"That'll teach you bastards not to mess with my transponder!"

True story: I was chairing a meeting at work a few years back and it was getting late in the day, and we were all starting to flicker a little. I told the assembled, "We'd better get on with this so we can call it a day. My attention span's going down faster than an airplane full of Lynyrd Skynyrd." The reaction was…

There's aircraft storage and salvage yards at RSW. As I wrote below in another thread, if Elvis wasn't connected to this airplane, it would have been chopped up there years ago.

Not to mention Lockheed wants nothing to do with supporting the JetStar any longer. IIRC, the owner of one of the last remaining JetStars took Lockheed to court over that a few years ago.

Just after the election a commenter somewhere (maybe on the AV Club, I forget) wrote something to the effect of "up until now, Trump has been playing with house money. But he's now about to move into an arena where the losses are going to be real and the consequences won't be as easy to escape."

Let's not even talk about the plight of the poor round-headed cameraman on Kraft Television Theater, who had to spend all week waiting on that little camera crane for his very brief appearances each week. They couldn't even get him a seat to sit on, either. Nor did they give him a cut of the merchandising (they sold…

Honda's had some neat ads the last few years. The animated one with all the drawings chronicling Honda's history was really neat (although to be accurate the Honda lawnmower should have transformed into one of the current McLaren Honda F1 cars, which would putter two paces and then implode).

Moonraker is this great cinematic core sample of so much about the late '70s: the characters, the attitudes, some of the themes. And even the hullabaloo about the impending start of the shuttle program (which, in the late '70s, the shuttle program and the potential it then represented was kind of a big deal in the…

Connery may be the classic Bond but Moore's Bond-with-a-wink was the one I grew up with, and that alone was enough for me to love him.

Brock Yates announcing the rules in what he thought was a practice take, getting ready to do what he thought would be the real take…only to have Hal Needham say "Nope, we got it! Next scene!"

Sometimes because that's exactly the same device they used (and here cue the famous story about Don Hewitt buying the sandwich board from a snack bar during a political convention). A second camera focused on a dark board with bright type was all you needed.

Such things are only slightly younger than the medium itself. The very first episode of Today, on January 14, 1952, had a crude news ticker (done as a practical effect, with typed words on paper scrolled horizontally) and time bug at the bottom of the screen. It was intermittent throughout the morning, but it was…

When she snapped at her friend during the meeting at Mesa Verde my first thought was that the endless hours of work on that account were breaking her down. Then the scene continued to play on….

I hate that - and the e-mails from company reps who essentially say "Would you have time for a 15-20 minute conversation about the wonders of this new product that will probably consume the entire budget of your tiny department?" Their own corporate mandate to sell, sell, sell means they do not accept your refusal to…

Polio. The symptoms came on quickly; within a few days he was in an iron lung, and dead a few days later. People forget why Dr. Jonas Salk was seen as having made a miracle possible, but Don Hornsby's case reminds all and sundry how diabolical polio can be, and why it caused such worry in the days before the vaccine.

I figured blanks would have something in there to hold the powder in but back then I didn't imagine it would have enough punch to do what it did. That instance taught otherwise, and reinforced the first rule of gun safety: never point a weapon at anything you do not wish to destroy, including yourself.

I also grew up around guns and "under no circumstances do you horse around with a gun" was drilled into me early on. Reading the details of what happened horrified me all the more because I knew what Hexum did was a no-no, and it's that horrified "I wish someone had stepped in and stopped it" feeling that creeped me…

(imagines Mickey and Minnie in adjacent bathtubs holding hands, in Disney-themed Cialis ad)

Several years ago somebody put together a collection of Petticoat Junction opening title sequences on YouTube and chronicled the differences from season to season. In the post-Benaderet sequences the producers had obviously tried to deal with the loss in the best way they could, but underneath it all was a tone of…

"Creesh" Hornsby is somebody who's disappeared down the memory well. I've scoured for what little I can find about him and the accounts of his act are just bizarre, defying description. I'm certain if one ever saw it in action it would have been hilarious (if Fred Allen liked you, that really meant something), but…