Tivo HD is out

The Tivo "Series 3 lite" is finally out, and it is being called Tivo HD. It's available now for $300, which is a far cry from the $800 price tag on the Series 3. Engadget has a round-up with reviews of the device, but the general consensus is that this is the one people have been waiting for.

In case you don't want to read all the details, this thing has HDMI and component out up to 1080i (which is the max that the TV standard goes anyway), dual CableCARD tuners, and built-in ATSC/NTSC /clear QAM tuners. It's missing THX certification and TivoToGo, which are probably not major deal-breakers for people when you can save $500.

DCC!

I'm so psyched that the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders reality show got picked up for a second season. Don't worry, I'm also completely ashamed, but it was fun and compelling TV. And I like all the dancing stuff too! Anyway, the second season premieres on Sept 14th.

HBO updates: The Wire

Apparently the cable channels are doing their press tour or press conferences this week. HBO just announced that the Wire will air in early 2008, and they also mentioned the Sex & the City movie, so I guess that means it really is going forward.

JK Rowlings

Surprisingly, although I love celebrity and day in the life documentaries, I'm not that excited about following the past year of JK Rowling's life.

"Simpsons" songs compilation

An album of songs from the past nine seasons of the "Simpsons" will be released as an album. I'm sure this will be a whole new source for ringtones!

Silly action-movie one-liners

Via popcandy, I saw that as a tribute to the latest Die Hard movie, Slate had an action-movie one-liner contest that was particularly silly. I think that "rm -rf /" could be a good one as well!

Man-eating badgers

British army denies any involvement with man-eating badgers terrorizing Basra. Yep, that's right. They had to deny deploying angry badgers as a weapon. That's badger-ific! I hope there's a cartoon about this someday. Or maybe a spinoff of Meerkat Manor, but called Badger Bungalow. Sadly, my knowledge of badgers is limited to this book, which I read when I was younger, and is about a kid who gets lost in the wilderness and gets adopted by badgers. So basically, the Jungle Book but with badgers and no talking vultures. Oh, those might not have been in the book.

Drive Finale Will Be Posted to MySpace

Sorry for the flurry of Drive postings, but I guess the Fox schedule changes for the show have made this media worthy. Or maybe the show has a bunch of sad, but passionate fans out there - although I haven't heard of any campaigns to send cars or setting up illegal road races to try to resurrect the show. Maybe Drive's fans are a lot more cynical. Anyway, I guess MySpace is good for something since the Drive finale will be posted there as of Monday 7/16.

Online game for Bourne Ultimatum

There is an online game on Google to promote The Bourne Ultimatum. I have to admit that I'm excited about the movie and I'm hoping it will be a fun action/spy flick. However, it makes me laugh to imagine that perhaps all the goverment needed was Google in order to find Jason Bourne. That would make him a crappy spy. Well, if the tomcat has enough time connected to the internet, I know he'll do this game...

Wii and DDR?

Nintendo demonstrated a Dance Dance Revolution-like game at E3. That would be totally awesome. The game where you kick soccer balls while avoiding things being kicked at you sounds like it might be pretty fun and silly! It looks like there could be some fun games for me on the console. Now I just need to persuade the tomcat to leave his Wii with me permanently. And they need to release a new version of Elebits...

Knights of Prosperity & a British monarchy documentary

ABC will be airing the last four episodes of Knights of Prosperity in August, which is a bit of a surprise. They must be desparate for something to fill the time. And there's a documentary about the British monarchy slated for September which I will definitely watch.

What would've happened on Drive?

You can find out by reading an interview with the executive producers. If you were obsessed with this show, I'm not sure if you should wait and try to obtain the last two episodes before reading this, since it will certainly be a spoiler, but hey, the show is deadd, so I guess it's a moot point. Go forth, tomcat.

Fox's fall shows

In a change for previous years, Fox won't start airing their new shows until late September, at the same time as the other networks...

Craziness on 24

Looks like 24 was planning on filming in Africa, but Fox balked so the writers are back to the drawing board. They are stopping production, and scrambling to rewrite the season. I wonder if this will make the season better or worse...

No more drive

Fox has changed their mind again and won't be airing the last two episodes of Drive. I guess fans will have to wait and hope the series comes out on DVD.

Nintendo's DS Lite + baseball

Looks like Nintendo's DS Lite is trying to make inroads in the game-playing baseball-loving demographic. You can order food, see video, view stats and play trivia with your DS Lite at the Seattle baseball park.

Unordered pilot: Amazing Race spoof

The futon critic reviews a show that did not get ordered, Dash 4 Cash, which is a scripted spoof/satire of the Amazing Race. It sounds like it's pretty funny - it has the requisite types of teams (sorority sisters, angry newlyweds, naive geeks...), and features some silly challenges like building a ladder out of crazy pieces or choosing transportation (car vs. horse). I hope this gets leaked to YouTube so I can see it someday.

Netflix separation anxiety

I just put my Netflix account on hold since I'm going to be busy for the next couple months and won't have time to watch DVDs. But I already feel a bit sad and am having some separation anxiety. I've already checked my queue, looking to add some new discs (like say, the Three Musketeers movie from the 90s which had Gabrielle Anwar, Kiefer, and Chris O'Donnell - totoro tried to dissaude me, but I can't help myself), and I can do that, but it's so sad knowing that rearranging my queue has no impact!

Spice Girls tour

I'm totally sad that I clicked on this link, thus increasing the hit counts for Yahoo articles about Victoria Beckham (and encouraging them to write more about her, but I have to say that I love the part of this article where she mentions that David Beckham is going to be groupie and come along on the Spice Girls tour. Yes, it makes sense that he'd go on tour to spend time with his wife and kids, but seriously, it's the Spice Girls tour...

Dead Like Me

Holy crap, Dead Like Me might go back to being a TV series after the DVD movie (item next to the picture of George), according to Ellen Muth's MySpace blog. I'm sadly so excited! And for more update on the DVD movie itself, it looks like it started shooting in late June, with an unknown release date. But it looks like it has a lot of the original cast, including Callum Blue (Mason!) so I'm psyched!

Simpsons shoes

Via tvatattle, Vans has hopped on the Simpsons tie-in bandwagon with a new line of Simpsons themed shoes.

The pitfalls of wedding ad campaigns

I swear, I'm so sad every time I open up a wedding magazine and I see the pictures of Emilie De Ravin, since she and her husband split up after only a few months. However, JCPenney continues to use their pictures in their print campaigns as well as on their website. I guess they paid their money, so they'll get their money's worth, and Emilie probably isnt't reading a lot of wedding magazines, but it's pretty sad. I liked the LeAnn Rimes pictures much more, since her husband is pretty cute and they're still together! I guess JC Penney's is assuming that most people don't slavish follow celebrity gossip as much as I do...

My Little Pony

I always like Defamer's editorial voice, but I thought this post about a mashup of the Transformers trailer with My Little Pony clips made me laugh. The trailer isn't that great, but the snarkiness of "we wouldn't be surprised to see this story--about an alien race of equine dwarves with brushable manes and names like Licketysplit and Baby Rainribbon arriving via rainbow-wormhole to blow a bunch of shit up--fast-tracked into production." is awesome.

Summer Hiatus

One of the blogs I browse, kottke.org is taking paternity leave, but it made me think - wouldn't it terrible if like television shows, the Internet took a summer hiatus and just put on filler crap or washed out stuff for three months in the summer because everyone was outside enjoying the nice weather? Gah, I guess it would speed up my morning routine of web surfing, but I might cry! Or I might end up being forced to lower my standards and read really crappy content just to have something to read.

Burn Notice again

When I talked about Burn Notice, I forgot to mention that it also stars Gabrielle Anwar, best known as the tango girl in Scent of a Woman. She was pretty young in that, according to her imdb profile; I had also forgotten that she was in Wild Hearts Can't Be Broken. Man, that takes me back. Anyway, in Burn Notice, she's got a strong Irish accent for the first episode, but apparently her character's schtick may definitely include lots of accents. Hopefully she's good at them or this is going to be painful.

Cash Cab

Two of my friends mentioned that they really enjoy watching Cash Cab, a game show that takes place in a taxi in NYC. Random people get into a cab and surprise, they can answer trivia questions for money. If they get three questions wrong, the cab pulls over and kicks them out. If they make it to their destination without getting three questions wrong, they can take the money and run or do double or nothing on what they've earned so far. It sounds pretty hilariously random, but it must be pretty fun to just expect to take a cab and end up doing trivia and hopefully getting some prize money. I'll have to check this out.

Summer TV Press Tour

Looks like the Television Critics Summer press tour starts July 16th. This is where the networks really start hyping their shows and usually marks the beginning of the indepth coverage of fall shows since most of the shows are now in production and have more to share with the press than just the pilots. All sorts of hijinks ensue with the panel interviews and stuff. Sadly this will be right after I go on vacation so I guess you all will have to fend for yourselves and I'll have to catch up and figure out what to watch when I get home...

Ask A Reality-TV Producer

TWOP does a Q&A with one of their recappers who is a reality show producer. It's a short interview, but interesting, including a possible way to figure out from the editing who will get eliminated. I think I'll have to keep this in mind and see if I can be better at predicting results based on editing.

Traveler is toast

Now may not be the time to start watching Traveler since it appears the show will not be renewed. The cast's contracts have been released, so they are free to do other things. It was promising at the beginning, but hasn't really kept me on the edge of my seat.

Fourth of July

I had the laziest Fourth of July ever, but it allowed me to do some monster catch up on the TiVo. I am down to four hours of stuff left to watch on the Tivo, which means I have about half a screen on the Now Playing List. Little tivo looks very empty, but it's all in prep for my upcoming vacation. In the process, I watched Burn Notice, which I'm meh about, but I think the guy is cute, and I'm mildly intrigued so I'll keep watching. I watched How I Met Your Mother, which I am finding quite enjoyable, but it's not a must watch for me. I ended up watching the Starter Wife, and really liked it, but it makes me think that I'm really a closeted forty-year old, Oprah-idolizing woman inside - we'll see how that eventually turns out for me.

I'm excited that the tomcat finally watched Friday Night Lights, and he promptly got so addicted to it, that I think he finished the whole season in about a week.

And lastly, I just discovered that Netflix has a cool way to view movie previews - it's just a page which plays the previews sequentially. You have a next button so you can skip to the next preview if you're not interested, but there's no control over what comes next. You can quickly see a whole bunch of trailers, even ones that you might not normally see so I like it. It's much easier than trying to troll the Apple trailers page. I wish my Tivo had something like this.

Living with Ari

A funny article about the people who own the house that stands in for Ari Gold's place in Entourage. HBO is paying them a buttload of cash, and it's too disruptive to swap furniture in and out over the production schedule, so while Entourage is filming (over nine months for the last season), they have to live with all of Ari's furniture, wall colors, pictures, etc. It actually sounds pretty surreal and funny.

Sex and the City Movie

Looks like the Sex and the City Movie is probably going to move forward. Maybe a fun Valentine's Day release!

Actor does radio sports reporting

Okay, I think it's kind of cool that Timothy Olyphant (actor from Deadwood) calls in every day to some LA radio station to be their sports reporter. I realize that I'm probably falling into the trap of thinking actors are cooler, which isn't intrinsically true, but I love the randomness of this guy doing the reports, and it sounds like his additional anecdotes about his life may in fact be pretty entertaining. I wonder if they stream is segments on the internet. I might tune in for this.

Simpsons 7-Elevens

Pictures and locations for the Simpsons themed 7-Eleven Kwik-E-Marts. You can find out if there's one in your town!