I’m not often one for the “Wow, that makes me feel old” line of thinking. I like to think that I’m pretty realistic about the passage of time. But…good lord, how can it be that we’ve just passed the fiftieth anniversary of the series premiere of Laverne and Shirley?!
I haven’t watched L&S at all since it first aired, but it was still iconic as hell. It was huge in its first few seasons, and I remember it being one of those shows we kids would talk about at school the morning after it aired. There was a kid in my kindergarten class, as I recall, who absolutely adored Fonzie on Happy Days, and I remember (vaguely!) talking about those two weirdos on L&S, the ones whose names my mother could never quite remember. “Who are those guys again?” I’d ask, and Mom would say, “Squiggy and somebody.”
I honestly don’t have a whole hell of a lot to say about Laverne and Shirley. It turns out that what I remember most about the show is its opening titles sequence, which would only be in use for the first half of the show’s run; for the back half of the show, when the entire cast all uprooted to go live in Burbank, the whole “flavor” changed, didn’t it? Maybe I’m wrong here, but I suspect that this was L&S‘s version of the shark-jumping that happened on that other show.
Anyway, here’s that iconic opening:
And how iconic was this opening? Almost ten years after L&S ended, the movie Wayne’s World would come up with a convoluted reason to send its main characters on a brief road trip from Chicago to Milwaukee, which resulted in this:
It’s quite a jolt when you’re watching a marathon of The Office and you catch the last three episodes and then it goes right back to Season One, Episode One.
Another observation: I’ve no idea how people deal with commercials on teevee. Lord, commercials suck.
I don’t remember the numbers in play, but the game was not a runaway; Ben actually needed to be right on Final Jeopardy to win…or at least not wager so much that he’d lose on a wrong answer. The Final Jeopardy clue was this (paraphrased), in the category “Shakespeare Characters”:
“The names of these two lovers are taken from Latin words meaning ‘blessed’.”
Now, first off: I came up with the right answer, because isn’t that the most important thing about Jeopardy, anyway? For you, as a viewer, to feel as smart as, if not smarter, than the people on the teevee who know all this weird random stuff? Why yes! But still: the two challengers both answered “Romeo and Juliet”, and both of those answers were wrong, so both of them lost money. Again, the numbers aren’t important, but at least one of them still had some money left after their wager.
Ben, however, got the right characters: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. But wait! He spelled them Beatrice and Benedict, which was enough for the judges to rule him incorrect. His wager was big enough to drop him into second place, and off the show (until he comes back for the Tournament of Champions, so all isn’t lost for Ben).
Well, tonight it happened again! Only this time, they let the misspelling stand. I don’t recall the Final Jeopardy clue, but the answer as “Antony and Cleopatra”. One of the contestants spelled it Anthony and Cleopatra, though. There’s no ‘H’ there: He’s Mark Antony, not Mark Anthony. Ken Jennings actually said something like, “There’s no H in there, but we’ll give it to you anyway.”
WHAT???!!!
Why did spelling count for Ben back in May but not for some other guy tonight? Now, the answer didn’t end up mattering this time: he still came in second, so the game would not have been decided had his answer been correct or incorrect, but back then I was told that the rules are the rules! Spelling counts in Final Jeopardy! One imagines Mr. Goodman from The Big Lebowski:
This is one of my favorite little scenes from Friends. I’ve always loved this little exchange, and in tribute to it, I have ever since referred to all spiders as “Phil”. (In this case I now assume that Phil can be a genderless name: Philip, Philomena, Philopina, you get the drift.)
Actor Matthew Perry died yesterday–that’s him in the clip–after apparently having drowned in his own hot tub.
I expect that there will eventually be more sordid details about his passing, considering his long struggles with addiction and other medical issues. But that doesn’t matter now. Perry did a lot of good work, primarily comedic, most notably on Friends. That particular show was a favorite of mine during its run, and I still love a great deal of it, even if much of it hasn’t aged very well; right now, Friends is kind-of in that middle area where it hasn’t aged enough for its problematic aspects to be seen as being “of its time”, but I do think that it earned its claims to be a classic sitcom. Friends did manage to capture something of the 90s zeitgeist for young people in that era. The people who were on it were my age group, or slightly above it (I’m 52; Perry was 54). But Friends wasn’t just that; it was usually written with wit and crisp attention to character and structure. Friends has never quite gotten its due for its writing, in my opinion. The show really excelled at things like setting up a big episode-ending punchline in the first minutes, and also at having big moments come as complete surprises while still being entirely consistent with the characters. Yes, Friends probably endured a season or two longer than it should have, but its drop-off toward its end wasn’t that bad.
Perry played Chandler Bing on Friends. Chandler was the neurotic jokester of the group who always seemed to have a quip ready at hand. The Friends producers made a lot of hay out of this, but they were also aware enough to know that sometimes that guy (there’s one in every group!) will make jokes that don’t quite land, that fall awkwardly, and that ultimately mask a certain level of weird insecurity. A low-level subplot that unfolded over the series’s run was Chandler’s growth and maturity, as he progressed from the smart-mouthed and insecure jokester to being one of the first members of the group to settle into a stable, long-term relationship (with Monica, another of the show’s regulars). As Friends ended, the group was transitioning as Chandler and Monica started a family and decided it was time to move to the suburbs.
Perry anchored Chandler Bing nearly perfectly, giving him a voice that was so distinctive that to this day people remember certain of Chandler’s phrasings and verbal tics. However, when I saw Perry in other projects, I realized that he had a good deal more range even than Chandler Bing afforded him.
Perry turned up on The West Wing as Friends ended. His character there, a lawyer newly hired for the White House Counsel’s office who happens to be a Republican, was an interesting addition…but sadly he came along right when Aaron Sorkin was exiting the show, which meant that Perry didn’t get to do much with Sorkin’s signature style, and he showed up a few times on a recurring basis. I’ve always found it perplexing that Aaron Sorkin left The West Wing after he added talent like Lily Tomlin and Matthew Perry to his roster. It was all a money thing, from what I remember, but sheesh–I’m not a rich writer, but if I was one, I think I might find my way to taking a pay cut to write for Tomlin and Perry.
Sorkin got another shot later on, though, at least with Perry: he was one of the leads on Sorkin’s backstage-at-a-teevee-show show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I watched every episode of Studio 60 with anticipation at first for a good show, and then with the anticipation one feels as one approaches the scene of a car wreck on the thruway. Studio 60 had…issues. Gigantic issues. The show was one of the most highly hyped new shows of its season, and then it winded up getting axed after that singular first year, for many reasons. But none of those reasons was Matthew Perry, who again anchored the show as the head-writer for a late-night live comedy show, Matt Albie. Studio 60 provided yet another data point in my long belief that Aaron Sorkin may be a good writer on individual projects (though not so great as many believe), but he’s simply not a very good show-runner for long-term television. The focus on Studio 60 was all wrong, and the best material came not when he focused on the struggles and the love lives of the Big Main Characters, but when he instead looked at the lower-level workers in television, the underappreciated people, the ones who aren’t household names: the writers.
As Studio 60 begins, Matt Albie (Perry) and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) are hired to take over and restore to prominence a long-suffering SNL-esque live comedy show. One big issue is that the writers’ room for this show is a big collection of hacks, overseen by two guys who hate Matt and Danny with a passion. These conflicts simmer in the background of Studio 60‘s one season, and at one point Matt hires two new writers, who have collectively about eight minutes of comedy writing experience, for the room. Shortly thereafter, the two guys who hate Matt and Danny quit, and they take all the other writers with them–leaving only the two deeply green newbies as the only writers Matt has left. In desperation, Matt brings in another comedy writer just to mentor these two into a level of competence. This, as it unfolds, is one of my favorite things that happened in the entire run of Studio 60. This video stitches together the entire storyline–it’s less than five minutes during one episode, and excuse the quality, this is where someone aimed their phone at their teevee–and while Perry doesn’t play a huge role in it, he still anchors it as the straight-man to the comedy that is unfolding two floors below his big office.
I’ve seen Matthew Perry in other things over the years–not a lot, but enough–and I think he always was somehow the “grounding” force in his projects, the guy who seemed like a real guy in the middle of whatever other weirdness was going on around him. Going back to Friends, someone had to be there to react to the weirdness of Phoebe, the goofball shit that always surrounded Joey, and the straight-up embodiment of “What are you doing?!” that was Ross.
I don’t want to speculate much about the facts of Perry’s death or the degree to which his personal demons may have played a role. I just want to point out the quality of his work over the years, and that he’ll be missed.
I don’t have much in depth to say about some of these, so I’ll limit myself to two sentences each!
:: Happiness for Beginners: This cheerful and utterly unsurprising rom-com, which unfolds on a hiking trip, is worth watching for some STUNNING nature shots. Keep the PAUSE button at the ready.
:: Always Be My Maybe: This, on the other hand, is a cheerful but actually occasionally surprising rom-com, featuring Randall Park and Ali Wong as Asian-American friends from youth who wander in and out of a relationship over the years. It has some big laughs, lots of heart, and a terrific cast.
:: Bridesmaids: I’ve no idea why, but I expected this to be a kind-of female-cast version of The Hangover. It isn’t, and that’s not a problem because it’s really good and Kristen Wiig is always a delight.
:: The Laundromat: I was completely flummoxed by this very strange film. I honestly don’t think I could assess it without a rewatch.
:: Bullet Train: This movie is so flat-out gonzo weird that I loved it. Imagine Pulp Fiction, on speed, on a bullet train in Asia.
:: How Do You Know: If you want a rom-com you won’t remember the next day, here you go. And that’s too bad, because the cast is fantastic.
There you go! More to come after we’ve watched some more stuff! Lately we’ve been plowing through Never Have I Ever…, which we’re loving and which we’re almost done with, as well as old episodes of Cutthroat Kitchen. And of course, MasterChef, which remains as full of shit as ever. The third season of Only Murders in the Building is unfolding as I write this, and four episodes in, this go-round is more uneven than the last two, though it does seem like in the last two episodes the mystery is starting to lock in, after quite a bit of backstage filler material. But the cast and the production is still perfect and I’d watch this trio of leads if they just recited old Presidential speeches, and not the good speeches, either. We’re talking Chester Arthur here.
It’s Friday morning, I’m taking the day off for some personal matters and later on attending the Erie County Fair, and right now I’m sipping coffee and thinking, “What’s a quickie topic I can write a post about?” And last night we watched two new episodes of Gordon Ramsay shows on Hulu, so…let’s talk about Gordon Ramsay’s teevee shows!
Obviously the man is all over teevee the last bunch of years, and I’m not complaining. We find him addictively watchable and have only actively disliked one of his shows. Here are a few thoughts on each show of his that we’ve watched!
(Unless indicated otherwise, all of these refer to the US versions. I’ve seen sporadic UK versions of these same shows, and the flavor and demeanor is often completely different; the “shouting and cursing” Ramsay image is really a carefully constructed on for the US market, and that aspect of his personality is really on display only on one show, for the most part.)
Hell’s Kitchen
Obviously it starts here. The new season kicks off in a month, and we’ll be there. I’ll be honest: this show has lost some of its luster for me as it has settled so seriously into routine that I wonder if it just films itself nowadays. You can feel every beat coming as the seasons go on, and the contestants are nearly indistinguishable until you finally get to the last five or so. But yeah, we’ll keep watching. It’s comfort food at this point. If you want full-on Gordon Ramsay screaming at people and swearing constantly, though, this is your go-to; he’s calmed down a bit in the recent seasons, but there were times in the first few years that he would go so wildly upset that his voice would crack. (Here’s an entire video of such moments! My favorite of all time is at 3:19. Language non-bleeped!)
MasterChef
The current season is unfolding right now. There’s also a sense of “same old, same old” here as well, but MasterChef really does try to put some new twists on things every year, which is nice. This year’s notion is separating the chefs into teams representing four regions of the United States. How’s that going? It’s OK. The most interesting facet is that the chef who wins the competition in each episode also saves their entire regional team from elimination, so some people who have cooked utter calamities of dishes (a dude who seasoned his churros with salt instead of sugar stands out) survive on that basis. MasterChef is more fun when it stays in the kitchen than during the “team challenges”, which end up feeling annoyingly like Hell’s Kitchen, and the show’s constant babbling about “elevating” dishes and patting itself on the back with stuff like “This is the greatest cooking competition on the planet!” gets irritating. And yet, every summer, we watch.
Kitchen Nightmares
Ramsay tours restaurants that are failing for one reason or another or multiple, and tries to put them back on track. Watch for family drama and tours of kitchens that really make you wonder what that particular restaurant’s local health department is doing with its time. This series has been off the air for a while, but I’ve read that it’s being revived.
24 Hours to Hell and Back
It’s Kitchen Nightmares, reduced down to a single 24-hour time period as Ramsay diagnoses a train-wreck of a restaurant, his team descends upon it to make it better, and they all leave. I liked this one, actually, a bit more than Nightmares.
Hotel Hell
It’s Kitchen Nightmares, but now the concept is applied to a hotel. I didn’t care for this one much. Ramsay’s most interesting dealing with food. His knowledge of the hospitality industry is likely considerable, but this show felt like padding the empire to me. I don’t miss it.
Gordon Ramsay: Uncharted
This was Ramsay’s answer to Anthony Bourdain’s No Reservations and Parts Unknown: travelogue shows that featured Ramsay exploring local culture and food customs. It’s a good show and beautifully shot, and the food stuff is very interesting. Obviously Bourdain was the king of this kind of show, but Uncharted is really good on its own; for all Ramsay’s “I know everything about food!” bravado, he is fascinated by learning new things and seeing new aspects of the world. Of all the “food travelogue” shows out there, this ranks for me just behind the two Bourdain series and Somebody Feed Phil (which is pure joy and I need to blog about it all by itself sometime).
The F Word
This is the one we didn’t like. We watched no more than two episodes of the single season it ran. Its format was something of a jumbled mess and it felt more like a blend of advertising and actual content than many of the other shows (which, let’s be honest, are always partially advertising).
Gordon Ramsay’s Food Stars
This one is currently airing alongside MasterChef, and it’s kind of an odd duck of a show. Ramsay has a dozen or so entrepreneurs from food-related businesses in a competition through various challenges, and the winner is to receive a sizeable investment from Ramsay himself for their business. So the show focuses as much on business skill and acumen as on food; it kind of feels like a less skeevy version of The Apprentice, with Gordon Ramsay running things instead of that creepy New York City real estate guy (I wonder whatever became of him?). The contestants are all kind of weird–one dude, a long-haired hippie type, wore an earring in the shape of a four-inch-long spoon–and the show is shot in a garishly over-exposed way, which is kind of off-putting. I don’t know if this one’s going to have any staying power.
Next Level Chef
Now this one is interesting. It’s had two seasons already and the third is apparently on the way. When it first showed up I thought the concept was really weird, but…the show has some staying power! It’s a cooking competition in which Gordon Ramsay, Richard Blais, and Nyesha Arrington each mentor a team of home cooks through a competition with various challenges on a cooking set divided into three levels. The top level is a state-of-the-art kitchen, the middle one is a perfectly good but not great kitchen, and the bottom kitchen has crappy equipment and tools. Ingredients descend through each level via a platform from which the contestants get to pick stuff for thirty seconds each, so by the time the platform gets to the bottom kitchen, those cooks have to use the less-desired ingredients as well as using less-than-good equipment to cook. The whole concept is pretty gonzo, but the show has a fun kind of energy to it. My complaint with this show is a weird one: they make the cooks all dress in the same outfit! What’s that about?
Looking through Ramsay’s filmography, it appears that for all our Ramsay-watching over the years, we’ve only seen about half of what he’s done! Sheesh, that guy is everywhere. And we keep tuning in.
In the course of keeping my father company lately, I’ve been watching a bit of Jeopardy* lately. I enjoy it as much as ever, though something happened earlier this week that annoyed me.
First, let me say that I’ve noticed over the last bunch of years–maybe since Ken Jennings’s big run–that the runaway blowout game has become more and more common, and it seems like more often than not, by the time Final Jeopardy rolls around, the score is something like $28000 to $3600 and $1900, respectively. I watched one champion rack up a week of such wins, and then she lost to another guy who then went on to pile up another week of such wins. His name is Ben and apparently he teaches Philosophy at a college in Wisconsin.
Ben lost the other night. And though I found his run annoying precisely because all of his wins were boring blowouts, his loss annoyed the shit out of me. It boils down to rules, and I know, the rules are the rules, but there are times when slavish adherence to rules is complete BS, and this was one of them.
I don’t remember the numbers in play, but the game was not a runaway; Ben actually needed to be right on Final Jeopardy to win…or at least not wager so much that he’d lose on a wrong answer. The Final Jeopardy clue was this (paraphrased), in the category “Shakespeare Characters”:
“The names of these two lovers are taken from Latin words meaning ‘blessed’.”
Now, first off: I came up with the right answer, because isn’t that the most important thing about Jeopardy, anyway? For you, as a viewer, to feel as smart as, if not smarter, than the people on the teevee who know all this weird random stuff? Why yes! But still: the two challengers both answered “Romeo and Juliet”, and both of those answers were wrong, so both of them lost money. Again, the numbers aren’t important, but at least one of them still had some money left after their wager.
Ben, however, got the right characters: Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing. But wait! He spelled them Beatrice and Benedict, which was enough for the judges to rule him incorrect. His wager was big enough to drop him into second place, and off the show (until he comes back for the Tournament of Champions, so all isn’t lost for Ben).
“Rules are rules!”, people will say, but in the greater scheme here, let’s be real. He got the two right people in the right play, and if that clue had come up in standard play, where answers are verbal, he likely would have been fine unless he had been very careful to enunciate the ‘T’ at the end of Benedict. And I have seen people provide misspelled answers that were ruled correct on Final Jeopardy quite frequently! Lots of times people don’t know the exact spelling of whatever it is they’re writing, so they come up with a phonetic equivalent. So the rub here would be that Benedict is not phonetically the same as Benedick, and that’s true.
But again I say, come on. The guy obviously got the two right characters from the right play, while the other two players weren’t even in the ballpark. To rule that he loses because he was ninety-eight percent right, but his two-percent of wrongness was sufficient to be equivalent to the two other folks who were one-hundred percent wrong, was just annoying.
But we’ll see Ben again. He’s a terrific player, and his loss was bullshit.
None of the games since has been a blowout and we’ve seen the championship change hands every night since Ben’s exit, so there’s that.
And by the way, Mayim Bialik’s giggle when someone gets the Daily Double is still annoying. She’s fine as host, I just dislike that one quirk of hers.
* Yes, I know that the actual title of the show includes an exclamation point, but it looks typographically wrong to me, so I’m omitting it.
The oldest extant text ever printed with movable type predates Gutenberg himself (born in 1400) by 23 years, and predates the printing of his Bible by 78 years. It is the Jikji, printed in Korea, a collection of Buddhist teachings by Seon master Baegun and printed in movable type by his students Seok-chan and Daijam in 1377. (Seon is a Korean form of Chan or Zen Buddhism.) Only the second volume of the printing has survived, and you can see several images from it here.
Impressive as this may be, the Jikji does not have the honor of being the first book printed with movable type, only the oldest surviving example. The technology could go back two centuries earlier.
Causey’s most successful TikTok videos follow her as she packs old-school candies, like wax bottles filled with sugary juice and vintage candy buttons, into boxes for customers. Her videos also show off new offerings that she eats on camera: Think gummy Nerds clusters and chamoy-drenched dulces enchilados, or Gushers coated in chamoy syrup and rolled in Tajin seasoning. Her account features imported chewy Puchao candies and Pocky sticks from Japan, along with a slew of other Asian candies. There’s also weird stuff — sour candy that you spray in your mouth, candy shaped like unicorn poop, and gigantic gummies, along with nostalgic favorites like fizzy Zots and lemon drops. But Causey’s taste of viral success really began when the jelly fruits trend emerged on TikTok.
In countless videos on the platform, users would eat the jellies — a type of candy sold in fruit-shaped plastic capsules — by popping the capsule with their teeth, causing the jelly to burst in their mouth, often to comedic effect. The hashtag #jellyfruitcandy has racked up more than 27 million views, and for a while Candy Me Up was one of the few places that sold it.
The article goes on to describe “freeze-dried candy”, which is something I saw in a store in Toronto recently. I thought about trying it, but that stuff was expensive, at least in the store where I saw it, and I’d already dropped a chunk of money in an anime-and-comics store that very morning. Alas!
I find Tiktok kind of fascinating, and I hope it, or at least something very much like it, survives the current challenges. (I have to be honest here: I don’t get terribly worked up about the Chinese maybe “spying” on what I’m doing. If they think they can learn something insightful from the odd doings of a guy in overalls who lives near Buffalo, well, have at it, Hoss. Something needs to be done about the car-theft thing, though.)
I actually didn’t watch V the first time it aired. I don’t remember any buzz about it in school, and right around then all our geeky energy was laser-focused on the impending arrival of Return of the Jedi. I think I remember one kid talking about the V show that he’d watched the night before. Plus, V aired on NBC, which was at that point languishing in third place on the networks, and it’s biggest hits of the 80s had either just launched and had yet to gain traction (The A-Team) or hadn’t even come along yet (The Cosby Show), and in those days (wow, there’s a phrase I’m not keen on using to describe the 19-freakin’-80s), buzz was based pretty much on if you saw the commercials on the network you were watching at the moment. So, for me, V came and went very quickly, and I missed it entirely.
A year later, though, the sequel dropped, and that one, I saw. By then we were watching NBC a little (thanks, A-Team!), and I might have watched a movie that I wanted to watch on NBC’s weekly movie telecast, back when the networks actually televised movies. In fact, I think it was a movie, because I remember a long preview at the movie’s end–maybe five minutes long, maybe more–for the upcoming Big! Teevee! Miniseries! Event!, called V: The Final Battle. Now that I was properly briefed, I watched V: The Final Battle faithfully, and I was a big fan right from there. The original miniseries from the year before was re-broadcast soon after, and I was now fully briefed.
V: The Final Battle was produced by a different team than the original series from just a year earlier, which led to some differences in tone and story; the second series is much more action-oriented than the original and it doesn’t focus nearly as much on the allegory of fascism that the original did. Also, the second series features one of the most gobsmackingly bad endings I’ve ever seen, even for a thirteen-year-old kid. But the preceding five hours and fifty-five minutes of the six-hour miniseries was great, so if the ending sucked, I was willing to forgive.
V was a big enough hit that the two miniseries led to a weekly series later that fall (1984, I think), which started off strongly but then bogged down a bit. There’s some handwavey-stuff in the series opener explaining how the humans’ victory from The Final Battle actually wasn’t, and then a favorite character from the miniseries was killed immediately, and the show just wound up bogging down. There was a reboot many years later (ten years ago, maybe?) on ABC, but I didn’t watch any of it.
Oh, and The Final Battle boasted a wonderful 80s-synth score:
SO MANY BRILLIANT songwriters came out of Canada in the Sixties — legends like Leonard Cohen, Joni Mitchell, Neil Young, and Robbie Robertson — that the talents of Gordon Lightfootare sometimes overlooked by those who don’t know better. He never even appeared on a Rock and Roll Hall of Fame ballot before his death at 84. That’s a raging injustice when you listen back to gems like “If You Could Read My Mind,” “Carefree Highway,” and “Early Morning Rain.” These songs earned him a sterling reputation as a songwriter’s songwriter, which you can see when you check the list of people who covered them: Bob Dylan, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, and countless others. Or you can take it from Dylan himself, who famously remarked, “I can’t think of any Gordon Lightfoot song I don’t like. Every time I hear a song of his, it’s like I wish it would last forever.” Here’s a guide to ten of Lightfoot’s best songs.
:: Color Him Busy: A profile of heavily-tattooed actor Robert LaSardo.
In person, LaSardo comes across as a sensitive soul with a sense of humor. In an interview in his agent’s office he lifted his right forearm as if to prove it, and there, amid a roiling sea, is winsome Betty Boop in her flirty pose. “That’s my comic relief,” he said. He’s reluctant to make too much of the other tattoos — or as he prefers, “illustrations” — that cover both arms, his abdomen, neck, hands, fingers, back and legs. He’s even a bit self-conscious about discussing their significance.
LaSardo admitted the ink has helped him establish a 20-year career portraying thugs, drug dealers and gritty undercover cops. But he said landing roles through his tattoos was never his intention. “It’s my life story,” he said. “It’s the trip through my world.”
A bit of background here: a while back I found a YouTube channel that posts clips from the classic show NYPDBlue, and just this morning there was a clip that features a guest stint by Robert LaSardo. Now, La Sardo has been one of my favorite “Hey, it’s that guy!” actors for years–the proper term is “character actor”, obviously, but “Hey, it’s that guy!” or “Hey, it’s her!” works to convey the same idea. His work as a particularly nasty bad guy in CSI: Miami is a standout in my mind, but he’s always good when he turns up. A quick glance at his filmography reveals five different appearances on NYPDBlue, each time as someone different!
Actors like LaSardo tend to get lots of reliable work by being, well, not only good, but also professional and reliable. The linked article above, which I found on a simple Google search, is almost twenty years old, but LaSardo’s career does not seem to have slackened one bit since then.
Shortly before each Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert is set to begin, someone discreetly walks onstage to place a score on the conductor’s music stand, then returns to retrieve it when that first piece is over — a process repeated for each selection on the program.
Those brief, easy-to-ignore trips across the stage are the only times that audiences get a glimpse at the three staff members who work in one of the CSO’s most important if little-known behind-the-scenes departments — its library.
Located one floor below the Orchestra Hall stage, this windowless space serves as a repository for the music the orchestra owns and a work space for three librarians.
Here’s a fascinating article about a little-known facet of professional orchestra operations: the library and its librarians. The music they’re playing–the actual physical music, consisting of the conductor’s score and the orchestral parts for all the musicians–comes from somewhere, after all!
In 1984, The Voyage of the Mimi debuted on PBS. The groundbreaking educational science series, part of the curriculum of many elementary and high school students (including this writer!), captivated kids throughout the ‘80s and ‘90s, spawned a sequel, and kicked off Ben Affleck’s career.
If you’re my age, you may remember watching The Voyage of the Mimi, either in school or on PBS at some point. I’m honestly not sure when I first saw it, but it’s been on my radar for years, so I’m assuming it was in the 80s at some point. It’s a 13-episode series about a research expedition into the North Atlantic to study whales, aboard a ship called the Mimi. There’s a crusty sea captain, two research scientists, their graduate assistant (who is deaf), two teenagers, and the sea captain’s grandson, who was played by a young Ben Affleck, if you can believe that. The whole show is available to watch on YouTube, and it actually holds up pretty well, as period educational shows go. Each episode consists of fifteen minutes of story followed by a fifteen-minute mini-documentary that applies to that particular episode’s topic. I wish it was viewable in better resolution than YouTube’s max from eleven years ago.
Sadly, the Mimi herself fell on funding and ownership difficulties that led to her eventual scrapping (though she was a long-lived ship, originally built in the 1930s!), but I did get to see her once! We were on our honeymoon in May 1997 in Boston and New England, and we went one day on a whale-watching expedition that set out from Plymouth. On the way back in, the boat’s tour guide pointed out two ships anchored nearby: one was a replica of the Mayflower, and the other was none other than the Mimi. I wish I’d taken a picture, but this was in the days (there I go again) of film cameras and I don’t even think I took my camera with me on that trip. Alas!
There was a sequel series to Voyage of the Mimi that I don’t think I ever watched, and sadly, a proposed third series never managed to get funding. Anyway, I like to think that the characters from the show got together again for more adventurey science voyages in the future!
:: Finally, speaking of Tiktok, this particular creator has found an incredible pair of overalls. I’m actually envious of these! The Big Smith brand made a lot of funky-patterned overalls years ago, I’m assuming in the 1970s, and they do turn up on eBay and vintage shops now and again.
:: We went to see Casablanca on the big screen, which makes it by definition the best thing we saw or watched in March. As Casablanca is my second-favorite movie of all time, the only way it could be bested for a month’s viewing is if we watched Star Wars in the same month, which we did not. I wrote about it on my Substack. (And I have got to stop letting so much time pass between viewings of this movie. It was about a year-and-a-half between viewings. Too long, man. Too long!)
:: Your Place Or Mine is a rom-com. Ashton Kutcher and Reese Witherspoon play best friends of twenty years who hooked up one time in college…and then settled into platonic bestie-status. They live on opposite sides of the country, and for the purposes of this plot, they agree to switch houses for a week. Then the movie has each become involved in the other’s life, and as the movie goes on, even though they spend the entire film apart, in the end they have to admit that they’re not platonic besties at all. It’s a diverting enough piece of fluff, but if you want the rom-com between two “lovers” who don’t actually show up in the same place until the very last scene, you’re better off with Sleepless in Seattle.
:: Then there’s R.I.P.D., which stands for “Rest In Peace Division”. I cannot lie: we watched this because it has Ryan Reynolds in it, and nothing with Reynolds is ever unwatchable, even if he has made the occasional not-so-great movie…like this one. Oh well, it happens. This movie coulda-woulda-shoulda been better! It’s not bad, but it has some cool ideas that sadly fall flat in the execution. Reynolds is a cop who is killed in the line of duty, but rather than go to the afterlife, he ends up with the Rest In Peace Division — R.I.P.D., get it?–where he teams up with Jeff Bridges, doing his best growly-angry version of The Dude, to track down dead souls who have gone on the run rather than report to their date with, well, the Bad Place. This is a riff of sorts on the Men In Black idea, with dead people instead of aliens, and with the talent on screen I kept thinking that it should be as good as M.I.B., and yet…it’s not. It’s not bad, exactly…but it’s not great, either. Frustrating, really.
:: I remember when Cameron Crowe’s movie Aloha came out, and it got roasted for being bad and uninteresting and also for whitewashing Hawaiian culture by casting white actress Emma Stone as a character who is “one-quarter Hawaiian”. Still, I wanted to see it anyway, because honestly, I’ve loved just about everything I’ve seen by Crowe. I mean, he’s given us Say Anything, Jerry Maguire, and Almost Famous, all of which are terrific. I am even a fan of Elizabethtown, which is not a highly-regarded movie, and We Bought a Zoo, which isn’t exactly poorly-regarded but isn’t considered in the class of his earlier work, either. So, what about Aloha? Well…I didn’t hate it, but it never really clicks, either, and no, Stone is not terribly convincing as someone keyed in by blood to the concerns of the native Hawaiian population. I didn’t hate it, but it’s not a Crowe movie that I’ll be revisiting any time soon. It doesn’t even offer much by way of Hawaiian travelogue goodness. After the movie, it hit me that the most interesting couple in aren’t the leads (Stone and Bradley Cooper), but the secondary couple, the military couple fallen on marital struggle, played by John Krasinki and Rachel McAdams. It’s never a good sign when the writer-director doesn’t realize who the most interesting people in the movie are, is it?
:: Last Seen Alive is…well, let’s just say that it was the perfect movie to watch while armed with a pitcher of Rum Punch. (Have I posted about the Rum Punch yet? No? Huh….) Gerard Butler and Jaimie Alexander are a married couple who are about to “take a break”, after they visit her parents, when they stop at a truck-stop/convenience store for gas. She disappears, and he proceeds to set out to track her down. If you ever want to watch a movie where the hero makes exactly the wrong decision at nearly every juncture along the way, this is it. Also, if you want to watch a guy sweat, watch Butler in this movie, because he sweats a lot. As Carla from Cheers once quipped when Norm said that he’s been known to sweat a bit, “We could grow rice!” It’s a taut thriller, sure–so taut that the movie doesn’t really take time to make me, you know, care about the characters. Three glasses of Rum Punch really helped this goofy movie go down.
Teevee thoughts:
Actually, not a whole lot! We’re still watching the same shows, really. Next Level Chef is still grinding along, and it’s a fun watch, even with its somewhat strange concept. (Why, I continue to wonder, are all the contestants made to dress the same? I don’t get this.) We also started a cooking show on Netflix called Snack Versus Chef, in which chef contestants are tasked with recreating junk-food snack items like Oreos, Lays Chips, and so on. Kind of fun, though it usually leaves me with the munchies.
We also started watching Wednesday, of which I will only say for now that we’re really enjoying. We watched the first episode as a family, and then The Wife and I continued watching, all the way up to the finale…when The Daughter saw us getting ready to watch that very finale and said, “Awwww, I wanted to watch that show with you!” We’re like, “Sheesh, it’s not like we binged it!” We took two to three weeks to get to the finale, and there are only like 8 or 9 episodes…but as of now, we’re rewatching it with her. And honestly? Watching stuff as a family on occasion is still a delight.
