These reunion things aren’t always that great, but this is actually well done, because the actors slip easily into their past roles and the writing is clever and has a lot of references to the show for fans.
Random Links: Labor Day Weekend Edition
- AllRecipes has a ton of Labor Day recipes to try, from old-fashioned potato salad to fried chicken and even ice cream sandwiches.
- Here’s a really handy guide to all of the fall TV season and series premieres.
- Nobody understands The New Yorker’s Gene Wilder cartoon.
- Some people don’t think handwriting is important anymore (but some people do).
- What killed the jingle?
John McLaughlin: 1927-2016
John McLaughlin, longtime host of The McLaughlin Group, passed away earlier today at the age of 89. He was on every single episode of the show for 34 years until last weekend, when he was too sick from cancer to appear (though he did do one last voiceover).
Here are two very funny sketches from Saturday Night Live that spoofed the show:
John Oliver on the future of newspapers
This is great.
Monday Random Links
- Interesting essay at The Los Angeles Review of Books about what Star Trek Beyond means for the future of both the movie franchise and the new TV show coming next year, Star Trek: Discovery.
- Great piece by Gael Fashingbauer Cooper on how computers ruined her handwriting.
- I just recently heard about Extra Crispy, a new site devoted to all things breakfast, from the people at Time, Inc.
- John Dickerson is a fine journalist and Face the Nation host (and author of a terrific new book on political history, Whistlestop), but I’d love to see him put out a book of essays. Here’s his latest, on picking up his daughter from camp.
- Do you really need to shower?
- There’s a new short up at Rifftrax, Campbell’s Soup: The Magic Shelf, with Bridget Nelson and Mary Jo Pehl.
- Recipe Girl promises you can make these chocolate cookies in 7 minutes.
J.G. Ballard on social media and the web
Writer J.G. Ballard wrote this in 1977:
All this, of course, will be mere electronic wallpaper, the background to the main programme in which each of us will be both star and supporting player. Every one of our actions during the day, across the entire spectrum of domestic life, will be instantly recorded on video-tape. In the evening we will sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters, and then stitch these together into a heightened re-enactment of the day. Regardless of our place in the family pecking order, each of us within the privacy of our own rooms will be the star in a continually unfolding domestic saga, with parents, husbands, wives and children demoted to an appropriate supporting role.
And in an interview in 1987, he said this:
Every home will be transformed into its own TV studio. We’ll all be simultaneously actor, director and screenwriter in our own soap opera. People will start screening themselves. They will become their own TV programmes.
[via Open Culture]
Friday Random Links
- Alvin Toffler, author of the classic ’70s book Future Shock, has passed away.
- The Juno spacecraft is seeing some interesting things near Jupiter.
- A new season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee has started.
- Claire Zulkey finds out you can go home again.
- I hope we never have to stop using our signature.
- A new version of Lost in Space is coming to Netflix.
- For the Fourth, how about Brownie S’mores with Red, White and Blue Marshmallows?
