Category Archives: Uncategorized

In our never-ending quest to spend all your money, we're going to recommend two new DVDs of less famous Buster Keaton material. Both have been assembled with uncommon care and consideration, and both give you a chance to see Buster when he wasn't at the top of his form (or budgets) but still with flashes of the grand Keaton style.

Buster Keaton – 65th Anniversary Collection gives you the ten short comedies he made from Columbia between 1939 and 1941. Buster's career had fallen to the point where the man who'd once made The General now had the same job (and directors) as the Three Stooges. Compared to Keaton at his peak, the shorts are disappointing. Then again, compared to Keaton at his peak, almost every comedy film is disappointing. In these shorts, you can see Buster often rise above his material and production values, and the DVD is a first-rate package with good transfers and plenty of historical extras.

Industrial Strength Keaton is a collection of Buster's oddments and leftovers — a few of his shorts, some promotional films, a number of his appearances on early television and a load of the commercials he made in the late fifties and early sixties. Some devoted Keaton fans dug all this stuff up and wrapped it in informative commentaries, and while it's no substitute for Buster's best work (this stuff), it's a nice add-on for the devotee of the man's talents.

The above titles link to Amazon pages where you can buy the two DVDs for (at the moment) $19.86 and $18.99 respectively. Note that each page currently has one of those great Amazon package deals. This one lets you buy them both at the same time for $38.85, a savings of…well, let me call up my little on-screen calculator and do the complicated math on this for you. Aha! Yes, as I expected, it's a terrific savings of absolutely nothing. Well, I guess it saves you a couple of mouse clicks. In any case, Buster is worth it.

The L.A. Times has a nice article on pin-up queen Bettie Page…though for some reason, the name of the artist most responsible for her "rediscovery" — Dave Stevens — is unmentioned.

Mitchell Anthony produces and hosts Creating Success, a widely heard podcast that interviews successful creative people about how they do what they do. The guest on his latest installment belies the premise…which is a coy way of saying it's me. If you're an iTunes person, you can hear this show (it runs about ten minutes) at this link. If you're not, here's a link to a plain ol' MP3 download. We mainly discuss what it's like these days to try to break into writing or drawing comic books…

Woody Allen's years as a stand-up comedian are covered in a BBC radio special you can listen to by clicking here. It's about 23 minutes and includes comments from Carl Reiner, Mel Brooks, Dom DeLuise and others. BBC radio shows often do not remain on the website for long so if you want to listen, don't dawdle. And if you enjoy it, don't thank me. Thank Shelly Goldstein, who sent me the link.

Continuing with our extravaganza of video links, here's thirteen minutes of Tom Lehrer performing…

If you've been thinking of buying a TiVo, their lifetime service deal is about to go away. No firm cut-off date has been announced but TiVo dealers are saying that the rumored date is March 15, which is next week. After that, you won't be able to buy lifetime service for any amount of money and certainly not for the current price of $299.

To make sure we're clear on this: When you get lifetime service, it's one machine's lifetime, not your lifetime. When TiVo originally started, they didn't make this clear so they allowed a lot of us early subscribers to transfer our lifetime subscriptions to another machine…once. It can no longer be transferred.

$299 is a great deal if you're going to keep your TiVo twenty-four months or more. I've had two of mine for more than four years and will surely be using at least one for another year or two. If I'd been paying by the month for those two machines, I'd have spent around $700 on each for the service.

A few years ago, there was little question that you would keep a TiVo for more than two years. Today, it's a bit more arguable. The current Series 2 TiVo machines do not handle Hi-Def. The Series 3 machines, which will allegedly be out at the end of the year, will have that capability, as well as the capacity to record two shows at once and there'll be other nifty features, as well. The grapevine suggests, however, that the Series 3 TiVos will lack certain existing features like multi-room viewing, which is the ability to transfer shows from a TiVo in one room to a TiVo in another, assuming you have two TiVos and that you have them networked. If you're thinking you might dump your Series 2 TiVo for a Series 3, lifetime service might not be such a peachy idea. On the other hand, it might be very easy to sell that Series 2 TiVo with lifetime service to someone who doesn't care about High Def.

So the decision's yours. All I'm saying is that if you're going to get lifetime service, you'd better get it now. You have to have the serial number for your TiVo and then order the service from the TiVo website.

You know, for all the touting I do of their products here, you'd think I owned stock in TiVo…but I don't. Maybe I should because one of these days — who knows? — the company might even start showing a profit.

I seem to be on a Google Video kick all of a sudden. Here's a video clip of a high-speed freeway pursuit from Oklahoma that I always thought was remarkable — one of those things that if you saw it in a movie, you'd think was hokey. Click on the little arrow to watch it. It's about two and a half minutes.

In 1972, there was a summer replacement TV series on ABC called The Ken Berry "Wow" Show. I don't understand the name either but that's not important right now. What is important is that someone (not me) is looking for video of this forgotten series to include in an upcoming TV special. If you have any episodes, drop me a line and I'll forward it to the appropriate party.

I swear I didn't retouch this in any way. It's up on the CNN website at the moment (here) and I thought at first I'd made a wrong click and wound up at The Onion. In case you don't get it, the "quack" story is about how some are saying Bush is becoming a lame duck president. That's bad enough but to put it next to a story about Bird Flu…

You know, it can be dangerous to quack around the White House. You might get shot by Dick Cheney.

I often read The Huffington Post but I hadn't realized until the other day that my friend Bob Elisberg is now among their gaggle of pundits. He has three columns up so far and I can recommend them all to you. Here's a link to his page there.

Because there are some things you just can't see too many times…

The other day, we were talking here about product placement, where some company pays to have its product displayed in a scene in a TV show or movie. Michael A. Burstein clues me in to this website, which is for a company that digitally inserts products into such material as part of sponsored placement deals.

As I've been been saying for years, I'm waiting for the day they can digitally take George Lazenby out of On Her Majesty's Secret Service and replace him with Sean Connery. Oh — and while you're at it, I'd like Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly, Angela Lansbury in Mame, Zero Mostel in Fiddler on the Roof, Peter Sellers in every Pink Panther movie that didn't have Peter Sellers, and W.C. Fields in the title role of The Wizard of Oz. Somebody get right on these.

Here's an auction you might not want to miss. I can already hear Star Trek fans emptying their bank accounts. (Thanks to Rowby Goren for calling it to my attention.)

This website reports that a study released by the Motion Picture Association of America says that last year's box office receipts were down 7.9% from the year before. This website reports that the ratings on last Sunday's Academy Awards telecast were down 8% from the year before. Anyone think this is a coincidence?