Most of the serious writing I do these days is for my AFTERBURNER editorials. I also co-host a show on PJTV called TRIFECTA. Steve Green from VodkaPundit, Scott Ott at Scrappleface and I got the idea when we met for the first time while at CPAC in Washington at the beginning of the year. TRIFECTA lets us handle smaller stories and just generally goof on them for the most part.
Producing the show is a bit of a problem, since Scott and Steve do it via Webcam. The problem for our PJTV producers is in getting everybody’s visual elements in line and ready to go for Tuesday taping. Scott hosts a segment, Steve hosts one and I host one, and we tape all three right after each other. Our Executive Producer then decides which order to release them in, but they’ll all come out this week in one order or another. So on Mondays we generally have a conference call to get our ducks in a line for the next day, and it occurred to me that some of you might be interested in seeing how we get prepped for these sequences.
Here’s my outline for the segment we’ll tape tomorrow.
Hello boys and girls.
Nothing leaping up at me except BALLOON BOY.
I’d like to open with Scott’s headline at scrappleface: WORLD HAILS OBAMA’S RESCUE OF BALLOON BOY…
…because I think it’s just priceless.
Three topics interest me:
1. The human connection. When we thought there was a kid in that thing we all sat transfixed. When you look back on it with no kid, it’s just a piece of debris. A lot of people talk about how crappy humans are, but this is us at our best.
2. Us at our worst: looks like the whole thing was a fraud by a family that has been watching a little too much reality TV. Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montaug should be Time’s People of the Year. They encapsulate everything wrong with the Culture of Celebrity and apparently, this is why they scared the piss out of the entire world: to get famous. I think mom and dad can be famous from prison.
3, This incident immediately hammered home to me how ridiculous conspiracy theories are, and upon what flimsy evidence they are based. When you show me footage of a real UFO that has the same kind of crispness and detail that this fake UFO had, then I will believe in UFO’s. Instead, we are always asked to interpret a single frame of a distant blur with WHAT APPEARS TO BE A MISSILE POD ON AN AIRLINER! or some other rubbish.
Why are UFO pictures so blurry and the Balloon Boy pictures so detailed? BECAUSE BALLOONS ARE REAL.
Anyway, that’s where I’m going. Talk to you at noon.
B
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3 Comments
1. Sally:The 3 trifectas and afterburner are the highlights of my pjtv week. Nice to see the background operation.
Oct 19, 2009 - 2:33 pm 2. Margie:“When we thought there was a kid in that thing we all sat transfixed…this is us at our best.”
Oct 19, 2009 - 9:51 pm 3. INCITEmarsh:Yes!!!
“Spencer Pratt and Heidi Montaug should be Time’s People of the Year. They encapsulate everything wrong with the Culture of Celebrity”
I vote for Nadya Suleman and Jon Gosselin, a.k.a. OctoMom and the front third of “Jon & Kate Plus 8.” In other words, a woman who wanted to outdo Angelina Jolie by looking like her and having 14 kids, and a man who invited cameras into the sanctity of his home and was surprised everything went to hell.
Reportedly, she’s kinda hot for him. (http://www.myfoxphilly.com/dpp/news/local_news/101909_octomom_Jon_Gosselin) Please God, let the world end if they ever hook up.
Oct 21, 2009 - 9:15 am