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This website is now located at t2buck.com. Please bookmark the new URL. Pages here at the old address, oocities.com/tbtho, will still exist until Yahoo! discontinues its Geocities service later this year. However, it's only on the new t2buck.com site that I will be making updates.
APRIL 27, 2009 1927 COLOR AND MORE I was only a small boy when my family went to the First Methodist Church one night to watch a silent movie. The year was about 1954. A portable screen had been set up next to the pulpit, and a plank had been placed across the backs of two pews to support a 16-millimeter projector. The feature that night was the 1927 Cecil B. DeMille classic, The King of Kings. Scenes from the Gospels were reverently dramatized and narrated with title cards, many quoting a Biblical chapter and verse. For us in our small-town church, the movie was not only silent but in black and white.
One from 1954 went into this article about single-camera interviews. Two from Damn Yankees have been added to this entry about low-budget studio backgrounds. And one is in this note about a TV "camera" that I once built. Part of it apparently traveled to the moon!
APRIL 24, 2009 WHOS HE? Sometimes, when listening to the radio, Im not paying attention. Or maybe Im tuning to a different station. At any rate, I often find myself listening to the middle of a story.
After a few minutes of this, my question is, Who are you talking about?! In written material, it may be acceptable to keep using pronouns without restating their antecedents. If the reader gets confused, he can go back a page or two to find out who he and she are. But on radio, the audience has no rewind button, and you have to assume that some listeners are joining the conversation at various points throughout. They cant ask, So what are we discussing here? The broadcaster should repeat the names occasionally. Some classic examples: Back in the 1960s on ABC Radio, it must have been network policy to write news stories with a certain redundancy. I remember hearing many stories that went something like this.
Anyone joining the story in the middle and wondering What fire? Was it around here? would hear the key facts repeated at the end. And when Hank Stram was the radio analyst on Monday Night Football, Id often hear him reorient his listeners.
APRIL 18, 2009 GOTHAM
APRIL 13, 2009 GOOD FOR YOU, BAD FOR ME When the media characterize news as good or bad, theyre not always looking at the big picture. For example, take the weather. A forecast of 89° and sunny is generally proclaimed as good news, but thats too hot for my comfort. A forecast of a rainy day is generally bemoaned as bad news, but not by the farmers whose crops need the rain. Those same farmers rejoice if the price of wheat goes up, but their joy is not shared by those of us who buy bread. For another example, take the population. Although the Pittsburgh region lost 2,967 residents over the last year, the local newspaper found a silver lining in the fact that the loss was only half as large as usual.
A larger population may be good news for businesses and construction workers and politicians. But should the rest of us want to see more traffic jams, more pollution, more overcrowded schools, and all the other consequences of the fact that there are already too many of us?
APRIL 7, 2009 KITTEH IZ MAKIN NU FRENDZ
APRIL 1, 2009 THE WAYBACK MACHINE Seven years ago, in an age when this website was updated only monthly, there was one month when the home page resembled the front page of a newspaper. It looked something like this.
MARCH 16, 2002 Obscure author T. Buckingham Thomas has agreed to upgrade his free site on the World Wide Web by paying actual money to Yahoo GeoCities. "I needed to increase the megabytes of storage and to enable uploads using File Transfer Protocol," Thomas attempted to explain. "And one side benefit is that those advertisements are gone. You know, the ones that used to drop down from the upper right corner every time you opened a new article." Thomas's monthly expenditure, which used to be zero, has reportedly increased to $4.95. He expressed hope that his readers, who will continue to view this site at no charge, will appreciate the improvement. TBT
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