BruceH

I only knew him from the rather annoying sausage commercials which my contemporaries and I grew up making fun of.

Happy Birthday and best wishes. :party:

"It was as if---"

Yes. I just caught it last night. What's next for our heroes, I wonder?

Guess I'll catch it on the damn DVD's.

Clarke isn't particularly depressing. (And then there's P.G. Wodehouse.)

British SF books in general seem to have incredibly boring covers, at least from what I've seen. I wonder why that is?

My favorite Sinatra ballad album is still In the Wee Small Hours.

It's a real classic for sure! And remarkably prescient about the advertisement industry culture! And the Supreme Court is trying it's best to make the book come completely true. I must say, though, when it comes to SF, Penguin has a real thing for dull, drab, rather ugly, and utterly boring covers.

I'll be looking.

Happy Birthday!! :party: We're both now staring at 50...but still, Happy Birthday!!!!!

Snot true! (Well, yeah.)

Yeah, you'd think so.

Matthew, in that #3 low pass you mentioned, I thought the guy standing was going to lose his head for sure. Yikes. That took guts (or stupidity) to just stand there like that.

What are some of the stories in this anthology? Amazon won't tell me a thing. John D Clark, "Minus Planet" (1937) Fritz Leiber, "Yesterday House" (1952) Larry Niven, "Neutron Star" (1966) Lester del Rey, "The Faithful" (1938) Don Wilcox, "The Voyage That Lasted 600 Years" (1940) - that's as far as I've got! Gee, the only one of those I'm familiar with is "Neutron Star." How do you shape up with the rest? (The last is the only one I've come across before.) Edgar Allan Poe, "Cosmic Disaster" (1839) Murray Leinster, "A Logic Named Joe" (1946) Fitz-James O'Brien, "What Was It?" (1859) and "The Diamond Lens" (1858) Richard Matheson, "The Test" (1954) Isaac Asimov, "Reason" (1941) H G Wells, "The Land Ironclads" (1903) I've read the Leinster, Asimov, and Wells stories. None too thrilled with any of them, although as I recall "Reason" was part of the I, Robot collection, which means I read it several times growing up.

I've long thought of the The Dick Van Dyke show as one of the best sitcoms of all time. People love to harsh my buzz by saying, "I never liked the kid," or some such. Yeah. Well, no show is perfect I guess... But dang if it wasn't pretty damn awesome.

Damn. He all but came back from the dead, career-wise. RIP

Spain?

Indeed. And a former hobo to boot.

Exactly. I always took it about the same way I took all those stories of kids jumping off their parents roof with a home-made cape, trying to emulate Superman.

I agree. And I've got to give the guy credit: According to one obit, while he was helping out Nixon with an anti-drug campaign, Linkletter came to the conclusion that marijuana was not all that harmful, and shouldn't be included on any list of "hard" drugs. Now there's an example of thinking for oneself.

I remember practically growing up with that story about Art Linkletter's daughter throwing herself out of a building because of acid. I also remember thinking it sounded like an urban-legend, bogeyman type of story, to scare kids away from LSD. Whatever the truth that lay at the bottom of it, the thing took on those characteristics.

You look at that clip that Jim posted and it's clear Linkletter wasn't suffering from Alzheimer's. I had no idea he spent some time during the Depression as a hobo.

I too was under the vague impression that he had left us some time ago. What a run he had. RIP

"I know you didn't pull the trigger son; but two people are dead and y---"