Sigh. Nothing worse than life imitating a throwaway joke. Last week, writing about YouTube’s copyrighted material discovery software, I called it “the digitial equivalent of drug-sniffing dogs.”

Little did I know that the MPAA had already taken my silly joke and turned it into an even sillier reality. In a move that sounds more like a YouTube parody than anything else, the MPAA has trained a pair of dogs to sniff DVDs. I swear to gods that I am not, in any way, shape or form, making this up.

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As you may have heard (or more likely seen, especially if you’ve been at a red light next to a bus), the 2006 - 2007 television season kicks off officially tonight. Starting tonight, approximately two dozen shows will attempt to find an audience; starting tonight, approximately two dozen shows will be biting their nails and hoping to survive until morning.

Television is not a sport for wimps.

Networks and studios spend months picking just the right shows, millions on production costs, sleepless nights on creating marketing campaigns, and far too many Post-Its to mention on setting just the right programming schedules to tempt our eyeballs. Then they ruin it all by throwing everything they’ve got at us all at once.

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This is going to be pretty short and sweet. I’m sure that Kirk may have a blow-by-blow analysis of all of Zune’s shortcomings forthcoming, but I just want to do a quick take on what is supposed to make Zune an “iPod Killer:” — that killer app that would coax people like me away from purchasing yet another iPod — the wireless song-sharing.

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For reasons I’m not going to go in to, I read a lot of press about opera. What with one article and another, I have learned that there is a lot opera being performed in the United States and that the concert halls that are home to opera companies are generally struggling for money. There seems to be a lot of soul-searching on this topic, but I keep thinking, “Who goes to the opera anyway?”

This is not an idle question. I know exactly two people who are opera buffs. When I asked a friend if he’d consider going to the opera, he took my question pretty seriously. “Maybe when I’m older,” he finally said. “Fifty.”

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Mention the 1960s and 1970s to broadcast TV execs, and you probably get sad sighs, as they reminisce dreamily about a time before the internet; before TiVo; before VHS; before original cable programming; before the remote control; when people would turn the TV to one single network and leave it there all night, watching the commercials and everything. It was the “Golden Age of TV,” for sure. Because TV got all of the gold.

Those days are gone, of course, but it doesn’t stop the broadcast networks from devising plans to once more grab, trap and have their way with a mass audience. Last week, ABC reportedly wanted to disable the fast-forward buttons on DVRs, and this week, CBS has announced their bold new marketing strategy: they are going to advertise on eggs.

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ABC, the network that has been at war with DVR owners for the past several yearrs may be going nuclear. According to at least one report, they are in talks with cable & satellite companies to disable the fast-forward button on future DVRs. Somehow, I doubt this is one of the features that Kirk had in mind when he wrote about his ideal DVR.

Even better, they claim that consumers will be OK with this, that people don’t actually want to fast-forward through the commercials. That the only reason they use DVRs is for the time-shifting aspects. And that we’d all be willing to put up with commercials to continue to time-shift, so there would be no backlash whatsoever.

Holy Jesus Frack! Do these people even use DVRs? There are so many things wrong with this, I don’t even know where to begin.

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Sometimes, you hear a story and think, “Hmm, good column material.” Sometimes you hear a story and think, “They’ve got to be kidding. Hmm, good column material.” And sometimes you hear a story and think, “What? They’ve got to be kidding me. Hmm, good column material.” Case in point: Universal’s big plans overhaul their CD packaging.

The proposed scheme was all over the news yesterday — such is the luck of those who live in Los Angeles — and goes something like this. Universal will offer snazzy new packaging with higher prices on new releases and no-frills packaging with lower prices on catalog product. See, ’cause it’s the jewel boxes that will drive consumers to the stores.

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In case you are wondering how much the Republicans are going to try to use the evil boogeyman of Hollywood as a way to try to whip up their base in a desperate attempt to keep the House this fall, then look no further than this amazing quote, from House Majority Whip Roy Blunt:

“This incident raises the disquieting possibility that the MPAA considers exposure to Christian themes more dangerous for children than exposure to gratuitous sex and violence,” Blunt said in a letter to MPAA Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Dan Glickman.

All this is due to the fact that the MPAA had the temerity to give a PG to a film about a football coach, and how his faith sustains him. Apparently, the filmmakers claim that the MPAA originally said the the PG was given due to the religious content, and then changed their story. The MPAA says that ain’t so.

I say that the filmmakers smell a potentially box-office boosting controversy and the Congresspeople smell a potentially ballot-box boosting issue.

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