Frenchy's Rant

If you ever build two TV trucks that are designed to work together, here’s a little nugget of wizdom: test them before they go out on the road. And after the testing, test ’em again. And when that’s done, leave a small offering at the altar (or bar) of your choice, take a large bottle of the Macallan along, have an exorcist or two on speed dial, and most importantly, have a back-up career in mind… just in case.

The reason for no recent blogs?

Simple.

I’m still not calling the new trucks Black and Red. It’s still ‘Black and Blue.’

Black and Blue? That’s not even accurate anymore.

More like Black and Death….

Regardless of the countless nagging issues, Blogger Master Control in ‘Death‘ is pretty nice.

Blogger Master Control – Just Add Blogs!

Once all this high tech shit gets worked out, it should be all systems go for HD Blogging! Until then, maybe I should change the ‘Nova Scotia Fund‘ to the ‘Surviving HD With Macallan Fund.’

In the meantime, the count is at three shows down, 997 to go………

And next week… WWE in real live High Definition!

I used my first full day off in months to drive around my home state, the ‘Biggest Little State in the Union,’ and take a few pictures. Here is the fruit of today’s labor, two more thrilling lighthouses located in southern Rhode Island!

This first lighthouse is another ‘spark plug’ type. Located on Plum Island in Narragansett Bay, this little plug of a lighthouse was on the Lighthouse Digest Doomsday List (Yes, there is such a thing…) In 2003, an ambitious project set out to restore the lighthouse, five years and $500,000 later, it sits proudly restored next to the Jamestown Bridge – safely off-limits to all of us jackass taxpayers who made the expensive restoration possible.

Half a million dollars gets a nifty coat of paint. Not sure if the light works though…

Next stop, Point Judith Lighthouse, a place that has special meaning for one of my uncles.

This story is a family rumor that I’ve never confirmed. It goes something like this: My Uncle Ed joined the Coast Guard waaay back in… well, sometime in long-ago history, to see the country. According to this unconfirmed and likely fabricated family legend, he got so incredibly seasick on his maiden voyage, he spent the entire trip in the sickbay.

The rest of Uncle Ed’s Coast Guard career was spent painting the Point Judith lighthouse.

After a lot of praying, head-scratching, sleep deprivation, programming, re-programming, re-re-programming, questions and answers, learning, wild guessing, and, if truth be told, just a touch of after hours slot machine operation, time ran out, and the first ever live RAW in HD went on the air.

And then… it ended. Just like that.

Was it perfect? No. Was there yelling and screaming? No more than usual. Did everything work 100%? No. But overall, was it better than expected?

Yeah, it was.

And tomorrow? Well, tomorrow’s another day… a day that the entire circus will travel 300 miles to Pennsylvania and do it all over again, but this time in just one day. One very, very busy day for sure. And same thing next week… And so on…

It’s official. The WWE is now in HD. The poorly named ‘Red‘ unit is now the new home of Frenchy’s Rant. This first blog is pretty pathetic, I know, but just like everything else, the HD blogs will improve too.

Hopefully.

The worst part of the first ever HD RAW from the Mohegan Sun Casino, at least for me? After my late night slot machine operation, the Nova Scotia Fund, just like Frenchy’s Rant Blogger Master Control, is now officially in the Red.

The long awaited day – January 7th – has nearly arrived. With Christmas safely over, Santa’s elves worked round the clock to finish building the WWE’s new High Definition TV trucks, code named ‘Peanut Butter‘ and ‘Jelly,’ installing several jillion dollars worth of high tech gear, including countless mysterious black boxes with curious names like ‘X-75’ and ‘Model 41′, and seven hundred thousand miles of wire connecting it all together. The rest of the elves’ days were occupied with the simple job of making sure all that freshly unwrapped and installed Hi Def equipment worked as advertised. Green and blue lights on the Model 41 and X-75 devices winked and blinked to life for the first time. The day before ‘Peanut Butter‘ and ‘Jelly‘ were scheduled to make their first ever drive to a venue, they were officially christened with the much less creative names ‘Black‘ and ‘Red.’

Yuck.

Boring names aside, truck building and testing continued right up to the last second, then – almost as if waking up from a bad dream – time was up and zero hour dawned. Hammers, monkey wrenches and crow bars were returned to toolboxes, plasma torches were left to cool down, people that hadn’t seen the sun, their families or a shower in a month were released from their shackles; four thousand empty cans of Mountain Dew and Red Bull were swept up and carted off to the recycling center; and late Friday night, with surprisingly little ceremony, twenty bazillion dollars worth of WWE High Definition TV trucks rolled out of the super-secret truck building laboratories for the first time ever.

In what the more negative people on the crew certainly took as a bad omen, those insanely expensive trucks rolled directly into a four hour traffic jam, making them very late to arrive for the first ever ‘official’ WWE High Definition Monday night RAW live broadcast. Or, as the optimists would say, the trucks made a fashionably late entrance. Is the glass half-full, half-empty, or is it just cracked?! Either way, the dawning of High Definition was upon us!

Fortunately, our schedule allows two full days to set up these new trucks for Monday night’s show. Unfortunately, we really need about a week. An entirely new system needs to be learned, audio consoles, fiber optic head ends, routers, intercoms, Hi Def cameras, and a whole plethora of bleeding edge gear need to be programmed, figured out and made to do what we think it should do. The best consultants in the world have been flown in, tricked into teaching us WWE truck monkeys how to make our show happen in this brave new world of HD.

Is there enough time to make it work? Uhh… sure! Can brave consultants teach a bunch of old dogs some new tricks? Who knows? Is that smell in the air excitement, fear, an equipment fire, or just recycled bean burritos? It’s anyone’s guess! Will there be enough Whiksy left to get us through Tuesday’s show in Wilkes-Barre? Doubtful! Will all of this new gear really work? Only time will tell, and as of this writing, there are exactly thirty-five hours remaining until we go on air with… something! As always, the show must go on, in some form. In other words, foam the runway, this plane is landing, one way or another!

Depending on how successful tomorrow’s show is, maybe the names ‘Black and Blue‘ will prove more appropriate.

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