I'm sure that I've hinted about it before, but there was a time that I'd tell receptionists or someone whom I didn't think really needed my name that I was either Peter Fonda, Phillip Michael Thomas or Anwar Sadat depending on my mood. Now as I've gotten older, my son's favorite movie for the past couple of months has been Thomas and the Magic Railroad with Alec Baldwin and Peter Fonda.

Of course there's nothing wrong with the flick, but we have so much Thomas and part of me wishes that he'd occasionally want to see something from one of the disks narrated by George Carlin or Ringo Starr. Carlin's work is pretty straight, so I just long for it to have something different in the background, while Ringo apparently did the first season, when "Mr. Conductor" was called "The Fat Conductor" and according to my daughter, there's a storyline in which one of the engines narrowly escapes "sudden death".

IOW: It's after 1AM and my boy is showing no sign of going to sleep. Right now, he's got a couple of chairs lined-up and he's climbing back and forth from me to the other end, while Mr. Fonda is letting "Lady" loose in the other room.

Oh, and "Baby Elmo" is getting carried along, so he keeps whining and asking for a bottle.

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I'm not going to name him up-top because he would find it via a Google Blogsearch and then I'd be outed, but lately I've taken an inordinate amount of pleasure in teasing a Bubble 2.0 figure on his own blog. I don't know why. I've never met the guy and have nothing against him. In fact there's nothing really wrong with him making a living through writing and webcasting, it's just that something inside of me takes pleasure in publicly questioning the validity of his messages.

Though, now that others have joined-in and the chorus is getting louder, the exercise is beginning to lose some of its appeal.

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Earlier this evening, I flashed over to the website for Craig Ferguson's show because I couldn't remember the name of the musical act and her voice was still in my head. If you haven't heard Nellie McKay, I can certainly suggest that you watch somebody's copyright infringement of her Friday night appearance before it's jerked from YouTube.

Of course, she's that whole jazzy piano, retro sound that has been among my faves for a while and I'd say from this one performance, I'd compare her to Rickie Lee Jones. Though after I submit this post, I'm going to flip through some of her other YouTubes, so I'll have a better idea and I might possibly try to find a legal copy to burn for our car ride tomorrow.

BTW: While you're there, you may notice that CBS uploads portions of Craig's monologue-type things. If you go to his main website, you'll find that they produced a montage of Tom Snyder clips from when he hosted the show and because I missed it the first time, I'll also recommend that you watch Craig's "Show & Tell" from July 30th because as usual, he was hilarious.

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Because a lot of this post has been me repeating myself, I thought I'd point-out that American Express has now uploaded their "Members Project" commercial and another video featuring "Tim from the office next door". Now that I've seen both and have done some side-by-side comparisons, I'm pretty sure that my initial instinct was right and as I posted the other day, he's being played by David Alan Basche, whom I recognized from a crappy sitcom which I mostly watched due to Peter Bonerz's involvement.

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And finally; About once a month, I turn on the local country station and for some reason, the last couple of times, a novelty ballad has played during my short drive and though you may want to go back and wash your mind out with the Nellie McKay video or her newest Amazon Sampler afterward, the Good-Ole-Boy in me still gets a kick from the words to Billy Currington's song.

Usually when I'm making a mid-evening run to the grocery store, I quickly flip through my radio presets for something to hear.

Sometimes, I'll land on Alice Cooper's show (brought to you by the Partnership for a Drug-Free America); Sometimes it's Dr. Drew and because it's only a two minute drive to anywhere, I occasionally land on a syndicated program called "The Tom Leykis Show" which is sort of a chauvinistic, male-centric advice program. (Sample quote from this evening: "When you look at Victoria Beckham, don't think that all girls in England look like her. For every Victoria Beckham, there's a hundred fat girls with bad teeth")

For years, whenever I've heard Tom Leykis, I'd wonder if he really was Jay Thomas doing a show under a different name because the voice sounds very similar to me. Not to mention the fact that the Leykis program is distributed by CBS Radio and is broadcast from the Paramount lot, which is where, I believe they did Mr Thomas' last couple of television shows.

Tonight, I took a couple of minutes to look-up Mr. Leykis and found on his Wikipedia page that he's quite likely a real person, who has been in radio since the '70s. After I was fully satisfied about the person to whom I've been listening, I flipped over to read Jay Thomas' entry and though I knew he still has as good of a film career as he's ever had, I also discovered that he's on Sirius Satellite Radio and he moonlights as a licensed real estate broker, working with a Coldwell Banker office in Santa Barbara.

( More, Completely Useless Information about Similar Subjects after the Jump )

I just ran across an article promoting a book, which could be subtitled; "Let's trash my dead aunt in hopes of redeeming my dead mother and to make a little money, while whatever you do, never trust anything said by a press agent". Perhaps there is more to the book than that bareboned description, but it certainly could describe the newspaper piece.

Anyway, though the whole thing may be an interesting read, I found the following paragraph slightly amusing;

At first, John kept up with his family, buying Mimi a house in Dorset when her Liverpool home was overrun by Beatles' fans, and spoiling his little sister Julia with new clothes and visits to his first big house, in Weybridge, Surrey, where they all ate bacon and eggs in the formal dining room.

• Th AP is reporting that a company in Colorado is recalling 15,000 pounds of sausage. So, though it isn't directly related, maybe that guy in the Sonic® commercials who looks like he could be Charles Grodin's son will shut the hell up about "streams of Colorado ham flowing down from the mountains", or whatever it is he says. Better yet, maybe those two goofs will take on the PE teacher and her van-driving dweeb in a cage match. Now, that's something I'd watch on pay-per-view.



• Also, I guess the administration should batten down the hatches because Sly Stallone opposes the border fence.



• And finally, though it may be a sign of getting older, but Lara Spencer is always going to be the babe from Antiques Roadshow in my mind. She's probably been off of that show for a year or two and I really can only stop on her flashy gossip show when she's on the screen, but whenever my wife would watch Roadshow and I was too lazy to do something else, it was the sight of Lara in jeans and a sweater that'd keep me in my seat.

ETA: Because even the most trafficked sites in the world aren't perfect;

If you live in the wild, wild West, you'll see Cowboys & Indians magazine near the checkout lines. I've never bought the thing, so I don't have a judgment about whether it's geared toward real Cowboys and Indians or just tourists in search of an image, but the cover of the newest edition certainly grabbed my attention and I thought I'd share.

For unimportant reasons, I found myself having to kill some time in a Walgreens this evening.

As I thumbed through their bin of discount movies, I was very impressed to find a copy of Billy Jack, but I didn't buy it because it had no extras. I was also very surprised to see a couple of Jack Palance films, you'd think that somebody might've pulled them and have marked them up, but there were a couple of titles with multiple copies available.

Out of the hundred or so disks in the bin, I purchased two. One was Abbott and Costello doing their version of Jack and the Beanstalk, which I thought my daughter might enjoy and the other was a four episode disk of the old Burns & Allen show.

I know that I've mentioned it before, but I consider Burns & Allen one of the greatest sitcoms in the history of television. Unfortunately, it's rarely shown these days and as time keeps getting further and further from the early 50s, it'll probably get more and more rare, so I bought it as an introductory disk with the idea that someday, I'm going to buy the whole package.

For those who have never seen this treasure, Gracie Allen was a comic genius, who with her husband and partner George Burns, she created a character on vaudeville and carried it through radio onto the television. George dibbled and dabbled in the type of jokes that he was always known for doing, but in those early days, he was mostly the straight man to Gracie's antics.

Gracie was so funny that she needed more than one straight man, so in addition to George, she had her television neighbors of Harry and Blanche. Blanche was deftly played by Bea Benaderet, a staple of early television and she must be featured in all four episodes on my disk because she's the only person mentioned on the box, with the exception of George and Gracie.

What has prompted this post is the "credit" which follows her name on the packaging; "Featuring a hilarious next door neighbor, played by Bea Benaderet (later the voice of Betty Rubble on the Flintstones), who aided and abetted the zany Gracie with all of her harebrained schemes." Now, once again, I haven't yet viewed this disk, but Bea was certainly another straight man and though she did voice Betty Rubble for a while; I'm sure most people remember her as Jethro's mother from The Beverly Hillbillies, the mother on Petticoat Junction or from one of her many guest appearances or recurring roles. So, I found it odd that from all the famous characters created by Ms Benaderet, four years worth of Betty Rubble is the only thing that made it onto the box.

Links

A couple of short snippets from the Burns & Allen television show is available via a Yahoo! Video Search. Google Video has a few episodes for sale, along with what looks to be at least one free episode and a couple of clips, while SingingFish mostly produced some of the old radio shows, if anyone is interested.

Edited to Add

"Talking Points Memo" notes that the last two senatorial candidates to concede were Conrad Burns and George Allen.

David Lynch and his Cow

(via Defamer)

ETA: Here's a 3:10 YouTube of Mr Lynch and Ms Dern at the NY Film Festival, with a couple of notes about filmmaking.

For reasons which aren't that important, I've spent a couple of minutes looking for an example interview clip of Judy Garland from her hazy days. Though, she isn't all that stoned and the story isn't rip-roarously funny, it's only amusing, I thought I'd throw out this YouTube of Ms Garland making an appearance on a Jack Paar (2:35);


And, because there's not much which could be finer; You'll probably have to increase the volume, but here's Judy singing her song in a clip from the movie, along with a normal volume cut from a Mike Douglas, where the adult Judy sings the same signature tune.

A couple of days ago, I posted an alert about a pre-taped appearance by Bill O'Reilly on tonight's Late Show with David Letterman.

Perhaps the full segment will find its way onto YouTube, but at this time, those who might have missed it can only get a short montage of clips from the show's official site. Throughout the weekend, I expect the video will remain featured as the "Big Show Highlight" under the "Dave TV" banner on the front page and though the full segment would certainly be worthwhile, a couple of statements from Mr Letterman rival in eloquence, a lot of what has ever been said on television by anyone at any time.

ETA: The full appearance is now available via YouTube.

As the wife and I were watching television last night, I offered her my review of ABC's Brothers & Sisters.

In a nutshell, I said that I've always had a thing for Sally Field, ever since those after school reruns of Gidget that I watched in my youth, I've felt that I could listen to her reading from the phonebook and she's still very easy on the eyes. But, though her new show has an all-star kind of cast, it just doesn't flow well after Desperate Housewives. Grey's Anatomy had a similar voiceover narration as the earlier show and it moved at the same quickened pace. While, though I can't argue with anything starring Sally Field, the new show moves at such a slow gait that during last night's final hour of primetime, I was actually watching three different programs.

This morning, I was using the various image searches looking for a couple of pics from Gidget and I clicked over to IMDB to get an idea of how old Ms Field was when the show originally aired and how old she might be today. While there, I did some clicking around and looked for one of my favorite quotes from Smokey and the Bandit to illustrate this post;

Carrie: Don't you ever take off that stupid hat?
Bandit: I take my hat off for one thing, one thing only.
Carrie: Oh...
[beat]
Carrie: Take off your hat.

And, because I can't just read one thing, I also ran across this gem of dialogue;

Carrie: You have a great profile.
Bandit: Yeah, I do, don't I? Especially from the side.
Carrie: Well, at least we agree on something.
Bandit: Yeah. We both like half of my face.

ETA: A few weeks after I made this post, ABC stuck a special showing of Boston Legal into Brothers & Sisters Sunday night timeslot. I have to say that the humor, tone and use of music flowed much better behind Desperate Housewives. And, though it might be ironic for the network to move David Kelley back into the berth he had occupied for years, the Sally Field/Ken Olin show might actually be better served, if it flipped into the Tuesday night slot and tried to capture some of the audience that kept Judging Amy on CBS.

I just watched Meg Tilly on The View.

The reason for her appearance was to announce that her '94 "novel" was really an autobiographical work. Rosie said that she had suspected as much, when the book was first published because it rang true and that she had asked Jennifer about it, when she was making an appearance on her old show. I don't know if that was the particular occasion when I first heard Jennifer demand that she not be asked about Meg or whether it was on Tom Snyder, but I now see that all my years of confusion, where I thought there was some kind of sibling rivalry between the sisters was probably based on a false assumption. Meg said this morning for what may have been the first time in public that she had labeled the book fiction to protect her sisters and though she's always been about truth, it has taken her 46 years for her to come to terms with her own past and the truth of her life. Plus, her next book deals with similar themes and she wanted to get ahead of the inevitable questions.

And, though I realize it is certainly impolitic to ask because most of her allure has always been a childlike innocence, her coy or coquettish demeanor and a visible excitability, all qualities which might also be attributed to arrested development; But, how did she go from abject poverty (Rosie's words), washing the dishes in the creek, a general lack of food, frequent beatings and sexual abuse beginning in her fifth year to where she was dancing with the Connecticut Ballet, starring in a few "quality" films and becoming a sex symbol for a generation? Her first book sounds like it may be an interesting read, but it's this other story that I'd like to hear.

The following are among the unedited comments that I've made to other blogs during the past week about Star Jones and her exit from The View. If anyone would like to express their own feelings or make a comment on the subject, be it from a Livejournal account or from without, please feel free.

I realize this comment isn't snarky, but I've got to agree with ABC's decision. My dad used to watch Star Jones on some kind of syndicated lawyer show and though there was some aloofness in her presentation on her own show, when she started "The View", it was like she knew that her ticket had been punched and there was some semblance of accessibility to her persona. As the years have progressed, Meredith and Joy had remained pretty real, Barbara will always be Barbara "freaking" Walters, but Star seemed to become more distant from her audience and the wedding fiasco was much too far over the top.

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Star - Your Q-rating went way down and there isn't a clamoring of people seeking your redemption. Your bridge has been burned, so please go quietly into the night.

Now, if Debbie Matenopoulos and Lisa Ling had gotten into such a row, I would've wanted it to turn into a cage match, but that's the kind of guy I am.

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Perhaps she thought that by staying in front of the camera, she'd be able to find a new gig, but if she continues to remain and delude herself into thinking that she can outflank Barbara Walters, she's probably sealing her fate; Coming Soon - Star Jones lives the "The Surreal Life".