Dick Van Dyke told his hardest story from a 75-year career

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dick Van Dyke turned 100 on December 13, 2025. And he published a book with a series of stories titled 100 Rules for Living to 100: An optimist’s guide to a happy life. An article by Sarah Lemire at Today on November 18, 2025 is titled EXCLUSIVE: At Almost 100, Dick Van Dyke Won’t Sit Still – and Is Eyeing 1 More Big Role. She notes that he had a 75-year career. There is another article by Liz McNeil in People magazine on November 25, 2025 titled Dick Van Dyke ‘Feels Pretty Good for 100.’ Here’s Why He’s Optimistic About His Centennial Birthday (Exclusive).

 

 On pages 105 to 113 there is a great story, titled Tell Your Hardest Story:

 

“In December 1973, I found a seat in a circle of chairs in a grim, fluorescent-lit meeting room at the Brentwood Veterans’ Hospital. Around me were military vets, young and old, all hospitalized for drug and alcohol addiction and gathered for regular group therapy. I was there as a visitor, doing research for my role as an alcoholic in The Morning After, a TV movie being shot elsewhere in the facility.

 

It was weird for these guys to have a Hollywood actor eavesdropping on their raw, real-life stories of struggle, I could tell. Right off the bat, I needed to assure them that I would be a sympathetic listener. ‘The subject of my movie is very personal to me,’ I began, ‘because I myself am an alcoholic.’

 

Their faces flickered with surprise. At the time, only my family and a handful of other people in my life knew about my drinking problem.

 

‘So, I understand some of what you’re going through. But really, I’m here to listen and learn.”

 

Then Dick decided to go public.

 

“The story got picked up across the country. As expected, when Mr. Goody Two-shoes admitted his addiction to the world, the public was shocked. Friends and colleagues from wherever I’d lived and worked called to offer sympathy and encouragement, reporting that they, and everyone they knew could barely believe the news. Within a week, I was getting letters by the thousand – people were moved and incredibly understanding. Many detailing how alcoholism had impacted them and their loved ones.

 

That reaction spurred me to go even more public. I appeared on The Dick Cavett Show, one of the best interviews I’ve ever done, and I told my story onstage in Washington, DC, for a press conference with other celebrity alcoholics. I am told that rehab facilities still show The Morning After to this day.

 

…. Each time I put a new layer of it into words, I feel a release of the power that alcoholism had over me. I was separating myself from the disease, seeing my experience as a battle with the disease. Telling my story was giving me power and freedom.

 

Each of us has our own hard stories of crisis and struggle. When we hold them in, out of fear or shame, they control us. But when we tell our stories, we’re in the driver’s seat. And when we share those stories, even just among our friends and family, we are literally helping one another to survive, just like that brotherhood of vets.”  

 

Pages 9 and 10 have a story titled Make Your Own Rules. On page 10 Dick has the following weasel words about his rules and stories:

 

“I readily admit that you might find variations of the same rule emerging in multiple stories here. That’s because my life, like everyone else’s, has its personality-specific ongoing themes – questions that pop up, over and over again, in different contexts, old challenges that look different in each new light, wisdom learned and forgotten and learned again.

 

I might also add that, for some of these stories, there’s not exactly a rule or even a specific question. Sometimes that’s because I know there’s some nugget of meaning in the story, but I haven’t figured out what it is. Maybe you can! Other times, it’s just a funny story, plain and simple. Because don’t we all sometimes just need comic relief?

 

Finally, if you’re inclined to count up these rules to see if there are exactly one hundred, as advertised in the title, your math might disappoint you, just a little. Quality over quantity, as the saying goes, right? I can assure you that this book will deliver enough main rules, sub-rules, ancillary rules, and multipart rules to last you a lifetime, yes, all the way to one hundred!”    

 

His book doesn’t bother to number those stories or even give us a Table of Contents. I got suspicious about whether there really were a hundred, and then wrote down the following list of all the story titles (grouped ten at a time):  

 

Don’t Act Your Age

Make Your Own Rules

Examine Your Head

Learn to Fall

Find Your Passion in Your Past

Tolerate and Cherish Your Little Brother

Face Your Fear

Find “The New You” Inside “The Old You”

Find Your People – A Story in Several Parts

Figure Out Who You Aren’t

 

Don’t Litter: Tips for Safety and Hygiene on Family Road Trips in the 1950s

Don’t Count on “The Big Break”

Hone Your Bit (Every Job Is Training for the Next One)

Don’t Do Live Morning TV

Some Secrets You Shouldn’t Tell

Eggs Again? Some Failures Are Just That

Dance with Chita

Go Nuts (But Maybe Not That Nuts)

Suck Up to the Landlady

Speak Up for Your Family

 

It Doesn’t Take a Good Boss to Do Great Work

Accept Your Limitations

Win an Oscar

Stay on the Phone

Make Christmas with What You’ve Got

Don’t Trust Machines

Reconsider the Boogeyman

Tell Your Hardest Stories

Play Against Type

Retire on Your Own Terms

 

Remain Anonymous

Start a Band

Commit to Play

Save All That Artwork

Believe in Fate

Take Your Doubts to the Desert

Accept “Rescue” with Grace

See the Pattern to Get Past It

Help Someone Find Their Voice: Do’s and Don’ts

Reimagine Your Legacy

 

Read the Fine Print

Learn from Animals: 3 Species, 4 Rules

Get a Good DJ

Write It Down

Bond Through Crisis

Be Someone’s Baker

Get Frank: A Meditation on Old Rifts

Remember the Good Stuff, Leave the Rest Behind

Reminisce While You Can

Get a Great Sidekick

 

Clear the Air

Get a Second Opinion (and a Third and a Fourth…)

Learn from Teaching

Cross Off Regrets

Learn from Shame

Never Call “Cut”

Don’t Match Jimmy

Don’t Live in the Past

It Pays to Go to the Gym

Build a Slide and Grandkids Will Come

 

Transmogrify Halloween (On Family Traditions)

The Clothes Make the Gnome

Stay Tall Inside

Hand Over the Keys

Read While You Can

Do Get All Judgy (When You’re Watching TV)

Learn a New Way to Fall

Carpe Chita

Remember Honestly

Live with Regrets

 

Your Purpose Doesn’t Need to be Grand

You Will Not Be Alone

Save the Afterlife for After Life

You Can’t Protect Your Survivors

Find Your Arlene

 

As you can see, there are just seventy-five. The book could have more honestly been titled Seventy-Five Rules from My 75-Year Career: An optimist’s guide to a happy life.

 

The wreath was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.  

 

A book of speeches by the late Sidney Poitier

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I found a book from 2024 containing an unexpected collection of speeches. It is a posthumous collection titled Sidney Poitier: The Great Speeches of an Icon Who Moved Us Forward. There are portions from it at Google Books. On page 3 it says:

 

“Sidney Poitier had an inauspicious early life. Raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the 1920s and 1930s, he was – from an American perspective, and certainly from a Hollywood one – disadvantaged with the wrong childhood environment, skin color, and accent, but nevertheless he was destined to help change the world’s most powerful country and one of its most influential industries – the movies – forever.”

 

In his Saint Mark’s School Commencement speech, June 2002, he described Cat Island (page 140):

 

“I spent my twelve years on an island in the Caribbean. Cat Island was forty-six miles long and three to five miles wide. There were only about two hundred families on the whole island. The population of our village was about thirty to forty families. I had just one friend to play with, and he lived a long distance away. On the island there were no cars, no trucks, no buses, no trains, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water, no television, no ice cream, no movie houses. At night we used candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to get about to see where we were going. Night or day, everybody walked wherever they needed to go, or rode a horse or donkey if they were lucky enough to own one. In fact, there were stretches in my life when I was a kid when I would go for a whole week and never see a single soul other than my immediate family. As a result, some of my best friends were birds and lizards and frogs; some of my worst enemies were wasps, mosquitoes, sea urchins and tarantula spiders. I used to have regular conversations with all of them,”

 

And in his New York University Commencement speech in May 1995 (pages 116 to 120) he described going from a dishwasher to an actor:

 

 “….I was a dishwasher. That’s how I survived my early years in NYC. Minimal skills were required. Dishwashing provided a salary and three meals a day. I was between job assignments on the morning in question, and my pockets were nearly empty. So empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom onto any kind of work that a Black kid with no education might qualify for. I purchased a copy of the Amsterdam News, one of Harlem’s leading newspapers, and started scanning the want-ad page for dishwasher openings.

 

The last page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, which contained an article with a heading that read ‘actors wanted.’ The gist of which was that a theatre group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted. Why not try actors wanted?’ I figured I could do that. It didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And they didn’t say they required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know, and in no uncertain terms, that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent. He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants, and marched me on tippy-toes towards the door. He was seething. ‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you could handle,’ he barked. ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’ That was the line he ended with as he threw me out and slammed the door.

 

I have to tell you, his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree in my childhood. I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he didn’t know, then what was it about me that seemed to have implied to this stranger that a dishwasher’s profession would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?

 

Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it or life was going to be mighty grim. And so, I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening lunch breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed – near the entrance to the kitchen – reading the newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant, and he helped me learn to read better than I was able to before.

 

My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, not that I had ever given it a thought. I simply needed to prove to that stranger that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes. And it worked. The second time around they let me in.

 

But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the first cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to round out the incoming class of new students. But not even that could keep me for long, given my lack of education and experience. After a couple of months they were going to flunk me out, and once again I felt that vulnerability – as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lose this, where am I? One more Black kid who can barely read, washing dishes on the island of Manhattan? ‘Not if I can help it,’ thought I. So, in desperation I conjured up a truly outrageous offer they couldn’t refuse. I would become their janitor without pay if they would let me continue to study. After some brief negotiations, it was so agreed.

 

Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve. As an actor, that is. But when it came time to cast the first big student production, in walked a new guy, another kid from the Caribbean. Not a member of the group, but someone to whom the director had assigned the part I had secretly hoped to get. After all my studies, busting my butt trying to learn to act, not to mention busting my butt sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace, she cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit, he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a good voice. He could even sing a little.

 

I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me his understudy. But little did I know, on the night of the first major run through, the one night an important director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid who had been cast for the lead – a kid named Harry Belafonte – couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him and, son of a gun, the visiting director liked what I did, and he called me to audition for a play he was planning to present on Broadway.

 

‘I’m opening Lysistrata on Broadway,’ he said. ‘There might be a small part you could try out for, if you’re available.’

 

‘Are you kidding?’ I thought to myself.

 

Next thing you know, five weeks later, on opening night, I’m staring out from a Broadway stage onto a sea of white faces in a packed theater – staring back at me – scared beyond belief as I fumbled unsuccessfully for my lines.

 

The word ‘bad’ cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was bad. The stage fright had me so that I was giving the wring cues, jumbling the lines, and within an instant the audience was rolling in the aisles.

 

The moment the scene I was in came to its tortuous end, it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.

 

The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so godawful they thought I was good. They said they admired my ‘fresh comedic gift.’

 

If you saw this in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? Someone was looking out for me, for sure.

 

My ‘triumph’ in Lysistrata leads immediately to an understudy’s job in the touring company of Anna Lucasta. Then after a long, lean, and frustrating period I found out, quite by accident, that 20 th Century Fox was about to begin casting for a movie called No Way Out. That, as it turned out, was my first motion picture job. Fifty-years and fifty-six movies later, here I am recalling the year, the day, the words, and the resolve that forged a new and undreamed-of-beginning and launched a journey more incredible than I could have imagined – through the streets of New York, along the highways and byways of life, on to a destiny written in a time before I came, by hands other than my own.”

 

The 2009 portrait came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Zero dark thirty and 25 (or 6) to 4

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some phrases are rather cryptic. For example, Zero Dark Thirty is 2012 political action thriller film directed by Kathryn Bigelow about the manhunt for Osama bin Laden. A Wikipedia page explains that title is:

 

“American military slang for an unspecified time between midnight and sunrise.”

 

There is another Wikipedia page about the Chicago song, 25 or 6 to 4 that was released as a single in June 1970. It was written by Robert Lamm, who said his cryptic title was telling about trying to write a song in the wee hours of the morning. There is an article by Jay McDowell at American Songwriter on February 1, 2024 titled The Mundane Meaning Behind “25 or 6 to 4” by Chicago. It is not about LSD (sometimes known as LSD-25), or heroin, or cocaine.

 

This post was inspired by my listening to the album, The Best of Chicago: 40th Anniversary Edition.

 

Filmmaker Ken Burns’s advice to graduates from his 2024 undergraduate commencement address at Brandeis University on May 19th

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Noted filmmaker Ken Burns gave the 2024 undergraduate commencement address at Brandeis University. You can read a transcript here. There also is a YouTube video here. Ken gave them the following advice:

 

“Listen. Be curious, not cool. Insecurity makes liars of us all. Remember, none of us get out of here alive. The inevitable vicissitudes of life, no matter how well gated our communities, will visit us all. Grief is a part of life, and if you explore its painful precincts, it will make you stronger. Do good things, help others. Leadership is humility and generosity squared. Remember the opposite of faith is not doubt. Doubt is central to faith. The opposite of faith is certainty. The kinship of the soul begins with your own at times withering self-examination. Try to change that unchangeable human nature of Ecclesiastes, but start with you. ‘Nothing so needs reforming,’ Mark Twain once chided us, ‘as other people’s habits.’

 

Don’t confuse success with excellence. Do not descend too deeply into specialism. Educate all your parts, you will be healthier. Do not get stuck in one place. ‘Travel is fatal to prejudice,’ Twain also said. Be in nature, which is always perfect and where nothing is binary. Its sheer majesty may remind you of your own atomic insignificance, as one observer put it, but in the inscrutable and paradoxical ways of wild places, you will feel larger, inspirited, just as the egotist in our midst is diminished by his or her self-regard.

 

At some point, make babies. One of the greatest things that will happen to you, I mean it, one of the greatest things that will happen to you is that you will have to worry, I mean really worry, about someone other than yourself. It is liberating and exhilarating, I promise. Ask your parents (audience laughs).

 

Choose honor over hypocrisy, virtue over vulgarity, discipline over dissipation, character over cleverness, sacrifice over self-indulgence. Do not lose your enthusiasm, in its Greek etymology the word enthusiasm means simply, ‘God in us.’ Serve your country. Insist that we fight the right wars. Denounce oppression everywhere.    

 

Convince your government, as Lincoln understood, that the real threat always and still comes from within this favored land. Insist that we support science and the arts, especially the arts. They have nothing to do with the actual defense of our country; they just make our country worth defending. Remember what Louis Brandeis said, ‘The most important political office is that of the private citizen.’ Vote. Please vote. You indelibly underscore your citizenship, and most important, our kinship with each other when you do. Good luck and Godspeed.” 

 

He included a pair of Mark Twain quotes, and one from Louis Brandeis. The first Twain quote on reforming habits is from Pudd’inhead Wilson, as discussed by Garson O’Toole at Quote Investigator on February 16, 2017 in an article titled Put all your eggs in one basket, and then watch that basket. The second is from Innocents Abroad, as discussed by Craig Thompson at

Clearing Customs on September 8, 2019 in another article titled The reports of Mark Twain’s travel quotations are somewhat exaggerated.

 

 The silhouette came from Openclipart.

 

What we can learn about speechwriting and PowerPoint from storyboards on a Disney ship

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

During the cruise my wife and I took in late April on the Disney Wonder I noticed there were framed selections from storyboards hung on the walls to the landings for some stairways. One set of eight from the 1942 eight-minute Goofy animated film How to Swim is shown above. A storyboard is an old but important planning tool for preparing animation – but it also can be used both for speechwriting and PowerPoint.   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Another dozen frames from the 1940 animated film Tugboat Mickey (Mickey Mouse Installment 107) are shown above.

 

At LinkedIn Pulse on February 6, 2024 there is an article by Jaimie Abbott titled Using storyboarding to plan your presentation. And way back on March 17, 2011 I had blogged about Use a storyboard to organize your presentation.

 

Etiquette for a movie theater or a presentation audience

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Doug Savage has a humorous Savage Chickens cartoon on February 7, 2024 about etiquette in a movie theater (as shown above). It also applies to the audience for a presentation.

 

Quotations from Vital Speeches of the Day: #6 – Steven Spielberg on how I Am Not Finished!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On February 22, 2023 Steven Spielberg accepted an honorary Golden Bear award for lifetime achievement at the Berlindale International Film Festival. He gave a speech titled I Am Not Finished! It was published in the April 2023 issue of Vital Speeches of the Day magazine on pages 91 and 92. Steven said that:

 

“….Time is really just a trick of the mind, and it’s a trick of the light. I’ve been directing a long time – six decades [sic] – but it feels to me like I directed Duel and Jaws last year. At 76 I know a lot more about moviemaking than I did when I was 25, and I directed my first feature film at 25. But the anxieties and the uncertainties and the fears that tormented me as I began shooting Duel have stayed vivid for 50 years, as if no time has passed.

 

….Now I also feel a little alarmed to be told I’ve lived a lifetime, because I’m not finished.

 

I’m not finished. I want to keep working, I want to keep learning and discovering and scaring the shit out of myself, and sometimes the shit out of you. I’ve got to get back to some of those earlier scarier movies, but that’s another story.

 

As long as there’s joy in it for me, and as long as my audience can find joy and other human values in my films, I’m reluctant to ever say that’s a wrap. I’d like to beat Manoel de Olivera’s record and direct my last film when I’m 106.”

 

There is another article by Ben Dalton at ScreenDaily on February 22, 2023 titled Steven Spielberg delivers memorable Berlin speech – read the full transcript.

 

I added the 1971 date to an image of the tank truck and car from Duel at Wikimedia Commons.

 

Importance of a previous context for music

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A few days I heard a radio ad for the 2023 Boise Fourth of July Parade. For background music they used John Philip Sousa’s 1893 stirring march, The Liberty Bell. I suspect the producer wasn’t old enough to know about a previous association for that tune. It had been used in the opening for Monty Python’s Flying Circus, the BBC sketch comedy TV series (1969 to 1974), which you can watch on YouTube here or here.

 

Five decades ago I saw an Air Force Now newsreel film using Edvard Grieg’s 1875 In the Hall of the Mountain King as background music for B-52 bombers taking off. That music was horribly inappropriate. It had previously been used in M, Fritz Lang 1931 mystery suspense thriller film. The melody was whistled by the child murderer Hans Beckert (who was played by Peter Lorre).

 

Back on April 15, 2011, I posted about Does your introductory music clash with your presentation?

 

An image of a marching band was adapted from this one at Openclipart.

 

Moonfall just was worth what I paid to watch the DVD – nothing

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At my local public library I saw a DVD of a film released just this January. I checked it out, took it home, and watched it for Thanksgiving. It truly is a turkey – a long series of scenes with awful storytelling.

 

Moonfall is an independently-produced ‘science-fiction’ disaster film co-written, directed and produced by Roland Emmerich. It cost around $146 million to make, but only made $66 million. The CGI special effects are the best thing in it. But the unbelievable premise of a Hollow Moon is a silly conspiracy theory. You can watch a two-minute trailer here on YouTube. There also is a ten-minute YouTube video from FilmComicsExplained titled MOONFALL (Lunar Megastructures, Rogue AI & Ending) EXPLAINED.

  

Imdb describes the plot as follows:

 

“In Moonfall, a mysterious force knocks the moon from its orbit around earth and sends it hurtling on a collision course with life as we know it. With mere weeks before impact and the world on the brink of annihilation, NASA executive and former astronaut Jo Fowler [Halle Berry] is convinced she has the key to saving us all - but only one astronaut from her past, Brian Harper [Patrick Wilson], and a conspiracy theorist, K.C. Houseman [John Bradley], believe her. These unlikely heroes will mount an impossible last-ditch mission into space, leaving behind everyone they love, only to find that they just might have prepared for the wrong mission.”

 

Some critics were puzzled. At Rolling Stone on February 3, 2022 David Fear gave it a review titled Is ‘Moonfall’ an actual movie, or a prank that’s being played on audiences? And in another review at FlickFeast on February 3, 2022 Dallas King said:

 

“…So the crux of the movie is ‘the moon is out of orbit’. Audience members, think of a reason as to why this would be? Got one? It doesn’t matter how outlandish it is. Write it down. Right, now scrunch that up and throw it away, you are not even close. Now Google moon conspiracy theories and pick the craziest sounding one. Still nowhere near it.

 

The third act of this film goes to places that are so insane that it will leave audiences slack-jawed, open-mouthed and shaking their heads in utter disbelief to what they are witnessing.

 

… To be fair, the film does live up to the title. The Moon does indeed fall. It is just a shame that by watching Moonfall, your IQ will also fall several points. Complete Lunar Tunes!”

 

The image was assembled starting from a moon and a late night city at Openclipart.

 

 

Give me a seat, so I can rest my feet

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At the main Boise Public Library I recently borrowed a DVD of Monobloc -  a 91-minute 2021 documentary by Hauke Wendler (in German with English subtitles) about one-piece injection-molded plastic chairs like the one shown above. About a billion monobloc chairs have been made. The film is about the social impact of design. You can watch a two-minute trailer on YouTube. There is an article about it by Thomas Wagner at ndion on January 26, 2022 titled Monobloc: What matters is that you sit. In India these inexpensive chairs meant that people could sit up to dine in their homes rather than sitting on the floor. Monobloc chairs also were used as the seat for the first-generation design of an inexpensive wheelchair given away by the Free Wheelchair Mission.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There also were some nineteenth century chair innovations by Michael Thonet. Way back in 1859 the bent wood Thonet Chair No. 14 (shown above) was introduced. There is an article about it at the Design Museum which says fifty million of this design were sold by 1930.  

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There also is the director’s chair. An article by Hadley Mendelsohn at House Beautiful on January 10, 2022 titled How the director’s chair became an icon on set and beyond says it was introduced 130 years ago in 1892. But, as shown above, you can find one in a Civil War photograph by Matthew Brady from back in 1862.

 

It is easy is to parody a brand name or logo

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

You don’t get to choose your nickname, and might not like what you get called. Every month I get at a letter or postcard advertising Sparklight - the fiber-optic internet provider which before summer 2019 had called themselves CableOne. As shown above, their logo is just a purple slash. But I always refer to them by a parody of that name, Fart light. Why? Twenty years ago (back in 1999) there was an animated comedy film titled South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut. Inside that film there is another titled Asses of Fire, in which the characters Terrance and Phillip try to light their farts on fire. My logo is a torch.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Similarly, the satellite TV provider Dish Network has a logo where the letter I is made from a red circle and three successively larger crescents. As shown above, my parody of their logo is Pish (Scotch slang for urine) instead of Dish and shows a stream presumably going down the toilet.    

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What used to be called Yellow Freight has a logo that already is a parody. Their rounded orange trapezoid clearly is not really Yellow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

One awful choice for a new logo was for a UK agency whose acronym is OGC, the Office of Government Commerce. On September 22, 2021 Joseph Foley discussed it in an an article at the Creative Bloq titled 14 design fails that were so bad they were actually good. As shown above, when you rotate the logo ninety degrees to the right the horizontal line for the G is very rude. It looks like a man with his fly unzipped whose penis is pointing upward.  

 

Telling a story with a song: ‘Number 37’ by James Keelaghan

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Number 37 is the third song on James Keelaghan’s 1999 album Road. It tells a story about natural horsemanship (like that in the 1998 film The Horse Whisperer). The insert on my CD says it was inspired by seeing a barrel racer one afternoon in June at the Elizabeth, Colorado Stampede. You can watch a four-minute YouTube video with it as the soundtrack. The lyrics say:

 

“She didn’t use a riding crop, she barely used her spurs,

She was hands and knees and she was gentle loving words…

 

And one thing that I learned that day, you can whip and you can curse

But you’ll get as good a ride if you use gentle loving words”

 

The barrel racing image by Montanabw is from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Table Topics idea: tell us about a film that hasn’t been made yet

I often read Scene magazine – the tabloid weekly entertainment guide which comes with the Friday issue of the Idaho Statesman. Sometimes I shake my head at the film reviews. Who decided to make a sequel of that film?

For Table Topics this week I asked people to tell us about another film -  one that hasn’t been made yet but should be. For inspiration I provided a lead actor’s name and three real titles, like these two examples:

Arnold Schwarzenegger

Terminator

Red Heat

Total Recall

Meryl Streep

The Manchurian Candidate

The Devil Wears Prada

Mama Mia!

One participant described a film where an aging Arnold had trouble remembering things – more like Total Dementia than Total Recall. He couldn’t save the world singlehandedly anymore. Instead he had to ask Honey, where are my pants? (the title of a TV comedy show in The Lego Movie).

I also described a more difficult variation where you had to change just a single letter from the title to get the new film. Start from a 1949 John Wayne film about Marines in World War II: Sands of Iwo Jima. Changing the first letter to a B turns it into Bands of Iwo Jima – which would be a musical mashup of The Music Man and South Pacific. Changing the first letter to a W turns it into Wands of Iwo Jima. What the heck is Harry Potter doing out here? Clearly we ran out of books to film, but still wanted to make even more piles of money.

An image at the Library of Congress of a theater in Lompoc was modified to add the title.

What you can learn about speechwriting for children (and their parents) from Fred Roger’s television show Mister Rogers Neighborhood

At The Atlantic web site on June 8, 2018 Maxwell King had an article about his forthcoming book titled Mr. Rogers had a simple set of rules for talking to children. Nine rules for translating into ‘Freddish’ are:

1]  State the idea you wish to express as clearly as possible, and in terms preschoolers can understand.

2]  Rephrase in a positive manner.

3]  Rephrase the idea, bearing in mind that preschoolers cannot yet make subtle distinctions and need to be redirected to authorities they can trust.

4]  Rephrase your idea to eliminate all elements that could be considered prescriptive, directive, or instructive.

5]  Rephrase any element that suggests certainty.

6]  Rephrase your idea to eliminate any element that may not apply to all children.

7]  Add a simple motivational idea that gives preschoolers a reason to follow your advice.

8]  Rephrase your new statement, repeating the first step.

9]  Rephrase your idea a final time, relating it to some phrase of development a preschooler can understand.

For example: 

“It is dangerous to play in the street”

would become

“Your favorite grownups can tell you where it is safe to play. It is important to try to listen to them, and listening is an important part of growing.”

There also is a documentary film which was reviewed at Rolling Stone by Peter Travers in an article titled ‘Won’t You Be My Neighbor?’ is a vital doc that shares Mister Roger’s enduring vision. It also was discussed on NPR. You can watch a trailer for that film on YouTube.

On February 21, 2018 I had blogged about Remembering Fred Rogers and the Children’s Corner. An image of a trolley car was adapted from this one at the Library of Congress.

Just Say It! - a worthwhile Canadian documentary feature film on public speaking and fear

Earlier this year Luke King posted a video of his 73-minute film Just Say It! on YouTube. It’s worth watching, enjoyable, and free. The trailer is shown above. (WARNING: It contains animated Gumby vomiting).

Luke’s film follows some contestants in the Ontario public speaking contest for school children sponsored by the Canadian Legion. It also contains discussions about fear with some Canadian celebrities like Peter Mansbridge (anchorman for the CBC TV evening news, The National), former boxer George Chuvalo, Roger Abbott and Don Ferguson of CBC’s comedy program Royal Canadian Air Farce, and various other experts.  

Those contestants include 1st to 3rd graders and 10th to 12th graders. The cutest part is six year old Alex Maisonneuve’s speech about a Giant Potato. The 10th to 12th graders are quite polished and mostly serious. 

In Luke’s 2007 film the stakes are lower than in SPEAK!, the more recent American documentary about the Toastmasters World Championship, which I reviewed back in 2012. But, the 10th to 12th graders gave speeches with the same 5 to 7 minute time limits as for the Toastmasters championship.

One of my favorite parts is about Caroline Marcil, a nurse and singer from Quebec. Back in 2004 she  stumbled while trying to sing the Star Spangled Banner at an exhibition hockey game between Team Canada and the U.S. ABS News described what followed in Anthem Singer Redeems Herself.