Pat Blythe – Where do we go from here? ……and music

Throughout the past two years we’ve all tried to predict, guess, envisage, calculate, even hope what the future of music will be, once we are no longer struggling and fighting this global pandemic. We have been living in a world that seems surreal…..like a bad dream you wish you could wake up from, just by rubbing your eyes. That anything like this could happen in the 21^st century seems rather absurd and unbelievable. Thing is…..it did. We are not impervious, but we are arrogant in thinking that we are. Lately, events have proven that we still have a long way to go. There remains, in all parts of the world, a whole level of uneducated obtuseness that exists even after we’ve heard from Archimedes, Aristotle, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Einstein, Stephen Hawking and their ilk. Baby…..we have a looooong way to go.

Darrell Vickers – I’ve Seen You’re Fired and I’ve Seen Rain

On balance, being a comedy writer is about as exciting as picking out a good denture cream for your great aunt at the local Albertsons. It consists of countless hours spent sitting alone in a room (much like we all did at our senior prom) and staring at a screen as white as Edgar Winter’s ass. No adoring crowds erupt into deafening acts of rhapsodic approbation, when we triumphantly tap out, “The End” on well-worn keyboards.

Darrell Vickers – Thicke of the Night Part III – Dark Fantasy

Very few enterprises begin their days with as much jocundity and hubris as Thicke of the Night at its inchoation. Fred Silverman’s latest blockbuster proclaimed itself to be a new and bold spring morning that would lead moribund late-night entertainment out of its dark and dreary winter. The talk show format had become stale and uninteresting. A pallid and tiresome visitor in the sexless bedrooms of America.

Doug Thompson:“I’M AS MAD AS HELL AND I’M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!”

Anyone who knows their movie history, knows that rant comes from Peter Finch’s newscaster/commentator character Howard Beale in the movie “Network”.  Credit where credit is due.  Those words actually were written by the author of “Network”, Paddy Chayefsky.  Where am I going with this you may well ask?  Well, see I LOVE A GOOD RANT!  And that “Network” rant is one of the very best.  There are plenty more out there.  Fox News commentator Bill O’Reilly trying to record a quick promo and not having the time…or Orson Welles losing his patience with a British director on a series of TV voice overs.

Darrel Vickers:The Long and the Short of It

Andrew and I have had the honor of working for three legendary geniuses during our higgledy-piggledy writing career.  One was Johnny Carson.  The second was George Carlin.  This is the story of the third.

The Beginning….

Once upon a time, two young and impoverished Canadian writers were sitting in a cramped, cockroach infested apartment in Van Nuys (The Oshawa of L.A.) with no prospects and virtually no hope.  They had bravely ventured down to this mystical land of tinsel and broken dreams a scant six months earlier and were now facing the ominous fate of having to go back to Oshawa (the Oshawa of Oshawa)…and it was all their own fault!

Doug Thompson: WHAT, IS IT NEW YEARS ALREADY?

John Lennon said it best in one of my all time favourite songs of his: “So this is Christmas and what have you done.  Another year over, a new one just begun.”  I do so wish that Lennon was still here to continue with his amazing talent.  But some self-centered asshole with a hand gun and a diseased brain (or a mind-controlled one, for all of you conspiracy buffs) silenced that legendary voice forever 33 years ago.