New posts over at the SDC site: a review of Pinthouse Pizza (updates to come) and a post about America’s favorite British chef and the latest episode of his TV show. (Can you say, “batshit crazy”, boys and girls?)
On a semi-unrelated note, I have an App.net account now. I will try to start sending out notifications of new and updated posts here and on the SDC site.
I hate being backed into a corner.
One of the reasons I wanted to do “Week of Gatsby” was so I could link to the classic Andy Kaufman routine from “Saturday Night Live”. I didn’t think that would be the problem it turned into.
That clip is not available, in any form, on the Internet, as far as I can tell. NBC Universal, as the copyright holders, seems to aggressively go after anyone who posts SNL clips on YouTube (as is their right, of course).
That clip is also not available, as far as I can determine, in Hulu’s library of SNL clips.
You can watch the entire episode with Kaufman (season 3, episode 13, with Art Garfunkel and Stephen Bishop) on Hulu – if you pay $8 a month for Hulu Plus (or sign up for a free trial). Otherwise, you’re out of luck. I say: to heck with that.
The text of Kaufman’s routine is available from the SNL Transcripts site, but reading the text of a Kaufman routine is like dancing about architecture.
This, however, might make the effort worthwhile: from a Cornell website, the “New Student Reading Project”, some notes on Gatsby. Chapter 7, “Performing Gatsby“, is rather interesting, especially for the comments by some of Kaufman’s contemporaries on his routine.
David Brenner: “And, you know, people would boo the crying. They were New Yorkers.”
(Also: a young Sam Waterson? This I’ve got to see. Was the man ever “young”?)
Yeah, we know, we’re late. We didn’t realize until Wednesday that it was that time of year again, and it took us a while to work up the gumption to do this. Part of the problem, of course, is that this is the column where TMQ mocks the mock drafts. As we’ve said in the past, TMQ thinks this is more amusing than it actually is, and there’s really no reason to go item by item through his attempts at humor.
But we have an obligation to our reader. So we might as well get into it…
Firings: Mike Dunlap, Charlotte Bobcats head coach. One season, 21-61.
Obits: Richie Havens. NYT. LAT. A/V Club.
E. L. Konigsburg, noted author (From the Mixed-up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler
This is one of those little tidbits that I find fascinating: “From the Mixed-Up Files…” won the Newbery Medal in 1968. That was Ms. Konigsburg’s second book. Her first book, Jennifer, Hecate, Macbeth, William McKinley, and Me, Elizabeth
There will probably be more to say about this tomorrow, but Allan Arbus has also passed away.
In other news, while I was out and about having fun, Lawrence was working. Specifically, he’s been posting video of the Travis County DA being arrested for DWI, and of the DA in jail.
And what do I have to offer to compare with that? Pictures, maybe?
Here we see the elusive Mike the Musicologist. While Jim attempts to throw a net over him, let me tell you about Mutual of Omaha…
And one for my great and good friend Weer’d Beard: ducks!
Heard on the CBS coverage: “How do you lock down an entire city?” (Nobody had a really good answer to that question.)
More:
(CBS, or the local CBS affiliate – I’m not sure which – just ran a commercial featuring an exploding air conditioner. Bad timing, guys.)
I may come back to this later. I want to do some research and possibly talk to Lawrence. In other news:
Jimmy Haslam recently bought the Cleveland Browns. Haslam made a pile of money off of the Pilot Flying J chain of truck stops and “travel centers”. Yesterday, the FBI raided the Pilot Flying J headquarters:
More:
The Browns just can’t catch a break, can they? It will be interesting to see how this plays out as we get closer to the NFL season.
(Heard on CBS: “I was going into this thinking there was some connection to somewhere.” No s–t, Sherlock.)
Edited to add: Since folks are distracted by Boston at the moment, let me note here: the confirmed death toll in West stands at 12.
According to the association, one of those firefighters was from Dallas: all of the others were volunteer firefighters with the West Fire Department.
“anyone who has lived in Travis County for six months” and “is not currently under indictment”.
Heh. Heh. Heh. Personally, I would have waited until she was actually convicted, but that’s just my strategic thinking.
(Hattip: Lawrence.)
The “not yet named as a suspect” in the Kaufman County DA shootings had “more than 20 guns” in a storage unit. Or, as we call that in Texas, “just about average”.
And the firearms included two or three handguns and seven assault rifles.
I’d like to see these “assault rifles”; I don’t trust the NYT to know which end the bullets come out of.
Edited to add: Well. Well, well, well. Well. How about that Aryan Brotherhood?
Speaking of trusting the NYT on guns:
More:
The Times assembled a database and analyzed several months of ads from Armslist
Whooop! Whoop! Journalist with a database alert!
I have to head out the door shortly, but may come back to this NYT article later on.
Obit watch: Pat Summerall.
Frank Bank, most noteworthy for playing Clarence “Lumpy” Rutherford on “Leave It To Beaver”, has died.
It is somewhat interesting (at least to me) that Mr. Bank was unable to escape his role as “Lumpy”. So he left acting and became a successful broker.
Also noteworthy:
“Call Me Lumpy
Two of my favorite websites intersect today.
XKCD’s “What if?” answers the question “What’s the worst thing that can happen if you misuse a pressure cooker in an ordinary kitchen?”
I want to start a Kickstarter in order to get someone to do this and put it on YouTube, where I can watch it from a safe distance. Anyway, this is how you get dioxygen difluoride, or FOOF.
The fun part is that XKCD goes on to quote Derek Lowe’s discussion of FOOF (yet another in the “Things I Won’t Work With” series). A part XKCD left out, discussing a scientific paper on the properties of FOOF:
This also gives me a transparent excuse to link another more recent Derek Lowe post, with YouTube video from France of some scientists doing science! Specifically, the French scientists in question are reacting chlorine trifluoride with various common laboratory objects: plexiglass, wood, and a gas mask, among other items. The results are entertaining, for values of entertaining that include “Gee, I’m glad these guys are doing it and not me.”
Somebody in the comments posted this link to the older version of Air Products Safetygram #39: the newer version is described as “sanitized”, and lacks the photos of raw chicken on fire.
One eyewitness described the incident by stating, “The concrete was on fire!”
Thinking about what I wanted to write, I came to the realization that I’ve already written much of what I wanted to say: he was a huge influence on how I think about movies (for which I am grateful), his views on what is and is not art were questionable, and many of the political views he expressed later in his life were appalling. (Roger should have spent more time reading Mencken.)
A/V Club. Onion. There are several posts at Jimbo’s site, but this one in particular seems to be worth highlighting.
This whole thing is kind of odd, taken in the light of Roger’s April 2nd blog post, where he talks about launching a Kickstarter campaign to bring back “At the Movies”, relaunching RogerEbert.com, and various other projects. I wonder how things went downhill that fast.
And I also wonder what’s going to happen to RogerEbert.com. My understanding is that Ebert et al planned to move the site to their own servers, and off the Sun-Times site. That’s fine. But I went to the site for the first time in weeks yesterday and realized that I wasn’t all that interested any longer; only one of the current reviews was written by Ebert. Many of the others were written by Richard Roper (who I only tolerated because he was on the same show as Ebert), Ignatiy Vishnevetsky, Jim Emerson, and other reviewers who I don’t find interesting. I’m hoping the site stays up as an archive of Ebert’s writing (and it’d be nice if it also archived “At the Movies”), but it isn’t a place I’m going to go for movie criticism any longer.
That’s a little mean, but it is also the truth. Let’s end on an upbeat note. Or two.
They don’t make them like that any more. (Actually, they do, but only for the SyFy channel.)
I couldn’t find their “Worst Movies of 1992″ show online, but here’s their original review of “Shining Through”, which was their pick for worst movie that year (this clip does include the strudel scene):
Someone’s done an IMDB list of all of Siskel and Ebert’s worst movies of the year, just in case you’re interested. A Google search will turn up clips from some, but not all, of those episodes.
More:
This is a story I am not proud of. In my defense, I was younger and dumber at the time.
A long time ago, I worked for the IRS; I was a “data transcriber”, which meant I typed in information from tax forms.
One day, they called all of the employees in the Austin service center together for a special assembly. It turned out the purpose of this assembly was to sell us on purchasing US Savings Bonds…and the powers that be had decided the best way to do this was to show us a “special episode” of “The Golden Girls” that had the characters explaining how wonderful savings bonds were. I don’t believe this was ever broadcast; I think it was something the government commissioned from the producers of “The Golden Girls”. I am willing to bet everyone got paid for their work, and I am also willing to bet that it was more than $60,000 even in 1986 dollars.
…or are there other folks out there who see the Pocket Hose commercial and say to themselves “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn“? (I can’t get the video to start where I want it to, even with YouTube’s embed link, so fast-forward to about 56 seconds in to see what I’m talking about.)
(And how have I gotten by for this long without a “Cthulhu” tag? Fixed now.)
Well, you don’t say. More guns. Less crime. And the WP admits it. Interesting.