Friday, July 7, 2006

Site News

A few days ago, I did a little redesign on the non-weblog pages here, adding in a few new sections and deleting others. There are some new listings scattered through the latter pages of Great Los Angeles Restaurants That Ain't There No More and I forget what else I changed. But there are some updates if you care to go looking for them.

One new section I added is for those of you who are interested in the progress of my weight loss since Gastric Bypass Surgery. A running total can be found over on this page.

Over here in the weblog section, the big news is that a few of our video links no longer link. The YouTube people have done a major purge of video clips that...well, some sites are reporting that they've removed items that seem to violate copyright but based on my quick survey, it looks like they've yanked clips based mainly on whether powerful corporations were threatening to take legal action. In some cases, the removed material was public domain footage and I'm guessing it got swept up in a stampede of litigation threats over some of the non-p.d. films. Unlike some bloggers, I don't have a huge problem with this. YouTube is under no obligation to host anything and some other site will surely pick up the traffic. In fact, a lot of the stuff they've deleted is freely available on Google Video or over at The Internet Archive.

I also need to apologize — yet again! — for being so far behind on mail. I get more than I can possibly answer here and have had to just confine myself to the ones that most seem to require responses...and not even all of them. I wish it could be otherwise.

• Posted at 12:49 PM · LINK

Gene Splicing

From Dave Sikula comes an identification of the clip in the previous posting...

In re, the Gene Kelly/Woody Allen clip, based on the poster for Half a Sixpence (which ran from April 25, 1965 to July 16, 1966) in Shubert Alley, I'm guessing we're looking at a bit of Gene Kelly: New York, New York, which according to this site and the IMDb, aired on February 14, 1966 with Julie Andrews as the other guest star. "This is not available on video, however, if you visit New York City or Los Angeles you can view it at the Museum of Television and Radio." Weird to see the two of them together. Good catch.

That sounds like it. Thanks, Dave.

• Posted at 7:47 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I'm not entirely sure where this is from. It seems to be a sketch from a Gene Kelly TV special of some sort with Woody Allen as a guest. I'm guessing 1968. Anyway, it's a little less than four minutes so give it a look...

• Posted at 12:07 AM · LINK