Sit And Wine

 Recently, my wife and I visited a full-service car wash.  While waiting for the vacuuming crew to clean the interior of the vehicle, we ended up sitting in these chairs made from wine barrels.  I guess if you sit in them long enough, you age well.

 

The Best Part About Having A Full-Face CPAP Mask:

You can have all the bed covers over your head and still breathe well.

The Red Geranium

This would be Lake Geneva’s Red Geranium restaurant.  It once was on the corner of Highway 50 and Edwards Boulevard, just west of Highway 12 in Lake Geneva.  That was, however, until Walgreens chose to put a new pharmacy at that corner…which led the Red Geranium to physically move its building to the east of its original location to make way for the new Walgreens.  Ever since the move, the Red Geranium just isn’t the same place that it used to be.

Tattletale Green

For the first time in a very long time, I am watching an over-the-air television broadcast that is not an NFL football game.  That’s because one of the digital sub-channels of WPWR-TV in Chicago is offering a new channel called Buzzr, which is an all-game show channel, with its core programming being the classic Mark Goodson-Bill Todman game shows of the 1970’s.  (The channel was put together by the production company that purchased the Goodson-Todman titles, Freemantle Media…the company that has also produced “American Idol”)  http://buzzrplay.com/

I had been waiting for this channel to debut on local TV for months now, and I found it last night when they were airing an episode of the Goodson-Todman classic “Tattletales”, hosted by Bert Convy.  I am thinking that Buzzr debuted on Monday of this week, because the 1974 debut episode that I posted here has the three same celebrity couples that were on the program last night (Tuesday 6/24) and again tonight (Wednesday 6/25) are on this debut episode (those couples being Jerry Stiller and Anne Meara, Dick Gauthier and Barbara Stuart, and Bobby Van and Elaine Joyce).  I was not aware, as well, that “Tattletales” started with the format you see in this video, with one of the celebrity spouses buzzing in to answer questions that Bert Convy asks, and the off-stage spouses buzzing in to match the answers.  The only format that I remembered was completely related to the “Tattletale Quickies” questions that are implemented in the first format of the game shown here.

When I discovered that Buzzr was added to our household over-the-air buffet table, the first show I saw last night was “Tattletales”…and it was the first time that I ever saw that program in color.  When I was watching “Tattletales” weekday afternoons during the summer after “Match Game ‘7X” at 3pm CT, I was watching the program on a black-and-white Philco TV.  When I saw “Tattletales” in color for the first time last night (and 41 years after the original run of the episode), the first thing that absolutely overwhelmed me was the loud Kelly green  that the set was.  It took me back to the absolute first time that I ever saw color TV; that was in the late 1960’s, when our family went to Burlington Memorial Hospital in Burlington, WI to visit my ailing grandmother.  The lobby of the hospital had a waiting area where my brother and sister and I waited.  Overlooking the lobby was a color TV showing another Goodson-Todman game show classic, “To Tell The Truth”, during its weekday daytime run on CBS.  I still remember the marvel of seeing the color in host Bud Collyer’s bowtie, and seeing panelist Kitty Carlisle in tones unusual for a boy who only saw these people in tones of what computers now call grayscale.  That image, burned in my memory for 45-or-so years, was revisited last night while seeing that garish green “Tattletales” set for the first time…demonstrating, in reverse of the famous tune from “All That Jazz”, that, in Ted’s world, everything new is old again.

The Great Clark Weber

Last week, an honor that was long overdue was given to a man who, in part, introduced me to what would become the career choice I have exercised (and one that I think sometimes should have been exorcised) for decades now.  It was as a preschooler, kindergartner and first grader that I heard the work of the great disc jockeys of WLS Radio in Chicago.  One of them was a voice that resonated through our farmhouse and barn weekday mornings during most of my grade school years.  That voice was the great Clark Weber.  Last week, on June 16, Clark Weber was inducted into the Illinois Broadcasters Association Hall of Fame.

Clark Weber was wonderful as an on-air talent playing the rock of the ’60’s and early ’70’s, as a talk show host, voicing his own syndicated feature called “A Senior Moment”, and as a great storyteller and entertainer at a live event he presented at a library in Vernon Hills, Illinois.  Clark Weber was a genial and kind man when I first had an opportunity to meet him face-to-face for the first time after admiring his work for 40 years.  He was a giving man, allowing me to twice interview him for radio programs that I hosted…both interviews, by the way, helping to earn awards of excellence from the Wisconsin Broadcasters Association.

Clark Weber officially retired from all of his work pursuits in May of this year.  A lot of people like me who are working in radio I know want to thank him for the contribution and inspiration that he provided to our lives and careers.  I am eternally grateful to have offered him my thanks for that personally, and I wish Mr. Weber nothing but happiness and health in his retirement.

Prior to Mr. Weber’s induction into the IBA Hall of Fame, longtime Chicago radio personality Rich Renik (who I remember from his days when Chicago’s WMAQ was a country radio station) put together a video tribute to honor and salute the career of Clark Weber.  That video is featured above this passage.

Do Not Be Afraid

This past Sunday (6/21/15…Father’s Day in America), the Gospel reading for Catholic Masses dealt with dealing with fear (Mark 4:35-41).  Following the Gospel reading, the celebrant of the Mass mentioned during his homily that when it comes to “fear not” or “do not be afraid” mentions in the Bible, there are 365 of them.  My wife, of course, mentioned that there was one for every day of the year.  I replied that there’s one for every day of the year except leap years; and that one day that is missed would be the day that the United States chooses the one who will serve as its president.  On that day, be afraid.  Be very afraid.

Welcome To The Pit

Here you will find random thoughts from a bottomless pit of useless information.  I was going to give this site that name, but a Canadian gal preceded me in naming her blog that.  Thus, this is The Bottomless Pit Of Inconsequential Information.  I hope you enjoy the forthcoming content, be it inconsequential or useless or whatever.