I’m an atheist but I have these:
Elvis
Grateful Dead (with art from their 1971 album)
Pee Tape (for the Trump pee tape which unfortunately doesn’t appear to exist
I have three prayer candles
Category: Uncategorized
The Levy’s rye bread ads
Note: I am not related to the people who founded this business
This was a famous ad campaign in the 1960s. The first tweet links to an outstanding article.
Levy’s ad campaign: “You don’t have to be Jewish” (1961–70s)
From Howard Zieff, later a film director, on IMDB:
On photographing in 1967 for the “You don’t have to be Jewish to love Levy’s” ad campaign: We wanted normal-looking people, not blond, perfectly proportioned models. I saw the Indian on the street; he was an engineer for the New York Central. The Chinese guy worked in a restaurant near my Midtown Manhattan office. And the kid we found in Harlem. They all had great faces, interesting faces, expressive faces.
Great Twitter thread on the Squarespace Super Bowl commercial
The ad was starred Zendaya and included Andre 3000. It was directed by Edgar Wright. This thread has a great view from someone who worked on it.
Boudu Saved from Drowning/Down and Out in Beverly Hills
Boudu Saved from Drowning is an excellent 1932 French film by Jean Renoir based on a novel of the same name. The novel was also the source for Paul Mazursky’s 1986 film Down and Out in Beverly Hills. They’re both about a middle-class family’s efforts to reform a down-and-out guy. I recommend both of these satires.
I remember Bert Is Evil
Bert Is Evil was a parody website that showed Sesame Street’s Bert in fake photos with bad people like Saddam Hussein. It was taken down after a pro-Osama Bin Laden rally used a picture of Bin Laden and Bert.
Toys from my childhood
I was born in 1953. We didn’t have video games. We had physical toys and playing cards. We glued cars together from kits. Here are some of the toys:
Train set
The History Channel ran a series called The Toys That Built America.
My generation was the first exposed to and motivated by toy ads on TV.
Great New Yorker cartoon on Marjorie Taylor Greene
She used “gazpacho” when she meant “Gestapo”. She shouldn’t have used that either. She’s terrible.
The garage at the building I worked at is now a morgue!
This is unreal. The Metro West Building at 300 N. Greene St. near downtown Baltimore was opened in late 1980 and closed in early 2014. I worked there for all but about six months of the time it was open. Originally, there were about 5,200 employees but there were only about 1,200-1,400 by the time it was emptied. The clerical work done there had mostly been replaced by electronic processes. It’s a huge building that takes up two city blocks.
The common perception was that the federal government would sell the building to the University of Maryland which has professional schools and a large hospital nearby. I was surprised when it was sold to a private company. As far as I know, only the indoor garage and parking lot have ever been used before this. The article linked to at the top says the garage has room for 452 vehicles.
GSA on the sale of the building
With ‘plenty of space,’ Caves Valley considers plans for Metro West
Developer plans large garage at Metro West site
This new (2/17) article doesn’t even mention the building!
The Window (1949)
The Window is a recent Warner Archive Blu-ray release. As usual for the Archive, the video quality is great. The film is a fine film noir about a boy who tells lies but can’t convince his parents that he really saw a murder. I couldn’t find a trailer online.
Covers: Act Naturally
“Act Naturally” is a 1963 Buck Owens record that was the last Beatles cover (1965) not counting the fragment of “Maggie May” on Let It Be. Ringo was the lead singer of the Beatles version and later recorded a duet with Owens. I saw Ringo perform this on TV today in a Soundstage rebroadcast – see the clip below
Sad! 