This year, Inventing Situations will be celebrating the most important day on the Canadian calendar - February 12th, Lorne Greene’s birthday. We won’t be following the Canadian custom of marking the day (and every other) by comically insisting we’re not Americans, instead we’ll mark it the same way we do every day here - running a load of Bonanzas.

Here’s the rundown:

10 AM Desert Justice w/ Hoyt Axton
12 PM The Gunmen (Currently in a 5 way tie for 3rd best grabs in the catalog!)
2 PM The Spanish Grant w/ Sebastian Cabot
4 PM The Stranger Ultra-Angry Lorne!
6 PM The Abduction Circus people. ‘Nuf sed.
8 PM Death at Dawn Ben is going to be hung.
10 PM Day of Reckoning Kahn tries to kill Adama. More or less.
12 AM Escape to Ponderosa

Note this is being run a little differently than most of our special events. Episodes start at the given time, and run until either they’re done or the next start time. Gaps will be filled in with ‘regularly scheduled’ material.

Here’s some info on the new grabs that will be showing up in the coming week. On the ephemeral front, we’ve got two classic Bell Science films courtesy of the AV Geeks archive. Both films are hosted by Dr. Frank Baxter, who you may know better as the odd gesturing fellow from the start of Mole People (MST 803). The first one is The Alphabet Conspiracy which features Hans Conried as the Mad Hatter and animation by Friz Freleng. (The first half of this film already ran in the wee hours of this morning).

The second one is Gateways to the Mind, with animation by Chuck Jones. It also features 10 seconds of clown footage so disturbing that every time I tried to save it to send to YouTube, my editor crashed. [Update 1/4/8: I was finally able to upload it. Do not view with your eyes open.] Since these each weighed in at around 50 minutes to begin with and produced so many grabs they’d have run for at least twice that, I’ve actually split them up into two parts each, that will run separately. But I’ve also added both films to the catalog, so you can request showings in their entirety via the links above.

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In order to serve you better (or maybe just mix things up) I’m moving around the ‘programming blocks’ at Inventing Situations. There’s still going to be five hours a day of ‘Non-Ephemeral’ films (e.g. feature films and tv shows), they’ll just be playing at different hours. Here’s the new schedule. It can also be found on the info page.

I’ve decreased the Library of Congress images to one hour a day since they’re repeating a lot faster than either of the larger collections.

In the coming weeks and months I’ll be tinkering with the schedule a little more:

• Adding another hour of “Non-Ephemeral” films.
• After Thanksgiving, I’ll be adding all of this year’s new to IS turkey-day movies to the regular rotation. There should be at least five this year. I’ll proceed to drop in the rest at some steady rate.
• Bonanza: Six new to IS episodes should start showing up in a month or two. Once those have premiered, the 18 episodes I’ve already run will start appearing.
• Plus, I’m toying with yet another programming block. It’s material that technically could go in with the feature films, but that I think will work better on their own.

While I’m discussing picture sources, thought I’d offer an update on how my campaign to add grabs has been going since I last discussed it:

Without considering the 1,500+ images I’ve tossed from the ephemeral collection, that’s around 75 grabs a day.

One last thought: Can anybody suggest a better phrase than “Non-Ephemeral Films”. I’m looking for a term that differentiates them from the “ephemeral films”, acknowledges the fact that they conist of more than just feature films (there’s cartoons, tv shows, movie trailers, Three Stooges shorts, and drive in ads in there too), and is less awkward and obscure than “Non-Ephemeral”.