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Designated Survivor Filming Washington, DC in Toronto & North York
Mystery building to the left of the street light on the far side of the road. (Click to Enlarge)
This summer I was meandering around my neighborhood in North York (fine, I was playing Pokémon Go and was on a poke-walk! Don’t judge me!) when I noticed this weird building to the west of the Allen Rd in what was either Downsview Airport or the grounds of the upcoming Downsview Park TTC Station. It looked like it was a medieval castle but not. I knew I needed to find out what it was so I came back with my point-and-shoot camera that has 21x optical zoom and took a bunch more snaps.
I asked friends and neighbours if they knew what it was and showed the photos but no one had any better idea what the mystery building was.
Fast forward to September 28 when I watched the second episode of the new Kiefer Sutherland show, Designated Survivor made by ABC and aired here in Canada on CTV. The show’s plot involves the destruction of the US Capitol building and they were showing the destruction’s aftermath when I noticed some familiar shapes.
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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.
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The Quotes Quoted By Dr Tom From CBC’s “Being Erica” – Season 4 Edition
Well, last night “Being Erica” had its series finale with the end of the Season 4 and I am here to bring you the quotes quoted by Dr Tom all this season. As well, I have provided links to previous incarnations of this post from the previous seasons:
If you are not up to date on the final season of Being Erica don’t worry there are no out and out spoilers in here.
I have also decided to add a new aspect to this post in that I am going to include Erica’s patient in each of the episodes. (I started writing this post after Episode 2 when she has already had a different patient in each of the two episodes as she goes through “Doctor Training.”)
Episode 1 “Doctor Who?”
Patient: Josh McIntosh
- Failure is nature’s plan to prepare you for greater responsibilities. – Napoleon Hill
- Life is too short to blend in. – Paris Hilton
Episode 2 “Osso Barko”
- Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. – Sigmund Freud
- With the possible exception of the equator, everything begins somewhere. – C.S. Lewis
Episode 3 “Baby Mama” Read more…
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When Is It A Spoiler And When Should You Have Seen It Already?
I hate spoilers I really do. I find it to be one of the most obnoxious things anyway can do is to ruin a new movie I’ve been waiting months to see or a newly aired TV show that’s still on my PVR and I’ve been waiting all week to see.
In today’s high tech, fast paced world there are certain places that spoilers are expected but there are still others where they aren’t. On Twitter, for example, people always discuss events as they happen be they TV shows, awards ceremonies, or real historical events (like when President Obama announced that they’d killed Osama). That is totally and completely expected by anyone who uses Twitter and I am not at all referencing that. A lot of Twitter clients these days even include the option to mute tweets that have certain words/hashtags in them so you can be spared seeing them discussed – I wouldn’t be surprised if it was added with this as one of the main reasons.
One thing I noticed when I started using the entertainment social network GetGlue was if I went to check-in to a show on the GetGlue website some inconsiderate people would sometimes be discussing the show or giving away plot points within their check-in which shows up on the homepage for the show. This is one thing, in my mind, if the show/episode aired a while ago but while the show is still airing that is ridiculously annoying. It ruined the surprise death of a show’s character in the episode I was just about to watch.
The fact that people discuss shows online as they happen is why I think it is OK to do while the show is happening (on Twitter) but after the show airs it is open for debate in my mind. What is the appropriate time to wait after the show airs or after a movie is released before you can discuss it openly? In my mind, I would say at least a 24 hour waiting period for TV shows and for movies I would put it at a month…although maybe the best way to go for movies is while it is still on the highest grossing movies in theaters list. I don’t know which is why I am putting it to all y’all. What say you? Let me know in the comments below.
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Cell Phones In Movies And TV: What A Difference!
"Run Lola, Run" German "Lola Rennt" Poster
I just watched the German movie “Run Lola, Run” which came out in Germany in 1998 and was struck by how different this movie would have been if the characters had cellphones.
Without getting too plot heavy (and ruining the movie) the beginning of the movie hinges on Lola being late to meet her boyfriend and because there were no payphones around she couldn’t call him to tell him about her lateness. Him also not having a cellphone meant that when Lola didn’t show up and he couldn’t find any payphones either to try calling her house or another one of their friends (there seems to have been a severe lack of payphones in Germany in the late 90s) he had to take the subway. These 2 plot points lead to the entire movie believably being able to happen.
Run Lola Run English poster
Now think about the movie happening now or even five years later. Lola would have been able to call or text her boyfriend about what happened causing her to be late. Even if she didn’t, her boyfriend would have been able to call her to find out where she was or call a friend to come pick him up. The movie’s entire plot falls apart with the presence of cell phones. People in 20 years will watch this movie and think how quaint it was that they didn’t have phones with them at all times.
This brings me to my next point of how movies and TV plots have been affected by cellphones, the TV series “24”. This was a show that began a few short years later, premiering in November of 2001 and running until May 2010 but the presence and availability of cellphones the show possible.
“24” took place within a 24 hour period and each episode of the season was one hour of that day. The protagonist, Jack Bauer, and his friends at the fictional US Government agency CTU relied on cellphones and smartphones for the plot to develop at the breakneck speed which it played out. CollegeHumor even has a video of the supposed ‘lost pilot’ of 24 from 1994. In that clip, every time Jack needs to get in touch with CTU he has to run outside of the building he is infiltrating to a payphone with a quarter to call them. When they need to get schematics of a bomb to him, they need to print it out and bike courier it to him because at 950KBs to put it on a disk would take “THREE FLOPPIES“! Check it out below:
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[Direct link to the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JMLH_QyPTYM]
It is simply amazing how different our world is now that we have all these devices at our fingertips. However, watch a movie or TV show from even a little more than a decade ago and it really drives home what a big difference technology makes in our day to day lives. Without cellphones and smartphones 24 would have had to have been called 48, 72, or even 168 (that’s 24*7, or a full week…I did the math on a calculator so don’t feel embarrassed if you didn’t know that offhand).
Recently, I flipped past the movie “She’s All That” on TV randomly one day and I stopped to watch a bit because I remember Rachel Leigh Cook being really hot. As I watched for a few minutes, I was struck by the differences in our society since 1999 when, in that movie, you hear a ringer go off and all the girls in the high school’s popular and rich clique walking together pull out their pagers to check who got a page! A page! Times have certainly changed haven’t they!
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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.
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
- What I want to see out of Season 4 in terms of the story wrapping up.
- 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.
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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.
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 Read more…
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LNN: Levy News Network 