“…and as always in parting, we wish you love, peace… and SOUL!”

HuffPo Most Popular List from the Politics Home Page the morning of 12/18

Kinda hit me that Barbara Walters annual special to honor famous people for being especially famous over the last 365 days was one of the predecessors to those stupid “most e-mailed” or “most popular” lists on news sites. Except these lists are much more pervasive. It’s fitting Walters critique of the Kardashians as being talentless and famous just for being welcoming of fame (admitting that the K’s are not that fascinating) is in HuffPo’s version of this stupid list.

• Other dining options:
• Spectrum Grille, an upscale restaurant
• Broad Street Bullies Pub
• PBR Bar & Grill, a country-western themer based on Professional Bull Riders; Tex-Mex cuisine served during the day and a country & southern rock party at night (featuring a mechanical bull)
• Victory Beer Hall, featuring beer hall-style tables, a stage for live indoor entertainment, and a 2,000 square-foot patio complete with a fire pit and a unique panoramic view of the Philadelphia skyline.
• And free parking on nonevent nights!

Via Philly Live!? No, Xfinity Live! | Philadelphia Inquirer | 12/15/2011

The thing about these bars is that sporting events are usually done before the Broad Street Line is closed for the day so that all of us drunk sports fans who live in the city or near a suburban Regional Rail station can hop on a train and not drunkenly drive home. If they plan on opening a bunch of bars that will be open until 2AM, they probably need to consider extending full transportation schedules to and from the stadium to 3AM.

A show is a feature of a network’s lineup. A season is a release, when a show goes on hiatus (aka a feature disappears) at minimum an explanation is needed. Community is a show, each season, that has had some of the best episodes of any TV show I have seen in the last few years. This season is no exception (“Remidial Chaos Theory”, shown in parallel timelines above, is fun to watch every time).

Putting aside the fact that NBC didn’t even acknowledge the series in their lengthy release discussing Midseason 2012, let’s look at the bright side. At least it wasn’t moved to Saturdays… right?

[..]

While it would have been nice if NBC had included a mention of the series to give fans some indication of what they’re thinking, at least they haven’t cancelled it (yet) or sentenced the comedy to some other night on television. Short of airing it via picture-in-picture over episodes of Law & Order: SVU, it’s unlikely that the series will score more viewers on any other night besides Thursdays. Aside from cancellation, the worst case scenario would be for NBC to do to Community what CBS almost did to Rules of Engagement in sentencing it to Saturday night.

It seems NBC feels they have another Friday Night Lights. And they are planning on splintering the viewer base like they did with that critically acclaimed drama even more by doing webisodes, some kind of alternate asynchronous delivery based upon the television provider (Directv, Comcast, Time Warner, etc.) you use.

But at least with Friday Night Lights there was warning. With Community, nothing. Just a mid-season update with the show conveniently disappeared. It’s weird that 3.49 million/week is not even worth a pro-active blurb unless you again consider, we are not the customer, we are the product.

In my opinion our watching eyes would best be served to advertisers on tier 2 cable or special on demand delivery (eg Hulu Plus, Netflix or provider based on Demand). Comedy Central, USA, TNT and TBS have been able to support wide variety of niche shows of varying degrees of the critical acclaim spectrum. The NBC Universal family has plenty of options. Nothing wrong with that if it allows creators of shows like Arrested Development and/or a Community to have less pressure to be crowd pleasers and affords them more freedom to grow the characters past two and a half seasons of development.

Heavy D and the Boyz - Living Large (album cover)

It was all a dream
I used to read Word Up magazine
Salt ‘n’ Pepa and Heavy D up in the limousine
Hangin pictures on my wall
Every Saturday Rap Attack, Mr. Magic, Marley Marl

-Notorious BIG, Juicy

Dwight Myers aka Heavy D died of pneumonia related complications on Tuesday in his home. A damn shame. Heavy D was universally respected and he was last of the “regular life” rappers. They didn’t have to be the hardest, the illest, the richest or the most gangsta. I could play most of his music in front of my parents without getting my tape collection broken (Mom did stomp out my whole tape drawer after my little bro had found my DJ Quik tape…for millennials: tape drawer smashed = someone deleting mp3 library by smashing the computer it’s on..pre-cloud. nevermind). Miss this hip-hop, but it’s been A&R’ed out of existence (yes consolidation of radio stations kills music’s breadth and rap’s diversity because gangsta is the biggest bang for the buck). My all time favorite Heavy D video…Nuttin But Love:

As a 16 year old. The women in this video. Damn. Chris Tucker calling out the Noxema girl FTW.
Final Interview with Tim Westwood:

Detroit is winning right now.