Weird year. Too many people we know died or got sick or injured. A lot of things seemed to kind of hang in suspended animation, no progress or backsliding, just there.
Yet, we're still here. And, once again, I take that as a good thing.
Happy New Year.
Here's something from New Year's Eve, 1950:
Happy 1951!
You know how hard it is to write for all these websites? Damned exhausting, it is. Sometimes you just gotta take a break. Here's a break from 1978, KCOP-TV Los Angeles:
Evelle Younger for Governor! He ran against Jerry Brown. He lost. Plus the highly talking Mrs. Butterworth bottle and Malt-o-Meal.
Even better, from WOKR-TV Rochester in 1980:
Blewski's reconditioned TVs! Tae Kwon Do 15% off! The gang from Dick Behnke's Transitowne Dodge! Awful-looking pizza from Captain Cook's! And a Please Do Not Adjust Your Set slide!
THAT'S local television the way it really was.
Not feeling it. Sorry.
We took advantage of our local multiplex's cheap Tuesday deal to go see "True Grit." Review: Gritty. Okay, also good. It's exactly what you'd expect knowing the story and the cast and the Coens; darker than the original, but with the Coens' occasional humorous touches. It's more straightforward than a typical Coen Brothers movie, but, not having read the Charles Portis novel, I don't know whether it's more true to the book than the original; I imagine that it is. And, yes, Jeff Bridges chews the scenery as much or more than John Wayne in the original, but to great effect. Worth the full ticket price, I'd say.
Interesting choice of trailers beforehand: the next "Transformers," which elicited a few chuckles and mostly groans from the older crowd, and "Real Steel," the Hugh Jackman robot-suit-fighting action flick, which got outright (and inappropriate) laughs. Granted, this wasn't a crowd of teenaged males, but we're talking zero crossover here.
They also showed another trailer for "Rango," the CGI animated standard-issue coward-pressed-into-being-hero story, only with lizards. Unlike the early trailers which showed nothing but mysterious, dialogue-free scenes, this one has Johnny Depp's voice front and center and lots of action; the problem is that it seemed like it told everything you'd need to know of the plot except the end, which you can assume. Aah, whatever. Maybe it'll be good.
It's been a long time since we went to a movie; the late arrivals who showed up 5 minutes after the movie started and talked through much of the action reminded me why. But at least "True Grit" was worth the trouble.
What's interesting to me about this silent home video of Tijuana circa 1957 is how little different the area looks today. The border crossing itself has changed radically, but a lot of the buildings in TJ look as run down now as they did then, other than the later development of the Zona Rio:
Here's more film of a (greatly different) San Diego and (typical) TJ from 1951; note the Waikiki Theater marquee ("Miss Atomic Torso"!). Plus a giant sombrero:
The Jai Alai Fronton Palacios is still there, on Avenida de la Revolucion. The people at the end, I'm not so sure about.
The cancellation of the Eagles-Vikings game tonight reminded me of the good old days back east, by which I mean sitting in the house waiting to get buried in a foot of snow. Wait, maybe those weren't the good old days.
I do, however, enjoy watching football played in horrific weather conditions. I doubt I would feel the same way if I had tickets, but from 2,500 miles away, it's great. The cancellation deprived us of that entertainment.
The best we got were a few flakes in Chicago and Cincinnati. That's no match for a white field and zero visibility.
But I can't gloat over others' weather-related misfortunes, not after the week of rain and flooding. And I hope the east coast gets through this without too much trouble. I really could have used a blizzard game, though.
On Christmas, let's remember one of my favorite games from childhood:
I had a table hockey game just like that one (but, of course, not with the Dallas Stars or San Joes Sharks, who would not exist until many years hence. No, I had four sets, the Rangers, the Flyers, the Canadiens, and... I forget who the other one was. It had the Original Six logos on the side. Might have had the Expansion Six, too. Plus an overhead scoreboard through which you dropped the puck for face offs. EA Sports can't create a hockey video game that was nearly as much fun as those flat metal players sliding in their slots. If you got one for Christmas, you were lucky.
Appropriately, courtesy KYW-TV (CBS3)/Philadelphia, here's the late Harry Kalas reading "The Night Before Christmas." Enjoy:
Have a great one.
Busy again. Printer now works, car damage will cost a lot. Not the best day. Need a smile. Oh, look:
ALVIN!
That's a preview of a post coming tomorrow at Nerdist. And with that, Merry Christmas Eve Eve.
Just time for a few updates on, and referrals to, stuff I posted over at Nerdist.
The ded printer has been replaced, thanks to a great deal and great service by NewEgg -- low price and practically overnight shipping (ordered late Monday, processed early Tuesday, on the doorstep today). Got an Epson, it works, and I'm back in business, literally so.
This short piece with video ties into my usual baseball card obsession -- it shows how they make trading cards, which turns out to be a) exactly what you think it'll be like, and b) that boring.
This one is about all the gadgets I should discard, but haven't. Yes, I still have a ZIP drive, perfectly functional and useless.
And for Christmas, um, cheer, you gotta see this. Maybe it was less creepy in 1963, but I doubt it.
Clay Cole died the other day. Anyone who grew up within range of New York television in the 1960's watched Clay Cole's dance shows. He became a successful TV producer after leaving his TV show, but for a time there, he was, at least in the New York area, a star. As a very, very young person, I was a fan. Never forgot him, either.
There are very few surviving clips from his show, which aired on the old commercial Channel 13, WNTA, and then as "Clay Cole's Disk-O-Tek" on WPIX, Channel 11 -- one clip with the Everly Brothers has been silenced by YouTube because of the use of copyrighted music -- but here's Clay singing (!) a bunch of songs in the movie "Twist Around the Clock":
This one has Clay vigorously performing a move that my sister and I, watching this film on television, immediately identified as a symptom of severe sexual dysfunction:
The squares get shocked by the raw erotic energy of young people chastely swiveling their hips and swinging their arms in rhythm:
And the classic "Don't Twist With Anyone Else (But Me)":
Crazy, man.
I've been busy dealing with torrential-rain-induced damage and dead printers and stuff. So I've run out of time for anything substantive here today.
Here, read this thing I wrote about another minor league ballpark gustatory abomination to be inflicted on fans in Akron next season, a hot dog inside a bratwurst inside a kielbasa. It's all I've got for now.
I can't say it better than this (as long as it isn't taken down by the YouTube police):
I'm still not sure that happened. Beautiful.
Yeah, I know, nobody cares but me... but who else will get excited over a brief clip of a deadly dull post office Christmas PSA followed by a nice clear ID from WFIL-TV/Philadelphia, circa 1957?
I have no idea what happened to me during my formative years to make me someone who thinks that's fascinating, but I do. Sorry.
It's been raining all day. That's not normal for these parts, but I can deal with it as long as I don't have to go anywhere. That's one thing Saturdays are good for.
They're also good for sleeping late, which for me is 6 am. And for sitting around staring at the rain, and for getting into a discussion about the Phillies with the manager at the Ralphs because I happened to be wearing a Phillies cap at the time.
All of which I did. So it was a good day overall.
Every once in a while when I have a few minutes, I like to browse through the Internet Archive and see what old TV shows have made their way into the system. It's amazing what you'll find there.
Take this fragment of a show called "Hold That Camera" from WABD-TV/New York, the DuMont network flagship, December 1, 1950:
This was a no-budget variety show that aired for a brief time in which the thing was retooled from a game show into a standard variety show. Why, of all shows from 1950, someone chose to save this one, nobody knows, and it's also been butchered a little, losing commercials and intros and probably other material, plus the print's poor, but it's TV from 1950, when the very idea of TV was a novelty, so who's complaining?
How about Groucho Marx on "The Hollywood Palace," with Margaret Dumont's last appearance?
Speaking of Groucho, how about an uncut, pre-editing film of "You Bet Your Life," the radio show, from December 1949, with Groucho sans suit jacket or tie, and all the stuff they would edit out of the film before airing it on TV:
From the BBC in 1954, "Rag, Tag and Bobtail," a regular segment on the children's block "Watch With Mother"; Judging by the font for the episode title, this one was probably taken from a (much later) airing or tape:
What smaller-market local TV news looked like in 1976, on WTVC in Chattanooga:
Tony Hancock in "Hancock's Half Hour" from January 1959, "The Set that Failed," about his busted TV:
I love this stuff.
Sleeping until 5:30 am.
Writing three or four pieces, editing a few more.
Running a few errands, writing some more, then taking a few minutes to watch some mindless TV.
In my world, that's as close to a vacation as I can hope to get.
Not that I'm complaining. In fact, I'm kinda enjoying this so far.
I watched some of that long-lost kinescope of NBC's coverage of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series, and it reminded me of a few things.
FIrst, it places the time when men stopped wearing fedoras outdoors sometime before 1960. The crowd was mostly hatless -- chapeaus adorned only a relative few who hadn't gotten the memo that hats were out. On the other hand, most men in the stands were wearing ties; that convention hadn't been discarded yet.
Second, the pace of the telecast was glacial, which might be expected with no color commentator, practically no graphics, and no color (the telecast was actually in color, but the kinescope was made off a black-and-white television). Mel Allen and Bob Prince did the call straight, just-the-facts, and it was pretty dry. But Vin Scully is proof that having a single voice need not make things dull or slow. Watching this game felt more like work than it should have, but that's what happens when 2010 expectations meet 1960 production values. Anytime I'm tempted to complain about the overkill on Fox or the awful announcing on TBS, I'll remember that we've come a long way from static overhead camera angles and droning play-by-play.
Third, it was jarring to watch what was clearly aged, historical footage and realize... okay, here, you'll guess that my consternation is that I was indeed alive at the time of that game, but I was a baby with no recollection of the time, so, no, that doesn't make me feel old. I know what the world looked like back then. Not a problem. But it WAS weird to see these 1960, baggy-flannel-uniformed players and to remember seeing some of them still playing by the time I became a fan. Clemente, Face, and Mazeroski, among the guys who played in that game, were still active when I was old enough to figure things out. I still have all of their baseball cards.
But it was great to see the game tonight. It was like opening a time capsule and finding something of greater value than a dusty newspaper and proclamation from the mayor. Now, if only there were more games from that era available...
The most hypnotically annoying thing you will see and hear today? Click the image:
Genius. Genius website, Ruben Amaro Jr. is a genius, genius all around. It's easy to be generous on a day like this.
Miami Go Go!
National Airlines was the one with "Fly me" spots. This one wasn't one of those, although it does feature a suggestively winking stewardess... er, flight attendant. This is how your mod, hip, with-it 1960's TV viewer was sold flights to Florida. DIg that hep wailin' sax! Groove on her accent and all the swiveling hips! Imagine how someone born many years later would look at this and think it was as ancient as we thought the 1940's were!
If you need more go-go, here's a London go-go contest from 1970, with judges including Michael Parkinson in a bizarre straw hat:
It's still hard to imagine that I was alive at a time -- 1969 -- when this was considered so salacious as to be worthy of censorship:
"Je t'aime... moi non plus" was a number one hit in the U.K. AFTER being withdrawn by its original label. It got practically no airplay in America due to its content. And it wasn't even in English. It was, of course, a deliberate provocation by Serge Gainsbourg, a "dialogue" between lovers -- Gainsbourg and his girlfriend Jane Birkin -- in French, ostensibly during sex, but not actually saying anything terribly single-entendre. (The title means "I Love You... Me Neither," a joke; it had been originally recorded with Brigitte Bardot two years earlier) All whispers over a particularly 1969 riff, it sounded like a shampoo commercial. But you would have thought that the record was reaching out of the bins in stores and molesting people.
Today, of course, it's almost impossible to get your record frozen out from chart success, although Cee-Lo made a good run at it. "Je T'aime" could almost be a "Hannah Montana" outtake.
It's a day off.
Everyone likes monkeys, right? Here, some monkeys rustling around in trees:
Enough.
This week couldn't end fast enough.
A couple more nightmare days and I'm done.
Right now, though, I just want to soak my head.
So I will.
Here, glow-in-the-dark fish:
Kids, this is what TV looked like in 1978:
What's interesting about seeing this is that while it's in some cases laughably dated, we're talking 32 years ago, and it doesn't look THAT outrageously different from TV in 2010. 32 years before 1978 was 1946, and there was barely TV, period; what TV existed in 1946 was beyond primitive. At least this stuff was in color. Plus, there's "Quark," WMCA, Cora for Maxwell House, "Wow, I coulda had a V8," and a guest appearance by Heart, selling "Dog and Butterfly" and two shows at the Palladium. Now, THAT'S 1978.
Things continue to be busy, cranking out all the news at All Access, most of the posts at Nerdist, and dealing with stuff at home, too.
This Nerdist post is something I always intended to address here -- the titanic disappointment that is electric football -- but never did. It seemed appropriate there.
Also, Ella made her first Nerdist appearance there tonight.
Check it out, stop by All Access for Net News several times each day, and we'll keep doing that until there's more time to drop some stuff here. I gotta have SOME place to post stuff about sports and old TV shows.
This is another anniversary, and I note it every year. This year's no different, although circumstances make it even more precious.
Fran and I met 23 years ago today. December 7, 1987.
Yes, that was a good day.
And so is today.
I'm still slammed after spending the day attending to that personal matter. All I'll say about it is that it was, ultimately, a good day. Long, tense, difficult, but, in the end, good.
I did post stuff at Nerdist, so go there. Cameos by Ray Walston, William Demarest, and Donal Logue. Can't beat that.
No, I'm serious, I have to go. Much personal stuff to do. You would understand if I could tell you why.
Go do The Mouse again:
First, there was that song "Dynamite" by Taio Cruz, the one that goes "I throw my hands up in the air sometimes saying Ayyy-yo!":
Then, that Mike Tompkins guy who does a capella versions of hits did a pretty cool version of that song making all the sounds himself:
And now, the acapella group at Yeshiva University in New York has a Hanukkah parody of "Dynamite" in the a capella version, called "Candlelight":
Yeshiva students groovin'. Just priceless.
The next several days are going to be light here, because there's much to do and some personal things to address. So you're just as likely to find me at Nerdist.com as here. Rest assured that there's good reason for concentrating my attention to other things.
In the meantime, here's a guy talking to his hand:
For today, go check out my first post over at nerdist.com, my home away from my home away from home. You'll get the idea.
And welcome to those coming over here from Nerdist. Browse the archives and you'll learn a lot about me, mostly that a) I'm obsessed with pop culture stuff nobody else cares about, b) I'm a Philadelphia sports fan, and c) I'm perpetually pressed for time. Me in a nutshell.
By way of stalling because I don't have time for a full entry, here's another Dippity-Do commercial:
I was exactly the age one needed to be to think chanting "Dippity-Do!" was the height of comedy. This affected me greatly.
