Month: April 2008

Pet Pitches For Coca-Cola

It’s already been over a year since the PBS program The British Beat, hosted by Petula Clark, first aired. Take a look at this video clip I posted, and you’ll see what Comcast analog cable TV looked like, and why I switched to Verizon FiOS digital.

That show wasn’t the first time Pet had been paired, in a sense, with legendary New York DJ Bruce Morrow, aka: Cousin Brucie. Pet did some radio spots for Coca-Cola in the sixties, with Cousin Brucie doing the intro.

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I know that Pet greatly admires the late Dusty Springfield, but as a kid I had a hard time recognizing Dusty’s new songs. Versatile to a fault, is how I would now describe her work. In this regard Springfield was similar to Bobby Darin.

Petula Clark, on the other hand, has a distinctive and immediately recognizable sound that’s all her own, whether she’s belting out a pop tune or a love song. She’s done it all, from small French cabaret performances to lavish Broadway productions. For myself, growing up when I did, Pet represents the same thing the Beatles do — the absolute finest in popular music.

Problem

As I feared would happen, the conversion of my site to iPower’s new management platform has made a mess of things. My oldest blog post is now my newest. AUGHH! If you click on the individual categories you should be all right. I’ll start the troubleshooting process….

UPDATE: Indeed, there’s been an update. A big one. WordPress is now the absolute newest version, which seems to have fixed the problem. It was no surprise this update was necessary, but I would like to say that the iPower support guys confirmed this for me, in a matter of minutes. So kudos and not brickbats to them.

The only casualties I’ve spotted so far are the “Contact” and “Gallery” pages on the navigation bar, and that seems to be a problem with the theme. I should be able to fix that with some minor code edits, or maybe I’ll finally try a new theme. Please let me know what quirks and blow-ups you come across. Hopefully no blow-ups!

UPDATE update: Well, what I just did seemed to have fixed the navigation bar problem. So if you were hoping I’d pick a new theme, you’ll just have to wait! 😉

Mentos Moment

Click to enlargeYou’ve perhaps, if not probably, seen videos of what happens when Mentos candies are dropped into bottles of diet cola. The reaction is due to the carbonation, and diet soda is better because it isn’t sticky. There’s now a Geyser Tube™ kit you can buy that will make it possible to waste some Mentos and a bottle of soda from a safe distance for ten seconds of excitement. Eric and his cousins Sarah, who pulled the string, and Kate, who complained the demonstration wasn’t very exciting, demonstrate.

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I’m glad Eric took the video in front of the garage. This gives me a chance to tell you that Glenn, our contractor, is visiting again, but there’s no big project like last year, when he remodeled the porch. In a few days the bit of vinyl that’s above the garage door will be gone, replaced with cedar shingle, and that chimney will be removed. It belonged to a wood stove that was gone long before we bought the house ten years ago.

Pratt Garage

Media Matters

Having been, in a relatively small way, in both the broadcast and print media, I’m fascinated by the blurring effects the Internet has had between these industries. Newspapers have been hit the hardest, and they’re doing what they can to adapt, mostly by taking advantage of the Web.

One innovation is to use blogging software, so letters to the editor can now be comment threads. Another approach is to add video. The suburban paper here, The Metrowest Daily News, posts videos on YouTube that are relatively rough, but servicable. Some are interviews, while others capture events, such as this suspicious truck fire at a Bose (the Wave Music System) Corporation parking lot.

Larger newspapers, such as The Boston Globe, are now posting slickly-produced videos to complement their feature stories. The video below goes with the story at this link, and I think it does a good job of helping to get the writer’s point across.

By the way, as I’ve pointed out before, the newspaper business had decades of warning that changes were coming. The very thing that was a great burden and expense, the printing and distribution of paper, was also a primary reason (along with literacy) for the success of newspapers, because it gave them control over access.

Papers liked to promote the idea that a single copy would be read by more than one person, but of course they preferred that not too much of that went on. Readership is only a guess, while circulation is a known number, and it’s always better to sell more copies.