Prison Break: A Potential Breakout Hit for Fox Television
Fall 2005 Television Season Kicks Off at 8 p.m. Tonight

August 29, 2005TelevisionRaymond Tomlin

The weather is cooling, the sun seems to be heading back behind the clouds, and the rains appear to be on their way. What does this mean for most of us? Yes, the fall TV season is about to commence.
This year the fall television season is set to kick off a bit early with the début tonight of Prison Break, one of the more lauded new shows of the fall TV season. Globe and Mail television columnist John Doyle writes …

Prison Break (Fox, Global, starts Monday) is about a guy who goes to prison to get his brother out. He’s got the blueprint of the prison’s design tattooed on his body. That’s the gist. Fast-paced, kinetic, moody and filled with characters either brutal or beatific, it grabs you by the throat and takes you on a wild ride. Michael (Wentworth Miller) is the hero. His brother, Lincoln (Dominic Purcell), is on death row and scheduled to die in a few months. As Michael sees it, Lincoln has been framed for the murder of the brother of the vice-president of the United States. There’s been a cover-up and, in some way, the Catholic Church is involved. The prison setting is dangerous and filled with foreboding. The warden (played by Stacy Keach, who did time in prison in England in the 1980s) is well-meaning but wary of Michael and Lincoln. Heavily promoted by Fox, the series gets a jump-start by launching this week. With little else new to watch, it could get viewers instantly hooked.

John Crook, reporting for zap2it.com, provides some background on Prison Break. USA Today’s Bill Keveney also weighs in on tonight’s début of Prison Break, as does USA Today critic Robert Bianco, who says “check it out”.
Meanwhile, The Vancouver Sun’s Alex Strachan says, “a breakneck-paced thriller about a prison break will make the weeks fly by before a new season of 24 débuts in January … Prison Break is a fast-paced, rousingly good entertainment — a rock ’n roll roller-coaster ride that hurtles along the tracks like a runaway train.” Strachan awards Prison Break an A- rating.
The fact that first-rate actors Peter Stormare (Minority Report, Chocolat) and Robyn Tunney (The Craft, The Secret Lives of Dentists) have opted to set aside their movie careers in order to star in Prison Break speaks volumes about its probable quality. The series débuts tonight at 8 p.m. on your local Global TV outlet (BCTV locally), with a 2-hour season première.
Update: Following a week of fun and frolic, VanRamblings finally got around to watching the 2-hour season première of Prison Break. Our assessment, overall: comme çi, comme ça. Although the actors’ performances are across-the-board solid and praiseworthy, the writing is at best pedestrian, the production values (camera work, cinematography) second rate, and the story line cheesy and requiring of such a level of suspension of disbelief as to pull you out of the narrative. The good thing? We won’t be adding Prison Break to our regular television viewing this upcoming fall TV season, allowing us time instead this autumn to pine away for lost love, now found.

CBC Unplugged: We Don’t Need No Stinkin’ Transmitters

August 22, 2005RadioRaymond Tomlin

Missing your daily fix of CBC radio? Wonder when the time will come when you’ll next hear World Report, or the folks who bring you The World at Six will make their triumphant return, so that you’ll know what’s really going on in the world?
And what about The House? How are we supposed to figure out what the shenanigans of those Ottawa-based hooligans on Parliament Hill really mean if Anthony Germain and company aren’t available to help us tread through the shoals of the affairs of the Canadian political miasma?
And just how much stinkin’ BBC News can a woman (or man) listen to and watch before going completely bonkers? We want Peter Mansbridge back on the air, and we want The National to begin broadcasting NOW !!!
No NHL hockey in Canada for a year. A piece of cake. But, if you’re anything like the author of VanRamblings, a week without the CBC is the equivalent of what we believe a week in hell would be like. And that just ain’t no fun.
CBC Unplugged has come to our rescue, and not a moment too soon. In a story on The Tyee, British Columbia’s feisty online presence reports …

Locked-out CBC employees are working together to put out their own radio programmes, under the collective name of CBC Unplugged. They will broadcast on conventional radio stations and across the Internet through a new technique called podcasting, in which people download audio files from the web and listen to them on their iPods or other digital audio players.

The initial CBC Unplugged podcast is available here, and the second full hour broadcast is available here (Windows Media Player required).
A bit of sanity has returned to the universe. And not a moment too soon.

Unconditional Love: Worship Me, Love Me, Care For Me Forever

August 21, 2005VanRamblingsRaymond Tomlin

Blogger Raymond Tomlin as James Skitt Matthews, the founder of Kitsilano

Lest you think that the author of this blog looks just like the dashing personage of yore you see above, allow VanRamblings to disavow you of that notion, and state for the record that who you see in the photo may indeed be the estimable Mr. Tomlin, but said person is impersonating one James Skitt Matthews, a founder of the Kitsilano community 100 years ago, and the City of Vancouver’s first archivist. All of this foofaraw, of course, taking place as part of the Kitsilano Centenary celebration in late June.

Turn Up the Quiet: Moving Toward a Noise Free World
The Quest for Sonic Bliss and a Good Night’s Sleep

August 20, 2005Environment, Food & HealthRaymond Tomlin

It’s an epidemic, and it’s all around us. It’s in our bedrooms, in our rec rooms and living rooms, in our cars and even in our baby’s crib. It causes stress, isolation, sleep deprivation and increases our blood pressure. And it is literally making us deaf.
What is this monster? It’s noise. Noise is responsible for more than one-third of all cases of hearing loss, a life-altering disability that is eminently preventable. Hearing loss is Canada’s third leading chronic disability, affecting more than 3 million people — and the leading cause is noise, responsible for more than one third of cases.
According to a recently published study conducted by Timothy C. Hain, a Professor of Neurology and Otolaryngology at Northwestern University Medical School in Chicago, Illinois …

We are steadily losing our hearing due to over-exposure to noise at an earlier age than ever before. The number of people with hearing loss who are between the ages 18 and 44 increased 17 per cent. The greatest loss in hearing is found in people 45 to 64 — 20 years younger than expected and the reason: over exposure to noise.

Children are also feeling the effects of living in a noisier world and are especially vulnerable. According to the study, 15% of school children have hearing loss, increasing to 30% in young adults entering the work force.
In this month’s issue of Utne Magazine, writer David Schimke explores our quest for the creative and natural soundscape all around us — the music of nature, the laughter of friends and neighbours, and our own inner voice.

I didn’t know that cheaper housing was statistically linked to mind-numbing noise pollution: that city planners insensitive to the needs of lower-middle-class citizens typically build two-lane highways through neighbourhoods designed for the horse and buggy, or that airport runways literally begin and end in people’s backyards. When I first moved to the city, I didn’t expect that construction crews and street sweepers would rattle and hum before sunup, while schoolchildren and working families tried in vain to rest.

According to the U.S. 2001 Census Survey, 11.6 million households reported that street or traffic noise was bothersome, and an additional 4.5 million said it was so bad they wanted to move.
Schimke reports that there are 40 million cases of hearing loss in the United States, with 10 million cases attributable to excess noise. Besides contributing to deafness, at just 85 decibels (a human voice averages 65 decibels, while a hair dryer clocks in at 95), high sound levels lead to stress (the human pain threshold is 120 decibels), indigestion, high blood pressure, weakening of the immune system, and hypertension.
The relationship between noise and the natural soundscape is similar to the relationship between litter and the landscape. We need to get people to understand that, to create a new aural ethic. Dissonance is not inherent in the human condition. Noise induced hearing loss doesn’t have to happen to you. For now, practice safe listening — turn it down and use protection.