bits and pieces: the "we got more gongs than the breakdancing robot that caught on fire" edition

[spatch]

Anyang!

001. Courtesy byrneout and YouTube comes the most awesome and frightening thing I've ever seen without dosing first: The Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo on the Gong Show. The consensus from the comments is that Danny Elfman's on trombone. The most frightening part of the whole thing, I think, is Buddy Hackett's hair. By the way, the Gong Show's grand prize, $516.32, was SAG minimum in those days for a speaking role on television.

010. Give a cheer! Matinee at the Bijou is coming back to PBS! I think this may have been when I first got a taste of old films, cause I remember watching it when I was but a wee lad enrolled at the hippie elementary school. It was a weekend show on PBS, and it pretty much was a bill of fare as would have been seen at a movie theatre back in the 1930s and 40s. They'd show an episode of a serial, a newsreel, maybe a comedy short, and a feature film. Well, apparently it's coming back next year and Debbie Reynolds will be hosting. That's awesome.

011. Check out the latest reason why I like my cameraphone:

The camera caught the "excited" neon gas pulsing in the sign. That's awesome, too.

100. File under Wikipedia Will Eat Itself: http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Hunter_S._Thompson_suicide_note

Yes, they're arguing over whether suicide notes are copyright protected or in the public domain. So when you end it all, be sure your "Goodbye, cruel world!" is distributed under the Creative Commons license, 'kay?

101. And finally, before I leave for the weekend and do cool things, I'll let you know that I'm gonna develop a sitcom set in the early 90s featuring a cute and spunky indie film actress and all her slightly surreal adventures in high school. It'll be called Parker Posey Can't Lose.

Goodnight, everybody! Tip your waitress!

Comments

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

Earthworm Tractors with Joe E. Brown? Dad would be so excited!

[coconuthead.livejournal.com]

(sorry - they mentioned it way at the bottom of the bijou thing)

[off_coloratura]

The movies were speaking,
The market was peaking,
We lived off the fat of the land,
But the banquet was ending!
A plague was descending!
The day of the locusts at hand!

But at the Bijou bitter gall
Because as sweet as brandy
And humble pie turned into cotton candy...

America was standing in breadlines,
Dillinger was stealing all the headlines,
But down at the Bijou people said lines
Like "Boop-boop-be-doop, boop-boop-be-doop!"

Through the dust bowl the black winds were wailing,
The rivers were rising! Ohio was bailing!
But little Shirley Temple always had clear sailing
On board the Good Ship Lollipop!

Andy Hardy never had to go hungry,
There was no bank panic at Tarzan's branch
Il Duce and Der Führer
Couldn't have been obscurer
On the planet Mongo or the Melody Ranch...

[dogofthefuture.livejournal.com]

Anyang, Hermano!

Is it bad that I thought that the woman with the accordion (whether she could actually play it or not) is one of the smoking hottest women I've ever seen? Even though (if this was 1976, when I was four years old) she's now guaranteed to be, at the very least, about 50 years old AND YET I STILL WANT HER?

[morgaine723.livejournal.com]

I don't remember the Bijou, but it sounds like a fun thing to bring back. :)

I am in the market for a camera phone. What kind do you have?

[silvair.livejournal.com]

Dear Mr. Spatch,
Please post the phone answer, as I've been meaning to ask you that as well.

Also, thanks for posting another stunning photo. They are always a pleasure to view.

[malconstant.livejournal.com]

I think that notes from successful suicides are a matter of state record. In Massachusetts, at least at one point, all such notes were collected and filed with the State Medical Examiner. When I was very little, my dad was doing research that involved these notes. He wasn't permitted to remove them from the basement of the Medical Examiner's office and he couldn't photocopy them (that might just have been because photocopiers weren't so ubiquitous in the early/mid 1970s), so he hand-transcribed several hundred. He gave up the project because it started to get kind of depressing for some reason.

[spatch]

The story of that project is a This American Life segment just waiting to happen, you know.

[antiquated-tory.livejournal.com]

I remember Matinee at the Bijou with great fondness myself, delighted to hear they're bringing it back.

And The Gong Show, that blast from the Decade that Taste Forgot! Excellent clip and it's a real shame that no one would ever make anything as purposefully cheap and cheesy as that again. Live audience, too, given that they didn't tape over Chuck Berry flubbing his line at the commercial break. (How Much Dope were those guys on?)

I wish they'd make something like that here, since after all there's a Czech Superstar and a Czech Big Brother.