Agreed about the song "Dear God" - the whole Skylarking album (1986) is terrific and I have both versions, with "Dear God" and its substitute track "Mermaid Smiled" respectively, as well as the 12" single.

Working a temp job as a new Twin Cities resident in early 1983, I was subjected to "The Girl Is Mine" at least 50 times - it was the kind of radio station that would play no track from Thriller but that one.

Jim D.: I suspect we both carry around in our heads, not entirely voluntarily, many of the treacly radio hits of the '70s. Only one of them gets radio play around here (DC) these days - "Dream Weaver" by Gary Wright, circa 1976. As for Seals & Crofts, I still think the Summer Breeze album and especially its…

It was Seals & Crofts, not Croft, who didn't record "Southern Cross." Dash Crofts contributed the mandolin playing on many good S&C tracks up through "Hummingbird." Jim Seals' brother was Dan Seals of England Dan & John Ford Coley ("I'd Really Love to See You Tonight") fame.

With respect to Williams' role as Philip K. Dick's literary executor: Only Apparently Real is definitely worthwhile as the earliest book about PKD to consider his non-science fiction novels of the 1950s (all published posthumously except for one, Confessions of a Crap Artist, in 1975) and their relationship to the SF…

In Groucho and Me, Groucho gives his birth year as 1895, whereas it's actually 1890. Which reminds me: A great source not only of true facts about the Marxes but about how their comedy was created (both in the movies and earlier), with lots of photos, is Groucho, Harpo, Chico and Sometimes Zeppo by Joe Adamson. It's…

The Lennon/Ono Playboy interview was in late 1980 and was published as a book - very worthwhile.

I've read it myself and agree that the book is worthwhile (especially in its discussion of the 1950s and '60s) despite the score-settling with O'Rourke, etc. I subscribed to the Lampoon for 3 or 4 years starting in 1973 (and bought the Radio Dinner LP) and its influence and decline certainly had to be addressed. But…

Naah, for Groundhog Day to be perfect, Andie MacDowell would have to be a much better actor. I love the movie anyway, but there's a reason I don't own the DVD.

"Yet the lackluster shrug that greeted Ghostbusters II…" So tell me please, what would a lustrous shrug look like? Would you sense it from across a room?

What? I watched the original run of the Shogun miniseries in 1980, and the all-Japanese scenes had no subtitles nor any sort of overdubbing.

You mean Arthur 2 On the Rocks - missing only the talent of the writer of the original, Steve Gordon. (He died in the interim and so can't be blamed.)

It became a "speed game" after the first Trebek year, 1984-85. That year, as with the Art Fleming years, contestants could buzz in before the host finished reading, locking out the others, and (as was explained to us candidates in July 1985) the format was now changed so that no one could buzz in until Alex was…

Never heard of Pollack until now but enjoyed the interview very much. "Grups" comes from the early (1966) Star Trek episode "Miri," with guest stars Kim Darby and Michael J. Pollard, who has a lot of fun with the word.

Downtown was better than Edwards describes it. Takes place in Philadelphia, PA (with lots of location filming). And Forest Whitaker knows how to have fun with a character.

If H.E.A.L.T.H. had been a better movie, I would remember more of it today than a brief wordless scene of Dick Cavett watching Johnny Carson on TV. (Maybe because it occurs twice.)

I want to see the series pilot for This Week in Nemtin, broadcast just once in 1972, which was described in Harlan Ellison's book The Other Glass Teat, a collection of his early-1970s TV columns:

The Julie Andrews scene (actually, she was playing an actress who was coaxed into doing it) was in the not-very-funny Hollywood satire S.O.B., her husband Blake Edwards' follow-up to 10 - starring Richard Mulligan (whose character is dead for the last half of the picture). Curiously unmemorable…

Even if Haggis is depicted that way, so what? One would assume (living on the east coast) that many, perhaps most, people in the entertainment business in L.A. could be described as such.

Add to the pile of stories referencing Hubbardism a very early (1954) and somewhat obscure Philip K. Dick story, "The Turning Wheel," which takes place in a post-apocalyptic America; characters say "Elron be with you," there's a reference to "clearness," etc. (This was after the publication of Dianetics but before the…