Archive for the ‘TV’ Category

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

Obit watch: January 8, 2016.

Friday, January 8th, 2016

I’m still kind of hoping for an obituary from a more mainstream news source, but Florence King, writer and National Review columnist, has died. Tributes from Tam and Lawrence.

This was a little surprising:

I’m not going to say she was as influential on my writing as P.J.: I came to her relatively late in life. But she was a damn funny writer (even if I can’t quote some of my favorite lines here), and the world is a lesser place for her passing. Frankly, we could do a lot worse than a monarchy. Especially one run by Florence King.

Pat Harrington Jr. A/V Club.

Interesting career. He started out on “The Jack Paar Show” (or “The Steve Allen Show”, depending on which obit you read).

His film credits include “The Wheeler Dealers” (1963) and “Move Over, Darling” (1963), both starring James Garner; “The President’s Analyst” (1967), starring James Coburn; and “Easy Come, Easy Go” (1967), starring Elvis Presley.

Of course, he was most famous as Schneider on “One Day at a Time”.

Ashraf Pahlavi, sister of Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi.

According to an internal secret history of the C.I.A., she also played a crucial role in the British- and American-inspired military coup that overthrew Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and restored her brother to the throne.

Really? I wonder where the NYT got access to this “internal secret history”.

Posted in 1970s, Books, Clippings, History, Obits, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: January 1, 2016.

Friday, January 1st, 2016

Wayne Rogers.

Unfortunately, his death seems to have fallen into the holiday gap, so everyone’s running the same AP obit. The LAT link above seems to be the most complete version.

Posted in 1970s, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 28, 2015.

Monday, December 28th, 2015

Haskell Wexler, noted cinematographer.

Mr. Sayles said Mr. Wexler had once told him the story of being torpedoed. “He said the U-boat surfaced as the sailors were swimming to their lifeboats,” he said, “and they all were afraid it was coming up to machine-gun them. Instead, the captain lifted a small movie camera to document his kill, and Haskell remembered thinking, ‘I wonder if he’s shooting color or black and white?’”

Meadowlark Lemon.

“Meadowlark was the most sensational, awesome, incredible basketball player I’ve ever seen,” basketball great Wilt Chamberlain, Lemon’s onetime teammate, said in a television interview shortly before his death in 1999, as the Times reported. “People would say it would be Dr. J or even Jordan. For me, it would be Meadowlark Lemon.”

Edited to add: NYT obit wasn’t up previously, but is now.

NYT obit for George Clayton Johnson.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: December 27, 2015.

Sunday, December 27th, 2015

Robert D. Douglas Jr.

I hadn’t heard of him before the NYT obit, but he led an interesting life: he became an Eagle Scout in 1925. In 1928, he and two other Eagle Scouts were selected to go on a safari with Martin and Osa Johnson; the three Scouts later published a book about their experience. He later went hunting for whales and bears off the Alaskan coast (and wrote another book), flew with Amelia Earhart in an early autogyro, and spent more time in Alaska stomping around with “the Glacier Priest” (and got another book out of that).

This has been floating around for a few days, but I finally found an obit I was willing to link to: George Clayton Johnson. Johnson wrote several of the best “Twilight Zone” episodes (odds are, if the episode you’re trying to remember wasn’t a Matheson episode, it was one of his). He also wrote “The Man Trap” for “Star Trek”, the story that “Ocean’s 11” was based on, and co-wrote “Logan’s Run”.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Yearly administrative note.

Friday, December 4th, 2015

This is your yearly reminder: if you use the Amazon search box on the right hand side of the page to buy stuff, I get a small kickback.

Said small kickback, as you all know, goes to purchasing toys for crippled orphans supporting this blog, mostly by enabling our purchases of Robert Ruark and Jack O’Connor books, along with other crap in general.

(Speaking of Ruark, I’m reminded that I have two historical notes coming up back to back before the year is over. One of those should be of some interest to Lawrence…)

(And speaking of Lawrence, I would be remiss if I did not note, as I do every year, that books from Lame Excuse Books make fine presents for the holidays, especially if you have SF or horror fans on your shopping list.)

I believe I recommended Amy Alkon’s Good Manners for Nice People Who Sometimes Say F*ck last year, but I’ll plug it again as she deserves it.

Another book that was loaned to me by a friend, and that I’ve almost finished – I will be purchasing my own copy, so I have no qualms about recommending it – is Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking. I somehow missed this when it came out in 2012, but it’s a very good book about the psychology of introversion, how to cope with being an introvert, and how to cope with significant others/family members who are introverts (if you’re an extrovert) or extroverts (if you’re an introvert).

I don’t see a shipping date for Archer Season 6 yet, but How to Archer: The Ultimate Guide to Espionage and Style and Women and Also Cocktails Ever Written made me laugh more than a cheap TV tie-in book by some anonymous ghostwriter had any right to. (But get the Kindle edition, or a used copy.)

cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra cobra

Edited to add: Also. If I’ve managed to irritate you, please consider supporting the fine folks at Popehat through their Amazon link instead.

Also also: I haven’t given them any money, but I’ve always been kind of fond of the HouChron‘s “Goodfellows” program.

Also also also: the Reason Foundation is having their annual fundraising drive. And they will accept bitcoins, too.

Posted in Admin, Books, Christmas, Neuroscience, Reptiles, Snakes, TV | Comments Closed

TMQ Watch: November 24, 2015.

Tuesday, November 24th, 2015

Old man yells at cloud!

This week’s TMQ, after the jump…

(more…)

Posted in NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: November 2, 2015.

Monday, November 2nd, 2015

My two favorite Fred Thompson moments:

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Nixon, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 20, 2015.

Tuesday, October 20th, 2015

Irwin Schiff, noted tax protester.

In essence, Mr. Schiff argued that the Constitution had established that the value of the dollar was based on a certain amount of gold or silver, and that after the so-called gold standard was phased out, starting during the Depression, citizens no longer earned dollars, or income.

His second basic argument was that since all information in a tax return can be used against the taxpayer in a criminal proceeding, filling out a return — he called it a “tax confession” — violated the Fifth Amendment protection against self-incrimination.

Mr. Schiff was serving a 14-year prison sentence when he died.

Pat Woodell, aka “Bobbie Jo Bradley” of “Petticoat Junction”.

Posted in 1970s, Clippings, Law, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: October 16, 2015.

Friday, October 16th, 2015

There’s a really nice obituary in today’s NYT (written by Bruce Weber, one of the paper’s best obit writers) for Sybil Stockdale.

Mrs. Stockdale was the wife of James B. Stockdale. You may remember him as Ross Perot’s vice presidential candidate in 1992. But before that:

A captain when he was shot down over North Vietnam on Sept. 9, 1965, Admiral Stockdale was listed for several months as missing in action before the Pentagon learned he was being held in Hanoi at Hoa Lo prison (the so-called Hanoi Hilton). He survived seven and a half years there, subject to torture and held in leg irons and solitary confinement for long periods, before he was released, returning home in February 1973.

During his captivity, Mrs. Stockdale became a leading advocate for the POW/MIA cause. She also worked with the CIA to gather information. This story brings a smile to my face:

In one [letter -DB], she sent a cheery note about his mother along with a picture of a woman bathing in the Pacific Ocean. Admiral Stockdale’s mother loathed swimming, however, and the picture was not of her; the note said she had come to visit because she wanted to have a good “soak,” a code word that instructed him to soak the photograph in urine. When he did so, he discovered, hidden behind the backing of the photograph, a small swath of special carbon paper that could be used to press messages in invisible ink into his own letters home.

Speaking of the CIA and other bits of history, Ken Taylor has also passed away. Mr. Taylor was the Canadian ambassador to Iran during the hostage crisis:

When the U.S. embassy in Tehran was stormed by Islamist students and militants, six American diplomats escaped and found sanctuary in the homes of Taylor and his first secretary John Sheardown. In addition to shielding the Americans from Iranian capture, Taylor also played a crucial role in plotting their escape.
Working with CIA officials and Canadian Prime Minister Joe Clark, Taylor obtained for the Americans six Canadian passports containing forged Iranian visas that ultimately allowed them to board a flight to Switzerland. He undertook all these covert actions at a high personal risk, as he and his team would have been taken hostage themselves in the case of discovery by the Islamist militants.

Last, but by no means least: “fresh-faced ingénue” of the 1940s, Joan Leslie.

At 9, touring with her sisters, she played Toronto. Their act included her impression of Durante.
One night after the show, her dressing room door opened to reveal a man armed with nothing but criticism. Her Durante was all wrong, he told her. Unbidden, he showed her the right way to do it.

Read the obit for the punchline, if you haven’t already guessed it.

Posted in 1970s, Clippings, Heroism, History, Movies, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

TMQ Watch: September 29, 2015.

Wednesday, September 30th, 2015

We apologize for the delay. We had a dinner engagement last night at Rocco’s Grill in Bee Cave. Some things are just more important than TMQ blogging, like dinner with family.

After the jump, this week’s TMQ…

(more…)

Posted in Food, NFL, Sports, TMQ watch, TV | Comments Closed

Short random notes: September 24, 2015.

Thursday, September 24th, 2015

James Mee has his job back.

I feel sure I’ve written about this before, but I can’t find the post now. Mr. Mee was a deputy with the LA County Sheriff’s Office. He was fired because of his alleged involvement in a police chase that ended when the vehicle he was supposedly chasing crashed into a gas station.

At least, that was the claim. So why was he really fired? Well, Mr. Mee was also one of the officers who arrested Mel Gibson back in 2006.

Mee’s lawyers argued that sheriff’s managers falsely blamed Mee for leaking details of Gibson’s 2006 arrest and the actor’s anti-Semitic tirade to celebrity news site TMZ.com. Mee, his attorneys alleged, was repeatedly subjected to harassment and unfair discipline in the years that followed, culminating in his firing over the 2011 crash.

This one’s for Lawrence: Frank Gehry is working on a project to rehabilitate the Los Angeles River. This has some people upset.

(Obligatory. Plus, the video I’ve linked to before has been taken down, so call this a bookmark.)

Posted in Art, Bookmarks, California Über Alles, Clippings, Cops, Gehry, Law, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: September 14, 2015.

Monday, September 14th, 2015

Moses Malone, legendary NBA player with the Philadelphia 76ers, Houston Rockets, and San Antonio Spurs (among other teams). NYT. HouChron.

Frank D. Gilroy. Interesting story. He knocked around television for a while in the 1950s and 1960s, then had a huge Broadway hit with “The Subject Was Roses”…and then was unable to replicate that success, and spent the rest of his life knocking around movies and theater.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: September 8, 2015.

Tuesday, September 8th, 2015

Judy Carne. WP. She’s just at the fringes of my memory: I remember watching “Laugh-In” with my parents, and I remember “sock it to me”, but she left the show when I was four…am I inventing these memories?

Martin Milner. “Route 66” went off the air a year before I was born, but I loved “Adam-12” when I was a wee lad. I have the first season on DVD, and you know, it still holds up well.

The FARK thread is actually pretty respectful, and worth reading if you were a fan of “Adam-12”, “Emergency”, and “Dragnet”. It reminds me that I want to write a re-evaluation of both “Dragnet” and “Adam-12”, arguing that what Jack Webb was trying to represent was his vision of how policing in general, and the LAPD specifically, should work. Not the way it really did work, but the ideal that he felt they should strive for; in a way, you might say that Webb was trying to represent on television Peel’s Nine Principles of Policing.

Posted in 1970s, Clippings, Cops, Law, Obits, TV | 1 Comment »

Obit watch: August 10, 2015.

Monday, August 10th, 2015

I was too young to remember Frank Gifford‘s playing days, but I do have fond memories of him from Monday Night Football in the 1970’s.

Interesting bit of trivia:

While at U.S.C., he developed a persona, however modest, beyond the football field, gaining Hollywood bit parts. In the 1951 Dean Martin-Jerry Lewis football movie “That’s My Boy,” it was Gifford who kicked the winning field goal as the stand-in for Lewis. A handsome campus hero, Gifford made his mark in contemporary literature as well, serving as the glittering object of envy for one of his classmates, Frederick Exley, whose 1968 memoir, “A Fan’s Notes,” is a staple of the genre (although the author freely acknowledged that some of it was fiction).

Posted in 1970s, Clippings, NFL, Sports, TV | Comments Closed

Obit watch: July 20, 2015.

Monday, July 20th, 2015

Interesting fact about the late Alex Rocco: he was also the voice of Roger Meyers Jr. (A/V Club.)

The A/V Club is also reporting the death of George Coe.

He went on to to appear in films like Kramer Vs. Kramer, and in 1968 was nominated for a Best Live-Action Short Film Oscar for “The Dove,” a satire of Ingmar Bergman films, which he both starred in and co-directed.

I have a copy of “The Dove” somewhere on my MacBook…

Mr. Coe was perhaps best known to contemporary audiences as the voice of Woodhouse in Archer.

Finally, Aubrey Morris has also passed away.

In a career of more than five decades, Mr. Morris brought a memorable touch of eccentricity to films including the cult thriller “The Wicker Man” (1973), Woody Allen’s “Love and Death” (1975) and Ken Russell’s “Lisztomania” (1975).

He was perhaps most famous for playing Mr. Deltoid in A Clockwork Orange.

Posted in Clippings, Movies, Obits, TV | Comments Closed

« Older Entries
Newer Entries »