Benny: “It will take a miracle to solve this case!”
Francis: “Good thing they called us in!”
“Pope and Pope, Thursdays at 8, on Fox!”
Alternately, Benedict XVI was secretly studying forensic pathology in his spare time, and resigned to follow his true calling, in which case it gets named CSI: Vatican City.
I could have gone with the “Popes by day, superheros by night!” angle, but you don’t want to strain plausibility.
Another bit for St. Patrick’s Day: The late, great John Belushi on “The Luck of the Irish”:
Belushi’s frothing editorials were always among the highlights of the original Saturday Night Live cast. I wish they’d put all of them on a single DVD, maybe paired with the Samurai skits, or else the Ackroyd/Curtain Point/Counterpoint bits.
Another Thanksgiving-related Public Service announcement: Try to avoid dropping a frozen turkey on your foot or your pets. You know, just in case you were planning on doing that for grins. At the very least you might want to wear shoes when you pull that sucker out of the freezer.
Dwight and I were watching episodes of Night Gallery, and in addition to the extremely good “They’re Tearing Down Tim Riley’s Bar” (with a fine turn by the late William Windom), we also watched “The Last Lecture of Mr. Peabody,” in which a professor of comparative religion lectures on The Great Old Ones, including reading aloud from the Necronomicon, with somewhat predictable results. The Mythos is mostly played for laughs and in-jokes (including students named Lovecraft, Bloch and Derleth), but it may be the first time the name Cthulhu was ever mentioned on network television.
It’s a little broad, but it does have its charms:
The episode was written by Jack Laird, who seems to have adapted a number of Lovecraft stories for Night Gallery.
A deeper appreciation (and the nifty following screen grab) can be found here.
I checked out of Family Guy when it stopped being funny, which was shortly after the OJ Simpson episode. But I must admit, this shroomed-out Brian visiting his own personal hell is nicely creepy.
I know that when I think “punk,” Huey Lewis and Toni Basil are the first names that come to mind:
I can hardly wait for their forthcoming Heavy Metal collection with Simon & Garfunkel and The Bee Gees.
(To be fair, Devo were considered punk very early in their career, and Billy Idol at least dressed the part and came out of the same scene as The Sex Pistols. There’s a very amusing bit in Glen Matlock’s I was a teenage Sex Pistol in which a suddenly chastised Idol grows apprehensive over having wrecked his father’s car…)