Category Archives: Entertainment

September Song

A little Sarah Vaughan and Wynton Marsalis to start the month:

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Hollywood’s Best Actors For The Buck – Forbes.com

Interesting…

Earning $20 million upfront for a movie is so 2007. These days studios are squeezing every cent they can out of actors, and that means many stars only earn the big bucks after the studio gets back its money.

In these frugal times it’s useful to look at which actors earn studios the most for their money. Pay someone $10 million to star in your big summer blockbuster and what can you expect for your investment? If you hire Shia LaBeouf, expect a lot. For the second year in a row, he tops our list of Hollywood’s Best Actors for the Buck.

And:

Because women typically earn less than men in Hollywood, they make up a full half of our top 10 list. Anne Hathaway is the highest-ranking woman in the No. 2 spot. For every dollar she earns studios earn $64 off of her films.

More:  via Hollywood’s Best Actors For The Buck – Forbes.com.

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Keck’s Exclusives: Bryan Batt Back to Mad Men?

This is great news!  Sal, the gay character on “Mad Men” appears to be coming back to the show.   I’ve missed him and I know many other fans have also…

By now I’ve learned that getting the super secretive Mad Men cast to confirm anything is impossible. Even so, I’m feeling fairly confidant that before long we’ll be seeing Bryan Batt back in ’60s-era NYC as artistic director Salvatore Romano on the Emmy-winning AMC drama. Why am I feeling so positive? Well, in the past, every time I’d run in to Bryan and ask for an update on his status, he’d tell me quite sullenly that he’s heard nada from anyone. Basically, he was getting on with his life. But at the Emmy Awards, Bryan was back with his cast and just seemed tickled — as if he knew something we didn’t.

“A few months ago I got a call from the god of Mad Men [series creator Matthew Weiner],” Bryan told me. So what did Weiner say? “He told me Sal is not dead.” That’s all Bryan would say on the subject (which makes it sound as if the much-missed actor has been brought back under the cone of silence).

via Keck’s Exclusives: Bryan Batt Back to Mad Men?.

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What Firemen Do When No One Is Watching

I’ve already shared this on Facebook, but it’s so popular and I liked it so much, I wanted to repost it on the blog.

By the way, you can now share my Blogs on Facebook and in other ways by using the button at the bottom of each post.

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Andy Griffith: “A Face in the Crowd”

Seems like a good day to repost this….

This is one of my favorite films.  It’s also amazingly timely now, 53 years after it was made.  It could almost be called “The Glenn Beck Story.”

If you only think of Andy Griffith as Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, you really should see this movie.  He is amazing.  I can’t believe he didn’t get an Oscar nomination for this performance.  It also features a stellar performance by Patricia Neal, at her peak, and introduces Lee Remick in her first film.

Here is the original trailer:

There is also a great article in “Vanity Fair” about this film.  Here is the link:

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2007/03/wolcott200703

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Filed under Entertainment, Politics, Religion, Social Commentary, Television, The Economy

The Golden Girls 25th Anniversary Collection Promises a Sickening Display of Humanity’s Bitter End | ChristWire

Another great, funny, tongue in cheek article from one of my favorite websites.  Here is an excerpt and a link to the full article:

“One of the great ideas of Western civilization,” philosopher Ross Douthat recently wrote, “is the celebration of lifelong heterosexual monogamy as a unique and indispensable estate.” Tragically, that celebration is winding down as more and more Americans sneak off to the afterparty of carnal depravity. Lured into the dark, humid spaces of homosexual relativism by activist judges and Hollywood stars, these people are now embarking on the complete reëngineering of society’s basic tenets of marriage and family. It is the culmination of a decades-long campaign that can be traced back, in part, to the messages broadcast in the 1980s by television programs such as The Golden Girls.

There was something subversively tawdry about the programming from that era. Whether it was Designing Women or Spenser for Hire, Hotel or Murphy Brown, each sketched out a flamboyant worldview in pastel hues that was specifically targeted at the confused and awkward. But there was one show in particular that recklessly upped the ante in this high stakes poker game of modern morality. What The Golden Girls postulated for America was nothing less than a neo-socialist landscape populated by same-sex “family” units composed of jobless predators whose lives revolved around food, clothes and brawny men. The women of this series embodied the antithesis of traditional marriage, publicly decrying that institution while reveling in divorce and sex. They spawned an endless cycle of Sexy and the City and Housewives of New Jersey types of shows and invented the idea of “cougars,” i.e. older women like Demi Moore who wear young mates on their lapels like fancy diamond brooches.

And

This Golden Girls ideal of a same-sex household got passed along like a venereal disease until it landed in the lap of the nascent “gay rights” movement. Unsurprisingly, young homosexuals fell in love with this booze- and fornication-laden ideology. For them, Betty White became the forgiving mother they never had, Dorothy Zbornak the father whose expectations they could fulfill. Maybe Blanche was the bartender in their fantasy lives while Sophia sat on the next stool over, offering up pointless stories to pass the time like some gassy drunk. In the ensuing years, gays spread their vicious seeds far and wide and today we are seeing the musky fruits drop from those aging trees. Yes, those fruits are falling all over in the form of legislative and judicial maneuvers to redefine marriage, from Judge Vaughn Walker’s denial of Proposition 8 in California to the legalization of same-sex nuptials in Catholic Spain. In essence, this trend of “homosexual” marriage is nothing less than a cruel testament to the power of that loathsome foursome of libidinal Floridians.

via The Golden Girls 25th Anniversary Collection Promises a Sickening Display of Humanity’s Bitter End | ChristWire.

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Eileen Farrell

I discovered Eileen Farrell when I took a chance on a CD at Best Buy about 20 years ago.  I had never heard of her, but she was one of my great discoveries.  Steve and I both have loved her for years.

Eileen was an Opera Singer.  She was a Diva who sang at the Met, but  left it all to marry a Cop and move to Brooklyn.  She was later a college professor in Maine, but then she sang standards in her later years.

She’s not well known today, but she’s one of my favorites…

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New Robbie Williams Video

Robbie’s c0me a long way with this new “Brokeback Mountain” inspired music video  for his new single.  I guess now that he’s married-to a woman-he’s feeling  braver.

Still, I think it’s pretty good…

By the way, it’s a duet with his former “Take That” Boy Band member Gary Barlow.

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It’s Friday. How about “Talking About A Revolution”?

I heard this driving into work today and it seemed like a good way to start- and end- a Friday.

A little Tracy Chapman.  I can’t believe this song is 22 years old.

And we haven’t had the Revolution yet!

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Pretty Women/ The Ladies Who Lunch

Streisand at her best… a slight connection to my latest Blog Post on m other blog;  MySouthernGothicLife.com

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