Ramblin' with Roger

Who starred with whom, and where?

The IMDB has an advanced search function.

There is this list of the five best television series of all time, compiled by ABC News and People Magazine, and conveniently broadcast on ABC in the past couple of weeks. Interestingly, all were comedies, none of them were broadcast on ABC, and the latter four would probably be canceled quickly these days because the early ratings were not particularly good. The list included:
I LOVE LUCY (CBS)
SEINFELD (NBC)
MASH (CBS)
ALL IN THE FAMILY (CBS)
CHEERS (NBC)

I read about it on Ken Levine’s blog. He (pictured) mentioned this because he was a writer for two of the shows, MASH and Cheers, which I suppose I’d consider for my list as well. I’d also pick Lucy, if only because it was seminal in the development of the TV rerun. All in the Family, which I did enjoy at the time, did not age well, though. And Seinfeld I liked for a few seasons, but grew tired of it, about the time the character Susan died from licking an envelope. There are plenty of dramatic shows (Twilight Zone, Hill Street Blues, among others) I’d put on the list, but if I were limiting it just to comedies, certainly the Dick Van Dyke Show would be on the roster.

What was most interesting to me, though, is that someone asked Levine: “Other than you and David [Isaacs, Levine’s writing partner], is there anyone else associated with 2 or more of the top 5? Probably not. You are in a very special group.” Levine named some writers. He also noted that “George Wendt and Shelley Long [of Cheers] both did guest stints on MASH.” In the comments section, a guy noted that the IMDB has an advanced search function – go to Collaborations and Overlaps – so that one can discover, e.g., that there are 16 people with credits on both The Dick Van Dyke Show and MASH, starting with Jamie Farr and Bernard Fox. Or that five people were affiliated with both the Van Dyke program and Cheers, including Ann Morgan Guilbert and Sheldon Leonard.

One can also put in Dick Van Dyke and Ted Danson to discover that Van Dyke appeared on Danson’s show Becker, as Becker’s father, and Danson was a guest on Van Dyke’s Diagnosis: Murder, as himself, both in 1999. I will definitely make more use of this feature.
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Ken Levine’s thoughts on the GQ CHEERS article.

Living on Anbesol and Advil

The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album.

As mentioned, I had a root canal a couple of weeks ago, and the pain was far less than the last one I had some 15 years ago. But then I had to have some work done on another tooth, and the mouth discomfort after that one was mighty steady; not a sharp pain, but a constant ache, for which I was surviving on certain medicines.

And it was not great timing. Last weekend, the daughter didn’t have soccer, but the Wife and I did have a wedding to go to, a co-worker of hers who I didn’t know to a guy I knew just as well. The service was at 2 pm in Niskayuna, in neighboring Schenectady County, and it was lovely. The reception wasn’t until 5 pm, in Altamont, in Albany County, a 30-minute drive, so we did what we needed to do; we went grocery shopping. Talk about being overdressed for an activity.

The reception was at a place called the Appel Inn; our friends Marc and Janna had their reception there in November of 1999. We sat with one of the bride’s and my wife’s teaching colleagues, and her husband, neither of which I knew, but they were a delightful couple. But somewhere during this, the throbbing returned and having no over-the-counter solutions, I tried Southern Comfort and 7-Up; singularly unhelpful.

After church on Sunday, we drove to Schenectady to meet my sister Leslie’s bus. She had flown from San Diego, CA to Charlotte, NC back in late September to go to a conference, and visit our sister and niece; then flew to New York City, and visited relatives and a friend; then took a bus to Binghamton, NY to do genealogical research and to attend her high school reunion; and finally to Schenectady.

We are at some downtown restaurant called Bombers, and I saw that the New York Giants football team (my team) was already down 14-0, after only five minutes in the game; sigh. They ended up winning 41-27. But I didn’t see it.

We went to see the 2 pm stage performance of Mary Poppins at the Proctors Theatre, and it was quite good. Perhaps a little long, with too much of the exposition done to the tune of “Chim Chim Cher-ee,” but there were so many WOW moments – the transformation of the park, Bert walking on the ceiling – that we were all impressed. By the time we got back to Albany, though, I was exhausted from pain and went to bed before anyone.

The Sister returned to San Diego on Tuesday, the pain has subsided somewhat, and we’re back to a busy schedule, mostly driven by the Daughter’s activities. Especially on the weekend.
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Jaquandor saw Mary Poppins in Buffalo two years ago.

Says Mark Evanier (and I fully agree): The music group called Big Daddy (loved by many, including me) is staging a Kickstarter campaign to raise $35,000 to produce their new album. I would like to see them do this and have already backed…but it doesn’t look good. With only two days to go, they are a little over halfway there.

Technology is my friend, or a fiend

We could have a whole bunch of Thomas Paines out there, speaking truth to power.

Chris from Off the Shore of Orion, whose been off her blog, but on other social media, wonders:
What piece of technology would you hate the most to lose? Which piece of technology do you wish would just disappear?

The former is quite easy; the latter, not so much.

I am a lousy typist. I used to use tons of Wite-Out and those weird little strips that would take up a letter from the already-typed page. But it was tedious and exhausting. Clearly, my favorite technology that has been developed in my lifetime is the word processor. It has made the creative process INCREDIBLY easier. Oops, I typed an n when I meant an m; no problem. Backspace and correct.

I remember having this Sears typewriter back in the 1980s that had about a page worth of memory, so you could write before it typed about a line of text, and there was this narrow screen on it, so you could see a little bit of what you had written. It was an improvement, but not like the chance to view, save, and change a large document.

If I were dependent on the old technology, I wouldn’t be a librarian, for I would still be working on my graduate school paper from 20 years ago, which ran about 50 pages long (and wasn’t very good). When I first composed it, the sections were structured 1a, 1b, 1c, 2a, 2b, 2c, 3a, 3b, 3c. But once the first draft was completed, I realized I had it all wrong; it should have been arranged 1a, 2a, 3a, 1b, 2b, 3b, 1c, 2c, 3c. So I cut and pasted over 2/3s of the document. If I had had to RETYPE it…

I don’t know what kind of typist Jaquandor is, but I’m sure that he is appreciating editing the text of his book or two, including Princesses In SPACE!!! (not the actual title), on a word processor, rather than retyping every draft. BTW, I think is rather awesome that he’s doing that. You should read what he says about writing, with a wife and a kid and a job, in response to this column, which I sent him.

And of course, the word processing mode eventually made this whole blogging thing possible, which means, theoretically, that we could have a whole bunch of Thomas Paines out there, speaking truth to power. We don’t, of course, and people write all sorts of garbage, but that’s not the fault of the technology.

This is why I get extremely nervous about those sneaky draconian bills such as ACTA, designed presumably to protect against copyright infringement, but which would have a chilling effect on free speech.

On the other side of the original question, it’s more difficult to say. I could pick getting rid of the drones we fire into Pakistan. But the technology itself is neutral; a similar methodology might be used to blow up that asteroid that’s going to hit the planet, or to play video games.

The same technology that might infect thousands of people with some terrible virus might also be used to save them.

Somewhat off-topic, but Mark McGuire noted that “Facebook announced it has hit one billion users. Do you think you will still be using FB in 5 years? What social media platform do you think you will be using the most by then?” My answer is that I haven’t a clue. I didn’t know, 10 years ago, I’d be blogging; three years ago, I ignored Facebook altogether. I might have said three years ago, Twitter was pointless (I didn’t, but I could have), yet here I am tweeting daily, mostly things that I blog, to be sure. And I would not have thought you could so easily link them.

I WILL say that planned obsolescence is a terrible trait in manufacturing, but that’s more a methodology than a technology.

Oh, you know what technology I wish would disappear? The eight-track. A stupid technology that would make a lot of noise in the middle of a song. That’s something that should go. Wait: it did. Lots of bad technology goes away on its own.

Lyrical revenge

I realized that this was some sort of cosmic payback.

I was at a church meeting recently, which hadn’t really started. I was sitting next to one guy, and it seemed that every other sentence uttered by the others was a cue for a song lyric to pop into my head. It was coming so fast and furiously that I stopped citing the song and would just mention the artist. “Fleetwood Mac!” “Led Zeppelin!” “Jackson Browne!” Indeed, after a while, I only noted every OTHER song I was hearing from the discussion.

It’s fun, but it’s also a curse. I don’t go listening for songs; they just well up in my brain. I used to subject my mother to this torture when I was growing up, but it was a bit of a wasted effort since she usually didn’t know my reference point.

A few days ago, the Daughter was lying on the sofa and said something I thought was funny, so I chuckled. She said, with a straight face, “How can you laugh when you know I’m down?” She was quoting lyrics from the Beatles, and an obscure song at that, the B-side of the single Help.

I realized that this was some sort of cosmic payback.

The graphic above I stole from Facebook and indeed reposted. Someone commented, “I can vouch that it’s true.”

I’m Down – the Beatles (1965).

M is for the Monkees: 1967

In 1967, the Monkees had the #1 album far longer than any other group, and More of the Monkees was #1 longer than any album, including Sgt. Pepper.

1967 was a stellar year in popular music. According to Robert Christgau and David Fricke, the former billed as the “dean of American rock critics”, the “40 Essential Albums” of that year included albums by the Doors, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Jimi Hendrix, the Beach Boys, Bob Dylan, the Who, the Velvet Underground, and, of course, the Beatles. As it turns out, none of the albums released by the Monkees made the list.

The Monkees was a band formed by television executives to have a loony TV program in the tradition of the Beatles’ first movie, A Hard Day’s Night. The program which ran from 1966 to 1968 was quite popular, and even more so in eventual MTV reruns. I watched it occasionally, I will admit. But the group was derided as the “pre-Fab Four,” as opposed to the “real” Beatles.

Interestingly, the listening public did not seem to care about the controversy. On this weekly list of number #1 albums of 1967, the 1966 album The Monkees continued as #1 for five weeks (plus 8 weeks at the end of the previous year). It was replaced by More of the Monkees, which was #1 for 18 straight weeks. After a week of the Tijuana Brass, and a week by the Monkees’ Headquarters album, the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper ruled for 15 weeks. Then two weeks of Ode to Billie Jo by Bobby Gentry, and five weeks of Supremes Greatest Hits. The last five weeks of the year, the top-selling album was the Monkees’ Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.

In other words, in 1967, the Monkees had the #1 album far longer than any other group, and More of the Monkees was #1 longer than any album, including Sgt. Pepper.

Fast forward to the early 1980s. One of my co-workers gave me some Monkees’ greatest hits album. I must admit that I liked it enormously. I wrote it off as a “guilty pleasure,” but now I proclaim that there are lot of songs by the Monkees that I enjoy a lot.

And BestEverAlbums.com even gave the group a modicum of respect, with Headquarters considered the 38th best album of 1967, Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. at 39, and More Of The Monkees at 85.

From More of the Monkees
Mary, Mary (Michael Nesmith). The song was first recorded by The Butterfield Blues Band for their 1966 album, East-West. The Monkees were derided for doing a Butterfield song until it was shown that a Monkee had actually written it.
(I’m Not Your) Steppin’ Stone (Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart). Boyce & Hart wrote a number of Monkees songs. This went to #20 in the US, making it the first Monkees B-side to chart.
I’m a Believer (Neil Diamond). #1 in the U.S. for the week ending December 31, 1966, and remained there for seven weeks, becoming the biggest-selling single record for all of 1967.

From Headquarters
Randy Scouse Git (Micky Dolenz). The songwriter says it was written about a party that The Beatles threw for the Monkees, with references to the Beatles (“the four kings of EMI”) and to others such as Cass Elliot of the Mamas and Papas.

From Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd.
Words (Tommy Boyce, Bobby Hart). One of my favorite songs by the group.
Pleasant Valley Sunday (Gerry Goffin, Carole King). The single got to #3 in the US. Even though it’s about a street in New Jersey, I always pretend that it’s from upstate New York, where I have visited often. And how can I not love the lyrics: “And Mr. Green, he’s so serene. He’s got a TV in every room.”
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And for no reason except that it would have been John Lennon’s 72nd birthday: Strawberry Fields Forever – the Beatles (1967).

ABC Wednesday – Round 11