Supporting Jane Russell

I didn't see The Outlaw when it titillated audiences and irritated  censors  back in 1943. Turner Classics recently ran it for us who wonder (as in Wonder Bra) what all the fuss was about.  I was mighty impressed with the cantilevered bra that Howard Hughes designed for Jane Russell.

It gets even better when you know what a cantilever is.  It's a beam supported on only one end. It carries the load to the support where it is resisted  by shear stress. They use them for buildings, bridges and structures that project horizontally into space.

Why do I keep staring at photos of Jane's horizontal structure and the marvelous appliance that engineer  Hughes designed to support it?  Why can't  I  leave 'er?

Dinah, Dyna and Me

Over on my Facebook page there's a silly, musical video rendered on my old Hammond Organ.  One of the song snippets, played badly from my faulty memory of some of the notes, was made very famous by Dinah Shore.  If I put that hint over there, will I hear a loud chorus of "Dinah WHO?"  from 30 and 40 year olds who never heard of her? Might that confirm my  sneaking suspicion that I am much too elderly to be hanging out with those Facebook kids?  And what if I add a reference to another favorite Dyna, last name Flow,  who made my '51 Buick so shiftlessly  smooth.  Would the men in white coats be at my door to take me to the dementia ward? 

Facebook too personal?

Am I alone in becoming nervous and uncomfortable with the very personal stuff posted on Facebook?  Maybe I'm paranoid when I imagine all manner of bad guys using that information for purposes various and nefarious. 

I intentionally avoided mentioning last week's 56th anniversary of the day a radio fan and I got married on the air in Flint.  When you have been married that long you are expected to be wise and have profound things to say about marriage.  I'm not and I don't.

"Bones" ...Quirky fun

It's clear that I like quirkiness in my TV Fare. Which is probably why the only forensics/crime show I like is "Bones."  There's also the presence of Michaela Conlin.  She gets my vote as TV's hottest babe.  What a quirky love life "Angela"  leads. I guess she goes both ways.
Last night's episode started at a chicken farm operated by a guy named Cluckston.  That's funny.  I think the writers have great fun with their scripts.
Most interesting ... males are   most often portrayed as brilliant but dense, socially inept eggheads. But here we have a woman in that role.  Emily Deschanel as Dr. Temperance Brennan does it very well.  Fun fun fun.

Elitist Public Media

Are Pulic Radio and TV elitist?  Of course.  That's good.  We can use a little elitism to counteract the   crude, crass crapola that commercial media gives us.

Religious Jokes

This post also shows up in my Goofy Church Stuff blog. That one probably has even fewer readers than this one. Can that be possible?? Oh well, grinding out these silly things keeps me off the street.  But not always out of trouble.

Mr. Keillor might have been replaced by David Sedaris as America's greatest humorist but the aging guy from Lake Wobegon with the face made for radio reigns as our finest religious humorist. He gets away with things on Public Radio that would get him kicked off of commercial media. I love it. From one of his early annual joke shows: "What do you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness and a Unitarian? Someone who goes around knocking on doors for no particular reason."   "As nervous as a Christian Scientist with appendicitis." I got in trouble when I quoted that one in my column in a local paper. A member of that body was not amused, said followers of Mrs. Eddy do not get nervous about things like that.

Patriarch? Hell, No!

For the first time, I have heard myself referred to as a patriarch, which might be translated as "grand old founding father," revered and honored for something or other. I am most uncomfortable with that label.  It's not the "old" part of it, I can handle that OK.  It just sounds too serious. One definition is "last surviving member,"  so all you have to do to become a patriarch is live longer than somebody else. Being the object of reverence and honor  is laughable.  I am in at least my second childhood.  All I want to do is  write, not caring a whole lot if nobody reads it, and play with my toys. Anything heavier than that is too serious.

Tell Me A Story

I totally relate to Don Hewitt and the four words he lived by that changed TV news and made  "60 Minutes" an institution.  I loved it when he said he's not interested in issues. He just wants a good story.  Issues are boring.  Tell me a story. That's probably one of a number of things about me that irritate and frustrate friends and family. I won't talk about issues and I'm not much interested in what others have to say about their favorite issues.  Tell me a story. And that's why NPR's "On the Media" is the best thing on radio.  It's not about issues.  It's about how they are covered in the media.  It's "covering the coverage." It's about how the stories are told.  I love it.

Life's Railway to Bettie Page

With thanks to friend Beth for the title, here is one more attempt to link to my musical tribute to the great pin-up girl.  It's clear that I don't know what I'm doing but some wise guy said you have to find out what doesn't work before your great invention is produced. OK, so this is hardly great stuff.  But bodacious Bettie is!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GACpzAqzQZE

Funny Business

Talking with a retired college level English instructor, I asked if she is a Garrison Keillor fan.  All she had to say was that he's a good story teller but she's not that interested in humor.  I'm pleased at that encounter because it brought home something I had not previously realized.  I am a serious student of humor.  I'm quite fascinated by funny ideas and how they are created, presented and perceived.

That Bucket Woman

I sit here laughing myself silly, still not recovered from watching that wonderful Britcom, Keeping Up Appearances again last night. It is so hiliarious that it stays funny no matter how many times you see the same episodes.  Funny, funny stuff.  I just put a photo of the cast on my desktop.  That's good for a quick laugh anytime.

Phil Harris and Alice Faye

I somehow missed Phil and Alice on their radio sitcom when I was young.  Our family must have been listening to something else when it was on.
I've been hearing it on Max Schmid's show on  the Yesterday USA online network.  Max, who knows as much about radio's golden age as anybody, says it's the "only radio sitcom worth a damn."
He might be right.  The cast and the writing are so right. It's not clever, not witty,  It's just silly and funny,  perfectly suited to Phil, Alice and and Elliot Lewis as Franky Remley, one of the great comedy characters to come from radio's best days.

Catherine and Vincent

I saw a promo for some show featuring Linda Hamilton.  I didn't watch whatever it was.  I just enjoyed a romantic reverie thinking about her as Catherine, in love with Vincent the Lion-man who lived underground.
Ron Perlman was perfect as Vincent.

His Vincent voice was perfect, too ... quite unlike his natural voice heard in his other roles.  I don't know where that came from.  I read that he was offered deals for promoting products as Vincent, but he turned them down.  Good man. That would have been a travesty.

Oh boy, they sure don't make shows like "Beauty and the Beast" anymore.  1987 ... can it possibly be that long ago ? I suppose it's available  on DVD. I don't know if I could handle watching it again.  I'm too old for that much romance.

There's much about the show on the 'net.

"Christmas Story" heavily abridged

The channel that kept Jean Sherpherd's Christmas Story  running for 24 hours chopped it up pretty bad to make it  and the commercials fit in two hours.  It has become such a holiday tradition that we know when something is missing.

Perfectionists be Damned... or not?

Making You Tube videos is great fun but it brings out my latent, generally  well controlled perfectionism.  There is no possibility of producing sight and sound presentation of professisonal quality with the equipment available to me. Would it be perfect if I had the use of a high class production studio? Not a chance. Never good enough.  I couldn't even produce a decent, wholly satisfying  audio tape when I was in radio, presumably working with more or less professional equipment. I fussed over little things nobody would even notice but it was never quite right. Razor blades, splicing tape, multi-track machines. The digital generation doesn't know what it's missing.

The best that a perfectionist can hope for in his trek though an imperfect world is to  avoid subjecting others to his crazy standards.  We are crazed.

Herewith,  some painfully imperfect videos from my CAP production studio.  Cheap and Primitive.

Willie and me
Geriatric Playroom

Will the perfectionists be damned to an eternal hell of never getting it quite right or is there a corner of heaven where everything works?

One of the imperfections in this post, before I fixed it, wondered if perfectionists would be damed  to an eternal hell of never getting it right. I left out the "N."   Oh my, would that refer to an eternity of havng problems with dames ...dolls ... babes? Spare me that!

Invasion Iowa

I was about to risk being sent up the river to the Federal Pen for puchasing a bootleg DVD of a TV show not legally available.  It has now been released, so I must overcome my basic cheapskate nature  and buy it or ask someone who has it to make me a copy. That's not  exactly legal, either.  I'm not sure the Feds at our respective  doors would be impressed if I remind them  that everybody does it. 

What's got me into this moral dilemma is Invasion Iowa. I saw it on the Spyke channel back in 2005. There was some  kind of legal stuff that kept it from being available on DVDs until earlier this year.That mini series gets my vote as one of the funniest,  most elaborately orchestrated  and executed pranks of our time.

Riverside already had its share of what you might call future fame as the March 22, 2233 birthplace of Captain James T. Kirk, who revealed in a Star Trek episode that he was from the tall corn state. I don't know if it was William Shatner or someone else who came up with the idea of  playing  a gigantic trick on the Iowans who lived there in the fifth year of century 21.  Whoever conceived it, they did it up right.

Shatner and a crew of super-quirky movie makers blew into Riverside with a script for a sci-fi  film to star local people. It was  a gigantic prank  to see how those Iowans would perform if they thought they were actually making a film. If they did it today I guess it would be called a reality show. I don't want to spoil it by revealing many details, but  the whole thing  is absolutely  hilarious and the finished "product" is  so bad that it's good.  Some of the locals who watched themselves in the movie were mad as a flock of wet hens clucking their way out of a muddy Iowa corn field  when they learned that they had been had. Others found humor in it all  A big cash donation to the town helped to calm the angry ones.

It's ten episodes long..  If you have plenty of time and want to laugh yourself silly, don't miss Invasion Iowa. But be sure your copy is legal, in case the copyright cops are watching.

Tall Tales from the Tall Corn

What is it about Iowa that lends itself to huge hoaxes and pernicious pranks? Riverside's claim to fame is the future birthplace of Star Trek's Captain Kirk and a monumental hoax, Spike TV's   Invasion Iowa  from 2005.  Now the  town of Bancroft, Iowa is in the news.  An old hoax about Animusic, that astounding feat of computer animation that PBS runs at fund raising time,  is circulating again. The story says an incredible music machine was fashioned from tractor parts. The tale, a prank of the highest order, names names and institutions,   all phony, to add credibility to it all.  I don't think the person who started it has laid claim to his creation .  That's too bad.  It's as much a work of art as Animusic itself,  which exists only on  a computer's hard drive.   Rube Goldberg would love it.

Introverts and Cats

Harry is right.  A meeting of introverts would be a most  unconventional convention. It gets funnier as I think about it.  A ballroom full of tables with a lone occupant at each one, being his or her best introvert self. 
Putting together such a meeting would be like herding cats.  I wish I had thought up that phrase.  It's more than a clever analogy.  Its a fact of feline life.  Cats will not be herded.  I have three and they herd me.

 Up there is Amos, who became Amy, soaking up the heat from the Comcast box. She is evil.

Here is Andy.  He is a sweet old guy.  Like me. His full name is Andretti, after the race car driver.












Willie is much too cute and charming and she knows it.




I wonder if there could be a convention of introverts and their cats.  That might work for those who get along better with pets than other people.

I learn about Joseph Schmidt

Technically, if I wish to be painfully precise about word meanings, I cannot feel nostalgia for something I have not experienced.  I can't long to return to a place or time where I have not been.  But I can have a love of learning about things that happened before I was born or when I was too young to know about them. Harry Heuser puts it perfectly as "keeping up with the out-of-date" in his Broadcastellan Blog.

I  knew nothing of Joseph Schmidt until I watched a most fascinating TV documentary. A Rumanian born operatic tenor, he was  apparently an earlier version of Mario Lanza. A superb singer, very good actor, romantic movie star, much  loved in Germany and the Netherlands during the '30s.  All this in spite of being only five feet tall, standing on a platform so as not to be dwarfed by his leading ladies.   He died in 1942.

Does anybody remember  Joseph Schmidt  these days? Does anybody care?  I care.  That's why I blog.

His story:   http://www.dutchdivas.net/tenors/josephschmidt.html