De Havilland went on to earn her own Academy Award in 1946 for her performance in “To Each His Own,” a melodrama about out-of-wedlock birth. A second Oscar came three years later for “The Heiress,” in which she portrayed a plain young homebody (as plain as it was possible to make de Havilland) opposite Montgomery Clift and Sir Ralph Richardson in an adaptation of Henry James’ “Washington Square.”

At one point the Guinness Book of Records recognized that Regis Philbin had spent more time on camera than anyone in the history of US television – some 17,000 hours. To recognize the enormity of that, imagine that you spend two hours a day on camera, five days a week, 52 weeks per year, with no vacations. Even at that pace, it would take you more than 30 years to get to Regis level.

John Saxon’s face is one that everyone knows. He has been ubiquitous throughout our lifetimes, having appeared in more than 100 films, and nearly as many different TV shows.

“The cost for NBC was over $250,000 to build as it was all by hand and very detailed. The show almost put NBC into bankruptcy as the ratings were so terrible and the star of the show was this train essentially. Great piece of television history that belongs in a museum or a collection where it can be seen again!”



(The article is on IMGUR)

“On Sunday morning, I suffered gunshot wounds, as a result of a crime that was committed against me and done with the intention to physically harm me … I’m incredibly grateful to be alive and that I’m expected to make a full recovery.”

(She seems to be trying to control the narrative. A bystander video showed Megan herself in cuffs, and she reportedly told the LAPD she had suffered an injury to her foot due to broken glass on the floor of the car.)

I love the Fletch books and I think Hamm is a great choice. I like it so far. Don’t mess it up, guys.

I’ve written before that this is a franchise that was completely bungled after a very promising start. One of the best books in the series, “Carioca Fletch,” took place immediately after the final scene of the first Fletch movie, with Fletch in Rio. Talk about an obvious choice for a sequel! Moreover, it had everything necessary to make a great movie – exotic locale, Brazilian music and culture, and an interesting mystery amid the chaos of Carnival. Best of all, it had a generally befuddled Fletch, who was unable to navigate the intricacies and nuances of Brazilian life and law enforcement. The entire set-up is cinematic, and the book was hot off the presses when the first movie was released. Why didn’t that sequel ever happen? I don’t know. It seemed like a no-brainer. The sequel that they finally did make, some 4-5 years later, has its defenders, but I thought it was kinda awful.

There is another great Fletch yarn that would be perfect in today’s world if it were modernized a bit, “Fletch and the Man Who,” in which Fletch becomes the press secretary for a presidential candidate.

The Hamm reboot will be based on “Confess, Fletch,” which I must have read because I devoured all of them, but I can’t remember. Based on the linked article, Fletch himself becomes a suspect in a murder investigation, and the lead homicide detective is Flynn, a perfect foil for Fletch, and the star of his own series by the same author. I remember reading all the Flynn books as well, but they didn’t leave much impression on me. (Depending on the script, the casting of Flynn could be as critical as the selection of Hamm to play Fletch, since a great reboot could theoretically launch two franchises.)

No consolation prize for this game …

Earlier this week, Woolery tweeted that, essentially, everyone was lying about COVID 19, “The CDC, media, Democrats, our Doctors” were all lying to make sure Trump lost the election. Trump immediately re-Tweeted Woolery’s Tweet, basically agreeing with him and throwing Dr. Fauci and every right thinking person under the bus.

The next day Woolery backtracked. The reason? His son, he said, had tested positive for the virus. “Covid-19 is here and it is real,” he said, contradicting his entire prior Tweet. And his whole philosophy. The former host of “Love Connection,” outspoken right winger and supporter of Donald Trump, has deleted his Twitter account



“Recently, a graphic designer from Moscow, Lenivko Kvadratjić, made a bold move by reimagining the iconic Simpsons family living their most miserable lives somewhere in Russia. The designer was born in Siberia in the late USSR and later moved to Moscow to get his degree. “The Simpsons has a great influence on me and people all over the world. Many famous persons made intros for The Simpsons. I always wanted to make some parody version too with my country’s local flavor included. So I made it one day”

I assume “Lenivko Kvadratjic” is a pseudonym that implies Lazy Square, which is the English name of his YouTube channel, in a sort of Slavic mash-up language. I’m not a scholar in the Slavic languages, but he seems to play around with several of them to give his work a generic Slavic feel. He’s Russian, but the credits and captions in his Simpsons parody seem to be in the Czech alphabet rather than Cyrillic. Lenivko is the actual Bulgarian word for “lazy,” but it’s recognizable to Russians as well because the very similar ленивый is the Russian equivalent. I think kvadratić or квадрат, or something very similar, is recognizable as “square” across the Slavic world.

“First Playmate” is a trivia question that will win you many bar bets. Most people think it was Marilyn Monroe. You can also win bets on the first centerfold, also not Marilyn. You all know that Marilyn appeared in Playboy #1 in December of 1953, but the magazine never applied the term “Playmate” to her (MM was the “Sweetheart of the Month”), and she was not a centerfold, having appeared on pages 17-19. The main color picture was presented vertically, as shown in the link above.

  • An obscure model/actress named Margie Harrison became the first “Playmate” when she was so called in the second-ever issue of the Bunny-oriented publication. Margie also became the first woman chosen as a Playmate twice, when the magazine pictured her again a few months later in the June, 1954 edition. Unfortunately for her, the picture was not identified as Margie at the time. It was not until two years after her appearance in Playboy #2 that Playboy’s readers learned her identity.

Brainscan covered her in Lil From Brazil in part 4 of his brilliant overview of Grindhouse Films.

  • The first actual centerfold (two-page) was Janet Pilgrim (Miss July for 1955)
  • The model for the first three-panel fold-out centerfold was Marian Stafford, Miss March for 1956.

Find more Playmate trivia here.

One site pictures every one of them!

By the way, you can find a replica of that first Playboy online. It was primitive!

The second issue was somewhat more professional in appearance, but was still rudimentary, and was still predominantly black-and-white.

Backlash? Who could have guessed?

“The independent film stars Bella Thorne and “is about a street-smart party girl with a Jesus fetish who gets mixed up in a violent drug deal and finds a possible way out — by masquerading as a Nun.”

(The same way I got out of Vietnam, by the way.)


It may have a way to go before challenging the weirdest portrayal of Christ, in Greaser’s Palace, one of the oddest movies ever filmed.

GP centers around Jesus returning to the earth in the old west, into the shabbiest, most run-down town in any dried-up gulch. (Well, I suppose Bethlehem was no Paris either.) He’s on his way to Jerusalem to be an actor/singer/dancer, and he’s a whiz at performing 1940’s boogie-woogie. Jesus, aka “Jessy,” is wearing a black and gray striped 1940’s zoot suit and a big pink hat, and looks pretty much like Jim Carrey after he puts on The Mask.

God the Father is a crusty lookin’ old cowboy greybeard. The Holy Ghost wears a cowboy outfit except for the bed sheet over his head with two eyeholes cut out, and he’s upset because The Father never gives him a chance to do anything important. Here’s the Holy Trinity:

Seaweedhead Greaser is the guy who runs the town, and he has constipation problems. He can’t move to action unless properly spurred by mariachi music, so his quartet follows him around in case he needs them. Like all movie strongmen, he has a wimp of a son, and he kills the kid, Lamy Homo Greaser, in the first scene, but Jesus later brings him back to life like Lazarus, and …

Let’s see. Tattoo from Fantasy Island plays a tiny homosexual cowpoke who makes a move on Christ. And there’s a 90 year old man playing a character named “Petunia”, clad in pink gingham drag. And there’s really no way to describe this without going through every discontinuous scene. It was directed by the supremely odd Robert Downey Senior, and will give you a clear hint that Downey Junior’s early drug problems may have been inherited.

But in one sense, Hugh was never really alive, at least not in the way that we normally conceive of life.

He would have been a perfect choice for one of those “Is he alive or dead?” quizzes. I probably haven’t thought about Hugh Downs in decades, and had no idea that he was alive.

“’The Guinness Book of World Records’ recognized Downs as having logged more hours in front of the camera than any television personality until Regis Philbin passed him in 2004.”