Like he's driving home from-a work on the freezaway

Watched a bit of ABC's coverage of the Indy 500 on the weekend. It's somehow strangely reassuring to know there isn't a single ABC broadcast that won't get converted at some point into a commercial for Disney World.

More still alive

On my list in the last post, I forgot to include Arnold Stang (Top Cat), who is still with us. Any others y'all can add?

EDIT: I wrote this post on the 25th, and was unable to post it then for reasons that continue to mystify the experts.

Still alive

No real explanation to offer for my, well, unexplained absence. It was just a busy week at work. Now for real important stuff -- like the deaths of four veteran cartoon voice actors in a week: Frank Gorshin (a lot of more recent stuff, plus he was the Riddler on "Batman"); Henry Corden (the second Fred Flintstone), Howard Morris (Mr. Peebles, Jughead, and he was on "Your Show of Shows" and "The Andy Griffith Show"), and Thurl Ravenscroft (Tony the Tiger, "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch" singer). Basically, from the field of voice actors from that now long-ago era, we're left with...

• June Foray (Granny, Rocket J. Squirrel, various witches)
• John Stephenson (Mr. Slate)
• Stan Freberg (Junyer Bear, the Three Little Bops)
• Dick Beals (little boy voices)
• Paul Winchell (Gargamel, Dick Dastardly, Tigger)
• John Fiedler (Piglet and a lot of on-camera stuff in some well-known pictures)

Also, as far as I know, all Betty Rubbles after Bea Benaderet are still with us. Interesting to note that according to IMDB, Betty #2, Gerry Johnson, has not acted since the 1966 Flintstones movie.

Cool!

My world seems a little more important today: Louis Riel is the featured article at Wikipedia today, and, well, I'm a regular motorist on the Louis Riel Trail.

Help

I'm looking for the old A&W tuba jingle. You know the one. Anyone have it, give me a shout. The fate of the nation rests on it.

Blogger woes

Yup, having trouble publishing again. Things seem to be all right at the moment.

By the way, an update on the Radio Shack story, it seems the real Radio Shack is coming back into Canada, with plans for 30 Toronto-area stores by year's end. They're also trying to recruit associate-dealers of the Circuit-City owned Radio Shack.

Long, slow goodbye

For a cancelled show, CNN's "Crossfire" is sure managing to remain on my TV screen. Every day at 4:30 ET, there it is. This in spite of numerous articles by media critics referring to president Jonathan Klein's "cancellation" of the show. Yes, Tucker Carlson departed, and yes, Klein made disparaging remarks about the show. But did he actually cancel it? Here's an AP article that refers to the show now just airing as a short segment during other programming. Patently false, and AP oughta issue a retraction. Well, this article in the George Washington University paper seems to clear things up - it's cancelled, just not yet. Still seems like a lot of sloppy journalism, referring to the show in the past tense when it still airs daily.