Archive for February, 2007
1960 Time Trip
February 28th, 2007This morning I had a little time to kill, so I lugged out an old issue of Look magazine, scanned some of the ads, and created a small 1960 flickr set. This batch has some nice, kitschy imagery as well as some neato illustrations. Like these snappy cut-out kids advertising Armour Meats, for example:
Coupla other […]
Periodically Speaking
February 26th, 2007More magazines! Here’s The 51 Best Magazines Ever as ranked by Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter. An excellent read with Carter smartly highlighting specific periods with many of his choices (Esquire 1961-73, for example). I’m so happy that he included Games from its ’80s glory years, ranked at #36. That magazine in that time absolutely […]
The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly: Oscars 2007
February 26th, 2007Good — Nice distribution of prizes with no one film hogging the honors; Naomi Watts’ lovely yellow gown; Melissa Etheridge’s surprise win; the classiness of Helen Mirren; montages clips that didn’t look like they came off someone’s third-generation VHS tape.
Bad — Ellen’s inoffensive, unedgy patter; Beyoncé and Eddie Murphy not clapping for Alan Arkin; too […]
Maestro Morricone
February 25th, 2007As I write this, the Academy Awards are minutes away from starting. One of the things I’m most looking forward to at the ceremony will be the presentation of Ennio Morricone’s honorary Oscar award. The legendary Italian film composer has downplayed the honor, even going on record as to saying that he’s disappointed that he […]
Magazine Subjection
February 24th, 2007Y’know what I hate? When you sign up for a magazine subscription, and they begin by sending you an old issue. This happened when I started a subscription to Wired (it was only $10/yr so why not). Yesterday’s mail saw the first issue, from February. Whenever they do this, I can just tell that they’re […]
100 Favorite Moments In Television Revisited
February 22nd, 2007I’ve updated an old scrubbles page — 100 Favorite Moments In Television, a reprint of an article which appeared in the short-lived pop culture magazine Egg in 1991. When I first put this together back in 2003, I didn’t notice that a few missing pound symbols in the page’s HTML code resulted in a screwy […]
Orphaned Music Reviews #2: March
February 20th, 2007The following music reviews were originally slated for publication in the March 2007 issue of az magazine. They appear here in unrevised form:
Among the current crop of sensitive male singer-songwriters, Ireland’s Damien Rice has made a name for himself as a coffee shop troubadour for the Starbucks generation. His second album, 9 (Heffa/Vector), expands his […]
Great Lost TV Theme: Probe/Search
February 18th, 2007Every so often I have a mini-obsession with certain tracks in my iTunes library. Lately it’s been composer Dominic Frontiere’s theme from Probe, a made for TV movie which served as the pilot for the series Search. From what I can gather, Search was a technology-based caper series in the Mission Impossible vein. It ran […]
Weekend Update
February 17th, 2007A few jottings for an unusually warm Saturday:
Christopher’s post on the U.S. Citizenship Test contains links to the test Qs and As which recent immigrants need to memorize to gain citizenship. Look over the 142 questions to figure out how much elementary school history you’ve retained.
Scrubbles.net reader Chandy sent me The Final Take, an interesting […]
You Better Work
February 15th, 2007As Sports Illustrated runs its first-ever Swimsuit Issue with a celeb and not a model on the cover, Nikki Finke of the L.A. Weekly runs the numbers and confirms what we already know — celebs sell magazines. Now, I couldn’t care less about S.I. and their “Minivan Cheesecake” approach to fashion coverage, but this […]
Mary Mary Quite Stationary
February 14th, 2007An amusing series of short films dramatizes a few days’ worth of Mary Worth comic strips (via Crackskulbob). The actors are framed and positioned exactly as in the strips, making it weird and funny at the same time.
In a completely different vein, my review of the self titled third album from The Autumn Defense has […]
Comments Return; Used Book Haul
February 12th, 2007Comments are back. My webhost had apparently ran a script barring spam comments to my site, a script which also barred legitimate comments. Everything should be back to normal (except for the weird white screen which often pops up in browsers after leaving a comment — something else I need to look into (groan)).
Locally, we […]
Still No Comments
February 11th, 2007Still in the midst of trying to get to the bottom of why scrubbles.net suddenly is not accepting comments, so this space is gonna be quiet for the next few days. In the meantime, take a gander at the banner I designed for a new weblog called Circa 45. Circa 45 is the brainchild of […]
No Comments
February 9th, 2007Right now we’re going through a problem on this weblog where attempting to comment results in the dreaded “500 Internal Server Error” page. Sit tight; I’m working on it. I know everybody is just dying to leave comments (sarcasm). Sorry if you attempted a comment and it got lost!
It might be a problem with my […]
Another Dr. Demento Momento
February 8th, 2007For some reason, I was very recently thinking about a series of novelty skits which used to get played eons ago on Dr. Demento’s radio show. They involved a reporter interviewing somebody, with the answers coming in the form of snippets from various hit songs of the day. Who did them? Now I know — […]
