Following threats from the National Football League, the Fall Creek Baptist Church of Indianapolis was forced to cancel its Super Bowl Bash, triggering a wave of cancellations in churches across the country. The Indianapolis church party would have involved a 12-foot projection system. No more than 55 inches are permissible, said the NFL, and you can't charge admission. However, the NFL admitted making exceptions for sports bars, leading to an interesting situation: If you're serving jello shots to the demimonde, you're an honored member of the NFL audience, but if you're serving tuna casseroles to raise money for new altar decorations, you're a copyright criminal. The initial news report from the Indianapolis Star brought the newspaper more than 1000 emails and 100 phone calls. Fall Creek's senior pastor, Dr. John Newland, thanked his church's supporters and offered "heartfelt congratulations" to both the Colts and the Bears. Meanwhile columnist Dan Carpenter had a field day: "Forgive us, Football, for we have sinned, and we beseech Thee to show mercy and not visit a pestilence of lawyers upon us. Nor forsake us when we seek to prepare our house for your XLV Coming.... Yea, verily, a state that prides itself on praying in public and legislating chastity got a revelatory taste last week of what America's true religion is.... The bald presumption! To raise a craven [sic] image on the big screen of the holiest occasion on the nation's calendar without a dispensation from on high?! Who do these people think they are, Hooters?" Unfortunately, few of the many commentaries noted that the jaw-droppingly lucrative telecast, festooned with multi-million-dollar ads, occurred over the public airwaves, which are owned by the public and regulated in the public interest. Since when has the NFL usurped the function of the FCC?
For prolific director Michael Apted, the Up series continues to be a lifelong labor of love.
Before he embarked on a distinguished career in feature films (Coal Miner's Daughter, Gorillas in the Mist, The World Is Not Enough, and many more), director Michael Apted was part of a revolutionary British-television documentary project. It was called Seven Up, and it profiled a group of children in 1964. Apted took over from director Paul Almond starting with the first follow-up, 7 Plus Seven. He rounded up the same subjects at age 14 and has gone on to shepherd the series through to the present day. The films have become increasingly powerful for their ever-expanding scope and their ability to effectively condense entire lives of everyday citizens in a matter of minutes. 49 Up is the most recent installment, on DVD from First Run Features. All of the previous iterations are also available in an extraordinary boxed set.
There's a whole lot of stuff that makes up a digital TV signal. Here's a primer on how it works.
In the beginning, there was analog television. You aimed the antenna, tuned in the channel, and then sat back to watch as the amplitude-modulated pictures flashed on the TV screen and the frequency-modulated audio blared forth from the speakers. Some time later, analog TV added color by shoehorning in a small signal with the necessary information amongst those amplitude- and frequency-modulated pictures and sounds.
If you scoured all of the details on the recent HDMI 1.3 release (and who didn't?), you may have noticed the inclusion of xvYCC and Deep Color. These are two different things that together will theoretically make displays' color more realistic. The short version is this: Deep Color increases the available bit depth for each color component, while xvYCC expands the overall color gamut. Sure they do, but why?
