Today’s “The Week That Was” sponsored by Mattel. You can tell it’s Mattel, it’s swell!
It was a good week here at the blog. I want to thank everyone for their comments on The Friday Five and on yesterday’s Stream of Consciousness Saturday post. I’m sure real psychologists would see my comparison of the brain and the mind to hardware and software and laugh themselves silly, but I thought it was good, and apparently so did a lot of you. Thank you for that. And I think you’ve given me most of a Thursday Ten of TV shows with numbers in the title. Again, thank you.
On my Battle of the Bands, Elvis beat Big Mama Thornton by a 2-1 margin, and that was with my vote for Willie Mae. I like them both, but had never heard Big Mama’s original, which it turns out I liked a little better. I wonder if Elvis and his posse chose to do “Hound Dog” after hearing Big Mama’s version?
I chose to do a writing prompt from Mama Kat on Thursday rather than a Thursday Ten, and took you on a ramble through the Rogers Park of my youth. Talking about movie theaters, Madam Dreamweaver said the Indiana Theater in Indianapolis is another “movie palace” that has been refurbished, and there’s another in Pensacola that now hosts live shows. My friends in Ann Arbor told me about the State Theater, an Art Deco palace that’s scheduled to reopen next year or the year after. Mary and I saw Roy Orbison and Johnny Rivers at the Chicago Theater before we moved to Atlanta, so there are quite a few of the old movie palaces left. It’s strange going to one of the old theaters now that the multiplexes are the name of the game. Elen told me she grew up in Evanston. Little coincidences (synchronicities?) like that make the world go round.
We were hit with some sad news this week: Yvonne Craig, TV’s Batgirl and Elvis’s girlfriend in a couple of movies, died of breast cancer on Wednesday. She had a full resume that included time with Denham’s Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and numerous movie and TV appearances. She even did some voiceover work on the cartoon Olivia, which I see is on the schedule on both our local PBS stations; check your local listings. Ms. Craig’s family passed a beautiful message from her, reminding us she loved meeting and talking with her fans, and telling us to celebrate her life and not waste time mourning her. Last night, MeTV showed two Batman episodes that featured her as well as the episode of Star Trek (“Whom Gods Destroy”) where she played Marta, a gorgeous woman with green skin. A great way to celebrate a fine and busy actress.
Also this week, Melody Patterson, who played Calamity Jane on F Troop, passed away at 66. She was just fifteen when she got the part, and they had filmed a few episodes before they found out.
My One-Liner Wednesday was a message I received from WordPress congratulating me for having received 1337 “like”s. I had no idea why until Linda Hill, who runs One-Liner Wednesday as well as Stream of Consciousness Saturday, told me about “leet.” “Leet” is a shortened form of “elite,” and it’s a way of using numbers and other special characters instead of A through Z. For example, my last name would be |-|0170|\|. In this case, WordPress was congratulating for being “elite,” or “leet,” 1337 in their orthography. Thanks for explaining that, Linda.
Two for Tuesday featured the music of Holland-Dozier-Holland, one of Motown’s greatest songwriting teams. They probably wrote some of your favorites.
Monday, I had no idea what to write about, so I went on a ramble. I talked about possibly getting a free copy of Windows 10 anyway, since Microsoft munged my machine with the upgrade (and their answer was “no, you can’t,” and my response to that was, literally, “see you in the funny papers”). I also gave a big thumbs up to Solitude for Windows, which I run both on Mac and Linux using a program called wine, and expressed my displeasure with the phrase, “it’s never too late to have a happy childhood” and proposed several alternates. Lauralynn uses the George Eliot quote, “It’s never too late to be what you might have been,” as a signature to her emails; Joanne said she likes all the quotes, including the original. Which is cool with me.
Right now, they’re playing this at Starbucks. I love this song.
I wasn’t happy with the Unity desktop delivered with Ubuntu, so I installed several others, including Linux Mint‘s Cinnamon. It looks like the desktop from Windows 7. I like it.
So, this week, all the usual stuff. Hope to see you here!
The Sound of One Hand Typing 