I was afraid this would be what I saw.
Are you as annoyed as I am that so many headlines end with “Here’s Why”?
Author: DOuG pRATt
Tripping With Doctor Who
In this clip from The Late Late Show on CBS, pre-James Corden host Craig Ferguson tributes the time-tripping Doctor Who, with an appearance by the 11th Doctor, Matt Smith.
To Ferguson’s delight, Smith’s Doctor regenerated into his old pal, Peter Capaldi as the 12th Doctor. Here they are talking about dropping acid. Which I assure you I never did, or ever had any interest in doing.
Ferguson is about to go on a short tour, and one of his stops will be at the gates of Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts.
https://www.aomtheatre.com/event/craig-ferguson-the-fancy-rascal-tour/
My old Western Mass newspaper cohort and friend Mike Dobbs spoke with Ferguson by phone a couple of days ago.
https://www.thereminder.com/dining/features/craig-ferguson-to-perform-at-academy-of-music-sept/
Picking up on my Cuckoo Month post from a few days ago, you can add Doctor Who to the list. The series premiered on November 23, 1963.
Rootkit Canal
The story of Sony’s notorious rootkit deployment, as told by Dave Plummer, the Microsoft developer whose code made the hack possible.
Credit for the deep digging to uproot the rootkit goes to Mark Russinovich, a founder of Winternals. Before becoming one of the voluntarily unemployed, I was very familiar with their Sysinternals Suite of utilities. Russinovich’s work was so outstanding that Microsoft bought Winternals and brought Mark on board.
Crapto Currency
I’m halfway through Easy Money: Cryptocurrency, Casino Capitalism, and the Golden Age of Fraud, by actor Ben McKenzie, B.S. Economics, and journalist Jacob Silverman. It’s one of the new books covered in MIT Technology Review.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/23/1077693/crypto-foul-play/
CNBC has been breathlessly covering the crypto action since it started, almost invariably with a positive spin. In this short segment there’s an attempt to discredit McKenzie’s view that cryptocurrency is a scam. Which is funny, considering all of the investment nonsense that entertainer Jim Cramer spouts on CNBC. Nobel Prize economist Paul Krugman also sees no valid economic use for crypto currency.
Speaking of economics degrees, the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond checks on the popularity of the major in colleges.
https://www.richmondfed.org/publications/research/econ_focus/2022/q3_profession
The Lennon Sisters Sing About Puberty
The Lennon Sisters sang this “coming of age” song on the Lawrence Welk Show in 1956. Kathy, on the left, was thirteen going on fourteen. Peggy, on the right, was fifteen going on sixteen. Eldest sister Dianne, aka Dee Dee, was sixteen going on seventeen, and Janet was ten.
“Thirteen Going on Fourteen” hasn’t aged well, but the Lennons, being girls singing about girls, made it a cute little song. I can imagine Welk thought it was perfect for them when he heard the single recorded by the Crew Cuts. Today, a quartet of men in their mid-20’s singing about a 13-year-old girl being “a pretty little flower, ready to bloom,” comes across as rather creepy.
Written by Al Hoffman and Dick Manning, what’s most interesting about “Thirteen Going on Fourteen” historically is that it predates Rodgers and Hammersteins’ “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” by three years.
The Cuckoo Month
The Beatles released their second UK album, With the Beatles, on November 22, 1963. That same day in New York, actor Patrick O’Neal and his brother Mike opened their first restaurant, The Ginger Man, named after a play Patrick was in. They had a rough start.
On November 24, my family appeared in a Parade magazine article that was ignored along with everything else, because of what happened in Dallas on Friday. Another play that was on stage in New York in November of ’63 was an adaptation of Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
The production lasted for only 83 performances, even with Kirk Douglas starring as McMurphy. New York’s attention would soon be turned away from JFK’s assassination by the arrival of the four lads from Liverpool.
There were other notable actors in Cuckoo’s Nest, including William Daniels. Ed Ames, who died a few months ago, played Chief. After the play closed, the following year Ames, who was Jewish, was stuck with playing an Indian once again, this time for the Daniel Boone TV series. I was surprised to see Gene Wilder’s name in the cast. Wilder, who was 30 at the time, played Billy. So he had Broadway experience when, four years later, he was Leo Bloom in The Producers. Douglas wasn’t able to get One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest produced for film, but his son Michael managed to pull it off twelve years later.
Wait, here’s another one!