#MuseumSecrets Season 2 Premiere Tonight At 10pm On @HistoryTVCanada

Tonight I am heading to a party celebrating the Season 2 premiere of “Museum Secrets” on History Television Canada.The point of the show is to reveal the stories of 6 irreplaceable treasures (in each episode). As an example they give the Mona Lisa, the Sistine Chapel, and the golden mask of King Tut. Museum Secrets probes familiar legends and assumptions, using cutting edge research and technology to investigate the unknown. They get to (and bring you the viewer along) beyond the public galleries, into hidden places visitors are rarely allowed to see. When a story of an artifact moves outside the museum, the team – and by extension the viewer – follows. They have gone to the grounds of a medieval French chateau to recreate a fatal jousting accident, and down into a 50 foot hole in the Egyptian desert to stand inside the tomb of Ramesses the Great.

The show premiers tonight at 8pm on History Television Canada and they have told me to encourage tweeting using the #MuseumSecrets hashtag, which we at the party will also be doing. In fact, there’s already quite a bit of buzz going on around that hashtag so you can check it out right now.

The Museum Secrets team is using the twitter account @MuseumSecrets, and they told me they want to encourage chatter between them and the TV audience which I think is just awesome and forward thinking and such 21st Century amazingness. The show is produced by @KensingtonTV for @HistoryTVCanada and I have to find out if it is aired anywhere else (or if they make it available to stream online outside of Canada).

They told me to feel free to promote the upcoming episode, by embedding their behind the scenes vlog on my blog so here it is:

Looks cool but personally I was hoping for some cutting room floor footage of the museum – can’t have everything right?

The website for the show is museumsecrets.tv and they assure me that soon they’ll have plenty of new webisodes like this one there: Ancient Tattoos. You can also check them out on Facebook at Facebook.com/MuseumSecrets/.

This season, I am told, will include a trip to St. Petersburg with a young Canadian professor (from Toronto) as he completes his homage to ancient Scythian mummies’ body art, after reading of their discovery deep below the permafrost of Russia. One thing I am definitely looking forward to finding out about (and it will b in tonight’s episode) is about how one early technology* improved Catherine The Great’s sex life! Maybe she had an early variation of a telegraph hooked up so she could summon men for late night trysts? Hooray for historical booty calls! (I completely made that up with absolutely no research).

*To be revealed during the show, they wouldn’t tell me beforehand.

This whole thing looks very cool and I am pretty excited to see it as a history geek – I make no secret about that and you all already know the level of my history geekiness. But I want to be clear that although I had never heard of the show before they contacted me to attend their Season 2 Premiere Party if someone had told me about this just randomly I probably would have checked it out anyway. More than likely I would have eventually come across it flipping channels and been enraptured by it but I don’t want to pretend like I am pushing this show because I fell in love with it last season because I didn’t. But you’re reading the thoughts of a guy who reads alternate history, was a history major, and for a good couple of years spent the majority of his pleasure reading time reading biographies and auto-biographies. Also, I’ve seen pretty much every episode of Cities of the Underworld so this seems like a good natural step for me to go to.

Let me know what you think of the episode. I think I know what I’m going to be doing this weekend – watching Season 1!

IDEA: A Smarter Sports News Ticker

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Has this ever happened to you? You get home and you want to see the highlights from the game you missed which you also made sure to not find out the score of and you turn on an all sports channel. While you are watching the highlights one of the tickers on the bottom of the screen completely ruins the outcome of the highlights you are watching. If you don’t see exactly what I mean, check out the picture below where I have circled the relevant portion which reveals the ending of the game that has highlights on the main portion of the screen.

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Note: To be clear, the image above is just what happened to be on TV which reminded me of this issue. It is not only SportsNet in Canada which does it but TSN in Canada and as far as I can recall, ESPN in the USA does it too.

My idea to fix this seems to me to be pretty simple. Write a program which knows which highlights are on the screen and skip the part of the ticker which shows the score during the highlight reel. I am not a programmer so I don’t know how simple something like this would be to develop but it doesn’t seem like it is too much to ask.

What do you think? Have you ever noticed this before? Does it perturb you too from time to time? Let me know in the comments below.

Being Erica On CBC Tonight: 7 Possible Owners Of The Gloved Hand & What I Want To See From Season 4

Being Erica Season 4 Cast wallpaper 1024x768 via CBC at http://www.cbc.ca/beingerica/extras.html

Recently, I watched all 3 seasons of Being Erica once again so I could write the 3 ‘The Quotes Quoted By Dr Tom From CBC’s “Being Erica”‘ which you see linked below.

• Season 1 Edition here.
• Season 2 Edition here.
• Season 3 Edition here.

Watching the whole series again was a great primer for seeing tonight’s premiere of the final season of Being Erica: Season Four.

SPOILER WARNING!!!

Before I continue on, let me make clear that if you have are not fully caught up on Being Erica (up until the end of Season 3) there will be SPOILERS in this post.

Everything related to Season 4 will just be guesswork by me, so if you’re waiting for the premiere like I am, don’t worry I won’t be ruining anything (because I can’t).

Consider yourselves warned.

Season 3 Episode 12 “Erica, Interrupted” ended with Erica meeting her new patient…but who was it? All we see was a leather glove which Erica takes with a huge smile on her face. We simply don’t know who it was, but of course it is going to have to be revealed in Season 4 as that’s the next part of Erica’s therapy – becoming a doctor and treating her first patient. CBC even ran a contest for people to be able to guess who her patient was going to be but, of course, haven’t revealed the answer yet. I have some of my own guesses which I thought I would list here.

I thought I would jot down a couple of things before watching Season 4’s premiere tonight of

1. What I want to see out of Season 4 in terms of the story wrapping up.
2. Who I thought could possibly be her new patient.

1. What I Want To See Out Of Season 4 In Terms Of The “Being Erica” Story Wrapping Up

• What are the doctors? Erica once asked Dr Tom if he was an angel and he replies that there will be time for that question later.
• What is the doctor hierarchy like? Dr Naadiah was/is Dr Tom’s doctor so it seems she outranks him. Dr Naadiah often goes to Dr Arthur to discuss Dr Tom and Erica and we get the sense that Dr Arthur was/is Dr Naadiah’s therapist. Is Dr Arthur the ‘Head Doctor’?
• How do the doctors perform time travel? How do they decide who gets to be in therapy?
• (I doubt this one will be answered) How long in real time are patients ‘away’ when they go on time travel treatments? Are they even physically ‘away’ or does their consciousness just go to “another plane” of existence and then travel back in time to occupy their younger bodies? I think it can be either or situation simply because we know Dr Tom should be dead after he jumped off of a building and if only his consciousness moved out of his body then we can’t explain the episodes where his daughter reappears – which would require him to be alive.

Twitter Hashtags & Names Appear On Screen During #SheenRoast. A Sign Of Things To Come In TV Land?

Last night Comedy Central aired their Roast of Charlie Sheen. The hashtag for the evening was #SheenRoast which was displayed on the bottom left hand corner of the screen encouraging people to weigh in on Twitter as to what they thought of the show. That move, the hashtag being included in the corner during shows, has become fairly common as of late but what I hadn’t ever seen before was the inclusion of the people on screen’s Twitter accounts. I took screen captures of each of the folks as they were on stage roasting Charlie (and one of Charlie himself) each with the #SheenRoast hashtag on the bottom of the screen and right below the hashtag their Twitter account handle. Here’s a slideshow of the screen caps I took with my BlackBerry PlayBook.

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I wonder if this signifies a shift in the social aspect of television watching. Can we expect to start seeing the Twitter handles next to names in the credits of shows?  Obviously I don’t expect regular shows to start popping up actors’ names on screen when they first appear within the show but in the credits (opening or closing though I think opening would be better) I can TOTALLY see it happening in the near future. It is already fairly

My Mom’s TV, May 1979-January 2010 RIP

Yes, you read that title correctly. My mom just told me she threw out the TV I have been urging her to get rid of for YEARS. She bought it in 1979 right before she and my Dad moved to Toronto from New York City, a few months after my older brother was born. She remembers this specifically because it was still in its box when they loaded it onto the moving truck.

So ya, basically this TV was my family’s middle child. Right in between me and my younger brother on one side and my two older brothers on the other. It was in the family longer than I’ve been. I will need another 2 years & 1 month to even have been in the family for as long as this TV.

Now you may be wondering why my mom, after all these years, threw it out? Not because she wanted to connect a coaxial cable to it – ya, it didn’t have a port for that. Or because she wanted to watch digital cable on it – she somehow managed to make that work too! But because the tubes in the TV were apparently so old it would literally stop showing a picture after it was on for 20 minutes of use!

It also makes you think of all the history that TV must have displayed: The Iranian Revolution and the American Embassy Hostage Crisis, the Meech Lake Accords, the time when MuchMusic launched and actually played music, the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Soviet Union, the protest at Tiananmen Square, the Oslo Accords between Rabin & Arafat, the Prime Ministership of the first female Prime Minister of Canada, 9/11, the appointment of the first black Governor General of Canada, and the election of the first black President of the USA. Wow! The amount of history is astonishing and those are only some I picked which stuck out in my mind.

Also, there’s a well known saying: “They don’t make ’em like they used to.” Thinking about the “life and times” of that TV really brings that saying home to me. Do you think any piece of technology you have/use today will still be in use by you in 2041?

UPDATES:

• I changed the date on this post because I actually wrote it on the subway en route to an event last night with no reception and only remembered to actually send it to WordPress once the day was already officially over. I count that as it being qualified for my Post-A-Day post for when I wrote it not when it posted.
• I fixed the spelling on Tiananmen Square – as I said above, the post was written with no Interwebs connection so I couldn’t look it up at the time.

TV Channel Surfing: Something I Still Enjoy…Don’t You?

Channel Surfing

I know how most people of my generation will agree they’d rather give up TV as opposed to their computer/internet. However, I have to say I still enjoy going to a TV and flipping it on to see what random show I can find. Sure, I can go to a streaming website, a hard drive collection, or even a DVD/Blu-Ray collection and watch any show/movie I want but there is something to be said for just seeing what reruns (or randomly interesting shows) are on and vegging out to them. Have you ever sat around for half-an-hour in front of your computer/disc collection trying to figure out what you want to watch? Sometimes too much choice is just paralyzing. It’s nice to flip to a channel and see that random rerun of Friends or Seinfeld or whichever episode from whichever Star Trek series Space is showing at that moment.

I also fully admit I LOVE having every TV show at my fingertips online. But sometimes it is just too much work deciding what show/movie I want to watch when I can just flip on the TV and see what’s on. Haven’t you ever had that moment when you turn on the TV and flip around a bit and lo and behold a movie you haven’t seen since the late 90’s is on. Yes, it was a cheesy movie even then, and yes, the commercials are annoying. But c’mon, you have to agree there’s something so simple and enjoyable about tuning in to the randomness of shows and movies that are on the boob tube 24/7/365.

I think, though, that in the future we may see a final shift from television when people start broadcasting  Internet TV Stations much like the Internet Radio Channels that started popping up in the early 2000s and continue on to this day. When that happens, one of the only things TV is still good for will be lost. Then, all that will be left will be sports and award shows which I know are already being broadcast online both for free and for pay.

A bunch of people watching a bunch of really big TVs at a sports bar in Toronto