Bus Gallery

Whole buncha new stuff in the Bus Gallery tonight!

Address Correction - Hal Seeger Productions

Send your cards and letters of support to Hal Seeger Productions, Inc., P.O. Box 231117, Great Neck, NY 11024. And tell em Dave sent you!

SPAM ALERT

Be ware of ANY e-mail message that purports to be from "Pepsi Contest" or other entity. It is a WORM called "So Big". Body of email message says "Please see attached zip file for details". Inside that ZIP is a .PIF which is usually BAD NEWS.

We are soon going to be making a major policy statement on e-mail to this website. Please watch for it, particularly if you are a regular correspondent.

Found The Icons

We apologize if you noticed missing icons from this page yesterday. We had to do a quick change on the page and had no access to Blogger. We tried to do it via FTP but the Index page was looking for all the graphics in a different directory (if you ever save pages in Internet Explorer, you will understand what I am talking about).

Now It's Your Turn To Come To Batfink's Rescue!

There's a reason this icon is at the top of the stack you see at the left. We have always been staunch supporters of the plutonium-infused bat with the wings of steel and the supersonic sonar radar. After what seemed like an eternity (I think we went online with it in 1996), my little Batfink site has finally attracted the attention of the Seeger family, who couldn't be more pleased that we are keepers of the flame.

I am pleased to announce that Batfink's snail mailbox is now open! Hal Seeger Productions wants to hear from Batfink fans! What are your memories? How would you like to see Batfink as he prepares for his big comeback? Revival of the classic cartoons? New cartoons? Maybe even a feature film? The possibilities are endless.

Send your cards and letters of support to Hal Seeger Productions, Inc., P.O. Box 231117, Great Neck, NY 11024. And tell em Dave sent you!

Still Teaching in Toms River Next Year

Tomorrow is my final day with full classes at the three Toms River high schools as Orchestra Director. As I pass the baton back to my predecessor who will be returning from maternity, I receive another baton from a retiring elementary teacher and will be teaching in two of the Toms River elementary schools next year, specifically North Dover and West Dover. I look forward to be giving lessons and running the bands for the Pirates and Blue Jays.

Don Pardo Hanging In There!

You get a gold watch for retiring after 30 years. Assuming at some point Don Pardo retires, what does he get? Today was his 59th anniversary of his hire by NBC Radio Network. He still carries his original ID card, noting his date of hire as June 15, 1944. Keep em flying, Pardo!

BTW, has anyone else beside me who tracks voiceover activity notice that Jackson Beck has pretty much disappeared from the scene? Up until a few years ago Jackson, who turns 91 in June, was still doing commercials and film roles by the score. I think the last thing he ever did was a commercial for Infusium hair care products. Maybe he retired at 90? Hope he's still well. Jackson Beck, of course, was in a ton of Paramount cartoons and was the narrator of the Superman radio show. (How does this tie into the item above? Jackson Beck once did a voice over for a SNL skit. What it was I can't remember. They didn't totally rely on Pardo in the show's formative years. Dan Ingram narrated a skit about a kid addicted to video games, and Bill Wendell was the narrator on the "Spud Beer" fake commercial.)

More "Trading Spaces" Books

Now available for purchase in the General Store are some new Trading Spaces items. Three soon-to-be released books and a calendar you can order now. (You can literally order them now by clicking on each which will take you to our partner, amazon.com.

Chicago Rolls Into Town

I saw Chicago last night. Not the movie, silly, the GROUP that's now on the road in its 37th consecutive year. Jimmy Pankow is still THE MAN.

Big Seeger News

Oh, and there is some exciting news coming soon to the Animation pages, specifically, the Hal Seeger pages... more to come on that.

Answer: The Violin

I was watching "Millionaire" and one of the questions yesterday was "The concertmaster of a symphony orchestra plays which instrument?" The idiot contestant had to use two lifelines, his 50/50 and his Phone-A-Friend (or, to make a pun that only those close to me will appreciate, perhaps his Phone-A-Freund?)

Happy 100th!

Bob Hope made it to 100. Next...

99.99999 years old!

At this writing, Bob Hope has one day and a little less than four hours, West Coast Time, to go to make it to 100.

Whatever you do, Bob, don't sneeze.

Buy Iraq Cards

Forget about the offers your e-mail spam is filled with. You want the
Iraq's Most Wanted Playing Cards, you gotta go through me. Only $6.99 through amazon.com and I get a little spiff on each deck you buy.

Bus Shop

The Bus Shop is now open. We offer Jim Lehrer's memoir "A Bus Of My Own", and the Iconografix series of bus history albums, everything from Yellow to Mack to Flxible to Prevost to MCI. Visit, and more importantly, buy!

Dave Mackey and Amazon Team Up To Bring You Stuff

Years ago the slogan was "I wanna be Like Mike." Now, you can be like Dave and shop like Dave, thanks to Dave's partnership with amazon.com. Your purchases will help defray the costs of this website. First up is the Cartoon Shop. There are only a handful of items available, but please visit. We will be adding more as events warrant, and hopefully something new from Warner Bros.?????????

We will also be featuring a Music Shop and a Bus Shop. Also, a General Store, for things I recommend that don't fit into one of the three main areas of the site; right now, we have a selection of "Trading Spaces" books and videos. One other thing: unless otherwise noted, all videos are in DVD format.

Take This Class Trip

I don't know if I will be updating the Music page this weekend, but I have a couple of dates this weekend. Tonight (Friday), I will be part of a hastily-thrown-together horn section that will be accompanying Class Trip (see Blog item below) at their appearance at the Hub, on Hooper Avenue, in Toms River. We start playing about 10:00 p.m. Come on out and say hi to Jesse, Mary, and all the rest of the Class Trip crew.

On Sunday, I will be appearing with the Holy Spirit Ringers of the Manahawkin United Methodist Church at their Handbell and Choir Concert. The church is on Stafford Avenue in Manahawkin, and a free will offering will be taken during the performance to help buy equipment and music for the ringers. I will be conducting one of the joint choir and handbell selections, "Let All The Church Rise Up With Praise", by Forest Green.

"Toon Heads" Tribute to Norm McCabe

This is more a reminder to myself than anything else. Cartoon Network's "Toon Heads" will be repeating their much-heralded one-hour tribute to the 1940s cartoons of Norm McCabe on Sunday, May 18 at 8:00 p.m. McCabe, who is now 92, is the sole surviving WB Cartoon director of the classic era.

Class Trip Band

I know two-fifths of this band. They're the guy and gal at the flanks of the top row. Jesse Frack and his wife Mary Buck have been colleagues of mine in a little band I play with once in a while called The Brass Tacks, and they have been playing out for ages. Check out their site then go and see them sometime!

Blanche The Singing Bartender

As regular readers of this blog doubtless know, my father-in-law died rather suddenly a few months ago. One of his great joys, and one which he has passed down to at least one of his children, was frequent visits to Atlantic City, and Al regarded the Tropicana Casino and Resort as one of his favorite haunts.

While in A.C. on other business, I visited the Tropicana for the first time in several years and was pleasantly surprised at some of the changes - and some things that have stayed blissfully the same.

When the Mackeys were regulars at the Tropicana, the management discovered a young vocalist who was singing while tending the bar at a local nightclub, so the wisdom was that this was a good thing and Blanche Travis Morro began her run as Atlantic City's Singing Bartender at a small bar built for her at the Tiffany Lounge in the Trop. She gained great fame doing this culminating in a national TV appearance on "The Rosie O'Donnell Show". About a year or so into her run, Blanche was taken out of the bar and onto a little stage. It wasn't the same. By the time we switched alliances to Caesar's, we had written off Blanche as a failed noble experiment. Apparently there was some sort of contretemps with a labor union over what she was doing, but that seems to have been settled in Blanche's favor.

Happily, my recent visit to the Trop found Blanche back where she belonged, behind the bar, serving beers and singing as she has for the past five years. You can visit Blanche at her official website, or better still, catch her at the Tropicana.

While some newer slots have been added, the Trop's video poker offerings remain as they have been, using mostly older-model IGT and Sigma machines (part of the place's charm is that they still hang on to these older machines - which still work quite well). The progressives remain where they have always been, but one bank of poker progressives seems to have disappeared for good. New areas have been added with a new hotel tower on the way.

Al would have loved it.