Keener 13

Back before the internet and on-demand video, back before cable brought us CNN and MTV, we watched television over the air. As I was working on today’s digital visit with you all, I brought up Detroit Free Press columnist,  BetteLou Peterson’s TV article from today in 1970. Here’s a real trip back in time. What were Detroiters watching?

On Monday night, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In was at the height of its popularity, the most popular program in town. Mod Squad owned Tuesday nights. On Wednesday the competition between The Virginian, Glen Campbell, and the Sally Field’s Flying Nun was fierce. Family Affair and Daniel Boone were the winners on Thursday night. Ranch opera programming was also popular on Friday night, with High Chaparral beating the Brady Bunch. Jackie Gleason was still on the air in 1970 and in the front spot on Saturday nights with My Three Sons, and Lawrence Welk trailing. The Wonderful World of Disney was still in the lead on Sunday night with The FBI close behind.

With three networks still dominating our viewing, Fred Silverman’s concept of the “least objectionable alternative” was in full bloom. It’s still a valid concept today. Think about how you manage your Netflix queue. But those of us who were growing up back then still, occasionally, look back wistfully on the days when huge audiences turned to our TV sets to be entertained, en mas. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/5” →

50 years ago today, the front page of the Detroit Free Press carried a UPI story detailing the hijacking of Eastern Airlines Flight 7. It turned out that Candid Camera host Alan Funt, his wife, and his two youngest children boarded the flight in Newark heading to Miami. The plane never made it. Two men hijacked brandished weapons and demanded passage to Cuba. Some of the passengers, having spotted Funt, thought the whole thing was a Candid Camera stunt.

We’ll learn soon if Super Bowl 2019 was the snoozer I thought it was. They lost me during the boring Maroon Five halftime show. On the flipside, Gladys Knight‘s rendition of the National Anthem (Video) was one of the best. Netflix may have lost 32% of their typical audience during the first half, but they gained at least one set of eyeballs after: Mine. If you slept through any of the game, we’ve got all the commercials, HERE.

The best TV of the day was the poignant interview CBS Sunday Morning did with Linda Ronstadt (Video). She is still just as feisty and funny as always and I was glad to see that she is repurposing some unseen live show content for a new album release. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/4” →

1939 was a memorable year for classic films. Take a look at the list of top grossers and see how many you’ve seen. It was the height of the popularity and power of the studio system. Iconic stars were being born and burnished. The first “franchise” films were on the runway. TV was still a decade away from disrupting the universe. People went to their local theaters weekly to escape the lingering Depression, the spectre of war and the challenges of day-to-day life.

Today, we have more ways to consume multimedia content than ever before. I own many of the films on the list at left, some of which are also in circulation on Netflix, Amazon Prime and linear channels like Turner Classic Movies.

Seattle’s Cinerama Theater does a booming holiday business, showing classics like “Christmas Story”, “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and “Love Actually”. More and more venues are seeing the potential value of screening the classics. Continue reading “Old Movies on the Big Screen” →

50 years ago today, all seats were 75 cents at Detroit’s suburban theaters for a showing of “Thunderbirds are Go“. The 1966 British science-fiction adventure film was based on the 60’s TV series Thunderbirds,  starring marionette puppets. The plot focused on the futuristic spacecraft Zero-X and its manned mission to Mars. When Zero-X suffers a mechanical failure during re-entry, it is up to International Rescue, with the aid of the Thunderbird machines, to save the astronauts on board before the spacecraft is obliterated in a crash landing.

This January 16th article in the New Yorker features a conversation with Avi Loeb, the chair of Harvard’s astronomy department, who talks about the appearance of an unexplained object, speeding by us in space. Conversations about UFOs have been happening since the humanity first documented science. In America, it was the atomic age that sparked popular interest in the phoenominon.

The earliest known film about aliens was “Aelita“, a Russian made silent in 1924 and edited for American audiences as “Revolt of the Robots”. 1953’s telling of H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds”, the first starring role for Gene Barry with Anne Robinson as the love interest gained additional traction when it’s television distribution happened in parallel with the sales boom in color TV sets. Many like it followed, some really good, like Robert Wise’s “The Day The Earth Stood Still” and many more really bad, as noted on this exhaustive Wikipedia list.

During my own college years, we watched “2001 – A Space Odyssey” more than once, sometimes in altered states of consciousness. Later, Stephen Spielberg’s “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” & “E.T. The Extraterrestrial” awakened a new generation to the genre. With the launch of the Star Wars franchise, “Space Opera” became a well worn word in the Hollywood lexicon. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 2/1” →

50 Years Ago Today: Daylight Savings Time was headed for its second defeat in Michigan. With 55 Upper Peninsula Precincts yet to be tallied, the measure was failing by a 500 vote margin. Proponents asked for a recount after the proposal was defeated by 1,501 votes. In 1967, the Michigan Legislature adopted a statute, Act 6 of the Public Acts of 1967, exempting the state from the observance of DST. The exemption statute was submitted to the voters at the General Election held in November 1968, and, in a close vote, the exemption statute was sustained. Michigan did not observe DST from 1969 through 1972. Hence the classic CKLW time checks, “It’s 4:30 in Detroit and 5:30 in Windsor!” In November 1972, an initiative measure, repealing the exemption statute, was approved by voters. Michigan has observed Daylight Time ever since.

Up Front: What makes something go viral? We’ve all been talking about how cold it is up north. Yesterday, my buddy, Fred Jacobs had enough. Some would consider his tweet NSFW, or Not Safe for Work. But it instantly generated a ton of positive engagement. Interestingly, his friends in other southern markets asked him things like, “Can you include us Texas A$$wipes, too?” Fred told me later that the ultimate irony was that he was sitting in a Florida coffee shop when he tweeted it. I was on my treadmill up the way in Jacksonville, laughing out loud.

What constitutes engaging content? Naturally the Twitter Business Unit has some advice. Mining other content (retweet with your own context added to it), using visual assets, hashtags and referencing other Twitter handles are all part of Social Media 101. Social Pilot adds some sauce to the goose by suggesting that you engage influencers and popular brands active on the platform, always including a call to action and sharing a weblink. They also touch on selective use of humor, which is at the center of Fred’s tweet. Best in class companies engage super connector firms like Izea to help them amplify their messaging. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/31” →

50 Years Ago Today, Detroit was feeling the effects of a 1965 German Measles epidemic. Mothers who developed Rubella while pregnant, many without knowing it, leading to an increase in birth defects. 5 years later, the number of children in need of special services due to hearing loss more than doubled in the Motor City. A vaccine was not developed until 1971 when Maurice Hilleman invented the MMR vaccine measles, mumps and rubella in a single shot followed by a booster.

When Talk Radio was truly entertainment. A generation has now grown up listening to the echo chamber of political opinion that passes for “talk radio” these days. But once upon a time, talk radio was enlightening, entertaining and attracted loyal followers in every market where it aired. Joe Pyne, John Nebel, Jean Shepherd, and Jerry Williams were among the first to explore the medium in the 1950s. KMOX, 1120 AM in St. Louis, Missouri, and KABC, 790 AM in Los Angeles— both claim to be the first to adopt an all-talk show format in 1960.

If you grew up in Boston, you stayed up with WBZ’s Larry Glick. In Miami, Larry King‘s act attracted the attention of the Mutual Broadcasting System where his show was broadcast from coast to coast. Many of my generation remember late nights listening to Larry interview the nation’s most notable personalities, interspersed with personal stories (Click the links to hear his classic Carvel Ice Cream and Incorrigibles tales) and inside radio bits that those of us who were chasing broadcasting careers totally understood. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/30” →

50 Years Ago Today: You could buy an RCA 20′ Lowboy console color TV for $359.00  at Highland Appliance. By the 1966-67 season, all three major US networks had converted their prime time schedules to color and a majority of sets sold in ’69 were color. Interestingly, ABC and CBS didn’t convert their daytime broadcasts until later. Wonder what $359 would cost in todays dollars? Roughly $2440.00.

We are getting to the age where more and more of our friends are becoming “bionic”. Conversations among us baby boomers inevitably include organ recitals about what hurts and what we’re doing about it. The FDA’s Scott Gottlieb wrote that “2018 was a record year of approvals of novel medical devices for our agency; supported by new policies, processes and programs we’ve implemented over recent years to help efficiently promote safe and effective innovation in medical device development.” The debate about quantity vs quality is something those of us who have said goodbye to aging parents wrestle with. Many have bodies that are outlasting their cognitive capabilities. With an Alzheimers vaccine inching closer to reality, are our lifespans still increasing?  Isaac Azimov wrote about what the world would be like if we counted our time on this mortal coil in decades instead of years. How long will we live in 2069? Here’s some speculation. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/29” →

50 Years Ago Today, Chrysler announced 32,000 layoffs at 6 of its 8 assembly plants due to slower than anticipated sales. The 1969 model year started off at a brisk sales pace, but dealers reported a 53 days supply of inventory as the calendar year began. Company president Virgil E. Boyd said Chrysler expected to sell as many cars in the 1969 model year as they had in 1968, 8.6 million units.

With a 50th anniversary celebration of the 1969 Woodstock Music and Art Fair set for the original upstate New York venue, we thought we’d take a look at two copycat events. One in Indiana was a disaster. Another in Michigan at a place called “Goose Lake” came off without many hitches, but the governor banned future events like it.

Know anyone who is trying to get into college?  The Wall Street Journal Reports that many universities, “are quietly tracking prospective students’ online interaction with the schools…” including how quickly they open email and whether they click links. “Enrollment officers at institutions including Seton Hall University, Quinnipiac University and Dickinson College know down to the second when prospective students opened an email from the school [and] how long they spent reading it.” Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/28” →

In the news on January 23, 1969: Ocala, FL (AP) – An itinerant male hairdresser was jailed in Ocala, Florida, after police said he staged an Aretha Franklin show by forcing a penniless Virginia singer to pose on stage as the $20,000 a week soul singer. Lavell Hardy, ’24, of New York was booked into Marion County Jail under $500 bond on false advertising charges after he bought radio ads and plastered Ocala with posters advertising “The Aretha Franklin Review” for Thursday night at hall here. The girl, Vickie James, 26, protective custody. Investigator Martin Stephens said Miss James and Hardy staged a show for 1,000 persons at $5.50 each last Saturday night at the High Hat Club in Fort Myers, the first of nine appearances arranged by Hardy. Prosecutor C. G. Musleh said police were kept by agents for Miss Franklin after the Fort Meyers show. Musleh said party brought Ms. Jones to Florida from her home in Petersburg, VA., promising to get her in to a show with Miss Franklin, currently writing high in pop music circles as “Soul Sister No. 1”.

Quick Takes:

We often forget that Mark Hamill had many TV appearances before his Star Wars fame. Our video link takes you to his title card in the series “Eight is Enough” A versatile guy and a great actor.

Baseball is the ultimate game of statistics. Here’s one surprising data point. In its entire history, nobody has made the Hall of Fame unanimously on the first ballot, until now.

As we process Oscar nominations today, a useful vid about how accurate our favorite film rating site, Rotten Tonatoes really is. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/23” →

January 22, 1969: William G. Milliken puts his hand on a borrowed bible at the State Capitol takes the oath of office as Michigan’s 44th governor. He promises “public order, social justice” and will focus on welfare improvements, educational reform and pollution control. The former Lieutenant Governor inherits a $50 million dollar budget deficit.

What we’re talking about:

Comedian Robert Klein is touring again. He came through our town on Sunday and was just as funny as he was when I first saw him in… 1974. We were looking around the venue and commenting on “how many old people are here”. Then I realized that this guy has been touring almost nonstop for 44 years. His material has evolved to suit his aging audience. But it still works.

Marie Kondo. The Netflix phenomenon is inspiring people to pick up stuff they don’t use “thank it and throw it away”. My wife is folding things differently & throwing stuff out. This is good!

Conan O’Brien is returning to TBS tonight with a new, shorter format and no live band. He’s podcasting too. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/22” →

A scan from the newspaper on this date in 1969. Plan to visit your Detroit Area Sears stores this week to see a demonstration of the Roberts line of reel to reel recorders, including the 778C, which can transfer your 3 3/4 inch per second 8 track tapes with ease!

It’s a tale right out of the Twilight Zone. The Internet increasingly controls everything.. including what goes on inside our heads. For the companies behind the apps we use, it’s all about the data. For our enemies, it is something to be weaponized. There’s a lot of Twitter talk today about these items.

A frightening story in the Wall Street Journal, details how Russian hackers are infiltrating the nation’s power grid. It’s a social engineering tale that Kevin Mitnick could have thought up. And it’s working. Nearly half of the country is vulnerable.

We’ve written before about how games like the super popular Fortnite can have a negative impact on our kids.

Is the data we share about our lives having a detrimental impact on our state of mind? Our cars share “telematic” info about how we drive, which may ultimately determine our insurance rates. Companies track our buying & browsing habits and serve us ads based on what we look at. Fitbits record our every move, inspiring some of us to take those extra steps to hit a goal. And the new Apple Watch can even track our heart health with an electrocardiogram app. This report says it’s all starting to get to us.  On a related note: Is “Big Brother” watching your Tweet Stream? The ACLU sues the FBI to find out. And how private is Google’s “ingocnito mode”? Not very. Even search firms who don’t track you warn that you have to do more to protect your internet privacy.

One last thing: Ever wonder what’s really behind Facebook’s “10 Year Challenge” then-and-now photo thing? Gathering more accurate facial recognition data. Continue reading “Today in Keenerland 1/21” →