Bringing Buster Back

I lifted this from the blog of a friend of a friend:



Can't claim to be a Switchfoot fan, but I am a fan of (1) Guitar Hero and (2) Buster, so this is awesome on many levels.

Speaking of the greatest show ever on television, I heard news last week that nearly brought a tear to my eye: Will Arnett confirmed on Conan that he and others affiliated with Arrested Development are "in talks" about a possible Arrested Development movie. I'm not mortgaging my house to invest in the project until I hear that Mitchell Hurwitz is producing it. Then I'm all in, baby: this is a sure thing.

Second best news of the week: DirecTV announced that beginning this fall (read "football season") they will be carrying the mtn., a sports channel featuring sports of the Mountain West athletic conference. Since the boneheads at the Mountain West Conference decided several years ago to forego their relationship with ESPN, which is seen in nearly every cable and satellite TV home in the nation (even my parents now have cable!), and instead strike out with a fledgling cable channel with no national distribution, Mountain West conference sports fans like me have paid the price. We haven't been able to get access to watch our schools' football, basketball and other games, because the mtn. was simply unavailable to most people unless you lived in one of the key conference markets and had Comcast cable (which I have taken a blood oath never to do again). Prior to the DirecTV announcement, the mtn. was seen in about 1.4 million homes. Assuming the Salt Lake Tribune's math is right, that's only about 1.2 percent of the nation's television homes. This announcement now means that BYU fans in Southern California (like me), U. of Utah fans in Vermont, San Diego State fans in Florida and U. of New Mexico fans in Seattle can all watch their teams' games beginning this fall - they just need to get DirecTV, which I already have. They haven't announced which programming tier the mtn. would be offered on, but I'll admit that if they created the "Really Crappy Sports Conference Premium Tier" and added it for a $50 monthly surcharge I'd probably still get it. THAT's how passionate I am about TCU women's lacrosse games, Air Force water polo matches and Colorado State indoor track.

On the other side of the pop culture news spectrum (i.e., bad news) was the announcement that Toshiba will be abandoning its HD DVD format and ceding the hi-definition DVD format battle to the Blu-Ray folks. This announcement does not bode well for the long-term future of the XBOX 360, which doubled as a HD DVD player (Sony's PlayStation 3 instead plays Blu-Ray discs). So much for my secret plan to get Devoted Wife hooked on Guitar Hero 3, convince her of the power of the XBOX 360 to play not only Guitar Hero but also hi def DVDs, and then eventually once again be able to play HALO in my home, this time in HIGH DEFINITION on a new XBOX 360! The Fun Police must have gotten wind of my plan and snuffed it before it could bloom, because HALO isn't available on the PlayStation 3. Curses!

Oh well, at least I still have UNLV mixed doubles badminton to watch.