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Sunday, September 20, 2009
"No hamsters" - 1980's dating service video compliation
Dating Montage is an 80's video-dating video compilation on Daily Motion, an Internet video site. Whew. One line, by one of the prospective suitors says it all: "No hamsters."
Saturday, September 19, 2009
Joseph Griffith's painting of George Washington - The Surrender
[click the painting to enlarge]
According to Joseph Griffith, "I painted this for the 225th anniversary of the Battle of Yorktown when George Washington and the Continentals traunched the British. The county would not dignify it with a response, however, George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate kindly wrote me an e-mail saying they would “pass it along to the staff”.
I think I like Fonzie the best...
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Huh? Keep f***ing that chicken! Ernie Anastos's live "slip"
Ernie Anastos of Fox News affiliate Channel 5 in NYC tells the weather man to keep "f***ing that chicken..." He drops the F-bomb seemingly out of nowhere. The best part of the video clip has to be the look on his co-anchor's face--a mix of horror, her own innocence, and the realization Ernie is in hot water.
As a meandering side-note...Anastos alludes to Frank Purdue's commercials from my days in New York, where Frank would tell us "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Purdue sold a lot of chicken in the NYC region (and his company still does I think). I remember that he somewhat resembled our mayor, Ed Koch, and that Purdue chicken were quite yellow (like many chickens in Mexico) because marigold leaves were part of their diet...
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As a meandering side-note...Anastos alludes to Frank Purdue's commercials from my days in New York, where Frank would tell us "it takes a tough man to make a tender chicken." Purdue sold a lot of chicken in the NYC region (and his company still does I think). I remember that he somewhat resembled our mayor, Ed Koch, and that Purdue chicken were quite yellow (like many chickens in Mexico) because marigold leaves were part of their diet...
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Friday, September 18, 2009
Thursday, September 17, 2009
Gollum terrorizes Panama town?
According to the Panamanian news service Telemetro, locals in a Panama town are scared sh**less after a creature they describe as "Gollum" crawled out of a lake and charged at schoolchildren. "The four terrified boys said they hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it, before throwing its corpse in the water and running away." Actually, they don't sound THAT scared, do they? One of the boys said the five-foot creature emerged from a cave and started scrambling over rocks "as if to attack them".
In a "desperate bid to defend themselves" the four boys hurled rocks at the strange creature to kill it and then threw the body in the water before running away. Their parents returned to the lake the following day — where they discovered the disturbing body washed up on the beach.
Panamanian officials have yet to make any statements regarding their discovery. Quite possibly, their silence is due to the fact that Panama Red is back in town.
Thanks to Jeff Clinton for suggesting this article.
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TBTL Lives!
click to enlarge
TBTL roared back to life as a Podcast after being cancelled as a terrestrial radio show in Seattle. The show was always one of the lowest rated in Seattle, but it has fans around the world and its podcast was always extremely popular. The parent company decide to fund Too Beautiful To Live as a podcast for an unspecified period of time. This is my favorite radio show of all time.
Subscribe! Go to the iTunes Podcast page to subscribe or download shows, or go to http://www.tbtl.net/
Tom Tangney, a Seattle movie critic, wrote the following moving tribute last week, when TBTL's cancellation was announced:
TBTL - Why it mattered
By Tom Tangney
The KIRO radio show TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has attained its own apotheosis. The show whose very title dared to foretell its demise has now completed its mission. TOO BEAUTIFUL TO LIVE has indeed died.
I am not here to bury TBTL however, but to praise it. Its 396 shows now constitute the complete "TBTL Collector's Series" of programs and, in retrospect, the most compelling question may not be "Why is it suddenly gone?" but rather "How did it last as long as it did?" I'd like to believe we live in a world in which something like TBTL could survive but the evidence points to the contrary. So instead, I'll just appreciate the fact it existed at all.
TBTL was the most original, innovative, and intelligently off-the-wall show I've ever heard on radio. Where else are you going to hear butchered impromptu readings of famous movie scenes, regular visits from a grammarian, an in-house a capella re-enactment of a modern opera, an Oscar show in which food from a nominated film is cooked and consumed live on air, a week's worth of Spanish and Latin lessons, a spontaneous dance-off to music designated as impossible to dance to, in-studio imitations of Bob Dylan singing Christmas songs, and hundreds of other wacky ideas. And who else but TBTL would organize a listeners' prom, a roller skating party, and nights out at the Opera AND a Mariners game?
Often described as the radio equivalent of the TV series SEINFELD, TBTL really was a show about nothing. And in its seemingly haphazard investigation of "nothing," it proved to be, more often than not, about "everything." The genius of TBTL was that it recognized the profundity of the mundane. We all have to live in the mundane world, of course, but articulate dissections of our mundane lives can actually produce clever and entertaining insights. The personal stories shared each night by host Luke Burbank, producer Jen Andrews, and board-op Sean De Tore were more humorous than earth-shattering but the point was they were always very human - the kind of daily victories and embarrassments that make up our everyday lives.
TBTL often hurtled headlong into the inane preoccupations of pop culture as well. Their WHY IT MATTERS segments would debate everything from the silly to the sublime (e.g. an early show took on the significance of those Karate Kid movies, a late show examined the brilliance of Quentin Tarantino.) But no matter how deep it dove into the superficial, it would always, or almost always, emerge with a smile and a wink. After all, this was a show run by smart and culturally savvy people. Burbank is an especially quick and literate host who can drop off-the-cuff references to Tenzing Norgay, Soren Kierkegaard, and Jeff Koons as readily as he can to Zooey Deschanel and Jemaine Clement and he often does so in a single conversation. And Andrews was always more apt to cull material for the show from, say, THE NEW YORKER than she was from TMZ. For me and much of the TBTListan nation, I suspect, it's that high art/low art tension that best defines the show's appeal.
TBTL always reminded me of a slice of lemon meringue pie. At its best, it was the perfect combination of sugar-spun fluff and tart flavor. When taking a bite out of TBTL, you had to make sure you tasted both the meringue and the lemon, or you'd miss the point. Too many people, I'm afraid, couldn't get past the meringue in the show to taste the lemon. But if you stuck with the show long enough, the lemon would always out.
Rawr.
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Wednesday, September 16, 2009
Scwarzkopf on War and France
"Going to war without France is like going deer hunting without your accordion." - Norman Schwartzkopf
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
Monday, September 14, 2009
The 20 best rock songs of all time?
The 20 best rock songs of all time?? Not so much. Here is a YouTuber's take on the 20 best of all time. He got a few right. But he also has three or four AC/DC tunes on this list. Stay tuned for my list this week. . .
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Sunday, September 13, 2009
Two paintings by Narboo, a Seattle artist
For my birthday, Keelin bought two paintings by Narboo. I had seen paintings at a Vera Project show. Thank you Kee!
Click to enlarge:
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Click to enlarge:
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Saturday, September 12, 2009
Jack interviews Senator Jerry Melin, ca 1980
From 1973-1984, I recorded hundreds of hours of material in San Francisco, Seattle, and New York City. The Archives--a collection of cassette tapes, drawings, poetry, and ephemera--containing these recordings has largely disappeared, being lost, borrowed, and rendered unusable by the ravages of time. This recording was salvaged from a crumbling generic cassette tape by a Seattle audio engineer, Ian Rodia. The sound levels vary widely, there is a large amount of ambient noise, including buses and semis passing by. To make matters worse, every few seconds there is a bump sound in the recording caused by a defect in the recorder's mechanism. Jerry Melin died a decade ago, and this is one of the few audio recordings that survived him.
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Friday, September 11, 2009
Thursday, September 10, 2009
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