Local Terrorism

The "serial sniper" who's been terrorizing the Maryland/Washington/Virginia area caused Comcast Corp. to postpone its "Comcast Cares Day" in Silver Spring, Md., but C-SPAN stuck to its scheduled School Bus visit to a Fairfax, Va., school last week.

Comcast's postponement of the event due to take place at a Silver Spring elementary school Saturday, Oct. 5, came "in light of developments there," a Philadelphia-based Comcast spokeswoman said.

That, of course, was a reference to the seemingly random shootings that have claimed the lives of eight people since Oct. 2.

The Comcast Cares volunteer initiative — to be reset — was to involve 400 Comcast employees in the Washington metro/Virginia region, as well as Rep. Constance Morella (R-Md.), Montgomery County council president Steven Silverman and Del. Carol Petzold.

The plan was to improve the physical appearance of the school with painting, cleaning and landscaping.

C-SPAN's School Bus, on the other hand, went ahead with its planned visit to a Fairfax school last Wednesday, Oct. 9. The organizers decided to go ahead, a C-SPAN spokesman said, noting that at least one police officer was at the school and that Secretary of Education Rod Paige had his own security detail. The event was sponsored locally by Cox Communications of Northern Virginia.

Later that day, another shooting occurred less than 20 miles away, in Manassas, Va.

Chicks With Rhythm

We can tell you the third annual Women Rock! Girls & Guitars
breast cancer benefit concert staged by Lifetime Television with Marie Claire
magazine
will keep up the tradition of unique pairings of rock pioneers with new talent, singing a surprising array of material.

This year's concert, taped last Thursday night in Hollywood, is in a new home — having traded in the shabby-chic of Wiltern Theater (good acoustics, crappy neighborhood) for the brand, spankin' new Kodak Theater (muddy acoustics, slightly less crappy neighborhood).

The change appears to have done some good: this year's taping went off without the myriad of technical glitches that dragged out last year's otherwise fine show and caused more than half of the audience to sneak out before the finale.

This year there was a full house to the end, rocking with Chaka Khan, Chrissie Hynde and the Pretenders, Gloria Estefan, Michelle Branch, Lee Ann Womack, and even hostess Jennifer Love Hewitt. Some magic moments: Hynde soloing on the Louis Armstrong classic "What a Wonderful World" and Estefan and Womack teaming on the latter's "I Hope You Dance."

The rest of you can see the concert Oct. 25.

A SpongeBob Bug's Life

Fed up with "bugs," as in all those cable-channel logos occupying the lower right hand corner of TV screens? Nickelodeon hears your pain and has come up with a way to make one of its bugs a source of fun instead of frustration.

For its Nicktoons TV digital network, Nickelodeon is planning an interactive SpongeBob SquarePants
bug for set-top boxes with requisite processing power. When Nick's cartoon star appears to replace the Nicktoons logo, kids and other followers of his adventures can manipulate him back and forth across the bottom of the screen with their remote control.

Even better, specific sight gags are correlated to specific remote buttons, as Nick general manager Mark Offitzer demonstrated at Liberate Technologies' media briefing last week.

Press 1 and SpongeBob flips his head, press 2 for a salute, and so on. The Wire's fave: SpongeBob flipping a Krabby Patty up in the air, smacking up against the screen. Nicktoons hasn't set a date for sending this bug out to the ITV universe. Until then, lower right hand corners all over remain TV's bug capital.

Leased Access ... Yum!

Let's check out primetime on the leased-access channel tonight: City council meeting at 8 p.m., book discussion at 9:30 p.m. and the Taco Bell Chihuahua at 10 p.m.

Taco Bell, taking leased access time at 10 p.m.?

That's what Taco Bell, or rather parent company Yum! Brands Inc., did Oct. 7 on cable systems reaching about 11 million homes. In something rather unique for the field, Yum! — which operates Taco Bell, KFC, Pizza Hut and Long John Silver's fast-food chains — went leased access with a half-hour special to mark the company's fifth anniversary. New York, Los Angeles, Dallas and Chicago were among the cities represented.

Yum! promoted the show internally so that as many of its 450,000 employees and franchise partners could catch it.

Top executives from each Yum! unit joined CEO David Novak on the leased-access show to tout their success. The pitch: with $1 billion in annual revenues, we're definitely yummy in more ways than just tummies.

Movie with a Message

Who says movies don't address the big issues of our time?

Larry Kasanoff, Threshold Entertainment CEO and producer of the film Foodfight!, offered marketers a "sneak peek" at clips from that forthcoming digitally animated film about the growing world of product placement. The place: The Association of National Advertisers' annual conference last week in Naples, Fla.

The film, set in a grocery store after closing, featured the antics of such famous advertising characters as Mr. Clean and Charlie the Tuna.

(Kasanoff's Threshold, incidentally, is behind Blackbelt TV, an aspiring digital-cable network devoted to the martial arts.)

ANA conference attendees also saw Sen. Fred Thompson (R-Tenn.), who leaves the Senate in January, speak on "U.S. Security at Home and Abroad." Attendees included advertisers that are sponsoring or may sponsor NBC's Law & Order, whose cast Thompson just joined Oct. 2. In the opening credits, he's billed as Fred Dalton Thompson.