(You know, I may not be terribly observant. But it never clicked with me that he was in “This Island Earth”, which I have seen (in the MST3K version)).
And, though I have never been a big fan of The Wizard of Oz, I do want to link to the A/V Club’s obit for Ruth Robinson Duccini, the last surviving female Munchkin. Jerry Maren, according to reports, is the last surviving Munchkin.
Pretty much all of these strike me as good choices, except “Roger and Me”. “Pulp Fiction”, I’m sure, will be divisive. More at the LAT link, including the stuff you probably haven’t heard of. On that list, I’m kind of intrigued by “Daughter of Dawn”, “King of Jazz”, and “Notes on the Port of St. Francis”.
Man, yesterday was a rough day for actors and actresses. I decided to hold off until this morning on posting obits, figuring that would give the various papers of record some time to get their thoughts and acts together.
Once upon a time, a long time ago, I loved the “worst” lists published in various places. Jeff Millar‘s worst movies list in the HouChron. Siskel and Ebert’s “worst movies of the year” episode. High points, things I looked forward to every year.
(On a side note, it fills me with delight down to the bottom of my coal-black little heart that Siskel & Ebert.org has the complete 1992 worst up on their site. This is the year that Roger lost the coin flip and picked Shining Through as his worst movie of the year, complete with the interminable strudel scene. Really. I kid you not. Melanie Griffith just goes on. And on. AND ON. Here, watch for yourself:
The Shining Through section begins at about 15:30, but you should really watch the whole thing.)
But things have changed. Siskel and Ebert and Millar are all dead. For a while, the AV Club was an acceptable substitute.
But this year’s AV Club is a little off. Take their worst movies of the year, for example. I admit I have not seen Planes (I don’t care for Pixar films) or A Good Day to Die Hard. But were they really among the worst movies of the year, in a year that included The Purge and The Incredible Burt Wonderstone? Worse than Last Vegas or the Carrie remake? At least Battle of the Year made their list. (Didn’t see it, but saw the trailer for it.)
Smurfs 2 came out this year. It isn’t on the AV Club list. Enough said.
Likewise, a “worst TV” list that doesn’t include Bob’s Burgers, Family Guy, or Raising Hope is pretty much worthless, and tells me that the AV Club writers are either on drugs or taking payoffs from Fox.
But there is one thing I can count on, although it technically isn’t a “worst” list (except maybe of family disasters): the Carolyn Hax Hootenanny of Holiday Horrors. The 2013 edition is here.
All of the sudden she stuck out her hand and bellowed “SPOOOOOON!” at which point someone meekly handed her a spoon and she proceeded to stir the gravy.
(And dryer lint really is great for starting fires. Especially with a flint and steel. At least, that’s what I learned in the Boy Scouts.)
Edited to add more: someone on the AV Club posted a link to “The Dissolve”, aka “Where Many of the AV Club’s Most Interesting Writers Went to Languish In Obscurity”. And they have their own worst list, which I find…kind of credible.
Yeah, okay, the Die Hard movie is on it, and Smurfs 2 isn’t, but they do get points for reminding me of some other candidates for year’s worst movie. For example, The Internship, aka “A Two Hour Long Commercial for Google”, and Movie 43. Might be worth keeping an eye on this site in 2014.
Holiday quiz time! Test your knowledge of ‘Elf,’ ‘Home Alone’ and more
Last year, we ran a hugely popular quiz from Dale Roe for what might be the greatest holiday movie of all time, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation.”
And that was as far as I got, since:
The article is behind the Statesman‘s paywall.
Everybody knows the greatest holiday movie of all time is the original “Die Hard“.
(Though the less cynical side of me thinks The Annotated Christmas Carol would be a swell thing to have, even if it is unlikely to displace Mr. McGee in my affections. But I’m also a sucker for annotated books.)
When I was younger, my family had a subscription to Scientific American, and I loved “Mathematical Games” (though I didn’t really have the mathematical background at the time to follow many of Gardner’s columns). When I was older, I encountered him as a skeptic, in the pages of the Skeptical Inquirer as well as in Science: Good, Bad, and Bogus and Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science.
Anyway, my point (and I do have one) is that this a very good thing. I’m not sure how many Gardner fans are out there in my audience, and if any of them already knew about this; but if you did know, why didn’t you tell me?
(There was a period of time when I was going to see a lot of movies at the Dobie Theater here in Austin; this was before the Alamo Drafthouse, and Dobie was the “art” film theater. Anyway, it seemed like every movie I went to see had the trailer for “All the Vermeers in New York” in front of it. Drove me absolutely bugf–k nuts. The trailer was so annoying, it killed any desire I might have had to see the movie.)
Over the past few years, we have come to the conclusion that the word “professional” is becoming the most abused word in the English language. “Professional grade” pickup trucks; as a dedicated amateur, can I save a few bucks by purchasing a non-professional grade one? “That’s not professional” has become a commonly used phrase in business; what that really means, as we see it, is “I don’t like it, but if I invoke the word ‘professional’, you can’t argue with me.”
What does this have to do with TMQ? Well, in this week’s edition, after the jump…
(You know, I’d read about Mantango in one of the Golden Turkey books, but it wasn’t until I read the Wikipedia entry that I became aware it was based on a William Hope Hodgson short story.)
I was unfamiliar with much of Harrison’s work. Apparently, he wrote a lot of novels set in Africa. But perhaps his biggest claim to fame is a short story, “Roller Ball Murder”, which was published in Esquire in 1973.
Norman Jewison hired Harrison to do a screenplay based on the story. The result:
We apologize for the delay in this week’s TMQ Watch. Allergies or a cold or something are still kicking our butts. It is our profound hope that, when science perfects the uploading of consciousness to machines, they choose not to emulate the human sinuses.
(Drainage!)
(On the other hand, are the sinuses necessary to fully emulate human consciousness? Is consciousness itself a chaotic system, with a sensitive dependance on initial conditions? Would leaving the sinuses out of the emulation change the nature of the emulation?)
(Worth noting before the jump: this week’s TMQ, and by implication, this week’s TMQ Watch, may contain possible spoilers for “Breaking Bad”, “Under the Dome”, and “The Bridge”.)
Ken Norton, former heavyweight champion of the world and the man who broke Ali’s jaw.
Richard C. Sarafian, film and television director, perhaps most famous for Vanishing Point.
(He also directed the “Living Doll” episode of the original “Twilight Zone”; there’s a funny story in the LAT obit about that, which I won’t spoil here.)
Ellie Rucker has also passed away. This means little to anyone who didn’t live in Austin during the 1980s and early 1990s, but Ms. Rucker was the Statesman “consumer columnist”. This meant, in the pre-Internet/pre-Google days, that she answered questions from readers such as “Where can I find beeswax?”, ran handy household tips, and sometimes even mediated disputes between customers and businesses.
I always liked Ms. Rucker’s column, as did many of my friends. When she retired and was replaced by another writer, we continued to refer to that column as “Not Ellie Rucker”, in her honor.
(You’ll note that I didn’t link to Ms. Rucker’s actual obit. That’s not by choice; of course, the Statesman wants you to pay to read it.)
Football season again. Soon, the air will chill. Soon, the Christmas decorations will start appearing in stores. Soon, Gregg Easterbrook will be writing about TV shows and the blur offense.
Oh, wait. Did we say “soon”? We mean “now”. After El Jumpo…
. Think The Polar Express but with shoggoths.
. Hmmmm hmmm hmmm. Somebody might get this for Christmas. (Hey, $8 for the Kindle edition?!)
off the shelf for the annual re-reading.)
would be a swell thing to have, even if it is unlikely to displace Mr. McGee in my affections. But I’m also a sucker for annotated books.)
.
and 
.
was my introduction to Chesterton, and let us not forget 
.