NBC’s 'Day One' could be so bad it’s great

With the television networks now airing summer reruns and reality TV filler, I’m already looking ahead to the fall TV season.
The CW’s “Nikita,” a remake of the French action film “La Femme Nikita” (1990), and the CBS reboot of “Hawaii Five-O” look interesting.
But last year I was interested in seeing an NBC show called “Day One.” It has yet to air and may never air, according to EW and Movieline.
Movieline called “Day One” the “expensive series so bad even NBC wouldn’t air it.” After all, this is the same low-rated network that basically abandoned primetime TV last fall by airing “The Jay Leno Show” five nights a week at 10 p.m. ET.
NBC first announced a midseason premiere for “Day One,” an apocalyptic adventure show, and a 13-episode season. Later they slashed the order to four episodes to air as a mini-series. Then they trimmed it to a two-hour TV movie. Then NBC just scrapped the show entirely.
“Day One” must have been astoundingly bad for NBC to cancel the show after filming the two-hour pilot. The trailer for the show looked like “Melrose Place” meets “War of the Worlds.” It probably had a lot of sappy melodrama, angst-ridden characters and idiotic science fiction. Also, it likely was “crap-tacular.”
“Day One” could have been so bad it’s great. (i.e. unintentionally hilarious.) I’d love to see it. Chances are that NBC will find a way to burn it off as a direct-to-DVD movie for Redbox and Blockbuster or air it on the SyFy channel or something.
I started following the blog and Twitter account of “Day One” creator Jesse Alexander, who also worked on “Heroes,” hoping he would shed some light on the fate of “Day One.” But he’s been completely mum on the topic.
Maybe he’s embarrassed about the whole thing too.

Yahoo ignoring core users; Glitch goes unfixed for months

A couple of months ago, I e-mailed Yahoo tech support about an annoying glitch in Yahoo Finance. I received a response at the time stating that they were aware of the bug and were trying to fix it.
Fast forward to today and the glitch is still there.
Yahoo Finance is one of the web portal’s crown jewels. You’d think they’d care enough about it to fix an obvious error. But no.
I keep track of dozens of publicly traded companies as part of my day job. I group them into portfolios on Yahoo Finance to monitor stock action and news.
When I click on a portfolio, I get a grid of stock information for the companies followed by “Recent News.” At the bottom of that list of news headlines is a web link to “View More Recent News.”
If you click on “View More Recent News,” it takes you to another page of headlines. This page includes mostly headlines that were on the previous page, but that’s not the glitch to which I’m referring.
At the bottom of this second page is a link that reads “More headlines …” If you click on this link, it takes you to a blank webpage and gives you an error message in the header that reads “Request URI Too Long.” (See screenshots above.)
The fix is simple. Just delete the “More headlines” link. Because two lines lower there’s a link for “Older Headlines” that actually works.
Really. How long does it take to fix a dumb glitch like that, Yahoo?
Have you just stopped caring?

Update (7-6-10): Yahoo has fixed the glitch. It's about time.

Favorite websites in review, part 2

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Cool niche websites on TV shows, movies

Lately I’ve been praising specialty websites.
So I thought I’d mention a few that I like related to television shows and movies.
TV Series Finale is an interesting website devoted to TV show endings, reunions and revivals. It’s one of the places I check when I’m trying to find out whether a favorite, low-rated TV show is being canceled or not.
Instantwatcher.com is dedicated to helping people find the best movies available on Netflix’s instant-viewing service. It offers scads of genres and useful lists to peruse. I particularly like the list of movies certified as “fresh” by Rotten Tomatoes.
Netflix Instant Play Picks of the Moment by Paul J. Marasa highlights a good new movie every few days that’s available on Netflix streaming video.
There are more, but that’s enough for now.

Specialized websites sometimes short-lived

The Failed Promise of Digital Content, Part 12

Among the unsung heroes of the Internet are people who devote their time and efforts to a specific expertise and share that knowledge with others online.
They create and maintain specialized websites devoted to covering one subject in a thorough and exhaustive manner. They become the go-to resource for information on their special niche.
I’ve written about several such focused websites that I admire, including Future Rock Legends (coverage of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and eligible artists), Theme Park Brochures (an extensive collection of amusement park maps and brochures), and most recently the Internet Adult Film Database (a NSFW database of porn movies, performers and directors).
But maintaining such websites involves tremendous commitment and dedication. As a result, many specialized websites don’t last. Their creators lose interest or no longer have the time to work on them.
I’ve seen a number of interesting specialty websites get abandoned or disappear. Some are no longer updated, but linger like ghosts. Others are now just broken weblinks or direct to different websites.
During the Great Recession, which started in December 2007 and might have ended in July 2009, several websites popped up to track job cuts and retail and tech company closings, but they’re now dead.
Among the deceased websites are FuckedStartups.com, Screwdd.com, LayoffBlog.com and Timely Demise.
In some cases, their data and articles are archived. In others, the information is gone.
And we’re all less for it.

McDonald's has gone to the birds

Just the other day at the McDonald's restaurant in Norwalk, Conn., my kids and I watched birds go wild over a spilled bag of French fries. It was like Alfred Hitchcock's "The Birds" -- if the people were replaced with delicious thin cut fried pototoes. OK, so it was nothing like that movie. But it was fun to watch.

Internet Adult Film Database: A fine example of niche expertise online

The beauty of the Internet is that people with specialized knowledge can readily share their expertise with anyone.
A good example is the Internet Adult Film Database. It is to pornography what the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is to mainstream movies. The porn industry is a multibillion-dollar enterprise, so regardless of your personal feelings about it, it should not be ignored. (Warning: IAFD is not suitable for work. Contains adult images.)
The IAFD lists 104,302 titles and 99,391 performers and directors.
The IAFD has an all-volunteer staff of 12 editors who do research and data entry, says the site’s webmaster Jeff Vanzetti. The website is the premier resource for information about the U.S. porn industry, although it has been adding more European titles to the database.
The IAFD was created by Peter van Aarle, who died in September 2005 at the age of 42 from a heart attack, according to Wikipedia. Vanzetti and others continue his legacy.
In an e-mail interview, Vanzetti told me his favorite part of working on the IAFD is knowing that he’s “giving something back” to the community. “I think that’s what drives most of the editors; knowing we’re part of something larger than ourselves and we’re helping the fan and the consumer make informed choices,” he said.
The IAFD includes both gay and straight porn movies. The database has significantly more porn actors than actresses recorded. It notes 58,004 actors and 35,958 actresses. That’s a lot of people having sex on camera.
The database also lists 5,429 directors. Of those directors, just over 2,300 (42%) were performers themselves, Vanzetti said.
As with any extensive database, a lot of interesting information can be mined from it. Vanzetti was kind enough to run the numbers for me for some fascinating statistics on the porn industry.

Q: How many active performers are there in the porn movie business today?

Assuming an active performer has had a movie released in 2009 or 2010, the Internet Adult Film Database lists 6,295 male performers and 3,642 female performers. There also are 682 active porn directors.

Q: What’s the average career length for people in the porn movie industry?
Two years for performers and three years for directors.
The typical female performer makes 10 adult movies. The average for male performers is six movies. Directors average 13 movies.

Q: What’s the average age for actresses and actors doing porn?

The IAFD’s birthday data are incomplete, but what there are shows that, on average, female performers start at age 23, males at 26 and directors at 32.
Female performers tend to quit porn acting by 27, males by 32 and directors by 37.

Interesting stuff.
Thanks again to Jeff Vanzetti for helping out with this article. He also assisted my posts on porn parodies based on real-life events or public figures and the cleverest titles for porn parodies of Hollywood movies and TV shows.