Congratulations to Julia Collins, the new winning-est woman in Jeopardy! The greatest of all game shows has had its best start of the year ever, between Arthur Chu and Julia, with Brad Rutter’s impressive, and highly lucrative, win in the Battle of the Decades. But Ken Jennings was right when he said that he didn’t think we’d see another string of more than twenty consecutive wins.
Addendum: J! fan SamJay reports that Julia lost on the 10th anniversary of Ken Jennings’ first win.
A very Happy Birthday for the wonderful Prudence Bury-Fuchs! This is a promotional photo with Prue and Terry, her first husband, after they were married and had moved to New York in 1965.
They were promoting the Youthquake fashion campaign, about which I’ll have more later.
There is a new Blu-ray release coming from Criterion of A Hard Day’s Night. I’m very pleased to see that Criterion includes Prue in the cast list.
British Pathé has put 85,000 videos on YouTube, including this one, for all of you youngsters to watch if you don’t understand what all the excitement was about with the Beatles.
Now that Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, is agreeing to pay cable TV providers what I consider to be, in essence, protection money, he’s feeling free to criticize the deals. And he should, because the problem has nothing to do with Netflix using up a lot of ISP bandwidth. It’s the inherent conflict of interest that cable providers have by also being Internet service providers.
Cable TV companies collect the money for HBO subscriptions but they don’t collect the money for Netflix subscriptions. That’s what is driving them crazy. Their extremely profitable business model is falling apart and they’re desperate to force Internet video to be part of the old model. They want to sell the Netflix channel to their customers the same way they sell premium cable TV channels. Well, that just shouldn’t happen, because if the argument is that Netflix is using their bandwidth then they will have to charge every Internet service an additional fee for using the bandwidth, whether or not they compete with their cable TV business — bandwidth that their customers are already paying for.
Edeka is a huge supermarket chain in Germany. I’ll let you look up what “supergeil” means.
