Houston.BloggersPub

Yes that headline is right. A former KPRC Channel 2 meteorologist has his own action figure…in a TV promo at least at his current station.  Popular Houston morning weather guy Chuck George has his own blond Ken looking doll, complete with a cheesy 70s style commercial for KOLD Channel 13 in Tucson, Arizona. Nice job! It’s memorable and stand out amongst the copycat TV promo world.

WATCH THE PROMO (ver 1)
WATCH THE PROMO (ver 2)

That’s right see it on the mikemcguff.com blog first and on other Houston blogs last!

(Thanks Ed!)
[Image courtesy of KOLD]

This is an interesting site.  It’s where adults retake photos of themselves as children in modern day. Same poses and shirt color/patterns in most cases…they just add on the years.

GO SEE

(Thanks marc1919)

One of my favorite TV shows on the weekend is Texas Country Reporter. Host Bob Phillips and crew know how to do feature stories right! (Read the show’s history)

WATCH SOME STORIES HERE

The show is reportedly on in every Texas television market (Houston Channel 51 KNWS).

According to this New York Times article, Bob Phillips is going national. A national version of the show, On the Road With Bob Phillips, is planned to debut in January 2009.

If you are from Houston, you might remember The Eyes of Texas.  It was the Houston produced version. KPRC Channel 2 has resurrected that show, but the original episodes are back on the air too.

Houston’s PBS station KUHF Channel 8 now plays the Ray Miller version of the show but calls it Texas Our Texas. You can see a promo for the original show here.

BlogHOUSTON lets us know about a Houston watchdog/news group that is now up and running called Texas Watchdog:

Texas Watchdog describes itself as “a news Web site and training center that scrutinizes the actions of government agencies, bureaucracies and politicians in Texas. It is an independent, nonpartisan entity founded on the belief that our American democracy depends on transparency in government.”

Seibert says that the Houston-based group will cover some state issues, but will also hit local issues. He adds that in addition to breaking news, the group hopes to provide training for citizen-journalists interested in watchdog journalism and government transparency/accountability, and will even offer some fellowships. READ MORE

http://www.texaswatchdog.org/

At least according to this site.

I told you about the search engine viewzi a few weeks ago, now here is a look at a couple of more new search engines. In early August referrals from Addict-O-Matic and Clusty started to come to my blog.

My favorite of the two is Addict-O-Matic.com. This is one comprehensive search engine.

Basically the site combines searches from a bunch of different engines and combines them into a single page.

Meaning if you look up Mike McGuff, you essentially get the equivalent of a front page of a newspaper on me from sources like Google, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube and a lot more.

The site is clean and easy to use.

 
The next is Clusty.com and it is what it sounds like…it clusters searches:

Clusty queries several top search engines, combines the results, and generates an ordered list based on comparative ranking. This “metasearch” approach helps raise the best results to the top and push search engine spam to the bottom.But what really makes Clusty unique is what happens after you search. Instead of delivering millions of search results in one long list, our search engine groups similar results together into clusters.

Hands down I like Addict-O-Matic.com the most out of these two.

(Image courtesy of Flickr users Travelin’ Librarian)

I was very excited to learn that the very famous “Boom Goes the Dynamite” guy (aka Brian Collins) landed a job at my old station KXXV Channel 25 in Waco!

His YouTube video is so popular that it still gets emailed to me years after it first came out. No joke, just two weeks ago a friend sent it to me.

Glad to see that the Internet fame didn’t scare him away from a job in the TV business.  Read more about the guy who hired him.

Woman asks on YouTube what is now in our water that causes rainbows in a sprinkler stream?

WATCH THE VIDEO

 She says, “It is something that did not happen 20 years ago, but it is happening now! What is oozing out of our ground?”

(Thanks Mr. SunCaughtFire)

Face it, they are usually scripted and boring, but sometimes we get something interesting.  Uncle Barky lays down the top 10 televised political convention moments.  As he says “Some are odd, others eventful. All made their marks.”

SEE THE LIST

Will Al Gore show up at this year’s Democratic National Convention and do a number from MTV’s America’s Best Dance Crew (Season 2)?

Houstonist’s Katharine Shilcutt Gleave has a nice write up about all of the restaurants on Houston’s Washington Avenue. This place is hopping.