Sephy’s Platzish

If you don’t follow free-to-air TV in Australia (which, if you’re not from there, makes complete sense - I don’t follow the ins and outs of it, but since it has been all over the news, I’ve had some interest in it), you aren’t aware of the storm that is Underbelly. Meg wrote about 9’s changing of the show’s site to basically remove any mention of details of the show.

Why did they change the site?

A judge told them they had to block broadcast of the program into the whole of Victoria because it, apparently, it would influence potential jurors in a trial. Over here, we’d handle that by asking the pool if they had heard of the program and whether or not they had seen it on TV. Why this couldn’t be done in Australia is beyond me - it seems to be something very logical to do, instead of forcing a TV station to nix what turned out to be a very well-watched program, even outside of Victoria.

However, the ridiculousness of the situation doesn’t stop there - shortly after the show aired (as happens with almost every show aired in the US and probably in a lot of other countries as well), someone (or more likely, a group of people) uploaded the show to certain websites - which exact ones they were, I don’t know, but the main sites that I know of did not allow users to post information about the show. As RT from Untwisted Vortex pointed out in his articles - Downloaded Pirated Anything is not Illegal, and Followup to the Previous Article - the followup’s included so that the whole story is there - the only thing that can happen is a civil suit as that is all copyright infringement is (which is what happens when you redistribute a TV show, for instance, on the internet.

Now, of course, it’s in 9’s interest to keep the show out of the hands of Victorians (not so much because of the ban, but because of the lost advertising revenue, I’m guessing), but if you read one story on their own website, they claim that there is an organization who are wanting to bring legal charges against people uploading the show.

Because of one line in that story, some sites that I know of have actually quietly gone away for the time being - when the ruling was handed down, the decision was made that it would be somewhat hands-off, but the vagueness of that one line made the world all blurred, and generally made things not so good.

The attention that this show has garnered has caused the judge to revise the decision, after reports of one hotel showing the program off of a legal satellite stream, to block any exhibition of the program from or into Victoria. Even before the tightening of the decision, one national network, Nine Imparja, which broadcasts to a wide swath of the country, including the Northern Territory, South Australia, regional Queensland and most of the rest of the country via satellite, chose to not air the program, giving viewers the following advisory -

Meanwhile, viewers in Melbourne were graced with the presence of former 9 head, host of Who Wants to Be A Millionaire?, president of the Collingwood Football Club, Eddie McGuire, with this announcement, which included the note that the program would be replaced by the Shawshank Redemption.

By the way, these, along with videos of news reports on the ban are the only videos you’ll find on YouTube about the show - they’re policing uploads of the show pretty closely apparently.

One last thing - to the judge in this case, and to the Department of Public Prosecutions - forcing a TV station to block broadcast of a program for such a weak reason as possibly influencing potential jurors is something you shouldn’t be encouraging. Especially if you believe in a free press. It’s not to say that we’re just as good; in fact, sometimes the TV stations here are too weak - they’ve been known to drop programs even before they air on the premise that they might get complaints about it.

Whatever happened to common sense?

And, I have to say that it’s better than ever. Not necessarily because of the use of the V8 Supercar look-alike “Car of Tomorrow Today”, and it’s not because of Junior’s move to Hendrick Motorsports (I’m not a big fan of Junior, but how cool was it that he won his first race with them?). Nope, for me, it’s all about the radio.

As I had mentioned last year, when there was a night race then, I’d be forced to try to dig out either a weak-in-my-location FM signal from about 50km away, or hope that WSM radio in Nashville were broadcasting the race so that I could pick up their clear channel signal from 800km away. Of course, this wouldn’t work on Saturday nights because of the Grand Ole Opry broadcasts from Music City.

However, thanks to the operator of a small radio station from about 25km away selling the station to the incumbent rights-holders of the races in the area, and them deciding to move their signal to this 24-hour station (ending the split days and nights schedule and effecting halving their station IDs, even though during the transition, they give two call sets of call letters), I now have a reliable signal that I know will bring me the races all through the season.

Also, I have to say that I always love watching the shows that are on just before Daytona. For example, right now, I’ve been watching a retrospective special where you get to see clips from throughout the years, with original commentary supplied by announcers from CBS, Fox, MRN radio, and even NBC (for that ever so popular picture of Sterling Marlin, ahem, adjusting, his car). The best part is that it is a current show (at least the beginning and end were redone in order to suit this year’s situation), but even watching the specials you’ve watched before is cool, in my opinion. Then again, it’s hard to come across a good special about racing.

Lastly, just as a reminder of last year, here’s the last 2 laps of the race, with the amazing finish (if you have ESPN Classic, the race will be shown in a 2-hour version at 1pm Central - a rarity having a Fox race shown on ESPN).

Oh, and one last thing - Speed, if you’re listening, it would be really nice if you would broadcast Phillip Island and Bathurst live this year, with Boris being in the races and all (heck, can we maybe even get delayed coverage of the races - like same week or same day? - ah heck, I’ll probably just get them through my normal way anyway. )

I don’t think there’s anyone who hasn’t seen the antics of Jamie and Adam on Discovery’s extremely popular program Mythbusters (by the way, if you didn’t know, the show is actually made by Beyond Productions Pty. Ltd., an Australian company with branches around the world). Usually, they can be the definitive source on whether something is true or not. However, they’re not perfect, and they know it.

The episode that Discovery showed tonight at 8PM central - repeated at 11PM tonight and probably sometime soon - featured them trying to beat a speed camera. Now, they aren’t something that we have many of here, yet. They were featured on a story on ABC News just tonight as well with the installation of the first cameras on a freeway in Arizona.

While there are a lot of privacy issues behind these cameras, what they were testing was, whether you could beat the camera. They used a bit of straight road - the drag strip at Sears Point raceway, with a length of around 1/4 mile (0.4km or so). It was good distance for the cars they tested, but for all they tried, they couldn’t beat the camera. Well, Jamie did beat it - by having a flipping license plate, but that doesn’t count.

However, here’s where they’re wrong. The folks on BBC2’s Top Gear (a great show that sadly isn’t on in the States) tried to beat the camera in the first series of the revamped show. They had slightly different results. The BBC have put the videos up on YouTube, but have disallowed embedding, so I have to give you links to all three segments (don’t worry, though, they’re short).

Segment 1 - Honda Civic Type R; top speed, 146mph (235km/h)

Segment 2 - Mercedes CL55 AMG; top speed, 155mph (249km/h)

Segment 3 - TVR Tuscan S; top speed, 170+mph (274km/h)

Needless to say, with more than 2 miles of track to use (on a disused airfield), they were able to flex the cars to their top speeds, but only one car failed to be caught by the cameras. Which one? You’ll have to watch.

And it ain’t today. I’m going to be cheering the New York Football Giants onto a victory tomorrow against the 13-3 Cowboys as a win will bring the NFC Championship game back to Lambeau Field up in Green Bay for the first time since 1997 when the Carolina Panthers came up to the frozen tundra and got beaten heartily by the Packers as they were on their way to victory in Super Bowl XXXI in New Orleans. If you’re a fan of the Packers, then you’ve definitely seen the scene of coach Holmgren being chaired by the team with n triumph in the Superdome. If you need a quick reminder of the game, here ya go:

Now, to the game - tomorrow from 3:30PM Central time on Fox (in the UK it’s on Sky Sports 2, in Australia on Fox Sports 2, both live). I’m not going to do the bigtime chalk-talk segment here, but the reason that I think that the Giants will prevail is quite simple - one of the hardest challenges in the NFL is to beat the same team three times in a season. The most recent occurrence of this that I can remember, in 2004, was when the Vikings got revenge on a season sweep by the Packers by defeating them in the playoffs, after stumbling horribly into them.

Also, I suspect that despite claims that Terrell Owens will be playing, he won’t be up to the task. Also, there’s that hovering question about Tony Romo’s trip to wherever it was that he and Jessica Simpson went to - not that anyone actually cares where they go. All that matters is that she show up for the game - he has, shall we say, performance issues whenever his girlfriends show up for a game. Maybe that is what they were off on vacation to handle…

Just remember the line from the song - “C is for ‘Cowboy’ and C is for ‘Crap’”

I haven’t been feeling well for a couple of days; I think that it’s a cold that has been going around the area that’s gotten me down. I’ve been quite tired over the last couple of days and haven’t had much energy to do much of anything. So, that’s why you’re getting a random edition of stuff today.

First up is a discussion of listening to cricket on the radio, written by Chico Harlan, an American who is spending six months on the staff of the Daily Telegraph in Sydney - The sound of summer is pure poetry (by the way, make sure you check out Kerry O’Keeffe’s column today about the Sydney Test; it’s brilliant comedy). He is spot on about listening to cricket being as intimate as listening to baseball - my favorite baseball commentator has always been Bob Uecker, who has been covering the Brewers ever since they came to Milwaukee in 1970; not far behind him are the late Harry Caray, Vin Scully and pretty much any commentator who understands that their voice isn’t the only thing that needs to be on the air.

The other thing on the palate for today are a couple of videos involving something that I still love - the trumpet. Probably the best classical trumpeter of the last century is Maurice André, of whom I have a collection of classical music that I haven’t listened to in quite a while, but that I must find the CD that it’s all on (or just download it, hehe ). These videos were taken in 1993 at a show in Frankfurt where he was just demoing some trumpets for Stomvi. What happens can only be described as totally cool. It’s in 2 parts