You're browing the archives for the month of September 2008
I actually interviewed Poehler again a few years later, for a short article for the Rolling Stone “Hot Issue” in the fall of 2002 as she entered her second season of Saturday Night Live. I was a little bummed after I got off the phone with her: surprisingly, she hadn’t been particularly funny or quotable. […]
You may have heard that Amy Poehler is leaving Saturday Night Live in November to, in order, have a baby with husband Will Arnett and star in a new NBC sitcom created by Greg Daniels of The Office. (There are conflicting reports, but apparently it’s not an actual Office spinoff.) Just about exactly ten years […]
posted 17 September 2008 in Archives, Articles. no comments yet
Much craziness this morning at Rule Forty-two World Headquarters, where we’re migrating all our files to our new computer and fighting off a nasty virus with nothing much more than hand-waving. So the next installment of the 1988 countdown will have to wait until Thursday. Until then, the final installment of my series of condensed […]
posted 16 September 2008 in Tasty Bits. 6 comments
I decided to empty out my notebook of all the past House-related stories I’ve written, and despite complaints last week from commenter “James” that Olivia Wilde is a blight both upon the show and the American potato crop, I’m proceeding with a short profile I wrote on her last year, still timely given that she […]
posted 15 September 2008 in Archives, Articles. 5 comments
A few more pictures from Burning Man and then I’ll be done for a while (although I might bring some others out as counterprogramming to the Christmas season later in the year–we’ll see). I’m hoping to return to the flipwalks next week. The Burning Man festival is different things to different people, but I think […]
posted 12 September 2008 in Photos. no comments yet
An animated MTV promo: this one’s got African-style masks in a color palette of black, white, orange, and yellow–and lots of drumming and hollering on the soundtrack. It’s just ten seconds long, but if you nodded off during the Icehouse video, it wakes you up. The “Bad to the Bone” riff announces another ad for […]
posted 11 September 2008 in 1988. 3 comments
Last year, House did something unusual for a hit TV show entering its fifth season: the creators looked at its weaknesses and did something about them. The medical-mystery scripts were still witty but had become painfully predictable (three wrong diagnoses from Dr. House every week each before he figured out what was going on). So […]
posted 10 September 2008 in Archives, Articles. 5 comments
Here’s what I remembered about “Electric Blue” twenty years later: 1. It was cowritten by John Oates of Hall and Oates, presumably in an effort to keep up with Daryl Hall’s songwriting credits; Hall had a solo hit with “Dreamtime” in 1986. (Actually, a fair number of Hall and Oates’ song catalog was written by […]
posted 9 September 2008 in 1988. 7 comments
Sometime around 1999, possibly suffering from a case of pre-millennium tension, I got fascinated by futurism. I ended up collecting lots of examples of predictions that were supposed to have flowered by 2000, from cyborgs to vitamin-fortified alcohol to gunfights between astronauts in outer space. You can read the resulting article here; it starts with […]
posted 8 September 2008 in Archives, Articles, Unpublished. 2 comments
I brought along my camera to Burning Man this year, but I don’t like taking too many pictures while I’m there; I feel like it puts me in the mindset of being an observer rather than a participant. But one morning, I went for a long bike ride and took a few pictures on the […]
