Rant #2,605: Action

Today, after a long hiatus, it is time for a little self promotion/
 
Quite frankly, I am sick and tired about talking about things like Dr. Seuss, Mr. Potato Head, and Andrew Cuomo, even though the press and others seem to be obsessed with these topics.
 
They do need to be spoken about to a certain extent, which I have already done, and I am putting them all to bed for now.
 
I am not retiring them, I am just casting them off on the side, and if they need to be spoken about again, then I will do so.
 
But today I want to talk about something that is much lighter, something that has been near and dear to my heart for the past nearly 60 years.
 
I am a true Baby Boomer, and when I was eight years old and living in the new community called Rochdale Village, South Jamaica, Queens, New York, the possibilities were seemingly endless, and almost every day there was something new to do and explore.
 
And that included on television, which was a medium seemingly designed and created for my generation.
 
Baby Boomer were the real first TV generation, and I watched television each and every day.
 
I loved the sitcoms, of course, and I loved the cartoons and the Little Rascals and the Three Stooges and Abbot and Costello, and I was just getting into the sports on TV, but I also loved the new things that were popping up on the tube back then, the new concepts, the new shows that were premiering right before my eyes.
 
Back in those days, ABC was solidly the third network. CBS was king, and their shows were pretty standard fare, stuff that I liked but were geared pretty much for an older audience.
 
NBC was somewhere in the middle, kind of gravitating toward that older audience but with one foot in the new generation.
 
But ABC was kind of the doormat of the three, and since they could not go against “Gunsmoke” or “The Ed Sullivan Show” or even “The Tonight Show,” they decided that their direction and focus would be on younger viewers, and that meant at all times during the day.
 
So on ABC you had shows like “Dark Shadows” and “Bewitched,” which certainly catered to the Baby Boomer generation, shows that there was no way in heck that CBS or NBC would have ever shown at that time.
 
And you also had “American Bandstand,” a show that was created to showcase the new music, which was rock ‘n roll, to kids from New York to Los Angeles and everywhere in between.
 
Although Dick Clark was not the original host of the show, once he got on board, the show took off way beyond any expectation that ABC could have had for it.
 
Clark, known as “America’s oldest teenager,” branched the show out from its five-day-a-week afternoon outings into the evening on Saturday, and later, he moved the show from Philadelphia to Hollywood and it became a Saturday staple of the network for generations.
 
The show was so successful that it spawned a copycat show in many markets, including those hosted by Lloyd Thaxton and Clay Cole.
 
Anyway, the show was so successful that there were several spinoffs, and perhaps the most successful one was something called “Where the Action Is,” which ran on ABC during weekday afternoons from 1965 to 1967.

 
The black and white show had one theme: how young kids and rock ‘n roll blended together into a fun mix, and the program highlighted many of the top acts of the day, including the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Turtles, the Who, Tommy Roe, the Supremes and many others performing lip synced versions of their hits on the beach and in other vacation spots around the country.
 
It was done is such a free-form way that even though it was lip synced, that acts were having lots of fun singing and dancing on the beach or in a park or wherever, and the crowd that gathered to hear them was having lots of fun too.

 
The show was so popular that it created its own stable of stars. At first hosted by Steve Alaimo and Linda Scott, the new stars that got their foothold on the show included Keith Allison, Tina Mason, and of course, Paul Revere and the Raiders.

 
The Raiders were almost designed for television, with their Revolutionary War outfits and the free reign that they were seemingly given on the show to do anything and everything that came to mind.
 
And the ringmaster of the show—which was certainly the precursor to “The Monkees” series on NBC and later, MTV—was Dick Clark, naturally, who was on each episode to keep things in some type of order.
 
The show was as if Tiger Beat Magazine or 16 Magazine came alive, and kids rushed home from school to watch WTAI and “Dark Shadows” often back to back.

 
Anyway, when the show went off the air in 1967—and the Raiders were moved to another show format, the “Happening” shows that they did for the next few years each week—these shows, featuring the top acts of that tine period, pretty much faded into the either. To this day, none of these shows have ever been formally released on any type of video format.
 
They have turned up on numerous video bootlegs, but the quality is pretty bad, as witnessed by the photos I have put into this blog entry.
 
Supposedly, Clark was finally working on a deal to release these shows in some form when he passed away a few years ago, and thus, they still remain in something of an abyss right now.
 
But people remember the show, and I sure do, as it was really, along with “American Bandstand,” my introduction to the world of rock ‘n roll. Ed Sullivan was too—the Beatles, for sure, but also the Dave Clark Five and the Rolling Stones and so many other acts—but WTAI and Bandstand were my weekly doorways into this music.
 
I so fondly remember WTAI that I have set up my own Facebook site chronicling the show, offering it as a meeting place for all of us to talk about the show and reminisce about one thing or another.
 
The Facebook group is called “Where the Action is: Yesterday and Today,” and you can access it at https://www.facebook.com/groups/598790963991601/?modal=false&should_open_composer=false
 

I put up links to available videos—all bootlegs on YouTube—photos of the show, and the records that were featured on the show, and it is a fun site, no politics at all, it is nothing but fun.
 
Right now, I am trying to get together a project where a lot of the music on the show will be featured in a place where members can access it, and it has been fun digitizing a lot of music that I hadn’t listened to in ages for this project.
 
Anyway, if you remember the show, why not give the site a whirl. I don’t think that you will be disappointed at all.
 
The site is as I described it, nothing more or less, and if you are a Baby Boomer or want to find out what kids who are now in their 60s were listening to when we were youngsters, this is the place to be.
 
Heck, I believe that even Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head would enjoy this site, and you can bet the Governor Cuomo, the same age as I am, watched this show as a kid too.
 
Those aren’t endorsements, but it just gave me a few more lines of this blog entry to shill a little bit for a site that I am kind of proud of, with well more than 1,000 members.
 
Action! Action! Action!
 
Let’s Go Where the Action Is!
 
Try it, you’ll like it!

Rant #2,604: One Chain Don't Make No Prison

I am convinced that the world we live in needs people like me, who speak their mind and know right from wrong.
 
The world needs people like me who understand history, learns from history, and progresses because they understand history.
 
The world needs people like me, who reject the “cancel culture” that currently prevails in our country.
 
The world needs people like me, who understand who Dr. Seuss was, is and will always be.
 
Now the PC Police—who have kind of morphed into “cancel culture” over the past few years—have decided that certain books by Dr. Seuss will not be published anymore, because they contain what can be construed as racist references.
 
One of the books was first published in 1937, 84 years ago, or when our culture wasn’t so sensitive to everything on God’s green earth.
 
It contained a reference about a character of Asian origin, a character who was Chinese, and it used a kind of common Asian reference at the time to describe the character.
 
In fact, Seuss himself updated the character decades later to make the character less “offensive,” but that isn’t good enough … now we must just get rid of it because 87 years later, it does not fit the social norms of today.
 
Using that thinking, let’s get rid of books like “Huckleberry Finn,” let’s get rid of every book written by Jacqueline Susann, let’s get rid of every book ever written, including the Bible.
 
This thinking is just so ridiculous.
 
We are supposedly so progressive in 2021 that any reference offends us, but our children revel in the culture of today, with its almost mundane references to the “N-word” in music and other scatological references in music, TV and the movies.
 
That we can stand, but Dr, Seuss we can’t.
 
If you can explain this to me … well to you, I would say “Mr. Potato Head.”
 
On Facebook yesterday, somebody had the audacity—and I hope that this person was kidding—to say on my post about the kids’ toy that  “to call someone Mr. Potato Head is offensive.”
 
No one was calling anyone Mr. Potato Head. That is the name of the toy.
 
And I have no potato guilt for calling the toy its name.
 
The next thing we are going to see is that green people—whoever they may be—are going to get upset at Seuss for his Grinch character, or for “Green Eggs and Ham.”
 
The sad thing is that evidently, we are not learning from our past mistakes, because this is not the first time that “cancel culture” has reared its ugly head in our society.
 
It wasn’t called that back in the early 1970s, but it was present, and I knew something was afoot when I watched “The Little Rascals” and “The Three Stooges” on local TV, and I wasn’t seeing the full 15- or 20-minute features anymore.
 
“The Little Rascals” and “The here Stooges” were on its last breaths as a kids’ TV staples in 1970 and 1971. The rules were changing, and kids’ TV hosts could not promote certain products without being liable for any false claims made by those products, so local kids’ TV hosts were being weeded out.
 
In New York, we were the mecca of such hosts, and Officer Joe Bolton held court on Channel 11, WPIX, at that point showing the “Our Gang” and “Three Stooges” shorts.
 
Channel 11 always showed truncated versions of the shorts due to time constraints. There were also “Little Rascals” shorts, in particular, that were never shown because they were so overtly racially tinged that you simply could not show them on local TV, even in the 1960s and early 1970s when other stations were still showing “Amos and Andy” TV shows on a regular basis.
 
But now, in the swan song days of the kids’ show hosts on local TV, Officer Joe Bolton was showing not only truncated versions of the Rascals’ and Stooges’ shorts, but episodes that were so cut apart and edited—and censored—that they made no sense at all.
 
Scenes with an even mild racial tone were being removed, any violence was being cut, and any inferences of anything that would offend anyone were cut out.
 
I had become a teenager in 1970, and maybe the little kids watching didn’t know that what they were watching was clipped beyond recognition, but I did.
 
Thank goodness those shows had ran their course back then, because to show destroyed shorts—classics that were filmed many decades earlier—was truly a crime.
 
Happily, the Little Rascals and Three Stooges shorts never really left, morphing first to late night movie theater runs—where so many people were inebriated and stoned that it really didn’t matter what was up on the screen—and later to video, then DVD, and now streaming.
 
Heck, the Three Stooges are on MeTV every Saturday for two hours!
 
And you can see the full, un-cut versions of these shorts, and even those that were banned way back when.
 
And the same thing will happen to the Dr. Seuss books. Millions upon millions upon millions of these books are in circulation, and if certain books won’t be printed anymore, you will still be able to get them, and your children and their children and their children will be able to read them with glee.
 
So “cancel culture” really doesn’t totally work. The things they want to get rid of are still out there, and still loved by people who have enjoyed these things for generations and will continue to enjoy them for many generations in the future.

 
“Cancel culture” is simply a “modern” off-shoot of the situation in Nazi Germany, where books were burned, any art was confiscated, and people were robbed of their lives because of who they were.
 
I don’t think we want that here, but it seems that some people do.
 
Let’s reject—and cancel—“cancel culture” before it morphs into what it did in Germany 70 years ago.
 
And my current heroes are Dr. Seuss and Mr. Potato Head—let them lead the charge!

Rant #2,603: One Tin Soldier

Well, on the second day of March 2021, what should I write about?
 
I often ask myself that question when I sit down at my computer after eating breakfast each weekday.
 
I think what makes this blog fresh and so different from other opinionated sites is that about 75 percent of the time I have no idea what I am going to write about before I actually write about something.
 
Yesterday, I just had to write about the shenanigans surrounding Mr. Potato Head, so I knew exactly what I was going to write about as I sat down in front of the computer.
 
Today, it is a little different.
 
As I type this, I am still gong back and forth on things …
 
But I have finally settled on something, and a lot of you aren’t going to like what I have to say, but let me preface it by saying this:
 
I am not a fan of Governor Andrew Cuomo of New York, never have voted for him, and I have not cared for any of his supposedly progressive policies.
 
He has acted as the dictator of New York since the pandemic broke, and his handling of nursing homes during the early days of the pandemic was dreadful at best.
 
He leads a state that is losing residents at an alarming rate, and a lot of it has to do with the programs that he has passed in the state making actual citizens into second class citizens.
 
That being said, I don’t believe for one minute any of the malarkey being bandied about now about how he treated women in the workplace.
 
It’s like everybody is coming after the governor like vultures do on a dead carcass, and the way people are buying into this, well, I just cannot believe that we have become such a gullible society today, taking in very heartedly whatever pabulum we are being fed.
 
Cuomo is being rocked by the nursing home scandal, and he darn well should be. Thousands of people died because of his idiotic policies related to who should be admitted into nursing homes.
 
He had other avenues to use during this period, including a medical ship right in New York Harbor and the Javits Center, yet those went unused at the time, and he allowed people to go into these homes that spread the virus like wildfire.
 
Yet he continues to justify his actions, even when one of his closest aides admitted that the count of these people was under-reported.
 
That is what he should be taken to task about, not this other nonsense.
 
He is down right now, his brash bravado lessened by things swirling around him. Stupid New York voters put this guy into office not once, not twice, but three times, so you get who you vote for.
 
But this other nonsense … come on, open up your eyes.
 
When his opponents see an opening, they barge through as if the opening was as wide as the Grand Canyon, and they are doing that right now.
 
Out of the woodwork have come two women in particular—one, a 25 year old who was brought up in a generation that gets offended at just about anything, including Mr. Potato Head—and another who is running for office herself, and they have both accused him of improprieties in the workplace.

And now I read that another woman has come out of nowhere, and you just know that they are now lining up to get this guy.

 
Seems like we have the Donald Trump saga once again, where women were coming out of the woodwork accusing him of one thing or another, and their stories kind of faded into the ether, just like these three women’s stories will too.
 
Having been in the workplace, I know that funny things do happen there, and nobody is going to deny that.
 
Each workplace has its own personality, and I have worked in places where sexual topics were spoken about freely, by both men and women, and I have worked in offices where there was plenty of innuendo about whey one person jumped up through the hierarchy over others.
 
In fact, I have worked in two offices where it was pretty obvious that hiring was done strictly based on certain physical attributes that the person had, and those type of people who are hired for those jobs usually don’t last in their positions very long, and most of them didn’t.
 
In particular in smaller offices where people are working side by side, a lot is said between one employee and another, and also, you have to know who you are dealing with.
 
Some people, both men and women, don’t want to fraternize that much, but for others, they will tell you everything you need to know and then some.
 
The governor has admitted that he might have said some things that he thought was making his office a "cozier" place to work in, but he is of MY generation—he is my age—and stuff like that doesn’t play anymore with a generation that gets upset at the slightest move that they feel is off kilter in their ultra-sensitive minds, a culture that gets upset at the drop of a hat but embraces every curse word and every subject possible into their means of entertainment, including in their music, movies and TV shows.
 
But in the workplace, God forbid you step a little out of bounds to them—you really upset their world.
 
As for any physical touching of any of these women, I highly doubt it. It took the particular woman in question three years to tell the world about it, and if it upset her so much, why come out now?
 
Because the governor is ripe for the picking now, now that he is down and out with the nursing home scandal, and in this particular case, the woman is running for Manhattan borough president, and it gives her a higher profile among constituents who didn’t even know she existed before this canard came to light.
 
Things do happen in the workplace, and those incidents should be investigated to the fullest.
 
Cuomo made a really bad tactical error by appointing a retired judge who he was close with to look into this thing, but now, an independent investigation will be done, and if it does not exonerate him—as I feel it will—then yes, he should probably resign.
 
But his third term is coming to a close, and even if he is exonerated, you just know that the vultures will be coming after him until his Election Day.
 
There are victims, true victims of heinous behavior in the workplace, and there are gold diggers, who cry about things that either never happened or are quite exaggerated.
 
I think in the Cuomo situation, we have the latter situation at hand here, and these women should be ashamed of themselves, because it lessens the experiences of real victims of workplace harassment into nothingness.
 
Andrew Cuomo, like his father was, is brash, head strong, and quite aloof in his dealings with the populace.
 
A lot of people absolutely love him, and many rue the day he took office.
 
But to cut him down because of allegations that don’t hold water … that is not the way.
 
Get him on the nursing home fiasco, but the other stuff is now taking precedence, which it really shouldn’t.

Rant #2,602: One Potato, Two Potato

How was your weekend?
 
Mine was not that great.
 
We found out on Sunday that a few family members on my wife’s side of the family have the coronavirus—one probably getting it from the other—and that they are all suffering from it as we speak.
 
I am sure that they will all rebound from it, but it sends a clear message to us that this thing is far from over.
 
I wish all of them the best.
 
I know having the virus warps a lot of things that you take for granted—like your sense of taste and your sense of smell—but I did not know that it can also warp your brain …
 
That is my personal diagnosis, because what is happening in Rhode Island has to be as a result of such a brain warp, because there is no other explanation for it to be happening.
 
I am sure you have read that Hasbro, the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, game company, as decided to make the iconic Mr. Potato Head toy into a gender-neutral spud, and I can only think that their brains have been infected by this mysterious malady that we are battling now as the reason for this.
 
There simply is no other explanation.
 
Mr. Potato Head has been played by every generation of kid—white, black, yellow, brown—since the 1950s, first as simple attachments to an actual potato and then as a complete plastic potato and attachment toy.
 
Kids mixed and matched the attachments, had fun with it—I know that I did—and when our childhood attention spans were tapped to the max, the toy was put away for another time, just like every toy we had when we were growing up.
 
And when we played it, we put in the eyes, the mouths, the moustache, and all the other attachments to our liking, probably putting them in the wrong place at times just to see what it looked like, such as putting the ear where the nose should be.
 
It was funny, it was a toy, and that was the thought process of the two or three year olds or the four and five year olds who played with this toy.
 
Nowhere in its history was a penis attachment included in the toy, but now Hasbro has declared that the “Mr.” in Mr. Potato Head is no more.
 
“Culture has evolved,” said a company spokesman. “Kids want to represent their own experiences. The way the brand currently exists—with the ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’—is limiting when it comes to both gender identity and family structure.”
 
Yes, three year olds really know exactly what “gender identity and family structure” means.
 
Other comments from the company that I read had to do with the belief that now that the toy was gender neutral, kids could create their own same-sex situations, with a “Mr. and Mr.” Potato Head and a “Mrs. and Mrs.”—or is it “Ms. and Ms. Potato Head”—getting together.
 
Think of the possibilities!
 
I just think that kids of this age have no idea what same-sex unions are, and I think that by foisting this utter nonsense upon them, we are putting supposed adult values—the key word is supposed—onto our children, rather than allowing the to be children.
 
As a culture, we have not learned from previous attempts at stealing our kids’ childhoods away from them, and in doing so, we are creating a sort of “zombie culture” of kids who have absolutely no ability t think for themselves, pouters who want things only one way or they sulk.
 
There was such a backlash about this nonsense that Hasbro later came out with a clarification of its decision, which makes as much sense as the decision itself, which means it makes absolutely no sense.
 
The company announced that while it will be dropping the “Mr.” and
Mrs.” from its name, the plastic potatoes will now retain “distinctive gender identities.”
 
The company said, “While it was announced that the Potato Head brand name and logo are dropping the ‘Mr.,’ I yam [sic] proud to confirm that Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head aren’t going anywhere and remain Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head.”
 
Yuck yuck.
 
The greatest comedy writer in the world could not write this, as truth truly is stranger than fiction, that people actually believe that having a Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head is offensive.
 
But what is worse, such decisions are taking away and ruining our kids’ childhoods, the early, formative period of their lives when they are supposed to discover on their own how the world works.
 
The next thing we are gong to see is a Barbie that is in a transitional phase and before your kids’ very eyes, will morph into …
 
Ken.