At 9 PM tonight this is where I’ll be.
https://wfmu.org/playlists/shows/135080
Until then, on this Christmas evening I will be watching Top Secret!, the totally whacked-out follow-up to the totally whacked-out Airplane! This is the movie that made Val Kilmer whatever it was that Val Kilmer became. It asks and answers the question, “What if the Nazis had held onto power in East Germany at the end of WWII, and where the French resistance continued to resist?”
https://youtu.be/FHUgwQjO9Mo
Tommy José Stathes is an animation film collector, curator and historian. A few months before the panic of pandemic lockdown, I attended a very enjoyable and entertaining presentation by Stathes. The event was sponsored by Paul Howley’s comics and collectibles store, That’s Entertainment in Worcester, MA. The New York Times has this profile of Tommy.
I think [“Somewhere in Dreamland”] helped me to better understand and connect with the inner children in my own grandparents, all of whom were born right around the time of the 1929 stock market crash and grew up during the Great Depression.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/nyregion/stathes-vintage-cartoons.html
Tommy has posted “Somewhere in Dreamland” on his YouTube channel.
Fun fact about my friend Paul Howley. We were introduced almost 50 years ago at a Christian youth gathering that was held at Freedom Farm, in Bolton, MA. My girlfriend Karen thought I’d like to meet him because of our mutual interest in comic books. After many years as a Christian fellowship ministry, the Freedom Farm property was sold and it’s now a commercial operation.
My all-time best story about troubleshooting a problem at work involved Karen. I’ll have to tell it sometime.
When “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses)” was released on November 25, 1967, everybody knew it was a play on the Beatles’ “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”. Rather than being a novelty record, it’s a Psychedelic Blue-Eyed Soul masterpiece that took on a life of its own. The single stayed on the Billboard Hit chart for 16 weeks, compared to 11 weeks for “Hello, Goodbye”, knocking the Beatles out of the #1 spot in January.
The song is on John Fred & His Playboy Band’s second album, Agnes English, that was quickly given a new sleeve with the single’s title. I have an LP with the redone sleeve and, whaddaya know, the album is another creative musical gem from 1967.
Released only a few weeks after “Judy” was another perfect Psychedelic Pop record, “Green Tambourine” by the Lemon Pipers. These two singles are permanently linked in my mind, and when I hear one of them I always think of the other.
The “Living Bra” reference in “Judy in Disguise” came from Playtex, the company came up with the winning design for the spacesuits used in NASA’s Apollo missions.
Nobel Prize economist Robert Solow has died. Solow was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Obama. It’s an honor that was subsequently tarnished by Trump giving one to Rush Limbaugh.
As [Solow’s] work shows, technological advances, broadly defined, are responsible for the bulk of modern economic growth
https://news.mit.edu/2023/institute-professor-emeritus-robert-solow-dies-1222
Solow’s obituary in The New York Times has this amusing quote about John Kenneth Galbraith.
Mr. Galbraith “mingles with Beautiful People; for all I know, he may actually be a Beautiful Person himself.” But the book, he said, “is for the dinner table, not for the desk.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/21/business/robert-solow-dead.html
I think Solow’s “beautiful person” crack may have revealed a bit of the old M.I.T. vs. Harvard rivalry. Meeting the very tall Galbraith was a pivotal event for me in deciding to make Economics my college major.
Coincidental with Solow’s passing, last night’s PBS Newshour has this segment on AI’s potential effects on employment. It was mostly recorded at Boston’s Museum of Science (which is actually in Cambridge), where one of my sisters works developing educational materials.
For a deeper dive into the work of Robert Solow, there is this interview from just six months ago. It was conducted by his former student, economist Steven Levitt.
I’m listening to AM radio and reading a print newspaper.
There’s no stopping Tom Hanks on his music mission. He’s already back again as DJ on Boss Radio 66! Today at 11.
