T. Buckingham Thomas Archive 2012f

I don’t completely understand TV marathons. This weekend on the cable networks, for example, A&E is showing 10 straight hours of Storage Wars, and VH1 is showing 10 straight hours of Mob Wives. But IFC plans to outdo them both with 24 straight hours of Portlandia, from 6 pm New Year’s Eve until 6 pm New Year’s Day.

By the way, “Portlandia” is the name of a large sculpture in downtown Portland, Oregon. On my 1989 visit to that city, I saw the statue. However, my purpose in walking down that street was actually to see the seven-year-old Portland Building, a famous early example of postmodernism. Michael Graves is not one of my favorite architects, and his low-budget city office tower didn’t particularly impress me, particularly the blank beige surfaces interrupted only by small evenly-spaced square windows.

Four years before my visit, the statue had been added. The goddess crouches over the entrance. From this unexpected location, she looms out over the sidewalk, reaching toward the pedestrians as if trying to catch a salmon with her bare hand.

Anyway, apparently only 18 half-hour episodes of the TV series Portlandia have been made so far. Therefore, most of them will air three times during the marathon.

I suppose the idea is if you happen to tune into IFC anytime during this period, you’ll discover the show, and maybe you’ll want to come back for more when the third season begins on January 4.

But surely nobody is expected to watch the whole 24 hours in one sitting, or even the nine hours it would take to see the whole series once. Who has that kind of endurance? Not me. Like most TV shows that don’t bring me to the edge of my seat, this one tends to put me to sleep after 20 minutes.

The lockout in the National Hockey League has reached 99 days, with no end in sight. If the players and owners can't come to an agreement soon, the entire NHL season will have to be canceled. Already both sides have lost a lot of money because of this work stoppage. So have others who depend on hockey games for part of their income; that includes arena ushers and nearby restaurant workers, not to mention television crews.

When I was just a toddler, there was another 99-day work stoppage in a different industry that resulted in an untold amount of indirect losses, plus direct losses to workers, dealers, and suppliers of nearly $1.4 billion — in 1950 dollars. That summer, my father summarized the disaster in a radio talk for WILE-AM in Cambridge, Ohio. Among the details: Many idled and impoverished workers had to sell their homes because of local requirements that "you have to get rid of all assets before you can go on state or city relief." And when an agreement was finally reached, "the workers gained very, very little more than they had already been offered before they struck."

My parents and me, opening presents. Holiday decorations indoors and out.

That’s what you’ll see when you click on my latest compilation of images from 1970s home movies, Super 8: Christmas.

I received a master’s degree from Syracuse University in the state of New York, so you’d think I’d know how to pronounce Syracuse. Wouldn't you?

Let’s look at the first syllable, Syr. You might think it’s sire, rhyming with lyre or pyre, but you would be wrong. You could note it actually rhymes with tear. However, that wouldn’t resolve the issue, because tear can be pronounced two different ways!

As it turns out, most of us rhyme the first syllable of Syracuse with peer. A significant minority rhyme it with pair.

Then there’s the last syllable, Cuse, which could rhyme with snooze or truce. Being a naturally lazy sort, I chooze the former.

So to me (and I believe that I’m in the majority), it’s Sear Accuse. To others, it’s Sarah Kyoos. Take your pick.

Or you could visit the original Syracuse on the coast of Sicily. There the Italians say coo instead of cue and “Siracusa” comes out as “SEAR a KOO zuh.” Much more musical.

DECEMBER 7, 2012 YES, VIRGINIA

Remember this little girl, who asked the editor to tell her the truth about Santa? In a new article, All Minds Are Little, I imagine she had other questions later in life.

It was the eve of the election, and three of Mitt Romney’s nieces — Faith, Hope, and Charity, good conservatives all — were predicting what was going to happen.

Hope agreed, “I hope he wins, too. The country would be in big trouble if Obama were re-elected.”

Faith said, “Don’t worry about that. All our polls show us leading in the swing states. I’m completely confident that by this time tomorrow, we’ll be the nieces of President-Elect Romney!”

“But to be fair,” interjected Charity, “the Democrats have other polls that show the opposite.”

“And,” added Hope, “the TV networks and the rest of the commentators pretty much agree that Obama is leading. I hope they’re wrong, but that’s what they say.”

Faith exploded. “Are you going to believe the evil mass media? They’re all on Obama’s side, and they’re deliberately skewing the polling data to discourage us. There’s no way that Americans would re-elect that socialist and give him another four years to destroy our country. I don’t know anyone who’s voting for Obama. Do you?”

“Well, hardly any,” Hope admitted, “but we really don’t know many folks outside our family and our church and our political organization. This is a big country, and apparently there are people who disagree with us.”

“They’re not really Americans!” Faith spluttered. “They should deport themselves back to wherever they came from. No, I have faith in our country. I know true Americans will elect Mitt Romney. He doesn’t even need to bother to prepare a concession speech. Losing is impossible. He’ll win by a landslide!”

And now abideth Faith, Hope, Charity, these three; but the worst of these is Faith.

My specialty, TV graphics, has come a long way since this contest that aired exactly 50 years ago tonight. It was a CBS celebrity game show called Stump the Stars.

In a game of charades, Ross Martin tried to communicate a joke to his teammates. The text crawled across the bottom of the screen, pulled in front of a camera by a stagehand.

Ross had a limited number of seconds, so above the crawl was a timer whose digits rolled past like an odometer.

After each round, the graphics camera showed us a scoreboard on which names and times hung from little hooks.

Let me show you another example from the early days of television.

You know, some say the crawl became a permanent feature of television news after 9/11/2001. But news crawls have been around from the beginning. Check out the kinescope of the very first Today show on NBC, January 14, 1952.

The program that morning showed off the new TV technology by going live to such sites as the Pentagon parking lot and Chicago’s Loop to watch people arriving for work.

But for part of the three hours, hosted by “communicator” Dave Garroway, the latest headlines were typed onto a long strip of paper. This ticker tape was then formed into an endless loop, attached to a drum, slowly spun past a camera, and inserted into the bottom of the screen.

I recall watching a long-ago telecast of the National Invitational Tournament. It was about 1959. An announcer stood in a room off the basketball court at the old Madison Square Garden, and beside him was a blackboard that he used to explain the NIT bracket.

I recall reporting the local election returns on cable TV in Marion, Ohio. It was about 1973. For each race, I held up a piece of poster board with the names of the candidates and their pictures, which I had cut out of the local newspaper. This card had windows to reveal another card behind it, on which I’d written the latest vote totals in Magic Marker.

I’ve written a new article, although you’ve heard the story before.

Somewhere out in space, a planet forms. Its rather wild-eyed creator is one of the gods, shown here.

On that planet he plants a garden including two magic trees. He doesn’t explain why.

He also decides that his planet needs people on it.

He says to the other gods and goddesses who surround him, “Let's make man — in our image, after our likeness.”

Needless to say, the experiment doesn’t work out quite as intended. What happened? Marduk explains in my article, Let Us Make Man.

When creating a full-screen graphic for television, we usually want to put a title on the top row that summarizes what the graphic is saying.

We can be literal, as in “Top Five NLCS Home Run Hitters.” We can be clichéd, as in the well-worn “Centers of Attention” or “Super Sophs.” We can try to be clever with tortured puns, as in “Peyton the Town Orange” or “Shaq’ed Up.”

Each entry on this website likewise has a title. I recently realized that not infrequently over the last six years, my title (or part of it) has been in a language other than English. For example:

French

German

Greek

Hawaiian

Latin

LOLcat

Mirror Image

Russian

Spanish

Teabonics

Aside from a little German, I don’t actually speak any of these ten other languages, but that hasn’t stopped me from writing some of their words.

1973
Four decades ago, my favorite weekend recreation was driving around the Ohio countryside with a partner, following instructions in a rally. (I showed you numerous pictures in this article last month.)

1974
A temporary shortage of gasoline led to odd-even rationing in many parts of the nation. We rallyists wondered whether we could, or should, continue wasting gas in our non-essential activity.

So we took to the sidewalks and competed on foot!

At least we did in my imagination.

I explain in a newly-posted article called Offbeat Rally Ideas.

I raised this question four years ago. Now I’ve added the answer. Click here.