Moving from lowly MSNBC to ABC didn’t really help.

Baldwin’s show pulled in a rating of .4 – on a major network

To put that in context, I once produced a cable access show that had a higher rating that that – competing AGAINST network shows.

To be fair, he had some tough competition. I think there was a re-run of My Name is Earl on one of the cable channels, and a mid-major crappie-fishing tournament on the Outdoor Channel.

But he was crappier than the crappies.

Hey, that would actually make a nice slogan for his show.

Oh, I kid. He really did get jammed by his time slot. He was competing against Sunday Night Football, which had a great match-up for a change. But even so, Baldwin’s .4 was the lowest broadcast rating of the evening. He even lost to the shows on the CW network.

 

There have been 11 movies based on SNL sketches. Only two of them have been watchable: The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World.

With only eleven to choose from, it’s amazing that some of the films on the list are among the worst films ever made. (It’s Pat, e.g.) It is a sad commentary on the genre that the totally uninspired MacGruber is the one they rated highest after the big two. It would be difficult to name ANY eight films worse than MacGruber, let alone eight from the same sub-genre. To be fair, some of the lower ones on the list (Wayne’s World 2, e.g.) actually are probably better than MacGruber, given the rather low bar they had to clear.

“I have had bouts of situational depression and my heart was broken last year because, unknowingly, I put so much validity in the reaction of the public, and the public didn’t react in the way I had expected to … which broke my heart.”

Nah. Not gonna happen. Here’s the real deal:

Katie Perry lives for attention. If she can get attention by saying she will leave music, she will say that. Then she will again get attention by saying she will not leave music. Then she will get attention by saying she’s leaving her silly judging job. Then not. Then she will get attention by saying she’s leaving Orlando Bloom. Then not. Then she will get attention by saying she loves Donald Trump or something else preposterous. Then not.

Whatever it takes to keep the focus on her.

 

“Insane Clown Posse’s Shaggy 2 Dope tried to dropkick Fred Durst this weekend, but failed miserably.”

There’s no sense in arresting him because conviction is impossible. How are you going to assemble an jury of twelve people who don’t think Fred Durst should be dropkicked?

From the comment section:

“If I’m that DA, I bring charges even knowing I’d lose. Totally worth it to be the prosecutor in People v. Dope.”

This is an excellent story of a fascinating man.

It relates how the character developed in the Republic Pictures serials (before that, the Lone Ranger had been a hit radio broadcast), but the key thrust of the piece is Lee Powell himself.

“Six years after starring as the mysterious masked man and thrilling audiences in the theater of every town in the United States, he was dead on a tiny faraway island at the age of 35. He had been wrong about the longevity of the Lone Ranger’s popularity. The character has become an American icon while Lee Powell unfortunately has faded into obscurity.”

Man, it can make you cringe to read those old newspaper articles. Powell died “fighting the Japs.” It’s not quite as blatantly racist as those old Warner Brothers cartoons, but it’ll still give you pause. Even as boys in the 1950s, my friends and I could see how old-fashioned the 1940s had been. It wasn’t just the newspapers and cartoons, but also the movie serials, like the one Lee Powell had starred in.

The movie serials were very much a harbinger of television, except that the episodes had to be watched away from the home. There were many genres: westerns, crime stories, sci-fi and more. Many of the episodes had cliffhanger endings to bring people back. They were before my time, but when I was a kid they were essentially in the public domain since nobody wanted them for TV or the theaters, so the summer camps I belonged to always screened different ones during lunchtime. We loved them, although not for reasons that would make the creators proud. They were so primitive, and so frequently and flamboyantly melodramatic, that even a bunch of unsophisticated 10-year-olds in the fifties would laugh out loud at the bad effects and clumsy overacting in moments that were supposed to be filled with suspense or drama. The line deliveries were hilarious, and often punctuated by hysterical, repetitive voice-over narration! How did so many cowboys and spacemen (and narrators) get New York outer borough accents? It was like watching the Three Stooges without all the head-bopping.

Great memories.