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Isn't Life Terrible

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Sundays With Snyder - Number 2

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.

Listen...



or Download the mp3.

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Friday, August 28, 2009

What's My Hush Hush? Ernie Kovacs on NBC, 1956

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.



Videos I've posted to YouTube

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Monday, August 24, 2009

How I Hacked The OS Of My First Computer And How It Changed My Life

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:

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."

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Sunday, August 23, 2009

Sundays With Snyder - Number 1

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).

Listen...



or Download the mp3.

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Saturday, August 22, 2009

Mis-directed Movies With Our Gang And Joan Crawford Available At Last

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: this is 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."

Only because it was a family newspaper.

Our Gang (1938-1942) at the WB Archive.

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Together, We Can Beat This Thing

History repeats itself.

This recession-themed sixty second spot from WICC-AM is from June, 1992... but it could have been recorded yesterday.

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Saturday, August 1, 2009

Bob and Ray On The Bicentennial

Here's the audio from a Bob and Ray appearance on the Tonight Show with Johnny Carson from 1976 - rescued from an old TDK audiocassette in my archive. It features:

- The historian for the Democratic party (a wonderful switch on the Komodo Dragon Expert routine)
- Wally Ballou on the Bicentennial civic project at Lost Canyon, Utah (a truly great sketch).

You can hear, as always, Carson laughing in the background... and the Tonight Show audience loves it! 11m



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