I watched the return episodes of some of the late night talk shows—Letterman with writers, Conan, Leno, Stewart and Colbert without—and I’ve got questions. Leno, of course, has been excoriated for saying he wrote his opening monologue, which explains why the show seemed to display about the same level of suckitude as it usually does with writers. Conan, on the other hand, seems to be flying mostly without a net, and the Stewart/Colbert duo are obviously making some things up as they go along. Even so, all three shows are clearly benefiting from prep work, which raises the question of where the WGA and the talk shows decide to draw the line. When is a show improvised and when is it “written”?

I’m not alone in asking the question; shortly after the first Stewart and Colbert episodes on Monday, TVSquad wondered about the same thing. Who does the graphics? Who ties jokes to those graphics? Who picks out clips and decides they should be the target of ridicule? And in the case of all the talk shows returning without writers, not just Stewart and Colbert, who does the research and plans the questions for the guests? Some of these tasks seem distinctly writer-ish.

Some more insights into TheA Daily Show during the writers’ strike comes from an audience member who saw the taping of Monday’s episode. On the one hand, the description of how the first segment played out originally makes it clear Stewart’s ad-libbing. But then there was the question from the audience of how the show came together, and Stewart’s statement that “thoughts didn’t go through the fingertips”—in other words, an outline of the show but no script. Does writing cease to be writing if you make it sufficiently vague or don’t actually put it down on paper? When you’re not coming up with specific jokes, but you are sketching out topics to cover, is that planning or writing?

One thing’s for sure—by the time the writers’ strike is over, the average television viewer will probably have a much better idea of just what a writer does on a talk show, if only because these sorts of questions are going to keep coming up.

This and this are my two favourite things for today. Seriously, her heart is bursting with cute animated robot empathy. BURSTING.

We turned up in Bristol and started unloading only to find the venue locked. We went around the front and found the whole place shut down and a notice announcing the rest of their tour was cancelled due to ‘band illness’. No one had bothered to tell us anything. The only reason we were on this fucking tour was that band. They were all amazing shows, we might have broken even, we might have got some new fans and then they come along and cancel. They’ve never bothered to contact us. They’re not that popular with us right now.

Lizzie Powell of Land of Talk, who was understandably a bit miffed after the Decemberists cancelled the European tour Land of Talk was supposed to support. Thankfully the band is safe and sound back in North America, where at least they have a tour and venues to play. The interview is a bit of a downer—Lizzie’s pessimistic about the value of music, the band gets ticketed in London for setting up a recording session in a park near Buckingham Palace, and, oh yeah, the Decemberists split town without telling anyone and the band was out the cost of assorted transportation and accomodation expenses. Add that to having their original drummer leave the band earlier this year (and as Chromewave mentions, having their gear stolen after returning from the UK), and you start to wonder how many awful twists of fate the band can take before—well, I dare not say.

But if the unthinkable does happen one of these days, I’ll know who to blame. I’ll organize a show with the Decemberists, and then leave them stranded. In the middle of the Sahara fucking dessert.

I got Guitar Hero 3 last week for the Wii, marking the first game I’ve bought for the poor white box since Trauma Center, which has mostly laid unlamented and unplayed on my coffee table ever since the incredibly impossible early level. You know the one. The one with the stuff. I didn’t even get to GUILTs or nothing.

Anyways, it turns out that because I got the Wii version, and because people have long ago figured out how to connect the Wiimote to a Bluetooth-equipped PC, it means I can connect my Wii guitar to my computer and play Frets on Fire. The day after the game came out, someone had already put together a GlovePIE script for the guitar. This is great except Frets on Fire comes with just three songs. But I didn’t hook up my guitar just to play songs on my computer. Oh no. I hooked up my guitar so I could make songs on my computer. Fake songs. Or rather, fake frets to real songs that I didn’t originally write.

Basically I have become a pretend Harmonix/Neversoft song developer for the weekend. And it’s strange the things you learn about music when you have to line up brightly coloured dots to the beat that correspond to buttons people are supposed to press in order to pretend they’re playing guitar. Perhaps the most frustrating thing, one that’s given me a new fondness for metronomes, is that some bands can’t seem to keep a steady beat. Be Your Own Pet is an awesome band, but holy crap does the bpm change with practically every measure of “Ouch!”

Why does this matter? Because generally games like Frets on Fire and Guitar Hero tend to assume that time signatures and tempos don’t change very much, if at all, during a song. It’s a very digital way of looking at things—everything in regular intervals, no divergence—but it doesn’t exactly reflect reality very well, especially with the smaller bands whose songs I most desperately want to play. So, if you’re an indie band who wants desperately to have a song featured in the next Guitar Hero or Rock Band game, here’s a tip: buy a metronome and use it.

The producers of Channel Five motoring show Fifth Gear are quick learners: it only takes them one or two seasons after a format change to figure out how to make the show interesting again. This would be more of a virtue if they didn’t revamp the show about every three seasons, but we’ll take what we can get.

The pointless crush my car/breakdown/stupid car tricks segments: gone. The daytime-TV interstitials: less cutesy and less traditional (though some may not like the new Paul Greengrass shakycam feel to the new interstitials). The great reviews and insightful chatter: piled on! More Tiff: check. More Tom: check. Really, it’s an improvement on almost every element of the last season, itself a major improvement over the horrific season 10.

The 12th season really leaves just one major problem spot to deal with. Why is it that the British motoring shows seem to think we want more celebrities in our shows? Perhaps I’d care more if I actually knew any of the British footballers and talk show hosts Fifth Gear has on every week, but even if you replaced every single one with Christina Ricci the celeb segments would still be horrible. Celebrities driving cars do not often make for good television, and definitely not when Jason Plato pulls his usual “ha ha, look at how much I can scare the civvies by driving sideways!” schtick. The only segment in recent memory that bucked this trend was the Girls Aloud segment, and then only because one or two of the women actually seemed interested in going fast. Even then we got Plato’s lovely “don’t let girls around your Ferraris” comment at the end. Even that was ten times more exciting than the usual “let’s give this cricketer a Lamborghini and see how fast he can drive it” spot.

So consider this another well-reasoned plea to the producers of Fifth Gear. This time we’re only asking for one thing: remove the insipid celebrity fawning spots, add in another car review (or hell, bring Jon Bentley back in front of the camera, he was actually making decent, informative segments before he disappeared), and suddenly you’ve got a top-notch, high-quality show that acts perfectly as the higher minded, more journalistic compliment to Top Gear’s crazy antics.

Of course, if the usual trend continues, next year we’ll get an all-new Fifth Gear where Vicki Butler-Henderson co-hosts with Clint Eastwood’s monkey live from the Chunnel tunnel, Tiff Needell is replaced by Tim Lovejoy in drag, and all the segments feature Geri Halliwell giving you tips on how to do handbrake turns. Stay tuned.

Ever wonder why the end credits in a movie always seem to scroll at the same rate as it does in other movies? No? Well, here’s the answer anyways. Beware: if the terms PAL, NTSC and scanlines mean nothing to you, here be dragons. Found via an AskMetafilter question that provides some interesting reading material for those of us not blessed with a working understanding of video resolutions and interlacing.

(The title of this post is apparently taken from the end credits of the UK short film Blowout, though obviously it applies to a great many other films.)

Back when Pitchfork was just one of many sites trying to put up daily reviews on the web, and the whole “we made Broken Social Scene famous” thing was just a pipe dream in some music journalist wank’s mind’s eye, I read a review of an album called Ghosts of Dead Aeroplanes. Based solely on that review, which in hindsight gives me no clue as to why I thought the album was worth picking up, I went and bought the last copy of the album at Rotate This, and the narcotic bass line of “Essence of Cessna” was my introduction to Prolapse. (Come to think of it, maybe the name “Essence of Cessna” was so cool that I had to have the album just to have a really cool song title in my collection.)

After that purchase I learned about bits and pieces of the band’s history, scattered across the internet and missing big chunks of time—like what was the deal with the first two albums, and did Prolapse tour The Italian Flag in America, and hey how come they haven’t released anything lately? And then there were the stories, heard fifth-hand like legendary myths of derring-do on the I Love Music boards, of Prolapse’s live insanity—Scottish Mick the angry ranter and Linda Steelyard the woman scorned, yelling and screaming at each other and beating the living shit out of one another on stage. It’s not as though you couldn’t hear that weird tension in the music, but to see it laid bare like that must’ve been one hell of an experience.

Eight years on, Prolapse is definitely no more, and it seemed like the band’s history would be forever told in bits of half-forgotten internet scripture. But no more, because now we have this dizzying e-mail interview with every member of the band, a sort of oral retrospective of Prolapse’s too-short-by-half history. The most entertaining parts are, of course, the stories about the live shows, but there’s plenty as well on the writing and recording process, the breakup, and life after Prolapse. I figured everyone had forgotten about Prolapse, and never thought I’d see anything as detailed as this interview. Finding this interview has completely made my day.

This is exactly what YouTube should be used for: as an archive for every last bit of ephemeral video we can possibly find and shove onto their servers, so that cultural treasures like these Mike Rowe clips are never lost. If you’ve ever seen an episode of Dirty Jobs I don’t even need to say anything else, you’re already watching Rowe spin late-night home-shopping gems like “You want me to teach you the Hustle? It starts like this: ‘Hey little girl, want some candy?’ ”

The Long Blondes just came through Toronto on their month-long North American tour. Notes:

1. “Swallow Tattoo” followed by “Separated by Motorways”? Best. encore. ever.
2. I can’t decide whether I like the actual intro to “Fulwood Babylon,” “People think I’m being/perverse on purpose,” or what I thought I heard during the show: “People think I’m weird/but that’s on purpose.” How ’bout we call that one a draw?
3. I was walking out with a gaggle of girls who seemed relatively unfamiliar with the Long Blondes, but all they were saying to each other was how it was the funnest show they’d been to in ages. I completely fucking agree.
4. I hear Kate Jackson and company might be returning to North America in September. PLEASE COME BACK TO TORONTO.

Between Land of Talk, the Pipettes and the Long Blondes, the beginning of June has been very good to me concert-wise. I don’t see how the rest of the summer could possibly top this.

The juicy backstory:

On an August morning in 1978, French filmmaker Claude Lelouch mounted a gyro-stabilized camera to the bumper of a Ferrari 275 GTB and had a friend, a professional Formula 1 racer, drive at breakneck speed through the heart of Paris.

No streets were closed, for Lelouch was unable to obtain a permit.

The real story, of course, is slightly less romantic; instead of a Ferrari 275 GTB, it was an old Mercedes 450SEL. Instead of the Formula 1 driver, it was Lelouch himself, along with two others in the car. The sound of Lelouch’s Ferrari was dubbed over the movie for added oomph. And for all that, C’etait un rendezvous is still an astonishing bit of driving cinema. And now you can follow Lelouch’s route as the video plays, via Google Maps.

Fifth Gear tried and failed to recreate the glory of C’etait un rendezvous earlier this year. I almost hesitate to link this because it was a pretty boring segment; morning rush-hour Paris is no time to be making a speed run.