Samjay says that yesterday I missed the funniest thing he’s ever seen in all his years of watching Jeopardy!
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By the way, I saw the second and third days of Jeopardy!’s Watson computer challenge. When IBM announced the contest I asked Larissa Kelly about it, and she said that she was looking forward to watching it herself. Considering the drubbing that Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter suffered, I guess I’m glad Larissa wasn’t a contestant!
When I read that Ben & Jerry’s ice cream had given Jimmy Fallon his own flavor, I knew that Stephen Colbert wouldn’t let the threat to his Americone Dream go unchallenged.
As usual, I have a bunch of posts I’ve been ticky-tacking away at for a while, but haven’t finished, then something grabs me so I write about that instead. Ya gotta love Louis Prima. Man, that cat could swing! Listen to this bit from his fantastic 1956 mash-up of “I’m Just a Gigolo/I Ain’t Got Nobody” — later covered by none other than David Lee Roth.
[audio:http://s3.amazonaws.com/dogratcom/Audio/2011/Mar/LouisPrima.mp3|titles=Louis Prima: I Ain’t Got Nobody (excerpt)]But get this. Marion Harris recorded “I Ain’t Got Nobody” before WWI!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24dfSxU1S64
Here’s a song that’s familiar to people of a certain age.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjHJ_snG3RI
Marion Harris did that one first, too, the year it was written, 1923.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-w0bzYKdXwk
Here’s a favorite by Harris. Listen to her phrasing in “After You’ve Gone,” and you’ll hear Marion’s influence on generations of singers to come.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kA6ulKFXiTA
Right now, Monte Schulz is at Warwicks, a bookstore in La Jolla, CA. Monte’s new book, The Last Rose of Summer is out, and I have my copy, although I’m 3,000 miles from La Jolla, so I won’t be able to get Monte’s autograph on it. I’ll be reading it as soon as I am through a couple of non-fiction books. I prefer to read novels without having any other books in progress. Monte owns the Santa Barbara Writer’s Conference, which this year is being held June 18-23 in, you guessed it, Santa Barbara.
On the Peanuts side of the Schulz family, which is run by Monte’s brother Craig, there is a new DVD coming out, and a graphic novel, the first Peanuts publication from the Kaboom! arm of BOOM! Studios.
You may recall that Charles Schulz never had an assistant helping him with the comic strip, but that did not hold for the Peanuts comic books from DELL (before there was a computer company by the same name), and later Gold Key. Jim Sasseville, then Dale Hale, worked with Schulz on those comics. D.F. Rogers has a great idea, that Nat Gertler should put together the complete collection of Peanuts comic books. High quality color scans from the original comics would be great.
I haven’t checked eBay lately, but I assume there are still sketches being offered that sellers claim are by Charles M. Schulz, but are obvious fakes. Here’s a sketch that looks like it might be genuine. The owner asked a newspaper columnist for an estimate of what it’s worth, and assuming it was done by Schulz I think he’s wrong about the personalized autograph holding down the value of the piece.
Last night, Turner Classic Movies showed Billy Wilder’s hard-hitting 1945 classic about alcoholism, The Lost Weekend. Tonight, it’s showing the next film he directed, The Emperor Waltz, from 1948. It’s a Bing Crosby costume musical comedy that I’ve never seen, with classy and lovely Joan Fontaine. Billy Wilder is known for his darkly humorous noir films in black and white, but The Emperor Waltz is light-hearted fun (until there’s talk of drowning puppies) and in fabulously vibrant color. What a beautiful print. Once again TCM makes cable TV worth keeping.
In the second half of this audio clip from Monday’s PBS NewsHour, senior Utah senator Orrin Hatch rips apart the federal health care law. The gist of his argument is it’s too expensive. He says he’d love for everybody to have health coverage, but “they outta trash the bill and get rid of it” and come up with a bi-partisan bill.
[audio:http://newshour-tc.pbs.org/newshour/rss/media/2011/02/28/20110228_healthredo.mp3|titles=PBS NewsHour: Health care compromise]Hatch says Utah’s health care [PDF link] is good, so maybe I should read up on how it compares to what we have here in Massachusetts, enacted into law by Mitt Romney, who has his own ties to Utah. If Hatch truly opposes government health care coverage, I assume he must not take advantage of it himself, as he is entitled to do as a United States senator.
