At last! The wonderful days of summer are here. For me it means, water parks, visits to Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom for fun and to watch visiting WWE wrestlers working with the local OVW group, cookouts, and other things. Normally, after a long hot day, my favorite place is in my chair, watching some good show on television. This summer, however, it's going to be hard to find.

As we all know, the writer's strike caused widespread devastation to the regular television season and now we are getting phase two of that incident. Because of everything being fouled up by that strike, the programmers at the major networks and some of the other networks as well, are resorting to opening the floodgate of reality shows to fill their schedules while work begins on the upcoming new season.

Now don't get me wrong. There have been some good reality shows that have been actually entertaining, among them Fox's American Idol, VH1's Celebracadabra, the original season of ABC's The Mole (hosted by a then unknown Anderson Cooper), Dancing with the Stars, also from ABC, SciFi's Who Wants to be a Superhero and the about to return on A & E, Dog the Bounty Hunter.

Now some reality shows are okay, but this summer it seems the networks are totally overrun with them. It seems that most channels are turning into mostly reality networks. Who is to blame for this television nightmare? I don't blame the writers as they were strictly doing what they felt they had to in order to get proper payment for their work. I lay the blame for the upcoming mess at the feet of the programmers. They knew the strike was coming and had time to better prepare for the fallout.

Normally, one would look at this kind of summer TV schedule and remark that the new season was just a few weeks away, but now the Screen Actors Guild seem to be on a path toward a strike themselves which will once again stop production of our favorite shows and the new ones as well. What will happen then? Will the major networks become all reality all the time?

Great Maker, deliver us!!!!

The Force is with Us: Are you ready for the return of Star Wars to the big screen? The seventh chapter in the saga, the first one in CGI comes to the screen on August 15^th. Many of your favorite characters will be in it, some with the voices you know, some with familiar but new voices, continuing the story of the great clone wars. If you haven't seen the trailer for it, click here!

Another great leaves us: June 15^th, SciFi fans lost a true master of special effects with the passing of Stan Winston. His achievements read like a who's who of sci-fi and fantasy movies, four of them winning him the coveted Oscar for his efforts in Aliens, Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Jurassic Park, and Batman Returns. At the time of his death, his work was on the screen in Iron Man, and will return one final time in Terminator: Salvation.

And Yet Another: I've always believed that the greatest gift man has is that of laughter and those who can bring it to us when we need it the most. Such a man was George Carlin. From his creative mind came comedy bits that may have been anti-establishment, but they hit the funny bone and hit it hard. From the early days of the “Hippie Dippy Weatherman” to his routine of “Wonderful WINO Radio” from his infamous “Seven Words You Can't Say on Television” to his material of later years (“Stuff” was one of my favorites), Carlin continued to bring laughter to his fans, leaving them with aching sides from laughter, but a smile on their face. Sadly, shortly after I first uploaded this column, the news broke that he has passed away at the age of 71. This November, he was to receive the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor. While he won't be there physically to receive it, he left us knowing how much an impact he had on all of us.

Ain't That Weird: Drivers in the West Chester, Ohio area are praying that what they recently saw was not a prophecy of the future. A Speedway station in that Cincinnati suburb accidentally was displaying a price for regular gas at $9.09 a gallon. After several hours, the embarrassed station owner changed it to the actual price of $4.09. Anyone want to bet on how long before that is a real price?

Think about it.

Photos:  Wikipedia.org, Findagrave.com 

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