Author: DOuG pRATt

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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Catch Prue If You Can

For its American release, the 1965 Dave Clark Five movie “Catch Us If You Can” was given the title “Having a Wild Weekend.” If you look quickly, you can catch a couple glimpses of Prue Bury, where she’s made up to look almost like the original Goth girl!

Prue Berry in “Catch Us If You Can”

Prue even dances with… the Wolfman?? There’s a costume party later in the movie with a man dressed as Frankenstein.

Prue Berry in “Catch Us If You Can”

The gent with the hat is Clive Swift, best known as Richard Bucket, the long-suffering husband in the English TV series “Keeping Up Appearances.” Here’s one last quick shot of Prue that I found.

Prue Bury in “Catch Us If You Can”

Anna Quayle in AHDN and beyond

One of the best of the many memorable vignettes in “A Hard Day’s Night” is the exchange between John and “Millie,” played by the wonderful character actress Anna Quayle. In this video is the full scene, followed by Quayle a few years later in an episode of “The Avengers”, and then in a brief role from the 1981 production of “Brideshead Revisited.” Nickolas Grace is the outrageous Anthony Blanche, with a performance that’s over-the-top, yet more reserved than Tim Curry probably would have done it. I end the clip with Anna Quayle talking about her part in AHDN.

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