DrBullfish.com

One of my interests beyond the scope of television is astronomy. I love space, I love the planets - I’m eternally fascinated by that entire realm of science. Imagine my glee then to find a clip within my video library of two of my hobbies intersecting - the man who discovered Pluto, Clyde Tombaugh, appearing as a contestant on I’ve Got a Secret in 1956. The panel is so bamboozled that the game stops early, as clearly both Garry and the show’s producers wanted to give the man the full time to show off the photos leading to the discovery of the planet.

NBC may be in dire straits now, but back in the halcyon days of 1990, their lineup wasn’t all roses either. As evidenced by these two promos (same tape, no editing stop in between) the programming on NBC Saturday that fall…well…was terrible. None of the three shows advertised made it past a year. Had I decided to go with my original idea for a site dedicated to short lived shows, odds are all three would have found a place here. As-is, they’re but footnotes in this new upload showcasing NBC’s hit lineup that night in Fall 1990. The more things change…

Periodically, I post clips of one of my favorite series, What’s My Line, featuring famous or otherwise interesting guests.

The newest in the series is a clip from the tail end of the 1970s syndicated version with Mystery Guest…Aretha Franklin!

Visited the local Circuit City for the final time yesterday - the chain’s final day open for business. Most of the stock was already liquidated - save some misc. odds and ends that no one would want for 15 cents, let alone 15 dollars. I always had a soft spot - *why* is explained below - for Circuit city…I bought my current TV, a 27″ HDTV, on sale there two years ago for $399. A 27″ HDTV for 400 bucks in 2007 was fairly unheard of.

Though it’s easy to assign blame for Circuit City’s failure to the economy - in this case the company’s failure has just as much to do with their own incompetence as anything else. The writing has really been on the wall since the day they switched from the commissioned sales model to the minimum wage grunt system.

There were happier times for the company. The last of the truly great times for the company was embodied by one of my favorite jingles from the company’s early-90s ad campaign.

I absolutely loved this ad campaign - and it’s a remarkable coincidence that it’s phasing out in 1996 eerily coincided with the beginning of the company’s decline at the hands of Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and the Internet.

Honestly, I think the alliteration in the post titles is a neat touch.

From 1978, watch a show-opening Winner’s Circle where Anita Gillette and her partner - through no fault of Anita’s, managed to rack up a whopping $50 on the $20,000 Pyramid.

For more Pyramid greatness - or lack thereof, tune into GSN starting March 30, when both the $25,000 and $100,000 Pyramids return to the schedule, airing twice daily.

The eleven of you who’ve visited my site in the last month and a half want more videos, clearly. Ask, and ye shall receive after considerable delay.

From an early episode of Cash Cab: After Dark - two people enter the Cash Cab, and while excited to play they quickly realize the folly of agreeing to play as their lack of knowledge is quickly made apparent. While not the *only* time it’s happened on the series, as the show’s great host Ben Bailey mentions, it’s still embarrassing to get 3 strikes on only 3 questions.

I figure that if I’m going to continue to pay the hosting bill to run this site, I might as well put something on it. Before I start throwing things to the wall to see what sticks, though, I figured I’d lobby the eight of you who visit this site: What do YOU want to see?

During the 1980s, producers at Wheel of Fortune decided to throw an extra-long puzzle onto the board during a round with a $5000 top dollar. To boot, the puzzle also had several instances of multiple repeat letters. What they didn’t count on was that someone’s spins would work out just right so that they accrued large sums very quickly. They also didn’t expect the person to be completely clueless as to the answer, thus having to continually spin.

Eventually, they lucked out and the contestant’s lack of knowledge of the puzzle saved the company $62,000+ worth of prizes. And it truly WAS the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.

Wanted for questioning in the murder of my external hard drive

Anyone who knows me well enough - and I’m going to assume that’s none of you - know that I like to tinker around with computers, and the operating systems on them. Well, every few years or so I get the urge to try Linux again. And within 24 hours I’m usually reminded of why I avoid it.

The last time I tried this experiment was in 2004 with Fedora Core 2 back in 2004 - I played around with it for the duration of my trip to Denver, Colorado…and promptly removed it when I got home. Aside from the joy of Tux Racer, I found the software to be lacking in comparison to Windows (I’d not yet discovered Apple). My two big gripes were a lack of application support (Newsflash, folks: Some of us *want* to run proprietary software, particularly say, Photoshop?; we don’t care if it requires a license/fee or is free, just so long as it’s the best at getting the job done. And don’t start me on GIMP) and the fact that I just had to spend too much damned time in the terminal. I don’t like command lines, I like graphical interfaces - I’m a Creative-type at heart, and so I tend to gravitate towards shiny toys that let me get the job done easily.

Three days ago, I decided on a lark to mess around with ubuntu. Version 8.10 for those curious. Knowing a bit, I get cute and set the installation partition on my external hard drive. I’m promptly greeted with a large number of error messages through the install process. Since the only way out appears to be to turn off the computer cold mid-install, I decide to just let it go. Ubuntu finishes installing, and boots without nearly without incident - I DID have to enable the graphics driver since it was considered “proprietary” and so for some reason they decided it would be a good idea to cripple it on first boot. Thanks a lot there.

Not really thinking about my previous errors, I play around for a while. Its alright and has advanced a decent bit from the 2004 days though I still prefer Windows and OS X to it. Changing distributions probably helped, as ubuntu seems to have a bit of a reputation as being user-friendly. Well, I switch back to Windows in my dual-boot and call it a night. Next morning, I go into iTunes to load music - music which happens to be installed on the external drive….and error message. Try another song, same deal.

I venture into My Computer, into my external hard drive…and find lots of gibberish - those error messages were apparently the installer’s way of trying to tell me the external drive was too damned fragmented to install Linux without corrupting everything else; except that since whoever programmed these error messages has no grounding in the English language, they were presented in technical terms and not actual warnings. Boot over into Linux to see if anything can be salvaged, and no dice. Do a scandisk, and it finds gigs worth of partially corrupt files and re-places them as useless .chk files. Wind up having to re-format the drive.

To those out there who love Linux: You need to start coding error displays in actual English. Telling me there’s a fault at hd1 at block 42019 is nothing. If you ever want your operating system to be adopted by anyone, you need to translate that into “WARNING: YOU *WILL* SCREW UP YOUR HARD DRIVE IF YOU KEEP GOING. PLEASE CANCEL”, then include the technical info afterwards. Including the option to actually cancel the install at the partitioning level or beyond would also be VERY helpful.

Incidentally, I still have the dual-boot with Vista and ubuntu - I didn’t get to finish toying around with the operating system before the hard drive crash, and I want to fully see what it can do. The true benchmark for me though is one it may not meet for some time, the eternal question…”Can it run Photoshop?”. No, not yet.

So what did I lose on the hard drive? Mostly multimedia, including:
Approximately 4000 MP3 audio files, running the gamut from Phil Collins to Franz Schubert to The Who
Many TV episodes, including:

• 2 episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson
• A half dozen episodes of Late Night with David Letterman
• Bill Clinton’s appearance on Arsenio Hall in 1992
• And a bunch of random other TV stuff you aren’t likely to care about

Not to mention my most recent computer backup (two weeks ago) and the majority of graphics and documents I’ve created in the last 2.5 years.

Thanks Linux, thanks a lot. You just couldn’t warn me in plain English, could you?

I, for better and worse, am a fan of Wheel of Fortune. Have been for ages. But I readily admit the show has had some, well….crappy gimmicks over the years.

While some fans feel this is a recent occurance, this isn’t true. The abominable Megaword was from the mid 1990s, and even before THAT they had their 1st Annual (and probably ONLY Annual) Soap Opera College Challenge. College students played against soap stars, with the college kids playing for themselves and the soap actors/actresses playing for their favorite colleges.

Naturally it was a trainwreck. One other oddity: They actually gave away a rather expensive (for the time) convertible *as a Wheel prize*. Here now is that episode (Youtube embedded playlist):