Egg-citing news from Waffle House!
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/01/nx-s1-5453567/waffle-house-egg-prices-surcharge
Let’s check with FRED for the most recently available data. In May, eggs averaged about $4.50/dozen. That’s still a lot more than $3.60, the high price that helped to get Trump elected.
Watch this and fall in love with Shari Lewis.
The way the kids in the audience reacted was how I felt as a young boy watching Shari. A documentary celebrating the life and work of the late and very talented ventriloquist/puppeteer has some upcoming screenings.
I’ll take exception with the assertion in the trailer that, “In the early days of television, there really were no kids shows.” Howdy Doody began in 1947, as did Fran Allison’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie puppet show. Crusader Rabbit was pitched as a limited animation TV cartoon series in 1948. Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany puppet ensemble first aired in 1949. The 1950s brought a flood of TV shows for kids.
That quote in the trailer continues with, “for Shari to come along… have puppets… comedy… I just knew this was different.” Shari was certainly special, but I wouldn’t say her act was essentially different from other ventriloquists. Edgar Bergen and Paul Winchell used dummies. Señor Wences and Shari talked to themselves with hand puppets.
Blogger Tralfaz says, “She was like the nice older girl down the street.”
https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-six-year-old-who-loved-shari-lewis.html
Shari wasn’t just nice, she was sexy. She had appeal beyond the kiddie set that, unfortunately, never took off. The dads in the audience must have paused to take in more than a passing glance. Everything about Shari Lewis was, in a word, attractive.
Tralfaz has this quote from a 1963 news item, reacting to the cancellation of Shari’s NBC show:
Childhood’s loss, however, may well turn out to be a gain for adult audiences… It will undoubtedly come as a great shock to the summer theater audiences who go to see “Indoor Sport” to find Shari, the perpetual ingenue with pony tail hairdo, playing a young matron with divorce on her mind—and without a note to sing or a hand puppet named Lamb Chop or Hush Puppy to talk to.
So what happened? Why wasn’t there a big primetime network TV breakthrough for Shari in the Sixties? Her greatest success was entertaining kids, and yet NBC canceled her beloved children’s show, while CBS kept Captain Kangaroo going year after year. This conundrum is something I hope the documentary can explain.
The Shari Lewis Show replaced the long-running Howdy Doody. Robert Crumb thought Howdy Doody was creepy and unsettling, whereas Paul Rubens loved the show and he took inspiration from it when creating Pee-Wee Herman. Which reminds me that I need to revisit and rework my posts regarding my unintentional role in getting Morty Gunty’s WOR-TV show in New York canceled.
Seeking to free myself from following politics on the Internet, I picked up an old, paperback collection of science fiction short stories. John W. Campbell wrote “Who Goes There?”, the short novel that was adapted into The Thing From Another World.
Campbell wrote a fantastic forward-thinking short story, called “Twilight,” in 1934. Predating WWII, mankind’s end doesn’t come from atomic war. Instead, it has a Rachel Carson ending. Reading “Twilight” this morning reminded me of how much I enjoyed reading science fiction as a kid into my young adult years.
https://ccrma.stanford.edu/~ge/artfuldesign/think66/2019/stuff/twilight.pdf
I’m re-watching season 1 of Andor, a series that takes a springboard leap from a single throwaway line in the original Star Wars. “How will the Emperor maintain control, without the bureaucracy?” Sorry about the low sound volume.
Andor shows us the bureaucracy in all of its relentless oppression and cold brutality. Without the Jedi and their lightsabers, with only a passing nod to The Force, what Tony Gilroy has done to expand the Star Wars backstory is just frickin’ complicated superb. I can’t say “simply” superb, because the workings of the Rebellion against the Empire are as complex as the Empire is itself.
You don’t even need to know anything about Star Wars, except that it exists, to get caught up in the series. Take an old prison movie, like 1930’s powerful The Big House, and filter it through George Lucas’ THX-1138, and you have some of the most compelling television I have ever seen.
The power goes out, an alarm sounds, and “something’s really wrong on two!”
Wait. How the ding-dong heck did I miss this? Diego “Andor” Luna had a guest host run last week on Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Tony’s Bunker Busters are guaranteed to decimate, obliterate and destroy!
Although I don’t often listen to audiobooks…
… what’s true for Arlo also applies to me.
My own take on staying up too late, from when having an online life was a relative novelty and printers were still the dot-matrix variety.
At some point in my adult life, between the requirements of work and family, my fiction reading became more sporadic than it had been in my relative youth. This NYTimes article is shared paywall-free.
