Saturday Night Live Japan debuted last week, and to be quite frank, it’s almost creepy.

Readers of this blog know I’ve followed Saturday Night Live since its very first episode. Through the bad years and the good, I’ve been there, and I have no plans to ever tune out because it’s just a part of my life now.  However, what I didn’t know was that foreign versions have been launched in France and Spain.  This came as a bit of a surprise to me, and I only learned of those two because the news came out that Saturday Night Live Japan was going to air its first episode last weekend.

Considering the peculiar sense of humor of the Japanese, I wasn’t quite sure how the show would translate, but then I saw the opening credits.

They got Don Pardo, the voice of the American SNL since the first episode to do the cast read? Epic! Not to mention that the opening shots are filmed in the exact same style as the American credits, which is also fairly cool.  From what I heard about the rest of the episode, the humor was much more slapsticky than the American version, which holds more true with your usual Japanese style of comedy.  It could also somewhat harken back to the early days of our version, but my suspicion is that it is much about about what the Japanese are used to.

The biggest difference?  Their version will only air once a month.  Yikes.

The Walking Dead season 2 has gone into production in the area surrounding Atlanta, and AMC has wasted no time in releasing some non-spoilery promo pics.

While I certainly had my issues with the first season of The Walking Dead, I’m sure I’ll be back for season 2.  Sadly, the first images released are not doing anything to help my issues with the show as now it seems that whatever causes the zombies is also capable of changing their bone structure?

In this first image, check out the African-American gentleman on the right.  Perhaps his flesh is rotting away, sagging so much to reveal his bone structure?  Then why is the rest of him not suffering a similar fate?

If it was just this one picture, I’d chalk it up to poor make-up design, but … enlarged eyes and sockets?  Sure it’s creepy looking, but since when did zombie plagues start changing us from humans to to deformed creatures?

Good job, AMC picking the creepy images, but you left me unsettled in the sense of I have no clue what you’re planning to do to annoy me this year.

Almost as big of a character in the Green Lantern mythos as any of the named characters is the planet Oa. Located at the center of the universe, the planet is the home of the Guardians of the Universe, the founders of the Green Lantern Corps, and it serves as the gathering point when the various Lanterns need to speak with one another.

My feelings on how the Green Lantern movie will do seem to oscillate every time I turn around.  While some of it is based on the fact it’s in 3D, a lot of it of course has to do with how the source material is treated.  While I’ve been vocal about my issues on the costumes, the original trailer and more, Oa has been a bit of a mystery.  While this is not exactly a detailed look, it looks too lived in.  Oa has always been about the Guardians and the 3,600 members of the Corps, bu this planet looks like a bustling society.

I know, I know, minor quibble, but … darn it.  Get at least something spot on, would ya?  Take a look for yourself and see what you think

X-Men: First Class may have won the weekend, but it didn’t perform anywhere close to expectations.

Clocking in at $55 million, the newest film in the X-Men franchise beat the debut of the original film from back in 2000, but just barely.  Adjusted for inflation, the prequel fell short of the original based on attendance numbers, and considering the $160 million dollar budget, that is most definitely not a good thing.

The Hangover Part II brought in $31.4 million for a 63 percent drop from last weekend.  Apparently the bad word of mouth finally caught up with it.  It actually brought in less than the original did on its second weekend, but the damage is already done for this film to be considered a success, and a third film is already in the scripting stage.

Also not fairing well was Kung-Fu Panda 2 which fell 50 percent to $23.9 million this weekend.  The original fell 44 percent in its second weekend, and 50 percent is almost unheard of for an animated film in its second weekend.

Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides fell another 55 percent from its previous fall last week to bring in $18 million.  It’s domestic total stands at $190.2 million, but it’s raking it in on the foreign markets for a worldwide total of $790.8 million.  Rounding at the top five was Bridesmaids which actually had the best weekend statistically with $12 million.

A teacher at Boiling Springs High School has been charged with sexual battery on a student.

Abby Kate McElhenny, 23, was charged with the sexual battery of a 16-year-old senior at Boiling Springs High School.  Ms. McElhenny was a Spanish teacher and swim coach at the school until she resigned in the wake of the relationship being discovered after a relative of the student alerted the authorities.  She turned herself into authorities the day after her resignation, and was charged with the sexual battery of a student.  The police have also subpoenaed 750 texts that were exchanged between the teacher and student that reportedly were seeing one another from Dec. to May.

What makes this case different than others is that McElhenny is being charged under a recently enacted law that forbids sex between a teacher and student no matter what their age.  The age of consent in South Carolina is 16, and the boy’s parents have signed a waiver saying that they do not wish to press charges.  Some have said that charges being pressed against her is wrong as they are both of the age of consent, and that her punishment should be restricted to the loss of her job.  The problem with this concept is that a teacher is always viewed as someone that is charged with the care of minors while they are on school property.  It does not matter that the boy was legally able to consent to sexual intercourse with McElhenny, she was still in a position of power over him.

I’m sorry, but there is never an excuse for a teacher to be having sex with a student in my opinion.  While criminal charges don’t pop up from instances of it happening in college, if it’s happening in high school, no matter what the ages, it should be considered illegal.

Could someone else explain to me why it seems like every teacher sex scandal now involves text messages? Do none of these people read the stories of how those always come back to haunt you?

A total of 31 this week.

FunJug.com

• Jeep Roll Over
• Entering a Car Like a Boss
• Star Wars Weekend at Disney World
• 50 State Stereotypes (in 2 minutes)
• The 100 Greatest Movie Threats of All Time
• Start-Up Guys
• Saturday Shorts: Emily Post’s Table Manners

SeanPAune.com

• The Hangover Part II Rules Memorial Day Weekend
• Cowboys & Aliens Graphic Novel Review
• Flogging Molly: Speed of Darkness Review
• DC Comics Reboots its Universe and Goes Digital
• Internet Speeds in the 21st Century
• Scattercast Episode #147: Oh, Little Jimmy!
• Song of the Cicadas

TechnoBuffalo.com

• Memorial Day: Just What is it About? (infographic)
• iOS Developer Possibly Headed to Apple to Help with Notifications
• Twitter to Launch its Own Photo Service?
• AT&T to Launch Pantech Crossover on June 5th
• Sprint Files “Petition to Deny” in AT&T/T-Mobile Merger
• Cheap Gas: Apps and Sites to Find the Best Gas Prices
• Apple Files For the iCloud Trademark in Europe
• What’s the Apps? – Smart Keyboard, an Alternative for Android
• Chrome Now Accounts for Over 12% of the Browser Market
• T-Mobile Announces Samsung Exhibit and Gravity SMART
• Sony Hacked Again, Over 1 Million Passwords Compromised
• iPhone 4 Giveaway Winner!
• DVD Sales Plummeting, Paramount Eyes Cutting Jobs
• Apple Making Advance Payments to Music Labels for iCloud?
• AT&T Opens Up About How It Manages Its Network
• Apple iPad 3 With LTE by the Holidays?
• Flashback Friday: The Death Of Mac OS 9 at WWDC

It’s that time again, once every 13 years when the Cicada bugs pop up, and … sing? … through out the summer.

I am far from an expert on Cicadas beyond the fact that I know they show up around my area every 13 years, shed their bodies, fly around and make a heck of a lot of racket.  While they are slightly annoying, they’ve never bugged me that much, but some people just flip out over the things and do nothing but complain about them through out the short time they are here.

The biggest complaint you usually here is over their song/sound/whatever you want to call it.  While not the most soothing of sounds, it isn’t that bad, and it just becomes background noise after a day or two.  Don’t like the sound?  I recommend you never go to Japan as whatever breed of Cicadas it is they have over there comes out every summer, and their song is so common place that it is a fixture of Anime series.  Even in the city, which generally lacks much greenery, you can’t go anywhere without hearing it during the summer months.  (Although I will say theirs is a bit more melodic with a pitch that rises and falls)

Just remember folks, you only have a few more weeks with them, and then they’re gone until 2028, I think you can cope.

It’s episode #147 and it looks like this week the whole episode was uploaded on the first try!

Sorry for what went wrong with the show last week!

A whole bunch about the changes at DC Comics

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

subscribe to Scattercast via iTunes.

It seems like just yesterday I would fight with a 9600 baud modem to log on to CompuServe, usually taking several tries to get a solid connection.  When I worked up to a 56 Kbps modem, I thought I was rocking good speeds, but luckily there was a lot more to come.  Around 2000 I got my first cable modem, and it was a couple Mbps (meagbits per second), and finally worked my way up to 10 Mbps download and 1 Mbps up.

Well, as luck would have it, my ISP, CableOne, has finally finished testing its DOCSIS 3.0 equipment and that means a bump up to around 50 Mbps (or “really, really fast”).  The odd part is the numbers you see to the side where my upload speed is about a 25th of my download.  While slower uploads are not unusual, this much disparity between the two numbers is a bit extreme.

Either way, these types of download speeds are going to become a little bit more common over the coming years, but seeing as some people are still on dial-up, you have to wonder when those people can expect even the most basic of high speed solutions.  There has been a proven connection between better Internet connections and local economies as more companies are willing to come to a town, so you would think every town would be backing projects to improve their Internet, but it just isn’t happening.

Of course, with faster speeds comes other issues such as data caps, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish that you don’t want to hear me go on about.

Hopefully others will be seeing speeds such as these in the near future, but it bothers me that this test said my new speed outranks 84 percent of the U.S., I’d much rather it say I outrank 16 percent.

DC Comics is going to take a huge roll of the dice this fall by not only relanching almost its entire line of books, but also deciding to release them digitially the same day they come out in print.

In an unprecedented move, on Aug. 31st DC comics will launch a new series of its premiere super team book, Justice League.  This will be followed by the relaunch of an astounding 51 titles in Sept. in an effort to revitalize the aging heroes.  ”We really want to inject new life in our characters and line,” Dan DiDio, co-publisher of DC , told USA Today. “This was a chance to start, not at the beginning, but at a point where our characters are younger and the stories are being told for today’s audience.”

While relaunched are nothing new in the world of comics, the next idea is the one that has never been done before: Each of the titles will be available day-and-date as digital downloads on mobile devices and via the publisher’s website.  ”We’re allowing people who have never bought a comic book in their lives to download them on portable media devices and take a look,” Jim Lee, co-publisher of DC along with DiDio, told the paper.  ”Having the ability to give people access to these comics with one button click means we’re going to get a lot of new readers.”

While Mr. Lee is right, he’s also wrong.  While accessibility both physically and story wise has been an issue for the industry for years, now you will have people saying, “I’m paying $2.99 a month for a digital download?  No thanks.”  Other publishers have seen initial excitement over their digital offerings, but a year later they are barely selling enough copies to warrant the continued production of the publications.

There is also an issue of what this will do to comics retailers.  While the majority of people who frequent stores are die-hard collectors, those on the fringe, those who truly only buy the books to read, will be very tempted to go digital as it will eliminate clutter in their lives and allow them to remove an errand from their to-do list.  Speaking as a former comic retailer, I can tell you that if enough of those types of customers were to move on, the stores would very definitely be in trouble.  If enough of these customers move on to cause a handful of stores to close, the bottom line of DC would end up getting hit, and this forward thinking move could actually turn around to bite them in the behind.

There is also a potential for a loss of serious collectors.  When I ran the comic shop and a major book would relaunch as a #1, some long time collectors of a title would take it as an opportunity to drop the title as it changes the numbering structure.  Combine the loss of casual readers and those wishing to move on, and the hit on all fronts gets worse.

And, yes, there is one last potential overlooked issue here, and that is the free time of readers.  Years ago I went to a video rental store conference, and the wisest thing I have ever heard at any sales conference was said there.  The speaker said, “We aren’t just in a battle for the customer’s wallets, but we’re also in a fight for their free time.”  My jaw literally hit the floor when he said that, and he was a 100% right.  Things are even worse now between the Internet, video games, streaming video and a plethora of other distractions.  Comic books, no matter the medium by which they are delivered, are just another thing in that fight.

I wish DC a lot of luck with this, but I hope they are also ready for the possible ramifications of their experiment.