Whimsy: October 2006 Archives

Tiny Tim sings his signature tune on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In in 1968, as Dick Martin looks on in awe, or something like it:

By the way, that was Judy Carnes taking away Tiny Tim's cape at the beginning of the clip, and Goldie Hawn walking off with him at the end.

Laugh-In was my favorite prime-time show back then. Although much of the humor sailed over my five-year-old head, it was my introduction to both topical satire and zany madcap humor, which developed into an appreciation for Mad magazine, Monty Python's Flying Circus, Saturday Night Live, and the comic strip Pogo.

(Via Dawn Eden, who says she is "determined to make the most of YouTube's vintage treasures before the inevitable copyright crackdown." If you ever want to save a video from YouTube or another video-sharing service for posterity, KeepVid takes the video's URL and turns it into a link for downloading the Flash video (.flv). [There are ways to do this manually if you have the patience to wade through HTML source code.] The very versatile open-source viewer VideoLAN has built-in Flash video playback capability and is available for Windows, Mac OS X, and various flavors of Linux.)

RELATED: tvhistory.tv has scans of the prime-time schedule grids for the 1960s (back when all the networks premiered shows in the fall and mid-season changes were unusual).

Tonight and Saturday night at 10 p.m., the Circle Cinema in Whittier Square, Admiral & Lewis, will show the classic zombie thriller, "Night of the Living Dead," followed by a mystery zombie film. Zombie Tom would be pleased, I'm sure.

Also coming up on the Circle Cinema calendar, they'll be showing what may be the worst movie of all time, Ed Wood's "Plan 9 from Outer Space" as the midnight movie on Friday, November 17th and Saturday, November 18th. It truly is so bad that it's good.

Meanwhile, if you'd like to see films that are more uplifting and positive (but more spooky than usual this month) and which feature little to no brain-eating, check out this Saturday night's monthly screening of the Altarnet Film Society at Agora Coffeehouse, 7:30 p.m. in the Fontana Shopping Center, 51st & Memorial.

Not quite as tough as the previous puzzle, this one, generated at random by the Sudoku program I have on my PDA, can be solved using seven basic strategies.

6 1	6 5   2	2 6 8 5 4
6 5 1	1 6 4 9	9 7 6
6 9 1 3 2	3   4 7	7 1

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Sudoku Solver, with the puzzle above already loaded, which will step you through to the solution.

This is the toughest Sudoku puzzle I've come across yet. It was generated at random by the excellent Sudoku program I have on my PDA. Solving it -- as opposed to making guesses and backtracking when the guess turns out wrong -- required some advanced techniques I had yet to learn. See how you do with it.

8 4 3	3 4	3 9 4 1 6
9 2 5	9 1 2 3	5 4 3
6 9 4 2 5	5 8	1 9 6

UPDATE: Here's a link to the Sudoku Solver, with the puzzle above already loaded, so you can not only see the solution, but how the puzzle can be solved.

This link will show the puzzle completely solved.

One of the "top sellers" at t-shirthumor.com. Found at White Knuckled Wanderer.

(That same blogger, Bill McNeal has an interesting item about how Fairfax County, Virginia, back in the '60s, screwed up their chance to benefit by the extension of the Washington Metro, and they're screwing it up again. By putting an elevated transit line down the middle of the freeway, they made it impossible to create dense development around the transit stops, which means the Metro line does less than it could to alleviate traffic problems.)