Television
Cracked.com has put out one of the frequent lists, this one of “10 Awesome Ads (For Traumatizing Children)” (warning: Cracked tends to use vulgar language a lot). All ten ads were great picks, and several were truly disturbing, but this one (#4) was for me the most frightening: It’s like watching the setup for an [...]
Things I probably never would have seen without the ‘net: Hat tip to The New Old Thing. ..bruce w..
Continue reading about Why I love the interwebz, part MCXXVI
For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” – John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892) American Poet For your viewing, with a tip o’ the hat to Phil Plait at Bad Astronomy: The singer/composer/video editor is Marian Call, who has an entire album (“Got To Fly”) in tribute [...]
Just watch and enjoy: Hat tip to The Borderline Sociopathic Blog for Boys. ..bruce w..
Ricardo Montalban, one of the most distinctive and evocative voices from my childhood and early adulthood, died yesterday at age 88. No one could say “soft Corinthian leather” with quite the same intonation: And, of course, he earned geek/SF immortality with his role in “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan”, still the best of [...]
As has been reported elsewhere in the press, reclusive actor Patrick McGoohan died earlier today. The 17 episode series of “The Prisoner” was transformational in many ways for television. In an age of episodic television, where everything was resolved in 30 minutes and at the end nothing ever changes, McGoohan’s show was one enormous story [...]
Courtesy of Ace of Spades comes the most reviled, most wretched “holiday special” ever produced. First, here’s the Vanity Fair article to give you the entire ugly background: In the summer of 1978, Bruce Vilanch had a bad feeling about the Star Wars television special he’d been hired to write. A veteran of the comedy [...]
Continue reading about The Star Wars Holiday Special! (1978)
OK, I wrote an initial review after watching Part 1 of A&E’s miniseries, “The Andromeda Strain”. It was goofy and heavy-handed in its political agenda, but was still a bit fun, and I was waiting to see how Part 2 went. So now I’ve watched Part 2, which (IMHO) descended from goofiness into full-blown stupidity. [...]
Continue reading about “The Andromeda Strain”: a brief review (w/spoilers)
OK, Sandra and I just finished watching the first two hours of A&E’s mini-series, “The Andromeda Strain”, based on the Michael Crichton novel. Sandra, about 45 minutes into tonight’s showing, turned to me and said, “This is like a SciFi Channel movie, but made with better actors.” What makes that really funny is that she [...]
Continue reading about “The Andromeda Strain” (pt. 1): a brief review (w/spoilers)
Thursday throes
We aim to please (most mostly we aim to hit) . . . MID-MORNING UPDATE: The FBI raids the office of the DC Chief Technology Officer, who is (or was) Vivek Kundra, who is now the new CTO for the Obama Administration. However, it appears that the focus is not on Kundra, but on two [...]
Continue reading about Thursday throes