Wednesday, May 9, 2012

4 X 4

*1. Four states (or provinces) I've been to: Florida, California, Tennessee, British Columbia 

*2. Four smells I love:  freshly cut grass, Junior Mints Candy boxes, rain, ocean air 

 

*3. Four people I think will respond: Fred, Aaran, Oakie, Ian 

*4. Four TV shows I Love:  House, Mad Men, The Mentalist, Who Do You Think You Are?  (If I could say an older show I'd pick "The Avengers" but I think they want current shows.)  

Here's what you're supposed to do now... Copy and paste onto your page, delete my answers, type in your answers, post it and see who responds.

28 comments:

  1. 1. Rhode Island, California, Nevada, Washington state {and of course I traveled across country from Rhode Island and then was born in Germany, does that count?}
    2. ocean air, air after a big rain, vanilla, garlic bread cooking in oven
    3 ???
    4.Mike and Molly, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Grimm {filmed in Portland Oregon}

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  2. Doug, no one but my sister & Sigurd look at my page, or it would be fun.

    1. All along the West coast, Wisconsin, from Kentucky to California & all that is between, New York & MIchigan.
    2. Four smells I love: redwood forests after rain, honeysuckle, tarragon, fresh brewed coffee
    3. Um--it's your page!
    4. I don't watch TV

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  3. 1. The Northeast is one area I need to still see, Marty.
    2. Vanilla is one smell I forgot about. It is wonderful.
    4. Didn't know any regular shows were done in Portland, other than "Portlandia".

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  4. 1. You've seen the country.

    2. Great scents all.

    RE: 4 You're probably better off not having developed that "habit", Dragon. :-)

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  5. 1--I'll accept any place like Tasmania or any part of that country across the ditch. ;-)

    2. All great smells.

    3. Nice of you to say that, Iri Ani, but I doubt it.


    4. All these shows look interesting. I'm surprised Call the Midwife" isn't broadcast over here. "The Almighty Johnsons" looks like a show I'd really like. I'm surprised the US networks hasn't done a rip-off version. "Native Affairs" looks good too--reminds me of some of the better news shows i used to get to watch out of San Francisco.

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  6. Yup, its kind of a horror show about people who turn into weird looking creatures....and thats what it says, they are in Portland, Oregon. You should watch it sometime Doug, its on Friday night at 9pm our time on NBC.

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  7. Native Affairs is probably the best news-comment programme here at the moment. Thos other two programmes I mention seem to be both quite new. We only just started watching the "Midwife" one here but Miranda who is in it does a great comedy how of her own which has been quite popular here, so it is really interesting to see her in a straight show. One of the other actresses comes from Downton Abbey.

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  8. Four states I have been to:- catatonic, hypomanic, ecstatic and soporific and that was just this afternoon.

    Smells....this is a tough one but.... incense of various kinds, tar, vanilla and baking bread I think Doug...

    I'll get back to you on the others when I'm a bit more awake..

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  9. lol...I hope you took some transition time between "states". The ecstatic to soporific can be a major transition.

    Baking bread! Ah! that's a great one, AA.

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  10. Now where was ...oh yes 4 people that will respond....David Petraeus (Director CIA) - Jonathan Evans (Director General MI5) - Robert Mueller (Director FBI) - Simon Calver (Chief Executive -'Mothercare plc').

    Four TV shows ---this is very tricky I only watch University Challenge - historically I would include Champion the Wonder Horse, Monkey Magic, Watch With Mother and Panorama.

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  11. LOL...A very keen quadrant of respondents, AA: are they considered "online buddies" or friends"?

    At least they connect to you. I can't tell you how embarrased I was to send invitations to both Director General 'Snapper" Evans and General Davie "Crockett" Petraeus only to be ignored.

    At least Director Mueller expresed interest in my passwords.

    What a classic photo. I never saw any of those shows, but I really like the titles. "Watch with Mother" likely sounded so charming when we were wee fry --now it's a bit ominous, don't you think?

    The four favorite shows I watched as a kid were "Romper Room" (a kindergarten show with "Miss Nancy",); "'The Lone Ranger"; "Scooby-Doo" (a show where an oversized animated dog and a likely pothead hippie named "Shaggy" solved spooky mysteries with some help with their friendly but judgemental posh friends), and "Jeopardy", a quiz show for adults that taught me more about history, culture and politics and than I got from school much of the time.

    This is a clip I found of the show from 1974. It had the same host then (the inimitable Art Fleming) as when I started watching five-six years earlier.

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  12. I've never heard of Romper Room or Miss Nancy Doug, but The Lone Ranger was a favourite of mine, although he somehow has, swell - contaminated the William Tell Overture for me, so I cannot hear it without thinking of that masked man calling "Hi-yo, Silver! Away!" and galloping off with trusty sidekick Tonto, his very own ke-mo sah-be as they say in Potawatomi. I knew a bit about Scooby-Doo but never really got into it myself, I think it was more my younger brother's bag. 'Jeopardy' I have never heard of, but obviously I recognise the format from similar shows here. The leisurely pace is missing from quiz shows like University Challenge - a quiz programme that has aired in Britain since 1962. Wikipedia helpfully points out that the University Challenge format is actually based on the American show College Bowl, which it says, ran on NBC radio from 1953 to 1957, and on NBC television from 1959 to 1970.

    Great clip, thanks for sharing Doug.

    I bet you shout answers at the screen - which is what I still do now as a matter of fact...... Sometimes I don't know how I knew that answer I just blurted out......it's like a cerebral workout I suppose.

    and its Hi Ho Silver Lining ...damn it another ear worm!

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  13. The website and content for "Native Affairs" reminds me of a SF Bay Area show called "A Closer Look", Iri Ani. They examined a lot of topics like discrimination against women and "minority" groups that were off the radar for a lot of the local television stations unless it was a big story. Unlike a lot of tv news operations, they went out and dug up stories that were missed by the big media.

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  14. I'm sure there was a British equvilent to "Romper Room", AA. Odd come to think of it--kids like me at age 6 or so coming home from school to watch kids in a television studio at a school. Bit ironic really.

    'The Lone Ranger" I saw was re-run from the 1950's. That music just stayed in my head forever. It was one of the first color shows, although our set was black and white until '68. Most of the cartoons I saw were black and white, too.

    Imagine the royalties Senor Rossilini missed out on? Boggles the mind.

    i hear that Johnny Depp is going to be Tonto in a new feature film about the Lone Ranger. The post-modern possibilities of revisiting that franchise might be worth seeing.

    College Bowl! Thats slipped my mind. Yes, I remember that show as well in the 60's. Why did NBC ever stop that one? They had a panel of young men (don't recall any women, sad to say) from Ivy League schools like Harvard or Dartmouth or other prestige colleges answer questions. They still have secondary school shows like it over here, but "College Bowl" with Alan Ludden as the host was the real deal. (Thanks for the research there.)

    Yes, I have been known to shout out the answers. When I was a kid I was notorious amongst my friends for doing just that. The thought of actually going on the show would give me the chills.

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  15. I was watching "Call The Midwife" last night. 'Chummy' (Miranda Hart) is being courted by a Constable Noakes! They went to see a film and then he took her dancing!

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  16. Our "Native Affairs" programme certainly does cover stories that are 'off the radar' for the other tv stations or else they come at a story from a tangatawhenua (people of the land - indigenous people) perspective. Which is excellent and achieves balance especially from the caterwauling of mainstream news sometimes.

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  17. We used to have a New Zealand "Romper Room" equivalent back in the seventies. It showed about 2.30pm so before the schoolkiddies got home. I don't recall the name of the teacher/presenter now. It was a rather inane programme I thought. How did you guys get onto a Romper Room discussion? *scratching head*

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  18. How funny! Historical accuracy is a bit off I'm afraid. Men of the Noakes clan aren't usually drawn to the law enforcement field, Iri Ani. I suspect a subplot where the constable siphons petrol out of official vehicles to sell on the black market . A gambling problem is likely as well.


    On the other hand, this Noakes bloke better behave like a gentleman to Chummy. I will write a sharp letter to the producers otherwise! ;-)

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  19. I'm glad you have such a media outlet in NZ.
    Yes, regular local news shows in the USA have a depressing similarity no matter where you are.

    Even today you turn on the television where I live on one of the three local stations and you'll likely as not an older white man as the anchor, a younger white woman as co-host and maybe a black guy on the weekend reports.

    A female reporter often is a "double" in the insider media parlance, a woman who is of black or Asian ethnicity to satisfy the need for diversity without losing the old white guy set-up.

    And you'll fins an old white guy doing the weather report.

    I remember in the 1960's we had one station in San Jose that had a "weather girl" doing the news. She was maybe 25 and still called a "weather girl"!

    A Closer Look" broke the mold on that dreary paradigm. As importantly, they did no "catawauling" and the focus was on getting under-reported stories on air. Thye also iinterviewed activists that the main stations wouldn't touch. or give any real air time to just speak--black activists, community organizers,members of the Mexican-American farm workers unions, et al.

    Public Broadcasting in America does a much better job of bringing the news to people, locally and nationally. Progress has been made since the 60s and 70s, of course, but the old patterns are still there in smaller metro media markets.

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  20. lol...It's my fault Iri Ani. AA mentioned a kids show and off I went into the old "Romper Room" vortex.


    I checked on line and "Romper Room" was indeed an international hit in that format, even in Japan. It was an inane program to anyone over seven years old I suppose. I remember my "Miss Nancy" holding up her "magic mirror" and saying the names of kids at the end of the program who she claimed she could see through her magic mirror.

    I hoped she would say "I see Doug..." with the other names. Just once. One time say my name. Just say "Doug" or "Douglas"... Once, damnit!

    It was never to be. ;-(

    As I matured as a lad, I grew to think the whole "magic mirror" set--up was a scam. This marked my whole later outlook on life. If Miss Nancy was a con artist, then who could you trust?

    cue: *sad violin music in background*.

    I couldn't find the MIss Nancy I knew, but this is an example of the magic mirror by "Miss Margaret". My Miss Nancy was a lady named Nancy Beest from a station in the Bay Area. I probably watched this show when I came home from pre-school and later kindergarten, along with scores of other kids. It was all monochrome television in those days.

    Here's the "magic mirror" format--this was from another version of the show in the 70's I guess.

    The poor lady looks like she's working on a pip of a migraine headache.

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  21. I forgot to mention that the story is based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth (a midwife in the story) so I'm picking that Constable Noakes really existed. It is set in East London in the 1950's. We are watching the first series which is in 6 parts and, according to Wikipedia, was only premiered in January this year, so that makes us feel pretty flash being only a couple of months behind. The Wikipedia entry says that "a second series of eight episodes of the show has been commissioned and is expected to air in mid 2013 (in the UK presumably).
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Call_the_Midwife_%28TV_series%29

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  22. Oh golly, "whoever she was presenting here" had a magic mirror too. I had forgotten that until you mentioned it. It seems funny to me hearing Romper Room done with a magic mirror. I don't think our "magic mirror" moments had such a long list of names.

    We didn't have telly in New Zealand until the sixties and it started in Auckland (with one channel) working it's way down the East side of the country and then back up the West side. I was living on the West Coast of the South Island so we were among the last in the country to get reception (about 1966-67). Thus my generation spent our pre-school years with radio not telly. When I first had children I thought it was really odd that they would grow up in a world where they never knew time without telly. We got a second channel about 1975 and a third channel in the eighties. This was all Free To Air. We didn't get Sky to the late eighties.

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  23. Back in the sixties when we first got telly one of my older cousins aspired to become a weather girl but she became a School Dental Nurse instead. But the bloke she married was part of the weather team (not on the telly but part of the scientific lot who told the telly people what the weather was going to be so they could tell us). We always seemed to have Weather girls (probably following your model of the time) so it became seen as a girls job. I can't quite remember when blokes started telling the weather but typically they seemed to be teachers who would instruct as opposed to the girls who were "just reading". Back in the day most newsreaders did seem to be blokes (older and authoritative-looking) with the occasional "exceptional" woman. The main requirement was perfect elocution (I believe they had classes) and they all had to speak "BBC english" rather than sound like Kiwis. Luckily we have left that cringe behind now.

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  24. That's good news. Maybe they will start showing show "Call the Midwife" here in the USA this Summer or Fall. It looks interesting from the link you added. Thanks.

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  25. That must have been rather exciting, waiting for television to arrive you way. On the other hand, of course, it can be a great time-killer for family and book reading. My mom was very good about making sure I was up on my homework and chores and such to get to watch television, but I've often wondered what life was like when all their was to listen to was radio.

    I remember about 1972 we got cable television and suddenly instead of six channels we had twelve. Four or five of them showing the same programs as the other we got much of the time! ;-)

    I wonder that about kids today---they are always hooked up to cell (mobile) phones and texting and such. When I went outside as a kid after school, we interacted with our environment. I think kids miss something by always having to feel "connected" to electronic devices.

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  26. I imagine there were a lot of similar demographic and cultural patterns between California and New Zealand, Iri Ani. I don't want to draw too close a line there, but the way you describe women's roles in American television sound like what I read about women's careers in the media. The one thing that stands out as really different is that need to sound English by network standards. Although there is still a sort of "Midwestern American" accent that was and is favored for news readers in national newscasts.

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  27. I think so. I like that Kiwis are now allowed to sound like Kiwis on the telly (and radio).

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  28. Seems the best way to avoid confusion. :-)

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