|
As you all can see, my regular Random Crap feature is back. About the third week of last month my tailbone stopped hurting and I can sit without having a lot of pain. That means I can focus on things like doing Random Crap articles for the rest of the year.
September has come and gone and that now means it is October. That also means that at the end of the month here in the states children will come to your house and extort candy from you in exchange for not throwing eggs at your house/car, soaping your windows or toilet papering your trees. Having seen the results of some houses that were toilet papered, and how long it took to clean up, just giving the kid a fun size snickers bar is money better spent rather than having to get up on a ladder and clean off trees when you could be inside watching professional American football, college American football or the major league baseball playoffs.
Not a lot has happened since when we last met back in August. The major fandom convention season has wound down; the movie studios are gearing up to get their Oscar contenders ready for public consumption and a new fall television season has started for the major networks. I thought I would go through some older shows that might be overlooked by some viewers that I thought people should try.
- Key & Peele (Comedy Central Wednesdays 9:30pm CT): Key & Peele is a half hour sketch comedy show where comedians Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele spoof some of the things that go on in popular culture. They are probably best known for their You Tube posts of their President Obama sketches with his Anger Translator Luther. If you do go looking for the sketches on YouTube be warned, the language on some of them is very NSFW.
- Dragnet (ME TV weekday afternoons): Dragnet is not a show about people who dress in drag and go out fishing. Although that might be coming from TLC or another cable station. Dragnet is a half-hour drama from the late 1960's that starred Jack Webb and Harry Morgan (Col. Potter from the television show MASH) that focused on Police Sergeant Friday's and Officer Gannon's cases in the LAPD. The show is considered by me to be the granddaddy of police procedurals. What I like about the show is that it is not like the hour long police procedural dramas we have now. There's no magic getting the information you need within seconds from a computer or getting results that come back in hours instead of the weeks it should take in real life. They actually had to go out and talk to people and get the information and catch a break. Yes the show does show its age when one of the officers asks to use the homeowners phone to call the station they are working out of, but that is what they did back then. It also shows its age in the fact that most of the teenager's and twenty somethings they encounter use a lot of sixties slang. It is still a good look at a somewhat realistic police work even though it is about 45 years old.
- Columbo (ME TV Sunday nights): Columbo is not about guys who go out picking coffee beans in the rainforests of Columbia, it is instead a movie of the week show from the early 1970's that focused on Homicide Detective Lieutenant Columbo of the LAPD and how he basically solves murders on his own. Okay so it is not a lot like Dragnet, but it is still entertaining when you have a couple of hours to kill and don't like anything else that is on Sunday night television. Lieutenant Columbo is played by the legendary actor Peter Falk who some of the younger of us will remember from the movie The Princess Bride as the grandfather that was telling the story to his grandson. You look at Detective Columbo and think to yourself, "How did this guy make Detective in the first place let alone Lieutenant?" He's got the wrinkly raincoat that he always wears; walks slightly stooped over, and is chomping on a cigar throughout the whole movie. We see the murder happen and then the Lieutenant arrives on scene and does his thing. It may look like he's just wandering around the crime scene not really paying attention, but then he finds some insignificant piece of evidence that blows the whole thing wide open, but does not let anyone know and instead toys with the killer, by acting dumb. Peter Falk really played this role well and made Columbo look smart without making him the super policeman.
That covers all I wanted to this month. I hope to have something longer and more involved for next month.
|