Randy Phillips

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.

Way back in 1962 I was hunkered down in front of the black-and-white TV in the family ‘front room’ to get my very first exposure to Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ at the hands of an adaptation featuring none other than Quincy Magoo himself.

I remembered it so clearly – that famous cartoon character Mr. Magoo, voiced by the fantastic Jim ‘Thurston Howell III’ Backus, fumbling his way into a Broadway theater to take up the role of Ebenezer Scrooge. I remembered the songs, the scenery, everything. And I’ve been longing to see it again ever since, some 47 years (yikes!) later.

Today, it showed up as a multi-part post on one of my favorite blogs, Classic Television Showbiz, which is always posting clips from the Golden Age Of Television (the post about Mitch Miller a year or so ago came from there). I was very enthused, but a little wary – what if Mr. Magoo wasn’t quite as good as I remembered?

There was nothing to fear – it’s still fantastic, and well worth your 45 minutes or so to watch. Just click on the picture and hop on the Way Back Machine!

Gordon Lightfoot

RP and I saw Gordon Lightfoot in concert at the Canyon Club in Agoura Hills last night, Oct. 21, 2009.

I’d never heard of The Canyon Club before RP received a promotional offer a month or so ago with some pretty attractive discounts, so she sprang for it. It doesn’t look like much from the outside – just off the 101 in a shopping center dedicated to mostly antique stores, which just happened to match the several hundred people who were in attendance last night. It’s sort of a dinner/night club. Tickets are issued as standing room only, but if you also make a reservation for dinner, you’re pretty sure to have a seat with a great view of the stage. It’s an intimate setting, with capacity at around 1250. However, the food is decidedly NOT the reason to go – overpriced and just not that good.

I’ve seen Gordon Lightfoot in concert quite a few times over the years, and all those concerts were after his vocal peak in the ’70s and ’80s and I’d not seen him since his near-fatal health problems some five years ago. In all those concerts, it’s was evident that his voice was not as strong as when he was in his prime. Even so, I was really shocked at how thin and reedy his voice has become. At the beginning of the concert, his singing was almost a whisper, and he’s lost both the upper and lower ranges of his formerly-robust baritone. There were flashes of richness from time to time as the performance continued, but they proved to be short-lived. He made some modifications to some of the melodies to avoid having to sing the highest notes, but he has so far refused to sing these songs in a lower key, which does not surprise me, knowing his penchant for perfection.

Otherwise, it was a solid Lightfoot concert, all the hits, all received with great warmth by his appreciative audience. He told some corny jokes – ‘Why is the moon pale? Because it was out all night’ – his stage patter has never been much to write home about. He played his six-string as well as two twelve-strings, one capoed at the second fret, the other at the third.

He was backed by the same band I’ve always seen with him – Mike Heffernan on keys, Rick Haynes on thumping bass, Barry Keane on drums and the superlative Terry Clements on lead guitar. No real surprises in the set list, which lasted nearly two hours without a break, ending with the classic ‘Canadian Railroad Trilogy’ and an encore, ‘Blackberry Wine’.

This was the seventeenth of twenty dates in 26 days, and he’s headed for his traditional homecoming concert series at Massey Hall in Toronto in November. I was glad to see him this one last time, but I think that will indeed be the last time – I’d prefer to remember the stronger performances of the past and of course his huge catalog of recordings.