No cable, no problem – until next year

Ever since Eryn Smit bought his house in Chatham, Ont. three years ago, he’s wanted to tear down the ugly three-storey television antenna attached to the side. He almost got around to it this month when his father suggested he play around with the contraption to see what kind of reception it got.

“I was absolutely shocked when I hooked it up,” Mr. Smit says.

When he flipped the switch two weeks ago, major networks from Detroit, Toledo and Cleveland – and even a U.S. amateur sports channel – began flooding his home at no charge, in addition to the big Canadian networks. Some of them were in high-definition.

Future Mars Rover mission Earthbound a little while longer

NASA’s next-gen Mars Rover mission has suffered yet another setback:

Development problems and increasing costs are threatening to delay the landing of a nuclear-powered rover on Mars next year.

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told the U.S. House Science and Technology Committee this month that the space agency’s engineers had to redesign a risky heat shield on the Mars Science Laboratory. Tests have shown that the shield could not survive entry to the Martian atmosphere, and designing a new one meant pushing back the mission.

Family Guy Spins Off Cleveland

Fox is getting ready to put Cleveland on the map.

The network, along with 20th Century Fox, is currently developing a spinoff of its enduringly popular Family Guy to revolve around Peter Griffin’s bathtub-loving, accident-prone neighbor, Cleveland Brown.

According to the Hollywood Reporter, the new animated series, tentatively titled Cleveland, will be coming from the same comic minds that brought Stewie & Co. into the mainstream, with Family Guy creator Seth MacFarlane, former Simpsons writer and American Dad exec producer Rich Appel and Family Guy writer-producer, not to mention the voice of Cleveland himself, Mike Henry, on board to write the new show.

The master of comedic slam-dunks

When Hollywood talks about “bankable” stars, it’s really only talking about a handful of actors – Will Smith, Tom Cruise, Jodie Foster and Will Ferrell.

For every interesting box-office failure Ferrell offers the public, such as Melinda and Melinda or The Producers, he makes at least two megahits: consider Elf ($220-million worldwide); Anchorman ($90-million); Talladega Nights ($163-million); and last year’s Blades of Glory ($145-million). Even Bewitched, dismissed as a flop by critics, hauled in $131-million, and none of these big numbers include home rentals. That math makes Ferrell’s antics a solid investment. He’s more than bankable – he’s the bank itself.