kanna175 will understand that one, even if no one else does. :)

Today, let's take a trip back to the '60's and look at five of my favorite Saturday morning cartoons:

• The New Adventures of Superman--Yes, the animation was laughably crappy. Yes, the plots were incredibly trite. I was six years old and I didn't care. I loved the incidental music, and most of all I lived to hear Bud Collyer's voice drop ten octaves as he'd say: "This is a job...FOR SUPERMAN!"
  
  
• The Mighty Heroes--Another one I have very fond memories of, particularly because of the sequence where the heroes switched to their super identities. When you get down to it, only two of the Heroes were of any real use, but they were fun. I don't think it'd fly today...the connotations of "Diaper Man" in today's world are just a bit toooooo kinky to contemplate for very long.
  
  
• Johnny Quest--Duhhhhhhhhh. And my favorite episode was...all together now..."THE INVISIBLE MONSTER THAT ATE EVERY LIGHT BULB IN THE WORLD!" Needless to say, I do have a great copy of the Freakazoid parody "Toby Danger" as well as their appearances on Harvey Birdman.
  
  
• The Herculoids--I'm beginning to think I had a Hanna-Barbera fetish back then. Looking at these wiki entries, I'm amazed that I never realized I was hearing the same voices on all these shows. Not that I really cared about the human characters. Gimmie the flying dragon or the triceratops that shot energy rocks from its snout!
  
  
• Spaaaaaaace Ghooooost!--But of course. Cool ship, cool outfit, funky power bands--what's not to love (besides the monkey and those stupid kids?) I'm kind of mixed on the Cartoon Network show...on the one hand, it's funny as hell and I get a kick out of it, but I also feel like it's taking a dump on my childhood when I'd wrap a dishtowel around my neck and "battle" my friends, screaming "I can't...reach...my POWER BANDS!"
  

And the five song list for this week:

• "I Want To Be Your Girlfriend"--Mary Chapin Carpenter, "Place in the World"
  
• "Changing Channels"--Jimmy Buffett, "Off to See The Lizard"
  
• "Goodtime Charlie's Got the Blues"--Danny O'Keefe,"O'Keefe"
  
• "Scenes from an Italian Restaurant"--Billy Joel, "The Stranger"
  
• "Hasten Down the Wind"--Linda Ronstadt, "Hasten Down the Wind"
  

Tags: five for friday

In an attempt to be mildly interesting, I thought I'd try this: every Friday I'll attempt to come up with a random "things I (blank)" and come up with five items that meet the criteria. If nothing else, it'll make me think.

Five books I keep going back to reread:

1. Good Omens, by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman. I think I've lost count on this one. It's one of those rare beauties that you can pick up, choose a page at random and immediately get lost in it no matter how many times you read it. The Redhead and I still firmly believe that if a movie should come to pass, Patrick Stewart is the quintessential Shadwell. Just imagine that voice bellowing "Hoor o' Babylon!"
   
2. Texas Rhapsody, by Billy Porterfield. My parents bought this book around 1980, and when my father died it mysteriously made its way to St. Louis and now Omaha. Porterfield was/is a reporter, and he has an incredible gift to talk about the various characters he has encountered over the years and make them irresistibly interesting. And his pieces about his parents and his own life are so intensely intimate it almost hurts.
   
3. Blanda: Alive and Kicking, by Wells Twombly. It's a biography of legendary George Blanda, the oldest man ever to play the game, but it's Twombly's narrative that gets me every time. I suspect a great deal of the irreverence that pops out of my own prose came from this book.
   
4. The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I suspect most people who know me would have expected Farhrenheit 451 instead of this one, but I think Chronicles, while admittedly being a patchwork of short stories, is the better work. It's a tapestry of tales over time and I have always loved how the pieces all fit into the whole.
   
5. Hype and Glory by William Goldman. I love Goldman's books; they're incredible rich in detail, both in the personal and the industrial sense. This book, ostensibly about the year he was a judge for both the Miss America Pageant and the Cannes Film Festival, is the best of his work.
   

And just for fun, five songs I've been listening to this week:

• "Quittin' Time" by Mary Chapin Carpenter, off "Party Girl And Other Favorites"
  
• "Romeo's Garage" by Peter Mayer, off "Romeo's Garage"
  
• "Across the River" by Bruce Hornsby, off "Night on the Town"
  
• The blasted Ultraman Mebius opening theme, which refuses to leave my brain
  
• "Overkill" by Colin Hay (acoustic)
  

Tags: five for friday