Tuesday, November 18, 2003

Time to leave Cub Fans alone

No, I mean it. I had even been planning a new blog dedicated to collecting photos and stories demonstrating how pitiful Cub fans are. But a little while ago, I caught an A&E �Biography� episode about Siegfried & Roy which had, of course, been hastily updated to cover Roy�s being attacked by one of his tigers. The story also showed the hoardes of crying fans gathered outside Roy�s hospital, leaving candles and little stuffed tigers by the entrance. Yep, people who are even more pitiful than Cub fans.

But then again, these people won�t be whining about Roy for the next 60 years.

Parenthetically, even though video does exist of the actual tiger attack, A&E had the taste not to show it (or maybe didn't want to pay for it). Instead, they used their trick of combining existing stock footage to suggest the sequence of events.

And this incident forced me to grudge a little more respect to S&R. Heck, even Penn Jillette was interviewed, saying absolutely no one was doing what S & R have been doing for over 30 years. And he�s right, of course. It�s not like the Mirage has �Magical Manfred and His Mighty Lions� standing by.

I'm littering up the Web even more

I'm trying to place links to other places where I've written pithy or worthwhile stuff. Here you can find an index of comments I've left about movies on the
Internet Movie Database. Worth a try.
Also, when I contributed a plot summary about the "Fargo" TV pilot, it was indexed under this search link.
Finally, wayyy back in college, my roommate Tim was building a card file on which he had entered all of the actors who had appeared on �Star Trek� (this was before the name needed to be qualified with the subtitle �The Original Series�) and was combing through TV Guides to find other shows on which these actors had appeared, clipping the program descriptions, and pasting them onto the index cards. That's right, kiddies, this is exactly the analogy they use to describe a computer database, which, before everyone had computers, had to be done laboriously by hand.

At some point I inherited the card file, with the intention of updating it. Then I had the intention of putting it in the computer. Finally I realized this work had already been done on the internet. So I�ve been taking a few cards at a time, and checking the credits against the IMDB, adding new credits where none were noted before. This is mostly for guest shots on TV shows that no longer have much of a following. I can see the list of update when I�m registered to imdb, but others can�t, I�m afriad. So far, I've updated info on 15 TV shows.