Bran Castle, a 14th century Transylvanian fortress and mythical home of Vlad the Impaler (although there is little evidence to support this), is for sale.
Vlad the Impaler was Bram Stoker’s inspiration for his Dracula character. Bran Castle’s link has given it the reputation of being ‘Dracula’s Castle’.
The castle was seized by the Romanian Communists in 1948, but just last year was returned to it’s rightful owner, Dominic von Habsburg. Von Habsburg now has the castle for sale. The price tag? A cool $78 Million.
Larry Ellison or Bill Gates should buy this for a summer home. How cool (and appropriate) would that be?
Serials are the new fad in US TV. Fox experimented with Fashion House and Desire a few months ago and ABC launched Day Break during Lost’s mid-season break.
Now normally I have a rule. I don’t get involved in a TV series until AT LEAST the first season is over. That way, if they cancel the show I’m not writhing in mental torment.
For Day Break I decided to make an exception to my rule. ABC ran promos for the show stating (or implying - I don’t remember the spots too clearly) that the show would run the full story in 13 weeks - until the return of Lost. I thought this would be great. The story looked interesting. No spoilers, but Digg’s character is stuck in a time loop. One day keeps repeating as he works to solve the mystery.
Honestly, I thought it was a great show. Kind of a sci-fi twist on a 24 type show. The cast was good and the story was engaging. Best of all it was a serial, each episode built on the previous (like 24).
Problem is, ABC wasn’t getting the ratings it wanted, so they canceled the show after the sixth episode. I didn’t even know about this until last week since my trusty dusty Tivo was setup to record Day Break automatically. I thought it had been a few weeks since I had seen an episode and when I checked on it there were no upcoming shows scheduled. After a bit of research I found that the show was canceled in favor of reruns of George Lopez and According to Jim. ABC promised to put the remaining episodes on their website, but there has been some snafu there with music licensing and they haven’t appeared there yet either.
I have to say, I’m considering a class action lawsuit for mental anguish. I have invested 6 hours in this show and now I have to wait for them to sell the syndication rights before I can find out how the story ends. That’s just mean.
How does this make sense to the network? How can leaving the remaining episodes unaired improve ABC’s financial position? Are George Lopez reruns really getting a bigger market share than this show was? Even if it was, was it worth angering 3 million viewers to pull the show? It must have been, but I for one won’t be watching any new ABC shows any time soon. I’ve learned my lesson.
I’ve Tivoing and watching Scrubs lately. It wasn’t that I avoided it before, just wasn’t part of my standard TV viewing.
Zach Braff has been catching a lot of flack from the Indie music crowd. Appearantly, since The Postal Service got such great exposure in Garden State, some people are lumping Zach’s work in with The OC for promoting indie music. Of course the ultra-music-snobs don’t like this, or something. Personally I couldn’t care less, but the commentary did get me interested in more of Braff’s work.
While Zach’s combination of physical comedy and dry wit in Scrubs is enjoyable I think The Janitor, Neil Flynn, has the best role. The part is so well written and his delivery is perfect every time.
You Tube is full of Janitor clips, here is one of my favorites…
Wow, this Donald Trump/Rosie Odonnell thing is completely out of hand. At least Rosie has her own show to throw insults from - The Donald has to work the circuit.
Watched him on Letterman over the weekend - he has some very unsavory things to say about Rosie. I’m beginning to wonder how much of this is real and how much of it is just hype for The Apprentice (on a side note - amazing how NBC doesn’t even have a page for the new season up yet).
You know what they say, there’s no such thing as bad publicity. Looks to me like Trump is just taking the Odonnell train to the end of the line. They are probably snickering, in private, about how gullible all of us normal people are.
A few months ago I saw an ad for the William Shatner Sci-Fi DVD Club. The hook was that Captain Kirk himself would be personally creating a list of DVDs and sending them out for $4/month. How could I refuse, and honestly he came up with some good ones.
My personal favorite to date is Close Your Eyes starring Goran Visnjic of E.R. fame.
Unfortunately, I recieved an email a couple days that Bill is no longer going to be able to send me DVDs because ‘his partners cannot continue to provide these movies at the current low prices’.
The club is going to send the remaining DVDs that I’ve already paid for, but no more special recommendations from the great William Shatner himself. How depressing.
