Links for 2006-03-31

Posted March 31, 2006 12:17 AM.

Have any television or radio presenters died while they were in the middle of a live broadcast? I don't know the answer to this question, but I want to, so I decided to ask Yahoo Answers. All inspired by Simon asking whther they'd cancel Eurovision if Terry Wogan died unexpectedly.
OS X Satisfaction Chart is a humourous look at how people get their head arounds the plusses and minuses in translating over to Mac usage Absence of games = big deal, although there is really only one game in existence for any computer and that's World of Warcraft and Macs have that.
The new patch for World of Warcraft includes radically better Flightpath functionality Like about three of you will care about this, but it's really sweet and will save an enormous amount of time - if only because you can now go and make a cup of tea while traversing a continent...
Hugh's helpful card for excitable people Jet-lag makes Tom grumpy. Not sleeping makes Tom grumpy. Excitable people make Tom grumpy. You tell 'em Hugh.
The BBC reports on BT's attempts to enforce its monthly download limits... "BT is targeting customers who it says are regularly breaking their monthly broadband download limits."
A grid explaining the various characters of the International Phonetic Alphabet This is actually sort of beautiful if you're nerdy - a one page representation of all the noises that people use in speech, quite well typographically laid-out. From Wikipedia...
"The Pope has a special hat. Rabbis have special hats. Rastafarians have special hats. Why not Pastafarians?" Venganza presents a crochetted hat depicting the Flying Spaghetti Monster in entirely too much detail. Stunning.

Comments

Please stay on-topic, informative and polite. I reserve the right to remove comments for whatever vague capricious reasons seem reasonable at the time.

Oh the new WoW flightpaths are so handy! I love the way the griffins wheel round outside Stormwind when they realise they don't need to land.

Have you managed to see any weather yet? Not so much as a tropical shower for me!

→ Posted by: Becky at March 31, 2006 8:35 AM

Gah, beaten to it I was gonna ask have you seen any weather in WoW yet.

Don't think any broadcasters have died mid air. Personally think that if Wogan pegged it mid broadcast yes Eurovision would be taken off air, if he was to die beforehand they would rush Jonathen Ross in by excutive jet if necessary and while I don't want Wogan to die particulary I think he has past his sell by date as far as Eurovison goes.

→ Posted by: Jane at March 31, 2006 12:10 PM

As a recent Mac buyer it's not the games that I miss.

It's that I swap constantly between a PC and a Mac and I'm under endless confusion whether I should be pressing CTRL, Alt, Apple or the Windows key, for all those shortcuts.

But overall I really like the Mac, and not for the reasons I thought I would. I'm not too bothered about OS X, yes it's nice enough, but in day to day use it's not significantly better or worse than XP.

The stuff that impresses me is the software. Omnigraffle - beautiful looking charts in minutes. Pages - I can drag and drop images in from the web and resize and crop them really easily. (Something I've never been able to get Word to do.) And the whole iLife / iWork integration. It all works fantastically well.

→ Posted by: Rob Manuel at March 31, 2006 12:57 PM

Tommy Cooper died live on-stage during Sunday Night at the Palladium.

→ Posted by: Martin at March 31, 2006 1:13 PM

Yeah, but he's not a presenter, is he?

I've floated the question around the office here at The Stage, and everybody's been putting their thinking caps on. Nothing yet -- the closest we've got so far is Davina McCall dying every week on her new chat show...

→ Posted by: Scott Matthewman at March 31, 2006 1:42 PM

Apparently, Kenneth Horne, the presenter of Beyond our Ken and Round the Horne, died while accepting an award in a ceremony that was being broadcast live.

The only other suggestion we've had in so far was Peter Finch blowing his brains out in Network, but that was fictional.

→ Posted by: Scott Matthewman at March 31, 2006 2:09 PM

there is really only one game in existence for any computer and that's World of Warcraft

I have to say that's one of the best quotes latety:)

→ Posted by: Krzychu Danek at March 31, 2006 9:49 PM

Don't know about presenters, but there was an American politician called Budd Dwyer who shot himself on live TV...

→ Posted by: quis at March 31, 2006 10:17 PM

Not really a presenter, but I remember watching Tommy Cooper die on live TV when I was 14. It really afffected me at the time, especially as we all thought it was part of the act and were laughing.

→ Posted by: Colin at March 31, 2006 11:21 PM

Mark Sandman of Morphine collapsed on stage in Italy in July 1999 and was pronounded dead in the ambulance on the way to the hospital.

→ Posted by: Gord Fynes at April 2, 2006 2:39 AM

from wikipedia's list of unusual deaths...

1974: Christine Chubbuck, an American television news reporter committed suicide during a live broadcast on July 15th. At 9:38 AM, 8 minutes into her talk show, on WXLT-TV in Sarasota, Florida, she drew out a revolver and shot herself in the head. The technical director reacted quickly enough to cut the on-air video to black a split-second before she pulled the trigger.

link to wikipedia list

→ Posted by: pj at April 3, 2006 12:23 PM

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