Best Leisure Time Blog

posted by Adam Johns on Mar 10

The history of reality shows has begun in far 1992 when “The Real World” was first broadcasted by MTV. It turned to become a great success though it had been made as an experiment. People from different places and backgrounds were put to live together in a single house for several months. All their movements and actions were filmed 24 hours a day. This show was so popular that in a year’s time reality TV shows has taken a considerable part of air time.

Another super popular reality show appeared in 2002 and was called “Survivor”. A group of people had to survive on a deserted island. The prize was a fantastic one million dollar sum. The first “Survivor” reality TV show has started the whole series of “Survivors”. Casting agencies still continue to arrange survivor auditions.

Today we experience a reality TV show boom. Almost every big channel has its reality primetime show. But modern shows are a bit different from their forerunners. You can’t even call them reality (real-life) shows, as people act there as if they were common people but they are just actors. Everything is done to get popularity, money and rating. You won’t ever get to a reality show nowadays unless you contact a casting agency. You also need to possess definite moral and physical characteristics in order to get in. Reality show competition is so high that no one can afford to film common people. It is a straight road to bankruptcy.

posted by Adam Johns on Mar 8

The communal bond that keeps fans of Led Zeppelin listening and hoping is strong, if not stronger, than it was when first forged by the hammer of the blues-loving gods in the late 1960s. It has withstood the death of one member, long absences by the other three and occasional cameo reminders of what is and what will never be.

When the three remaining members — Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones — reunited with drummer Jason Bonham, son of the late John, for a concert last December in London to honor the late Atlantic Records founder Ahmet Ertegun, Ron Laffitte considered not attending, even though he obtained a ticket more precious than Willy Wonka’s gold ducats.

“I’ve been a fan since I was 11,” said Laffitte, a managing partner at Red Light Management, which handles acts like Alanis Morissette, The Decemberists and Band of Horses. “I bought ‘Physical Graffiti’ in 1976. I didn’t get to see them when they toured in ’77, when I was 12.

“I almost didn’t go to the show (in December) because I thought, ‘What if I fly all the way to London and they suck?’ All of my life, this band meant so much to me. If they suck, it will destroy the illusion.”

But naturally, he went.
Love or money?

Plant is 59, Page is 64 and Jones is 62. When they were about 27, 31 and 29, respectively, I saw them at Madison Square Garden, in 1975. (The exact ages are unclear because research reveals they played the Garden at three different times of that year on their North American tour, and I can’t find my ticket stub). It was about as spiritual an experience as a high school-aged kid could have while breathing hemp fumes from the blue seats and grooving to “Dazed and Confused” while being wonderfully dazed and confused. I’m not a religious man, but this scripture I could dig.

Roughly 32 years later, the band returned, with Jason being embraced by band members and fans alike for having his dad’s genes and his own wicked beat. The show at London’s O2 arena was a smash hit, fueling speculation that Led Zeppelin might just turn the one-night stand into a thing.

Just why has Led Zeppelin resisted the lure to tour all these years when many of their rock and roll brethren — the Rolling Stones, Eagles, Police, to name a few — have ignored their “been there, done that” instincts to perform for thousands and rake in millions? Why are Plant, Page and Jones the last holdouts?

Obviously, when John Bonham died, something within the other three went with him. Yet with Jason such an accomplished and honorable replacement, there isn’t that obstacle anymore.

I understand the Led Zeppelin fan’s catch-22 as well as anyone: I want them to tour, but I want to remember them as they were. That’s what Laffitte experienced going in.

“It completely lived up to the hype,” he said. “The feeling in the room was incredible. The anticipation was incredible.”

‘Serve the fans, serve the music’

Cameron Crowe understands this better than most. He went looking for that confounded bridge like the rest of us, only he got there. Now an acclaimed writer-director, his experiences as the youngest-ever contributing journalist for Rolling Stone were chronicled in his film, “Almost Famous,” for which he won an Oscar for best original screenplay. Led Zeppelin was one of the famous groups he made even more famous in the ’70s.

Source: msnbc

posted by Adam Johns on Mar 5

The mobile-phone industry has finally developed a worthy successor to AT&T’s Digital One Rate. Late last month, Verizon Wireless ushered in the era of “all-you-can-eat” pricing. For a $99.99 monthly fee, customers can make unlimited domestic mobile calls. The basic plan includes voice calls. Another $20 a month gets you unlimited monthly text messaging too.

The last time that I used a hotel-room phone, about a dozen years ago, I got dinged for $11 for a two-minute call from Phoenix to New York. This was during the phone wars, a nasty era for business travelers that lasted for years after the government broke up the old AT&T monopoly in 1984.

During that time, hoteliers would mark up domestic calls by 500 to 600 percent, and three-digit prices for short calls from overseas hotels were standard. Business travelers essentially opened their economic veins whenever they plugged their phone modems into a hotel system and downloaded their email at the then-blazing speeds of 14.4 or 28.8 kilobytes.

Pay phones were even more ridiculous. Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, telecommunications companies would put goofy proprietary pay phones in airport concourses. One I remember particularly well had a pullout keyboard, acoustic couplers for the handset, and a miniscule monitor. For two or three bucks a minute, you could laboriously dial into AOL or Compuserve—and be disconnected before you retrieved a single message.

Back then, I carried a separate little travel wallet stuffed with calling cards, all claiming to shield me from the telephonic havoc. During those years, I had three flavors of AT&T cards; a call-back card that routed all my calls through some Caribbean country; and even a phone card from American Express—which saved me a lot of money, assuming that I was willing to dial 32 digits to phone home.

Fortunately, mobile phones made the phone wars irrelevant. In the years since their widespread adoption, some telecom experts say that hotels have lost as much as 80 percent of their calling volume and revenue from in-room phones. Pay phones have all but disappeared from airports and city sidewalks. And do you know any business traveler who still uses a calling card?

It’s easy to pinpoint the moment when mobile phones changed the game for business travelers: In 1998, one of the many mobile companies that have been called AT&T introduced the Digital One Rate plan. Customers paid just 11 cents per minute for a mobile call from anywhere in the nation—no roaming charges, no surcharges, and no other tricky fees. With mobile service truly national and predictably priced, business travelers converted in droves.

It’s taken a decade, but the mobile-phone industry has finally developed a worthy successor to Digital One Rate. Late last month, Verizon Wireless ushered in the era of “all-you-can-eat” pricing. For a $99.99 monthly fee, customers can make unlimited domestic mobile calls. The basic plan includes voice calls. Another $20 a month gets you unlimited monthly text messaging too.

Verizon’s major competitors reacted in a flash: Within hours, AT&T essentially matched the Verizon deal (but pointedly excluded the Apple iPhone from the offer). T-Mobile, generally the cheapest of the major firms, went even further—its $99.99 monthly plan includes unlimited calling and unlimited text messaging. T-Mobile’s catch? You must extend your existing contract to qualify. Verizon and AT&T allow existing customers to switch to all-you-can-eat pricing without adding time to their current contracts. Sprint Nextel finally joined the fray last week, unveiling its own $99.99 endless-talk plan.

Market analysts are skeptical about the flat-rate pricing, of course. They worry that the plans will erode the profit that mobile companies wring out of heavy users like business travelers. They also insist that flat-rate prices will further commoditize the mobile-telecom industry.

There’s no such carping from business travelers. In fact, a predictable monthly price for mobile calls and messaging is the next-to-last front. “A hundred bucks a month for my mobile?” one frequent business traveler emailed me last week. “I’ve spent more than that on one phone call from my hotel room back in the bad old days.”

Now that we’ve got a path to taming our domestic calling costs on the road, all that’s left to conquer is international mobile calling prices. An overseas cell-phone call can cost as much as five dollars a minute, and the calling protocols and roaming regimens remain daunting.

“I wouldn’t hold your breath on the international front,” one mobile-phone executive told me the other day. “We have a hard time figuring out what we pay to provide international service, so I don’t think we’ll be in a rush to cut fees there too quickly.”