Winnie the Pooh

What a total delight.  Walt would like it. Being a voice freak, I was concerned that nobody could sound like Sterling Holloway.  But Jim Miller comes pretty close.

Dr. Phil's Looney Bin Again

Dr. Phil to his hopelessly screwed up, nutcase, high drama addicted guest who should be in a rubber room:  "Forget the cameras.  This is not about television."  Does he really believe that???

R. I. P. Norma Zimmer

Norma Zimmer has died at 87.  Known today mostly as Lawrence Welk's Champagne Lady, she was a busy studio singer, working in  background groups for all the famous stars. She is heard on Bing Crosby's "White Christmas," among dozens of other all-time classic recordings.

Oh Frances

I am in love with a younger woman.  Frances Sternhagen is about a week and a half younger.

JANE RUSSELL

We lost Jane Russell on the last day of February, 2011.  Here's my tribute, a post from last March

                                                            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 building 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?
                                             ----------------------------
Friend Harry Heuser's punny comment is the best part of this one:

Bra-vo! Rarely has the matter in question been captured so well.


There’s a tricky design

of the cantilevered kind

of which canny Mr. Hughes,

made such clever use

that I’ve got “cantaloupes” on my mind.

The Lone Hornet

Three of my otherwise splendid offspring do not read the newspaper.  Only first-born Clifton Jr. and his community activist wife, Ann, keep up with what's up the old fashioned way. For those three and all others of the digital generation, Here's my  letter to the Chronicle about the true origin of the Green Hornet.  Incidentally, I don't hear much good about the film.

A review of "The Green Hornet film in the Jan. 20 Chronicle said  the story began as a movie serial in the 1940s.  Wrong!
Britt Reid, publisher of the Daily Sentinel, first drove the Black Beauty on Detroit's WXYZ Radio in the mid '30s.
The series was created by the people who had come up with "The Lone Ranger" and " Challenge of the Yukon." They thought it was time for a more contemporary, urban crime fighter.
They invented Reid as the great  nephew of the Lone Ranger, Dan Reid.   

Larry Listened

Can a compulsive talker be a good listener? Anything's possible but it doesn't happen often.  Can a professional talker ...news person, public speaker, commentator, broadcaster, talking head ... be a good listener?  The best  ones are very good listeners.  Larry King did it.

What's a woot?

I suppose it's quite normal for the Facebook Generation to use some old words that shock the old folks and invent some new ones to confound us. There's a strange word that one sees all over the social network world these days.  It is apparently an exclamation, usually to express great pleasure.  This is the only time I will ever type it and I refuse to say it. That's good because the Facebookers would get a good laugh upon hearing a geezer use their word.  Woot!

That was Burlesque

I'm not yet sure if I want to see "Burlesque." I prefer to remember the not-so-glitzy Avenue
Burlesque in Detroit.  I showed my birth certificate to get in to see Scurvy, the baggy-pants comic and
Blaze Fury, the original garter girl.

I won't play Misty for you, Evelyn

I've been thinking about Clint Eastwood's 1971 film, Play Misty for me.  He was a deejay and Jessica Walter was his crazed fan, Evelyn. Every deejay, especially those of us who worked overnight, know  there are some dangerously lonely women out there in radioland. Viewing that film has helped many an overheated deejay to keep his pants on.

Bob Hope's Writers

I was not a big Bob Hope fan.  Oops, I should fix that before I get deported for un-American activities. I might better have said I am not a fan of the snappy, topical one-liner kind of comedy that Bob did so well. Old ski-nose was a great and giving entertainer who probably made more people laugh, including our  service men and women, than anyone before or since.

Being a serious student of humor and comedy, I have  greatest admiration for the writers who put all  those gags in Hope's mouth. To his  credit, he often praised his writers for their good work.  There's a book, THE
LAUGH MAKERS  by Bob Mills, one of Bob Hopes best writers. If you want to know how it was done, this  will tell it all. Just think of the leg work and research it took to make every one of Bob's shows topical and local, something the members of each audience would relate to. When he did a show in my town he fired off a one liner about Nunica, a very small village near here.  He did that wherever  he went, making the audience laugh at things they know about. His overseas trips are full of topical gags that poked fun at something about the war or the particular military base where he was performing.

 I took a comedy writing course years ago and turned out quite a few groaners. When I am about to undergo some sort of surgical procedure I think up a topical  line to amuse the doctors and nurses. It doesn't always  work.  But my colonoscopy nurse thought it was real funny when I told her I drank my gallon of  Kickapoo Joy Juice to get cleaned out.  She was too young to know about Li'l Abner and  Dogpatch, so she thought I made up a funny word that had "poo" in it. If you don't know anything about that procdure I won't tell you why it was funny. An old friend told me my sense of humor is warped and untimely.  A local priest says it's devious.  They are both right.  That's why it's so much fun.

Zippy one liners are not my chosen brand of  humor.  I like a story or monologue that might or might not have a punchine but has laughs along the way.  If it's topical, that's even better.
Garrison Keillor does that well when he takes the Prairie show on the road. He always has something local and topical for the audience.  If he's in Florida his Lake Wobegon tale might include a bit about a Minnesotan vacationing in the Sunshine State.  If he's out West he speaks of a Lake Wobegon rebel who left the Lutherans and joined a California cult.

I guess I can't handle the shotgun comedy style.  I need to savor the humor. A belly laugh is always good but a  knowing chuckle is nice, too.
.

I Love Wires

Do I know where all these wires go and what they do?  More or less.  Sort of.  How many wires does it take to go wireless?  As many as I can find places to plug them into.

R. I. P. e-mail

I continue to moan and groan about the demise of e-mail, the last vestige of traditional letter writing. Today's college students don't use e-mail because "it's too slow."  They need the instant communication gratification of texting and social networking. To quote Chester A. Reily, "What a revoltin' development this is."  Nobody under 70 knows who Reily was.  I'm damed if I will tell them.  Let 'em wonder.
Oops, I got so hot under rhe collar that I left the N out of "damn."  No, I was  not thinking about dames, as in "there is nothing like one."  Nobody under 70 probably knows about that, either.  They think a dame is a British broad that went to the Queen who touched her with her royal whatever it is and said, "You are now a dame."

Facebook: I don't get it

The current storyline on the funny comic strip  "Zits," about mom and pop and their teen age son,  has the parents wishing they had not looked at Jeremy's Facebook page.  How true to life that is. The language and content I see my adult offspring and their kids puting on Facebook for all the world to see leaves me reeling.  So why do I look at it?  I don't  know. Ask Jeremy's mom and pop. Ask Jerry Scott and Jim Borgman.  Scott comes up with the stories and Borgman draws the pictures.  I wonder if they have teen agers.  They seem to understand them well.

Alright, every generation has its own communication style, designed to be incomprehensible to the old folks. I accept that.  I am old enough to be the father or grandfather of most users of Facebook.
But I'm puzzled by those bright, educated, literate members  who seem quiite content to communicate with nothing beyond "John Jones like Mary Smith's status." I just don't get it.
Most have abandoned e-mail, the last vestige of real letter writing.  One can get in touch with them only through a Facebook message. They check that every hour on the hour, apparently to determine who likes their status or who wants to be their friend. I don't get it.
ON THE OTHER HAND ...Silly old guys can have far too much fun with it.

Oldest Profession

It's sports.  Oldest profession.  I was about to say second most popular and profitable.  But I'm not sure that's true. Going  way back to the Roman and Greek games, right up to the present, sports has more fans and makes more money than sex.   When a tennis match can pre-empt a steamy soap opera, when sports stars  salaries are in the millions, it looks like sex has been replaced. I doubt that even the hottest lady of the night makes that kind of money.

Arthur Godfrey

Harry Heuser's  Broadcastellan Blog is currently opening with a photo of Arthur Godfrey admonishing himself to behave, which he has no intention of doing. Thinking about the old redhead gets  me and lots of other old broadcasters who idolized him, all warm and  fuzzy. What a broadcaster/charmer//entertainer/communicator/salesman. Arthur Godfrey.  The forgotten giant.,

Leave my song alone, Lionel

Copyright laws can't possibly keep up with technology. The internet makes it so easy to get  so-callled "intellectual property" for free  that lawyers and legislators are going nuts trying to figure out how to make us pay for it.  One of the old laws, which still exists so far as I know, is that you can't copyright a title. I'm ambivalent about that one.  If I want to write a song called  "I love you, " I want to be free to do it without getting sued by the Cole Porter estate or anybody else who put music to those three little words.  On the other hand,  I hope that anybody trying to write another "Stardust" or a novel about "Gone with the wind" might get some legal flack from Hoagy Carmichael's people or the Margaret Mitchell estate. 

So where am I going with this? One of my favorite songs is "Dancing on the Ceiling."  Rodgers and Hart wrote it a long time ago. A great melody line, appealing harmonic progressions and  a lyric that is  some of the greatest  romantic imagery ever produced.

                           He dances overhead on the ceiling near my bed
                            in my sight through the night...

It ends with imagery and rhyme that gives me goosebumps.

                             I love my ceiling more since it is a dancing  floor
                             just for my love

Will I go to the federal pen for posting those words without permission from the copyright owners? Will Lionel Ritchie go scot free for his  rock song "Dancing on the ceiling" on which he steals Fred Astaire's ceiling dance  and Rodgers and Hart's title?   There oughta be a law.

Walter Tetley: Leroy and Julius

I heard one of  radio's most recognizable voices on the Great Gildersleeve show mentioned in the previous post. Walter Tetley was  the voice of Leroy, Gildy's nephew.  He was also Phil Harris's bratty neighbor, Julius. Tetley's story is not a pretty one. He was in his 30s on those shows, still sounding like a pre-pubescent boy. Later he voiced some TV cartoon characters.   His voice never changed and he was quite short.There is one awful story that his mother had him castrated because she didn't want to lose the meal ticket that he provided with his early radio work. He spent his last years in a wheel chair, the victim of a motorcycle accident. A sad show business tale.
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Added July 3:  I just watched "Gildersleeve on Broadway."  Walter Tetley appeared, not as Gildy's nephew Leory, but in a bit part as a bellboy.   A review called him "Midget actor Walter Tetley."
There's a biography, Walter Tetley: For Corn's Sake  by  Ben Ohmart and Charles Stumpf.  Listening to old Phil Harris shows every Sunday Night on Yesterday USA Radio, I am becoming very interested in Walter, thinking about springing for the book.

Old Radio Commercials as history

Some radio historian has probably written about old radio commercials as a history of the times in which they were aired.  Here's one I heard last night on a "Great Gildersleeve" show from 1949. Sponsored by Kraft, makers of  Parkay Margarine, it told us that we could now buy colored margarine if our state was one that had made it legal.  But it would cost more because of a federal tax on it. No doubt that made no sense to any  present day youngsters under 70 or so who might have been listening. I remember when "oleo," as  we called it, had to  be sold  in its natural white and colored at home with a little packet of yellow coloring that came with it.  The dairy industry didn't want the margarine makers to fool us into thinking we were getting the real thing..  Some parts of the world were behind us in accepting the yellow non-dairy spread. .  Australia didn't legalize it until the '60s.

Geriatric Obstreperousness

Thanks to Helen Thomas, former dean of the Whitehouse press corps and Bob Garfield of NPR's "On the Media," one of my blogs will have a new name.  Formerly "Farting Around," it shall henceforth  be known as geriatric obstreperousness.  That's one of the possibilites that Bob came up with to explain the  recent comments of the old babe,  even saltier than usual for her. Oh, I still believe in farting around.  But at my age I can think of nothing more fun than doing it with geriatric obstreperousness.  I don't know if Bob writes his own commentary.  I think he does.Whoever thought that one up deserves some kind of literary award.