p h o b e . c o m is a roundup of silliness that I stumbled across whilst looking for a sufficently offbeat virtual otter pop. I chuckled; perhaps you will too.

Of note: the obsessively detailed life of Harold Haxton, the director of such notable B-flicks as “I was a Monkey’s Uncle” and “The Mummy’s Foot”.

Who can forget the scenery-chewing antics of T. Ross Mancini in “Green Doom”?

eBay: eBay item 1369970060 (Ends Aug-05-02 06:25:04 PDT ) – OOAK BAG LADY BARBIE CART & EMPTY CANS INCLD.

What does OOAK stand for?

I found this while looking for a doohickey I saw a little old lady with at the grocery store last week – basically a tripod golf bag cat that had been redesigned for use as an urban pedestrian’s shopping bag hauler. The main spar of the cart had a bunch of heavy-duty hooks on it to hang bags from, a reasonably-tall rubber grip handle with a locking brake on it, and the rig itself rode on three 12-inch spoked wheel with inflated rubber tires.

I use a little-old-lady cheaply made wire-basket cart and doing so has given me more than enough time to identify the specific featuresI desire and potential engineering solutions to employ: the cart glimpsed at the store appeared to have them all.

It was the shopping cart of my dreams, and I can’t find it on the web, because “shopping cart” in google means the digital mechanism where by one orders stuff on the web.

Alas.

Metafilter poster notes that PWC’s recent sale to IBM puts the kibosh on Monday.

jimfl has a modest proposal at his Everything Burns site.

It’s the return of Silent Movie Mondays at the Paramount in downtown Seattle!

About three years ago, I noticed that film-score preservationist and silent-film accompanist Dennis James was hosting a series of silent classics at the Paramount, including some films which I’d long heard of but never seen such as Douglas Fairbanks’ “The Sea Hawk”, if I recall correctly. I’ve tried to attend every single one since, with varying degrees of success. I still regret having missed Keaton’s “The General”.

James graduated from Indiana University in Bloomington when I was kid, sometime around 1980, and while he was attending IU would stage these elaborate presentations of classic silent horror films such as “Phantom of the Opera” or “Nosferatu”. These shows inevitably included a massive parade of cosumed adultas and children across the stage of the IU Auditorium (the one near Showalter Fountain), and the audience would applaud loudly for excellent costumes while a veritable blizzard of paper airplanes filled the air.

Combining these impressive events with the non-stop silent comedy super-8 loops at the pizza joint Noble Roman’s that my family ate at all the time meant that I have a lifelong love for and interest in silent movies.

To see them in the splendidly restored absurd opulence of the Paramount, a movie and vaudeville palace fortunate enough to have retained its Mighty Wurlitzer, is something I savor so greatly it’s difficult to convey.

A big thankee to Spencer Sundell for the heads up!

… and so as the sun sets gently in the west, Ken Goldstein draws his heartrending work of inordinate wit to a close, with Episode 15 of Guy Sterling: Skee-Ball Champion! Sadly for those of us with a long-standing interest in the sport of kings, Ken was unable, after heroic efforts toiling within the mighty bowels of google and ebay, to locate Episodes 14 and 15, and thus the story picks up at its’ conclusion.

It had been the busiest, craziest, most exciting week of his whole life, and one way or the other it would be all be over in a few minutes.

Then with the much-anticipated the Skee-Ball Week Theme Song, Ken rings down the curtain on his wildly acclaimed labor of love, salvaging the lost past of a slice of Americana the likes of which we’re sadly unlikely to ever see again.

It is hoped, however, that as the resulting lawsuits from the deeply offended descendants of Joey “Spats” Murphy wend their way thru the courts, Mr. Goldstein (“Steen”, to those in the know) will take time from his busy round of depositions, wholesale disavowals of responsibility, and press-ducking junkets to update the blogopulace upon his fortunes in fending away these ill-timed distractions.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled round of bankruptcy filings, stock market crashes, and assorted acts of death and destruction. Ah, Skee-Ball Week, we hardly knew ye.

Actually, which kings specifically?

Member of Sex Abuse Panel Upsets Some

Heh heh (NYT link – registration required blah blah blah). Heh.

Sorry.

As promised, I ironed the curtains.

Also as promised, here is a picture of moi (prn: “mou-waah”) modeling the finest in contemporary home maintenance wear courtesy of Paul Frankenstein. Click the pic for a big, big eyeful (no, no, you don’t have to send the kids out of the room, honest).

The shirt is VERY large, but I haven’t washed it yet. I have a couple other cafepress shirts and they are marked as the same size. They fit fine. Paul has many fine garments for purchase by the public at large (including the one I’m wearing: it says “en cas d’urgence gardez votre calme” next to a lil doob-levay-say, or crappah, as some would have it) here.

I won the shirt in a too-short, thanks to me, first-come-first-served contest (link to Paul’s current blog page; once you’re there, use your browser’s page-search function to look for “number of dots”) that Paul hosted regarding the logical mechanism underlying a design feature of his blog. Later in life I hope to adjust this link so it points to the appropriate archive.

I’d love to tell ya about it, but his NDA was killer.

I would like to point out however, that the shirt espouses a fine sentiment which we can all get behind.

Paul also today wrote a fine roundup of his visible corner of the blogocology, which I heartily recommend.

In the spirit of these things, here’s mike.whybark.com’s first contest: first person to accurately count the things in this photo which have been previously featured on mike.whybark.com in their own entries wins a randomly drawn gimcrack from a big bag of Archie McPhee goodies we have laying around the house!

(ahem, no, Viv, immediate family members are NOT included.)

As I was flipping around, looking at what other blogology went down whilst I was out gettin’ smoky in the hills, I noticed not only uncharacteristically sober coverage of Lomax’s passing at Bill Barol’s Blather, but also a fine pointer to Lost Indiana, one of my favorite Hoosier sites.

I see that the proprietor of Lost Indiana promises a comprehensive history of Burger Chef at some unspecified point in the future. I believe I still have one or two of the Burger Chef ‘n Jeff gewgaws that the chain handed out to tykes back in the day, before they were eaten by Hardee’s.

And just to add the whipped cream, thereby forcing me to run this before I run my Lomax bit, Barol cites homey Ken Goldstein’s work of skee ball genius, already noted here many, many times.

Ken’s latest, “Skee-Ball Week Continues, with a Brief, Scholarly Interlude!” sheds light on many matters, including the ground-breaking introduction of “Spats” Murphy into the 1930’s serial Guy Sterling.

Ken is a freakin’ genius, and this skee-ball coverage is the best work he’s done in the context of his blog, possibly the best work he’s ever done to date.

His detailed scholarship throws the many questions most readers have concerning the historical development of skee ball, with, of course, special emphasis on the fruitful cross pollination of celebrity endorsement with adolescent serial in the surprisingly neglected Happy Boy Magazine:

Anyway, I thought that before I continued with the Guy Sterling reprints, I’d get you all caught up to speed, so to speak, with the following excerpt from Scott Scoglio’s article “Magazines for Adolescents in the Pre-War Era,” which appeared in the American Library Association publication Periodicals Quarterly.]

…

While other serials had occasionally featured real-life celebrities in cameo roles, the Guy Sterling serial was the first to actually use them as full-fledged characters, interacting as part of the storyline. Some of the nation’s top Skee-Ballers, including Brinks McGillicuddy, Bobby Knowles, and Ray Rayberg, were signed to licensing contracts and became major players in the Skee-Ball Champion storyline. During a time when the sports press was much smaller and the private lives of athletes were far more private, these stories gave many young fans the idea that they were seeing the men behind the legends.

I shan’t cite further. Suffice to say, if you value your heritage as an American, and harbor curiosity about or love for the colorful role of the pulps in creating contemporary American pop culture, you owe it to yourself to get up-to-date on Skee ball Week at the Illuminated Donkey.