Vautrin

I thought everybody else in Starbucks would be glued to their own electronic devices. Yes, I remember reading that Grammar was a conservative, though I don't think he's way out there like a James Woods. I know Frasier is only a character on a TV show, but it's really hard to like that guy. Just when you start to he does something really obnoxious ...again.

I've heard rumors about a new Frasier too. Frasier was the kind of guy who would bash the hell out of Trump for his bad taste and ignorance and then suck up to him like crazy if he met him in person. Good old Toe Jam. I'm happy to report that Zmed is still vertical. He has returned to his first love, the theater and will play the title role in King Lear later this summer after filming is completed on Grease III: This Time It's Almost Personal. As soon as the theme music for Hooker starts after Perry Mason, I make a quick channel change on the remote.

I Aim at the Stars, but I hit slave labor camps.

I think I saw a little of that concert. I was never an Iggy Pop fan. He didn't look too bad for his age, but he needs to consider buying a shirt. Maybe Jim Jordan can lend him a jacket too. Yeah, one would think that Pop would probably go before Bowie did. I saw Bowie a few times in the early 1970s. He was pretty flamboyant by the standards of the time but not as much as Iggy Pop.

Don't forget Positively 4th Street and Lay Lady Lay. I remember buying the latter, the only Dylan 45 I ever bought. But you're right that Dylan was not a big singles artist like the Beatles or CCR. I remember reading an interview with Clive Davis, then the head of Columbia records. He said they would advertise the album early so that all the Dylan fanatics would come out and buy the album and that would send it high up on the charts, though it might not stay there that long. Talking about elitist pop icons, I would sometimes discuss with ol' DGF about David Bowie and Elvis Costello getting lots of press and being popular on the East Coast and big cities but not selling a whole lot of records compared to more popular but less heralded artists.

Maybe not a smart move commercially, but otherwise.

Most of the time greatest hits collections are about the hit singles the artist has had or, if they didn't have a lot of hit singles, popular tracks from their albums. Maybe when CDs became popular, with a longer running time, B sides or other things could be included. Motorpsycho Nightmare is a wonderful and funny song, but it was never a hit single.

Smart move.

I didn't realize that. I've been hearing jokes about Mandigo for years and years but never got around to watching it. I don't think I'm missing much except for some unintentional laughs.

I don't remember if I saw that movie before or after Elaine did her impression on Seinfeld. Okay, Mandingo is not on YT for free, but Drum, which looks like a Mandingo rip off, is.

Well thank you. She certainly aimed high, however impractically. It can't cost too much more to apply to MIT than to Podunk Community College.

No, all the colleges I went to are here in the good old USA. If I had to pick one, I think I'd go with Rutgers. I remember there was a student from California who thought Rutgers was quite a big deal academically. Think he had it confused with Princeton.

The mandingo ate your ba-bee.

That line stuck in my mind and over the years I forgot what song it was from. I had to do a quick double check to find out. A hilarious song, though not exactly a Greatest Hits selection. Varoooommmm.

I'm a clean-cut kid and I've been to college too.

You just might have. There is quite a selection, much more than there used to be, but I don't have the time to listen to them.

I watched a lot of Frasier, which I hadn't seen the first time around, on the Hallmark Channel late at night, but I've seen every episode a few times so I don't watch it anymore. You could wrote those Hallmark movies in your sleep, which may be the way they do it they're all so similar. DirecTV now has a channel that shows a lot of the old TV shows--Perry Mason, Peter Gunn, Father Knows Best, etc. And for the truly masochistic, T.J. Hooker.

Guess you can't call her Baby anymore. I don't know about Bogie, but if I saw her in that outfit I might find a palm tree to hide behind.

I've never seen one either, I'm just going by the promos I sometimes come across. Of course the non-Christmas ones are just as sappy. I like old time Christmas songs, but not twelve months a year. The DirecTV music channels have something for everyone. 80s Classic Reggae C&W.

A pretty middle-aged woman with personal problems moves back to her hometown with her cute 12 year old son. Her mother subtly works to get her hooked up with her old high school crush, Sam the hunk, who is now divorced and has two cute kids. After many twists and turns they marry in a Christmas eve ceremony with wide smiles on all faces. The end. I was just clicking through the DirecTV music channels a while back and there is now a year round Christmas music channel. Have a holly jolly.......

Now I see where the problem lies. I was thinking of the 1970 movie Joe starring Peter Boyle and Susan Sarandon. That clears everything up. Joe turned into a hippie hunter.

That's the magic of Hollywood. No passport, no money, no problem. It is a bit plausible in this case since Bacall seems to be pretty well set up and we can assume that she slipped Bogie enough spending dough until she arrives with the rest of the bank. And at the very beginning, she just happened to be painting up near San Quentin on that particular day and then finds Bogie in the ditch off the road. Okayyy.

There does seem to be a lot of people who say they work better under pressure. I guess when you have a strict deadline, you'd better get busy. I didn't know anyone in the cast was named Kafka, unless I missed a small bug in the movie. Speaking of things going horribly wrong, Joe wasn't exactly living a charmed life. A right-wing nut ahead of his time.

I always figured she was just a bitter old coot and something of a small town hick who didn't like fancy girls from the big city. Not a lot of likable characters in this flick. I'm rooting for the birds.

Poison is usually considered a woman's method of killing someone, including one's self. Maybe the people who worked on Dark Passage made Moorehead's end ambiguous as a way to protest the Production Code.