Late Night - The Smothers Brothers

 

RIP Tommy Smothers. Dick is still alive.

Game Grumps - Ice Hockey Returns 2

Yet more Ice Hockey.

Dave's Video Collection

 Before the Wheel of the Worst, before Plinketto, before Black Spine, there was Dave's Video Collection.

Uh, and before that, there was Dave's Record Collection. I guess that doesn't matter.

Popcorn in Bed - White Christmas

 

Perfection.

Stuttering John vs. Phones

 

John is at his mom's house when the fans start calling on the phone. Is John smart enough to figure out how to get the ringing to stop?

The Last 100 Years of Steak

 Guga cooks and tests 100 years of steak:

Best of the Worst - Christmas Plinketto

 

For this year's Christmas episode, it's Plinketto! And the results are weird but you already knew that. 

Why they skip over the introduction to "Silent Night Deadly Night 4" I don't know.

Game Grumps - Ice Hockey Returns!

 

The 2023 edition is less manic and therefore not as good as past versions. Still, it's Ice Hockey.

Film Flam - Freddy's Fridays

 

Bad news: no Dylan 'Bruiser' King. Good news: karate!

Christmas with Dennis II: Electric Boogaloo

 

It's been 5 years now since I first celebrated Christmas with Dennis and I have celebrated Christmas with Dennis, perhaps not every year, but many times since.

Well, there is a sequel - canonically entitled "Dennis Awe: An Awesome Christmas." And this edition has a number of guest stars including Pat Boone and Donna Douglas (Elly May from "The Beverly Hillbillies") as well as a giant Shoji Tabuchi-size audience.

The organ playing is excellent, the special has all the quality you'd expect from Dennis. But early on it becomes apparent that there is a strict separation between the performance and the giant applauding crowds. The game within the game is this: will there ever be a shot that establishes the performers and the audience are in the same place? Spoiler alert: it never comes.

At 46:00, it's time for Dennis' sister DyAnne to shine. You don't need me to tell you that her playing charges the special's atmosphere with eroticism.

At 1:35:30 the special completely gives away the game as it tries to pass off a split-screen gag as taking place in front of the "live" audience. There's no question anymore.

Finally, you might go to 1:47:15 to see Dennis do a comedy double-act with someone other than himself. And I won't give it away, but at this point the special sinks to new lows. I was hoping, "Surely, they're not going to do this." But they did it. Oh, they did it.

The Oldest Known Recording of Jingle Bells

 From 1898.

People back then had a much "freer" notion of rhythm, I guess.

Late Night - Diane Sawyer's Expose

 

The Letterman channel has been uploading segments from Dave's Film Festival lately. It's an interesting concept and new to me but there are more misses than hits.

I like this Diane Sawyer piece, partly because I miss Diane Sawyer. I'm going to send this to my parents, I think it's especially for the Boomer crowd.

Late Show Staff - Will Forte

 

Former writer Will Forte talks about his experience working on the Late Show.

I'm amazed. Firstly, I didn't know Will Forte was a writer on the Late Show. Secondly, I didn't know there was a MacGruber TV show.

Calling Out Josh Groban

 Or: "Partially Ruining a Christmas Classic"

Driving to my parents house with the Christmas music on the radio and Josh Groban's rendition of "O Holy Night" comes on. I noticed something askew.

It's a high quality rendition of a classic song for the most part but I couldn't stop noticing something absolutely inexplicable about it.

The first two minutes, everything's as it should be. Once we get to 2:00 Groban sings "O Knife Divine." Thereafter, almost every instance of "night" is replaced by "knife." The only exception is at 4:15 where there's a legitimate "night" but even that is followed up 2 seconds later with another "knife." So it's "O night / O knife divine."

And now I will never un-hear "O Holy Knife." This is the biggest lyrical scandal since "Poker Face."

Living in Cyberiad

 "The Cyberiad," by Stanislaw Lem, is a whimsical collection of science-fiction fairy tales, in a similar style as "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." It's episodic but it generally follows two intelligent machine rivals who try to outdo each other with their own invented machines. My favorite story in "The Cyberiad" is "The first sally (A), or Trurl's electronic bard."

The following contains spoilers for "The Cyberiad."

Through much hard work and countless hours of toil, Trurl has created a machine that, he hopes, can write poetry. He invites his rival Klapaucius over to test it (or to show off.) Klapaucius accepts, and after some false starts and tweaks, recites a short poem. Klapaucius is not impressed - the poem was just a pre-recorded message written by a person. Trurl invites him to make a request as a real test. Klapaucius thinks, trying to figure out the hardest request he can imagine. Finally he suggests:

"Have it compose a poem - a poem about a haircut! But lofty, noble, tragic, timeless, full of love, treachery, retribution, quiet heroism in the face of certain doom! Six lines, cleverly rhymed, and every word beginning with the letter s!!"

Trurl begins to object...

But he didn't finish. A melodious voice filled the hall with the following:

Seduced, shaggy Samson snored.

She scissored short. Sorely shorn,

Soon shackled slave, Samson sighed,

Silently scheming,

Sightlessly seeking 

Some savage, spectacular suicide.

The story goes on from there with other bizarre requests and other poems but I'll focus on just this one, as it's my favorite. I was so used to seeing this story as a wonderful, whimsical flight of fancy (I first read this story in 1998-1999) that I completely failed to see that it's now a reality. Or is it? I was wondering, if I give this same prompt to ChatGPT, what would be the result?

Here is the experiment.

In truth, I usually see ChatGPT as just a more advanced search engine. I was fully expecting it to just lookup and return the poem from "The Cyberiad," at which point I would have had to try a similar prompt. But no, it simply went straight to its own attempt. Also surprising is that it doesn't follow the "only s" rule, for some reason. I mean, if a computer program doesn't write great poetry, we can all understand why but I absolutely do expect it to understand and follow basic, concrete rules.

I don't want to lose sight of the fact that I am astonished by the sophistication of ChatGPT. Still, it definitely falls far short of the goal.

Let's try Bing:

Arguably better; it at least follows the 's' requirement, but still wanting.

And You!:

Terrible.

We live in a science-fiction future but the world of "The Cyberiad" still retains its mystique and fascination.

Finally, a small factoid that I just learned from Wikipedia: "The Seventh Sally was also an inspiration of the game SimCity." According to the New York Times, "In the Lem story a banished tyrant returns to his despotic ways after being given control over a simulated city."

Popcorn in Bed - Sneakers

 

The people in the Pocorn in Bed community say "Sneakers" is "so underrated" and a "hidden gem". The community is correct.

Recalling the Luleelurah

 

Listening to a vanilla, adult, mainstream radio station and this song by Fall Out Boy comes on. I guess we're in that point of time where music from this era stops being out of fashion and comes back around as nostalgia. And listening to this song, I couldn't help but remember the lyric video that goes with it.

I think Emo was an interesting phenomenon for me in that it was the (pretty exact) point at which I fell out of fashion. I was the young guy who knew the current trends in music implicitly and then one day I hear there's this new genre I've never heard of. Where did it come from? Who's listening to it? It all had to be explained to me.

To be honest, I don't fully understand to this day. But none of that matters. This video is a classic of the pre-youtube days and everyone should see it.

So... Why a Leg Lamp?

 

The Leg Lamp from "A Christmas Story" is one of the great gags of the movie and in recent years has become iconic. The movie explains that it's an award but never explains why anyone would award a leg lamp to anyone.

A few weeks ago I accidentally stumbled upon the explanation and feverishly began researching a full article. I looked up primary sources and began to buy reference books, but in my searches I found tons of trivia sites which already had the answer. My full scholarly article is cancelled.

Still, not everyone knows so here is the short version.

The company running the contest/sweepstakes was supposed to be the Nehi soda company. At one point, their logo was a single woman's leg (Nehi = Knee High) so the prize for their contest was a lamp of the company's logo.

"A Christmas Story" is based on the radio show/writings of Jean Shepherd. Shepherd reveals the Leg Lamp-Nehi connection in the TV movie "Phantom of the Open Hearth" which was made 7 years earlier, in 1976. Shepherd also talked about it in interviews.

Introduced in 1924, Nehi was bought by Royal Crown, which was bought by Dr. Pepper and is actually still made today. You can actually buy it.

"A Christmas Story" will be re-released to theaters December 10th and 13th for its 40th anniversary.

I quite like that the origin of the lamp is left unexplained. It reinforces the theme of childhood - the world is a strange place and rarely makes sense.

Film Flam - Winnie the Pooh: Blood and Honey

Dylan 'Bruiser' King's cameo, it seems, is all too brief.