I've watched it from several hundred miles away with nothing but sadness, because there's so many levels of pathetic and disgusting and depressing to that story. I can't talk about it without cussing, so I'll only say I despise the acts of people whose driving instinct is that kind of punching down. We've managed thus…

Hey, I'm also a (former) editor who also taught myself to read by 3 and my mom sent notes to the elementary school librarian to let me check out books from the sections for higher grade levels. We're not the same person, are we? (I hope not, for it gets…well, interesting being me.)

Lt. Ace Cannon, the hotshot fighter jock who plays a mean saxophone.

Further to this, in higher education settings there will be some form of independent oversight within the institution. Where I work (it's a smaller college) we have an independent committee, made up of representatives from various disciplines (some from the sciences, some from other disciplines), that reviews all…

(Chicken Man explodes)

(adding machine leaves outhouse, trailing long strip of register tape)

I grew up about an hour from the Savannah River Site. I never knew at the time what they really did there, but now that I know, I'm aware that if the balloon went up our little hometown would be doomed. Maybe not immediately, but it wouldn't take long.

I was able to get the Apollo 8 and Apollo 10 coverage on DVD via the trading circuit about a decade ago (and with commercials intact, no less). It's a lot of fun to watch. Apollo 8 is especially interesting because you do get the feeling of "this is how it felt that morning when humans left the cradle for the very…

I will never forget a friend of mine telling me about going to the show and seeing The Crying Game and how he'd completely fallen for Dil, until…that scene. Days later, he was still kind of distraught about that.

Watching Fail-Safe makes you understand why Kubrick had to abandon his original intent to do Dr. Strangelove as a straight drama. The only way he could deal with material so abjectly depressing was to make fun of it. Fail-Safe is just plain bleak.

Fuzzymemories.tv has video of the commercial breaks in its "Day After" archive. Commodore computers bought a good bit of the ad time (which, IIRC, was available at great rates because few advertisers wanted much to do with the film's content or tenor). Other sponsors included Dollar Rent-A-Car, Dexatrim, and Orville…

Not only a solid lineup but they actually kept it civil and more toward a discussion, and Koppel kept them on the rails. He point out at the beginning that they were there "to discuss, not debate."

Able Archer 83 falls squarely into the category of "things I'm glad I didn't find out about until long after the fact." The KAL007 shootdown was terrifying enough in that moment. (I still need to get the new book that's out now about Able Archer 83.)

Two television moments I would love to have seen when they first happened: the November 18, 1951 premiere of See It Now, when Ed Murrow showed live pictures from both coasts at the same time. It is something we now take for granted but I wish I could experience the amazement of that first moment and realize what a…

I discovered Lawrence in 1993 and have only seen the restoration in low-resolution VHS format. It's long been a dream of mine to see it on a big screen as the spectacle it originally was. Same for other "spectacle" films of back then (I've long believed part of why Grand Prix hasn't really worked so well, aside from…

For anybody who wants to really grasp what that moment felt like, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television (fuzzymemories.tv) has a huge selection of news clips and special programming related to The Day After, including some of the special roundtable discussions and man-in-the-street pieces (and even the commercial…

I was 10 and deathly afraid of nuclear war, the saber-rattling between Reagan and whatever aging and infirm Soviet premier they had that particular week terrified me (Andropov in particular scared the hell out of me), and so the buildup around The Day After scared me to death. I didn't see the full thing until 2000,…

That's me! Monaco is always fun. You watch not necessarily to see what's going on up front (which usually becomes a parade) as you do to watch exactly what you described, which is a bunch of cars going fast in impossible places. Hope you enjoyed it - between that and the way the Indy 500 played out, it was a great day…

I interpreted it not as a slam on John Slattery but as a "what the hell?" on casting him as Ike.

I don't recall if it was that, but if it happened that way, that's next-level stuff (and exactly the sly sort of thing that characterized that program).