A powerful multi-use hand-held inspection and evalutation device that precisely dates objects to an accuracy of plus or minus six months of elemental construction or recomposition.
It scans and authenticates signatures via a huge internal database of reference signatures (with recent sale prices!)
It will automatically upload data and images to Ebay and other online auction sites – simultaneously providing pricing guidance and estimated shipping cost information.
While there is a “New Low Price,” Genius II still represents a significant investment for professionals and serious amateurs who buy and sell in the antique and collectible industries. But consider this – with one seriously mispriced “find,” the thing basically could pay for itself. The only downside is wait time on orders, which may be considerable. Click on the image for the fantastic details.
As a young man I attended Marquette University. I never did graduate, which nearly broke my Mom and Dad’s hearts. I was short ten credits because some professor claimed I copied another student’s book report. This professor had a morning class and an afternoon class. I was in the morning session, the other student in the afternoon. I never met him. Or her. I tried to convince the guy that if we were both reviewing the same book, as turned out to be the case, our reports would be similar. He didn’t buy it and flunked me. I was a senior and so pissed off I moved to Savannah, Georgia to start my television work. – Tom Snyder, April 9, 2003 (Picture: TS in bit part on The Rifleman, 1961 – From Videowatchdog)
This is our third Sunday With Snyder: every Sunday, ILT “rebroadcasts” Tom Snyder’s ABC Radio Show.
Tonight: August 26, 1992: Making Schools Better with Larry Martz and British Entertainer Des O’Connor. Tom’s hour with Des O’Connor is terrific.
“Tribute” band shows, I mean. One site defines the basic “tribute band concept” in extraordinarily blunt terms:
Can’t afford tickets to see your favorite pop icon? Is he/she dead? Insane? Try these bands and let your imagination fill in the difference.
Wrong.
This has nothing to do with imagination. It has to do only with the ability to willfully defy reality. If you’ve been in a bad marriage, admire Sarah Palin, or have ever bought a lottery ticket, you just might be just able to pull this off. To check your own ability to abide tribute bands, see how long your candle can stand up to the following video wind.
If you’re able to watch this promo and not think, “Hey, looks like Elton John is headed for this year’s Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, floating over forty people with ropes,” good for you. If you didn’t notice the rather ham-fisted attempt to simulate John’s midline diastema… using some black wax, I’m guessing… you can potentially save time and money via tribute bands.
But careful – there are two parts to the equation as you take your seat to enjoy the incredible simulation that is The Folie A Deuxbee Brothers. Recognize that you enter into a conspiracy to defraud with the performers as they climb onto the stage and pretend to be someone else. This is the unspoken agreement that powers all of the bands that do Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! (A Man After Midnight) as their encore, including Abbalanche, Rebjorn, Abbasolutely Live, Abbalicious, Abbaration, and the misleadingly named 100% Abba (above left). Their act “can incorporate Benny and Bjorn on request,” so right there, they’re no more than 50% Abba. And since, in the course of their performance, they also do a little Debbie Harry and some dead-on Tina Turner, a more accurate band name might be Ballpark 28% Abba, Give or Take.
Members of the coalition of the willing for tribute bands include those concert-goers who can pay premium prices for last-row seats – those who leave their distance glasses at home to further enhance the fantasy that they’re actually in the presence of John and Yoko, often ridiculed as the “gateway act” for tribute musicians, since white suits, floppy hats and long wigs are plentiful and inexpensive. And, heck, nearly everyone has the ability to emit shrill, ear-piercing screams.
Jed Town as John and Lianne Rowe as Yoko don’t just sing – they perform dialogues in their show about “bed-ism, bag-ism, and acorns for peace” on the off chance that there are people out there in the world who want to hear all that stupid claptrap again. They bill their show as “…a happening that can be tailored to all occasions – be it weddings, parties, corporate events, product launches…”
So. No longer can we complain about annoying wedding DJ-MC’s who intimidate guests by shouting, “C’mon now… everybody up… I want to see everybody out here on this dance floor for some fun.” Hell, that sounds like a walk in the park compared to a wedding that offers, as its entertainment component, John and Yoko impersonators sealed in bags talking about acorns for peace.
If you find choosing a product from among the above brands “a real brain-teaser,” order your tribute band tickets today.
The guy at left is a dead ringer for Springsteen, if you squinch your eyes up real tight.
Unfortunately, unlike other facial muscles, ear muscles have their own accessory nucleus, a control area for muscle function, in the brainstem. That’s the reason you can’t squinch up your ears, in case you were wondering.
Do you think CSN&Y are “honored” by the “tribute” stage show presented by 4 Way Street? More likely they see wannabes scooping up the low-hanging ticket fruit that makes it even more difficult for the real band to fill big venues. CSNY is a brand name hemorrhaging market share to cut-rate store-brand look-a-likes.
To be fair, the members of 4 Way Street get points for trying real, real hard:
The Stills guy gained more weight for his role than Jared Leto did for the John Lennon assassination movie that no one with a conscience went to see.
The Crosby guy had his liver replaced even though there was nothing wrong with it, stating “…the audience will know.”
The Neil Young guy is such a perfectionist that he refuses to tour with 4 Way Street for years at a time.
And the guy impersonating Graham Nash takes his job so seriously that he patterns himself not directly on Nash, but rather bases his performance on the artist Nash stole his persona from, Errol Flynn.
In a Quinnipiac University poll, 87% of respondents failed to identify Graham Nash when shown the above two photographs.
On a recent evening in Manhattan, two of the Steely Dan Tribute Bands – Aja Vu and Steely Scam – performed at B.B. King’s in Times Square (opening acts: Stolen Dan, Nearly Dan, Reely Dan, and Stealy Band) on the same night that the actual Steely Dan, Walter Becker and Donald Fagen, were also trying to perfectly replicate the sound of their old hits just 32 blocks north at The Beacon. This provided the first real opportunity for Consumer Reports to burst onto the rock journalism scene with their totally unprecedented comparitive review.
Our trained concert-goers pitted the original Steely Dan band against two “tribute versions,” Aja Vu and Steely Scam.
To level the playing field, we selected one track from each Steely Dan album from October, 1972 to February, 2000 that each band performed on the selected evening.
Scores were recorded in 10 categories, which, when combined, represent overall satisfaction with visual and aural aspects of the concert-going experience. Differences of less than two points on the ten-point scales were not considered significant. (Ratios of ticket price to overall satisfaction are considered elsewhere).
Results: Aja Vu’s performance used 17% more energy, but low marks on stage presence and pitch accuracy dropped the band’s average below CR’s “Don’t Buy Tickets” threshhold. While Steely Scam’s Donald Fagen easily outdistanced Steely Dan’s Donald Fagen, Walter Beckers were judged comparable across all bands.
Barrytown proved a difficult accomplishment for all three bands, with the lyric“I can see by what you carry that you come from Barrytown” proving problematic for all, but we gave the edge here to Steely Scam, who easily surpassed the original band’s attempts at recreation. Steely Dan’s years of experience performing “Don’t Take Me Alive,” however, left the tribute bands in its wake.
Between Steely Dan and Steely Scam, we’d have to say “too close to call,” since the concert-going experiences were on par in nearly all respects. Either band will suffice, but those looking for value in ticket price versus overall satisfaction might best spend their future dollars on Steely Scam tickets.
“I never play down to children,” George Sanford Becker once told the New York Times. Nor to adults, one might add, who were every bit as befuddled as their kids by “Hambone,” Sandy Becker’s singularly odd and eerily prescient TV character whose feathered helmet, coke-bottle glasses, and retro-military wardrobe softened the country up for the arrival of Elton John some years later. Hambone strutted and slid across the stage, twisted himself into odd angles, and swooped in for an out of focus close-up, his nose touching the TV camera’s lens. It all seem to be inspired by, or predicated upon, a song by Red Saunders and his Orchestra.
“Hamboning” is today best known as a lucrative job, but its origins in the US date back to slavery. When southern states passed laws forbidding slave drums and slave drumming, Africans reverted to “patting juba, involving intricate, rapid clapping of the hands against different parts of the body in quite complex successions of rhythm,” as well as beating the hell out of any object that could be coerced into making a percussive sound. Considered a lost art for many years, the practice was revived in 1965 by Wrecking Crew drummer Hal Blaine on the 1965 Beach Boys recording of Barbara Ann when Blaine played his famous ashtrays. But I digress.
The “Sandy Becker” version of Hambone is a minor re-edit of a 1952 Okeh single that added Sandy’s trademarked manic scream of joy to the proceedings. But here, listen for yourself:
Some investment advice in today’s rocky economy. If you had bought a thousand dollars worth of Nortel stock a year back, today it would be worth about forty six bucks. If you had bought a thousand dollars worth of Miller Light (the beer, not the stock), and drank all the beer and redeemed the cans at the redemption center, you’d have about a hundred and five dollars. Given the current volatility in the market, my advice is to drink heavily and recycle! – Tom Snyder, July 30, 2002.
This is our second Sunday With Snyder: every Sunday, ILT “rebroadcasts” Tom Snyder’s ABC Radio Show.
Tonight: From May 20, 1992: TS with guest John Astin (partial) and Nightside hour. John Astin talks about the Addams Family (recording sessions for the animated version) and with a member of his own family. Also: acting with Charles Laughton. On the Nightside hour: Dan Quayle has attacked sitcom character Murphy Brown, who chose to have a child outside marriage; Tom creates a yogurt controversy.
Much like Eugene Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, and other playwrights of the theater of the absurd school, Ernie realized that very few things in life made sense. Unlike them, however, he did not conceive of the absurd as terrifying. Ernie saw laughter as a means of survival, and created a television of the absurd as a video fallout shelter – Ernie would have tripped Godot when he finally did show up.
- Edie Adams
This video, edited from the first half hour of an episode from Ernie’s NBC series of 1955-56 hasn’t been widely circulated, and while it’s not “classic” Kovacs, it does show how casually Ernie approached his shows, even in prime time. It’s fun watching the his mental gears spin in the monologue, it’s reassuring to know that Al Kelly’s doubletalk transcends time and place… and it’s worth remembering that 10 minutes of Kovacs are usually better than ten minutes of nearly anything else.
Listen up, you Johnny-come-latelys… I’ve been involved with the whole computer thing from the very, very, very beginning. Even before the very, very, very beginning; before most of you whippersnappers were born.
My first computer was the original Apple Macintosh: no hard drive, one slot for a floppy. You had to boot off your floppy, then swap discs. You people with your namby-pamby hard drives… you can’t even imagine how tough it was in the old days.
No – wait. That’s not right. Before that, I had a Kaypro.Green characters on a dark screen – it was like wearing night vision goggles. But I actually hooked that sucker up to the (text-only) Internet, through GEnie, after only a month or two of trying.
No – wait. That’s not right, either. I had an analog computer even before that. Any questions? I thought not.
It was an Edmund Scientific. Word processing? E-mail? That sissy stuff that came much later. Math problems, that’s what this baby was designed to do. To find the solution to equations that would previously have required a team of top-notch scientists, all you had to do was set the problem up on dials one and two. You’d hear a tone emanating from the computer, and you’d adjust the third dial until the tone disappeared, then read the number that its indicator pointed to, et voila, you had your answer.
Theoretically.
I don’t believe The Edmund Analog ever worked, since the tone never actually disappeared, but at its lowest volume, you were probably within 10,000%, plus or minus, of the true answer. Yeah, we rounded in those days… now’s it’s a lost art. Young people today…
No – wait. Oh my God, no, this is it, the first computer I ever had:
[2021 note: Don originally embedded an image of this toy which is now lost.]
Made by Hasbro, the Think-A-Tron was digital in the sense that a player piano is digital – hole in paper versus no hole in paper. On or off. One or zero. Think-A-Tron could answer any question in the world. It was a great leap forward, making Magic 8-Balls instantly obsolete.
The box states on the left (in red type) that Think-A-Tron “thinks, answers, and remembers.” Yet just above (in black type) it claims that Think-A-Tron is a “machine that thinks like a man.” Hey, you can’t have it both ways, Hasbro.
Multiple choice questions are printed on little punch cards. You select the answer you believe to be correct, then feed the punch card into the machine. This produces a spectacular light show on the center panel, with lights randomly blinking on and off. The machine then clatters like a newsroom teletype, and the lights eventually resolve into either A, B, C, T or F.
This was impressive, because at the time the Think-A-Tron did this, circa 1960, all we knew about computers was that they had blinking lights, as seen in movies and on TV.
Like today’s Internet, the Think-A-Tron was primarily concerned with trivia. My brother and I would set up the ol’ Think-A-Tron and then match wits with each other, keeping score with the purpose-built dials on the front of the machine.
The source of Think-A-Tron’s trivia questions was The Book Of Knowledge, so it should come as no surprise that Think-A-Tron was awarded the coveted seal of approval from The Book Of Knowledge. Believe it or not, this ground-breaking children’s encyclopedia did not arrange its subjects in alphabetical order. This was supposed to encourage browsing.
And, again, believe it or not, the Book Of Knowledge had a preface that included this sentence:
The editors have sought to convey to this vast multitude of men and women of tomorrow such an understanding of the world they live in as shall make their lives happier, and save the waste of precious years at school.
I like the way these editors think, so much so that I’d even say they think like a man. And it makes me sick to think of the precious years my brother and I wasted in school simply because the parental units denied us our own complete set of The Book of Knowledge.
Sadly, we never even made it through all of Think-A-Tron’s 300 questions. After a while, my brother refused to play Think-A-Tron, because he always lost. He could not figure out why I was consistently smarter than he was. Although I am consistently smarter than him, in this case there was a specific explanation for my infallibility.
Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe that I may have been the first computer hacker in the United States. Yes, even before Matthew Broderick in War Games.
You see, the Think-A-Tron’s digital OS was a series of contacts in the machine’s interior card tray. When a card was inserted, a punch-out determined which of the contacts would be “live” when the crank was turned… and would thus determine the answer that ultimately appeared onscreen after the light show.
I realized that if I could figure out which card punch location corresponded to which answer, I’d never lose. It took months of mental anguish to crack the code: the cunning programmers at Hasbro (many of whom worked on Enigma) had been devilishly, deviously clever: all the circular punched holes are red herrings; they mean nothing. It’s the cut in the right edge of the card that determines the answer. Damn you, Merill and Helal Hassenfeld!
Once I perfected the hack… from that point on, I had nary a wrong answer. My brother, my family, the whole neighborhood… they were in awe. I looked like the 60’s Ken Jennings, when, in reality, I was merely the latest incarnation of Charles Van Doren.
Like Van Doren, I went too far, and hubris brought me down. I jumped the shark when I claimed I could beat Think-A-Tron while blindfolded. My family gathered ’round me and fell into an eerie hush as I dramatically donned the blindfold. I told my brother to shuffle the cards, and when he finished, I did that annoying magician thing about was he thoroughly satisfied and would he like to shuffle again. He didn’t. I squared the deck up, removed the top card, felt the edge cut and said “True.”
I felt my way towards the Think-A-Tron, inserted the punch card, turned the crank, and when the engineered-in noise stopped, I knew a “T” was lit up on the screen. Dumbfounded silence from my audience was my sweet reward. I selected the second card. The third.
I gave the correct answers for one hundred consecutive cards, and I would have gone on, but the silence was too eloquent – it spoke of pride from my parents and abject humiliation from my brother. I gave them all a break and removed my blindfold.
They were gone. Gone not like just-left-the-room gone, but gone-gone. The car was no longer in the driveway. I had outsmarted Think-A-Tron. My father, I later learned, had outsmarted both of us.
Think-A-Tron and I flunked the Turing Test; the total lack of natural language conversation during the demonstration should have tipped us off. The deceivers were deceived.
And not for lack of trying. Hasbro did their research and put their all into the Think-A-Tron, as the recently declassified photo above now confirms.
Even so, at that time, it was pretty clear: neither the Think-A-Tron nor I could reasonably claim to “think like a man.”
In 1987, Tom Snyder filled-in as occasional guest host on Larry King’s Mutual Radio show. He enjoyed the work and was good at it.
In 1988, the ABC Radio Network gave Tom his own nationally syndicated call-in program. Known simply as “The Radio Show,” it ran for three hours every weekday night for five years. The first hour was usually a news maker or political guest; hour two featured someone from the field of entertainment, and the third hour, the “nightside” hour, was “…you and TS, all alone on the telephone.”
This wasn’t confrontational radio. It wasn’t partisan political radio. It was simply the world filtered through Tom Snyder’s intellect. He was sympathetic to guests and callers alike, connecting on a basic, “common sense” level. When common sense seemed an impossible goal, Tom would give an exasperated “Sheesh!” Not “Sheesh, this person is ridiculous,” but rather “Sheesh, how far am I going to have to go in order to have a conversation?”
It was easy-going and personal. Tom would swap stories with guests rather than formally interview them. It almost didn’t matter who the guest was – listeners tuned in for Tom. Tom gave them great radio.
If these shows are archived somewhere, I haven’t found them. So Sundays With Snyder will be a regular feature here on Isn’t Life Terrible until our finite supply of programs saved on audiocassette runs out. Some shows will be “joined in progress,” some will be incomplete, some will have static, and some will suffer from a buzzing sound generated by a nearby appliance. Others will be screwed up professionally by WICC-AM, the local affiliate, where the board op would frequently miss cues or played two feeds at once. WICC also provided long periods of dead air… but those, like commercials and newscasts, have been cut out. Commercials and newscasts are retained when there’s historic or entertainment value.
Tonight: From Feb. 18th 1992: TS with guest Gloria Steinem. The country is smack dab in the middle of a recession, and it’s the day of the New Hampshire primary when Tsongas beat Clinton and Bush beat Buchanan. (We do not know how provocatively TS was dressed for this show).
The MGM Our Gangs (1938-1944) are not nearly as good as the Hal Roach talkie Our Gangs (1929-1938). In fact, Leonard Maltin calls the MGM shorts “unbearable” and nails the reason:
The MGM crew eventually turned the Our Gang comedies into ten-minute morality plays, stressing mother love, patriotism, pedestrian safety, and other American virtues in such a maudlin way that the studio’s Andy Hardy films seem anarchistic by comparison.
But at a quite bearable 67 cents per short, the entire MGM run on 5 DVD’s (total: $34.95) might just be worth considering.
The shorts will shortly be released through the WB Archive direct-sales program. The WB Archive exists to do precisely this sort of thing – make films with limited commercial potential available on DVD.
How limited is that potential? How many of the 305+ million Americans have been clamoring for the MGM Our Gangs?
Let’s take that a step further. How many want their very own copy of, for example, The Boob? Consider this thirty second clip from that Warner Archive title:
Now, in spite of that wildly entertaining clip, I’d still like to see this movie, a late silent (1926) about prohibition directed by Wild Bill Wellman.
Wellman’s own comments about the film don’t serve to make it much more tempting:
I had directed, or rather I misdirected, one picture at the Goldwyn Studios, the title of which escapes me, thank God. Oh, no, I just thought of it: The Boob. In it were George K. Arthur, Tony D’Algy, Charlie Murray, and a young star by the name of Lucille le Sueur, later to be known as Joan Crawford. The [studio] brass took one look at my first directional blooper and bounced me right out of the studio, and fate demoted me to an assistant director once again.
- A Short Time For Insanity, the autobiography of William Wellman
So, historically speaking, the film is important, in that it nearly destroyed Wellman’s career. Other facts of note: The Boob was considered a “lost film” for many years. Though the Archive doesn’t mention it, IMdB does: thisis the movie that’s playing in the town where Buster Keaton encounters a hurricane in Steamboat Bill Jr., and the speakeasy set seen in The Boob was actually created for the silent 1925 Ben-Hur and was “re-dressed.”
That’s enough for me. I’m inviting friends over to see 1-2-3 Go! (1941), the MGM Our Gang about the formation of a safety society, and The Boob, the William Wellman movie that The Baltimore Sun called, upon its 1926 release, “… a piece of junk.”
"Isn't Life Terrible" is a Charley Chase short from 1925. The title was derived from a 1924 D.W. Griffith film, "Isn't Life Wonderful?" Other Charley Chase film titles that ask questions are "What Price Goofy?" (1925), "Are Brunettes Safe?" (1927), and "Is Everybody Happy?" (1928). Chase abandoned his titles with question marks for titles with exclamation points during the sound era.
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