Month: June 2009

Petula Knows Where She’s Going!

Petula Clark is going to Canada in September. She’s going to talk about the film “I Know Where I’m Going!” in which she appeared as a girl of twelve, as seen in this video clip that I first featured over two years ago.

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In case the article at the link above loads too slowly, or if it disappears, you’ll find the text below. The website for the event is at this link. What fun!

Here’s something else that’s fun. Petula singing “Downtown” in German. I admit to having swiped this from the Keep the Coffee Coming blog.

[audio:http://www.dograt.com/Audio/2009/JUN/DowntownGerman.mp3]
Continue reading Petula Knows Where She’s Going!

K3 Kaput

And so it’s farewell. Sunday in Rotterdam, Holland, Kathleen Aerts appeared with Karen Damen and Kristel Verbeke for the last time. K3 — in my opinion one of the very best Pop music girl groups ever assembled — is no more.

Watching the video, to me it appears the farewell performance had little energy and excitement. A replacement for Kathleen will soon be selected, but K3 won’t be the same. I had the same feeling when David Duchovney left “The X-Files.”

More videos from last weekend’s Summer Festival have appeared.

Pets in Petaluma

Snoopy at Petaluma

In 1968, Snoopy attempted to enter the World Wrist Wrestling Championship in Petaluma, CA, only to be disqualified for not having a thumb. This week in Petaluma, Jon Provost of “Timmy and Lassie” voted on the world’s ugliest dog, with a boxer named Pabst being awarded the distinction.

Jon Provost

Jon’s super-duper tell-all autobiography, written with his wife Laurie Jacobson, Timmy’s In the Well is a great read, with many Hollywood stories, concentrating on the staid Fifties into the Swinging Sixties. Timmy never did fall in a well on the TV show, but as I pointed out a couple of years ago, a cartoon version of Timmy did fall in a well, in a Kenner Give-a-Show slide, and today that slide was given the Give-A-Show Projector Blog treatment.

Xbox Live, eX-Box Dead

School vacation has just begun and my son Eric’s Xbox 360 has the dreaded RROD — Red Ring of Death. (To be precise, it’s the three flashing red lights problem.) Needless to say, Eric and I are not pleased, especially after the expense and effort to upgrade the hard drive to 120 GB a few months ago.

To add further to our aggravation, because it’s Saturday afternoon we can’t ship it for repair until Monday. Going through the process of arranging the return wasn’t fun, between Internet Explorer 8 blowing up a couple of times on Microsoft’s own site, and Microsoft’s maddening voice-guided phone support. Bismo sent in his Xbox 360 twice for repair, and the second time, rather than repairing it again, a replacement unit was sent.

None of Eric’s Nintendo consoles has ever had a hardware failure. The Wii glitched a couple of times, but after using the lens cleaning kit we could see an obvious particle, and it’s been fine since then.

As far as I’m concerned, Microsoft is a software company pretending to be a hardware company. What really galls me is that the extent of the RROD problem was a known issue long before August 29, 2007, when Eric’s unit was manufactured. Have they figured it out once and for all, even now?

Speaking of video games, I’ll follow up a bit on the Tokyo Game Action auction that was held back on June 6. I was going to write something more in-depth about the death of arcades, because Good Time Emporium in Somerville, MA is also gone, but I’m afraid I lost my momentum.

This video shows the property, assessed by the town of Winchendon at about $400,000, being auctioned off for $115,000. Eric and I had a chance to thank Andy McGuire and to wish him well. Andy said he and his wife would be going to Japan as soon as possible after the auction.

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