You know you’ve always needed this: A list of fictional characters who have worn the Nixon mask in movies and TV shows.
And with Halloween coming up, you also need to know where you can buy a Nixon mask of your very own.
You’re welcome.
Here’s a great video-interview site: IHateYoungPeople.com. Check it out:
(Via Attack of the Show)
But about the things the older people say about music, I’d like to point out a few things:
1. Not all hip hop is bad. There is actually some interesting non-gangsta rap out there.
2. Not all young people like rap.
3. There is a lot of good new alternative music coming out these days, all the time. A lot of it almost rivals the best of the Baby Boomer music.
4. Remember that an awful lot of the music we grew up with was crap, too. We might not hear it as much today, so we can put it behind us, but we had to slog through it on the radio and dominating the pop charts at the time, so we really don’t have a position of moral superiority on this matter.
5. A large percentage of young people have a great appreciation for the best of the Boomer music. A lot more 20-somethings and teens like Led Zeppelin, the Beatles, and ZZ Top, to name just three, than we had appreciation for our parents’ music back then.
So shut up about “the music today” already. Just change the channels when the latest prefab Beyonce video comes on, and seek out the good stuff.
And if you don’t know how to find the good stuff, just ask me.
These days Merv Griffin seems to be known most as a producer, but he started as an actor, and a singer, before becoming a game show host, then a talk show host, then a producer.
I don’t have any memory of watching his talk shows, but, as a game geek from early childhood, I grew up on his (and others’) game shows. My favorite (and the one with the most influence on me) was Word for Word, the little-remembered project that nevertheless gave him the producing cred to be allowed to produce his two megahits, Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune.
Contestants on Word for Word were given a word, and challenged to form other, usually smaller words, out of the letters in the first word. The only word I remember at this point, in one of the first episodes I ever saw, was “cranberry”, and the bonus word was “barn”. I immediately became infatuated with the show, and, more importantly, with playing with the letters in words; the fact that my domain name is an anagram of the letters in my name is living proof of this influence. I even had the board game, which I think is still somewhere in my mom’s garage..
More important than any of his other credits, though, is the general feeling that Merv was a good human being. One person on the Fark message board said:
My grandfather was a writer on the Merv Griffin Show years ago. Long after my grandfather died, my mother got cancer. Merv cut a check to help with her medical expenses. He got us through some rough times.
Bonus points: He had a sense of humor about himself, as evidenced in this scene from Steve Martin’s underrated “The Man With Two Brains”:
Today is the 35th Anniversary of the Watergate break-in, which lead to the downfall of President Nixon. These days, when government scandal and treachery are the normal way of life, it might seem strange that a news story about a bungled burglary could monopolize the news for two years and culminate in a constitutional crisis, but it did. It was the biggest news story for the entirety of my freshman year in college, which I must say made for some interesting Political Science classes.
So anyway, let’s take another look, shall we?
First, the boring informational links: Watergate.info and Watergate on Wikipedia.
Okay, now let’s have some fun:
Watergate: The Card Game! (Scroll down to 1973 to see Watergate.)
Nothing conveys the promise of lifelong commitment like a Watergate Wedding! Book yours today!
I want this shirt really bad: VOTE ROBOT NIXON. May death come swiftly to his enemies!.
Watergate editorial cartoons. Not very good ones, since they’re from “Herblock”, but they’re still interesting in their heavy-handedness and anachronism.
The Watergate Hotel on Flickr. Lots of pictures of the the humble physical structure from whence launched the scandal that toppled a presidency.
The so-called Saturday Night Massacre. No, don’t get excited, nobody was really massacred.
That we know of.
I used to have this comedy album: National Lampoon’s The Missing White House Tapes. Side One was mostly audio from Nixon’s speeches recut to hilarious effect (“I was an active vice president … I had a … firm … staff … and I stuck it out!”) Side Two consists of comedy sketches which include Chevy Chase and John Belushi as performers, a couple of years before the world knew who they were.
A librarian’s personal Nixon book collection.
Watergate era poster: “Daffy Dick and Spiro T. Pig”. I’m sure it was funnier at the time.
Watergate.com: “Home of The Nixon Era Times, the Official Publication of the Nixon Era Center of Mountain State University.” Well, aren’t WE full of ourselves.
Was the now-senile Mark Felt really just a smokescreen for the real “Deep Throat”, Alexander Haig? The author of The Silent Coup seems to think so.
A BABY named Nixon. Seriously.
A goth pin-up girl named Nixon.
Seriously.
And now some videos:
“Watergate“, a school report in the form of an excellent short documentary, including present-day teenagers reenacting scenes from the time:
It’s good to see the kids having an appreciation for classic historical periods …
Next: You know the t-shirt I linked to above? It was a reference to this episode of Futurama:
Nixon’s back! Who’s kicking who around now?!
Next: Another Nixon appearance on Futurama — this time in Spanish!:
Muy fabuloso!
Next: The famous “I am not a crook” speech:
That was history in the making, right there! Personally, I thought the “There will be no whitewash … in the White House” speech was going to be much bigger than this one, but all these years later it’s nowhere on the cultural radar screen. Go figure.
And finally: Video of Nixon’s resignation speech:
Bunches of random things:
As if we need another video site, check out Chime.TV. Still, this one looks to have some new angles — including a charming little “Aloha” page — so it’s worth a look. … I saw that site and also this piece of news on Attack of the Show: The White Stripes are releasing their new album on a limited-edition hand-painted flash drive. The only problem is that it costs FIFTY-SEVEN dollars, for just a half-gig drive. … Notice that the Pitchfork Media site mentioned offhand that Porter Wagoner will be opening some tour dates for the Stripes … frigging PORTER WAGONER!!! WTF??? … And finally: Lately in my new music sequencer I’ve been messing around with an old MIDI file of this song, which was a favorite of mine about 38 years ago, and still casts that kind of hippie-dippie bubblegum feelgood spell over me. And now all these years later I’m having fun assigning various instruments to the separate tracks. Now I need to find where I put my backup CD with all the rest of my MIDI’s on it.
This one almost got past me: Today would have been John Wayne‘s 100th birthday.
I only noticed because AMC is having a John Wayne marathon, and I just happened to catch The Quiet Man (the colorized version, of course; nobody wants to watch a gray movie about Ireland, of all places).
John Wayne might not have been that great as an actor, but he was certainly a presence, and in my mind he had always been inseparable from the concept of movies. He also embodied the ideal of masculinity for generations, and his acting roles were just an extension of that. We always think of him in Westerns, but he also played his share of military men in his record 142 leading roles, as well as the occasional oil man, sea captain, businessman, police detective, and even a pharmacist.
So today, on this centennial of the birth of a legend, check out his official website (even though it’s riddled with programming bugs — when I tried to register for the forums, for example, it just returned the word “undefined”!), and the official website of his birthplace.
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 30 years today since Star Wars was unleashed upon the world. I didn’t see it on this day — it took it a month to hit Lubbock back then — but I did see it on the big screen, back when Darth Vader and R2D2 were still not household words, and like everybody else, I was totally hooked the minute I saw that huge Imperial battle cruiser fill the screen.
I’m also proud to say that I saw the final Star Wars installment, on my 50th birthday, which happened to be the day it premiered.
A more bizarre coincidence was never known.
Anyway, here are a few interesting Star Wars things …
Ewok links. No, not sausages, WEB links.
Star Wars blogs. And you thought nobody needed to get a life more than us regular bloggers.
Hundreds of cool SW links from our friend Steve at Look at This. (Be sure you check out all four pages of links; scroll down to the bottom of the page for links to the other three.)
Here’s a great comedy bit about Darth Vader visiting the cafeteria on the Death Star to try to grab some lunch. (And yes, that’s Eddie Izzard from The Riches; if all you know about him is from that show, this might be a BIG surprise for you …)
And finally: Thanks to the Inter-Nets, I can finally read this Star Wars article in Rolling Stone. I actually bought the issue 30 years ago, but The Spook “borrowed” it, and couldn’t seem to find it when I asked for it back; he blamed his roommates.
I suspect he was getting back at me for stealing a couple of his girlfriends in college …
If so … it was totally worth it.
A few quick notes before my birthday is over: Thanks to everyone who left birthday wishes in the comments of the previous post; and this would be a good time to say that I recently started having to moderate all comments, not because of any stalkers or comment-flamers, but because of the damn stupid spambot bastards. I intend to implement some more of the spamproofing tools, but until then, your comments won’t show up until I notice that they’re waiting for moderation. … It was a good birthday, as birthdays go. I went to see Spiderman 3, while my wife was at work, and I was so underwhelmed that I left about half an hour before it was over — I just felt like my time could be spent better elsewhere. … And that elsewhere was at home, meeting my wife so we could go out to eat at my favorite type of birthday restaurant, a Japanese steakhouse. Then we came home and I worked on my garage computer for a while, then I took a bunch of pictures of my birthday cards and stuff, which I uploaded to Flickr, so check ‘em out. I also uploaded a bunch of pictures of Molly and Bristol, so check those out if nothing else. Some of the shots of Bristol are particularly nice … That may not seem like much of a birthday, but remember that I’m just skimming over quickly here … A had a nice birthday surprise, BTW: I noticed in my visitor logs that I’ve gotten traffic from Wired Blogs — it turns out that they used, and gave me credit (and a blog link) for one of the photos I’ve had on Flickr: It was a picture of one of my mom’s medical monitors from her stent surgery in December of 2005, and they were using it in an article about when former Attorney General John Ashcroft was in the hospital! Pretty weird, huh? Anyway, I got credit for it, and it’s the most prominent use to date (out of about four instances) of my Flickr work by other people — and four uses is also not bad for somebody using a five-year-old Sony Cybershot … Also: Another birthday present for myself (we don’t usually get each other major presents, since we can buy our own much better) is some music software, as I mentioned last week. I’ll talk more about that when it comes in on Wednesday or so …
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that, as an early birthday present, I bought myself the DVD-ROM with over 50 years of complete issues of Mad Magazine. That has to have been the best 50 dollars I’ve ever spent: Not only is the humor and the artwork great entertainment, but it’s also a detailed time capsule of the history of the last half of the 20th Century. It also happens to be, for me, an album of the times from my junior high and (most of my) high school years. I had forgotten about a lot of the news, music, and entertainment items from back then, but it’s all coming back now … and I’ve only browsed through a fraction of the issues.
More to the point, though, I picked these two covers to highlight today. They’re both June issues, but they were released in May. The top cover was the first issue of Mad as a humor magazine, instead of the comic book it had been in its first three years of life, and that issue came out the same month that I was born. Coincidence? In fact, a lot of major things happened in the months leading up to or following my birth: The retirement of Churchhill, the death of Einstein, the beginning of the Daley dynasty in Chicago, Ray Kroc opening his first McDonald’s, the introduction of the polio vaccine, the opening of Disneyland, the premiere of Gunsmoke. the signing of the Warsaw Pact — I hereby credit my existence for the good stuff, and absolve myself of any responsibility for the bad.
ANYWAY: The lower issue here, the Clockwork Orange parody, was released in the month that I turned 18 and graduated from high school.
It is shown here only for reference; anything that happened around that time, for good or ill, was completely independent of my presence on this planet.
That’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
ANYWAY: Tomorrow (Saturday the 19th) is my birthday. Please try to remain civilized and law-abiding during any celebrations in my honor.
Thank you in advance.
Thirty-seven years ago today, three things happened: The Beatles released “The Long and Winding Road”, which would be their last U.S. #1 single; an F5 tornado hit Lubbock and killed 26 people; and actor Nicky Katt (Boston Public, Boiler Room) was born.
Was this just some kind of freaky coincidence? Yeah, that’s what they want you to think …
Seriously, though: I remember what I was doing that day, the day Lubbock got hit. I was living 50 miles away, finishing up my freshman year in high school, and about halfway through Ray Bradbury’s Something Wicked This Way Comes.
I read it by candle light that night, in my aunt and uncle’s basement, when our electricity went out.
I never finished the book, and never read it after that night.
It was spooky enough as it was, and after that night, I was too creeped out to go back to it.
Have you got any weird memories like that?
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