Show Me the Money, I Show You the Verve

I’ve got a few things on my mind today but nothing that adds up to a whole post, so here’s the odds and ends.
The news that the Who (or what passes for it these days as long as Keith Moon and John Entwistle remain dead) might be playing at the Super Bowl halftime this year [...]

Never Jump Into a Pile of Leaves With a Wet Sucker

It’s 50 years this week since Charles Schulz introduced the Great Pumpkin in his Peanuts comic strip, and it’s 43 years tonight since It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown was first broadcast on CBS. Every time I watch the show, I wonder how much of it goes sailing over the heads not merely of today’s [...]

Late Games

I’ve often said of my father than he’s a fan of the Green Bay Packers the same way he’s a Methodist—not flashy, not demonstrative, but in the pew every Sunday. And when I was a kid, sports fandom was acquired in the same way religious affiliation was acquired—it was a family thing. And so we’d [...]

Fawlty Towers Rise Again

Like many Monty Python addicts, I’m also a fan of Fawlty Towers, John Cleese’s series set at a small hotel in Torquay, on the coast of Britain. Cleese played innkeeper Basil Fawlty, basing the character on a “marvelously rude” innkeeper he had met when the Pythons were filming in Torquay years before. Other main characters [...]

TV Rock

The trend of pop stars hosting TV variety shows didn’t really start with Sonny and Cher, but theirs was the first to become a Top-10 Nielsen hit. The duo’s 1971 summer replacement series, which took over the time slot of The Ed Sullivan Show after it left the air, was so successful that it led [...]

Luna’s Shadow

It’s a grand coincidence that the 2007 documentary film In the Shadow of the Moon, which has been in our Netflix queue for months, should have shown up last Thursday—the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11. The film features interviews with 10 of the 24 astronauts who orbited or walked on the moon [...]