Podcast Tuesday: "Mopey Dog"

Dr. Joyce Brothers guest stars on Happy Days.

Gary Cooper: man of few words.

The Fonz started out as a tough guy of few words. Producer Garry Marshall has said that one of the inspirations for the famous Happy Days mechanic (memorably played by Henry Winkler) was taciturn Western star Gary Cooper. In Fonzie's earliest appearances from the first season in 1974, he has an air of mystery and even danger around him. Maintaining an air of cool detachment at all times, he keeps his conversations with nerdy Richie Cunningham (Ron Howard) short and to the point. You get the sense that Fonzie has more important things to be doing.

By Happy Days' fifth season, however, Fonzie had become an idol to children across America and was as much of a cheerful chatterbox as anyone else on the show. There was very little mystery and even less danger to the character by then. The gradual softening of Fonzie began with episodes like "Fonzie Drops In," "Fonzie's Getting Married," "A Star is Bored," and "Guess Who's Coming to Christmas," all of which exposed the character's vulnerable side. By 1978, with Fonziemania in full swing, the once-threatening greaser had become a veritable teddy bear in a leather jacket. He eats his veggies, pays his rent on time, gets his high school diploma, and even works with the police to stop a potential gang war in Milwaukee. The fourth season ends with Fonzie getting baptized as an adult into the Catholic church.

As all TV sitcom producers know, the surest way to soften a character is to have him interact with either kids or animals. Happy Days did both. Fonz became a mentor to his nephew Spike (Danny Butch) in the second season and cousin Chachi (Scott Baio) a few years later. The episode "Fonsillectomy" from October 1977, meanwhile, had Fonzie being stuck in the children's ward of the local hospital during Halloween and having to entertain a group of ailing tots. 

The March 1977 episode "Spunky Come Home" gave Fonzie the opportunity to interact with both kids and animals. The story concerns Fonz acquiring an adorable mutt named Spunky for "protection" from his many female admirers. Bumblers Potsie (Anson Williams) and Ralph (Don Most) promptly lose the dog, which is then found and adopted by a local kid named Wilbur (Erin Blunt). The finale has Fonz negotiating with Wilbur for Spunky's safe return. It's adorable... and a long way from where Fonzie started.

The prodigal pooch did not show up on Happy Days again for nearly a year. Spunky made his second and final appearance on the sitcom in Season 5's "Spunkless Spunky," which is the episode we're covering this week on These Days Are Ours: A Happy Days Podcast. The plot has Spunky falling into a deep depression, forcing Fonzie to seek help from famed pop psychologist Dr. Joyce Brothers (appearing as herself). Once again, Fonzie is put into a quasi-parental role. He even refers to himself as Spunky's father!

What did we think of "Spunkless Spunky"? You can find out right here:

What's been happening in 'Mary Worth'? Oh my god, so much.

Mary refused to wear the chain mail bikini. Sorry.

It's been a couple of months since I've done one of my "comic strip roundup"-type posts at this blog, so I figured it was time to do another. The last time we spoke, the current Mary Worth story about dog lover Saul Wynter and his protective pooch Bella was just getting started. As you'll recall, Mary and Toby approached Saul and Bella at a Charterstone pool party. Muffins were offered. It didn't go well.

What happened after that?

The Antics of Brewster, the Old-Timey Dog

Bad dog, Brewster! Unspeakably bad dog!

The Adventures of Sarah Morgan, Child Genius

Cats are sometimes difficult to identify.

You might think that a comic strip called Rex Morgan, MD would be about a doctor named Rex Morgan and all the medical stuff he does all day. You'd be wrong. Rex is more of a supporting character in the strip that bears his name, and he's such a vacuous dimwit that you wouldn't want him doing any doctoring. Instead, the main character is Rex's precocious daughter Sarah, who has a career as an art prodigy going and who looks like a grown man in a bad wig in closeups. Sarah is the creepy heart and icky soul of Rex Morgan, MD, and eventually the strip will bear her name. Until that glorious day, here is my pilot for the reboot.

This way lies madness: 'The Doggedly Dogs'

A dog, Muffin, is about to enjoy some secular music in "The Doggedly Dogs."

Bible Truths For Children.

What is it about religious shows for kids? Why are they always a direct gateway into a world of complete, bat-shit insanity? You tell me. These programs are generally low budget and semi-amateurish in terms of production values, so you'd expect some degree of wonkiness in the sets, costumes, props, animation, music, acting, and chroma key-style video effects. And you'll definitely find all of that stuff in these shows.

Generally, religious kids shows are labors of love, made by well-meaning people with a shortage of money, experience, and technical know-how. It's understandable that they'd be cheap, cheesy, and tonally awkward. But that's true of a lot of low-budget productions, including secular ones. None of this explains the total delirium that emanates from these particular shows. There's something else going on here.

A big factor is the religious element. All religions seem kind of nutty to me, and the further you commit to any particular faith, the further you stray from reality and science and sanity in general. And by the time you're doing a religious kids show with puppets and talking animals, you're obviously way, way off the deep end. I mean, you don't just start out dressing like a cowboy clown and singing songs about Jesus to four-year-olds. You have to progress to that mindset over time, probably many years. By the time you arrive on the other side, your brain is pretty much the equivalent of butterscotch pudding.

There is a definite element of brainwashing or indoctrination going on here. Kids don't naturally come to religion on their own, after all. It has to be sold to them and reinforced all the time until they believe.

But there's also something dark under the shiny, happy surface, since Western religions tend to center around a capricious creator God who can banish you to Hell for all eternity if you get on his nerves. I guess what makes religious kids shows so entertaining is that contrast between the relentlessly cheerful songs and skits and the more sinister undertones of their true, ultimate purpose.

All of this is my long-winded way of introducing a highlight reel from a video called called Bible Truths for Children. I have very little background on this, other than the fact that it might be a VHS compilation tape of highlights from a mid-1980s Texas-made program called The Filling Station or God's Filling Station.

I honestly don't want to over-explain or oversell what you're about to see. It's better if you go in cold. Just know that I love this video and have watched it at least a dozen times. It encapsulates everything I like about religious kids shows.

Clearly, the main event is "The Doggedly Dogs," which is definitely worth following until the very end, when... well, I don't want to spoil it, but pay attention to the voice of Muffin. The rest of the video is delightful, too: the nerdy ginger kid reading Bad magazine and proclaiming that "Reading is Seeding," the parade of "instruments for righteousness," and the Bob Duke family of Greenwood, Indiana, whose deeply creepy Sears family portrait is emblazoned on the robe of an animated Christ. Enjoy.

Mill Creek comedy classics #14: "Behave Yourself!" (1951)

Farley Granger wants some of that sweet Shelley Winters action in Behave Yourself!

The flick: Behave Yourself! (RKO Radio Pictures, 1951) [buy the set]

Current IMDb score: 5.6

Director: George Beck (never directed again, but wrote Boy, Did I Get a Wrong Number! for Bob Hope and Phyllis Diller and scripted a couple of Dobie Gillis episodes)

Henry Corden: Fred #2

Actors of note: 

• Farley Granger, (Alfred Hitchcock's Rope and Strangers on a Train)

• Shelley Winters (Lolita, Night of the Hunter, The Poseidon Adventure, etc., etc.)

• William Demarest (Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Sullivan's Travels, played "Uncle Charley" on TV's My Three Sons, etc., etc.)

• Lon Chaney, Jr. (The Wolf Man, Of Mice and Men, almost 200 other movies)

• Elisha Cook, Jr. (Rosemary's Baby, The Maltese Falcon, The Big Sleep, 200+ more)

• Hans Conried (The Great Dictator, voice of Captain Hook in Disney's Peter Pan, voice of Snidely Whiplash on TV's Dudley Do-Right)

• Sheldon Leonard (It's a Wonderful Life, Guys and Dolls, produced TV shows like The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy, Make Room For Daddy, The Andy Griffith Show, etc.)

• Henry Corden (The Ten Commandments, The Asphalt Jungle; the second guy to voice Fred Flintstone, a part he played on and off for 30 years)

• Francis L. Sullivan (Great Expectations, Oliver Twist)

• Margalo Gillmore (High Society, The Trouble with Angels)

• Marvin Kaplan ("Uncle Pooch" in David Lynch's Wild at Heart; regular on TV's Alice)

• Archie the dog (not a damned thing else, but his IMDb biography is amusing)

Other notables involved: The film was shot by master cinematographer James Wong Howe, whose fifty-year career includes such classics as Seconds, The Thin Man, and the live-action segments of Fantasia, plus a whole lot more. The title song was co-written by (of all people) Buddy Ebsen of The Beverly Hillbillies. It seems like the only non-entity involved with this film was its writer-director!

The gist of it: Poor dope Bill Denny (Granger) needs an anniversary present to appease his demanding wife Kate (Winters) and his even-more-demanding mother-in-law (Gillmore). A stray terrier, Archie (himself), follows him home and... voila! Instant, albeit accidental, anniversary present! Trouble is, Archie is a specially-trained dog who is very much wanted by two groups of crooks (including Kaplan, Corden, Chaney, Sullivan, Leonard, Cook, and Conried) who are very willing to kill to get what they want. What follows is a comedy of errors with a higher body count than the Tate-LaBianca slayings.

The original 1950 edition of Dianetics.

My take: Imagine an Alfred Hitchcock "wrongly accused man" thriller, only filtered through a dog-centric episode of I Love Lucy, and you've got sort of an idea what Behave Yourself! is like. Farley Granger, who memorably starred in two Hitchcock pictures, is the unlucky schmuck here. Throughout the film, his character's story keeps getting wilder and wilder as dead bodies and counterfeit money pile up. Time and again, Bill Denny innocently turns up at murder scenes and then has to explain himself to some very dubious policemen, led by hot-tempered O'Ryan (Demarest), none of whom are interested in his pitiful alibis about a stray dog.

The ad campaign for this flick clearly tried to present Granger's costar, Shelley Winters, as a curvaceous sex object. When she wears a dress with a low neckline in this film, her husband compliments her, "You've got the furniture for it!" Indeed, Shelley was a svelte and (by her own account) promiscuous young starlet in the 1940s and early '50s with a string of famous lovers whom she'd later betray in tacky tell-all books. She was pushing 30 when she made this film, and you can just see her becoming the Winters most of us know from her later years: the plump, bossy, hysterical loudmouth who amuses us while driving those around her to distraction. A mere 11 years later, she was the jealous mother of a teen sexpot in Stanley Kubrick's Lolita, a woman who would be insufferable if she weren't also tragic.

In Behave Yourself!, Shelley's character is supposed to be adorable, I think. She's sort of reminiscent of Lucille Ball here, only more mercenary and materialistic. Who else would marry this woman except the obviously-gay Farley Granger? His character is flustered, sweaty, and tongue-tied for virtually the entire running time, which gets a little wearying for the viewer. I almost wish this film had been made 20 years earlier with W.C. Fields in the lead role. This film's ending is a bit reminiscent of The Bank Dick, and Fields certainly would have been a more formidable adversary for Kate and her mother than weak-willed Granger.

Speaking of that mother-in-law, though, there is one truly fascinating little detail in the script that goes by so quickly you might miss it. A running joke is that the mother has a lot of pretentious, trendy interests, and among those is Dianetics, the Scientologist manifesto L. Ron Hubbard had published only a year before! This must certainly be among the first cinematic references to that highly controversial movement.

Oh, by the way, feminists and dog-lovers are likely to be appalled by the very last scene. What can I say? It was a different time.

Is it funny: Oh, sure, occasionally. Shelley Winters is her usual pain-in-the-neck self, but I was rather amused by her shameless greed and her casually forgiving attitude when she thinks her husband is a murderer. Considering all the famous character actors in the film, Francis L. Sullivan makes perhaps the strongest impression as rotund yet surprisingly elegant British gangster Fat Freddy, who makes his plans from a bubble bath while resting his head on an inflatable pillow.

My grade: B

P.S. - Nothing even close to a racial stereotype here. Again, no minorities whatsoever.

Mill Creek comedy classics #11: "Hollywood and Vine" (1945)

If you like the intersection, you'll love the movie.

The flick: Hollywood and Vine (PRC Pictures, Inc., 1945)

Current IMDb rating: 5.8

Director: Alexis Thurn-Taxis (A Night for Crime, The Yanks Are Coming)

Actors of note: 

• James Ellison (I Walked with a Zombie)

• Wanda McKay (The Lady Eve, The Great McGinty)

• Franklin Pangborn (All Over Town, Now Voyager, The Bank Dick)

• Ralph Morgan (The Life of Emil Zola, first president of the Screen Actors Guild)

• Prince Michael Romanoff (restaurateur and "professional impostor")

• Daisy (twenty-seven Blondie movies between 1938 and 1950)

• Emmett "Pappy" Lynn (Night of the Hunter, The Ten Commandments)

Intersections of note: Hollywood Boulevard and Vine Street, Los Angeles, CA 90028, today the location of a sushi restaurant, an Irish pub, a parking lot, and an empty retail space.

The gist of it: Martha (McKay), a pretty young lass on her way to Hollywood, stops for lunch at a little hamburger stand operated by the eccentric and talkative Pop Barkley (Lynn). There, she attracts the attention of successful playwright Larry Winters (Ellison), who follows her to Tinseltown, where he's working on the adaptation of his Broadway hit, Grandfather's Follies. Thinking it belongs to Martha, Larry brings along a talented little stray dog (Daisy) whom he dubs Emperor after Strauss' Emperor Waltz, which was playing on Pop's jukebox when he and Martha met.

Martha eventually does reconnect with Larry, who passes himself off as a newcomer named "Larry Summers" and takes up residence in a modest bungalow near Martha's. Soon, Larry's bosses and his snooty fiancee are searching frantically for him. Meanwhile, Emperor becomes a big Hollywood star whose overnight success leads to a zany custody battle involving most of the other characters.

"Uncle Carl."

My take: I wonder when Hollywood started turning its cameras back at the movie business, realizing its own industry was as bizarre and fascinating as any scenario a writer could dream up. One of the little joys of this movie is the chance to see a now rather quaint-looking version of Hollywood, a place where people still went to the Brown Derby and the Trocadero.

Watching this movie in 2013 was like seeing the innocent first draft of Barton Fink or Mulholland Drive with all the surrealism and seediness taken out. The "pretending to be poor" thing, too, seems like a harbinger of John Landis' Coming to America. While he's pretending to be a pauper, Larry takes a job at a drugstore, where he works for fussbudget Franklin Pangborn who does his trademark "prissy queen" routine again. The movie never comes out and says it, but I'd like to think that the place is Schwab's Pharmacy.

The studio in the film is called Lavish Pictures, where the members of the Lavish family all have phony-baloney jobs (like "Assistant to the Assistant Story Editor") and phony-baloney offices (with numbers such as "7 and 3/8ths"). I'd imagine this was a swipe at the Laemmle clan, whose founder inspired this famous quip from Ogden Nash: "Uncle Carl Laemmle/Has a very large faemmle."

Sharp-eyed MST3K fans will note that this film was released by the poverty row studio called PRC Pictures, which stands for "Producers Releasing Corporation" and not "Penile Replacement Corporation," as Tom Servo had it.

By the way, I wonder if any scenes from Hollywood and Vine wound up on the cutting room floor because there are some subplots which never get wrapped up. One running gag, for instance, has tough-looking gangster types come into the drugstore and cryptically request a "banana surprise," which makes Franklin Pangborn very nervous. Nothing ever comes of this, though. And there's a wraparound story in which Pop Barkley tells some reporters how he came to be enormously wealthy, but I don't think this was adequately explained either.

Daisy the dog, the actual star of this movie.

Is it funny: Occasionally. As a satire of the motion picture business, Hollywood and Vine is fairy toothless. Studio chiefs are penny-pinching blowhards who keep their whole family on the payroll. Romances are manufactured for the benefit of the press. Directors are temperamental divas. Aspiring actors are likely to end up working in drug stores. I knew most of that.

Because of Daisy, Hollywood and Vine has plenty of bark, but the script has no bite. The movie lavishes much more attention on the dog than it does on the rather dull human love story supposedly at the center of the plot. I guess it's funny watching the talented pooch roll over, play dead, bark on command, close doors, and hide objects when necessary, but it's obvious that the animal is waiting for cues from a handler who is just off-camera. At the time, Daisy was in the middle of a very hot movie career, playing the role of the Bumsteads' dog in a series of cheap-but-popular comedies based on the Blondie comic strip. What's really funny in this film is the "star treatment" lavished on Daisy/Emperor, including lawsuits and charges of tax evasion. I chuckled quite a bit during the Empreror Goes Hollywood montage. After all, like Elvis Costello once said, "You're nobody 'til everybody in this town thinks you're a bastard." Or a bitch, so to speak.

Ellison and McKay play their parts straight down the middle, so most of the comedic dialogue in the film is given to the supporting players like "Pappy" Lynn, whose crazy old coot character quickly wore on my nerves. I did like the way his character wound up figuring into the film's longest-running gag at the very end, though.

My grade: B-

P.S. - Not a Negro stereotype in sight here. No minorities of any kind, in fact.

Scene Study: Pee-wee's descent into madness!

"Is this something you can share with the rest of us, Amazing Larry?"

Pinky Lee

One of the things that makes Tim Burton's 1985 film Pee-wee's Big Adventure such an enduring classic is its unexpected complexity. You read that correctly.

On the surface, this is the featherweight story of a seemingly naive, innocent man-child -- comedian Paul Reubens as the self-described "loner" Pee-wee Herman -- and his quest to recover his beloved stolen bicycle, which has been taken from him by a jealous and spiteful neighbor. And, yes, Pee-wee is supposed to be a fun, happy, lovable character who will appeal to kids in the audience.

But, admirably,  the film does not shy away from showing the dark side of both its title character and the world in which he lives. This is a whimsical movie, sure, but it also contains moments of unsettling surrealism. It even takes some of its visual cues from decidedly adult crime and horror films. At times, director Burton seems as influenced by German Expressionism and film noir as he does by the 1950s children's TV hosts like Soupy Sales, Pinky Lee, and Buffalo Bob Smith who inspired the Pee-wee character.

Surprisingly, Pee-wee's Big Adventure does not flinch when it comes to portraying the negative aspects of the title character's personality, particularly his paranoia and bad temper. It could be argued that what allowed Burton and Ruebens to move Pee-wee Herman from the world of sketch comedy where he was born (Ruebens played the character when he was a member of LA's Groundlings) into the world of feature films was making the character three-dimensional and complicated. A one-note Pee-wee couldn't sustain a whole movie. So Pee-wee is sometimes nice and sometimes not. He's unpredictable.

An unhinged Pee-wee

Nowhere is the dual nature of this film better reflected than in the justly-beloved "town meeting" scene. In this bizarre sequence, Pee-wee has invited the lovably odd folks of the community -- his completely innocent friends and neighbors -- to confront them with the "evidence" he has collected since the theft of his bike. 

The crime has brought out the worst in Pee-wee, and the scene is a portrait in extreme paranoia. In a very short span of time, he has ceased to be a harmless, free-spirited eccentric and has become a suspicious, angry, accusatory monster with a tendency toward megalomania. What is shocking is that it took so little to bring such a momentous personality shift. 

Burton uses lighting very effectively here, casting shadows on Ruebens' face to give him a threatening, unfriendly appearance. Quite often during this scene, Reubens is either partially or completely in shadow. Darkness frequently obscures his facial features, giving him an air of vague menace. And Danny Elfman's score for this scene seems more typical of a tense Alfred Hitchcock thriller. Even Pee-wee's charming, clutter-laden house, seen briefly at the beginning of the scene, looks a little ominous at night. Note, too, that everyone attending this meeting seems to have gotten there on a bicycle. Just another odd, surrealistic touch.

In this scene, Pee-wee Herman is allowed to act in a manner totally unbecoming the star of a children's film. He yells. He paces. He spouts completely nutty conspiracy theories and keeps his "guests" virtual captives for hours on end in a stuffy basement. Even Pee-wee's little dog, Speck, is afraid of him.

Perhaps the most startling moment is when Pee-wee lashes out verbally at Dottie (Elizabeth Daily), the adorable bike shop employee who is the closest thing the film has to a romantic interest. It took real guts on the part of Reubens and Burton to allow their hero to be portrayed so negatively at this early stage in the film. A more timid film might have worried about alienating the audience, but Pee-wee's Big Adventure gives us more credit than that.

Besides, Burton must have rightly figured that audiences would go along with this scene simply because it was so funny. The dialogue throughout this sequence is hilarious. Nearly every line is quotable, so I'll limit myself to excerpting this unhinged monologue, the best of its kind outside of Humphrey Bogart as Fred C. Dobbs in Treasure of the Sierra Madre:

"When you've gone over something again and again and again and again like I have, certain questions get answered. Others spring up! The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and kitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting!"

Oliver Stone, eat your heart out. This is the greatest "conspiracy monologue" of all time.

"Why? What's the significance? I DON'T KNOW!"

10 Nightmarish Images of Buster Brown, Terrifying Shoe Sprite

"I'm Buster Brown. I live in your shoe. Sleep well, children."

A live-action Buster

When you think of Buster Brown, you probably picture those ugly shoes that no kid ever wanted to wear. Fair enough, but much like Skippy peanut butter, Buster Brown shoes were named for a now long-forgotten, theoretically lovable cartoon tyke from the early decades of the 20th century.

Created by comics innovator Richard Outcault, the man often credited with inventing the comics form itself, young Buster Brown and his canine companion Tige had their own newspaper strip from 1902 to 1921 and subsequently appeared in live-action short films, Broadway plays, radio shows, and even a television series. All of those trickled away by the time the 1960s rolled around, leaving the shoe business as Buster's only lasting legacy.

The lad started endorsing shoes in 1904, nearly from the beginning of his career, and he's still at it over a century later. In case you're curious about the character behind the shoe commercials, Buster was a well-to-do but mischievous lad who had a taste for low-level chaos despite his rather prissy appearance. In each story, he would get into some kind of comical shenanigans and would receive his comeuppance in the form of a spanking, yet he would never learn his lesson or reform his ways for long. One of his trademark bits was to make a ridiculous pronouncement on some matter and then declare that matter to be "resolved." In fact, "Resolved!" became Buster's catchphrase.

So... all in good fun, right? A harmless piece of Americana, right? WRONG! As the following pictures will prove, Buster Brown is the most horrifying hellbeast ever devised by man. He has the piercing stare of a psychopath, a fact that contrasts hideously with his weirdly formal, effeminate appearance. His dog, Tige, is no better -- a snarling, gargoyle-like creature with the mouth of a shark and an eerie fixed gaze matching that of his master.

Read on at your own peril, gentle traveler.

Still believe in God? How about now?

The full-color version of this was too gruesome even for this site!

Yes, Jerry Maren was in the Lollipop Guild. No, that doesn't help.

And it's sharp and pointy, too! Perfect for stabbing!

Surely, that's red paint. What else could it be?

Buster won't take "no" for an answer.

"Why so serious?"

So unwholesome. So very, very unwholesome.

You can dress Buster! Or he can watch YOU get dressed! Whatever.

Heeeeeeeeeere's Buster!

(today's zomby) AND THE BEST AND WORST SONG YOU WILL HEAR THIS TUESDAY!

From one "Fluffy" to another...

The cover of Gloria Balsam's infamous 45.

Gloria Balsam was the stage name used by Cynthia Frantz, an aggressively eccentric Philadelphia-born singer who became a hanger-on/peripheral presence in the San Francisco new wave scene of the late 1970s. Her discography is slim, but it does contain the indescribable 1979 single "Fluffy," which had an initial run of only 1000 copies but which found greater fame on a Rhino Records compilation The World's Worst Records in 1983. That compilation must have given Gloria's career a boost. Here is a video of the chanteuse performing the song live (singing along with a pre-taped backing) at a 1984 "new music" seminar in New York. Wonder if the audience knew what they were in for:

Gloria has not produced much in the way of new music in the last three decades, but we'll always have "Fluffy." The singer also seems to maintain a minor Internet presence these days. Under her real name, Cynthia Frantz, she works as an attorney in Vermont.

• Here's her Facebook page

• And here's her MySpace

• For the truly curious, there's a nicely detailed article about Gloria's career here.

(today's zomby) AND AMERICA'S FUNNIEST PRESIDENT, LYNDON BAINES JOHNSON

Millions now living have no recollection of the man commonly known as LBJ, a.k.a. Lyndon Baines Johnson the 36th President of the United States of America. He was actually dead before I was born, so I don't have any first-hand memories of the man. But I still think he's a strong contender for the title of funniest man to lead the free world. Here, for instance, is our former President holding a beagle by the ears:

Hilarious, right? (Relax, PETA people. The beagle was fine. I mean, it's dead now, of course. That picture was taken 40+ years ago, after all. But at the time, the beagle was not injured.) Need more proof that LBJ was comedy gold? Listen to the man order pants over the phone. (WARNING: Strong language ahoy!)



BLOGGER NEWS 'N' NOTES: After nearly two years of blogging, I have decided to give Dead 2 Rights a little bit of a facelift. I'm not quite done with it, but I was wondering what you thought of the changes. Any feedback would be appreciated. Thanks.