The ABC television programme Sports Night ran for two seasons, from 1998 to 2000, was a great show. And that comes from me, who is more likely to watch yak hearding than to watch anything remotely associated with sports on television.

I was introduced to the show by an article in The New Yorker, which discussed at length the struggles of creator Aaron Sorkin with ABC about whether or not Sports Night would air with a laugh track (he didn’t want one, ABC did).

Like Taxi before it, Sports Night was a niche show, with a limited audience, and was never a big hit. But, also like Taxi, it launched the television careers of many of its stars. From right to left in the picture above:

Sabrina Lloyd has popped up this season on the NBC series Ed.

Peter Krause, perhaps the most successful alumnus, is playing Nate Fisher on Six Feet Under (I’ve been trying to write about that show for the past month, but I can’t find the words; the third season starts Sunday in the U.S. on HBO and Tuesday in Canada on The Movie Network).

Veteran actor Robert Guillaume didn’t need a career bump, of course, having starred on stage, screen and television since 1966, perhaps most popular for his work on Soap and the spin-off Benson.

Felicity Huffman, arguably the best actor on Sports Night, hasn’t figured prominently on television since that series, save for a part on the aborted David Kelly-created Girls Club. Of course she’s also been busy having children with her husband William H. Macy.

Josh Malina is the “new Rob Lowe” on The West Wing. As Rob Lowe sinks out of the show, and becomes one dimensional and given a poofed up hairdo in the process, Malina is growing into his part here, and promises to become an integral part of the show.

The only career that appears to have gone nowhere from the Sports Night push is that of Josh Charles. First seen in Hairspray and Dead Poets Society, Charles played well on Sports Night, but has only had bit-roles in movies since, like “Agent Barker” in Muppets From Space. Not the stuff great careers are built on.

You can purchase the DVD of the entire two seasons now; if you missed the show entirely, or need a dose of good television comdram in the Sargaso Sea of reality dreck, it would be a worthwhile investment.

If you haven’t seen Tall Ship Chronicles on the Life Network, you really should tune in. Produced by Halifax-based Topsail Entertainment, the programme is 16-part documentary about the passage of the Barque Picton Castle around the world, from Lunenburg, NS, through the Panama Canal, the South Sea, Australia, South Africa and back to Lunenburg.

The show is hosted by Andrew Younghusband, actor and sometimes TV reporter; he is affable, an excellent narrator, and because he actually did the voyage as a bona fide crew member (which is the exception rather than the rule in “reality” television), is a compelling watch.

If you don’t pick up Life Network where you are, you can order the show on VHS from the Tall Ship Chronicles website

In a doctor’s waiting room this morning I picked up a copy of Pursuit magazine. It looked innocuous enough — a glossy magazine with articles about travel, movies and so on. A sort of “poor person’s Vanity Fair.”

As is my habit, I read through the masthead, and was curious to find the following sentence: “Financial support provided by Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited.”

As I continued to read, I realized that most if not all of the advertising in the magazine was for the “cover” organizations that Imperial Tobacco has set up to cloak its cigarette advertising trade: du Maurier Arts, Team Players and so on.

Indeed if you look up the WHOIS record for pursuitmagazine.ca, you find that it’s registered to Imperial Tobacco Canada Limited.

I’m not paranoid enough to think the doctor in cahoots with Big Tobacco — I’m sure the magazine ended up on their waiting room coffee table by mistake. But it does show how insidious these publications can be, and how they can end up in sadly ironic settings.

As an interesting aside, as outlined in this NOW article, Pursuit is published by Multi-Vision Publishing Inc., which also publishes SHIFT and Saturday Night.

It amazes me that Imperial Tobacco hasn’t followed the model of its American cousins, and changed its name to something like Altria (which is the new name of the Philip Morris Companies). Perhaps Benefix, or Wonderco, or Smothur?

Of course Imperial Tobacco feels “that to be truly successful, we should be making a difference in the lives of those around us and contributing in a meaningful way to the development and growth of our society.”

How do these people sleep at night?

If you did nothing else but listen to the music of the artists who are represented by Fleming & Associates, you would nonetheless have a very rich and interesting musical life.

My life to date would have gone a whole lot easier if someone had told me that the abdomen is not, in fact, an organ, but rather a region of the body — “the region of the body of a vertebrate between the thorax and the pelvis” says the dictionary.

I’ve been walking around for 37 years thinking that we all have a vestigal organ called the abdomen; I never knew exactly what it did, but figured that just meant it wasn’t all that important. Sometimes I’d hear about people getting “kicked in the abdomen” or having a “pain in the abdomen,” but I must admit that I never heard of someone “getting their abdomen removed.”

I will make a point of telling Oliver about the abdomen soon, so he isn’t similary held back.

My high school, since moved (the original converted into a seniors residence), was one of those heavily renovated in the late 1960s. Chief among the renovations were the “vocational” areas — the school was fitted with a wood shop, a metal shop, and a home economics area that would rival Martha Stewart’s ranch in the diversity of appliances and resources.

When you started your five years of high school (for in Ontario high school went from grade 9 to grade 13, a practice that comes to an end this year), you were quickly forced to choose between an “academic” stream and a “vocational” stream.

If you went “academic,” then you were in for 5 years, and took classes designed to bolster your university acceptance, but of little practical value otherwise. If you went “vocational,” then you stayed only for 4 years, and took classes that would lead towards either community college or a trade.

Not only did this system result in very marked social stratification, but it both denied vocational students an opportunity to change their minds and go to university (at least without a Herculean effort to bootstrap themselves back into the academic world) and denied academic students an opportunity to gain anything resembling practical skills.

One of those practical skills was typing.

At the east end of the school, above the metal shop and beside the art room, was the typing room. In that room, each desk was outfitted with a typewriter (manual or electric, I cannot recall). And that’s where you went for typing class.

While computers were present at the school from the beginning of my time there (in grade 9 there was a single Commodore PET that you could, among other things, play space invaders on), they were very clearly an academic pursuit, and the world of computers and the world of typing were two very different worlds, with no crossover.

The result of this is that unless you were in the vocational stream, and took typing, or were a geek (like me) and learned to type by sheer persistence, you didn’t learn how to type.

Indeed my own typing, which I can do quickly and with some efficiency, suffers from a “home brew” approach to learning, and I couldn’t find the “home keys” if I tried, and I go about 50% slower than the theoretical maximum because there’s a lot of “made a mistake, backspace, correct” built into my loop.

I came to think about all this today because I got a note from a friend of mine, let’s call him “Phil.” Phil is a well-paid professional living in Charlottetown. And Phil can’t type. I know this, because the longest email I’ve ever received from Phil is “I will call you later to discuss this.” Originally I thought Phil was just brusque, but that didn’t sync with his otherwise voluble nature. Then I realized that, given his age and career path, Phil would never have had any cause to learn to type.

I began to think of all of the successful post-40 year old professionals that I know, and I realized that none of them can type. Which explains why my email messages to them are long and detailed, and their responses are curt (another explanation is, of course, that I never know when to shut up, but that’s another story).

And so we have an entire class of people, the people who are at least nominally “in charge” of the world, who are disenfranchised from participating actively in the digital dialog about the future because they lack a simple manual skill.

It is the revenge of the typists, the final irony of the edu-stratification that was supposed to lead some to the promised land and leave others to open the mail and get the coffee.

My father admitted tonight that he has never, ever watched The Simpsons. So I must leave the computer now and go and explain it to him. How I wish Dave Moses were here.

I happened upon a marathon of The Surreal Life last night on KTLA Los Angeles the WB station that we inexplicably receive as part of our digital cable.

In case you have missed the show, or the PR surrounding it, it’s basically “urban Survivor for failed celebrities.” Or, as the show’s website puts it, “when the stars fall from sight … this is where they crash.” Or as their PR says “[a] tongue-in-cheek, yet surprisingly human, take on the lives of celebrities whose stars aren’t exactly burning bright these days.”

Among the cast are musician MC Hammer, former teen star Corey Feldman, former 90210 geek Gabrielle Carteris, Mötley Crüe’s lead singer Vince Neil and TV’s “Webster,” Emmanuel Lewis. In other words people whose name you know, but who haven’t heard about for a while.

Somehow — I haven’t quite figured out the rules of the game, or even if there’s a game — these people all live in a swanky house in Hollywood together, and perform various Survivor-like tasks. It’s bawdier than Survivor, and because of the location, less isolated from “real life” (which, in this show, is a difficult thing to put your finger on).

The programme is one of a new crop of “reality TV” shows that includes I’m A Celebrity ? Get Me Out Of Here (starring, among others, Robin Leach and Joan Rivers’ daughter Melissa) and Celebrity Mole: Hawaii. Each places a group of has-been stars in a house (or jungle) together for some period of time, without makeup (or dignity). And we watch. Presumably our appetite for watching regular everyday people do this has waned, and we’re now in need of a new level of “reality” to entertain us.

Aside from the rather depressing tawdriness of all of this, I think there are some interesting lessons to be learned, chief among them is that the people we venerate as “stars” are, without their makeup, just as screwed up as regular everyday people.

While I was growing up, the only time we got to see stars in “realistic” situations was on game shows like Match Game and Hollywood Squares.

Except on those shows, the stars were in more of a “hyper-reality,” reading scripting jokes, and acting like buffoons. Think Charles Nelson Riley or Paul Lynde if you need your memory jogged.

Today’s shows, while certainly much less like my everyday regular “reality” than not, do give us some insight into the condition of being a star. And it’s not a pretty site. Listening to Corey Feldman grouse with his fiance on the phone, or argue with MC Hammer about the time he’s spent in the bathroom, or witnessing a blow-out about the proper location in their remote Australian locale to go and take a pee in the middle of the night on I’m a Celebrity doesn’t exactly replicate “real life,” but it does do an effective job at showing us how thin the “fourth wall” really is.

After watching two hours of The Surreal Life, I was ready to sign up for duty as a full time iconoclast, for I was forced to reason that if these Gods could so easily tumble from grace, surely all of the others that we venerate — police, politicians, priests, judges, parking metre cops, teachers — must be equally as fallible. And not deserving of our mindless respect.

For a crop of television shows to so effectively drive home that point, night after night, can’t be an entirely bad thing.

This robot came calling here yesterday. Apparently NameProtect is a “Digital Brand Asset Management company.” Hmmm.

Perhaps one of the greatest unsung marketing success stories of the past 25 years has been that of the Jaws of Life.

Take this story about an accident on the Confederation Bridge for example: “The bridge was closed for about two hours while rescue crews used the jaws of life to free the injured.” Or this story about an accident on the Charlottetown bypass: “Firefighters used the “jaws of life” to cut the youths out of the vehicle.” Or this story. Or this one.

Jaws of Life is a registered trademark of Hale Products Inc.. Originally developed by Hurst Performance as a race track tool, the products’s history page says “Because the tool reduced the time to extricate a victim from a car crash, literally snatching them from the ‘jaws of death’, the tool earned the name Jaws of Life.”

What’s odd about the Jaws of Life is that whenever they are used to rescue someone in an accident, this fact is mentioned in news stories. It’s almost like the company has an product placement deal with media outlets. Imagine if every product, from ladders to hoses to stretchers, was mentioned, by its trade name, in accident reports.

While I can understand the novelty of mentioning the Jaws of Life when a fire department originally purchases them, or when they were a novel product, this has been going on for a long, long time.

Perhaps my friends in the media can enlighten me?

The How Stuff Works site has a good page that explains how the Jaws of Life work, by the way.