TVSquad

My friends, if you thought the coverage that's been going on since the day after the 2006 Congressional election has been overwhelming, you ain't seen nothing yet. Come sunrise on November 4th the television airwaves will be inundated with election coverage, comment, pontification, and general BS. Red states will become blue, blue states will become red, graphs will be drawn on easel boards with black marker and someone will predict the winner of the entire Presidential election at 7:00:01 p.m.

So, if you are wholly disinterested in the old way that the elections are covered you may want to tune into Current TV, or its website if you don't have the channel on your digital box, for an alternative to get the results you need. In this case, it's you, the couch potato that you are, who will be providing the coverage. It's called "Current Diggs the Election" and the way it works will be unique.

On the off chance you find yourself sitting around with nothing to do while you wait for the next installment of Lost, the fine folks over at Insanely Great Tees have a little project for you. Armed with a printer, some paper, the IGT pdf, and a little patience, you too can make your very own Dharma Initiative products. They even have a Hanso logo and Nutrition Facts. Although, as someone in the Digg comments points out, the UPC code should really involve "the numbers."

It's a little silly, and some of your guests may look at you a little funny, but for the TV nutter that has everything, a sixer of Dharma barley pops makes a perfect gift. Of course, if that's just a little too far out there for you, they also have what are purported to be insanely great shirts.

[ via Digg ]

Fox is set to kick off the new season of 24 with a two hour premiere tonight. To get you in the mood, have a look at this list of all the people Jack has killed in his first five days. If you're playing along at home, Jack's kill count stands at 136 going into day 6. Not a bad 120 hours worth of work.

This isn't just any list though. Along with who Jack killed, each entry has a video or picture of the kill as well as the method or weapon. It's well done, and the kind of crazy fanaticism that makes television and the internet a great match. Imagine how hard it was back in the day for Green Hornet fans to track the kills of Britt Reed and Kato.

[ via Digg ]

Last night, Stephen Colbert devoted his popular Colbert Report segment "The Wørd" to everyone's favorite site for questionable research, Wikipedia. The word for the day was "Wikiality", citing that, due to the site's format, any assertion can become fact if enough of the site's users agreed with it.

To prove his point, he encouraged viewers to edit entries about elephants with the absurd statement that the population of elephants in the world has tripled in the last six months. Indeed, such an edit -- as well as one Stephen said he'd make about him saying Oregon was "Idaho's Portugal" -- were found under an account named "Stephencolbert" around the time the show was taped. As a result, the Wikipedia admins have protected a bunch of elephant-related pages and blocked the "Stephencolbert" account until they can verify that it was actually Stephen (or his producers) making those edits (I guess if it's him, it's funny. If it's not, it's vandalism).

For those who are curious about the segment, the funny video is on YouTube. You can see it after the jump.

[via Bloglines]

It's been four and a half years since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. I don't know about you, but I still get a little emotional when I think too hard about how that morning unfolded. But, if you're interested in looking back at it from a journalistic point of view, here is a good place to do it.

The non-profit television library called The Television Archive has amassed Canadian and American media coverage of that morning over a 15-minute time period from when the first plane hit, through the second plane hitting the towers, and to the first reports of a third plane hitting the Pentagon. You can see how the news outlets responded, who got it right, who got it first, and who, initially, got it totally wrong. For example, Charlie Gibson of Good Morning America, remained totally calm as he reported what he was seeing. While Bryant Gumbel, who was at The Early Show on CBS at the time, saw phantom planes after the first two crashed into the towers, and he got all panicky on air. The entire video montage is about 30 minutes, but you may have to wait a few days to watch it, because now the website is timing out, probably from so much traffic.

[Via Digg]