Any song can be a Hanukkah song if you have a cantor, one or more menorahs and a whole batch of Jews in it. You can even turn a hit song from a Broadway show into a Hanukkah song. This is Julie Benko and Cantor Azi Schwartz performing in Times Square with a batch of […]
And of course, I'm spending it writing. I spent most of this past year writing and — since Sunday, January 21 — dealing with the ankle I broke that evening. It's almost healed but I'm still walking like a seriously drunk person trying to make his way to the men's room. Apart from umpteen visits […]
Ed Graham was an advertising man who specialized in animated commercials and this led to him producing the Linus the Lionhearted Show for CBS's Saturday morning schedule in 1964. I didn't think it was a great show but there were moments of wicked and very different humor in some of the cartoons. It also had […]
This year, our number three slot goes to Adam Sandler… […]
Linda Lavin not only performed "The Boy From…" on The Mike Douglas Show in the seventies — as seen here earlier today — she did it a few years ago in an online Zoom concert to celebrate the 90th birthday of Esteban Rio Nido Stephen Sondheim. My longtime amigo Joe Brancatelli thinks this is a […]
Me, I'm staying home with a friend. I don't like going out on New Year's Eve, she doesn't like going out on New Year's Eve…it's perfect. There was a time when I used to party-hop but — no offense to any friends who threw those parties — I never enjoyed any of them. And worse, […]
I never met Linda Lavin even though I was involved briefly with her show, Alice. I also don't think I ever saw her perform on the stage which, gauging from the rave reviews she routinely got, was obviously my loss. In case you haven't heard, the world lost this talented lady the other day. One […]
So I just spent so long on a phone call that I thought I might miss New Year's Eve…and I don't mean the one tomorrow night. I mean the one after that. My problem was one of these robo-operators whose artificial intelligence is not only artificial but largely missing. "She" kept asking me to enter […]
Here are the Maccabeats with their parody of the song "Shut Up and Dance With Me." Again, very nice voices and some dicey rhymes… […]
Fred Kaplan has some interesting observations about Jimmy Carter. […]
Some people are fond of saying Jimmy Carter was our greatest ex-president…and it's true that he did a lot of good, helping the homeless, negotiating peace and doing a lot of things that ex-presidents generally don't bother with. I thought he was a pretty good president, albeit one who had the unfortunate habit (for re-election […]
Someone has put together a "reconstruction" of the infamous lost/hidden/incomplete movie by Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried. I have no idea how close this is to what Mr. Lewis intended but here, for what it's worth, is the link… […]
If you've got twenty-eight minutes to spare today, spend them watching this video. It's called Great and it snagged the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 1976. It's actually sorta animated — a combination of various media used to tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century British […]
Writing this blog can be very educational. Since I posted this morning about Buster Keaton's first TV programs, I've received a number of e-mails telling me things I didn't know and setting me straight on some things I got wrong. I'll have a post up in a few days expanding and correcting this morning's. […]
We need to have at least a couple of renditions of Tom Lehrer's "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" in this countdown so who better than Cali Rose and The CC Strummers, a ukulele group based in Culver City, California? Unlike others who sing this song, they're actually singing this in Santa Monica — at […]