An evening pause: Instead of relying on the modern boring use of bathroom humor and obscenities, watch Groucho make everyone laugh by simply reacting to circumstances in exactly right way.
Hat tip Danae.
Link here.
An honest actor reviews the show he stars in: “Please stop watching it … Please stop filling your head with filth.”
Seven ways Star Trek changed the world.
The oldest known color videotape recording: President Eisenhower in 1958.
An evening pause: From a 1967 live television performance, one of the first ever broadcast by satellite around the world. Though this version has been colorized, the synch is off in the original. Also, in doing the colorization they cleaned up the recording, making it much clearer.
It is especially fascinating to watch Lennon and McCartney work together, chewing gum as they sing. And keep your eye out for Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, and other rock performers in the audience.
Ten science fiction episodes that changed television.
I don’t know if these particular episodes changed anything. I do know, however, that any single episode that people are still talking about fifty years after it was aired (such as “Walking Distance” from the original Twilight Zone) as got to be special.
The television as envisioned by dreamers — before it existed.
R.I.P. Eugene Polley, inventor of the television remote control.
If you build it they will come: An engineer has proposed using the USS Enterprise from Star Trek as a model for building an interplanetary spaceship for exploring the solar system.
Though similar in scale and appearance to the USS Enterprise (“it ends up that this ship configuration is quite functional,” Dan writes), the “Gen1 Enterprise” would be functionally very different. Firstly, the main nuclear-powered ion engine (boasting 1.5 GW of power) would strictly limit the Enterprise to intra-solar system missions, being incapable of anything approaching faster-than-light speeds. However, Dan claims that the Gen1 would be capable of reaching Mars from Earth within ninety days, and reaching the Moon in three.
The website is Build the Enterprise.
An evening pause: Music by Art of Noise, inspired by the soundtrack from the 1960s television show, Robinson Crusoe.
The video has some incredible stop-action cloud sequences.
An evening pause: R.I.P. Davy Jones. This reunion performance, which included Davy Jones, Mickey Dolenz, and Peter Tork of the Monkees, occurred on June 16, 2011 at the Beacon Theater, New York City. Less than a year later, Davy Jones had passed away.
Though the audio isn’t great, the joy of the song and those singing it comes through loud and clear. Go here to hear the song as performed in 1967.
An evening pause: The finale of Leonard Bernstein’s Candide. Just before the song begins, Candide says this:
We will not think noble, because we are not noble. We will not live in perfect harmony because there is no such thing in this world, nor should there be. We can only promise to do our best, and to live out our lives. Dear God, that is all we can promise in truth. Marry me, Cunegonde.
R.I.P. Davy Jones, 66, of the Monkees has died.
Oops! A cannonball fired during a Mythbusters stunt went off course, bouncing through two walls of a nearby home and then crashing through the window of a minivan.
