Building Blogging habits and getting my feet wet and hands dirty.

Welcome to the inside of my head...here's what's roaming around today.

I'm just learning the functions of Blogger and am getting my feet wet here and my "Head Blog" will certainly evolve and change as I learn all the tools available to me. I have a wide range of things that interest me and I want to discuss them all at length or in short here and use all manner of ways to do that. Drawings, videos, sound files, links, etc. covering all manner of things which enter my head.

My working model here is sort of an almanac to a few of my favorite things, music, movies, TV, radio, cartoons, comic strips and some other stuff. This is helping me flex my muscles and build some habits. Here's some anniversaries and birthdays relevant to today. Tomorrow may bring something entirely different.

Today in 1912 Carl Leammle incorporated Universal Pictures. In the 1920's they brought us the talents of the great Lon Chaney in pictures of all types, too numerous to list here, among them The Phantom of the Opera and The Hunchback of Notre Dame. In the 1930's, Universal again found their niche in the horror genre (Warners had the gangsters, MGM had the musical etc.) with Frankenstein, Dracula, The Werewolf of London (The Wolf Man followed in the 1940's...again for Universal) , The Mummy and The Invisible Man. All through the 1940's these franchises bore wives and sons and daughters and spent the decade "meeting" each other. They also struck comic gold with the films of W. C. Fields and later Abbott & Costello and they saw their way through the 1950's with a slate of more horror and science fiction films which thrived at the drive-in movie show. Stars like Fields, Abbott & Costello, Chaney and more with Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, Lon Chaney Jr. and a slew of contract players fit their slogan which appears with the end credits at the end of their early 1930's productions, "A great cast is worth repeating"!

Today in 1948 was the television debut of The Texaco Star Theatre with Milton Berle on NBC. The show had begun in radio in 1938 on different networks and different hosts (Ed Wynn then Fred Allen), but it was the television version which probably sold more TV sets than it did Texaco gas. Berle became "Mr. Television" and Tuesday nights with Uncle Milty were not to be missed by millions of Americans.

Jerry Stiller turns 82 today. He and his wife Anne Meara first made me laugh on the Ed Sullivan show before I was old enough to know why they were funny 90% of the time and he was comic gold on Seinfeld 30 years later. Happy Festivus Jerry.

Thanks for taking a side trip through my head. I hope you left some footprints and didn't get too dirty.