Michael Lee's Train of Thought

One of the things that this article about Firefly and its fans is whether fans of a series can have the reverse impact on people when they're trying to push their series.

It's an interesting thought -- can you be so over-enthusastic that instead of being a testament towards some sort of product or film or movie that you instead turn people off?

The next American remake of a British show is going to be Life on Mars.

Everything I've heard about this series from the BBC is gold, and I'm hopeful that the original version makes it over here at some point. I hope that the American remake to be good, as I certainly think this is a concept that could work really well for this country as well.

And hopefully, ABC is the station to do it -- I'd hope for something with the aesthetic of a Lost or Alias -- though David E. Kelley doesn't really strike me as right for this project, as he tends towards legal dramas and not a weird police drama like this. But perhaps he wants something different.

Labels: television

I've got our list of CONvergence Panels posted. Right now we're collecting panelists and starting to schedule panels. So if you're interested in something, now is the time...

Labels: convergence

Tomorrow is when the new Doctor Who finally lands on American television. I do most of my writing about Doctor Who over at the Torchwood Institute, but this will be your chance to perhaps understand what all of the fuss is about....

Labels: doctorwho

This is sort of a cross-over post, but I've posted some pictures of my cats encountering a Dalek. After all, it's only a couple of days until Doctor Who starts on Sci Fi.

Labels: cats, doctorwho

I saw the article in the most recent Star Tribune about Rep. Heidgerken's bill to restrict college teachers to speakers without strong accents.

I disagree with this legislation on several grounds. It limits the potential educators to a narrower field, instead of getting the best possible educators from around the world.

And as someone with a degree in the sciences, and as such have encountered a variety of accents both as part of my educational background and in my professional career, I believe that one of the valuable side-effects of my college education has been to better understand English speakers with a veriety of different accents on technical matters.

Yes, it might be something that one complains about -- but in the same way that one complains about the difficulty in coursework generally.

I won't believe this until I hold an actual CD in my hands.

Labels: music

I'm quite intrigued that they're putting the Oscar nominated short films on iTunes. One of the more frustrating things with some of the short films or documentaries is that sometimes you see something that looks interesting in the 30 seconds that they show during an awards broadcast, but there's really been no way to see most of them.

Hopefully that's changing..