Al Jaffee, call your office

If you're printing an ad on the back of a map, you really ought pay attention to what it looks like when you fold it up. Mark Evanier has a funny example from a New York tourist map. Go see it.

Woody Allen interviews Billy Graham

It really happened! Witty banter, serious respectful discussion of faith, sin, premarital sex, and popular culture, and both men handle questions from the audience. What Graham says about the harm caused by premarital sex wouldn't have been amiss at last night's Modest Proposals event which Dawn Eden described as a gathering of "Chastity All-Stars."

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The interview is part of Woody Allen's September 21, 1969, TV special, part of the Kraft Music Hall series. The show includes stand-up by Woody, skits with a 25-year-old and gorgeous Candace Bergen, music by the 5th Dimension (Wedding Bell Blues), and ads for Libby with Tony Randall as a private eye. Click below to watch the entire special, interspersed with classic TV ads:


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The Trouble with LOLtribblez

There's something about the Star Trek original series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" that invites parody.

We've already seen the episode reinterpreted in the style of Edward Gorey. Now click the picture to see the whole episode, done up LOLcat style!

Soup for you!

I was doing my payday shopping at the Costco and was amazed to see Al Yeganeh's face looking at me from a box. He calls himself the Soup Man; Seinfeld fans know him as the real-life soup kitchen owner who inspired the "Soup Nazi" character. I was surprised to learn that he has soup kitchens all over the northeast and is selling packaged soups all over the country.

Well, I bought a 15 oz. box of turkey chili and brought it home (almost eight bucks!). Back at the ranch, I had to surf over to YouTube to see if I could find any clips from that Seinfeld episode to put me in a proper frame of mind to appreciate the soup.

Instead I found this clip of the real Soup Man. The New York City Fox affiliate sent over a chirpy blonde reporterette for a live remote from his new location on Trinity Place downtown. In the first segment he almost seems reasonable in his protest against the reporter's carelessness (she went behind the counter and touched his ladle!), and I love it when he responds to the reporter's comment about how the interview will giving his restaurant publicity for opening day. "You are getting publicity your own self. I am giving you publicity!" Things get a bit more heated in the second segment. No one appreciates a perfectionist.



I am happy to report that the turkey chili was delicious and that, despite the fact that I stuck my finger in to see if it was hot enough, no one smacked my hand, scolded me, or snatched my soup away. Perhaps soup in a box is the solution for those of us who lack the self-discipline to be worthy of soup from one of his stores. When I brought the box into the house, I thought of that phrase from the Latin Mass: Domine, non sum dignus ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbum, et sanabitur anima mea. ("Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof, but say the word, and my spirit shall be healed.") Which could be paraphrased and modified a bit to mean, "Al, I am not worthy that your soup should enter under my roof, but say the word, and my stomach shall be fed."

Drink Freshy! It's the low-calorie Feh soda!

More vintage commercial goodness from Roadsidepictures: a set of vintage soda pop bottles, bottlecaps, cans, and signage. In addition to Coke and Pepsi, all sorts of obscure brands and generics are represented in this collection: Cragmont (the Safeway store brand), Del Monte, White Rock, Witches Brew (a licorice soda!), Foodtown Imitation Grape Soda, and Coffeetime carbonated coffee drink.

Once, in the early '80s, I was staying at the Statler Hilton in Manhattan, and the vending machine carried only White Rock products. In desperation, I bought a White Rock Orange Soda. Nasty stuff, but the little water nymph on the can was cute.

This photo shows an old-fashioned 10 oz. Mountain Dew bottle (back when it was sold as a hillbilly drink) and a squatty, non-conforming 12 oz. bottle for non-conforming 7-Up.

I don't know where they marketed the soda in the picture, but it can't have been anywhere in the northeast. The can looks like something MAD's Al Jaffee would have worked up as a parody. Feh! is probably too regional an expression for Wacky Packages to have used it. Note to product designers: If you're going to use alternating colors for a product name, make sure that each color's set of letters spells something like "Yum!" or "Good!" not "Ecch!" or "Ebola!"

(Update: Apparently Freshy was a Fresca knockoff for a line of Winn-Dixie store-brand sodas. Feh on a soda can wouldn't have registered in Winn-Dixie country, but it probably amused a few visiting Yankees.)

That "NO CYCLAMATES!" label takes me back. Remember the big controversy over cyclamates in the early '70s? Suddenly, saccharine became the artificial sweetener of choice, and then a few years later it was suspected of causing cancer. (Gilda Radner, Jane Curtin, Laraine Newman, and Linda Ronstadt sang about it on SNL.)

More: The pretty nymph on White Rock beverages is actually Psyche, from Greek mythology. "Psyche has the wings of a butterfly to depict immortality. Her story represents the pre-existence of the soul suffering in this life, going astray but remaining faithful to her ideals. She accepts her fate while showing courage and counting on love to lead her to life."

But the Witty Banter guys say, Soda = Death.

'60s signs

Boing Boing links to Roadsidepictures' set of black-and-white Polaroids of roadside signs taken in Washington state, probably in the early '60s. This one is of the Poodle Dog restaurant in Fife, Wa. Sweet.

Calypso Family Robinson

Seeing Jonathan Harris (aka Dr. Zachary Smith) on an episode of Bonanza has set me off looking for "Lost in Space" clips on the web. I found this hilarious mashup, which the uploader calls "Lost in Space on Acid." It's set to Harry Belafonte singing "Jump in the Line (Shake, Senora)."

Bleak Hoss

As I continued my couch-bound channel-surfing, I landed about 15 minutes into the first of three Bonanza episodes on TV Land. What I saw made me stick around for the whole show, and ultimately I watched all three.

I was not a Bonanza fan as a child, but the burning map that opened each episode seared itself into my memory. The premature death of Dan Blocker in 1972 was one of the earliest celebrity deaths I was aware of, and I remember the controversy over Bonanza continuing for another season without him. I also remember being puzzled by the fact that it was called Bonanza in the prime time, but the Sunday afternoon reruns were called Ponderosa.

What caught my attention was the sight of actor Jonathan Harris (you know him as the strange and sometimes evil Dr. Zachary Smith on Lost in Space), sporting chin whiskers and in the Virginia City jail. Playing a snooty Englishman, he was called "Mr. Dickens" by the other characters.

Yes, believe it or not, there was an episode of Bonanza featuring Charles Dickens as a guest at the Ponderosa. The episode's title was "A Passion for Justice," and its subject was copyright law and piracy. (That link leads to the Internet Movie Database entry about the episode, and in the user comments there is a good synopsis of the story and its background in real life; just overlook the constant misspelling of "copy-write.") Dickens did make a couple of tours of America, including a few years after the Civil War, and there were problems with mutual recognition of copyright between America and Britain.

In the episode, Dickens is giving a dramatic reading of Oliver Twist in Virginia City, but stops abruptly and angrily when he learns that the local newspaper publisher has been printing bootleg copies of his Old Curiosity Shop. When the print shop is vandalized that night, the townsfolk assume that Dickens is the culprit, and that is how he lands in jail.

Ben Cartwright knows Dickens isn't guilty, but the author is too proud to put up a defense at his trial. Adam and Little Joe do some detective work and catch the real vandal, Dickens is reconciled to the townsfolk and vice versa, and the episode ends with him completing his interrupted reading, followed by his recital of the Declaration of Independence as an encore.

The heart of the episode is a conversation between Dickens and Hoss, as they take a break from chopping wood at the Ponderosa. Hoss tries to explain to Dickens that the townsfolk aren't going to treat him like a king because he's a famous author back in England: "Folks around here judge a man by what he is, not what he was." Hoss tells Dickens that folks don't understand all his fuss about the copies of his book.

Dickens explains his outrage in terms Hoss can understand. Ben Cartwright built the Ponderosa from nothing, and he and his sons would defend it against anyone who would try to take it away from them. In the same way, Dickens' words represent his sweat and blood, and they're just as dear to him as the Ponderosa is to the Cartwrights. Later Ben lectures the townsfolk after Dickens' trial, calling the unauthorized copies a "rustling of his rights."

Piracy probably wasn't much of an issue back in 1963, when the episode first aired, but in this age of peer-to-peer file sharing, that's a message worth remembering.

The second episode I saw is worth a mention, too: "Rain from Heaven", guest-starring character actor John Anderson as a rainmaker named Tulsa Weems. (Seems fitting. One of the most dishonest and shifty people I ever met was from Tulsa.) Weems brings his wagon to drought-stricken Virginia City. He convinces several leading citizens to pay him to make rain, but they need Ben Cartwright's deep pockets to have enough for Weems' $200 fee. Cartwright doesn't believe in rainmakers; he sent Adam to buy some water-wagons to fetch water from Lake Tahoe for his ranch and the town.

Weems also has a very sick daughter, but as a proud mountain man, he refuses all charity. His rebuff of Ben's offer of a loan is violent enough to land him in jail, which entitles his family to be put up in the hotel at the town's expense. But his family is just as proud as their pa, and they run away to squat in the Cartwrights' barn. (They figure Ben owes them for refusing Tulsa Weems a chance to earn an honest day's work.)

Hoss demonstrates sacrificial love by snatching the girl out of the barn, over the objections of her proud mother and shotgun-toting brother. He nurses her in his room, using cool cloths to bring down her fever despite the risk of catching her typhoid fever.

Weems finally gets a chance to try his rainmaking techniques. He fires his cannon and shoots off skyrockets, but all in vain. The sky remains clear and dry, and he has failed, as he put it, to knock the devil out of the sky. Weems says that the devil has won, and the rain that might have brought relief to the land and health to his daughter would not come.

Ben rebukes Weems for using the devil as a convenient scapegoat for his own failures, and this is where the episode takes a surprising turn, surprising at least to a 21st century TV viewer. In poetic language, Ben calls on Weems to pray for his daughter. (I wish I'd recorded this so I could give you the exact quote.) After Weems' daughter recovers and the rains return a few days later, Weems chides Ben Cartwright for not believing in rainmakers. Ben's reply: "Oh, I believe in a Rain Maker: the one you were praying to last night."

After watching these two episodes (and a third, the Serlingesque "Twilight Town"), it's easy to understand why this series was so beloved. While too much of any kind of TV is a bad thing for children, I'd think that Bonanza and the Andy Griffith Show are a couple of programs that parents and children could profitably watch together.

The Bishop's Brownie Beanie

This morning I was feeling under the weather, so I stayed home from church. Instead of taking the opportunity for private devotions, I vegged out on the couch, just me and my remote and a 7-Up. ("You Like It. It Likes You." 7-Up always seems to pick me up when I'm feeling bad. I wonder if it's still lithiated?)

I flipped through the channels and happened upon an Antiques Roadshow repeat. I didn't catch the location or the name of the lady seeking an appraisal, but she told a funny and heartwarming story about the artifact she held in her hands. (Note: Later research reveals that this was probably the first of three episodes from Milwaukee.)

When this lady was a little girl, her family, like millions of others, were regular viewers of Bishop Fulton J. Sheen's Emmy-award winning TV show, "Life is Worth Living."

The little girl was in the Brownies and, as children often do, she lost part of her uniform: the hat. The hat was a chocolate-colored beanie with a Brownie emblem on the front and a little loop on top. (Here is a page about vintage Brownie uniforms with pictures of the beanie.)

So she was thinking about her lost beanie while watching Bishop Sheen. Suddenly she realized where her beanie was! She ran to her mother and said, "I know where my beanie is! Bishop Sheen stole it!"

The beanie was, of course, Bishop Sheen's violet pileolus, also known as a zucchetto. On a black-and-white TV, the cap would have appeared as some shade of gray, and it wouldn't have been possible to know whether the cap was brown or violet or some other color of similar intensity.

Her mother told the story in a letter to Bishop Sheen. ("Bishop Sheen stole it" was toned down to "Bishop Sheen has it.") The Bishop sent a letter in reply and included with it his pileolus, autographed inside with the inscription, "God love you." Sheen later told the story on his TV show, but advised the audience that that was the last cap he would be sending out.

So here was this former Brownie, on Antiques Roadshow some 50 years later, displaying Bishop Fulton Sheen's autographed beanie and letter, which she had framed along with a photo of him. Oh, and she did eventually find her Brownie beanie, and she had it with her on the program.

(Update: Neglected to say that she also had a framed photo of herself as a little girl, holding the autographed pileolus, which helped to satisfy the appraiser as to the item's provenance.)

I understand that Fulton Sheen is a candidate for sainthood. Perhaps, in addition to becoming a patron saint of television or apologetics, he could also be a patron saint of lost uniform pieces. (That website is interesting, if you've ever wondered how someone is canonized as a saint.)

(Update: Coincidentally, one of my regular blog reads also posted an item about Bishop Sheen on Sunday. Dawn Eden has an extended quote from Sheen's 1950 book Lift Up Your Heart on the deeper, enduring thrills of the spirit compared to the superficial and ephemeral "thrills" of the flesh. Thanks to Dawn, despite missing church, I received some spiritual nourishment nevertheless.)