Anybody in the U.S. who uses Netflix but doesn’t have a Netflix player for connection to a TV is really missing out. There are now a lot of Netflix-compatible devices. The one that I use, and love, is the Roku player.
Netflix seems to be on top of the movie game, and I think the industry has no choice but to deal with Reed Hastings and his vision of the future, the way Steve Jobs forced the music industry out of digital indecision. But I’m not on iTunes, in part because there are so many other options for music, especially for casual listening.
Roku offers services besides Netflix, and last night I took an update that enabled a bunch of additional channels. The one that caught my eye — actually, my ear — is the Pandora music service. A year ago I started using TheRadio.com, and it’s good, but I have to give the nod to Pandora, now that it’s on the Roku player. I want to hear everything that Elvis Costello has done that I don’t own, and Pandora makes that possible. I assume Costello gets money in the process, so everybody wins.
Another new Roku option is Revision3, with videos about tech topics. Looks promising. One of Revision3’s channels is Film Riot, where a guy named Ryan, who has some of Leonard Maltin’s mannerisms, teaches videography. Ryan’s latest entry features Popeye, which I liked, and I was impressed that he got into some history by talking about a technical innovation invented by Max Fleischer nearly a century ago.
Mediafly, sort of a news aggregator, is the only other Roku channel I wanted to try. Mediafly is rather rough around the edges, and not only is it slow to come up, there seems to be a bug that causes occasional lockups. Sometimes these are local to Mediafly, but sometimes they affect everything else on the player, and a restart is needed.
As my sister Jean will corroborate with sarcastic glee, as a young man a secret shame of mine was “The Bionic Woman.” Today, I had the pleasure of saying hi to Lindsay Wagner.
Lindsay put a lot into making “The Bionic Woman” more than just a spin-off of “The Six Million Dollar Man,” and for her efforts she won an Emmy. Ostensibly a kid’s show, there was plenty in there to keep college boys like me watching, as seen in this video that a Lindsay fan put on YouTube. You’ll see scenes from a beauty pageant, and you’ll find the complete episode below.
Lindsay is an advocate of homeopathic health, and she holds seminars and workshops as part of a program she calls “Quiet the Mind, and Open the Heart.” Here is part of a recent conversation with Lindsay.
There isn’t a DVD set of “The Bionic Woman” in America yet, although Linsday says it’s been released in England and elsewhere in Europe. She was surprised to learn today that some of the shows are available on Hulu. Here’s the beauty pageant episode.
Comedy Central splits this video into two parts, and the sound is muffled, so I made my own transfer. This sort of thing, from Thursday’s show, repeating tomorrow, is why I enjoy watching Stephen Colbert so much. Unfortunately, later in the show he had Woody Harrelson as a guest, who I can’t stand.
Petula says she’ll continue to work and perform as long as there’s an audience. Judging from this appearance in France a few months ago, she still has an audience.
It was 40 years ago, on Petula’s birthday, that BBC One TV broadcast its first programme in colour. BBC Two had been transmitting in colour for some months. The first colour show on BBC One was, “An Evening With Petula.”
Great acting job...
