(Found via the always-entertaining Tiny Gigantic.)

First, it’s on every TV network. There’s a list of them at that URL above. Eight broadcast networks, a couple dozen cable channels including CNBC, The Tennis Channel, and “TV Guide Channel”. There’s really no announcing/MC, although Ellen DeGeneres came out and introduced the whole show. I still have no idea at all who opened the show. And there is no audience. So the musicians don’t talk to the TV audience, they just stand nearly motionless on an eerily-dark stage and play while cameras cover them from angles that look nothing like a live concert.

Morgan Freeman is narrating right now. I’m waiting for him to say “If they do not do this, they will die.” At the bottom of the screen it alternates between the Red Cross’s URL and that of the Salvation Army. (!?)

Here’s the list of musical performers:

Mary J. Blige, Garth Brooks, Mariah Carey, Sheryl Crow, Dixie Chicks, Foo Fighters, Alicia Keys, Randy Newman, Paul Simon, Rod Stewart, U2, Kanye West, Neil Young

And celebrity appearances:

Jennifer Aniston, Jack Black, Cameron Diaz, Ellen DeGeneres, Morgan Freeman, Jack Nicholson, Chris Rock, Ray Romano, Sela Ward

I guess they just grabbed whoever had Friday night free or something. Rod Stewart?

It’s some of the weirdest production techniques I’ve seen in a long time, and it’s only one hour long. It’s so weird. I don’t get what the simulcast accomplishes — surely if I wanted to watch it I would tune to the channel(s) it was on, and if I didn’t want to watch it, reducing the available options isn’t going to make me donate.

Oop, now they’re showing dead bodies while they play a Green Day tune (which Green Day presumably is not playing live). And now Jack Nicholson is singing Maria into a telephone from the pledge desk. What the heck is this?

Edit: You can watch online!

The Wikipedia articles on The Price is Right and TPIR’s pricing games are a great read if you’re a fan of the game.

Speaking of Wikipedia, I learned via their article on heraldry that the blazon for the coat of arms of Brittany is “Ermine”. That’s it, just “Ermine”. Any heraldic geeks out there who know of any other notable coats of arms blazoned with a single word?

Tomorrow I get to go to the Ministry of Transportation to get my M2 motorcycle license, which lifts all of the restrictions I’ve had other than zero alcohol. This means I can finally ride in Quebec and on the 417 and 416.

I don’t plan on doing much highway riding (especially since the little bike will only get up to 100 km/h grudgingly) but there are more than a few rides that start some distance south or west of Ottawa, and the 417 and 416 are the practical way to get there. (There are places where it’s safer to be going 100 on the 400-series freeways where there’s a passing lane than 80-90 on two-lane country roads where the guy behind you wants to go 120 but can’t pass.)

I’m really looking forward to being able to ride in Quebec, though. Gatineau Park has some great roads, and there are a lot of day trip loops that start off on this side of the river and come back on the other side.

Just in time for me to take a week off work, too!

• The TTABlog is IP lawyer John L. Welch’s blog of analysis of recent decisions of the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board. You’ll either find this stuff riveting or like watching paint dry. Being only vaguely aware of the details of trademark law I find the level of hair-splitting involved interesting, and Welch has a geek lawyer’s sense of humor. One caveat: it’s written for other trademark lawyers, so it’s a bit hard to follow through the jargon and assumed knowledge at times.
• Wikipedia has a list of Twilight Zone episodes, and most of the original series’ episodes have articles containing plot synopses. I saw most of these in reruns growing up, and reading the synopses brings the whole episode to mind, or at least lets me imagine the episodes I haven’t seen.

Good thing that 43 C humidex is keeping me inside!

Candice and I found a place to have our wedding and set a date, only to find that there was a good chance that the Ontario massage therapy regulatory organization would be moving her professional exam to a conflicting date. We had no problem moving the date around, so now we’ll be getting married at the Courtyard Restaurant on July 8, 2006.

We finally got around to arranging for TV at home. For all the time I was in Montreal I never bothered getting cable there, partly because I tended to entertain myself by going out with a book, partly because I was on a student budget, and partly because basic English/French cable didn’t seem like a great deal. But I can afford it now and we always enjoy watching specialty channels when we’re at either of my parents’ places, so we’ve got a StarChoice dish on our balcony now. It’s been great, even if we have been watching the Food Channel pretty much exclusively so far. I did finally manage to see Family Guy, so now everyone’s mood themes and usericons make a bit more sense.

Fweebles and Spratt came down to visit a few weeks ago to see Ottawa, and the four of us went out for dinner one night. Had nummy food at the Black Tomato and then were planning on walking over to Parliament, but decided to cross the Canal on the skating rink and found that La Bottine Souriante were playing on the Winterlude stage on the canal, so we stopped there instead. It was great to meet Fweebles and Spratt (who we’ve known through LiveJournal support for a while) and to finally get to see Bottine live.

Speaking of live music, Shonen Knife played Ottawa a week ago at Babylon, which is a very small club. Fantastic live band. They played a few tunes from their older albums that I’ve got but most of their show was newer material. Still good, just not familiar. They did cover “I Wanna Be Sedated” in an encore, though. If you didn’t already know it you’d think it was just one of their tunes.

I’ve got a new laptop from work, a Dell Latitude D600 — it’s nice to have a 21st-century computer! My machine at work was a 750Mhz PIII, and my home desktop was an 800Mhz Athlon, and my old laptop was a 450MHz PIII, so this 1.8GHz Pentium M is a bit of a nice change. I managed to get everything but the smartcard reader running under Fedora 3 without much trouble, although suspend-to-RAM was a bit of work. Since I’ve got the extra power, I’ve finally decided to give GNOME a try. Turns out the Linux desktop improved a bit while I wasn’t paying attention. :-) I picked up an Linksys WRT54G wireless router and threw the dd-wrt fork of Sveasoft’s Alchemy firmware on, and it’s replaced pretty much everything but the NAS parts of my old firewall box. It’s nice having some dedicated hardware for that so I can play around a bit on the old machine without impacting connectivity here. It’s nice having >2Mb/s wireless, too.

Also, those of you who remember me not understanding RSS: It was because my RSS reader sucked and because I was regularly working from two different computers. With Liferea and one computer I understand RSS now.

And I found a Cat mood theme! And a gin and tonic. Can it get much better than this? I think not.