It turns out that our family is not alone in our love of the Amazing Race. Tuesday night’s episode was very good: I’m already adding “that zip line thing” to my list of things I must try sometime (apropos of which, I can’t wait until Phil’s Book comes out in the fall; I’ve a feeling it will change my life).

Here’s something I’ve never understood: a lot of sitcoms start off life with well-crafted, witty, clever opening credit sequences. Think of Spin City with its spinning manhole cover, or Ellen with it’s “we’re too good for credits,” or The Drew Carey Show with its Cleveland Rocks musical number.

Inevitably though, after a season or two, they almost all revert to the standard “theme song played over a montage of old episode highlights” style credits.

Why is this?

Is there evidence to suggest that viewers are more likely to stick around for a new episode if reminded of the wacky hijinks of episodes gone by?

The saddest example of this phenomenon is the change in the WKRP in Cincinnati opening, which started off with the classic “tuning the AM radio dial” sequence, and then took a sad slide into the standard montage.

I welcome the theories or explanations of others wiser than I…

GeekTool is a neat piece of Mac software that lets you stick any image (local or remote), any file, or the output of any command line into your desktop image. Here’s what my desktop looks like as a result (click for super-huge image):

From top-left down, you see the current The Old Farmer’s Almanac Webcam image, a graph of the load average on the Yankee webserver for the past 60 minutes, an MRTG graph of the bandwidth used at Peer1, where Yankee’s servers are hosted, and the current weather radar for Halifax.

Think “active desktop for the Mac” but less Microsofty, more geeky, and arguably much more lightweight and efficient.

Thanks to macosxhints.com for the pointer.

Here’s an interesting audio archive of interviews by Vin Scelsa on his WFUV radio programme Idiot’s Delight.

I’m in the midst of reading Mark Jacobson’s book 12,000 Miles In The Nick Of Time: A Semi-Dysfunctional Family Navigates The Globe, and was intrigued to listen to the interview with Jacobson and his daughter Rae. I’ll be reviewing the book shortly over on the Reinvented World site.

Other interviews you can listen to include Eddie Izzard, Norah Jones, Tim Robbins, Tom Wiats and Kurt Vonnegut.

From Edward Hasbrouck comes a reminder that The Amazing Race 5 starts tonight on CBS. Note that if you’re in Atlantic Canada, the show is being broadcast on ASN, not on ATV, although ATV is broadcasting it on Saturday nights in repeat. It looks like in the rest of Canada you can watch the show on your regular CTV station.

Catherine and I were driving up to Margate late in the afternoon yesterday to have dinner at the [fantastic] Shipwright’s Café before going to the big Bruce Cockburn concert in Summerside.

We decided to take the iPod with us, and listen to some audiobooks on the car stereo, using the little Griffin iTrip transmitter that broadcasts onto the FM band.

As we were driving along, I noticed that there was an uncommon amount of interference on the frequency we were using, so I asked Catherine to scan the dial looking for an clearer one.

So she tried.

And there wasn’t one.

All along the dial, there were radio stations coming in at every frequency. We stopped tuning at 88.5, and heard, clear as if it were broadcasting across the street, the unmistakable sound of National Public Radio. A few more minutes of listening and we’d figured out that, as if by magic, we were listening to WFDD, broadcasting from Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which is 1362 miles away from PEI.

Intrigued by this amazing occurence (okay, I was amazed, and forced Catherine to feign amazement), we scanned down the dial and picked out WVTF in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a couple of rock stations from Fayetteville, North Carolina.

This weirdness continued all along the drive from Charlottetown to Margate, with the stations fading in and out as we went up and down hills and around corners.

I immediately got on the horn to my “they know about radio” gurus, Kenny Adams and Gordon Johnstone, and they both confirmed that this is something that just happens once in a while because of something Gordon call a “lift.” Apparently the technical term is tropospheric ducting.

We shut off the radio when we got to Margate, tuned in again on the way to Summerside, and then, on the way back to Charlottetown around 10:30 p.m., found that our friends in North Carolina were gone from the dial.

I tried to convince Catherine that this was the weirdest thing that had ever happened, but she wouldn’t buy it. It was pretty weird.

Our colleagues at silverorange are organizing a frisbee golf tournament in support of Habitat for Humanity this Saturday. I’m proud to be able to reveal the members of Team Reinvented:

• Catherine Miller
• Cynthia Dunsford
• Matthew Rainnie
• Stephanie Rainnie
• Janice Stillman
• Ann Thurlow
• Me

Astute readers will recognize that we have almost all domains of human endeavour covered, from broadcasting to theatre to publishing to government to medicine to the visual arts. I’m confident that this broadly based team will combine to whoop some serious ass.

Daniel at silverorange assures me that there is still room for additional teams to enter at this late hour; full details on the tournament website.

Back in January, I predicted a Kerry + Edwards ticket. Now it’s happening.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust is holding a fundraising concert at Avonlea Village in Cavendish on Sunday, July 11, 2004 at 1:30 p.m..

Tickets are $15 per person, and this includes the concert, strawberries and ice cream, and admission to Avonlea Village for the day.

The L.M. Montgomery Land Trust works to preserve the scenic coastal lands on Prince Edward Island’s north shore in agricultural use. We work to acquire the “development rights” on land, leaving it otherwise owned and controlled by local farm families, who can continue to farm it in perpetuity, free from development pressure. It’s a worthwhile cause, and I’ve been a supporter, and member of the Board, for five years.

The fundraising concert is being generously sponsored by Avonlea Village: all funds raised will go to the Land Trust.

Avonlea Village is a great place for kids: I took Oliver out last year and we had a great time.

You can purchase tickets to the event directly from me (email avonleatickets@reinvented.net), or from any COWS on the Island.

Here’s an example, from Ben Hammersley, of using Perl to scrape an HTML page (in this case the FedEx tracking page) to grab data and spit it back out as RSS. Might be a good starting point for others, as he includes the source.