Silver Spa TV Story
Just an update because I wrote about it yesterday with those message board posts.
Kimbo Slice Set to Face Ken Shamrock
If this was Ken Shamrock in the 90’s it might be meaningful. You know, when Ken Shamrock wasn’t 44 and winless over his previous four years? Kimbo Slice is the youtube, backyard sensation who occasionally fights on CBS as a part of the EliteXC branding of mixed martial arts. He might be the scariest looking dude on the face of the planet. He is one part Hulk Hogan, one part Mister T, along with one part of Junkyard Dog. At the same time, he has been pretty humble as he begins his MMA career. He always claims that he has a lot more to learn.
With that being said, is this match set for October 4th on CBS the right stepping stone for Kevin “Kimbo Slice” Ferguson? Is this the equivalent of when the UFC put Brock Lesnar against Frank Mir? Or is it an even lower rent version of that?
Frank Mir had disappeared from the competitive landscape before his fight with Lesnar, mostly due to a motorcycle accident in 2004, but even as of this writing the dude is only 29 years old. Ken Shamrock had a considerably more impressive career than Frank Mir, but the dude is 44 years old now and he hasn’t looked formidable in years.
Shamrock certainly doesn’t look as impressive as he did the day I sold him a set of electric ear and nose hair trimmers in Brookstone in the Copley mall in Boston. (True story. Wrestlemania was in town and Ken was in the WWF now WWE for a shot at the Intercontinental belt. See how I pushed that story in here for no apparent reason?)
Anyway, it should make for an entertaining fight at EliteXC on October 4th on CBS, and it definitely is another step up in opponents for Kimbo Slice. At the same time, it also proves Dana White’s point when he scoffs at Kimbo Slice as a formidable MMA fighter. White is on record as saying that Kimbo Slice is an interesting personality, but that he would get smashed by pretty much any fighter that the UFC has under contract.
There is certainly no way of knowing for sure based on who Kimbo Slice has fought thus far, and Ken Shamrock probably won’t be able to provide any kind of proof one way or the other.
Marketing Companies Should Have Websites
If you pick my name out and call me asking me to be a client for your marketing company, and I ask you what your website is first so I can check you out, you should probably have one. Marketing is kind of a big deal nowadays, and every company’s strategy (and yes, I think I mean EVERY company) should include a website. Even if you are a therapist dealing in technology addiction and how to escape it, you should probably have a website so that those who are addicted to technology will be able to find you with a Google search.
I know that our website is lacking any real good functionality, but it is there. You can find our phone numbers. You can send us email. It is a means to something. I am just saying. I am considerably less likely to employ your agency to market my business if you haven’t embraced the web as a tool to market your own business yet.
So, maybe you shouldn’t call me anymore.
Potty Humor FOREVER
Will this stuff ever not be funny?
Polar Bear Doesnt Need to Flush - Watch more free videos
Sirius-XM Merger Finally Approved
The FCC finally approved the merger of the only two satellite radio services in the country. It is kind of funny that it has taken this long, but we are starting to see the future for this new company. The funny thing is that I am betting it will only have to do with satellites in the very very short term.
The reason? This product.
This, looks like an ordinary wireless router, but it isn’t. This is a mobile wifi router from a company called WAAV. It has been announced already that mobile wifi technology will be available in some of next year’s Chrysler cars. This device grabs the mobile data signals from cellular carriers like AT&T or Sprint and broadcasts it inside your car (and about a 50-100 foot radius outside your car) so you can access the internet on the go. This means laptops, video games, and soon enough wifi radios.
This is an important point because if the internet starts being an accessible network on the road in every car, it will certainly marginalize the need for a lot of satellite technology. All that money that Sirius and XM have spent over the years will seem completely wasted as more and more people stop bothering with satellite antennae.
Then, the new merged Sirius/XM company is no longer anything more than a content company. Instead of selling a technology, they are just selling Oprah, Martha Stewart, Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, NFL Football and Major League Baseball.
Except those last two will probably stop renewing their contracts with Sirius/XM because they won’t need a middleman to broadcast the radio descriptions of their games straight to consumers. So there is one lost selling point for Sirius/XM.
Also, the Sirius/XM music channels will have stiff competition from Slacker and Pandora that use user data to customize radio stations just for you, not to mention iPods which will easily be connected in any car on the road in the next couple of years. As it stands now, I would guess that at least 50% of cars being produced today have MP3 player functionality, at least by way of headphone jack.
It is through this filter that I find all the debate over Sirius/XM so hilarious. These two companies have done an amazing job developing a technology that will be completely unnecessary in a matter of years. As that happens, the content producers will be able to go directly to the consumers more and more, thus marginalizing the need for a company to consolidate talent into a service platform once and for all.
Does this sound like a monopoly to you? It doesn’t sound like a monopoly to me either.
Hat tip to MisterCrunchy, who actually commented on this site well over a year ago that satellite technology was going to be marginalized and obsolete.
The End of An Over-Reaction
Well, folks, the Janet Jackson / Justin Timberlake nipple-gate-pasty-wardrobe-malfunctioning affair is finally over. The date Justin Timberlake attempted to but really didn’t make Janet Jackson “naked before the end of this song” was February 1st 2004. Yesterday, a Federal Court of Appeals struck down the fine against CBS stations nationwide that totaled $550,000, levied by the seemingly toothless FCC. It makes me happy that the legal process played out this way, but the effects have already been so sweeping that the $550,000 is really the least of the country’s problems. This Janet Jackson nipple has caused sweeping puritanical change in the last 4+ years since it all went down because the FCC was able to get the maximum penalty raised from $27,500 per incident to $500,000 per incident.
Let’s count the ways:
- Television had to institute delays in most live broadcasts
- Television producers stopped pushing the envelope on nudity and language in their programming, even after 10 PM
- Radio tightened up their rules about language. It is to the point now where lawyers for CBS have instructed the Opie and Anthony Show that they can’t say “douche bag,” or “scum bag,” but they are allowed to use the word “douche,” and “scum,” individually. The (over)thinking is that the addition of the word “bag” constitutes a “description of a bodily fluid” and thus potential for FCC fines.
- Howard Stern moved to Sirius Satellite Radio at least partially as a result of the climate created by the event. Within a month of “nipplegate” Clear Channel, a syndicator or Stern’s show, removed Stern from its stations, citing raunchy material.
And who knows how many more examples there are of “standards and practices” departments at networks getting out of control with censorship. And this all went down as the result of an event that was EVENTUALLY OVERRULED IN A FEDERAL APPEALS COURT!
That’s just awesome.
How many comedians, entertainers, writers, and other artists have been stifled in the last 4 years, unnecessarily. The people that live on forever generally push the limits of what we are used to seeing. How much farther have we been set back?
Luckily, I don’t think we have been set back. While these companies were overreacting to the FCC and all the mock outrage over this incident, it has caused other avenues to thrive. Today, some of the most popular shows in the country have existed on HBO, Showtime, FX and other cable outlets that don’t censor themselves. While the networks have spent time nitpicking show creators on their networks, we have had the pleasure of watching the final seasons of The Sopranos, The Wire, Weeds, Dexter, Lucky Louie, Big Love, Rescue Me and what is reportedly the only show that Comedy Central doesn’t censor, South Park.
While the satellite radio companies seem set to merge because of negative economic realities facing the two companies, it isn’t a referendum on the content that the companies tend to put out. It is more a statement about the delivery method that the companies bought into with satellites. Still, as the first “cable” networks for radio, XM and Sirius have thrived content-wise with Opie and Anthony, Howard Stern, Ron and Fez, and others who all do uncensored talk. In addition XM and Sirius have channels that play songs and comedy unaltered for language like terrestrial radio has to play them.
I would like to think that the tightening of rules has actually pushed people to these alternative outlets over the years. So while I think that the reaction to this event was stupid, maybe we will look back at it one day as the catalyst that the U.S. needed to push the boundaries in different directions to places outside of the ridiculous realm of “indecency” that is created and monitored by a governmental group that has almost no checks and balances.
It may have taken more than 4 years, but there is some sense of justice in seeing these fines overturned.
Will Ferrell Stars in The Landlord
Apparently everyone in the world has seen this video already, but nobody ever linked me to it. Well, I will go out on a limb and figure that I can turn some people onto a website called “Funny Or Die.” Will Ferrell makes videos for the site like this one.
Being Informed Sucks
I was watching Real Sports with Bryant Gumbel this weekend and it just totally ruined my day. I knew that they were doing a whole segment on dog fighting and I knew there could be brutal footage, but I figured I wanted to be somewhat informed about it anyway. I am not sure why I felt the need to be informed about something that happens in such a minute percentage of the time around the country, but I did.
And think about that for a second. How much dog fighting can possibly be taking place around the country? Granted it is an awful thing, but with basically less than a handful of people nationwide participating in this activity, the amount of time that we have spent talking about it as a nation is completely disproportionate.
Anyway, I was watching the segment on Bryant Gumbel’s HBO show and the story hit a breaking point for me where I just couldn’t watch it anymore. It is one thing to have all these animals bred to fight for money. How these “Dog Men” get their pit bulls trained to fight like that is where these people truly hit their lowest points. As I am watching they start talking about how these trainers will kidnap people’s pets right out of the backyard, take them to their fighting pits, duct tape their mouths shut and allow their killer pit bulls to just ravage someone’s pet.
This didn’t totally surprise me, but then Real Sports showed a clip of one of these helpless animals basically using the black lab defense pose where they roll on their back, while a pit bull systematically circled it and dismantled someone’s pet.
After about three seconds of this clip, I looked at my remote, hit the stop button and erased the show from my DVR. But, the damage has already been done. Now, I have to think about this horrendous thing all the time, even though the occurrence of dog fighting, nationwide, is a really statistically insignificant type of occurrence.
Being informed sucks.
Digg Is a Funny Place
Digg users enjoyed the article. Except for the ones who are pissed at the use of the term CPU to describe a computer controlled opponent with artificial intelligence.
So then mayhem ensues. Geek computer guys vs. Geek gamers who have always referred to the artificial intelligence in games as “the CPU player.”
I don’t know which side of the fence that I am supposed to be on, but the comments on the story are hilarious. Keep in mind that when a comment isn’t popular it gets “Digged down” and you might have to click “show comment.”
XM Radio Expands Technology Lead Over Sirius
While people could spend all day arguing which satellite radio company has better content (ie Howard Stern (Sirius) vs. Opie and Anthony (XM); Martha Stewart (Sirius) vs. Bob Edwards (XM); Eminem (Sirius) vs. Snoop Dogg (XM); NFL (Sirius) vs. MLB (XM) etc.) there is one place where the competition between the two upstart radio companies has been relatively one-sided. That category is the radios, or more specifically, portable radios where XM’s newest two offerings are superior to anything Sirius has on the market.
(In the interest of honesty, I am an XM subscriber and based a large portion of my decision between the two companies on the technology and Opie and Anthony.)
SIRIUS : S 50 Portable
First, let me tell you what these two XM offerings are up against from rival company Sirius. The S50 boasts the ability to load up MP3’s and record Sirius programs for listening at a later date. It sounds a lot cooler than it really is, though. The S50 is incapable of picking up satellite signals when it isn’t connected to its docking station. So, anything that you listen to on the player will have to be recorded first, before you can listen to it on the go.
Oh, and if you are looking to grab a whole day’s worth of talk radio, you can forget it. The player is handcuffed with restrictions on scheduled recordings. You can have a total of 20 scheduled recordings, but they are limited to 2 hour recording blocks. Does this all sound as confusing to you as it does to me? Combine this with the fact that the FIRST GENERATION of portable XM radios can play content live without the need for a docking station, and it shows you just how far behind Sirius is from a technological standpoint with their receivers.
XM Radio : Pioneer Inno / Samsung Helix
At this year’s Consumer Electronics Show (CES) XM Radio unveiled two new radios that should be coming out sometime in the spring. Pioneer and Samsung will be making these two radios and they both have the same basic specs. Like XM radio’s first generation of portable receivers (XM2GO) the two new receivers will be able to pick up satellite signals as you are walking around outside. No docking station is needed, which is a huge advantage over the S 50. Also, this generation of receivers has 1 gigabyte of flash memory on-board so that you can record up to 50 hours of XM content.
And unlike the S 50, there are no restrictions on how or what you can record. In fact, XM has made it even easier to capture individual songs. Under the recording options, you can record by song, channel or scheduled session. Apparently the receiver also uses cached audio so that you can catch the beginning of songs when you grab it from the live feed. Also, while I have never used the Napster downloading service for digital tracks, the player uses a “tag” feature that will let you immediately purchase a song you heard on XM from Napster’s online store when you reconnect the player to your computer. You can fill it up with MP3’s that you already own to create a mix of MP3’s and radio content if you wish.
XM Passport Card
If this wasn’t enough to put XM ahead of Sirius, they also announced something called the XM Passport. The XM Passport is a small card that can be plugged in and out of XM-enabled devices. Obviously, without a lot of XM-enabled devices, this will be kind of a pointless product. But imagine having a little card that can go from a docking station in your home, to a slot in your car stereo and to a portable unit so that you can have a traveling subscription from one device to the other. If you don’t know, the satellite subscription is tied to the radio receiver you own. So, if you have one receiver in your living room in a boom box that costs you one subscription. If you have satellite service built into your car on a separate receiver, that costs you another subscription. With this new passport device, XM could really open up a whole new world of convenience that is currently not possible.
The satellite radio wars are definitely not over. Content will always be a huge part of the battle between the two companies. It is also quite possible, and even likely, that the technological lead that XM has opened up isn’t sustainable. After a while, as the technological leaps turn into baby steps, it will be difficult to differentiate the two services on any basis other than content. Until that time though, XM will have a noticeable advantage on at least one battlefield.
(In the interest of honesty, I am an XM subscriber and based a large portion of my decision between the two companies on the technology and Opie and Anthony.)
Sideblog 
- FreeTheAirwaves.org Tuesday, 19 August 2008, 7:51 am
Google has a vested business interest in this project, but I am rooting for them anyway. Google wants to take that unused fuzzy space between TV channels and broadcast internet signals all over the. […] - Browns vs. Giants - Preseason Game 2 Live Blog at WFNY Monday, 18 August 2008, 4:19 pm
The nice guys over at Waiting for Next Year are going to be live-blogging their event in a chat room over at their site. I am a geek, and will be joining them. Come on over. - Dan Gilbert is My Hero Sunday, 10 August 2008, 5:46 am
Cleveland Cavaliers owner on all the LeBron James rumors, ”The reason this thing is where it’s at,” Gilbert said, ”is that we’ve got a bunch of bored, East Coast sports writers who have noth. […] - LeBron to Europe? I Don’t Think So Thursday, 7 August 2008, 4:22 am
So, while the major media continues to plot LeBron’s departure from Cleveland, there is a sane voice out there letting everyone know how unlikely the most outlandish scenarios truly are. - Top Gun 2???!?!?!??!?!? Wednesday, 23 July 2008, 5:50 am
According to reports, the plot outline is, (wait for it) “The idea is Maverick is at the Top Gun school as an instructor — and this time it is he who has to deal with a cocky new female pilot.” - Be Afraid Utah Tuesday, 22 July 2008, 7:26 am
Carlos Boozer is a snake and one of the most dishonorable people in professional sports history. I guess I am not over this just yet. - How much you wanna bet… Thursday, 3 July 2008, 9:18 pm
That this 4-day work week will actually increase the amount of gasoline that these employees will be using? Instead of commuting to work, they will now be going to the grocery store, going to do som. […] - In-Car DVD Players are Stupid Thursday, 26 June 2008, 10:15 am
At least they will be when we get a load of in-car wifi!!!!! (I am such a geek.) - George Carlin is Gone Monday, 23 June 2008, 4:34 am
I once bet a guy in college that I could watch a George Carlin special on HBO without laughing. I did it, but it wasn’t at all easy. There is going to be a void left by Carlin dying. - Accepted Behaviors Tend to Increase Thursday, 19 June 2008, 12:15 pm
If you become too accepting of a condition that you really don’t want to encourage, you might just end up with unintended consequences.
