Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Tags: Jeers
Each Wednesday on Bloglander, we'll be giving you a taste of happy hours going on at bars around town that night. Here's our first installment:
Four B's and a G to calm your thirst this Wednesday.
At the Baby Bar $1 grilled cheese sandwiches will pair nicely with $1 PBRs.
At the Big Foot Tavern 12oz cans of Bud Light, Budweiser, Coors Light and Miller Light cost $1.75. The cocktail Malibu Breeze goes for $4.
At the Blue Spark, order yourself a bucket containing five domestic beers for $12. A happy hour from 4-8 pm offers well liquor for $3.50 per shot and food plates from $3-$4.
Up north at the Bluz at the Bend, Bullblasters and Washington Apples cost $4. Robert Mondavi Cabernet and Townsend Pink Table bottles are half price.
At the Grail Bar in Coeur d'Alene order one well drink and you will receive three. That's buy-one-and-get-three. That is two for free.
Tags: happy hour , hump day , Food
College football is well-known for its storied rivalries: Ohio State-Michigan, Army-Navy, even goody-two-shoes like BYU-Utah get in on the fun. According to the media apparatuses at Eastern and Portland State, it's time to add one more name to that list.
Yes, that's right, in a frenzied fit of marketing, the two schools have announced the 2010-2011 Dam Cup, to be competed for in five different sports; soccer, volleyball, football, men's basketball and women's basketball.
The stated purpose of the Dam Cup is to "create a rivalry between Portland State University and Eastern Washington University and provide a sense of pride between alumni in the Portland and Spokane areas," according to the news release. Because nothing spells "artificial rivalry" like "inventing a trophy that holds no significance."
The Dam thing is named as such in honor of the four different dams (so naturally they would use five different sports) one passes on the drive between the two campuses. But how does one award a cup that involves five different sports? Why, by devaluing certain sports, of course. The breakdown is as follows:
Women's soccer (1 pt x 1 game) | = 1 point |
Volleyball (2 pts x 2 matches) | = 4 points |
Men's basketball (2 pts x 2 games) | = 4 points |
Women's basketball (2 pts x 2 games) | = 4 points |
Football (4 pts x 1 game) | = 4 points |
The winner will be whoever receives a majority (nine of a possible 17) during the course of the Dam competition period. For those of you following at home, you'll notice they made a foolproof formula — except soccer can end in ties, like the EWU-PSU game did last year. Though last year's scoring wound up at 10.5-6.5, all it would have taken was one EWU win in men's basketball to finish the Dam competition in a deadlock.
Ridiculous arbitrary point systems aside, there's also the arbitrary rivalry quotient of this Dam plan. Though the teams have faced off against each other on the gridiron 32 times (the first in 1968, a 19-13 PSU victory), they did not do so steadily until 1990. And call me an old-timey curmudgeon if you must (you damn kid, you), but a 20-year-history is not enough to warrant the creation of a trophy-bestowing series. Especially since PSU's men's basketball team has only existed continually since 1986.
Hey, Eastern? Isn't it bad enough we have to hear you constantly harp about your Redrum Stadium? Maybe you should let some of the Dam ephemera slide.
Tags: college football , Sports
We TV watchers love our season finales. We celebrate them, we rank
them, we debate them. But the season premiere — the time when our
beloved show finally returns from its hiatus — can be just as vital.
That first hour or half-hour are when viewers are lost or gained.
Fortunately, since Bloglander is the go-to guide for screenwriters and TV showrunners alike, we're here to help.
Five Rules for a Great Season Premiere
1. Remind us what we love about your show. Take this through more drafts than your mid-season episodes. Craft it again and again in the writers room. If the season finale is your best episode of the season (and it should be) the season premiere should be the second best. If it's a comedy, find the best premise you've brainstormed so far. If it's a serialized drama, give us major plot momentum, hint at the season's overall plot, establish the stakes, and tease the villain. If it's a procedural drama with no major serialized elements, well, then give David Caruso a killer cold-open one-liner, I suppose.
2. Don't cheapen the season finale. So you left viewers with a season finale episode. That. Changed. Everything. At least, according to the promos. Well, don't Change. Everything. Right. Back.
Too many shows do this. Everyone quits, then everyone is hired back on. The big cliffhanger is resolved within seconds. (The gun was full of blanks! Or the bullet misses! Or it was all just a virtual reality simulation the entire time!) If we return to Chuck to find the blown-up "Buy More" totally rebuilt, if we return to Jack Bauer to find that, hey, he's back from the Chinese prison he was heading for already, we lose the impact. If you advertise a game-changer, let it change the game. At least for a while. While a few shows (like Lost and Angel) reinvent themselves each season, most eventually need to return to the status quo. But give it some time. Part of Breaking Bad's strength this season is that it actually had the guts to spend half the season dealing with Walt fighting with his wife before he returned to the world of meth-making. The show had enough faith in itself to know that the "premise" didn't have to be a cage.
3. Savor the reintroductions. Every
show is composed of little elements in the world that audience has
grown to love. There's the setting. There's the little bits of inside
jokes or call-outs that comprise the setting. And there are the characters themselves. Here's the opportunity to highlight the personality of each character and world.
In each of their opening moments, remind us that Greendale is a crappy
college, that Dr. House is acidic, that Christopher Chance is a badass.
A bit cliche? Perhaps. But there's bad cliche, and then there's fun cliche. This is the latter. ---
4. Give us an actual episode. We want to see our
television show. Our actual television show. Later in the season, we
don't mind if you give us dream episodes or musical episodes or what-if
episodes or my-god-the-curse-turned-him-into-a-Muppet episodes. If it's a
series that has an over-arching ongoing plot ("mythology," we like to
call it) you better not give us a humdrum case-of-the-week and expect
us to be satisfied. Advance the story in your typical format. No gimmicks.
5. Careful with the time skips, Skippy. Television loves to throw in a "5 years later" between seasons. Makes sense. It gives the writers a fresh slate of possible plots to work with. They can change a character's personality to something entirely new and spend the rest of the season obliquely referring to "the incident." Sometimes it works. The time skip on Battlestar Galactica gave the show four of its best episodes. But most of the time it seems a bit lazy. The advantage of television over, say, a movie, is that it allows us to watch character development in nearly real time. Over five seasons, the wuss can turn into a bad-ass or the asshole can begin to discover the heart-of-coal. Whenever that happens off screen, we miss out on watching our characters become different people.
For more TV commentary follow @danieltwalters on Twitter.Tags: tv