It Came from the '80s

Dylan spent most of the '80s wandering in the wilderness.  From "Empire Burlesque," an album described on Wikipedia as "featur[ing] a distinct "80s style" aesthetic" came a definitive mid-decade music video directed by Paul Schraeder and featuring a truly impressive pair of shoulder pads -

The Most '80s Thing

Teri "We Got It Made" Copley was briefly married to Micki "That Hot Chick from Shalamar" Free -

In their defense, they did endear themselves to their BMW repairman.

Q-tips

Q-tips are fascinating in that their primary use is actively discouraged by their makers and medical professionals.

Or, as the Washington Post put it, "Q-tips are one of the only, if not the only, major consumer products whose main purpose is precisely the one the manufacturer explicitly warns against."

"In 1990, a piece published in The Washington Post joked that telling people to use the swabs on "the outer surfaces of the ear without entering the ear canal," as Q-tips packages do, was akin to asking smokers to dangle cigarettes from their lips without ever lighting them....

On the FDA's website, it does say that swabs are classified as medical devices because they're "used to apply medications to, or to take specimens from, a patient." But it also says the same for cotton balls.

Neither the FDA nor the CPSC could explain why the commission was tracking injuries associated with cotton balls, but not cotton swabs. The CPSC suggested reaching out to the FDA. The FDA suggested reaching out to the CPSC. In the end, no one had an answer.

But the discrepancy has a significant effect: It means it's much harder to quantify the number of Q-tips-related injuries that occur each year in the United States. The FDA houses complaints on its website, but doesn't add them up.

"It would be very tedious to figure out how many injuries associated with cotton swabs were reported each year," said Deborah Kotz, an FDA spokeswoman.""

Jessica Fletcher behind Bars (w/ Special Guest Star Adrienne Barbeau)

Murder, She Wrote

Jessica Behind Bars 8:00 PM on COZI 4.2, 1 hr 1985 TV-PG

While teaching at a women's prison, Jessica is taken hostage by inmates rioting over an accusation that one of them murdered the prison doctor. Kathryn: Adrienne Barbeau. Warden Elizabeth Gates: Vera Miles. Bertha: Susan Paretz. Jessica: Angela Lansbury.

When Worlds Collide

The Beach Boys, sans Brian Wilson, and country singer Janie Fricke trying to announce the award for "Favorite Black Single" at the American Music Awards in 1985, the night that "We Are the World" was recorded.

Beatles Parody Bands on '60s TV Shows

• Ladybugs, "Petticoat Junction" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4en7WzQCbUk
• Mosquitoes and Honeybees, "Gilligan's Island" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rfU1sC5vK8
• Bedbugs, "F Troop" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2jgIQBzQZk 
• Four Insects, "The Flintstones" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NRTNtbfiO4A
• Monkees, "The Monkees" 

People were sure right that they were just a crazy fad.

More Bagpipes Please

The AV Club on songs that actually benefit from having bagpipes.  Perhaps surprisingly, one of the songs was composed by AC/DC and is perhaps the best of their many, many paeans to the glories of rockin'.


I am disappointed, however, that Big Country did not receive at least an honorable mention for "In a Big Country."

ACC

John Feinstein has a good piece on the dilution of the ACC basketball tournament.  Yes, there's obviously some absurdity in having "ACC" legends like Derrick Coleman or Darrell Griffith (shout out to the old Metro Conference), but I still have some fondness for the tournament.  It's probably due to having grown up in Virginia and the outer DC area when the tournament still meant something.  I still remember my middle school algebra teacher checking out the school library's TV set at the end of the school day on Friday afternoon to watch the early quarterfinal games.

Bing and Bob

I've been listening to the Bing Crosby and Bob Hope episode of "You Must Remember This."  I like its summary of the "Road" movies as amazingly successful and completely mystifying in its success to modern audiences.

I was also unaware of this cringe-worthy blackface sequence from "Holiday Inn".  Egad.

Although to Bing's credit, my grandfather was one of the many GI's who loved "White Christmas" as the podcast notes, supposedly breaking down in tears when it was played upon his arrival in the South Pacific's humid summer, far from the wintry peaks of his Cache Valley home.

Understatement Is Good

Inspired by a tweet from the blogger formerly known as Kinky Paprika about AC/DC front man Brian Johnson being told to stop touring or face total hearing loss (and wouldn't the true metal response be to pursue the latter?), I happened on this lovely summary from the AC/DC wiki:

"Givin' the Dog a Bone is a song by AC/DC appearing as the fourth track on their 1980 successful album, Back in Black. On original versions of the LP, the song was incorrectly spelled on the album sleeve as "Given the Dog a Bone", but was correctly spelled on the vinyl. The song is about oral sex."

Of course, the lyrics prove that the boys from Down Under truly were the masters of the single entendre:

She takes you down easy
Going down to her knees
Going down to the devil
Down down to ninety degrees
Oh, she's blowing me crazy
'Til my ammunition is dry

Rocket 88

Thursday or Saturday marked the 65th anniversary of the recording of "Rocket 88", a rhythm and blues song by notorious wifebeater Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythm.  The pleasant tune is the song most often credited as being the first rock and roll song.


Of course, when I think of epochal odes to the Olds 88, I think of a somewhat more recent tune -

Cadillac

The delightful Liz Clarke on Dale Earnhardt in a piece from the Post (is she the last of their memorable sportswriters?), although I don't know if I would say "nowhere was Earnhardt’s supremacy more evident than at Daytona" given that he only won the 500 one time.  Anyway, the piece reminded me of Springsteen's "Cadillac Ranch" and its line about Junior Johnson runnin' through the woods of Caroline.  I wouldn't have thought that NASCAR was noteworthy enough to merit a line in a song by a Northerner in 1980, but Bruce did like cars.  And the "Born in the USA"-era E Street Band really liked stage choreography as shown in the clip below.  Seeing Nils in that oversized, ten-gallon novelty hat always cracks me up, too.

Sha-La-La-La

Antenna TV has been airing episodes of "Family Ties" (often before Newhart!), which has reminded me of how big (and formulaic) that show was in the mid-80s.  The show clearly went through stages, namely:

1. The early years (1982-1984) - The show was on Wednesday nights and Alex was in high school and Michael J. Fox was somewhat credible as a teenager even though he was probably already about 25.  The show was originally supposed to be about the Baby Boomer parents (original premise:  cool parents, square kids), but the precocious kids, especially Alex, quickly stole the show.  Some of these episodes are actually pretty good, especially the ones with Tom Hanks as Uncle Ned, the stockbroker on the lam and eventually a wino.  I also remember the one with the acerbic teacher Mr. Tedesco.  The show wasn't a huge hit but had to be viewed as a bright spot on an otherwise bleak NBC line-up.


2. The glory years (1984-1987) - The show moved to Thursday nights after a new show that you may have heard of called "The Cosby Show."  The third season was transitional with Meredith Baxter-Birney on maternity leave and the show becoming even more clearly "The Alex P. Keaton Show."  After the huge box office success of "Back to the Future" in the summer of 1985, the transformation was complete.  Perhaps to accommodate Fox, the show, which had always been kind of formulaic, eventually became flat-out lazy.  Characters were added (a girlfriend and then another for Alex, a supposedly cute kid as baby Keaton, Mallory's inexplicably Neanderthal-ish boyfriend Nick), countless long-lost friends and relatives with problems were introduced and assisted in single episodes and never seen or mentioned again, and most of the remaining episodes came to be clearly focused on individual characters ("Mallory is a ditz," "Jennifer is maturing awkwardly," and especially "Alex loves to make money, ha, ha, ha!") instead of being ensemble pieces.  Ratings were through the roof.


3. The later years (1987-1989) - The show was moved to Sunday nights.  I can't say much about these episodes because I and most of America had stopped watching by this point.

Anyway, the show was a big hit and then we all forgot about it.  I don't remember "Family Ties" sticking around very long in syndication originally, and I hadn't seen an episode in almost 30 years.  Even so, the show's episode list is a fascinating compendium of many, many clip shows, the aforementioned troubled friends and relatives episodes, and episodes (usually featuring Mallory, Jennifer, or Elise) that were filmed and then inexplicably not aired before being burnt off during the summer several years later.

Y Kant Tori Read

I recently learned that Tori Amos did a commercial for the launch of Just Right cereal -

She claims, however, that the experience did not influence the creation of her song "Cornflake Girl."  That's about female genital mutilation, of course.

The Trans-Atlantic Accent (Or Why People In Old-Timey Movies Talk That Way)

I think that the dominant motivation was a desire to emulate if not ape supposedly more sophisticated British pronunciation. My sense is that it was taught and modeled in Northeastern private and New England boarding schools, which tended to appropriate British elements more generally. The accent fell out of favor after World War II when Britain ceased to be the cultural, and certainly economic and military center, of the English-speaking world and focus shifted to metropoles such as New York and Los Angeles.

East Bay, Baby

ESPN had an oral history of Marshawn Lynch, pride of Oakland Tech and UC Berkeley, and his celebratory ride in a golf cart following a 2006 victory against Washington.  I was at the game.


Technically speaking, Marshawn wasn't really "ghost riding the whip" because he did not exit the vehicle while it was in motion, but close enough.

Also, Ty Willingham was a very bad college football coach.

The Most Amazing Thing that I Have Ever Learned on Wikipedia

Long-time Milwaukee Bucks journeyman role player Junior Bridgeman is supposedly worth $400 million due to shrewd investments in Wendy's franchises.  Well, that and his can-do attitude and attention to customer service.

Anyway, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, for whom Bridgeman along with Brian Winters, David Myers, and Elmore Smith was traded by the Bucks to the Lakers in '75, is supposedly worth $20 million.  Then again, Kareem never seemed much interested in endorsing products, let along running fast food franchises, and seems to prefer writing novels about Sherlock Holmes's brother set in Trinidad.