Tag Archives: history

History picks up ‘Pawn Stars’ spinoff ‘American Restoration’

If you’ve ever watched a marathon of Pawn Stars on the History Channel surely you’ve encountered Rick’s go-to guy for restoring antique items. The man’s name is Rick Dale, and History has decided to create a spinoff show that takes us inside Rick’s Restorations.

AMERICAN RESTORATION features Rick Dale and his crew of loose screws at Rick’s Restorations in Las Vegas, Nevada, as they take rusty, beat-up items and restore them to their original glory. Whether it’s a giant gas pump from the 1940s or a Hopalong Cassidy bicycle from the 1950s, every restoration is a high-stakes business project where worthless rust is transformed into a valuable collectible. However, these restorations aren’t easy. Every project presents unique challenges for Rick and his team [including his younger brother and son], who develop inventive processes to finish each job flawlessly and on time. From old gas carts to timeless slot machines, the items Rick restores are part of the fabric that makes up American culture. Things just aren’t made like they used to be, but at Rick’s Restorations, old becomes new again.

American Restoration premieres Friday, April 15 at 10PM on History.

[Via EW; History]

This year’s Super Bowl is now the most-watched show, ever

Does that post title sound familiar? Well that’s because you saw it last year right around this time.  Super Bowl XLV attracted 111 million viewers last night, besting last year’s viewership of 106.5 million people to become the most-watched program in TV history. In case you were wondering, the M*A*S*H series finale had already been dethroned by Super Bowl XLIV since it attracted a slightly smaller audience in 1983 (106 million). Super Bowl viewership has climbed every year since 2005 and this year’s marks the fourth consecutive “big game” to set a viewership record. And as Deadline points out, last night FOX became the first network to exceed 100 million viewers (100.9 million) for a night of primetime. Impressive stuff.

And how did the post-Super Bowl Glee episode fare in ratings? Compared to previous years, not that great. Glee garnered 26.8 million viewers, significantly less than what the series premiere of Undercover Boss received last year on CBS (38.7 million). However it did manage to best NBC’s The Office from two years ago (22.9 million). Comparisons aside, this was unmistakably the highest rated Glee episode to date and the most watched scripted series since 2005’s post-Bowl House episode (29 million viewers). Taking a look at the big picture, Glee attracted the third largest audience for a post-Super Bowl scripted series in the past twelve years after a 2006 Grey’s Anatomy (37.9 million) and the aforementioned House ep.

Too bad the commercials and half-time show were nothing to call home about. Needless to say, history was made last night…again.

[Via Deadline]

The History of Gaming told through a first-person perspective

A gang of game design students hailing from Munich shot this “History of Gaming” piece.  The first-person perspective takes us on a journey spanning from 1958’s Tennis for Two (played on an oscilloscope) through 1996’s Super Mario 64, and up to 2008’s Rock Band.  Although it doesn’t include every video game console invented it does cover the wide gamut.  And as much as this is a tour of video games it also reveals the steady progression of television screen technology (ranging from the old CRTs to the modern LCD flatscreens).  Click the Vimeo source link to learn more about the making of this video.

[Via Kotaku; Vimeo]

Wall-painted animation captures the Big Bang, our eventual demise, and everything in between

BIG BANG BIG BOOM: an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life … and how it could probably end.

Produced by Blu.

This ten minute spectacle captures the birth of life on Earth, the slow but eventual rise to human species, and ends with an interesting twist on how everything might unravel.  How is something so intricate as wall-painted animation made, you ask?  The magic of stop-motion does the trick.  Street artist Blu would paint a sequence of images on a surface, take a picture of said images with a digital camera, paint new images onto the same (or new) surface, take pictures of those, and repeat.  After all the painting and photography was complete, he took the entire collection of images, laid them out side-by-side, and transformed it into a film.  Yes, this is an extremely tedious process; Blu admits this video took “months of work and hundreds [of] buckets of paint”.  The end result is nothing short of exquisite.

[Via NewScientist]

All public Tweets will be archived at the Library of Congress & on Google

Fellow Twitterers, your Tweets are about to become part of United States history.  On Wednesday Twitter announced it will be donating access to the entire archive of public Tweets to the Library of Congress “for preservation and research.”  Every 140-character public Tweet made since 2006 will find a home next to the Declaration of Independence.  According to Twitter founder Biz Stone, “only after a six-month delay can the Tweets will be used for internal library use, for non-commercial research, public display by the library itself, and preservation.”  Can you believe it?  A digital archive of Tweets.  Future tweens will get a glimpse into our world dominated by pop sensation Justin Bieber and they’ll think he was king.  All joking aside, Twitter has functioned as a virtual space where breaking news of births, deaths, tragedies, and triumphs have spread across the globe, and future generations will be able to see how we utilized social networking to quickly disseminate information and share experiences with one another.  Pretty profound if you ask me.

In related news, Stone announced a partnership with Google, introducing a new service called Google Replay.  Replay “lets you relive a real time search from specific moments in time” with Tweets.  In addition to viewing Tweets in an archived digital database at the Library of Congress, Replay is another “new way to revisit tweets related to historic events.”  Right now the service only goes back a few months, but Stone promises it will eventually be able to access Tweets since Twitter’s inception in 2006.  Google is rolling out the feature right now, and it will be made available globally within the next few weeks.  For now, Google Replay can be accessed here.  Try it out!  Search a specific keyword and experience how events relating to it unraveled in time with Tweets.

[Via TwitterBlog; GoogleBlog]