Battlestar Galactica Returns to Stellar Ratings

Battlestar Galactica by Carole Segal/Sci Fi Channel

Battlestar Galactica roared back into action Friday night, as the Season 4 premiere delivered more than 2.1 million total viewers — a 19 percent increase over the January 2007 bow of Season 3.5. BSG also emerged as cable's No. 1 prime-time program in Sci Fi Channel's key 25-54 demo.

Numbers-wise, Battlestar also proved once and for all its appeal to womenfolk, scoring its best-ever female audience when 606,000 women 18-49 tuned in. — MWM

Original here

The Dangers of Being a Television News Reporter

Live television is exciting because anything can happen. Most exciting of all is when 'respectable' television journalists succumb to the unexpected (they trip, get mauled by animals, lit aflame, etc.) right there on your TV. Here is a compilation video I made of everything tragic that could possibly happen to a television news reporter. Some of these clips have become internet classics, and some you may have never seen before. Either way it's three minutes of pure bliss that will make you feel better about dropping out of j-school.

Original here

Bird radio gives you wings

Bird radio gives you wings with smoking hot tunes

IF you're sick of the inane drivel that comes out of commercial radio, a unique British radio station may be the answer.

The Birdsong Station - as the name suggests - broadcasts nothing but the sound of birds.

Half a million listeners have tuned in to the station with directors now satisfying public demand by updating the recording.

The station plays a 20 minute-long recording of birds singing in chorus on a continuous loop.

Original here

April 8, 1953: Hollywood Finally Catches 3-D Fever

1950s filmgoers watch a three-dimensional movie wearing the special goggles needed to see the 3-D effects.
Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis

1953: Man in the Dark opens at the Globe Theater in New York City. It is the first 3-D movie released by a major Hollywood studio, beating The House of Wax to the screen by two days.

It took Hollywood a while to embrace 3-D technology -- the earliest known 3-D feature film, not made by a mainline studio, was The Power of Love in 1922.

But 3-D had already been around for a long time. Charles Wheatstone made the world's first stereoscopic viewer in 1838, basing his invention on theories of perspective dating to the Renaissance.

Wheatstone's viewer, built using angled mirrors, contained two separate drawings mounted side by side, one for each eye. Using the stereoscope allowed the images to merge, giving the viewer the illusion of depth.

The same principle was applied much later to 3-D movies. The audience was provided with special anaglyph viewing glasses with different color lenses that created the same illusion of depth as Wheatstone's stereoscope.

Man in the Dark was a noir film starring Edmond O'Brien, a remake of the 1936 Ralph Bellamy movie, The Man Who Lived Twice. As 3-D it was underwhelming -- the climactic roller-coaster scene was described as flat -- and it apparently wasn't much of a flick, either, at least not to a New York Times critic who called it "a conspicuously low-grade melodrama."

Nevertheless, it got Columbia Pictures off the 3-D dime and began Hollywood's rather fitful relationship with the technology that continues to this day.

Original here