Although most of them don’t realize it, fans of Buffalo Bob, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Bart Simpson and ‘60s beach movies are mourning the death of Ed Kean, the original writer for The Howdy Doody Show.
The coining of “Kowabunga” is generally misattributed by generations of Americans too young to qualify for regular colonoscopies. However, a contributor to the online Urban Dictionary has it right:
This was a term used by Chief Thunderthud on the Howdy Doody show in the fifties. It was picked up by surfers in southern California in the late fifties, then skateboarders. Not Swahili, not Hawaiian, not Mutant Ninja Turtles - Howdy Doody.
Kean scripted the seminal TV kiddie show from 1947 to 1954, and is credited with writing its beloved but earwig-like theme song, “It’s Howdy Doody Time.”
RIP Ed. Thanks for the cultural continuity, and praise God you weren’t Bozo.
PS: Please use this thread to cast your nomination for the Teabagger or Wingnut politician most deserving of the appellation “Chief Thunderthud.”
In addition to enabling you to “visit” your drunken, abusive father without having to worry that you’ll accidentally kill him in a blind rage after he repeatedly burns you with a lit cigarette whilst shouting “Whoreson! Whoreson!” and waving a framed photo of your fabulously good-looking, successful older brother who died pushing you out of the path of a runaway moving van, the “Telenoid R1” robot opens up a vast new frontier of entertainment opportunities, including:
♦ Totally turning the tables on your kid’s “Chucky” doll.
♦ Positioning the Telenoid in a TV Chair at the bus station and having it offer strangers cash for their body parts.
♦ Stuffing it in the trunk of a burning car, then YouTubing the craziness when the EMS guys get there.
♦ Shipping it to your ex-fiancée in a big red Valentine’s Day box, then “drunk-calling” her with it the moment she opens the lid.
♦ Getting epically baked on Christmas Eve and substituting the Telenoid for the life-size Baby Jesus in an outdoor Nativity display.
♦ Taking the Telenoid with you to an IRS audit, and introducing it as your CPA.
♦ Convincing your senile Nana that you’re visiting her on her birthday, while you’re actually on the other side of town cleaning out her Safe Deposit Box using a forged Power-of-Attorney.
♦ Getting excused from jury duty by claiming you’re a giant mutant fetus whose rights and obligations as a citizen aren’t explicitly enumerated in the Constitution.
The Telenoid R1 units are not yet available for purchase, although I would wager they’re pretty easy to kidnap.
But God Bless William Schallert, who—along with James Hong, David Opatoshu, Vito Scotti and a dozen or so reliable utility actors—populated the entirety of broadcast TV in the ‘60s and ‘70s.
Pro-tip: When using a long running and insanely popular entertainment franchise as the basis for your cruelly overextended metaphor, it is important to know the good guys from the bad guys.
Exhibit A: Yesterday’s press release from Mark Williams’ TPE, courtesy of Stephen1947. It was written by one of Williams’ duly deputized TeaBaggers. This means the typos don’t leap out and mug you and it doesn’t read like an M.C. Escher drawing converted to text. However, this does mean there is nothing to distract you from the high-pitched whine:
This is probably the best 10 minutes on Tesla available on the Web, albeit necessarily sketchy in its content and annoyingly reverential in tone. I mean, I think we’re all pretty clear that the guy was a god, and that Edison, Westinghouse, Morgan and Marconi were total punks.
On a lighter note, here’s some fun, stupid shit you can do with Tesla Technology that won’t result in a second Tunguska Blast.
This got lost going into the holiday, even though a lot of people covered it, including TPM and Olbermann. If you missed it, please put your hands where she can see them and welcome “Machine Gun” Pamela Gorman:
While Gorman appears to be a decent, feature-lite, budget-priced Palin knockoff for undemanding voters with poor distance vision, she exhibits the same sort of “rushed-prototype” OS/hardware mismatches that notoriously plagued OCP’s early Robocop upgrades:
However, despite her utilitarian, no-frills packaging, incompatibility with frameless school-marm glasses and over-reliance on NRA-supplied documentation and service support, Gorman repeatedly bench-tests Just as Nutty As Sharron Angle, as you’ll see in the field-trial footage below the fold.
Except for the device itself, the engineering animation and the fact that nobody’s naked, this could be almost any “Showtime After Hours” movie circa 1983.
Sarah could have been a leader. But she chose to duck accountability, cash the checks…and become the National Kvetch.
Fortunately, at this point, her tweets are so coded, gnomic and content-free that her Twitter Feed has become a cross between a test-pattern and a carrier-wave—kind of the UVB-76 of parked, pointless, clock-setting telemetry from the Wasilla White House.
So what if she won’t grace us with her solutions to America’s greatest challenges? At least we know she still has a trickle-charge on her transmitter. Party on, Ice-Ninny.
Nothing inspires confidence like David Asman and Steve-Forbes-in-a-neckbrace noodling the pros and cons of accidentally transforming the Gulf of Mexico into an open-air, self-serve gas station.
Thank God for Stephane Fitch, who probably doesn’t know what he’s talking about either, but makes the correct call anyway.
Come back to us, Oppy—and bring Richard Feynman with you, stat. We’re in some real shit here.
Geek forums are abuzz today with the news that “the Buzzer” is dead. UVB-76—a Cold War Era shortwave transmitter that’s been beaming the same eerie, repetitive signal on the same fixed frequency since at least 1982, has abruptly gone silent.
As we know from the movies, this can only mean one of two things: 1) We are all going to die horribly in the last reel or 2) We will discover that Mr. Mittens, the space station’s rascally feline mascot, harmlessly short-circuited the Doomsday Beacon when “he” scratched out a cozy nest behind the heat-exchanger in preparation for birthing a litter of adorable kittens. Then we’ll all die.
The sudden extinction of UVB-76 may or may not be causally tethered to last night’s initiation of the Creative-Class Access Blogotron Accelerator, but true Forteans understand that these things are rarely just “coincidence.”
