TVSquad

Some very cool news for fans of This American Life, the Showtime version of the long-running public radio mainstay. The first season of the series is now available on iTunes for $1.99 per episode (six episodes total) or $10.99 for the whole season. You can also download the radio version for free, just in case you didn't know.

I'll admit I didn't get into This American Life, the radio series or the TV program, until recently after hearing for many years how compelling and well-made it is. Those people were right, and it's become a permanent fixture on both my Tivo and my iPod. If they made a This American Life pamphlet, I would subscribe to that, too.

Starting today, the long-running soap opera Days of Our Lives will be available on iTunes for the usual $1.99 per episode. Fans can also get episodes a bit cheaper by purchasing twenty episodes for $9.99.

According to Variety, placing Days on iTunes is most likely a move to get more people to watch the series, which has lost some viewers over the last year or so. Frankly, I don't see why more soap operas aren't made available this way, or, even better, made available for free online. Soaps more or less require a person to be tuned in day in and day out, and fans, one assumes, would love to be able to go back and catch up on whatever they might have missed.

This, however, leads to another question, which is "how old are the people watching Days, and how many of those people are going to use iTunes for anything?" Something tells me an iTunes promotional push isn't going to be much help.

So you saw him at the White House Correspondents Dinner, watched the clips on YouTube and GoogleVideo, and talked about it ad nauseam on this very site and various other blogs and messageboards. Of course, I'm talking about Kenneth T. Walsh, chief correspondent for US News and World Report. Seriously, who let that guy speak, anyway? Don't they have some kind of screening process for these kind of events?

Yeah, okay, I'm actually talking about Stephen Colbert, who was either very funny or very not funny, depending on, well, whether you thought he was funny or not. Anyway, several blogs have been reporting that the DVD of the event is now available on the CSPAN Web site. Of course, you can also just watch the event on GoogleVideo, too, but you don't get the joy of loading a disc into something, which is really what life is all about.

Wayans brothers Keenen Ivory, Damon, Shawn and Marlon are negotiating with city officials in Oakland, California to build a movie studio and theme park where an Army base once stood. The council gave the brothers exclusive rights to the site. They've already put down a $150,000 security deposit. Since the deal is still being hammered out, there's not much info on what the heck they plan to do with the land, though they're apparently considering building a luxury hotel and some high-end stores in addition to the movie studio and theme park. Hmm, sounds rather swanky.