The happiest blog on earth
I've always said it's the most surreal moment in TV history. Frank Sinatra was welcoming Elvis home from two years in the army. This was 1960, and Sinatra had dedicated an hour-long show to everything 25-year-old Elvis missed while he was overseas. They get to the surprise hit single of 1959, and add a dance number commemorating the chipmunk-vocals craze -- trying to explain to Elvis that the…
It's the longest song ever recorded by Weird Al Yankovic. He'd wanted to compose a song "that's just going to annoy people for 12 minutes," Yankovic is quoted as saying (on the epic song's page on Wikipedia ). The name of the song? "Albuquerque." And there's actually a 12-minute animated movie version of it . The strangest thing is it's actually not a bad song, with a certain amount of…
It's probably the most famous passage ever written by this great American writer. But have we all been misquoting it for the last 91 years after a typist misread his original manuscript? I'm talking about Thomas Wolfe, and his stirring opening paragraphs for Look Homeward, Angel . ". . . a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door. And of all the forgotten faces. Naked and alone…
I love the image they've come up with for re-releases of the classic Route 66 TV series. Amazon Prime is now showing all episodes for free -- and last night I saw one that I'd never seen before. Its title? "Shoulder the Sky, My Lad." And towards the end, Buz Murdoch gives another incredible speech... He's talking to a teenaged boy who's about to escape town on a freight train. And Buz gives him…
In his first novel, Look Homeward Angel , 29-year-old Thomas Wolfe remembered a turn-of-the-century Thanksgiving from his boyhood. In his nostalgic fictionalized memoir, Wolfe calls himself young Eugene -- the toddler son of a couple named Eliza and a wildly prodigal stone-cutter named Gant. Seated before a roast or a fowl, Gant began a heavy clangor on his steel and carving knife, distributing…
Elvis Presley's song from 50 years ago still gives me goosebumps... It's called "Harum Holiday," but it's really about wanderlust -- that urge to get out of town and see the wide world. And amazingly, in this movie Elvis ends up going to Iraq! According to the movie's trailer .... "Elvis brings the Big Beat to Bagdad!" And that's not all he does... Lured by a desert temptress into an Arabian…
Route 66 -- the TV show, the highway, the legend, and the dream. Everyone knows I'm fascinated with "life on the road", and today I learned something wonderful. That the theme to the Route 66 TV show has lyrics! Here's the backstory. CBS had refused to pay for the rights to the old 1946 standard "Get Your Kicks on Route 66." That older song had actually been written on Route 66. (According to…
I love The Secret Life of Walter Mitty . And I'm fascinated by this song from its soundtrack. Its title is "Step Out," but the lyrics are a little darker. I could've sworn they were singing "House on fire. Leave it all behind you..." So I launched a quest to learn what the real lyrics are... I found several web sites offering lyrics for the song, but I still was hearing something different. (To be…
I'm updating this 2009 blog post because more than four years later, in February of 2013, Obama used the same joke when introducing Ray Mabus, the secretary of the Navy. "There he is right there -- the good-looking guy over at the end." In fact, if you search the White House web site, he's made that joke 109 different times!
I discovered there's a "last episode" of Route 66. Tod gets married -- his bride is played by Barbara Eden -- but in the last scene, her scheming relatives immediately have him murdered in order to claim his inheritance. The episode actually ends with them throwing his body off a high bridge, while his bride weeps. But it turns out that's just part one of a two-part episode...
I was walking around a beach town when I suddenly remembered the movie "Summer of '42." (A teenaged boy in a summer resort town has a crush on a woman whose husband is serving in the war...) Remembering the movie, I felt like I had to know: was the movie really based on a true story? It turns out the answer is yes, according to Wikipedia. And there's two more big surprises...
My girlfriend likes The Monkees. So for her birthday, I'd made her a "mix tape" of 26 of their best love songs. And "As We Go Along" was my favorite. You can listen to the song at the link below while watching a pretty video showing a field of flowers. (Or read its poetic lyrics). And if you're a hard-core Monkees fan, I'll also tell you which 26 love songs I picked!
Here's a fun list of the best TV moments of 2011 !
This is getting interesting! It looks like on Black Friday, there's going to be a three-way price between the Kindle, the Nook, and the iPad!
I wrote my first ebook!!! It's a fun (and funny) short "Thanksgiving mystery" about four turkeys awaiting the farmer's axe -- one of which has a plan for escaping! There's 12 cartoon-ish illustrations -- and the whole thing is written entirely in rhyme! "For Thanksgiving, try this game / Find the guilty turkey's name!"
Okay, here's something I never, ever thought I'd hear. Lounge act "Richard Cheese" does a snazzy, jazzy cover version of... The SpongeBob SquarePants theme.
I absolutely loved the opening "season premiere" song on Community. Click this link for the full video with its lyrics and some great trivia.
I've become obsessed with the great music that Ben Folds wrote for "Over the Hedge." William Shatner was on his (new!) version of " Rocking the Suburbs " - and there's a gentle ballad called " Still " that's really beautiful. I love the sweet (and satirical) '60s euphoria he sneaks into songs like "(I've Always Got My) Family of Me " and even a cover of The Clash's " Lost in the Supermarket " .…
Ever since I was a teenager watching Three's Company , I've been tantalized by this line from the opening credits. "Based on the British series A Man About the House ." Today I realized I could finally just watch the original British version of Three's Company online! "A fellow movin' in with two birds...? I'm not having it!" By the way, the British opening credits are absolutely terrible .
Yes, it's the cast of "The Office" re-creating George Seurat's famous painting, "Sunday in the Park". Click the images to enlarge NBC apparently created the image as part of their "upfront presentation," which tries to build excitement for their fall line-up of shows -- both new and returning -- when they're previewed to television critics. New York Magazine apparently snagged the image for their…
Here's an inspiring story. A part-time cameraman for the news (and commercials) at a local TV station in Texas was hired in the 1970s to start filming NCAA football games. Eventually he was filming NFL games and even part of the Olympics in Mexico City. But Steve Rash had a dream. And he spent the next five years raising money to make it come true. Don McLean's song "American Pie" had made Rash…
It's finally happened! Charlie Sheen's Two and Half Men co-star Jon Cryer has finally broken his silence and commented on what Sheen has been saying... Also: What Charlie Sheen says about his upcoming Kindle e-book
Edgar Allan Poe described walking to a tomb in a brilliant but forgotten poem called "Ulalume". ("Perhaps befitting the gothic poet, Ulalume has a secret history ," writes Moe Zilla). After his death, Poe's literary executor deleted the last stanza -- though the poem's even spookier without it. And somehow, YouTube has a video of the poem being recited by Nico of The Velvet Underground.
This is one of the most beautiful advertisements I've ever seen... And yes, that is Animal House... The ad was broadcast for just one day, on Thanksgiving Day during the NFL's traditional broadcast of a Detroit Lions football game. It's an implicit thank-you to America from GM for bailing out the struggling automaker, and it was produced by the ad agency Goodby Silverstein & Partners. It splices…
There's a great speech about the economy towards the end of The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo . "You have to distinguish between two things - the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones from Ericsson, cars from Volvo, chickens from Scan, and shipments from Kiruna to…
Fonzie literally "jumped the shark" — on water skis — in a 1977 episode of Happy Days . Three decades later, the writer of that episode insists "I still don't believe that the series 'jumped the shark' when Fonzie jumped the shark." "It aired Sept. 20, 1977, and was a huge hit, ranking No. 3 for the week with a 50-plus share (unheard of today) and an audience of more than 30 million…
Paul Simon remembers walking into a restaurant, where he's introduced to Joe DiMaggio, and "we immediately fell into conversation about the only subject we had in common." "What I don't understand," DiMaggio said, "is why you ask where I've gone. I just did a Mr. Coffee commercial, I'm a spokesman for the Bowery Savings Bank and I haven't gone anywhere!" I've always wondered about that. But it…
Jonah Hex was the movie adaptation of a classic western comic book. But it's more fun to read the reviews ... "Trust me, it doesn't matter that Josh Brolin's face is made up with a garish scar. Megan Fox is a hot hooker in a corset. Sometimes, she gets handcuffed to stuff. Their first mistake was in not naming the film 'Megan Fox Handcuffed in a Corset.'" And Box Office Magazine was especially…
Things I didn't know about Bing Crosby ... A 2001 biography of Crosby by Village Voice jazz critic Gary Giddins says that Louis Armstrong's influence on Crosby "extended to his love of marijuana." Bing smoked it during his early career when it was legal and "surprised interviewers" in the 1960s and 70s by advocating its decriminalization, as did Armstrong. Crosby even recommended that his son…
Happy first day of summer! Jan and Dean share some surfer zen - chanting "Summer means fun." (Over and over again...) I thought it was a shame that the complete lyrics to their bouncy summer surfer koan appeared nowhere on the web. But they do now!!! Surfin' every day down at Malibu 'neath the warm California sun. No more books, no more homework to do, now, 'cause summer means fun! Summer means…
So CBS aired a special promising "TV's Greatest Surprises" (as determined by a Nielsen Entertainment survey). Fortunately, here's a list of their top 30 of TV's Greatest Surprises - so you don't have to spend all night actually watching them! (Towards the end, it just seemed like one surprisingly grisly death scene after another.) Though they scoured through 60 years of television, if you believe…
Add this to the list of things I didn't know about IHOP . The first International House of Pancakes opened up in California, however due to concerns the heavy tectonic forces prevelent in California would topple the original a-framed building it was relocated to Idaho. This relocation process spanned the course of a year as piece by piece the original building was deconstructed and placed on flat…
That was a strange re-run to show on Mother's Day. An episode of "My Name is Earl" where Earl has to make things right with his friend Ralph -- for sleeping with his Mom! "She wasn't young, but she was conscious..." Is there something about Mother's Day that brings out the bad taste in everybody? See also: Lou Cabron's 7 Worst Mother's Day Gifts . :)
I've been trying to figure out how it happened - what put America on its path to the giant health care reform bill. Barack Obama gave a hint Saturday afternoon, in a private, speech to House Democrats ... Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didn't think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college. I went to work in neighborhoods, working with Catholic…
My friend Brian sent me an article about the new Gilligan's Island movie . But before I read it, I came up with my own dream cast. Gilligan - Will Ferrell The Skipper - Chevy Chase Mr. Howell - Steve Martin Mrs. Howell - Angela Lansbury Ginger - RuPaul Mary-Anne - Michelle Trachtenberg (from "Mercy") The Professor - Stephen Colbert Got a better idea? Send me an e-mail! (Er, but put "Gilligan's…
"DVD Clearance! Four for $10" And what did I see in the bin? Snakes on a Plane I guess it was inevitable... "New Line Platinum Series" Also available: "Scary Movie 4." And here's the definitive list of my other Snakes on a Plane posts: Snakes on a Sudoku Snakes on a T-Shirt Snakes on a Rockabilly Song Snakes on Jesse Helms Snakes on a Book Snakes on Goopymart Snakes on a Plane jokes Snakes on a…
I didn't know this book existed... Here's how Publisher's Weekly described it... In an act that should qualify him for the brilliant editors hall of fame, Dan Walsh discovered that if all traces of Jim Davis's lazy, lasagna-scarfing cat were expunged from his own comic strip, Garfield became a funnier, much darker series, about a desperately lonely, self-loathing man's existential despair. Walsh…
The Monkees wish you a Merry Christmas!
Mark Twain describes the time he co-authored a play with Bret Harte in 1876. "Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to get the dialect right. Bret never did know anything about dialect." Twain's literary executor, Albert Paine, records that Twain's statement is unfair, and in fact both men "worked…
And what happened to the actor who voiced Scrappy Doo? He was fired after asking for more money... Losing the gig was another blow to Lennie, though far from the biggest. Larger problems persisted in his life and a few years later, he decided he needed to change that life. He sold his jade green Rolls Royce and his mansion in Hancock Park and spent the rest of his life in peace and love with a…
How many settlers were in America in 1619? Just 2,000. (Though they were 500,000 Indians, according to this book I'm reading...) And three interesting things happened in Virginia in 1619.... 1. America's first legislative assembly met in Jamestown -- a governor, six councilors, and two burgesses from the 10 plantations. 2. A Dutch ship sold the settlers 20 slaves 3. A boat arrived with 90 women…
This item "has been discontinued by the manufacturer." So says Amazon .
My friend Richard sent me the ultimate summertime video. It's Mungo Jerry, singing "In The Summertime." But I didn't know that... They had another summertime hit called Lady Rose. The band's name "was inspired by the poem Mungojerrie and Rumpelteazer , from T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" (according to Wikipedia .
"Farrah Fawcett was the perfect practitioner of that most prized of American feminine arts: that of semi-wholesomeness... She had an utterly American sense of openness and fun, with a smile that suggested that life was fundamentally good and full of promise, that anything could happen (and that a few really fun things certainly would). Arts and Letters Daily linked to an essay by an editor at…
At a local bar, they're performing karaoke tonight. And what are the amateurs singing? "Thriller." Although personally, the album I'll always remember is Off the Wall. It's currently Amazon's #2 ranked album - behind only Thriller at #1.
Nathan Lane (from "The Producers") will play Gomez Addams, and who's playing Morticia? Bebe Neuwirth (from "Chicago"). I just found out that their making a musical out of The Addams Family . Their daughter Wednesday is now turning 18, and the family has to deal with her coming of age... I loved the TV show as a kid. And here's some interesting Addams Family trivia
Google Books now lets you embed a specific page from Google books directly into your blog. So of course I had to try it... This is my favorite page from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. And click here to read about Mark Twain's unfinished sequel to Huckleberry Finn.
I really enjoyed this article. It's a list of the Top 10 Creepiest Fast Food Mascots . (And for further enlightment, here's my own essay on the first fast food restaurants in America .)
Q: What was the first movie ever released on Blu-ray DVD? A: Charlie's Angels II: Full Throttle Somehow this Memorial Day, while everyone was watching McG's Terminator: Salvation , I ended up watching the director's previous summer blockbuster Here's some cool trivia about the movie from the Internet Movie Database. Courtney Love was offered Demi Moore's part as one of Charlie's former angels --…
"I have been and always shall be, your friend." Mr. Spock says it again in the new Star Trek movie. But MTV has discovered what William Shatner's dialogue would've been . To convince his younger self that a friendship would bloom between Spock and Kirk, Nimoy delivers a recording from the future that Captain Kirk made before his death in Star Trek VII . "...I want to tell you how much you've meant…