The Chicago White Sox win the pennant!! The Chicago White Sox are World Champions!!

The City celebrated its baseball champions with an old fashion ticker tape parade. The ticker tape parade was pioneered by New York stockbrokers who used the reams and reams of small paper tape (which tapped out the current stock prices) to toss out their office windows upon the grand marshal or celebrated hero of the day as the parade went down the business district. The machines printed the tiny strips during the trading day. In the end, it was pure waste. The ticker tape machine was the modern telecommunication device which gave time delayed stock quotes to brokerages across the country. To be connected with a ticker tape machine meant that you were wealthy, important and part of a small powerful club.

The powerbroker's waste was tossed upon the celebrity de jour: war heroes, generals, aviation pioneers like Lindberg. It was creating an artificial snow storm of confetti. It creates an excellent black and white photograph of an event.

So when the mayor's office decided Chicago should have a ticker tape parade for the Champion White Sox, there was a problem. Ticker tape machines have been replaced by electronic real time quotes. Brokerages are no longer ankle deep in the paper waste of the machines. So if the mayor's office was to keep up with the times, the ticker tape parade could have been updated with current brokerage technology:

 

Instead of the above carnage, the city spent the night before the parade creating its own ticker tape confetti, chewing up tons of paper into small bits. It hired a firm to fire cannons filled with the newly created confetti onto the buses as they traveled through the city streets. So the city had its parade, the Sox fans had their paper moment under the sun, and the circle of public celebratory life is complete.

When you have a hot property, you sell and sell and sell it to death. When one of the forgotten networks, ABC, stumbled upon a quirky, sci-fi survivor drama called LOST, it was merely an hour of filler slotted for a season. But in an oversaturated Reality television cycle, ABC suddenly found itself with an audience. Finding an audience in the wilderness of viewer choices is becoming harder and harder for a network executive. Dramas or sitcoms need writers, actors and a big budget. Actors are picky; directors are pushy; producers are greedy. It is a headache. Reality shows are cheap to produce, the 15 minute of fame seekers are naive and will get paid in alcohol to be humiliated on film.

Networks have lost their sheepish viewers. The previously captive television audience has more and more non-traditional viewing choices: surfing the net, listening to the iPod, surfing 100 channels on the dish, exercising with the iPod, working overtime at your computer cubicle, watching DVDs or movie rentals, editing your own home movies, or reading a book (or computer manual).

So ABC finds itself with a series, which each episode asking more questions than it answers. Each character has his or her own secrets. A plane crash, exotic beach locale, violence, sexual tension, mysteries and fear are the elements being weaved into quilt of human dysfunctional storylines. The rumor is that the creators had no idea that the pilot would be a hit. The creators themselves don't know where the storyline is going, so they continue to throw in new mysterious elements to keep the story engine fueled to the next week. It has turned into this decade's The X-Files, the quirky FBI-UFO cult show.

During the first season, ABC's web site had its LOST home page. The LOST page contained the basic fan-base features of characters, photo galleries, TV Guide style previews, a video snippet, trivia, and message boards. For a television network, it was a pretty good site. The best part of Season One at the site was the episode recaps. Most viewers came into the series at different times, so the plot lines were difficult to follow unless you had a reference. The Season One episode recaps were detailed novellas, complete with details which could have missed just from viewing the show. The episode novellas brought in many more viewers into the storyline and hooked them on the strange twists on the island.

Then for Season Two, ABC shifted its focus. It began re-running episodes later in the week. It also doubled up before the new episodes to get people refreshed for the action. The episodes also included more and more repeated flashbacks (which at this point is mere time filler than story line enhancements). As the episodes get stretched out, the LOST web site got compressed. The long novella episode guide is now a short story summation. If you want more information or information that used to be free, there is a premium link (data mining). More and more merchandise sales is crowding the site links. The commercialization of the show has now taken priority over the show itself. These changes are also fueling the rumor that the network and show creators are at the critical point of collapsing on their own sudden success; jumping the shark before the end of Season Two.

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