A+E

At long last, Sony has announced a final price point for its highly anticipated PlayStation 3. The system will launch in North America on November 17 at a whopping $499. And that's the economy version, with the 20 GB hard drive. Gamers wanting the first-class 60 GB hard drive can expect to pay $599 (twice the launch price of the PS2). The only way the PS3 could cost more is if it ran on gasoline—but the console also doubles as a Blu-ray Disc Player, and at present, those can run upwards of $1,000. So it may be worth a cut of your fuel budget this winter.

At
Idea-a-day.com you can sign up for a daily brainstorm, e-mailed directly to you. Some recent examples of human creativity:

• Open a store that hires out flash drives, each one loaded with a copy-protected movie. The movie can be played on a TV using a special cable that connects to a TV's video in/out plug and which has a USB plug on the other end to accommodate the flash drive. By Jessica R.

• Develop an "alarm clock" pill. The pill would contain a strong dose of caffeine, surrounded by a coating which would take a certain amount of time to be broken down by stomach acid. By Stuart Hogg. SD

What I won't be watching this week

Mad Money with Jim Cramer (weeknights on CNBC). I want to hear Boo-yah! when Erick Dampier dunks really hard. I do not want to hear Boo-yah! when Jim Cramer is foaming at the mouth about drilling companies, some new pharmaceutical study or even the future prospects of Google, as exciting as they might be. Plus, I don't even understand what a triple Boo-yah! is.

Sgt. Bilko: 50th Anniversary Edition (NR) (4 stars)


$39.95

In the entire history of broadcast television, few characters have stood the test of time as well as Master Sergeant Ernie Bilko, a creation of veteran comic Phil Silvers and writer Nat Hiken. The original title of their half-hour sitcom was You'll Never Get Rich, and, later, The Phil Silvers Show. Throughout most of its four-year run on CBS and throughout decades of reruns, however, it was known simply as Bilko. Silvers, who may have served as the inspiration for Milo Minderbinder in Catch-22, ran the motor pool at Fort Baxter, Kansas, where officers spent most of their time conducting inspections and polishing their brass and soldiers specialized in avoiding chores. It was from this sleepy base that the good-hearted conman, Bilko, worked every scam in the book, many of which would be repeated on such shows as F-Troop, McHale's Navy, Hogan's Heroes and M*A*S*H. Forty years later, the series would inspire a dimwitted feature-length comedy, in which Steve Martin played Bilko. In the context of a post-Vietnam and post-Desert Storm military, however, the concept rang pretty hollow. In 1955, it was easy to believe that a unit made up of unmotivated draftees could fall under the spell of a silver-tongued master sergeant who not only would invest their paychecks in various get-rich-quick schemes and poker games, but also fuel their contempt for ass-kissers and officers. The individual soldiers represented a cross-section of blue-collar and ethnic America. The most memorable, perhaps, was rolly-polly Pvt. Duane Doberman (Maurice Gosfield), a slovenly underachiever Bilko would use as the bait in his many traps. Doberman stole every scene in which was featured. The only thing wrong with the set, which offers some neat bonus features, is that only 21 out of the show's 138 episodes are represented.