Hill Street Blues had an extensive ensemble cast, in some ways large even compared to the primetime soap operas which had arisen in the same era. Dallas may have had more characters, but outside of a small handful everyone else was just incidental with temporary subplots being largely driven by in-and-out guest stars; Hill Street‘s ensemble consisted of as many as fifteen main cast members at a time, with as many as a dozen additional major recurring characters (who themselves often had key recurring storylines) alongside them.
Continue reading “Hill Street Blues Rewatch: Introduction, Part Two”
Author: Jon Morse
If you're here, you probably already know me well enough for me to not have to bother with this.
If not, then get with the program.
Hill Street Blues Rewatch: Introduction, Part One
It was January 15, 1981, five days before Ronald Reagan would take residence in the White House. NBC was still reeling from the disastrous beginning of Fred Silverman’s three-year tenure as network head (Supetrain, anyone?), the loss of inventory resulting from the United States-led boycott of the 1980 Moscow Olympics, and the 1980 writer’s strike. A new show hit the airwaves in the 10:00 time slot. Hill Street Blues was not immediately a hit. In fact, although it would achieve respectable ratings, it would never finish in the top 20, and was consistently beaten in its own time slot by Dallas spinoff Knots Landing on CBS.
Continue reading “Hill Street Blues Rewatch: Introduction, Part One”
Yes: Fly from Here (2011)
Last night, for the very first time — which should utterly shock you, except you probably have no clue about my musical tastes; suffice it to say that I grew up listening to these guys — I listened to Fly From Here, the most recent release by Yes. To be honest, I had no earthly idea the album had ever been recorded until a couple of days ago when a Twitter discussion about the Buggles sent me down the Wikipedia rabbit hole. What had begun as me jotting down some notes about how I felt about this release has instead turned into a nearly three-thousand word essay, so, you know, get ready (or tl;dr, ya bastards). The album was released in 2011, but to talk about it with an audience which may not understand what I’m getting at in the end here, a few paragraphs about things from 1979-1980 are required to put this in proper perspective.
Get Over Yourself, Radio Guy.
Way back in the dark ages, I originally wrote this piece on LiveJournal, and updated it again in 2011 when people started going berserk about Miss USA proclaiming herself a “geek”. There’s a reason I’m dredging it up again now, which we’ll get to in a bit, but first the original piece, slightly updated once again.
Continue reading “Get Over Yourself, Radio Guy.”
The Most Hilariously Inept Phishing Attempt I Have Ever Received.
Seriously. You have got to see this shit. I have changed absolutely nothing except for stripping out a live bullshit link and inserting linebreaks so you don’t have to scroll sideways. (And no, the missing spaces are not because I’m a dumbass and didn’t insert linebreaks correctly. They were already missing.)
YAHOOMAIL.COM,. HOTMAIL. ,GMAIL.,AOL, VERIZON, ATT, SBC,AND ALL CUSTOMER ACCOUNT USERS? Warning: This message may not be fromwhom it claims to be. Beware of following any links in it or ofproviding the sender with any personal information. Learn more Dear Account Owner, It has come to our notice that youremail has not passed the verification/Update process that we arepresently working on. We are currently upgrading our data base ande-mail account center .We are deleting all Old Web mail email accountto create more space for new accounts.. To prevent your account fromclosing you will have to update it so that we will know that it's apresent used account. To complete your account re-confirmation, youmust reply to this email immediately and enter your account details asrequested below. ****IMPORTANT : ********************************************************* Email User-name : EMAIL Pass-word : date of birth.. Country or Territory : Email: **************************************************** ALL YOUR IMPORTANTS SHOULD BE VERIFY ALSO: This updating is compulsory as aresult of our recent server changes. If you fail to update your emailaddress you will soon be unable to receive/send mails.Also your emailwill not be equipped with the latest anti-virus system in our newservers. This will make your email and PC vulnerable to virus attacksfrom the internet. ****HOW TO UPDATE: To update simply reply the above toupgrading admin as appropriate. Failure to do so immediately will leadto SUSPENSION OF YOUR ACCOUNT. Thanks for your co-operation, Web-mail Administrato
Let’s parse.
1. Remember not to provide the sender personal information, which of course is the entire purpose of this phishing attempt. That’s like a panhandler walking up to you with his hand out and saying “Don’t give beggars money, and can I have a quarter?”
2. They’re deleting e-mail accounts. Webmail accounts. At multiple service providers, because you know that someone just has to delete all those old AOL accounts to make room for new Verizon accounts. That’s how businesses operate, right?
3. All your importants should be verify also. All your importants. All your importants. All your importants should be verify also. You have no chance to survive, make your time.
4. Your e-mail will not be equipped with the latest anti-virus system in their newsservers, guys! Well, shit, man. How am I supposed to get all my USENET emails now?
5. Failure to comply will make my PC vulnerable to attacks from the internet, even though if I don’t comply, I won’t be able to get my e-mail, which means my PC won’t download any of the no-longer virus-ridden e-mail, which means… uhh, how will my PC get infected now, exactly? Wouldn’t my inability to access my e-mail actually protect my PC from any possible infection that these cumfarts would have anything to do with? GOD I’M SO CONFUSED.
Seriously, man. You’d have to be a complete fucking dipshit to fall for this one, which come to think of it means these cockbags are probably already reading granny’s emails and whacking off to pictures of your sister. Anyone who actually falls for this phish should be immediately turned into tasty protein cakes.
Manti Te’o: What Probably Happened.
As we all know now, Notre Dame linebacker Manti Te’o had a girlfriend who died, but it turns out she never existed. It’s a ridiculous story, and a lot of people are casting ideas on the water, but oddly I haven’t seen what I think is the most logical explanation of all this mess come from anywhere. This is not reporting; it’s definitely all supposition, and is not based on anything other than what’s already come out. It’s just an attempt to piece this together in the most logical fashion; in short, applying Occam’s Razor to the whole deal.
Imagine that Te’o met a girl online, and things clicked. He’s excited, he’s into it. It’s important to remember that even badass football players can suffer from self-esteem issues, and I don’t think it’s a stretch to suggest that football players known for humility and soft-spoken natures might fit into this category. So maybe Manti hasn’t been, shall we say, overly active with the ladies to this point. Guys his age in that situation… well, they tend to fall in love at the drop of a hat. Even with girls they’ve never met in person who talk to them nicely enough.
(Alternatively, maybe he’s a love addict, which is a thing; the reaction is similar.)
Either way, let’s assume that Te’o is devoted to his internet girlfriend even if he hasn’t met her yet. This isn’t unheard of, and if you’ve had any kind of long-term high-profile internet presence you know someone who’s been in the exact same boat. So his real-life buddies try to get him to hook up with, you know, real-life girls… and he declines. He has to explain why. And eventually, in order to duck away from the jibes of his buddies… at some point, he’s going to have to claim he’s met her. Think about it, and you know that’s the case.
So now, we have a guy who’s starting to build a lie for reasons which are pretty innocuous. Doesn’t make it right, but under the pressure of putting up with college-age friends who can be aggressive with their needling, it’s understandable. You say you’ve met the girl, everything changes. And at this point, Manti still believes it’s real; he’s just fibbed about one little detail.
And then, blam. The internet girlfriend dies. Now, we can argue that he should have seen the signs beforehand. The actual failures to meet when they’d arranged things. The convenient car accident which apparently cut off one scheduled attempt to meet. But is he naive? Well, he’s naive enough to form an attachment to a girl he hasn’t met, so… yes. So when she “dies”… it affects him in a very real way. He legitimately is mourning. Now, bear in mind, he’d lost his grandmother too. The timeline is sketchy, but most versions of it make it clear that he lost his grandmother first, and really that would be enough to get lots of sympathetic media coverage if he was trying to pull one over on everyone for nefarious reasons. So I think it’s reasonable to accept that the week of the Michigan State game, Manti Te’o really felt like he was playing for the memory of two people.
Then things started to unravel. Maybe he never noticed his dead girlfriend retweeting his tweet, but by December the game was lost. He knew. That brings up the final question: why didn’t he come clean then?
Embarrassment. Simple as that. If this had happened to you, would you be jumping at the chance to clear the matter up? Honestly? I’m not saying you wouldn’t, but you can sure understand the incentive. Or lack thereof, more accurately. Ultimately, having perpetrated an innocent lie, I think I would probably be motivated to come clean and explain things; doing so right then and there would have at least left my situation as merely the victim of a con rather than the potential party to one. But I’m not Manti Te’o, and if something like that happened to me it wouldn’t overwhelm Twitter and the media for an entire day (and likely much longer).
The only real hitch in the entire chain here is that Te’o is allegedly close to the guy who, allegedly, set all this in motion. That’s suspicious, but it also doesn’t mean anything. Maybe this dude — whose football career crapped out, remember — didn’t much like Manti. Jealousy, a grudge of some sort, whatever. That’s as reasonable an explanation as a conspiracy.
I could be completely wrong about this. Manti Te’o could be a cynical manipulator of the media. But I think it’s far more likely that he’s a human being who felt shame about having an internet girlfriend (the Anthony Michael Hall in The Breakfast Club jokes are devastatingly on-point here), told a little white lie to relieve the pressure, and then discovered that he was in a situation he couldn’t get himself out of without humiliating himself before an audience of millions.
Fire Donations
A bunch of people have asked if they can provide any assistance in the wake of our Christmas Eve house fire. Taking care of the deductible and any non-covered expenses will be a bit rough on us, so even though I really hate doing this… here it is.
EDIT: The Paypal button is apparently not working, so just do it the old-fashioned way. You can send to jon at jonfmorse dot com.
I appreciate everyone’s concern Monday night. It meant a lot to me and my family. Thank you so much.
The World Continues to Turn.
There’s been a lot of talk about how the NFL and the Chiefs are wrong, greedy, cynical, whatever for going ahead with today’s game in the light of the Jovan Belcher murder-suicide yesterday.
It’s all nonsense. I’m sorry, that’s harsh, and it’s also accurate. Lemme explain why.
If Jovan Belcher were a radiologist at your local hospital, they’d stay open (once any necessary intrusion by the police and crime scene investigators was taken care of). If he were a stocker at Wal*Mart, they’d stay open. If he were a customer service representative for your cell phone company, you’d still be able to call and get support today.
Maybe, if he were an employee of a very small business, they’d close for the day. Maybe. But outside of that, business continues in the face of incidents such as these. Why should the NFL be any different?
Indeed, there are those who might argue that this IS different, because… I don’t know. Because it’s in the news? Because we care more? Because we know, when we get in our cars and drive to the stadium, that something horrible happened and things are surreal whereas when we get in the car to go buy groceries we have no idea that the schlub who put the beans on the shelf three days ago shot himself in the loading dock?
We want the NFL to cancel today’s game because we feel it’s the right thing to do, and we accuse them of being selfish for not doing it. Maybe we should consider this: expecting them to halt business only serves to make US feel better, and in that respect we’re the ones being selfish for demanding they do so.
On the Value of Free.
Years ago, when I was just a snot-nosed wastrel learning how the real world worked, I was managing the second storefront of a small chain (i.e., “two”) of comic shops. My boss, who was the manager of the flagship store, had some very sage advice for me one day.
One day, I asked him why it was that we priced every single back issue, no matter the actual demand, at no less than a quarter over cover price when you could find a lot of the runs we had in stock in someone’s quarter bin. He looked at me with that look you give someone when you’re being extremely patient with them and said to me, “If you price something at a quarter when the cover has a great big ’60¢’ staring them in the face, they’ll figure it’s not worth anything. If it’s got a sticker on the bag with ‘$1.00’ on it, people who actually read the books are more likely to buy them. Trust me, been doing this awhile, and it sounds crazy but it’s true.”
It immediately made sense to me. Sure, we all want deals, and we all think getting something for free is better than paying for it. The catch is, psychologically this only works for things we already know we want and for which we can shop around. If it’s the only place you can get it, and it’s an impulse purchase, the perceived value of the item affects your buying pattern.
The reason I bring all this up is that I have been wondering, half-jokingly, if my blogs would get more traffic if they had ads. I wonder if the fact that I keep them ad-free gives off the impression that I don’t care if people read — or worse, that I don’t think my crap is worth reading. After all, why wouldn’t I try to make some money that costs the reader nothing at all?
I just don’t know if the same background mental processes work for something which is inherently free anyway. Just an odd Sunday morning musing.
A Disturbing Misconception.
I’ve been reading through this paper (it’s a PDF, FYI) on the use of social media by journalists during the Penn State scandal. There’s one thing in here that jumped out at me, though, and it needs addressing.
There’s a section in which the authors discuss the phenomenon of journalists promoting others’ work and expressing surprise that they’d do this. Their premise is that they can’t understand why one journalist would promote another when they’re in competition.
The thing is, with two exceptions (trying to get scoops on immediately breaking news, and potential competition for the same job), they aren’t. Journalists aren’t academics; it’s not a vital journalistic impulse to be the first one to present an idea the way it is in the academic world. For years, journalists — in print as well as online — have nodded to their colleagues’ work. Further, while the market is not infinite, there’s very little concern regarding scarcity, especially in a niche field (albeit a very, very large niche) like sports journalism. If I read a piece by Sara Ganim on the Sandusky investigation, it’s not going to prevent me from reading a piece by Gregg Doyel. We read multiple journalists’ work on the same story for a reason; we want to get multiple viewpoints on a subject. As such, journalists themselves are not in competition with one another on a personal level… and, in fact, quite frequently the act of promoting another journalists’ work is in and of itself a means of promoting the content of one’s own. (By which I mean the journalist promoting the work is often saying either “See, this person agrees with me” or “This person doesn’t agree with me, but our differences generate a valid discussion”.)
Now, news outlets are in competition, which brings up a separate beef I have with the conclusions of this segment of the study. Completely missed in the study is the fact that many of the references to “promoting the competition” the authors refer to are in fact colleagues at the same outlet promoting one another. (For example, during that time frame you might see Brett McMurphy linking to a story by Gregg Doyel; they both worked for CBS at the time.) The study failed to take affiliation into account, and thus assumed all journalists were individual actors when they aren’t.
It’s an interesting piece of research, but hampered both by an inexplicable lack of understanding of the field and by a mistaken belief that journalists behave the same way academics do. Academics are generally a suspicious and paranoid lot, and outside of a given research team are prone to avoid collaboration for fear of having their work co-opted; journalists, on the other hand, are largely a fraternity (especially given their propensity to switch employers), and feed off one another in a symbiotic relationship.
Edit: I forgot another thing here. A lot of the promotion of one journalist by another involved, and involves, columnists directing readers to the reporting of another journalist. Columnists and reporters are two entirely different species, and in fact a columnist directing the reader to initial reporting is, ah, no different than an academic directing readers to previous studies. I’m amazed that connection wasn’t made by this paper’s authors.
Also, I forgot to link the paper in question; that’s now fixed.