I realize we’re roughly mid-year between Passovers, but having spotted this amusing typo in a tech article on Apple News the other day I couldn’t rest until I was riffed out. Which did not take long, thankfully, so in a tie for the shortest of these lists ever you’re getting…
My Top Five Conjectures about Unknown Seders
5. Participants cover their heads with paper bags and tell bad jokes until gonged.
4. Children trying to find the afikoman need to figure out where dinner is being held first.
3. The Four Questions have no answers.
2. Cups are filled for Elijah, Miriam, and Nate Bargatze.
And My Number One Conjecture about Unknown Seders...
Mere weeks after rewatching 1941’s The Adventures of Captain Marvel as part
of the personal film festival I’d assembled for my 50th birthday, which I’ve neglected to dig into here for literal ages now, I was surprised and delighted to see its Billy Batson pop up on a 1974 episode of Shazam!
The CBS show was a staple of Saturday mornings during my childhood, as I noted in April of this year (and long before that). I’m hoping to write about the Republic serial at greater length the near future, but I first checked it out in high school — on a set of VHS tapes from West Coast Video — having read praise for it in Comics Buyer’s Guide; on both viewings, it lived up to its reputation as one of the finest of its kind. Even if Frank Coghlan Jr.’s Billy and Tom Tyler’s Captain Marvel don’t perfectly mirror their comic-book inspiration any more than do their Filmation counterparts — the serial gives us sparks and smoke in place of magic lightning, although it does have the ancient wizard himself rather than six Immortal Elders — we get some genuinely thrilling superheroics for the era.
The record that won its namesake 2001’s Grammy for Best New Artist, I Am Shelby Lynne wasn’t actually her first album but her sixth.
TV critic Alan Sepinwall the other day shared that he’s been let go by Rolling Stone.
I’d already been meaning to change the link on his name in my Friends & Favorites
list, at the bottom of the blog’s sidebar, from his author page at the RS website to the landing page for his What’s Alan Watching? newsletter on Ghost. Just a short while ago he announced that his free dispatch, usually out weekly on Fridays and until recently hosted by Substack, would soon be supplemented by a paid tier. Now his plan is for two paid tiers: One will carry the sort of material he’d been writing for HitFix, then Uproxx, and for the past 7+ years Rolling Stone; the other will have the content originally conceived for the premium add-on, with access to a Discord server for ongoing conversations. I’ve followed him since recaps of the show that inspired his logo, and obviously I recommend subscribing or there’d be no point to this post.
You can sign up for any level and still read 150-ish past editions of the free newsletter
at the boldfaced link above.
So there he was, Richard Dawson, in all of his ’70s glory — with a dark blazer and medallion over gray turtleneck — seated behind a large, ornate desk in a room lined with bookshelves. The camera pulled in on him as credits appeared on-screen announcing that I’d found my way to some kind of documentary series or infomercial on talk shows that he was hosting.
I came upon this sight while seeming to browse television channels in a dream.
Waking up, I got the sense that I hadn’t actually been flipping channels but rather watching the results of artificial intelligence tasked with creating such a program. It was still a dream, of course, no matter the rationale behind what was on that monitor in my unconscious; as I rapidly became conscious, though, I found myself intensely musing on similarities between dreams and imagery generated by omnivorous algorithm.
One fascinating thing about dreams to me is that they can draw on the entirety of what we’ve taken in, knowingly or subconsciously, to inform the plots and dress the virtual sets of the movies that play in our head as we sleep.
I dreamt once about my cats, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, adopted when they were just about fully grown at eight months old, delighting in what was basically a false memory of seeing them as tiny kittens. While I never knew them that young in reality, I’d been around cats in their infancy before, so all the data was there for my brain to extrapolate how they would have looked.
