Lassie and Ted

TV intertextuality: Ted Knight appeared as Mr. Ventrilo, a traveling entertainer, in a 1959 episode of Lassie. Mr. Ventrilo’s puppet dog reappeared on the hand of a ventriloquizing Ted Baxter in a 1973 episode of The Mary Tyler Moore Show.

But wait, there’s more. From the MTM episode “The Ted and Georgette Show” (January 22, 1977). Georgette has some bad news to tell:

Ted: “Nothing you could say to me could affect my performance out there.”

Georgette: “That’s not true. Remember the time Murray told you, just before the news, that Lassie was three different dogs? And you had to have ice pressed against the back of your neck before you could go out?”

In Mr. Ventrilo’s time, Lassie was indeed three dogs. From The New York Times:

There was the main Lassie, of course. But there was also the stand-in used in rehearsals, and a stunt double and the fighter dog (the dog who rough-housed with the main Lassie when the script called for a fight scene).

One more Lassie–MTM connection: Cloris Leachman, who played Phyllis Lindstrom, was the original Ruth Martin. Jon Provost, who played Timmy Martin: “Cloris did not feel particularly challenged by the role.”

Related reading
All OCA Lassie posts : MTM posts (Pinboard)

[An Oxford comma would make it clearer that the Times sentence is about four dogs, one of them not Lassie.]

From the Poetry Project

The Library of Congress has made available 420 recordings of poetry readings at the Poetry Project, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery. And that’s just what the Library calls “the first round.”

Learn how it happened: “Rare Book and Special Collections Division Digitizes 40 Years of Poetry Project Sound Recordings” (Poetry & Literature at the Library of Congress).

Masks

From The New York Times: “Does My Mask Protect Me if Nobody Else Is Wearing One?” The short answer: Yes, but make it a KF94, KN95, or N95.

The link uses the Times “gift” option. You can share the link with anyone, whether or not they have a Times subscription, whether or not they’ve hit the monthly limit for free reading. And yes, the Times lowercases if in headlines.

Banned books, free

For a limited time, the New York Public Library is making four often-banned books available to borrow in digital form anywhere in the United States: Laurie Halse Anderson’s Speak, Kacen Callender’s King and the Dragonflies, Jason Reynolds and Ibram X. Kendi’s Stamped: Racism, Antiracism, and You, and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

Details here.

Salinger in Ohio

[Click for a larger view.]

A genuine headline, not from a dream. You can find it here, as long as there’s no correction.

Related reading
All OCA Salinger posts (Pinboard)

Gratitude

An event was held at 6:00 a.m. to honor New York City EMTs, who attended on their own time. Mayor Eric Adams gave each EMT attending a cup of coffee and a donut, “as a measure of the city’s gratitude.”

Related reading
All OCA dream posts (Pinboard)

The Girl with the Pilates Mat

We are being cheated out of spring in downstate Illinois — with rain, wind, and freezing temperatures on too many days. As Elaine observes, we’ve had about four days of spring, two of which were in February. So in lieu of walking, we’re sometimes doing Pilates.

Elaine discovered Rachel, The Girl with the Pilates Mat, a certified Pilates instructor who began posting workout videos to YouTube during the pandemic. Rachel’s great — her channel now has more than twelve million views.

I highly recommend Pilates for strength and balance. And doing these exercises makes me feel taller — almost 5′9″.

Mary Miller, lying

Congresswoman Mary Miller (R, Illinois-15) is a proponent of The Big Lie. But she has lies in all sizes. Analisa Trofimuk of PolitiFact fact-checked one of them: “Rep. Mary Miller says White House is encouraging kids to take ‘castration’ drugs, undergo surgeries.”

I’ll add another: When I called Miller’s office earlier this month to ask why she had voted against a bipartisan resolution affirming support for NATO, the aide who answered the phone said that the resolution supported “nation-building,” which Miller opposes. As I told the aide, the resolution says no such thing, and I reminded him that Miller supports a president — oops, make that a defeated former president — who has repeatedly disparaged NATO. There’s the real reason for Miller’s “no” vote.

Related reading
All OCA Mary Miller posts (Pinboard)

Jane Lynch for Illinois

Jane Lynch has directed a series of TV commercials promoting Illinois tourism. You can find many (all?) of them at YouTube.

Crackpottery, early or late

The New Yorker has a long review by Lauren Michele Jackson of a first volume of excerpts from Alice Walker’s journals. The literary agency representing Walker has tweeted its approval of the review: “thoughtful and lovely.” The review turns the titles of Walker’s books into Amazon links, but there’s no link to Walker’s blog, mentioned in the next-to-last paragraph:

The journal entries selected for Gathering Blossoms Under Fire conclude eight days into the year 2000, but Walker has maintained a blog since 2008. Her posts are more hortatory than her journal entries, but not necessarily more disciplined. In 2012, she wrote her first post on David Icke, whose “freedom of mind,” she writes, “reminds me very much of Malcolm X.” She recommended a video for those who “haven’t been exposed to his thinking.” Icke’s thinking includes the theory that mankind has unwittingly been ruled by an intergalactic race of reptilians since antiquity. In an interview four years ago for the Times Book Review, Walker praised Icke’s 1995 book, And the Truth Shall Set You Free, which promotes anti-Semitic crackpottery about who runs the world. Walker, a proper boomer, seems also to have been diving deep into the brackish waters of YouTube.

Is this a late-life aberration, or can the tropism be traced to a deeper angst that was missed in its time?

One might ask: does it matter? Anti-Semitism, early or late, is anti-Semitism. Crackpottery, early or late, is crackpottery.

Jackson almost dodges her own question, noting that the journal excerpts reveal “no sinister taproot” but that Walker, “having grown up in a place where conspiracies, racial and sexual, were daily realities to be reckoned with,” “may have developed a belated hunger for more.” “Belated hunger” sounds to me like a polite rephrasing of “late-life aberration.”

How aberrant? Well, a Walker post from 2015 embeds an episode of InfoWars in which Alex Jones interviewed David Icke. Walker’s caption:

I like these two because they’re real, and sometimes Alex Jones is a bit crazy; many Aquarians are. Icke only appears crazy to people who don’t appreciate the stubbornness required when one is called to a duty it is impossible to evade.

Those crazy Aquarians! Sometimes they even file for bankruptcy.

[In a 2018 New York Times “By the Book” feature, Walker praised David Icke: “In Icke’s books there is the whole of existence, on this planet and several others, to think about. A curious person’s dream come true.” Much comment followed. I suspect that the notoriety of the “By the Book” feature, which brought Walker’s conspiracy-thought to widespread attention, made Icke an unavoidable topic in the New Yorker review. Here is a 2013 commentary on Walker’s conspiracy-thought from J. J. Phillips, who is far franker than the New Yorker reviewer: “Go Ask Alice Walker” (The Berkeley Daily Planet ). This link will take you to “By the Book” and follow-up reporting from the Times. Here is some background from Vox. And here is a recent brief retrospective from The Atlantic.]