Washington Post Fail

Brad DeLong has been railing against the Washington Post for some time. Mostly on politics, commentary, and editorials. Today, I extend that to television critics. Lisa de Moraes' column today took a look at the finale of Lost. And a lot of it is pure fail.

First, Lisa claims that everyone on the island was actually dead the whole time. Clearly, she didn't watch the last 5 minutes of the finale where Christian Shephard says that they weren't. Everything on the island happened when they were alive. Otherwise, the flash-sideways don't make sense. How would Jin and Sun remember their death if they were already dead?

Ok, if that wasn't the case, Lisa's next claim is that they were in some sort of limbo/purgatory and have now died happily ever after. Again, it appears that Lisa didn't even watch the show. Christian clearly explains that the flash-sideways of season 6 was a place that the survivors of 815 created so that they could meet again and then move on. The island itself was not some sort of limbo. Many people died there. Jack died to save his friends. He wasn't able to save everyone and his last memory of life is seeing Lapidus escape with a few of his friends on an airplane. The obvious solution to the Lost story was to take this copout and say it was limbo/purgatory. But it clearly was not.

Next, Lisa attacks the ratings. Sure they're down. But so is television in general, a fact not mentioned by Lisa. The way people watch TV has changed, again not mentioned. She matter-of-factly claims that the number (20.5 million) is hooey because that is the number of people who watched as little as 6 minutes of the show. In the same column, she says that 9+ million watched the Apprentice instead of Lost. Well, following that logic, many people watched as little as 6 minutes of that show.

But the key fail on Lisa is this quote, "...that 2.5 hour 'Lost'-apalooza contained a mind-numbing 45 minutes of commercials." That's mind-numbing? That's exactly what is expected in today's commercial television shows! The hour long dramas have about 42 minutes of actual show. Thus, there are 18 minutes of commercials in an hour of broadcast TV. Now let's take that logic to 2.5 hours of TV. Well 2 hours of TV would contain 36 minutes of commercials. Add in the half hour extra and you're looking at...drumroll...45 minutes of commercials! Exactly what you'd expect. Now maybe Lisa is remembering TV from 20 years ago when there would be 15 minutes of commercials in an hour-long show. If that were the case, you'd expect 37 or 38 minutes of commercials in a 2.5 hour show. Now 45 minutes of commercials in that setting would be mind-numbing.

Congrats to the Washington Post for failing once again.

Zune v. iPod cost debate

I'm sure you've probably seen the Zune ad and its claim that it costs $30,000 to fill it up at $1 per song. And the claim is that the Zune only costs you $15 per month to fill up. You also get 10 free songs per month. Not that they're free though, they're $1.50 a song. Note that's 50 cents more than iTunes (for the most part).

Penny Arcade did a great little comic on it too. They're joke is that it takes infinity dollars to fill up the Zune, so the ad is really stupid.

Gizmodo thinks it's sort of right, but ignores the 10 "free" songs you get to keep per month. Well, how much does it take to fill up the Zune? Let's assume you get a 120GB Zune. You have to make some other assumptions too on file size. But let's say it's 5 mb. So it takes 24,000 songs to roughly fill up your Zune. Since you can keep 10 songs a month, it will take 2400 months to fill up. Assuming that the monthly rate stays at $15 per month, it will take you $36,000 to fill it up. Obviously, this is based on some assumptions, but this is a rough order of magnitude calculation. You can tweak it a bit here and there, but the bottom line is at best, it costs the same amount of money to fill up either product.