Mr. Toy's Mental Notes

( Sing to the tune of the Big Bang Theory theme song . ) Our e-conomy was in a stable state, Then nearly thirteen years or so ago Bush tax cuts started, Wait, The deficits ballooned, Bernard Madoff began to croon, Bad housing loans had really zoomed, We started wars, FINANCED BY CHINESE LOANS! Math, science, common sense, Were treated as impediments, Which led to the fall of big banks, BANKS!

With much fanfare KSBW TV in Salinas is rolling out its newest product line. In addition to their regular NBC programming on channel 8 (Comcast cable channel 6) they will soon be adding ABC programming on digital channel 8.2 beginning April 18th. Channel 8.2, which KSBW used until recently to provide round-the-clock weather reports, will move from cable channel 186 to channel 7. Until now ABC programming has come to the Monterey Peninsula on cable channel 7 from KGO TV channel 7 in San Francisco. In addition to the ABC programs, we have been able to enjoy excellent San Francisco Bay Area news reporting and original content like 7 Live in the afternoons, things that KSBW is not equipped to provide.   KSBW has been spinning this change as a great opportunity for Monterey County. For the first time since San Jose lost its ABC affiliate, ABC programs will now be available over the air locally. That's great for the relatively few people who still use rabbit ears. For most of us...

Local movie buffs with cable may want to dig into the Comcast On Demand menu and check out the 1974 movie Zandy's Bride. It's a 19th Century drama, starring Gene Hackman, about a Big Sur rancher who marries a mail-order bride. They don't get along particularly well, mainly because Zandy, a reclusive fellow, has no social skills.  Zandy's Bride was filmed almost entirely in Big Sur, mostly in the mountains, and some scenes were filmed along the coast. A set built at Andrew Molera State Park makes an old frontier town, perhaps pretending to be old Monterey. It's a somewhat gloomy film, but worth a look.  It will be available on Comcast Cable through December 30. Go to the On Demand Menu and select Free Movies , then Movieplex then Movies M-Z and scroll to the bottom of the list. Note that it is formatted (cropped) to fit your TV, so you don't quite get the full widescreen splendor. But, hey, it's free.

In this internet age of instant commentary, I'm behind the times, writing a review of something that happened three days ago - ancient history in the cyberspacetime continuum. But I'm an old dude, to anyone under 40, so bear with me.   I was a fan of the original Hawaii Five-0 TV series. It was a well-written police detective show with just the right proportions of suspense, action and drama. The characters were well defined, had great chemistry, and they were true professional detectives. It didn't hurt that the show had the best theme and opening sequence in TV history.   CBS unveiled a new version Monday, and it was every bit as bad as I was hoping it wouldn't be. It began with a truncated version of the original theme music, with familiar images that sped by a little too fast, and slightly out of sync with the music. The actors were pretty-boy Macy's men's catalog fashion models, roughed up just a bit to look like imitation tough action heroes. The on...

Last week we had a little adventure with Comcast cable TV technical support. On Tuesday July 27th, we noticed that our on-screen program guide had disappeared, along with On-Demand service and every other on-screen display. We could still watch TV, but had to use the newspaper TV listings (remember those?) to decide what to watch. The first thing I tried to solve the problem was to reboot the cable box by disconnecting the power for a few seconds and plugging it back in. That trick worked for some other problems we've had, but not this time.   When the problem persisted into Wednesday I called Comcast and got a woman with an accent so thick I had to keep asking her to repeat things. She said she was sending a signal to our box to do something, but nothing happened. She then concluded that we needed a technician, and said one could be sent to our home a week from Friday. What? Nine days? I protested that was too long to wait. After all, I told her, the last time we needed se...

With the recent passing of Alexander Haig, a famous old soundbite has been dragged up once again, and misinterpreted once again.   On the day when President Reagan was wounded in an assassination attempt there was, understandably, a fair amount of confusion in Washington. Al Haig spoke at a press briefing in the White House to explain what was happening. One of the things he said was "I am in control, here at the White House, pending the return of the Vice President." I remember it well. I watched it on live TV. He was trying to reassure everyone that in the President's absence White House affairs were being attended to even though the president was in the hospital and Vice president Bush was en-route and temporarily unavailable.   In the days that followed, the only part of the quotation anybody talked about was the "I am in charge" part. By taking the phrase out of context, Haig was widely criticized for assuming Presidential powers in violation of th...

Now that the digital television age is underway, an interesting situation has come to my attention. Some people have widescreen (a.k.a. 16x9) TVs and some people, like us, have older TVs in the standard format (4x3). The problem is how do TV stations deliver their new widescreen pictures to people who have standard TVs. I understand that over the air converter boxes, the kind they were telling everyone to get with their government coupon, have a zoom feature which enables the user to either crop the picture to fit their TV, or display it in widescreen "letterbox" format with black bars at the top and bottom of the screen. All well and good. But we have digital cable, without that feature. How the system is delivering the images is a mystery to me, but generally it works OK. Sometimes the picture is letterboxed. Other times it is evident that the image is cropped, because people's faces or some text is cut off at the edges. Whatever the technique, somebody needs to exp...

It's nice to see an average person with talent being newly discovered, and I'm happy for Susan Boyle getting the exposure her voice deserves. What puzzles me, though, is how she got that recognition. When this frumpy middle aged housewife with a flat nose and a horrible hairdo appeared on stage for the Britain's Got Talent show the audience looked on her with low expectations in their eyes, while the judges were openly dismayed to see someone like that on the stage. When she opened her mouth and people realized she could actually sing with the best of them, everyone cheered like mad, as if they were watching a handicapped person do a pole vault. When the video circulated on You Tube Boyle became a worldwide sensation overnight. What is really going on here? She defied expectations, that much is clear. What puzzles me is why expectations were so low in the first place. A pretty face is not a prerequisite for a pretty voice. The most rudimentary layman's knowledge ...

We recently took advantage of Comcast's free digital cable upgrade, finally freeing ourselves from the olden days of analog television. As a techie kind of guy, you may think it odd that we waited so long. We had our reasons, most notable being the fact that upgrades were previously very un-free. Also our small house had no place to put a VCR sized cable box without sacrificing CD storage space. But the new Motorola cable box they're using now is sufficiently compact to fit in the space of a few knick-knacks. It was delivered within two days via UPS. Hooking it up took less than ten minutes, plus another 45 minutes to dust off and relocate the aforementioned knick-knacks. The rest of this story gets kind of technical, so be warned. I soon realized that the cable box was not delivering stereo sound to the TV, at least not through the standard coaxial cable. After ruling out a variety of potential causes (audio settings, bad cables, etc) I then ran a set of RCA type audio and ...

I'm a sports widower. I grew up with sisters and learned to cook. My wife grew up with brothers and learned to watch football, basketball, hockey, tennis, NASCAR, and ask "What's for dinner?" So I am forced to endure hour after hour of sports action on television when I'd rather be watching reruns of Star Trek and Gilligan's Island . I do enjoy Giant Spaceball (and only the Giants), a couple hours per year of the AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am Golf Tournament , and small doses of the Olympics, but that's about as far as I go sportswise. One thing that makes football tolerable are those hardworking NFL cheerleaders. They're very pretty, they're highly trained, and from what I understand they are paid very well. Men, who make up the vast majority of sports fans, are generally known to enjoy looking at pretty girls. So why are NFL cheerleaders given so little screen time on TV? About the only time you see them are just before commercial breaks with ...