Nice job…

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USA Today:

Stars have been belting out the national anthem before each game of the World Series. Country singers Scotty McCreery, Trace Adkins and Ronnie Dunn performed before Games 1, 2 and 3. And last night, Zooey Deschanel of Fox’s new hit show New Girl did the honors.

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What is not to love about this story? The levers of power in the world of popular culture are mostly held by the very few elite Watchmen who control the bottle neck of distribution. They are The Man and politically they are mostly not on America’s side or ours. Take that power away and they are nothing. I’d tell you to look at the music business as an example but no one can find it.

Here you have a young woman who used all the tools the Digital Revolution has to offer and created her very own success. You mix in some hard work with a genuine talent and no one can stop you. It’s like Twitter, this amazing digital forum that allows us to have a conversation amongst ourselves, to exchange ideas and information, without the malicious filter of the mainstream media telling us what is and isn’t important, proper, or worthy. Power to the People used to be a slogan shouted by socialists who meant just the opposite, but now it’s something coming truer every day in this amazing age we’re privileged to live in.

Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com.

By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads.

More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. …

In fact, Hocking is selling so well that on Thursday, the three titles in her Trylle Trilogy (Switched, Torn and Ascend, the latest) will make their debuts in the top 50 of USA TODAY’s Best-Selling Books list.

A recent survey shows 20 million people read e-books last year, and more self-published authors are taking advantage of the trend.

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USA Today:

Hollywood coasted through the final weekend of the year, concluding the second-worst year since 1996.Studios sold 1.35 billion movie tickets in 2010, according to a study by Hollywood.com released Sunday. 

While inflation and pricey 3-D tickets drove revenues above $10 billion for only the second time, the number of tickets sold was the lowest since 1996, when 1.33 billion moviegoers clicked through turnstiles. 

Back then, a movie cost $4.42 a ticket.

That cost leaped from an average of $7.46 a ticket in 2009 to $7.85 last year, the largest single-year spike on record. 

Attendance saw a drop of 5.4% last year compared with 2009, the largest drop since attendance fell 8.1% in 2005, according to Hollywood.com.  (more…)

So Tom Krattenmaker wrote a piece this week for USA Today, about Portland, Oregon being targeted by a Muslim terrorist. This gist: How could they bomb Portland! We’re just a quirky place everyone loves!

Or at least, doesn’t take seriously.

After the cliched warning to not rush to judgement, Tommy says, and I quote:

Why would Portland, of all places, be the site of a terror attack? The “People’s Republic of Portland” – so dubbed for its liberal ways – seems so utterly different from New York, Mumbai, London, or the other places that one associates with terrorist attacks. Portland is so much smaller, light years from the figurative front lines.This is a laid-back city where the red-hot rhetoric around terrorism, Islam, the “ground zero mosque,” and the like runs cooler.

So, because Portland’s a leftwing haven with homemade fliers for guitar lessons stapled on every Peet’s Coffee wall – terrorists should skip us, and focus only on the big, boring cities without all those great organic cafes. Heck, they probably don’t use cloth bags or read Chomsky (stuff jihadists care about).

And since Portlanders find red meat topics like terrorism so unseemly – our enemies should totally dig us! We love Bill Moyers!

Damn, these folks are dumb. They think their behavior is at the root of other people’s actions. And that, if you’re nice, terrorists won’t kill you. (more…)

Having achieved success with medical dramas on Thursdays and situation comedies on Wednesdays, along with some popular reality shows, ABC has set its sights on another TV staple in the past couple of years: crime dramas. It has a winner in Castle (Mondays, 10 p.m. EDT) and experienced a couple of audience failures with two very good shows, The Unusuals and The Forgotten.

All three of those shows were a little off the beaten path, a bit quirky, not the ordinary run of police procedural. Given the decidedly mixed results of that strategy (one that fits with ABC’s basic programming approach, which has mined the mildly quirky vein since the late 1950s), it’s no surprise that with Detroit 1-8-7 the Alphabet is trying a show much more in line with current-day police procedural formulas. And wonder of wonders, audiences like it, so far.

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Viewers gave it a B+ in the USA Today audience poll, second-best among the twenty-one series rated, and it finished second in its time-slot last week, behind CBS’s The Good Wife, with 7.4 million viewers (Good Wife having grabbed 11.8 million). Reviewers were less enthusiastic, giving it a 64 out of a 100 on Metacritic.

The show is definitely formulaic. It takes place in the mangled urban landscape of current-day Detroit and follows the workings of a homicide squad. (187 is the traditional police radio code for homicide.) The nominal protagonist is Det. Louis Fitch (Michael Imperioli), but each member of the team is given a goodly amount of screen time.

Each episode follows two main criminal investigations, named in the episode’s title. In the untitled pilot (although it could be called “Pharmacy Double; Bullet Train,” as those are the two investigations, so named in on-screen titles), one team of detectives investigates a double murder at a convenience store, and the other looks into the shooting of a divorce lawyer whose body was found on a freight train. (more…)

A USA Today story informs us “Viewers are about to see full-frontal male nudity, heterosexual, homosexual and group sex, and graphic scenes rarely — if ever — seen on mainstream TV.”

A few years back, I got a real taste for how silly Hollywood’s obsession with force feeding America a steady diet of filth had become.  I sat across from a Fox Family exec, pitching programs for kids.  I’d been in this chair many times and the result was always the same:  “Thanks.  Love ‘em.  Won’t work.  Let’s have you back soon.” 

Why’d the guy keep calling me back in?  And why did I keep returning?  I’m not sure which of us was most guilty of wasting time. 

Finally, one day, I blurted out what should have been asked long before:  “What do you want from me?” 

“Something like Action” I was told. 

Action was a Fox sitcom created by Chris Thompson originally intended for HBO.  In it, Jay Mohr played a troubled character patterned after producer Joel Silver.  Thompson insisted they leave the foul language in the program, and just bleep it out for prime time.  (more…)

Some days it’s tough to find things to write about and other days the floodgates open and there are just tons of people begging for a little mocking. Last night I was in a hotel in Fort Lauderdale searching for something to write about and finally gave up and watched the Bears drop another game. I went to sleep fearing the bleakness of the next day. Then this morning the morons started jumping out of the trees. Two great ideas just showed up.

The first was right there in the USA Today outside my room door. Seems the ultra-liberal mayor of Mexico City is cleaning up the town. No, he’s not stopping the rampant drug trade, chasing down murderers or the organized kidnapping rings. Mayor Marcelo Ebrard is hellbent on putting an end to whistling at women on the streets and gum chewers who spit their gum on the sidewalk!  I say “bravo” Mr. Mayor. There is no insult greater than being whistled at by a construction worker while being bundled into the trunk of a kidnapper’s car. Woe unto you if while you were kicking around in there some was gum on the bottom of your shoe! (more…)

Last night, David “I’m No Longer a Brain-Dead Liberal” Mamet’s “Oleanna” opened on Broadway.  The production (a transfer from Los Angeles’ Mark Taper Forum) stars Bill Pullman and Julia Stiles.  As discussed on these pages Friday, this play was originally produced off-Broadway 18 years ago and is now receiving its first, official Broadway production. “Oleanna” and the upcoming “Race” are two opportunities for Mr. Mamet’s work to be evaluated by the heavily-left-leaning theatre critics.

The play received quite positive reviews.  Here are some interesting things I read in the reviews…

In Elysa Gardner’s positive review in USA Today, she refers to the contrasting times in which the play is now produced versus the original production:

When David Mamet’s Oleanna premiered in 1992, it was widely perceived as a response to the confirmation hearings for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, in which Thomas was accused of sexual harassment by former assistant Anita Hill.  It has been 18 years since that real-life drama played out. But as the very different controversy now surrounding David Letterman reminds us, the debate over what constitutes an abuse of power between a male authority figure and a female subordinate isn’t going away. (more…)

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Now imagine you were somebody who only got your news from USA Today. What a weird worldview you’d have.

For one, you’d think colorful pie charts solve every problem, and you’d also think our military consists of nothing but troubled head cases. In the past year or so, USA Today has done little more than paint our military as rife with suicide, mental health problems, divorce, troubled kids and of course – alcohol and drug abuse.

Let’s look at the most recent USA Today piece on alcohol abuse. The paper reported that “Soldiers…with alcoholism or alcohol abuse, such as binge drinking, increased from 6.1 per 1,000 soldiers in 2003 to an estimated 11.4 as of March 31.”

That is disturbing, no doubt – and it’s all from military data. But what happens if you compare that figure to our general population? Well, according to the National Institutes of Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, 15.5 percent of the general population report episodes of binge drinking in 2006 – and for males alone – the number jumps over 20 percent. (more…)