television Archives - Page 37 of 43

S is for Sesame Street

Do I watch Sesame Street on TV? Not really. But I DO watch the videos.

Back in the early 1970s, I used to watch Sesame Street. I don’t think I really have to explain Sesame Street, do I? It’s this kids’ show that started in 1969, broadcast on public television in the United States, ostensibly to educate children, with the extensive use of puppets, or, specifically, Muppet characters designed by the late Jim Henson. The program has spread to a couple of dozens of countries, in a number of languages.

The “trouble” was that I didn’t have any children to give me cover; I just liked watching it, even though I was in my early twenties. I wished that there was a show so cool when I was growing up. and I liked the songs, such as Rubber Duckie, and, naturally, Bein’ Green. I even own the 10th-anniversary album from 1979, though I had pretty much stopped watching by then.

Skip ahead a few decades, and I have a child of my own. Over the years, the show has tackled issues such as language differences, disabilities, hunger, and, notably bullying. Do I watch Sesame Street on TV? Not really. But I DO watch the videos.
Sesame Street has always been cool, offering famous grown-ups the chance to participate. The video by Feist may be the one that reminded me that Sesame Street was still doing the celebrity thing.

Here are some videos I’ve watched recently, now that the site is no longer being hacked.

Issues
Change the World, featuring the same Muppet who loves her hair
Hunger

Celebrity
Adrian Grenier: Season
Jon Stewart: Practice
Liev Schrieber and Naomi Watts: exchange things
Mark Ruffalo: Empathy
Michelle Monaghan: Fascinating
Mila Kunis: Include
Neil Patrick Harris: Curly
Seth Rogen: Embarrassed
Terrence Howard: Incognito

Parody
30 Rocks
G – a parody of Glee
(And a parody OF Sesame Street: Occupy Sesame Street Gets Violent

Music
Monster Went and Ate My Red 2 with Elvis Costello, which makes more sense if you’ve heard his original. I love this.
Arrested Development: Pride
B.B. King: The Letter B
The banned Katy Perry video – too risque for some
Jaquandor also put together some singing videos

BTW, there’s a new movie documentary featuring the puppeteer of Elmo, Kevin Clash.

There are a couple of videos that made me more than a little sad:
The late Chris Reeve to the library
Goodbye, Mr Hooper. When actor Will Lee died back in 1983, so did his character. Watch especially starting at the 7-minute mark.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Andy Rooney

Rooney has made a number of unfounded comments about government and politics that made me grimace.

There was a time when I used to actually enjoy Andy Rooney, the long-time 60 Minutes commentator who retired in October 2011, and died less than a month later. It was even before I knew who he was. I remember watching a series of CBS News specials called ‘Of Black America’, back in the days when network television would/could broadcast such things, and as it turns out, Rooney wrote two of them. He also penned ‘Black History: Lost, Stolen, or Strayed’, which won him his first Emmy.

Then he did a bunch of quirky shows in the 1970s and early 1980s, such as ‘Andy Rooney Takes Off’, ‘Mr. Rooney Goes to Work’, ‘Mr. Rooney Goes to Dinner’, and the Peabody Award-winning ‘Mr. Rooney Goes to Washington’, which Mark Evanier linked to.

When he got his regular gig on 60 Minutes in 1978, he was seldom profound but often entertaining enough. But even then, he played the part of the crotchety old man. I always remember this segment, pre-Thriller, of who was famous. Paul McCartney was famous; Michael Jackson was not, even though he had led the Jackson 5ive and had a hit album in Off the Wall. He never, in my recollection, gave contemporary music any credence.

Still, his observation about fame has stuck with me. Who IS famous, these days? Media being as diffused as it is, a Real Housewife of Schenectady might be well known in certain circles but totally invisible by lots of others.

His schtick and delivery became so well known that he was often parodied. And lots of quotes were attributed to him, not all of them accurately. He DID say, The French have not earned their right to oppose President Bush’s plans to attack Iraq. What was often left out is the next line: “On the other hand, I have,” referring to his service as a war correspondent during WWII. And he DID suggest that both Pat Robertson and Mel Gibson were “wackos.”

However, he did NOT start a commentary with I like big cars, big boats, big motorcycles, big houses, and big campfires. Nor did he write an essay ‘In Praise of Older Women’ or advocate in favor of prayer or give tips to get rid of telemarketers or the ramblings cited here or here.

In the last decade, Rooney has made a number of unfounded comments about government and politics that made me grimace. A person who read as many newspapers as he purported to peruse would have known some of the things he proudly announced he didn’t know. I kvetched about him in this blogpost here over an ill-informed observation about the Census.

Still, he always was proud of growing up in Albany, and he summered in the county, in Rensselaerville, and I liked that. I’d hoped that he would have had a chance to enjoy his retirement. But, true to his seeming contrarian nature, he didn’t have that chance.
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My old buddy Steve Webb writes about Andy Rooney, Howard Hunt, Bob Dylan, and Steve Ditko, among others.

M is for Martha

Mary sat and listened to Jesus as he talked, but Martha objected to the fact that she was left with all the work.

I always liked the name Martha. Partly, it’s because my first girlfriend was named Martha. I used to serenade her with the song Martha My Dear by the Beatles [LISTEN], from the white album. It was only later I discovered that Martha was Paul McCartney’s English sheepdog.

Martha Dandridge Custis Washington (pictured), of course, was the first First Lady of the United States, though she wasn’t so dubbed at the time. Martha is one of those classic girls’ names that, while extremely popular in the US in the 1880s (#14 in 1882), never lost at least a core of support; it didn’t leave the top 100 until 1966 and was still at #709 in 2010.

I’ve heard the slightly derisive term “being a Martha.” This referred to Luke 10:38-42 when Martha of Bethany and her sister Mary “offered hospitality to their friend Jesus…Mary sat and listened to him as he talked, but Martha objected to the fact that she was left with all the work. Jesus told Martha not to worry about small things, but to concentrate on what was important.” This proved to be a key concept in Christian hospitality; don’t NOT invite someone over, just because your home is not immaculate.

My daughter is fond of a PBS TV program called Martha Speaks, which “is an animated children’s television sitcom based on the 1992 children’s book of the same name by Susan Meddaugh about a talking dog named Martha…who is owned by ten-year-old Helen… When Helen feeds Martha some alphabet soup, the soup travels to her brain instead of her stomach, resulting in her ability to speak. The show focuses on synonyms and vocabulary, with each episode featuring an underlying theme illustrated with keywords.” LISTEN to the opening title theme song, which features these lyrics: “Martha Speaks and speaks and speaks and speaks and…Communicates, enumerates, elucidates, exaggerates, indicates, and explicates, bloviates, and overstates and (pant, pant, pant) hyperventilates!” And here is a video guide to the episodes.

ABC Wednesday – Round 9

Toronto: The City Pass, Part 2

The highlight may have been a Rube Goldberg-type machine.

The third full day in Toronto we dedicated to going to the Toronto Zoo. It is on the eastern edge of the city and required both train and bus to get there. One could make the case for driving there, I suppose. One of the selling points of having the City Pass is that one could avoid lines. Never was this more true at the Zoo, where we avoided at least a 15-minute wait just to get inside.

The zoo is massive. We saw only about 40% of it. We went to the Malay and African sections but never even got to the Americas or Australia or Eurasia. We considered taking the train around, and we might do that on a future trip. We’re already thinking about that.

The only comparable facility I’ve been to is the San Diego Zoo in California, and that was over a decade ago, maybe two decades. The SD Zoo was $32 per person then, whereas the Toronto Zoo retailed for under $25 US.

There were some extra features, such as rides, which we did not use. But we were pleased that the splash park was part of the admission. It was a particularly warm day – I got a bit of sunburn – so it was a welcome relief. To give you what a full day it was, the Daughter fell asleep on my shoulder on the bus trip back to the train, and then fell asleep again on her mother’s shoulder on the subway ride back to our hotel.

The BONUS appeal of the Toronto Zoo, though, happened some days after we got back to Albany. The Daughter was watching her new favorite show, Dino Dan, which is a TV series about “paleontologist-in-training Dan Henderson (played by Jason Spevack) and his friends, who uncover clues about the past and secrets of the dinosaurs. The show combines live action with CGI dinosaurs.” On one episode last month, which I was only half watching, the Daughter correctly identified as having been filmed at the Toronto Zoo; I immediately recognized the elephant and lion areas myself. Someone put a bit of the episode on YouTube.

I will revisit the zoo later in the year.

We went to the Ontario Science Centre on our way out of town and may have given it short shrift. The quirky thing about this building is that the 6th floor is down, while the 1st floor is up. The Daughter enjoyed the reptiles, and especially the area where one plays with a hot air balloon, lights, bubbles, and a lot more. She particularly liked dancing to her image altered by some nifty effects. Most of our time was spent in the play area.

But the highlight may have been a Rube Goldberg-type machine similar to, but not exactly the same as this one. The one we saw had a bunch of billiard balls, and the patrons had to keep loading the balls into the machine, from a half dozen locales, to keep the effect going. The kids LOVED it; heck, I loved it.

There are City Passes for about a dozen other cities in North America. I’m not sure I’d use it for a city I’ve visited, such as New York or Boston; I’ve been to the Empire State Building. But for a city I’ve never been to, such as Seattle, I think it would be ideal.

August Rambling

GayProf noted Perry when he wrote: “Numerous songs en vogue right now celebrate women consuming alcohol to the point of blacking out, hooking up, or hurling (not always in that order). ”

Because I was out of town, I managed to miss a couple of significant cultural anniversaries. One was the 50th anniversary of the first real Marvel superhero comic, the Fantastic Four, by Stan Lee and Jack “King” Kirby. Mark Evanier explains why it had a November cover date. Check out this hour-long Kirby documentary. And here’s a link to the intro to the FF TV show.

The other was the 100th anniversary of the birth of Lucille Ball. I watched most, if not all, of the episodes of every single one of her ongoing series, from the seminal I Love Lucy (1951-1957; 8.9 out of 10 on the IMDB scale), which started before even TV Guide and I were born but lives through the clever concept known as the rerun; to the star-studded (and too long, in my recollection) episodes of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (1957-1960; 8.6); to The Lucy Show (1962–1968; 7.3), which was the one with Lucy as Lucy Carmichael, Vivian Vance (Ethel Mertz in the earlier shows) as Viv, and Gale Gordon as Lucy’s testy boss, Mr. Mooney.

Then there was Here’s Lucy (1968–1974, 6.8), where “Lucy Carter, a widow with two teen children [played her real kids with Desi Arnaz, Lucie and Desi Jr.] takes a job as a secretary for her stuffy brother-in-law [Gale Gordon, again.] Finally, there was Life with Lucy (1986; 6.0) “Lucy Barker, now a grandmother living with her daughter’s family” Gale Gordon also appeared in this show.

They declined in quality somewhat – Life with Lucy was particularly bad, as I recall – but if I didn’t quite LOVE Lucy, I liked the woman from upstate New York (Jamestown) quite a bit.

I believe this was Lucy’s favorite scene from her first series.

As you may have noticed, Katy Perry becomes the second artist, following Michael Jackson, to send five songs from an album to No. 1 on the Billboard charts, and during his birth month, no less. An accomplishment to be sure, though the charts don’t reflect the same level of sales they used to. (Similarly true of top-rated TV shows: the numbers are far less than they used to be.) Not incidentally, GayProf noted Perry when he wrote: “Numerous songs en vogue right now celebrate women consuming alcohol to the point of blacking out, hooking up, or hurling (not always in that order). “

In pictures of models, “there are women (and occasionally men) contorted into positions that, were you to see actual people in them, you’d find curious or peculiar or perhaps even alarming.”

Natalie Cole with the Allman Brothers. Check out the sidebar for David Crosby, Graham Nash, and others.

On Star Trek: The Next Generation, Data could reproduce the voices of humans with perfect fidelity. Brent Spiner can do the same with the voice of Patrick Stewart.

My new Kickstarter fave: Stripped is a documentary love letter to cartoonists and comic writers who’ve delighted newspaper readers for decades. Since 2008, 166 newspapers have shut down, leaving the future uncertain for many syndicated cartoonists. Amidst this industry upheaval, Stripped follows 60 cartoonists, including luminaries like Jim Davis, Scott McCloud, and Jeff Keane, as they navigate the uncharted waters of a new digital world.

Having seen the trailer for the Spider-Man movie reboot, I have no reason to actually see the movie. The first two movies with Tobey Maguire were great; even own them on DVD.
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Two music legends died this month. Jerry Leiber of the songwriting duo Leiber & Stoller wrote more songs than just about any pop composer. Here’s a list of most of them. Listen to Big Mama Thornton singing “Hound Dog”, some four years before Elvis Presley. Also, hear Charlie Brown by the Coasters; coincidentally, Carl Gardner, leader of the Coasters, died a couple of months ago.

Nickolas Ashford, who died August 22, was the songwriting partner and husband of Valerie Simpson. Ashford & Simpson wrote songs for Motown artists, Aretha Franklin, and others, as well as performing themselves. Hear Marvin Gaye & Tammi Terrell do You’re All I Need To Get By. Also, here’s a song originally performed by Ray Charles, I Don’t Need No Doctor (live) by Humble Pie.

The Jerry Leiber Cover Story on Coverville.

The Salon story about Leiber and Ashford.

GOOGLE ALERTS

Roger with the hula hoop

Rollie Roger Green T-Shirt

Roger Green, the proprietor of Hair by Roger, said noise and vibrations from the work were spoiling the salon’s ‘peaceful environment’. A spokesperson from United Utilities said: “We are fully aware of the impact this scheme has had on the community…”

“The Black Boardwalk Cat is a distinctive animal that has acquired an unusual place in the hearts of many university employees and students,” said Roger Green, associate professor of political science and public administration.

Forgotten Book: THE THROTTLEPENNY MURDER, Roger J. Green. My contribution this week to Pattinase’s Friday’s Forgotten Books is a book I read in 1993.

“Former Wisbech Mayor and Wisbech Standard editor, Roger Green who died in a road traffic collision on the A47 Wisbech bypass…. This particular Roger Green got a LOT of coverage.