And here we have three DVD sets that no fancier of Monty Python should be without. At Last The 1948 Show was a British series broadcast in 1967 which starred John Cleese, Graham Chapman, Marty Feldman and Tim Brooke-Taylor. It was an obvious antecedent of Python and some of it was very funny. Alas, most […]
Haven't found any Blondie crossovers today, but D.D. Degg caught another one I missed yesterday. It was in a strip called Through Thick and Thin which, I have to admit, I hadn't heard of before. In the Blondie strip itself, the Bumsteads are embarking on a vacation and along the way, they'll apparently run into […]
Our friend and hero Stan Freberg will be making a couple of appearances in England later this month. On September 19, he'll be the subject of a show for BBC4 Radio which will emanate from The Comedy Store over there. Here's the info if you're there and want to attend. When I find out how […]
The best bit of commentary I have seen so far on what's happened in and to the Gulf Coast comes from Keith Olbermann. Here's a link to a transcript of it and here, to whet your appetite, is the first part… Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said it all, starting his news briefing Saturday […]
A correspondent wrote to me, apparently misunderstanding something I'd written here, that he too wanted to hear no more about Hurricane Katrina. What I meant was that those of us who've done all we can (donations, mostly) cannot continuously think about it and nothing else. We have to — to use a phrase I've never […]
Mentioned today in Pluggers. Thanks to Jim Davis — no, not that one, a different one — for calling it to my attention. By the way: Call me dense but I just checked the Pluggers website and learned what that panel is all about. I never really pondered what a "plugger" was and if I […]
Okay, I'm gonna plug some shows I worked on. The folks at Fox Home Video are in the home stretch of releasing all 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends on DVD. Needless to say, you want to own all five volumes but just in case you're going to pick and choose, here are some of […]
Blondie mentions in B.C., Curtis and in Cathy. I suspect that's about the end of the mentions in other strips. If so, it's a bit puzzling why some strips participated and so many — including ones depicted in Blondie — did not. There was one Blondie strip (this one) featuring Frank and Ernest but I […]
If you're not tired of reading about Hurricane Katrina — and I could sure understand if you were — you might want to take a look at Brendan Loy's weblog for the days leading up to the storm's assault on the Gulf Coast. I don't know Mr. Loy but it says he's a second-year law […]
Tim Russert, who ordinarily is about as tough on the Bush administration as I am on members of my immediate family, is among the newsfolks who seem angered by how little has been done for the injured and displaced in the Gulf Coast. Today on Meet the Press, he interrogated the Homeland Security Chief, Michael […]
And there are also "unofficial" entrants in The Great Blondie Crossover. Richard Thompson does two strips for The Washington Post which appear nowhere on the web — Richard's Poor Almanac and Cul De Sac. A recent edition of the former showed us the clean-up after the festivities. D.D. Degg writes that I missed a Blondie […]
David Brooks doesn't think much of the crisis management for Hurricane Katrina and tries to put it into a larger context. I don't agree with everything in this piece but I think it's an interesting way to look at it. […]
Back in the sixties in a comic called House of Mystery, a kid named Robby Reed used to use a weird little dial device to turn himself into a wide array of different super-guys. The strip was called "Dial H for Hero" and it's inspired a neat website called Dial B for Blog. I don't […]
I'm not sure how long The Great Blondie Crossover is going to last. The strip turns 75 on September 8 but today's strip looks like the big celebration. So this may be it. Not a lot of Blondie activity in other strips today. Hagar the Horrible is about the anniversary, as is Bizarro. Other than […]
So now Justice Rehnquist has died. Not a huge surprise, of course, but the political climate in this country didn't need one more divisive battle at this time. The politics of Hurricane Katrina were already getting out of hand, what with so many people working backwards from their support or dislike of George W. Bush […]