William Shatner, who has been Priceline’s pitchman for the past 14 years (!), makes his last plea for customers to negotiate their best deal in his final ad for the company, which has decided to retire the campaign and move on to something new.

Like another one of Shatner’s iconic characters, he plunges to his death in order to save others.

And blows up real good.

It’s an odd end to an odd advertising campaign. Farewell, Priceline Negotiator. You will be missed.

Over the past few years, the stock value, figuratively speaking, of comedian Louis C.K. has been going steadily up. In a few years we might look back and say that 2011 is when it officially hit its peak. I hope it stays high for a long while. I suppose that depends how long C.K. can maintain it, and if he can continue building on the success he’s currently having.

In his latest (independent) stand-up special, C.K., in typical self-deprecating fashion, notes how well things are going but suggests it must be temporary: “It’s not gonna last,” he says. “It’s been about eight months, I’ve got a year left, and then I’m back to being just like you.” (Read more…)

Note: This post contains profanity. If that offends you, get the f**k over it already. And, also, sorry; I’m not trying deliberately to offend anyone.

Earlier tonight, Kathy and I were watching The Daily Show, and Jon Stewart had on guest Marion Cotillard, which right there led to a moment between me and my wife:

Me: “Oh, man, who the hell is that chick? She looks so familiar.” (Read more…)

Lest everyone assumes that I’ve forgotten that this website exists, let me assure you that I have not, so I’ll give you a quick update on things.

First, the TNG reviews. Sigh. I’m afraid what I’d hoped would be the Summer of Jammer’s Awesome Comeback has quickly slipped away to become the Summer of Lost Opportunities. After roaring through season five of TNG, season six remains on the back burner, and I regret to inform that I watched the first four episodes of season six back in late May, wrote the first review, and then got pulled away. Fast-forward nearly three months, and my grand plan to get TNG done before fall has become a fantasy. I’ll get back to it, but inertia has dragged me down yet again, I’m sorry to report. (Read more…)

Ever since I was a kid I’ve had something of a fascination with trains. Well here’s the ultimate train: one that tears up and then lays down its own tracks. It’s the TRT-909 Track Renewal Train, which made its way by my neighborhood last weekend.

The TRT-909 Track Renewal Train is a train upon a train, with its own rails to transport this tie ferry.

I’d known it was coming based on prior news reports weeks ago. I knew it was actually here when I heard very loud noises coming from the tracks a few blocks from my house on Sunday.

These particular tracks that run through town are part of the corridor that runs between Chicago and St. Louis and is being upgraded to accommodate the forthcoming high-speed Amtrak that will travel the corridor in a few years. (Note that “high speed” is by the lowly standards of Amtrak and not those of the world.)

Anyway, the TRT-909 is an impressive machine. It pulls up and spreads the rails apart, removes the old wooden railroad ties and replaces them with new concrete ties, then puts the rails back down. There are also a dozen or more smaller vehicles/machines that do other work on the tracks before and after the TRT-909 does its thing. I’ve seen other videos online that show this process in more detail, but this video shows the gist of the main part of the job, as well as I could shoot it from my distance of 20 or so yards away. Apologies for the shaky-cam quality; I was kind of far away and had to zoom quite a ways in to get the detail.

That such a machine was conceived and built and can do this is quite an impressive thing. It’s a very specific job, and here they’ve created a very specific engineering marvel.

Working as I do in online media — both as a career and as a free-time hobby — I naturally have to keep up with what’s hot, what’s trending, where everything is going, how people are using online tools to get and share information, etc., etc.

Obviously, over the last several years, social networking has exploded. Facebook and Twitter are pretty much platforms that every company or blogger has to be on, otherwise they’re missing out on a swath of people who might be on Facebook or Twitter all day, but do not necessarily seek out and view content on websites without being reminded by updates they get on Facebook or Twitter.

(Interestingly, the idea of going to websites to seek out the content you want — without getting some sort of reminder — seems almost foreign to me now. I pretty much do all my online reading via RSS feeds, where Google Reader gives me a list of headline links from all my favorite sites that I either choose to click on to read the story, or not.) (Read more…)

I’ve posted reviews for the remainder of Star Trek: The Next Generation, Season 5.

Go read ‘em. Then post comments to the individual reviews over on the reviews themselves.

Just to reassure you: No, this is not an April Fools Day prank.

No joke. I’m actually doing this.

This is me finally making good on a promise I made — oh, I don’t know — about 15 times over the past 36 months.

Three years. Yes, it’s been three years since I posted my last reviews for season four of Star Trek: The Next Generation Inertia can be a real bitch, let me tell you. Granted, I partially put this stuff on hold because I was reviewing BSG and later Caprica, but my attempts to get back to this failed time and time again, and before I knew it, one, two, three entire years had gone by.

Is there still anyone out here? Anyone who believed that I would finally actually do this instead of offering up my promise of “I’ll get back to it eventually”? (Read more…)

You can call this post what it is — a snarky, sight-unseen prejudgment of something that just looks stupid on its face.

Amanda Seyfried is going to grandmother’s house. (Warner Bros. photo)

I’m talking about the making of “Red Riding Hood” into a Hollywood “thriller” starring Amanda Seyfried in the title role, and I think involving a werewolf.

Yes.

With any luck, the werewolf, if there is one (and I don’t know that there is; I did NOT consult the Google on the Internets for a plot description), will be played by Taylor Whatshisface, in a crossover appearance from the Twilight franchise.

(And speaking of Twilight, why did they have to go and split the last book into two movies which I’ll now have to sit through with my wife? Greedy Hollywood bastards!) (Read more…)

As previously alluded to, I will not be individually reviewing the final nine episodes of Caprica as I did the first eight plus the pilot, but I figured I would at least offer up some belated closing thoughts of the defunct Battlestar Galactica prequel, whose final episodes showed that this indeed could’ve been a compelling series. Based on how the first and only season wrapped up, I’d have been back to see more, had it been renewed.

Caprica’s mob storyline reaches a turning point — one of several story strands that played out in satisfying fashion.

The single-season, 17-episode run of Caprica (not counting the pilot movie, which would make for a total of 19 hourlong episodes), to me plays like a compelling argument for the 12- or 13-episode run typical of many cable dramas. In this day and age, with so many choices out there, with so many mediums of content consumption available to audiences and with their attention divided and their attention spans shortened, does it really make sense to do a TV series — and even more so, a TV serial — that spans 20 or 22 episodes?

Granted, you could make the argument that season one of Caprica could really be called two seasons with two arcs, but that’s not what Syfy or its creators called it — and more to the point, the stories being told here just didn’t warrant as many hours as were devoted to them. (Read more…)