Another group with a big image problem turns to the government for help:
Little People of America, at its annual conference in Brooklyn this week, has called for the Federal Communications Commission to ban the use of the word "midget" on broadcast TV.
It's official. As of yesterday, the SciFi Channel is the Siffy Channel:
What's in a name? For the SciFi Channel, which morphs into “SyFy” effective today (Tuesday, 7/7), a new name means a new identity, even if the cable channel is kinda sorta the same as it was before in terms of the shows it airs.
What do you know? Jerry Springer and I agree on something:
He says, "We've been doing this show for 19 years now and I'm really sorry for that. No one had any idea that it would last all these years."
And Springer can't help but cringe when he watches back his very first episode: "That was pretty pathetic but it's not as if it's got any better, it's still awful."
Maybe he should go b
There are those of us who still cling to the "celebrities die in three" myth because guessing who the third might be in any given triad is an interesting way to pass the time. We were cheated out of our game last week when Ed McMahon's death was followed so closely by Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson checking out within hours of each other.
What I learned on Tuesday and Wednesday while collapsed on the couch with a summer cold:
We haven't been able to turn on the TV for the past year without being bombarded by digital-conversion hysteria, and still some people don't get it?
Starting in the morning and going into the night, TV stations across the U.S. are cutting their analog signals Friday, ending a six-decade era for the technology and likely stranding more than 1 million unprepared homes without TV service.
Well, aren't we all just stunned and amazed. With nearly 100 million votes case, underdog Kris Allen has won the eight season of "American Idol"! Phhht.
The entertainment world has been abuzz about Susan Boyle, the Scottish woman who wowed the audience and judges of "Britain's Got Talent." Here's the clip, if you're one of the handful of people who haven't seen it on TV or YouTube.
Finally, the truth about weather forecasting:
Predicting snowfall totals for Colorado Springs is a crapshoot: How far south that precipitation lasts is often anyone's guess. Add to that the potential for a narrow band of heavy snow to suddenly develop and, on Wednesday morning, none of the meteorologists could predict for sure what's going to fall where.
"Here in Pueblo, we could get an inch or 2, or we could get a foot," Magnuson said.
When's the last time you saw anybody smoking on TV, unless it was in an old movie on one of the cable networks? Are smokers going to start feeling like blacks must have in the 1950s, when television producers pretended they didn't exist? Just a passing thought, triggered by:
Smoking in a film? Rate it R, so that no children under 17 are exposed to it.
That idea, at least, is what anti-smoking advocates were promoting at a rally Wednesday evening in Downtown Indianapolis.
