May 2011 Archives

MEOW. FILM AT 11

I know, it's racing around the Net and you've probably seen it already, but if not, enjoy:

This is how all news interviews should be. I would actually enjoy TV news if an old guy wandered into every shot and made deadpan animal noises. I have no idea if this is real or a parody, and Lord knows I don't know what he's saying, but it's awesome nonetheless.

BULL

Last day of long weekend. I worked all day.

Here, a video of a couple of guys I know embarrassing themselves, one more than the other:

From Rock 100.5/Atlanta's Regular Guys show, Southside Steve Rickman to the left, Sebastian Dasckewicz-Davis to the right. 4 seconds? Sebas' life continues to follow a uniquely sad path. I trust later rounds were equally awful for both.

Back at full strength tomorrow. What fun.

Dad died seven years ago today, and Fran and I went to a deli this evening to have a meal like he used to love. We talked about him and I remembered little things about what he and I did together over the years, and Fran asked me if I remembered where we were on the day he died...

...and I didn't. I can't. I remember writing about it here, but I remember nothing else other than profound numbness and disbelief, even knowing that the end was near. I'd just seen him at the hospice in Florida, and I thought I'd prepared myself for the inevitable, but in retrospect, I went into auto-pilot. Now, seven years on, I sat in the parking lot of the deli desperately trying to remember a trauma I've managed to suppress.

But that's not what I should remember, anyway. I should remember Dad the way he was before then. I'm glad we commemorate his memory on the anniversary of his passing, but I don't want to remember the end, I want to remember the rest. And I do.

A PAUSE IN THE PROGRAMME

It's a rare day off.

Here are some TV commercials filmed off the screen from Grampian TV in Scotland in 1967:

Prices in guineas, Fairy soap... time capsule.

This is a picture from Google Maps of a place where I once lived. In fact, my old residence is in this photo. That's what I knew as Lancaster Avenue running diagonally from top left to lower right. Note the label on the upper left.

I was under the impression that I lived in Pennsylvania, not Quebec. It appears that I was incorrect.

YOU FASHIST PIG

Epic New York Times correction today:

This was at the bottom of an article about Ashton Kutcher's tech investment prowess. Just full of win.

In an era where everything's on the Internet, a blooper from over 30 years ago is going to be around. How about this, from sometime in the 1970's?:

That's from WMAR-TV Baltimore, and the disco theme and fashions of the era are funny enough before the reporter ends up with fumblemouth because his glasses -- big 1970's aviators -- broke. It happens, and he probably forgot about it the next day. But YouTube never forgets.

BUSTED WINDOWS

Dear Microsoft: You wanna know why people buy Macs? Simple: They're tired of random catastrophic operating system errors that have no apparent cause and no solution.

That's not to say that Macs are immune to that, and we know that Apple is notorious for insisting that its hardware isn't doing what users are seeing it do. But I spent all day dealing with the results of a critical Windows 7 upgrade that managed to spontaneously crash in the middle and reboot the computer and leave parts of the system unusable, but only random parts, like Internet Explorer and the ability to read e-mail in Outlook (the program launches, but the e-mails won't open). And attempting to do a repair job with the Windows 7 CD leaves it forever in "Checking Compatibility." The computer isn't unusable, but some of it is. Meanwhile, my Mac just works.

So I spent all day trying to fix what the update broke. A few minutes ago, as the Heat was finally putting the Bulls away in overtime, minutes before I was ready to give up for the night, I managed to get the thing back to where I wanted it, the way it was before the crash. (Oh, yeah, did I mention that the crash also took with it all the restore points, and the ability to create and keep restore points? And it disabled all the help files, and threw up arcane error numbers for which Microsoft just shrugged and said there was no definition?) It only took, quite literally, all day.

Next one's another Mac. No question.

BOB AND RAY AND BERT AND HARRY

Look, one of the classic Bob and Ray Piels commercials:

Bert and Harry Piel! Unfortunately, the last few seconds are snipped off, but you can get the appeal (no pun intended) of the spots. And there's this one, which I think I might have posted years ago:

And this:

It's interesting that the Bert and Harry commercials were a hit as entertainment but couldn't save the brand, which was already hurting from national brand competition; the ads ran from 1955 through 1960, and Piels ended up sold to a chain of regional breweries by 1963.

Amazingly, Piels still exists, at least in name, brewed by Pabst.

BAD GOOD TASTE

Thanks to FuzzyMemoriesTV, enjoy this commercial break from WFLD-TV/Chicago in 1971:

The Doublemint spot seems to be from well before 1971 -- more a 1950's-style spot -- but Charlie the Tuna was definitely of that era, with Herschel Bernardi as the fish and Danny Dark as the narrator. Yes, it's odd that Charlie WANTED to be killed and eaten, but that's always the case with food mascots. And, no, it wasn't unusual for stations to air black-and-white commercials and color bumpers, although by 1971 most commercials were aired in color. Not that I would have noticed -- we didn't get color TV until the World Series that fall, a 13-inch Sony Trintron we perched atop the old black-and-white Capehart console TV/hi-fi. Got three channels in color, the rest in grey fuzz-o-vision. We got cable shortly thereafter.

CLOWN CAR

Here's how they marketed the biggest flop in American automotive history:

Circus, Edsel, same thing. Ever smell a circus tent with elephants in the vicinity? That'll sell cars.

I'M ON A BUS

I need to get away from the computer, like, now. Did we have this before?:

1950, "A Journey by a London Bus." Eight minutes of buses, with a painstaking explanation of how buses work. No crowding or pushing out of turn.... The film was intended to be shown to newcomers to the country, which is why the central characters are from Africa and why they explain the kind of things most people know about already. It's a great time capsule from 61 years ago.

BETTER THAN QUAKE

Had to run out to Lakewood. Got back late.

Here, have a bowl of Quisp:

Mmm. Actually, the stuff tasted exactly like sister cereal Cap'n Crunch. Still does, since you can still find it at some stores, namely Super Target. So now you know.

Cool- my name on TV! Go to about the 1:50 mark in this clip from G4's "Attack of the Show," and when they zoom in on the Nerdist web page, there's my name!:

Okay, I'm the only one who'll look for it, but this is the second time my name's been displayed like that on "Attack of the Show," so maybe by repetition people will... nah, nothing will happen, but at least I get a kick out of it.

ALL WORK AND NO PLAY

I was just informed by an expert -- Fran -- that the reason I am struggling to get my writing completed is that I need some rest. She's right. So I will.

We'll see if this works. Tomorrow.

GEEZ, WHAT A GROUCH-O

I'm a little busy. Will tell you about my Adventures With Computer Memory today. (It's not exciting)

Go watch Groucho:

ONCE AROUND THE WRITER'S BLOCK

I had all sorts of trouble writing today. There were long stretches of staring at the screen, punctuated by suddenly desiring to wash the cars and clean the cat bowl and clear the pool skimmer. I just couldn't get it in gear. Too bad writing is what I do for a living.

And then Chris posted this on Twitter: "...aaaand 67,702 words later..THE 2ND DRAFT OF MY BOOK IS DONE. I'm shaking. I feel like I just gave birth to a brain-baby."

I know he didn't write 67,702 words tonight. But that's a lot of material. A brain-melting amount. Well done, sir.

I'm still not inspired enough to get back into a good writing mood. I managed to finish work today, but I'm not feeling it at the moment. But I'll take a cue from Chris, bear down, and get back into it for the week. After I finish this, I'll only have 67,540 words left to go to match him.

26.2 MILES, AND IT DIDN'T HAPPEN

They had a marathon in these parts today. That meant I had to get up at 4:30 to go run just so that I WOULDN'T get forced off the road by the "real" runners. I ran while they were setting up, and then I came back and worked, because, with the main road past our neighborhood, the only exit, blocked, I wasn't going anywhere. And I didn't. I worked, and then... I crashed. Hard. Lay down for a second on the couch and woke up hours later.

And by then, we could escape, so we went and grabbed lunch and ran errands and grabbed dinner, and then came home and the marathon was long gone. But we'd seen ambulances heading down to the race when we left, and I wanted to see if anything had happened, so, naturally, I went to the local paper's website and... nothing. Just a pre-race article obviously written the day before. No results, no coverage. The Patch.com site covering the town had a few pictures but no other coverage, and just directed readers to a third-party results site with the lists of times. That's it.

That's awful. If "hyperlocal" is the future, it'll have to do better than not to wait and not to report on the actual event, an event that snarled traffic for hours in town. And the newspaper should be aware that the Internet audience is not served by slapping the print version content on the Web and not bothering to cover breaking news. So both the "traditional" media and new media just bit the big one on this.

I'd be shocked if I had any more expectations. This is the future of news? Oy.

Where do these come from? Someone (it's apparently also at the Internet Archive) posted this episode of a 1949 television show, a corny variety show called "The School House" on the Dumont network, hosted by Kenny Delmar, whose Senator Claghorn character on the radio show "Allen's Alley" was an inspiration for Foghorn Leghorn's voice, with "students" Wally Cox and Arnold Stang, plus a live integrated commercial for Dumont television sets (in which Wally obviously forgets his lines, but remembers to point out that Dumont TVs had FM radio receivers in them; that's interesting considering it was 1949).

It's a bad show -- creepy, really, considering that the students are all obviously adults -- but it's fascinating to see what TV was really like in its infancy, when they were still trying to figure out how to do it and what would work.

THIS TIME, IT'S IMPERSONAL

This time, I'm not going to write a whole apology post, then forget to click "publish" and go to sleep.

Tonight, I'm going to write a short half-assed post because it's past my bedtime, then click "publish" and go to sleep.

Progress!

NOTE FROM WEDNESDAY NIGHT

Aah, nuts.

I had to run some errands tonight. That pushed work back, which pushed this back, which means that this gets shoved all the way off the table and into tomorrow. I have a column to write tomorrow, so what's here depends on whether I can come up with anything early and how fast I can crank it out. I have an idea, but it's just a tiny germ of an idea at the moment. I hope that it'll grow while I sleep. At least, that's what I'm about to do, so it had better grow.

SOME JINGLES, BECAUSE

Yesterday and today over at Nerdist, a post about a particularly grating yet memorable jingle for a pizza place in Ohio reminded me that I'd written about the heyday of cheesy local TV ads, particularly those on UHF in Philadelphia, and I went to find the post. Turned out that it was in 2004, upon the death of Benny Krass. And so, while looking, I browsed on YouTube and found a few examples from the good old days, when I'd be writing term papers in my dorm room and my little black-and-white TV would be on channels 17. 29. or 48 and I'd hear these:

This one's not embeddable, but it's classic: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQFlkK9nYYs.

It's so classic that comedy/nerd music kings Paul and Storm cover it when they play in Philly:

One of these days, I'm going to hook a VCR up to my computer and digitize some of the commercials on the VHS tapes I still have from the 80s, mostly of Philadelphia TV. There HAS to be some gold on there.

SMARTER THAN US

I used to watch this every week:

The GE College Bowl! Smart kids answering hard questions for... well, not a new car. It was a little inspiring for me; it turned out that you could be smart and get on TV and not get your ass kicked. In this 1959 segment, Allen Ludden is the host. On the Barnard team, Ellen Willis later became a prominent left-wing writer and music critic; I read her stuff in the Village Voice for years. Susan Rennie became a Columbia professor, feminist, and served on a committee with Ruth Bader Ginsburg, of whom you may have heard.

But that was before my time. It's much more likely I would have seen this episode:

1966, Robert Earle. Agnes Scott College vs. Princeton.

I would have done very, very poorly on this show. Way, way more intellectual than I turned out to be. WAY more. It turned out that my talents, such as they are, lay in areas requiring a different, less critical stockpile of knowledge. If they asked who played the Colonel in "McKeever and the Colonel" or who Sandy Koufax struck out to end his perfect game against the Cubs, I'd have been competitive. Alas, they didn't.

MOM, ON MOTHER'S DAY

I'm not sure what else is appropriate to say on Mother's Day that I didn't say yesterday. Really, on a day like today, walking through Ralphs and CVS seeing people scurrying to buy their moms last-minute cards and gifts, and seeing the cakes and chocolate-covered strawberries being carted away, I just kept wishing that Mom was still around so I could show her how much I love her.

But she isn't. And I can't, unless you believe she can see us now. I don't know about that either way, but if she can, I hope she had a great Mother's Day. Mine would have been better if she was around for it.

MOM, ON HER BIRTHDAY

Mom would have been 79 today. At least, that's the best guess. She never told us her real age, and some of the documents I saw had her five years younger. She would never tell. It was a defensiveness spawned not from the usual vanity but from an underlying fear that, somehow, some way, her past would come back to haunt her.

Her past, haunted her plenty though. That's because her past involved the Holocaust, the Nazis murdering most of her family, her escape as a "hidden child," the post-war move to the U.S. She was always fearful that "it could happen again." She never felt truly comfortable that things wouldn't go bad again. She was always looking over her shoulder.

But she loved me, loved my sister and my father, and she died way, way too early. I'm reminded of that every year on this day, and with Mother's Day tomorrow, it's especially tough. But we honored her today, I hope, by walking in the Revlon Run/Walk for Women up at USC. We walked to celebrate Fran's fifth year of survival, we walked to honor and remember the friends and family lost to cancer, and, every step of the way, we remembered my mom. Wish she was with us. Maybe she was.

WALKING AGAIN

One last time:

We're walking again in Saturday's Revlon Run/Walk for Women in Los Angeles, raising money for research and treatment of women's cancers. We do it every year, and this year is a celebration of Fran's being a five year survivor. How cool is that? Very. Now, if you can, please donate: do.eifoundation.org/goto/pmsimon is the link.

And if you're in L.A., come on out. It's always a rewarding thing to do. Plus, they have snacks.

NO BATTLE OF THE BULGE

Oh, damn, I ran out of time. Column writing is pushing me past my deadline, so... we'll reconvene tomorrow. Sorry.

Well, one thing: My MacBook Pro got the bulging battery problem, and I took it to the Genius Bar at the Apple Store. I was nervous, worried I'd have to pay for a new battery even though I have AppleCare. Result: Short wait, then cheerful replacement under warranty in less than 5 minutes. Seriously, it was as painless as a service call could be. You wanna know why I'll always pay the "Apple Tax" and go with their computers from here on out? That's one reason. Apple is far from perfect, and I'm in no way a fanboy, but this kind of experience is why people stick to their products. There, I said it.

Okay, NOW, I'll go.

When I was a kid, there were a lot of TV shows that were on in reruns on a reasonably constant basis that you never, ever see anymore. Most were in black-and-white and are really dated, so there's no reason a TV station would air them.

That's why it's cool when you find them on YouTube. And, in memory of Jackie Cooper, here's one show I hadn't seen in decades, "The People's Choice":

Ah, yes, the talking dog. Cleo's voice was Mary Jane Croft, from "I Love Lucy" and "The Lucy Show." Cooper played a city councilman, his wife was the daughter of the Mayor, the Mayor was named Peoples... and the dog talked to the camera.

No "Hennessey," though. I know episodes exist, but not on YouTube. Someday, just for posterity's sake, someone should digitize and post all of those 50s and 60s sitcoms.

NO NEWS IS NO NEWS

It is hot here. 80s by the ocean, which is, um, here, and 90s inland, which is where I'm trying to avoid. The windows were open all day, and the fan was on, and it was blowing hot air on me. Tomorrow is going to be worse. It'll get better after that, but for now, it's hot.

Heat doesn't help a writer. Nor does a lack of news, when one's job is, in part, to find interesting news items for talk radio people to use on their shows. There's basically one story, and, with the exception of the did-he-have-a-gun did-he-use-a-human-shield thing, it hasn't advanced much from the initial reports. So, it's been hard to come up with the usual load of stories. If Francisco Liriano hadn't pitched an Edwin Jackson-like no-hitter (six walks, only two strikeouts, a LOT of luck), I'd have had practically nothing tonight.

And I have little for tomorrow yet, other than sweat. I'm going to go look a little longer, then I'll go to sleep and hope for better in the morning. It helps that this isn't manual labor. It'll be too hot for that.

NOT OUR CAT

I told you I'd tell you about my busy Sunday. I lied. I'm too tired.

Here's a farting cat:

That should hold you until tomorrow, right?

SO LONG, IT'S BEEN BAD TO KNOW YOU

Long day. Tell you about it tomorrow.

In the meantime, as happy as I am about the bin Laden news, I'm ready to defriend or unfollow everyone who is either denying credit to, or claiming credit for, the president. It's amazing how people react as if this was a sporting event and their team either won or loss. I'll note that I haven't seen too many conservatives reacting in any way but joy, but a lot of my liberal/Democrat friends are claiming Republicans are upset (sorry, not seeing that at all) and Obama is wholly responsible. I think everyone can be happy with the outcome, and, geez, give some credit to military intelligence (not, in this case, an oxymoron) and Petraeus and the special ops feet on the ground as well as Obama, who's in charge now and is, after all, our president, without qualification. If we can't be happy as a nation without dissolving into I-rule-You-drool, we aren't really winning anything.

March 2012

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Who?

    Perry Michael Simon. Talk radio guy. Editor of the News-Talk-Sports section at AllAccess.com. Editor and writer at Chris Hardwick's Nerdist.com. Former Program Director, Operations Manager, host, and general nuisance at KLSX/Los Angeles, Y-107/Los Angeles, New Jersey 101.5. Freelance writer on media, sports, pop culture, based somewhere in the Los Angeles area. Contact him here. Copyright 2003-2012 Perry Michael Simon. Yeah.

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