Enotes

We have a DVR at home, as do many people nowadays, and I admit it is spoiling me rotten. For the few of you who don't know, the DVR enables you to, among other things, record your favorite shows and store them for viewing later. You can even categorize and file them, digitally, so your TV suddenly turns into a sort of computer hard drive. The other thing the DVR does--and this is the spoiling part---is allow you to pause, rewind and fast forward shows you are currently watching, including live sporting events. So you turn into your own replay specialist. We are DVR reliant at home. We only have one, connected to the big screen TV in the front room. And it gets a work out. Lots of pausing, like when nature calls or my wife needs to check on laundry when she's watching something of note. The pausing can sometimes lead to fast forwarding, especially during commercials. By the way, there's nothing better than fast forwarding through a four-minute commercial jam. Nothing...

I was walking the pooch the other day when I saw something on the sidewalk that elicited a big grin and took me back about 40 years, instantly. Kids had been playing with outdoor chalk and while I couldn't make out what they had written, it didn't matter, for just the sight of chalk on the sidewalk brought back a ton of memories. When I was a lad of 6-10 years old, my friends and I would create whole worlds, just with some chalk. Usually the theme centered around the automobile: roads, retail stores, gas stations, etc. It would go like this. Everyone would bring a toy car or truck or any other motor vehicle and those would be our "traffic." Then the roads and highways would be drawn, up and down the driveway and the adjacent sidewalk, complete with exit ramps to simulate freeways. We had a long driveway at our home in Livonia, so when you combined that square footage with that of the sidewalk that ran in front of the house, you had yourself enough space to...

Familiarity breeds contempt. That's the saying, right? It would seem to fit Mitt Romney like a glove. For the second political race in a row, voters are drifting away from the Republican presidential candidate the more they get to know him, or at least see him in action. It happened in the GOP primary, where Romney had difficulty putting away Rick Santorum, who was as far right of a candidate as has run in recent memory. Polls indicated that the more primary voters got to know Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, the less enamored they were with him. The same thing is happening now, in Romney's race against President Obama. Romney suffered a double whammy in the past two weeks: the Democratic convention with its stirring speeches, and his big mouth in the wake of the Libyan crisis. The former provided Obama with an expected (though maybe larger than expected) bounce, and the latter gave the country a sneak peek into what kind of man might occupy the Oval ...

"The only thing worse than being talked about, is NOT being talked about." Maybe not in NBC's case today. I'm sure the Peacock Network would be delighted if no one was talking about them, in light of this morning's monumentally stupid decision to blow off a national moment of silence so an interview with Kris Jenner could go on, uninterrupted. The moment of silence was recognized at 8:46 a.m. today to commemorate the moment the first plane hit the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. But NBC, during the "Today Show," didn't bother to keep quiet at 8:46. For that's when Jenner was talking about breast implants, or some such fluff. NBC blew it. Whether it was an oversight or not, the network has enough egg on its face to make the world's biggest omelet. How could "Today," a TV institution since the early-1950s, make such an egregious error? And don't you let NBC off the hook here. No excuses....

Time was, Michael Strahan was spending Sundays trying to sack quarterbacks and planting them into the turf. Now he'll spend weekday mornings trying to sack the talk show competition. If the folks who produce Kelly Ripa's weekday gab fest were looking for a drastic change from the retired Regis Philbin as co-host, they couldn't have picked one further from the Regis spectrum by tabbing Strahan, the former New York Giants defensive lineman. Strahan couldn't look more different than Regis, number one. Strahan is 40 and black, and huge. Regis was 79 when he retired, is white, and is far from a big man. Strahan has been honing his skills as an on-air personality for the past several years as one of the talking heads on Fox NFL Sunday , partnering with Terry Bradshaw, Howie Long, Jimmy Johnson and Curt Menefee. Now Strahan takes the seat next to Ripa, who has been in search of a permanent co-host for over a year. Apparently show execs liked the chemistry between R...

Late night television options used to consist of a movie, something on UHF and "The Tonight Show." The air space after the local news was ruled with an iron fist by one Johnny Carson. ABC made a run at Johnny when it debuted "Nightline" in 1980 with Ted Koppel (a show born from the Iran hostage crisis), but Johnny was the unquestioned No. 1 when it came to TV around the witching hour. Johnny was 36 when he took over "Tonight" in 1962. For comparison sake, Jimmy Fallon is 37 years old. But Johnny got better and more dominant with age, just like a strong whiskey. He moved easily into his 50s and 60s, his hair getting grayer but his appeal not. His viewers got gray with him, and maybe that was part of it, too. Joey Bishop made a run at Johnny in the late-1960s on ABC but even Rat Packer Bishop wasn't much of a threat. Then Johnny moved the show from New York to California in the early-1970s and his already impressive guest list got even better, as...

Actors call it typecasting, and it's a dirty word for them. It might as well be four letters in length. Typecasting (aggh!!) has been the bane of many an actor, who gets pigeon-holed into a certain character or persona and, no matter how hard they try, can never really shake the image. Typecasting isn't all bad, of course. Many an actor has made a mint playing the same character, either literally or similarly. And, conversely, there have been cautionary tales of a performer getting restless and leaving a successful TV series, for example, in an effort to find something else, anything else, to play. And those folks ended up losing a boatload of money. J.K. Rowling has been typecast---as an author. Rowling, the rags-to-riches author of the "Harry Potter" series of books, decided that enough was enough and stopped writing the Potter books, despite the enormous fortune the stories netted her. I don't know; if I was making the dough that Rowling was making-...