No, this is not going to be another post about the shoddy umpiring or spittle analysis or any of the other on-field matters that have been going on in baseball since the playoffs began. No, we're on a TV blog, so I'm going to just talk about the things that have annoyed me about FOX's and TBS's coverage of the ALCS and the NLCS. In no particular order:

1. The Fidelity-sponsored Fox Trak. The pitching tracker, which shows if a pitch actually hit the strike zone or not, has been around for years. But, the flight of the ball has been to this point represented by a red streak and a dot. Now that Fidelity Investments is sponsoring the tracker, the red streak/dot combo has been replaced by a green streak/green arrow combo that mimics Fidelity's "stay on the line" series of ads. What financial guidance has to do with balls and strikes, I'll never know.

(S03E21) The Office this week was like Jessica Simpson if she had a giant oozing pimple right on the tip of her nose (I was going to go with "giant underdeveloped conjoined twin on her back" but thought that image was a bit much). It was wonderful... except for one little thing that was so egregious as to sully the rest of the episode.

What was that thing? I'm too talented a teaser to let you know right off. You'll have to wait until after the jump...

Last night, I was watching Frontline, mainly as a way to avoid watching Idol, but also because it had part three of its four-part "News War" series. This episode focused on how alternate sources of news are causing newspapers to scramble to keep their readerships from dwindling too fast (let's just say there were lots of references to The Daily Show and Rocketboom). It was a pretty engaging report, interviewing almost every big name in the newspaper, television news, and online businesses.

My local PBS station, WNET, also knew that this was an engaging special, as they broke in at least 4 times during the 90-minute special to ask for money. And these pledge breaks lingered to the point where I switched away from them to see what else was on, only to come a few minutes after they went back to Frontline, which only got me more annoyed. I'm sure a lot of people get annoyed at these breaks; people have been making fun of them for as long as I can remember. Here's what I want to know: do those pledge breaks (or "begathons," as they used to be called) still work?

Who knew that even people in China want to know who Anna Nicole Smith's baby daddy is?

TV Week is reporting that NBC Universal Television Distribution has licensed the format of Access Hollywood to a Chinese television network. It is the first time a foreign studio show has been licensed to show in the People's Republic. The show will be called Access Hollywood China; it will be shot and produced in Beijing, and the local content-to-U.S. content ratio will be 70-30. So yes, that means the Chinese might be seeing Billy Bush annoy the hell out of celebrities, but dubbed into Mandarin (or Cantonese if it's being shown in the southern part of the country). The show's big local star? Asian actor and supermodel Hu Bing, whom I was very disappointed to find out was a guy when I Googled his name.

I don't know if it's the same in other local markets, but here in the Twin Cities promos for the upcoming local news broadcasts always include some teaser about the weather forecast that goes something like this:

Anchor: Just how cold is it going to get? And will we see any snow over the weekend? Tune in at ten and find out.

I can understand doing such a teaser if the station has an exclusive story or just scooped some recent event that none of the other stations have, but it's not like they're the only place where you can get weather information. There's the Weather Channel, there's the newspaper, and there's the freakin' internet, for crying out loud.

Nathan Rabin posed an interesting question over at the Onion AV Club's blog. Are there people you admire as actors but hate as celebrities? The first example Rabin gives is Jamie Foxx, a very talented actor in his own right, but a rather annoying celebrity, too. Rabin mentions catching an awful clip of Foxx crooning some horrendous song from his new album on The Tonight Show. I would add that Foxx also has a cloying habit of belting out songs in the middle of interviews. It's really annoying, like those music majors in college who would have "singing conversations" with one another until you wanted to slowly excoriate both of them with a cheese grater.

This is a difficult one for me to answer, because I figure once the actor has done their performance, they're no longer of any real concern to me. However, that's more than a little pompous and it's not as if I'm impervious to annoyance. In fact, I'm constantly annoyed by things all the time. So, off the top of my head, I'm going to go with Robin Williams, who I neither admire as an actor nor as a celebrity, but he did make me laugh once, quietly, for about .5 seconds, sometime in 1983. I guess that's admirable.

So kids, who do you love to watch perform but want to strangle when you see them any other time? The floor is all yours.