So, I’m not impressed by Amazon Unbox via TiVo. For starters, the shows aren’t captioned, even though TiVo’s in-house ads and previews always are.
This is an issue because the pilot episodes of Journeyman and Bionic Woman (i.e. the free preview pilots I actually wanted to see) were downloaded sans sound. If I’d paid the insane download rental fee for these, instead of getting a free preview, I would be pretty furious.
It’s a strange omission for TiVo — the captions, not the sound, which is obviously a mistake — since the preview of The Big Bang Theory, a sitcom by the creator of Two and a Half Men that didn’t require any special downloading at all, does have captions. Unfortunately, it also sucks, proving that Two and a Half Men isn’t a fluke.
Ah, well. I’ll just TiVo Bionic Woman and Journeyman like a normal person in a week or two.
At every newspaper I’ve been at, the paper has eventually sponsored some local event and, in return, said event has someone from the paper participate. Usually, that job gets punted to me. It’s led to me riding an elephant in the circus, and this Saturday, I’ll be riding in a plane in the Victor Valley Airshow, along with Hesperia Star reader Michael Hagan.
On the remote chance I go down in flames like Buddy Holly, please have Hollywood make a La Bamba style movie about me starring Jay Mohr.
If you’ve got a TiVo — and seriously, get a TiVo — you can download four NBC pilots for free using the Amazon Unbox video rental feature. I’m not sold on the relatively pricy rental or purchase system for the most part (why would I want to download a movie for the same price as a DVD that I won’t have a hard copy of, exactly?), but free is a hard price to beat.
The pilots are:
- Bionic Woman
- Chuck
- Journeyman
- Life
I’ll report back after we’ve watched them.
Well, Indy4 has a title at last, and I confess to being massively underwhelmed.
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull isn’t evocative of anything mythic like the ark or the holy grail. Still, Indy fighting in the jungles of it-was-only-filmed-in-Hawaii should be cool, and since it’s set in the 1950s, maybe we’ll get to see him going up against KGB instead of Nazis.
And yeah, I’ll still see it, even if I’m worried this will be more Indy2 than Indy3.
Today was the exciting first round of vaccinations — surprisingly, this turned out to not be a hit, as field trips go. Our future dishwasher and garbage-taker-outer is now 24 inches long, and weighs 14 pounds, 2 ounces. He claims not to have the manual dexterity or strength required to load the dishwasher yet.
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