First up, an important announcement. This Saturday NBC will begin showing old Saturday Night Lives at 10:00 PM Eastern, 90 minutes before the regular broadcast. This week’s episode will be the legendary show when Richard Pryor hosted in 1975.
The episodes will be edited down to fit the one-hour time block before your late local news. It will be fascinating to see if and how NBC edits some of the skits from these old shows. SNL aficionados know there was one skit in particular in the Pryor episode that was ground breaking and shocking but fit what SNL was doing in its initial year. Is it too controversial for 2014? We shall see.
Speaking of NBC, apparently they are cooking up a sitcom built on one of my favorite movies from the 1980s, Real Genius.
Like most reboots, this sounds like a terrible idea. But it makes me want to go back and watch the original, which had to have been one of my five most watched movies between 1986 and 19951.
NBC decides it’s a moral imperative to remake Real Genius as a sitcom
Did you know that the website for Heaven’s Gate, the California cult that mostly disappeared in a mass suicide in 1997 is still operational? Gizmodo’s Ashley Feinberg decided to find out how and why it was still up and running. The result is a fascinating story about the cult itself and the legacy it left behind.
The Online Legacy of a Suicide Cult and the Webmasters Who Stayed Behind
Columnists, especially those who are of the Baby Boomer generation, love to write of how baseball is dying. Craig Calcaterra takes on that argument and shows how, in most ways, baseball is as alive as it has ever been.
I’d personally love a return to baseball of the 1980s, but I guess if I insist on that I’m no better than the Boomers who want to return to the days of Willie, Mickey, and the Duke.
Baseball is dying? Nonsense: The Case for Baseball’s Vitality
When I was a kid, one of my least favorite baseball players was Steve Garvey. There was just something about the guy that rubbed me wrong. I hated how he was viewed as this perfect citizen and model of the modern, American man.
My grandfather, who I would sit and listen to Royals games with in the summer, loved Garvey. That was the only thing I ever remember arguing with him about. I couldn’t understand why he liked Garvey so much.
Anyway, I remember hearing about this article over the years, but never read it. It is Pat Jordan’s profile of Garvey and his wife for Inside Sports magazine from 1980. To read it now is pretty devastating. I can’t imagine what it was like to read this back in ’80, when things like this just didn’t get printed. Jordan, who is a former baseball player himself, absolutely destroys Garvey while his wife offers a number of absolutely shocking admissions.
It’s uncomfortable to read, but fascinating given when it was published and the people involved. Pretty great that Bronx Banter selected it for reprinting last spring.
Finally, via Kottke, some wonderful video of the aurora borealis taken in Canada a year ago. I’ve never seen the Northern Lights, but would love to some day. Especially if they look like this.
- Guessing those movies were Fletch, Vacation, Better Off Dead, Fast Times At Ridgemont High, and Real Genius. ↩