Well, kids, I’m sorry, but you’re going to be on your own this week. The Girlfriend and I are leaving in the morning for a much-needed vacation. We’re going to the City by the Bay, San Francisco. For me, it’s a long-overdue return to the first place I ever traveled as a grown-up, seventeen long years ago, but it’ll be Anne’s first visit to one of America’s most cosmopolitan urban areas. We’ve both had a long, hard summer, we’re both tired and eager to be gone from our usual surroundings, and we can’t wait to get down there and find ourselves some adventure…
Play nice while we’re gone, and I’ll see you all in a few days!
When you watch movies, you’ll see actors and you’ll see stars, but you very rarely see anyone who can honestly be described as both. These individuals combine two very different sets of qualities: the nuanced thespian skills and talents that enable them to create characters who genuinely seem to live and breathe apart from the actor themselves, and the personal charisma, the indefinable “it,” that makes audiences naturally gravitate toward them. In my opinion, these individuals are becoming more and more rare all the time; I don’t know if they were a product of the old Hollywood system that died out in the ’70s or perhaps they had a certain kind of training that’s no longer much practiced, or maybe the planets just aren’t properly aligned these days, but for whatever reason, the younger people in movies today simply don’t have the same effortlessly larger-than-life aura about them.
We lost one of the last and greatest of these actor-stars Friday when the legendary Paul Newman succumbed at the age of 83 to the cancer he’s been rumored to have been battling for some time. This is one of those Hollywood deaths that I’ve been expecting, but which still strikes me to the bone. I can’t recall ever not knowing who Newman was; he’s always been one of my mother’s favorites, along with his occasional screen partner Robert Redford, and I have very dim memories of seeing The Sting with her when I was just a very small boy. (I can’t recall, however, if it was on TV or if my parents took me to the theater when it was first out. It seems like we saw it in the theater, but I may be imagining that.) Newman seemed like somebody I actually knew, and it hurts to think he’s gone.
A couple weeks back when I was teetering on the edge of a major funk, my lovely Girlfriend came up with what she thought would be a sure-fire cure for what ailed me: a big plate of comfort food at one of those classic cafes I so love, those places where the regulars while away the hours at the counter over a warm cup of joe (once upon a time, they would’ve had a cigarette to go with their caffeine, but those days are long gone, of course) while couples and families cram themselves into Naugahyde booths with Formica tables and enjoy hearty meals of home-style meatloaf, chicken-fried steak, or a burger the size of your head.
The cafe she had in mind was new to both of us, a vintage-looking hole-in-the-wall she’d spotted while running errands, not too far from her place of employment. It sounded perfect, and I was surprised and touched by her willingness to spontaneously try some place new for my sake (Anne is generally a creature of habit when it comes to food), so in less time than it took to type this sentence, we were off on a new culinary adventure.
It’s Friday morning and time for another wander down televisual memory lane. Given the subject matter of the only entry I’ve managed to write this week, I’ll bet you smart kids out there in the audience can guess which TV opening we’re about to see…
As I recall, the title sequence for The Muppet Show varied a little bit for each of the five years it was on the air, and there were also week-to-week variations consisting of a different “cold opening” — the little gag before the music starts, usually featuring that week’s guest star — for each episode, a fresh grumble from Statler and Waldorf (the two grouchy old guys in the balcony), and a unique closing gag involving Gonzo and his trumpet. YouTube has several different examples; naturally, I had to choose this one featuring Mark Hamill (who turned 57 yesterday; happy birthday, Mark!) and the droids from Star Wars. Well, Empire, judging from Luke’s outfit.
The Muppet Show ran on Sunday afternoons around these parts, which meant I was usually at my grandma’s house and competing with the grown-up menfolk for control of the TV. I rarely had much success at talking them into switching from the football game to a Ray Harryhausen movie, Star Trek, or — god forbid! — Space: 1999, but The Muppet Show was another matter. That was something pretty much everyone liked, even grandma, who frankly didn’t understand why we had to have the TV on at all when there was so much “visitin'” to be done. But she did like those “crazy puppets.” Didn’t we all?
SamuraiFrog reminds us that today is Jim Henson’s birthday… he would’ve been 72 if he were still here. Strange to think of him that old, even stranger to think he’s been gone for nearly 20 years (according to the wikipedia, he died on May 16, 1990).
And now for something that has nothing to do with International Talk Like a Pirate Day but is still pretty dang cool:
I grabbed this awesome photo from Damaris, a woman who works at Kennedy Space Center and is in training to become an astronaut herself. It’s not especially rare for two shuttles to be on their launch pads at the same time, but it is quite unusual for them to both be visible like this, because usually there’s a massive gantry called the Rotating Service Structure surrounding them and blocking the view. (The RSS is the bulky-looking mess of girders to the left of the shuttle in the foreground… not that upright tower, but the other part with the white center.) This particular photo is actually 18 years old; that’s the late, lamented Columbia and her sister ship Discovery back in September of 1990, the last time anyone saw this particular spectacle. But as Damaris explains, we’ll get the chance again tomorrow when Endeavour and Atlantis take their places out there at Launch Complex 39 and, for a few hours at least, will be standing naked beneath the Florida skies.
There’s nothing earth-shattering here, just a neat picture of something you don’t see everyday, and some interesting trivia. Click the pic to enlarge it, and then head over to Damaris’ blog for the whole story…
[Update: Damaris just updated her blog with pics of Endeavour and Atlantis on their pads, including a really gorgeous aerial shot that even includes a rainbow! Go check ’em out…]
You’re the pirate everyone else wants to throw in the ocean — not to get rid of you, you understand; just to get rid of the smell. You have the good fortune of having a good name, since Rackham (pronounced RACKem, not rack-ham) is one of the coolest sounding surnames for a pirate. Arr!
In light of the occasion, how could I not post this particular title sequence?
For you trivia hounds out there, this is not the title sequence from the premiere movie that aired thirty years ago tonight. “Saga of a Star World” had more cinematic titles, without the “mugshot” visuals of the cast, simply words receding into the distance, something like the titles for Superman: The Movie, which I believe had debuted earlier that summer.
These titles came with the show’s first regular episode; the sequence was later shortened somewhat, and the opening voiceover by Patrick Macnee was dropped. A pity… I always liked that voiceover. Yeah, I suppose the “life here began out there” angle sounds silly now, but back in the day this stuff raised the hair on our arms, kids… because we had these things called imaginations.
