Jenn, who is a big Bea Arthur fan (probably the only 30 year old who can say that), recently rented this DVD set from Netflix. It’s a bit dated, but still very funny stuff.
But, wow, how many spin-offs did All in the Family have? The Jeffersons, Maude, Good Times, Archie Bunker’s Place I knew, but Wikipedia also says there were three more. Norman Lear is like the Chris Claremont of sitcoms.
I admit, I was nervous about Joss returning to Buffy. Not because I haven’t been eager for his return to the Buffyverse, far from it. But I didn’t really love Angel (too campy, too many cheap-looking sets, too much soap opera, too much focus on sunlit fantasy instead of gloomy horror) and didn’t know which Joss we were going to get here.
It turns out that Season 8 holds up to the best of the original series and is substantially better, in pacing, theme and tone, than the last few seasons. We jump forward in time (apparently about a year) from the 2003 end of the series, find out how much of what we thought we knew about Buffy’s fate from the final season of Angel was true and immediately plunge into a new saga that both spins out of what’s come before and stands alone as something new and different.
The dialogue is letter-perfect, as it should be, the art is almost perfect (Jeanty, strangely, can’t draw a recognizable Andrew, and it took a phone call sequence for me to figure out who he was supposed to be) and Joss uses the unlimited special effects of comics to give us otherworldly menaces with nary a rubber suit in sight.
The worst part of this TPB is that the wait for the next volume will be so long. But that’s a good problem to have.
Unreservedly recommended to fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
One of my favorite new songs of 2007, although it’s very different from their last album, which I loved. Perhaps unsurprisingly, iTunes isn’t selling a copy of the music video. (Apple seems a little strangely prudish at times about what they sell through their iTunes store.)
Here’s those lyrics:
You’ve got the money maker
You’ve got the money maker
This is your chance to make it
Out out out oh yeah
You’ll get out out out oh yeah
You’ve got the money maker
They showed the money to you
You showed them what you can do
Showed them your money
Make you get out out out oh yeah
You’ll get out out out oh yeah
You are the money maker
She wants to overtake you
You know you wanna make her
Show her your money maker
She said out out out oh yeah
She said out out out oh yeah
You get out out out oh yeah
You get out out out oh yeah
And deep in my hands
I will if you want me to
She is out out out oh yeah
She is out out out oh yeah
You get out out out oh yeah
You get out out out oh yeah
Newspaper publishers, entering 2008 with some of the worst economic conditions in many years, said Wednesday they hope to bring even more readers – and ad spending – to their Web sites with expanded offerings of news, advertising and video.
The newspaper industry has been struggling as a dismal housing market weighs heavily on real estate and other types of print advertising.
As Donald Graham, CEO of The Washington Post Co., put it: “2007 was not a good year for anybody in the newspaper business.”
But Graham said his company was hopeful about expanding its audience online, particularly as the 2008 presidential election approaches. That, he said, should play to the Post’s strengths in political reporting as well as at the company’s online magazine, Slate.
At McClatchy Co., the nation’s third-largest newspaper publisher by circulation, CEO Gary Pruitt said the company’s online advertising growth was “stunted” in 2007 due partly to one-off factors such as changes to the company’s agreement with CareerBuilder, a recruitment advertising network co-owned by Gannett Co. and Tribune Co.
The executives were speaking at a conference sponsored by UBS.
Chris Hendricks, McClatchy’s head of online operations, called the company’s 0.8 percent growth in online ad revenue in the year-to-date period through October “disappointing,” but said McClatchy was optimistic about converting more of its online traffic into ad dollars next year. In October, he noted, unique visitors to McClatchy Web sites jumped 23 percent over the same month a year ago, to 21 million.
Certainly online is being taken more and more seriously at the Star, Daily Press and the rest of Freedom Communications. New-to-the-site features will be regularly added to the site (Hesperia Star readers can now upload their own videos, for instance) and a redesign may even be in the offing.
Still, it’s a long journey to the healthy and secure online future, and not every paper making the journey (especially those reluctant to make the trip at all) are going to make it to the end.
