Andyland, USA

It's interesting to me that in the long running annuls of this here column, I've never ever talked about a comic book I'm into. There's a few reasons for that, the biggest being I'm not as brushed up on my comic book vernacular as some of my friends are. I've read them on and off for all my life, and I like them a great deal. However, lately I've been reading more as I've found some ones I' really quite fond of. There's a new series based off The Six Million Dollar Man , how cool is that? But the one comic that I am absolutely in love with right now, is a wonderful and brilliant new series from DC, Batman '66 . Batman '66 launched last summer as a digital weekly comic for tablets, making a wonderful hardcover debut last month with a first volume that collects the first five stories together. Obviously I don't need to tell you that much about it, based off the fact that it's called Batman '66. Everyone knows who B...

It can feel like beating a dead horse to say over and over again “they don't make them like they used to” when it comes to talking about classic films. The phrase itself automatically puts an aged sheen over a movie, a disservice, when sometimes what you want to do is get someone to realize that an older film can be just as relevant as whatever new Michael Bay film in which he destroys a beloved childhood property is (my bet is on Power Rangers as the next one). However, there are some times when that phrase is quite apt to describe certain movies, and nothing fits that moniker better than 1963's It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World . By the early 1960s, director Stanley Kramer had a glowing reputation as the moral voice of Hollywood. Kramer was best known for his big dramatic, socially conscious films, such as Inherit The Wind and Judgement at Nuremberg. Wanting to show that he had more to offer than just heavy films, Kramer decided to make what he called “The com...

There's a certain protocol one has to follow when accepting invitations to events held by friend's boyfriends. Picture a bullseye in your head, in the dead center is the circle of friends that you have known the oldest, those almost always get an automatic yes. Outside of that, is the group that you're close with, but if you skipped a graduation party or boozy Halloween bash, no one would really care. Closing out the bullseye, is the “people you've not seen since high school and used to make fun of you for liking Doctor Who but now that's all they talk about on Facebook isn't that somewhat ironic ha ha” group. These are the invites you outright ignore. So what happens when, through some mysterious twist of fate, one of your best friends starts to date a man who is firmly in the last ring of this bullseye? Then, once they've been firmly established as a couple through a series of endless photographs on the Facebooks, you're invited to attend ...

Most times when a cable or TV channel celebrates an anniversary, there's nothing to celebrate. Channels change, evolve, keep up with the ever important advertising dollars that force them to bend to the will of their demographics report. Sure, they'll have graphics to mark how many years they have been around, and it's all a large “pat ourselves on the back” moment. However, this year marks an anniversary that's actually worth celebrating. In a sea of endless reasons why there's no reason to keep cable TV in the year 2014, one channel stands alone, and that channel is the movie oasis known as Turner Classic Movies. I'm sure it's not going to shock anyone that I'm seeing it fit to write about their 20 th year of broadcasting—it's my go to channel. The channel my cable box is usually on when I start it up, and I drink my daily coffee out of one of three TCM coffee mugs. Yes, you could say I'm a fan. To my knowledge, TCM is most unique ...

We both knew going into the restaurant at seven on a Friday night was asking for a long wait, but it was the only time she was free, so we went with it. It wasn't a particularly upscale place, and it wasn't a particularly downscale place either, but it was the type of place full of people on a Friday night. After a twenty minute wait in a cramp waiting room surrounded by strangers—which always makes me a little uneasy—our table was ready. A plucky hostess came to seat us. Our table was one of the two that bordered the large, circular table for groups that sat in the corner of the dining area. I glanced at the table as I waited for my dining partner to sit down. There was five people there, looking at menus with two more menus on the table, they were waiting for people. I sat at the table, and we both opened up our menus and began to look over what we might want to digest. As this was going on, we heard the voice of a woman, it was shrill, not loud, but audible. “...

There's a reason why I'm always offering to host each year's Easter meal gathering at my house. The reason being I can control the food, and guarantee that I will have a good time regardless of what anyone else thinks. Selfish? Perhaps, but sometimes it's better to deal with massive amounts of family on home turf than it is an away court. So it came to pass that as I was gearing up to host for the fourth year in a row, there was a twenty pound spiral cut ham in my fridge. This was an all natural beauty. This ham was the type of ham that inspired poetry. The type of ham that makes you proud to be an American. Sometimes on days when I was feeling at my lowest, I'd open up the fridge, put on a Christopher Cross album, stare at the ham, and let the muse take me where it might (Now you all know why I wrote Pride and Prejudice with Ham ). I went to bed the Wednesday night before Easter feeling great, excited about the ham filled delights the weekend would brin...

A quick glance around the internets these days, and you'll discover that many a person is all hot and bothered over Benedict Cumberbatch and the BBC's Sherlock , the series which modernizes the adventures of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic detective and his companion, Dr. Watson. But that is the not the first time an attempt to modernize the classic literary character had been made. That happened during the run of the first, arguably, wildly popular media adaptation of the characters, the Sherlock Holmes film series from the late '30s to mid '40s, staring Basil Rathbone as Holmes, and Nigel Bruce as Dr. Watson. All together the series comprises 14 films made between 1939 and 1946— made alongside a popular radio program staring the two leads as well. The first two films in the series were made at 20 th Century Fox, then a gap in the series occurred, resuming in 1942 at Universal. Though the films made at Fox were big budgeted A pictures, Universal laun...