Randy Phillips

More and more of these Mitch Miller shows are showing up these days; here’s another from 1964 featuring Shirley Temple, singing and dancing. She was 36 years old at this point – she’ll be 82 this year!

Here’s a little side-poll to add to your Oscar ballot for Sunday’s show: who will garner the most applause during the ‘In Memoriam’ segment?

• Jennifer Jones (The Song of Bernadette, Love Is A Many Splendored Thing)
• Al Martino (The Godfather)
• Patrick Swayze (Dirty Dancing, Roadhouse, Ghost, Point Break, Red Dawn)
• Larry Gelbart (Tootsie,  Oh God!)
• John Hughes (Sixteen Candles, Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Pretty In Pink)
• Budd Schulberg (On The Waterfront)
• Karl Malden (On The Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, Patton)
• Farrah Fawcett (The Apostle, Saturn 3)
• David Carradine (Kill Bill)
• Dom DeLuise (The Cannonball Run, History of the World, Pt. 1)
• Ron Silver (Ali, Silkwood)
• James Whitmore (Shawshank Redemption, Give ‘Em Hell Harry)
• Ricardo Montalban (Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan, Escape From The Planet Of The Apes)
• Pat Hingle (Batman, Batman Returns, Batman Forever, Batman & Robin, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby)

Vote early, and vote often!

I hope everyone had a great Valentine weekend. The weather in Los Angeles was just glorious – temps in the 80s, clear blue skies, not bad for mid-February.

Rhonda and I had a spectacular Sunday, taking a trip to the Americana At Brand complex in Glendale. On the way home, we were listening to K-EARTH on the radio as they were taking Valentine dedication requests all weekend long. There was one in particular from a woman in Tarzana who was dedicating ‘Now That I Found You’ by The Foundations. I thought that was a sweet little moment…until I started thinking about the lyrics:

Baby,
Now that I’ve found you
I won’t let you go
I built my world around you
I need you so
Baby even though
You don’t need me,
You don’t need me oh, no (emphasis added)

Oh well, here’s hoping your day was better than hers.

We had the 78 rpm record of this when I was a kid (I think it was my mom’s), but there was a chunk chipped out of the lead-in groove, so I’ve never heard the beginning of the song. Now, not only can I hear how it begins, but I can watch this great lipsync by the mad men themselves – Spike Jones and his City Slickers!

It seems that every other blog is touting 12/31/09 as ‘the end of the decade’, much like 12/31/99 was dubbed the end of the millennium.

Once again, a counting lesson is in order. How did you learn to count when you were a kid? Did you start counting your building blocks with ‘zero’? No, you start counting with ‘one’ followed by ‘two’ then ‘three’ and so on.

It’s the same with years. There was no year ‘zero’ way back when. So the first ten years started with 01/01/0001 and ended with 12/31/0010. This (admittedly arbitrary) decade will not end until 12/31/2010, one year from today.

Can you tell that I don’t have much to write about these days?

I and many many others hold that TSA inspections at airports are in essence theater, striving to assure the flying public that air travel to and from the US is as safe as, say, driving a car. So limiting your carry-on liquid containers to 3 oz. or less in size makes a substantial difference, right? Or having your shoes inspected? And now maybe your underwear? I think not.

So what are the real risks that a flight in a commercial jetliner will become a suicide mission? Think about these numbers, compiled by Nate Silver of fivethirtyeight.com and designed by Jesus Diaz of gizmodo.com:

As Mark Frauenfelder at boingboing.net says:

Maybe the new TSA rules will decrease the odds of being a terrorism victim from 1 in 10,408,947 to 1 in 10,408,948. Let’s hope so!

One of our favorite Christmas albums when we were kids was Mitch Miller’s ‘Christmas Sing Along With Mitch’. Here’s an episode of ‘Sing Along With Mitch’ that features many of the old-time holiday favorites.

I noted something a little strange on the fifth clip featuring Leslie Uggams – when the camera zooms down on her, a strange fuzzy glow seems to encompass her from the neck down. Maybe a little camera trick to shield vulnerable viewers in 1966 from seeing an overexposed decolletage that may have gone unnoticed when the scene was shot – and they didn’t have time to shoot it again, so they ‘fixed’ it in post-production. Interesting.

Classic Television Showbiz: Sing Along with Mitch – Christmas Episode 1966.

I’ve written about Big Loo before – one of my most memorable Christmas gifts ever.

I was just cruising the ‘Net this afternoon and stumbled across this image – looks like he got himself a date!

Merry Christmas, everyone – I hope you each get your fondest wish this year.