read More

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Since we're in the TV business, it's doubtful you know this week is TV Turnoff Week. And if you knew, you probably have the same visceral reaction about TV Turnoff Week as a KFC executive would have upon hearing about a visit from PETA.

How do I know about TV Turnoff Week? I heard about it on the radio. You can cut the irony with a rabbit ear antenna.

Irony aside, the whole idea of turning off your TV for a week is beyond absurd on a more levels than the set of "Deal or No Deal."

Before we get to the absurdity, where does this TV Turnoff idea come from?

TV Turnoff Week is brought to you by the Center for Screen-Time Awareness (CSTA), formerly the TV-Turnoff Network. Founded in 1994, CSTA describes itself as a "nonprofit organization that provides tools for people to live healthier lives in fun...Read More

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You tell your wife you're going to complete that honey-do chore. You know she doesn't believe your bored "I'll get to it" response as you lie sleepy and askew on your sofa savoring a Bud. And she knows that you know she doesn't believe you.

So she nags … er, reminds you. Constantly. And the longer you lie on the sofa not doing what she wants you to do, the more intense and frequent the nag … er, reminding, becomes. Finally, the remind … oh, forget it – the nagging – becomes worse than the actual task. So you put the game on pause, pull on a pair of pants and sneakers and, muttering obscenities under your breath, you crankily complete your assigned task.

Kevin Martin is a terrible wife.

At CTIA earlier this month, FCC chairman Martin ...Read More

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As I was saying, the federal government has harvested (so far) $19.56 billion from the analog TV spectrum auctions last week.

But only $1.15 billion has been allocated to the converter-box program.

I said this was wrong that the government should be piling up these profits and then making consumers pay even a few dollars to buy a converter box, and I was right.

Or, at least Rep. Rick Boucher (D-Va.) agrees that I'm right.

"I do not believe there will be enough money dedicated for the purchase of these converter boxes," Rep. Boucher told me earlier this week. "At the current pace of demand for the boxes, the initial fund, designed to fund coupons for 30 million converter boxes, will be exhausted Aug. 1." Boucher told me he and others lobbied long and hard to fund...Read More

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This is not a blog. Oh, the tab on top of the HTML box that encloses these many musings is labeled "Blogs." Someone at TWICE uses a "blog tool" to post these musings (apparently I'm not trusted to post without someone first reviewing my rants).

...Read More

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Okay, now I'm REALLY teed off.

First, sorry for the fortnightly gap in my submissions here. I was laid low with the flu. All the ideas that usually flowed from my subconscious through my fingertips flowed instead in a more physical form from my sinus cavity through other facial orifices in volumes that caused Kimberly-Clark's stock to peak temporarily.

My temperature had dipped to normal, but rose precipitously close to blowing off the top of my head when I read Thursday night's lead story on CNN.com — the lead story, mind you &sh...Read More

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In my in-flight quasi-groggy semi-sleep state, I saw Sony executives here in Vegas at the Sony line show strolling gaily a foot off the ground, sporting giddy Gene-Kelly-dancing-around-the-light post-singing-in-the-rain grins.

But there has been no waltzing, twisting or voguing on the HD DVD grave. Sony's chief marketing officer Mike Fasulo noted that Toshiba's HD DVD abandonment announcement was good for employee morale, but that for most Sony executives who knew what was going on post CES and Warner Brothers, the announcement was anti-climactic.

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It's now T-minus one year to the analog TV turnoff. And the national media has finally woken up to the post-Katrina FEMA-like boondoggle the turnoff is likely to become.

Over the weekend, USA Today posted a story called "Campaign tries to clear up digital TV signal confusion," citing "reports of massive consumer confusion." The reporter names just one such report – a December survey conducted by Consumer Union that other outlets had reported on when the survey results were announced more than two weeks ago.

To recap (and to save you a click), the Consumer Union su...Read More

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A staple of late-night comedians is the off-beat news story. TV's Craig Ferguson usually shows a printed version of the outrageous story to prove its veracity, then sarcastically adds, "And if it's printed, it must be true."

This, obviously, is a well-deserved poke at the press, which revels in printing (or posting) the salacious over the significant, contorting context or creating headlines to focus on the spectacular aspects of a story at the expense of more complex and important information, all to attract attention. Tabloids revel in posing provocative questions in front page headlines, i.e. "Is Britney Spears A Man?", "Can Stuffed Animals Kill Your Children?", or "Is George Bush An Alien?" only to refute these self-created 72-point headline accusations in the twelfth paragraph of 9-point prose buried on a back-of-the-book jump...Read More

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Dirty movies.

Oh, you scoff. You snigger. You snicker. You sneer.

First, bare in mind (the first of many ridiculous double entendres to come) the adult video industry generates more revenue than the NFL, the NBA and MLB combined, at least according to Farley Cahen, licensing director at AVN, the Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) of the adult world. 

Even though there doesn’t seem to be any hard numbers, estimates are that dirty movie annual revenues are around $12 billion to $13 billion, a little less than $1 billion of that coming from DVD sales. By comparison, mainstream Hollywood generates around $42 billion, an estimated $23 billion of that from DVD sales.

But adult DVD producers also are losing share and profits to the growing availability of online content and see high-def DVD as a way of pulling adult ...Read More

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As a New Yorker, cynicism is my natural state. As a journalist, it's my occupation. So when someone acts solicitously, my bullshit antenna rises Pavlovian-like. Why would someone do something nice for me? What's their angle?

For retailers, the answer of course is simple: they want my return business. But fewer and fewer retailers seem to want my cynical patronage. With a rosy glaze of nostalgia, I recall a smile, basic common courtesy and the idea that the customer, regardless of misanthropic quotient, was always right was the norm. Now it seems retail sales people are either as cynical as I am and act transparently polite because they have to, or behave disinterested as if they're doing me a favor by helping me make a purchase at their store.

Earlier this week, I was remi...Read More

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