'Office' fans flock to edit Wikipedia
NEW YORK (AP) - In last week's episode of the NBC series "The Office," the boss Michael Scott turned to Wikipedia for tips on fending off an employee's request for a pay raise. Viewers quickly flocked to the online encyclopedia and added their take to its entry on negotiations.
Administrators at Wikipedia had to limit editing of the entry, most recently late Tuesday, placing it in "semi-protection" mode. That meant users couldn't make changes anonymously or from accounts fewer than four days old - to discourage those drawn to the site specifically because of the broadcast.
The site imposed similar restrictions on the entry twice before, only to see vandalism continue after they were lifted.
Wikipedia is a collaborative reference site where anyone can add, change or even delete entries, regardless of expertise. The thinking is that the collective wisdom results in a better product overall, and members of the community can watch for any vandalism and reverse it.
In the case of the "negotiation" entry, viewers quickly added phoney tips in response to clueless advice from Scott, played by Steve Carell, in last week's episode.
One edit simply replaced the entry with a statement praising the television program. That was followed by the insertion of Scott's tips for getting the upper hand, including "suddenly changing the location" and "refusing to talk first."
Users made more than 100 changes, including those to reverse the vandalism, before the site imposed the latest restrictions on revisions.
Wikipedia does face vandalism from time to time as a result of high-profile mentions.
Fans of Stephen Colbert's Comedy Central show "The Colbert Report" flocked to Wikipedia to alter articles on elephants after he said on the program, "all we need to do is convince a majority of people that some factoid is true - for instance, that Africa has more elephants today than it did 10 years ago."
Changes aren't always noticed and fixed immediately.
In late 2005, prominent journalist John Seigenthaler, the former publisher of the Tennessean newspaper and founding editorial director of USA Today, revealed that a Wikipedia entry that ran for four months had incorrectly named him as a longtime suspect in the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert.
Emmy-winning 'Taxi' writer Daniels dies
Stan Daniels, an Emmy-winning TV writer and producer who worked on two of the most acclaimed comedies of the 1970s, "The Mary Tyler Moore Show," and "Taxi," has died. He was 72.
Daniels died of heart failure Friday, according to Mount Sinai Memorial Park.
Daniels won eight Emmys during his long television career, including three as co-creator and executive producer of "Taxi" and three as a writer on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show."
He wrote for "The Dean Martin Show" and "The Bill Cosby Show," and early Cosby situation comedy, before joining "Mary Tyler Moore," which ran from 1970-77. He also wrote for the Cloris Leachman spinoff series, "Phyllis."
He and three MTM Prods. colleagues -- James L. Brooks, David Davis and Ed Weinberger -- left in 1977 to set up a production unit at Paramount Pictures, the Los Angeles Times reported at the time. Their show "Taxi" debuted the following year and ran through 1983.
Daniels also co-created the Brenda Vaccaro series "Lily" and co-wrote with Brooks the 1978 TV movie "Cindy," a retelling of the Cinderella story with a black cast.
Among Daniels' other TV credits were "The Kid," "For Richer, For Poorer," "Glory! Glory!" and "The Substitute Wife."
On Broadway, he composed music and lyrics for "So Long 174th Street," a 1976 musical version of the play "Enter Laughing."
Born in Toronto, Daniels attended the University of Toronto and before receiving a fellowship to study at Oxford.
He is survived by his wife of 50 years, Alene, and four children.
Actor Roscoe Lee Browne dies in LA at 81
LOS ANGELES - Actor Roscoe Lee Browne, whose rich voice and dignified bearing brought him an Emmy Award and a Tony nomination, has died. He was 81.
Browne died early Wednesday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center after a long battle with cancer, said Alan Nierob, a spokesman for the family.
Browne's career included classic theater to TV cartoons. He also was a poet and a former world-class athlete.
His deep, cultured voice was heard narrating the 1995 hit movie "Babe." On screen, his character often was smart, cynical and well-educated, whether a congressman, a judge or a butler.
Born to a Baptist minister in Woodbury, N.J., Browne graduated from historically black Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he later returned to teach comparative literature and French. He also was a track star, winning the 880-yard run in the 1952 Millrose Games.
Browne was selling wine for an import company when he decided to become a full-time actor in 1956 and had roles that year in the inaugural season of the New York Shakespeare Festival in a production of "Julius Caesar."
In 1961, he starred in an English-language version of Jean Genet's play "The Blacks."
Two years later, he was The Narrator in a Broadway production of "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," a play by Edward Albee from a novella by Carson McCullers. In a front page article on the advances made by blacks in the theater, the New York Times noted that Browne's understudy was white.
He won an Obie Award in 1965 for his role as a rebellious slave in the off-Broadway "Benito Cereno."
In movies, he was a spy in the 1969 Alfred Hitchcock feature "Topaz" and a camp cook in 1972's "The Cowboys," which starred John Wayne.
"Some critics complained that I spoke too well to be believable" in the cook's role, Browne told The Washington Post in 1972. "When a critic makes that remark, I think, if I had said, 'Yassuh, boss' to John Wayne, then the critic would have taken a shine to me."
On television, he had several memorable guest roles. He was a snobbish black lawyer trapped in an elevator with bigot Archie Bunker in an episode of the 1970s TV comedy "All in the Family" and the butler Saunders in the comedy "Soap." He won an Emmy in 1986 for a guest role as Professor Foster on "The Cosby Show."
In 1992, Browne returned to Broadway in "Two Trains Running," one of August Wilson's acclaimed series of plays on the black experience. It won the Tony for best play and brought Browne a Tony nomination for best featured (supporting) actor.
The New York Times said he portrayed "the wry perspective of one who believes that human folly knows few bounds and certainly no racial bounds. The performance is wise and slyly life-affirming."
Browne also wrote poetry and included some of it along with works by masters such as Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William Butler Yeats in "Behind the Broken Words," a poetry anthology stage piece that he and Anthony Zerbe performed annually for three decades.
No Leafs, no fun
The best part of the hockey season begins tonight -- yet all LEafs fans are on the outside looking in.
It is a most unfortunate place to be.
It didn't hit me, really, until last spring, after a year without hockey, how much I loved the Stanley Cup playoffs and how much the absence of the Maple Leafs affected my regular playoff emotions.
It must be different in a place such as Columbus, where there have been no playoffs, and hockey isn't all over your television, and you don't have a fantasy playoff draft, and you have to never think about what game is being shown on any given night.
But Toronto is Hockey Country -- and it is a market that lives, dies and emotes on a far too personal basis about everything that is Maple Leafs. And by not being good enough to make the playoffs, it isn't only that Leafs fans aren't always certain where to turn, it's that they have been essentially robbed of the opportunity to be part of hockey at its very best.
The Stanley Cup playoffs are not like any other championship run in sports and I haven't always understood why. In baseball, you expect the World Series to be better than the divisional championships and better than the League Championships Series.
In the CFL and the NFL, the Grey Cup and the Super Bowl are the games that are expected to outshine any other.
But from this view, there is an inverse effect to the Stanley Cup playoffs. The first round tends to be the best round of the playoffs. The players are still fresh. The possibilities are endless.
By the time the third and fourth rounds come around, it is often like the television show Survivor. The last men standing win.
Which is how the Maple Leafs have robbed all of you.
They stole your opening round. They stole your unbridled optimism. They stole the great hockey belief -- and Mats Sundin was talking about this the other day -- that any team can win just by making it to the playoffs.
That may not be necessarily true, but fans and players love that talk and who are we to stomp all over anyone's dreams?
Just no dreams, this year. The Maple Leafs made certain of that. In their flimsy apology, printed in ad form in yesterday's Toronto Sun, they glossed over how low the goals of this hockey team really are.
"We share your disappointment," the ad read. "However, we accomplished much along the way that puts us in a great position moving forward to pick up those few points in the standings needed to reach that next level."
Some teams begin seasons in search of championships. The Leafs begin them in search of eighth place. And when they don't get there, the most intense NHL market in the business finds itself having to scatter and try to find enough to care about in other cities and other places.
It can't be good for hockey when the Leafs miss the playoffs. It can't be good for hockey when Edmonton is out and Montreal is out. These cities are the lifeblood of the game.
So, now we watch, not certain where to turn. Can we get passionate about watching San Jose play Nashville without an emotional attachment in a first-round series that should be good enough for a Cup final.
PASSIONATE
Can we get passionate about watching the hated Ottawa Senators -- listen, we all have to hate somebody -- against the charming Pittsburgh Penguins (who, by the way, were 32 points behind the Leafs last season)? If you can't find it in your hearts to cheer for Sidney Crosby and Gary Roberts, you may have no heart.
I'm vaguely interested in Vancouver-Dallas because this is Roberto Luongo's playoff debut. Same goes for Calgary-Detroit, mostly to see if the annual Red Wings collapse is upon us.
Can't get excited about Devils versus anyone. Don't care about the Thrashers and Rangers. Will watch Buffalo beat the Islanders just to see what Wade Dubielewicz really is.
But it's not the same when there are no flags on cars, no horns honking, no non-stop analysis taking place on every radio station, in every coffee shop, on any of the hundred or so panels on sports television.
A playoffs without Toronto won't seem very much like playoffs at all.
'Las Vegas' Rolling Dice with Selleck
Tom Selleck has been out of the TV-series game for a little while, but NBC may deal him in for next season.
The former "Magnum, P.I." star and multiple Emmy nominee is talking with NBC about joining the cast of "Las Vegas" next season. He would play the new owner of the Montecito Hotel and Casino, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
Selleck would in effect be replacing James Caan, who left the series at the end of the show's abbreviated, 17-episode season earlier this year. Nikki Cox has also departed.
If the deal goes through, Selleck would be taking his first series-regular role since his short-lived CBS sitcom "The Closer" aired in 1998. He has scarcely lacked for work, however, starring in numerous TV movies -- including the "Jesse Stone" series of films for CBS -- and guest-starring on "Friends" and "Boston Legal."
His other recent credits include "Ike: Countdown to D-Day" and the TNT westerns "Crossfire Trail" and "Monte Walsh." He also has a voice role in the current Disney movie "Meet the Robinsons."
Selleck won an Emmy for his "Magnum, P.I." role in 1984 and has been nominated five other times, most recently for a 2000 guest appearance on "Friends."
"Las Vegas" finished its fourth season in early March and may begin filming its fifth in the near future, ahead of the normal midsummer start for most shows.
Would you believe a 'Smart' spy spoof?
The new Get Smart movie has to contend with two big changes from the original 1965 TV show: the fall of communism and the rise of feminism.
Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway are at work on the remake as spymasters Maxwell Smart and Agent 99, taking over for the late Don Adams and Barbara Feldon, now 75. The movie is set for release in June 2008.
Director Peter Segal (50 First Dates, Tommy Boy) says the challenge was figuring out a way to update a silly Cold War comedy for the world after 9/11, finding things to laugh at in the face of global fear.
"We try to show the disconnect between government agencies as we saw right after 9/11 when the CIA and FBI weren't really communicating," Segal says. "We wanted to make sure we were politically satirical."
The anarchy group known as KAOS is back for more foiling, and the mockery tends to stay closer to bureaucratic bungling.
"Obviously, Max works for CONTROL, and there's a lot of infighting within Washington over who's responsible for which parts of the world," Segal says.
The story focuses on KAOS' blackmailing the United States by threatening to give away launch codes for nuclear bombs that are in the hands of bad guys.
"Max has to figure out where the bombs are and stop them, ultimately saving the world," Segal says.
Meanwhile, the iconic shoe-phone and Cone of Silence make their return.
Carell's Oscar-winning Little Miss Sunshine co-star Alan Arkin takes on the role of CONTROL's Chief, a gruff straight man originally played by the late Edward Platt.
The film updates the relationship between the two heroes, telling an origin story of how Smart became an agent and met 99. In this version, she is the veteran spy who takes the newcomer under her wing.
"In the TV show, she was the woman who stood firmly behind her man," Segal says. When Smart failed to live up to his name, Feldon's character tended to giggle it away with an eye roll and an "Oh, Max!"
"That's a little dated for today," Segal says. "99 is a little more kick-(butt) and tougher, more emancipated. She's more the female James Bond, teaching him the ropes."