'Bred Crumbs
07.19.02
... And if you think the apostrophe's got it bad, don't get me started on the poor, ignored hyphen. But bless Salon's heart:
A hyphen isn't the only thing missing from "Eight Legged Freaks." (As any copy editor could tell you, this title suggests that the movie is about eight freaks, each of whom possesses at least one leg.)
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It occurs to me: about half the pop-up ads on the Web are for tiny cameras, and the other half want you to buy something to keep people from spying on you.
07.18.02
07.17.02
Bravo showed an episode of St. Elsewhere with guest star Tim Robbins, followed by an episode of Moonlighting with guest star ... Tim Robbins! Who knew the future Mr. Sarandon was such a busy TV bee in the early to mid-'80s? The double dose seems like a possible coincidence; the channel is showing both series in order, having cycled back to the beginning of each within the last week. (Robbins was in the first ep of Moonlighting after the pilot and in three of the first five Elsewheres.) But further investigation of the sort people with actual lives don't do suggest that Bravo has played the first few Elsewheres a little out of order – accident, or pro-Robbins ploy?
The shows, my two favorite at the time, hold up very well after all these years. One cool thing about seeing beloved old, well-written series in quick rerun cycles is that you can see the way they, either intentionally or un-, foreshadowed themselves. On Episode 2 of Moonlighting, David uses the name "McGillicutty" in a hypothetical joke example; much later, the series would add a recurring character with that name. And one of the early Elsewheres has a disgruntled hospital visitor saying "they should take a wrecking ball to the place" – which is exactly what happened at the end of the fifth season.
07.15.02
It is good that the South African version of Sesame Street is adding an HIV-positive Muppet for many reasons, among them that the creation increases the ratio of disease-fighting mascots to disease-representing mascots, after the San Francisco health department in its wisdom introduced the world to a human-size venereal sore (shown here in the Pride Parade, on the right), a menace which a cheerful walking penis (on the left) is surely insufficient to quell.
"In somewhat loosely related news, the creators of the Teletubbies are planning on introducing a new character to the wildly popular toddler program next season, tentatively named Zonk, who will allegedly be a mullato lesbian dwarf quadriplegic encephalitic autistic scoliotic genius waterskiing dentally challenged philatelist with multiple STDs and a wandering eye." – Mark Morford, The Morning Fix
FreeFoto is a fine little Web source for public-domain images. Particularly if for some reason you should be looking for photos of garden gnomes or Morris dancers.
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