From TechWeb: ‘Second Life’ Databases Hacked, 650,000 Affected

From the article: “Hackers broke into databases of the popular online role-playing game “Second Life” and accessed 650,000 player names, addresses, and passwords, prompting the developer to order all players to change their log-ins.”

Yipe.

Phone telepathy: You knew it was true

From the article: “Many people have experienced the phenomenon of receiving a telephone call from someone shortly after thinking about them — now a scientist says he has proof of what he calls telephone telepathy.” Oookkk…

I was poking around the black hole I laughingly call a basement, and came across a video tape (beta, no less) of the NBC 1966 new season promotion program, Two in a Taxi, starring Burns and Schreiver. (Those of a certain age will remember this comedy team composed of Jack Burns and Avery Schreiver…Huh? Yeah. Huh? Yeah. Huh? Yeah, that’s them.)

I cut out the look at Star Trek and include it here…unfortunately, there isn’t room for all the great shows NBC premiered this particular year (including Hey, Landlord, starring Great-Friend-Of-FOTR Will Hutchins, and T.H.E. Cat, starring Robert Loggia as Thomas Hewitt Edward Cat, and the Pre-Fab Four, The Monkees), but here’s the first real look most of us got of Star Trek.

Watch Now:

 Two in a Taxi Excerpt: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

As this blog entry is posted (8:31 pm), I’m nowhere near a computer - instead I’m sitting on the floor in the living room, watching an episode of Star Trek, “The Man Trap” playing from the “obsolete” technology of the LaserDisk. Hopefully, my daughter is sitting beside me, but my wife is probably shaking her head ruefully and busying herself in the kitchen.

Forty years ago right now, I was doing the same thing; the TV was black-and-white, Katie wasn’t around, and who knows what my wife was up to. But I remember sitting frog-legged on the family room floor, staring in wonder at that program. Oddly, my memory is that the first thing I saw was the beam-down…I suppose it’s possible we were a few minutes late getting the TV on, but I tend to discount that. I mean, I had been waiting for that day forever, saving up all the promo photos from the paper and the Sunday inserts. I was following the space program, and couldn’t wait to see “the future,” whatever the heck that turned out to be.

And I watched in awe.

Yeah, ok, that first episode was a little shaky, what with the green blood and salt-sucking monster. But there had never been anything remotely like it on television back then. It was simply awe-inspiring.

Tonight while I’m watching, I doubt there’s much of that awe left. I’ve seen the episode so many times I can recite most of the lines. And things have changed drastically from those days in the mid-sixties, when we thought everything was possible - heck, we are only now trying to recreate how those sixties engineers sent a rocket to the moon, when back then we all assumed we’d be in the middle of interstellar travel by the 21st century.

Wars, political embarrassments, and the “Me First” decade all seemed to get in the way of that Utopian future we built for ourselves. I remember attending the last New York convention held by “The Committee” (was that 1974? I’m too lazy to dig out the program booklet right now) and sitting in a coffee shop late into the evening with recently-met and long-forgotten “friends” discussing “the future.”

My present.

We haven’t come very far at all. We’re stuck in an unpopular war with no good way of winning, or even getting out. Political scandals are the order of the day. Too many children still go to bed hungry at night. Too many men and women are considered “inferior.”

I hope that if my daughter watches Star Trek with me tonight, maybe she can find a little touch of that awe in it somewhere. And maybe she can do a better job of turning that awe into reality than we did…let’s face it, we really screwed it up.

From The Daily Mail: Sorry, you can’t have the internet… you’re over 70

From the article: “After walking the Great Wall of China and making plans for a trip to Russia, Shirley Greening-Jackson thought signing up for a new internet service would be a doddle.

D*mned young whippersnappers…

From USA Today: ‘Standoff’ is more a turnoff

I could not have said it better myself. From the review: “It’s always possible, of course, that Standoff could improve. But it will need much better scripts and much more time, neither of which it is likely to get.”

You know, some days my father’s constant need to upstage his son gets wearying… ;)

On Monday, I was thrilled to receive a very kind on-air acknowledgement on The Bob Edwards Show for a small thing I did for the show last year. So yesterday my father has to upstage me and hit the local television news with my mother. No, he’s not doing a perp-walk, he’s doing what he does best - eating lunch:

Ok, say what you will, that name is sure getting around. ;)

The full story is here in Flash format:

Watch Now:

 Mom and Dad on TV27 News: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

…I’ve been spending an inordinate amount of time deleting the slimeball registrations on The Nostalgia Pages Forums and the Bob Edwards Show/Bob Edwards Weekend Discussion Forum. Yeah, the scumbags who link to their porn sites and scam pharmacy sites, usually in Russia, China, or some other country who will lease space to these morons, register in the hopes they’ll be picked up by the search engines.

I delete them multiple times a day, sometimes within minutes of them registering…and I’m also firewalling off tremendous chunks of the world to cut down a bit on the nonsense.

I finally convinced them there was no profit in trackbacking this blog (I use the excellent Trackback Validator to knock them away before I need to manually delete them), and now this. The scammers will steal from everyone they can.

Teen nudity exposes town’s bare-bone rules

From the story: “For now Brattleboro is weighing its options, and waiting for summer to turn to fall. ‘As soon as winter comes, there won’t be a story anymore,’ said Town Clerk Annette Cappy.” Or once it’s cold, at least a smaller one…

For those of you who aren’t members of The Bob Edwards Show/Bob Edwards Weekend Discussion Area, the hour-long interview with Studs Terkel broadcast last July is being rerun tonight (Monday, Labor Day) at 8:00pm Eastern, 5:00pm Pacific on XM Satellite Radio Channel 133, XMPR. Studs talks about his career in Old-Time Radio and early television in Chicago, and of course his many books.

The show is available until tomorrow morning at 8:00am Eastern on XM Online for subscribers, and will also be on the web every fifth hour this weekend, for those who don’t get a chance to listen to the sat broadcast this evening.

And if you didn’t see it back in April, this space has a report of a visit by Studs Terkel and Bob Edwards to the Politics and Prose Bookstore in Washington, D.C.

From CNN: Stingray kills ‘Crocodile Hunter’

Steve Irwin, the Australian TV presenter known as the “Crocodile Hunter,” has died after being stung in a marine accident off Australia’s north coast.

Crikey.

From The New York Times: President Logan Puts a Spin on the Plots of “24″

An older article containing an interview with Gregory Itzin, “Charles Logan” on 24. From the article: “An alumnus of the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco, Mr. Itzin has accumulated a recitation of stage and screen credits to rival the Gettysburg Address.”

From The Guardian: The men who can produce limitless amounts of clean, free energy

From the article: “Heard the one about the two Irishmen who say they can produce limitless amounts of clean, free energy? Plenty of scientists have - but few are taking them seriously. Steve Boggan investigates.”

Yeah, I don’t buy it, either. But it would be seriously cool if it were true, and frankly I sometimes like to daydream about not paying so much to heat my house or run my car…

From CNN.com: Bogus ‘No Parking’ sign bites drivers in wallet

Someone puts up an official-looking parking sign, and the Brooklyn cops start towing cars away. Don’t they know the parking restrictions?

Dr. Joseph Webb posted a file containing these I Deal in Crime episodes to the Internet OTR Digest, so we’re running them here to make it easier for folks to listen and download.

This episode: The Abigail Murray Case, broadcast September 27, 1947.

From our friend Jack French, he of all things Private-Eye:

I Deal in Crime ran for almost two years on ABC network radio and starred the very capable radio and Hollywood actor, William Gargan. In this, one of his many PI radio series (he’s best known, of course, for his role as Martin Kane), Gargan played Ross Dolan, described as a veteran detective who returned to his sleuthing job after his WW II service as a sailor. Or as Dolan puts it, “a hitch in Uncle Sugar’s Navy.”

 I Deal in Crime - The Abigail Murray Case [28:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download