Happy Halloween!

(Wicked witch courtesy of sister Debbie.) Here’s hoping that everyone out there in Yesteryear Land is having a cool, crazy fantabulous Halloween weekend!  Things have been sort of low-key here at the ranch, owing largely to the fact that neither Athens nor Clarke County established an official Trick-or-Treat time this year.  I observe Halloween on the 31st, as I’m sure most of you…

Hey hey in the Haystack

I must reluctantly confess that I’m a bit behind in catching up on some of my favorite blogs, so I’m coming a bit late to the party that is this questionnaire at TDOY chum Amanda’s A Noodle in a Haystack. (Anybody who admires both Una Merkel and Helen Broderick is aces in my book.)  Try it at home, but remember...no…

Never Steal anything small

Dr. Albert C. Barnes, born into a working-class family from Philadelphia, put himself through medical school as an amateur boxer and amassed an immense personal fortune in the pharmaceutical business by patenting a drug called Argyrol (a silver nitrate substitute used in the prevention of venereal disease in newborns). He used his wealth to obtain…

Don’t it seem like Twix just keep gettin’ harder to find

The Daily Beast, operating under the amusing delusion that chocolate candy has the same nutritional cache as—oh, I don’t know…carrot sticks, perhaps—has compiled a list of the 40 most popular candies and ranked them from “worst-to-first,” based, according to the Beast, “on their percentage from the median in calories, saturated fat, carbohydrates, and sugar, with each of those…

DVR-TiVo-Or whatever recording device strikes your fancy-alert!

At the start of its 1960-61 season, the TV western Maverick was having to cope with the loss of its star, James Garner, who had quit the series after a messy contract dispute with Warner Brothers, the studio that produced the program. The show’s producers added another Maverick to the family to help out co-star Jack…

Guest Review: Scarlet Street (1945)

By Philip Schweier Fritz Lang’s Scarlet Street (1945) is one of those seminal movies that first turned me on to film noir. Sure, there have been other classics such as The Maltese Falcon (1941) or Out of the Past (1947). Heck, Rhonda Fleming is worth the price of admission on that one. But the thing about Scarlet Street is it doesn’t feature any…

Guest Review: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970)

By Philip Schweier I have been a Sherlock Holmes since I was 12, when I was given a collection of the original stories by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. No, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t give me the collection himself. What I meant to say was the stories were written by – oh, never mind. It…

So’s your Antenna

Rick Brooks, Cultureshark blogger extraordinaire and creator of the phrase that pays (“The Greatest Cable Channel Known to Mankind”), was nice enough to give me a heads-up (which he spotted on the Sitcoms Online blog) on the latest venture being offered up by Tribune Broadcasting, which is scheduled to sign on the first of the year (January 1) in 2011.…

Don’t you think this Outlaw bit’s done got out of hand

The news that NBC has given the go-ahead to full season “pick-ups” of new shows The Event, Chase, Law & Order: Los Angeles, and Outsourced was met with a mixture of bemusement and bewilderment here at Rancho Yesteryear, because while I’m certainly not your go-to guy when it comes to choosing great television (I watch reruns of Mister Ed and Gilligan’s Island—what does that…

Guest Review: Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

By Philip Schweier With Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982), Steve Martin tried another send-up of old movies, this time with an eye toward comedy. Whether it’s actually funny or not is for others to judge. I’ve seen it too many times to offer a valid opinion. For me, the appeal of the film is the gimmick…