1851: Unlucky Number For NJT

NJ Transit bus 1851 (a 1994 Flxible) was the site of a fatal shooting yesterday when it was running the 62 route in Newark. Yet, that number seemed oddly familiar.

I checked my archives and remembered that on May 31, 2004, Academy Lines bus 1851 was involved in a serious accident on the Garden State Parkway. 43 passengers were injured in the crash involving a 1999 MCI 102DL3 coach. Academy still runs other buses in this series, notable for their plain-white appearance.

In case you've wondered where our bus pages are, we are not in any great hurry to bring the NJT info back up, since it is now slightly outdated... at least the fleet photos may be back soon. We will definitely be bringing back the Public Service bus pages as well.

Site Update

The Animation pages, a database of cartoon credits from a number of studios, including a complete filmography of Hal Seeger Productions, has now been restored to this site. Enjoy!

A Modest Proposal

GSN, The Network For Games, routinely features an hour of black-and-white programming from old kinescopes in its 3 a.m. timeslot. Programming is culled from the Mark Goodson-Bill Todman archives, featuring shows like "Password", "What's My Line", "To Tell The Truth", and "Beat The Clock" among others.

This one is a no-brainer for GSN. Apparently, the network can get pretty darn cheap the syndicated library of "You Bet Your Life" which was packaged in 1961 under the title "The Best Of Groucho" for local syndication by NBC Films. When the films were repackaged, editors very carefully removed all references to NBC (except for the NBC "snake" in the show's closing logo) and the show's sponsors which included DeSoto-Plymouth Dealers, Ford and Toni Home Permanent, which explains grainy closeups of Groucho in some scenes. New open and close bumpers were edited in.

The films have been relatively unseen in recent years, with the exception of a package of original cuts of the show (with all original bumpers, commercials and logos kept in) that have aired sporadically on PBS stations. The show had a surge of interest in the mid-1970's (during a nostalgia craze which included a major revival of Marx Brothers movies, including the suppressed "Animal Crackers"), when the syndicated films began showing up in late-night time slots on local stations and got huge ratings against 11 p.m. network-affiliate newscasts.

Of course, the game (rudimentary as it was) took a backseat to the interviews of the contestants conducted by Groucho Marx, which were largely concocted by a staff of writers who projected Groucho's seemingly adlib quips on large projection screens out of site. More material was filmed than needed (and yes, I said filmed - the show was actually shot on film and then edited into a half-hour unit, with some of the rest of the material adapted for an NBC Radio version) to ensure the best material would get on the air.

The result? Classic television that seemed unpredictable, but was very tightly controlled by producer John Guedel, directors Bernie Smith and Bob Dwan, and writers Hy Freedman and Howard Harris. George Fenneman was the straight man/announcer, and at various times the band was led by Jack Meakin and Jerry Fielding.

All of which is pretty attractive to GSN's 3 a.m. audience of insomniacs. How about it, GSN? Pay the freight and get Groucho back on TV.

Seventy-Six Trombones.... Minus Seventy-Five

BULLETIN: Tonight's (February 24) performance of "The Music Man" has been cancelled due to the impending snowstorm. For more information visit the Our Gang website.

Right now I'm in rehearsals for a Thursday opening of "The Music Man", which is being mounted by the Adult Division of the Our Gang Players in Barnegat, NJ. (Here's some more information from the Times Beacon.)

The show, of course, is the brainchild of Meredith Willson (shown here on a first-day cover of his 1999 stamp), who wrote book, music and lyrics and collaborated with Franklin Lacey on story. Willson again hit paydirt in the 1960's with "The Unsinkable Molly Brown", but also did a number of other things, including sit for a few years as a panelist on the ABC panel show "The Name's The Same".

I will be playing trombone for this show. I love doing pit work; I just wish I had more opportunities to do so close to home. This is a smallish pit, but we have some good players and they've all made "the new guy" feel at home. Steve Strouse is our musical director, a wonderfully talented individual, and our brass section also features trumpeter Ray Bohn, who also plays a little bass. Students from Pinelands High School and Southern Regional High School will round out our pit.

I urge you to come out and see this show and support local theatre. However, if you want to see how others have treated this golden material, I point you to a couple of DVD's you can scarf from Amazon by clicking on the links: the 1962 big-screen version with Robert Preston as Professor Harold Hill and Shirley Jones as Marian the Librarian (and Ron Howard, back when he had hair), or the more recent ABC TV-movie with Matthew Broderick as Hill and uber-adorable Kristen Chenoweth as Marian.

$524 vs. $38

The official notebook of davemackey.com for several years has been my trusty Compaq Presario 700 series. Apparently, a common problem of this computer is cracks developing in the lid near the hinge mounts. Just before Christmas, the unit finally gave and the lid snapped in two at one of the hinges. I took the unit to an authorized Compaq service facility, where the quote to fix came back to a nifty total of $524 - which would entail replacing the entire lid, including the LCD screen. That's almost the cost of a new notebook, and I wasn't prepared to pay that cost.

Fortunately, I decided to scour around eBay for the lid bezel, and I found one at a reasonable price - $30. I gleefully clicked the Buy It Now button and the part arrived a few days ago. It only took a few minutes to get the old lid off and the new lid on; the only thing was I didn't have a Torx bit small enough (I think it's a T7) so I had to use a small jeweler's screwdriver. Plus shipping, the whole repair job cost me $38.

If there's one thing I learned from my father, who was really handy with tools and knew his way around a car forward and backwards, it was that if you have just a little know-how, you can save yourself big bucks if you do little fixes yourself. Leave the big jobs to the experts, but do what you can yourself. My little notebook is doing fine and I'm using it right now to post this, in fact.

Hosting Update

We are back live on davemackey.com thanks to a new hosting order just placed with Globat... They are giving us five times the storage space and two and a half times the bandwidth at a much reduced price than that Brand X webhosting company we used to use offered us.

DAVEMACKEY.COM GOING ON VACATION FOR A WHILE

Due to bandwidth issues with our soon-to-be-former service provider (to which I just paid a hefty fee for account renewal), davemackey.com is going to be going away for a little while. This includes all features hosted on this site, including Trading Post.

We cannot afford to pay the freight for dedicated hosting.

We are looking into other agreements with other service providers. If you communicate with us via e-mail, I will be contacting you personally with other information. In the meantime, you may enjoy reading davemackey.blogspot.com, if you desperately need that daily dose o' Dave. Hopefully I can be a little more blogospheric here.

Thank you,
Dave Mackey

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Due to an increased volume of unwanted e-mail, the info@davemackey.com emailbox HAS BEEN DISABLED. Anyone that legitimately corresponds on this address will be diverted to a new, unpublished address. For general inquiries, please see below.

Also, anyone wishing to crack this security please note:

• I do not have a mortgage on my home
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In short, please leave me alone and go spam somebody else. Thank you.

Animation Updates Elsewhere On The Web

Scrappyland, the latest website offering of my longtime friend Harry McCracken (who by day is editor-in-chief of PC World and brother of novelist Elizabeth McCracken), is now open for business. The site celebrates the now-unfortunately-obscure character of Columbia cartoons in the 1930's, whose exploits were delinated by such cartoon talents as Dick Huemer, Art Davis, Sid Marcus, Ben Harrison and Manny Gould.

Also, we note the change in url for Charles Brubaker's DePatie-Freleng Website, which is in the process of being redesigned and expanded. There is some overlap in what I do and what he does, but he does it so much better. The filmography on both our sites is now dangerously close to complete, as regards theatrical cartoons. We are missing the credits from five "Blue Racer" cartoons. We both have gotten the credits for all of the "Dogfather" cartoons and I've now got them up on my 1970's DFE list.

Confession: if there's one thing I'd like to see again from DFE's archives, it would have to be the wonderfully obscure "The Oddball Couple", an authorized refry of Neil Simon's "Odd Couple" concept featuring a neat cat (Frank Nelson) and a sloppy dog (Paul Winchell), which ran for a couple of seasons on ABC beginning in the fall of 1975. The series has been seldom seen since its brief network run; it was never syndicated. Someone's got it somewhere. But where?

One Singular Sensation, One More Time

Mark Evanier weighs in on the impending return of "A Chorus Line" to Broadway. Sure, it's a little early to get excited about - the revival doesn't officially open until September of 2006 - but it is definitely something to get excited about when one of Broadway's landmark shows returns.

Years ago, I was involved in a production of "A Chorus Line" as part of one of the best pits I ever had the pleasure of playing in. Most of the brass section was imported from the Brass Tacks Orchestra lineup at the time. The Broadway return of the show will most likely put an embargo on local community productions, so hopefully I'll get the chance to play this show once again. (If this production runs as long as the original does, I will be in my sixties once it hits the community boards again. Yikes.)

Happy 35th Birthday To...

I want to wish a happy 35th birthday today to two institutions I'm happy to have had at least some association with over the years.

Long before being the fictitious "sideways" school in the books of Louis Sachar, I was one of the first students at the Wayside School in New Jersey when it opened its doors on January 5, 1970. It was a wonderfully modern school plant that's still in existence today and hopefully they did something nice to mark the date. (Hopefully not opening the time capsule buried in the cornerstone and reading the embarrassingly bad poetry inside.)

While we were getting used to our new school, our moms at home (except maybe for my mother, who wouldn't budge from CBS soaps for anything) got their first glimpse of Pine Valley, as ABC premiered a new soap opera entitled "All My Children." The show nominally featured Ruth Warrick, who had been featured in films such as "Citizen Kane", as the matriarch of a family of interesting characters. (Note: Ruth Warrick made her final AMC appearance on the anniversary show; she died on January 15.) Buried somewhere in the melange of people populating any soap was a true daytime original - the vixenish, scheming, and eventually much-married Erica Kane, played to the hilt by Susan Lucci. AMC continues today and Lucci is still there, lovely as ever after 35 years. For a brief time, I was an active AMC viewer and participant on the Usenet discussion groups devoted to the show, and for a time maintained the show's cast listing, tracking the show's regular and semi-regular cast. (On at least three occasions, I noted an actor named Patrick Page in the cast - not knowing that eventually he would marry our beloved Paige Davis in later years.)

So happy birthday to both the Wayside School and AMC!

Pat Sajak's Head Is Out Of Control!

Is it just me, or does Pat Sajak's forehead get bigger with each passing year? When he started on "Wheel Of Fortune" in 1981, it was a manageable size. Now his cranium is just plain out of control. I think "Wheel" has been renewed through the 2010-2011 season, and by that time they'll have to strap that sucker down to keep it from exploding in the middle of the Mystery Round.

Just a note to all those TV and radio stations out there....

The proper website address for relief donations for the Asian tsunami disaster is

www.redcross.org

NOT your local station's web site. This is no time to use this tragedy to appease your advertisers in the form of hits to your website. Thank you.

Hal Seeger's Place In Warner Bros. Cartoon History

You're looking at it, folks. It's the main title sequence from "The Porky Pig Show", the 1964 ABC-TV series featuring old Porky toons and an absolutely mind-boggling title sequence by that master of cartoon lunacy, Hal Seeger (?). Read why on our new Porky Pig Show page.

Goodbye, Public Service

The price of progress: energy company Exelon, which just announced plans to purchase PSEG (the holding company which owns Public Service Electric and Gas), says the company will assume the name of its corporate parent, laying to rest a proud name in New Jersey energy and transportation circles for the last century.

We do our part in keeping the Public Service alive here.

We Don't Go Down Often...

...but when we do, it's a doozy. Our hard drive on our server at Webmasters failed, so a new one is being installed and backup is being prepared. If you can see this message, then we're back up. (The reason this notification is so late is because of a firewall issue.)

Poker Is The New Wrestling

I was watching an episode of the syndicated "Ultimate Poker Challenge", which airs very high channel numbers in a lot of markets, and I came to the above conclusion today.

Robair, who was in the room with me, noted, "All you gotta do is give Vince McMahon a deck of marked cards and let his wrestlers have at it."

Back to the above observation: the plethora of televised poker has reached a point where it is as ubiquitous as pro wrestling was in the days of the WCW/WWF (or, as it was originally called, WWWF) rivalry. Now, sadly, WCW is no more, and WWE (as it's now called) has the market pretty much to itself.

Now, as for poker, you've got the aforementioned syndicated show, Travel's "World Poker Tour", Bravo's "Celebrity Poker Showdown", the new "Poker Royale" premiering tomorrow night on GSN, the endless ESPN rebroadcasts of "World Series Of Poker", and Fox Sports has "Championship Poker at the Plaza" and a show currently not on its schedule, the British import "Late Night Poker". NBC is even planning on televising poker sometime this winter (NBC, of course, owns Bravo, so they know how well "CPS" has done for them). So there's gotta be a shakeout real soon.

But do all these shows, now, feel they have to tell us how to play No Limit Texas Hold 'Em every time out? Anyone who's seen enough of it has probably picked up the rules. It's like baseball - you're not told the basics of how the game is played every time it's broadcast. So, to modify a trademark phrase of a certain tournament director - "SHUT UP AND DEAL!" (I'd also like to see a little more balance as far as keeping younger viewers away from the card tables until they're of age, not to mention messages deterring compulsive/problem gamblers to get help.)

UPDATE: GSN does indeed carry advisories on "Poker Royale" advising against compulsive gambling and promotes the 1-800-GAMBLER phone number, for those who need help with that sort of thing. To my knowledge, it's the only televised poker extravaganza that does so.

The Answer Is...."Offer to do his taxes free for life"

How does America's leading tax preparation company get publicity out of Ken Jennings' loss?

One Last Question For Ken Jennings

Who's doing your taxes this year, pal?

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