M*A*S*H-ing along

One of the top two or three favorite TV shows ever is M*A*S*H. I consider Alan Alda, in his incarnation as Hawkeye Pierce, to be one of my top two pun influences along with Groucho Marx.

Anyway, here's the official list of the hometowns of top M*A*S*H caracters:

Pierce/No Crabapple Cove, Maine, exists
Trapper/Boston, supposedly, though I never heard that; Leo Lincourt says it likely comes from the movie
Margaret/Fort Ord (beside Monterey, Calif.) (also from the movie, not the TV show?)
Blake/Bloomington, Ill.
Potter/Hannibal, Mo.
Radar/Ottumwa, Iowa
BJ/Mill Valley, Calif. (Marin County, Bay Area)
Klinger/Toledo, Ohio
Mulcahy/Philadelphia
Winchester/Boston
Frank Burns/Fort Wayne, Ind.

Before earlier this month, I'd been through, and stopped in, Hannibal, for a college baseball game, and saw Mark Twain stuff. I've been through and stopped in Monterey, though not Fort Ord. Been through Bloomington and Toledo, and spent time in Philly at all the historic sites. Been th rough Fort Wayne, and driven by the Lutheran seminary.

I also visited, 3 years ago, the Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, northwest of LA, where episodes were filmed.

Well, finally, in my most recent Bay Area trip, I visited Mill Valley.

CBS axes hundreds, pays millions

So, CBS, the economy, and the media world, is so bad you have to ax more people, yet CEO Les Moonves raked in more than $43 million last year, AND, and, you defend that by claiming much of it was performance based even while saying poor media numbers force you to ax people?

Is NBC that desperate?

To pay Jay Leno $30 mil a year dfor a prime-time derivative of the Tonight Show?

I stopped watching him years ago.

The man, for a comedian, has an incredibly inept sense of timing. His monologue jokes have no rhythm, no space, no room to breathe.

Letterman's better, but bought too much into the New York City cynicism for a while.

Want happiness? Kill the boob tube

Research says time watching the idiot box is the single biggest difference between those who report themselves as happy vs. unhappy.

That said, the study doesn’t demonstrate which way the causal correlation goes. So, it may be that people bring their unhappiness to the boob tube seeking drug-like relief, rather than TV-watching weighing them down.

However, people were on average happier doing more, rther than less, of any of the other activities on the list.

Local TV going the way of the newspaper?

It would seem so, given the ad drops, viewer drops and now, the job-slashing, that’s hitting local network affiliate stations.

Outside of Baltimore, CBS is seeing cuts at network-owned affiliate stations in New York, Boston, Chicago and San Francisco. The story says no order came out of HQ for this, but did note these were allegedly low-performing stations. CBS as a company lost 14.6 percent in the first quarter of this year.

Contrary to the newspaper article, though, it’s more than fragmenting of the market, or audience. And, yes, I agree that part of this is recession-driven.

It’s more than just the “traditional” Internet, of newspaper and TV station websites, supplemented by the Yahoos and Google News of the world.

Instead, just as blogging provided an outlet for some sort of “print” citizen journalism, now YouTube has done the same for video citizen journalism.

In other words, TV is facing the same future that hit newspapers a decade ago.

Newspapers have adapted, in many cities, by cutting staff writers and hiring more freelancers. In general assignment work, that’s OK. But, as The Dallas Morning News has shown here, when you have freelancers doing things like science journalism, it backfires.

Of course, TV does less in-depth stuff like that. You could keep staff reporters and videographers for investigative work, and start farming out the rest. The flip side of that is, TV stations could “bureau” their news by suburban areas, in the larger TV markets.

It’s coming, in some way, shape or form.

Beyond the world of local news, entertainment is not just going to cable channels. YouTube has more and more of that to offer, too.

And, if this story about Internet 3.0, Hypernet, or whatever you want to call it is true, we’ll see a lot more people leaving the traditional boob tube turned off.