This year, our number three slot goes to Adam Sandler…

Linda Lavin not only performed "The Boy From…" on The Mike Douglas Show in the seventies — as seen here earlier today — she did it a few years ago in an online Zoom concert to celebrate the 90th birthday of Esteban Rio Nido Stephen Sondheim. My longtime amigo Joe Brancatelli thinks this is a superior performance so here it is. Take your choice…

(What I want to know is did she have to learn the lyrics all over again to do this or were they firmly embedded in her brain forever after umpteen performances of the song on stage?)

Me, I'm staying home with a friend. I don't like going out on New Year's Eve, she doesn't like going out on New Year's Eve…it's perfect. There was a time when I used to party-hop but — no offense to any friends who threw those parties — I never enjoyed any of them. And worse, getting from one to another, I was sharing the boulevards with some seriously alcohol-infused drivers. So I'm staying home.

If you're staying in like we're staying in, you might enjoy some or all of a special six-hour (six-hour!!!) program hosted by my friends Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun. It's a holiday edition of Stu's online TV/radio program, Stu's Show, and it should be of special interest to those of you who are interested in old TV shows and especially old game shows. They'll be showing both and Stu will be interviewing two in-studio guests. One is"Shotgun" Tom Kelly, the famed radio personality. The other is Rick Greene, who has a new book out on the promotional material for the classic Laurel and Hardy comedies.

You can watch it on your Roku TV. You can watch it your computer. You can listen to it without watching it. Details on how to do these things can be found over on this page. And no, you're not obligated to watch or listen to all six hours.

I never met Linda Lavin even though I was involved briefly with her show, Alice. I also don't think I ever saw her perform on the stage which, gauging from the rave reviews she routinely got, was obviously my loss. In case you haven't heard, the world lost this talented lady the other day.

One of the first things she did on stages in New York was the 1966 off-Broadway production of The MAD Show, based on guess-what-magazine. In it, she introduced this song, "The Boy From…" which was kind of a sideways parody of what was then a recent hit, "The Girl From Ipanema."

The music from the show was written by Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard, and the lyrics for just this one number were credited to "Esteban Rio Nido," whose name is in quotes because that was a pseudonym for Stephen Sondheim. The joke in the song — which I didn't get when I first heard it at age fourteen — is that the lady singing it is unaware that the boy from Tacarembo la Tumba del Fuego Santa Malipas Zacatecas la Junta del Sol y Cruz is gay and is moving to Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch to be with his boy friend. The latter location is a real village in Wales, whereas the first location is a name made up by Mr. Sondheim.

Please forgive whatever the unhyphenated length of the latter place name does to whatever screen or device you're using at the moment.

Here is Ms. Lavin performing the number — probably the exact same mostly-deadpan way she sang it Off-Broadway — on The Mike Douglas Show with Mike in the background…

So I just spent so long on a phone call that I thought I might miss New Year's Eve…and I don't mean the one tomorrow night. I mean the one after that. My problem was one of these robo-operators whose artificial intelligence is not only artificial but largely missing. "She" kept asking me to enter the number of a prescription I was calling about and I kept entering that sixteen-digit prescription and "she" kept telling me "she" could not locate any prescription by that number and there didn't seem to be any way to move the call to any sort of next step until I'd entered one that "she" recognized.

In dealing with such robotic logjams, there's usually a magic word or phrase you can say that will get them to kick the call over to an actual human being. I tried "agent" and "human being" and "representative" and "pharmacist" and everything else I could think of and finally, "she" said she'd connect me with someone. I think but am not certain the magic words were "live agent." I've jotted that down in the Notes section of my phone listing for this company. But wouldn't it be nice if they told us what those magic words were up front? Or if they all worked on the same magic words…like "Open Sesame" or "Swordfish" or "Human being?"

Here are the Maccabeats with their parody of the song "Shut Up and Dance With Me." Again, very nice voices and some dicey rhymes…

Fred Kaplan has some interesting observations about Jimmy Carter.

Some people are fond of saying Jimmy Carter was our greatest ex-president…and it's true that he did a lot of good, helping the homeless, negotiating peace and doing a lot of things that ex-presidents generally don't bother with. I thought he was a pretty good president, albeit one who had the unfortunate habit (for re-election purposes) of telling Americans what they needed to hear rather than what they wanted to hear. He also did a lot of good things as president for which Ronald Reagan took bows.

There are already lots of pre-written articles appearing that attempt to assess his four years and what followed. This one strikes me as worth reading. If you have a low opinion of him, it may not elevate that opinion…but maybe it'll tell you something good that you didn't know about the man. May he rest in as much peace as he brought to the world.

Someone has put together a "reconstruction" of the infamous lost/hidden/incomplete movie by Jerry Lewis, The Day the Clown Cried. I have no idea how close this is to what Mr. Lewis intended but here, for what it's worth, is the link…

If you've got twenty-eight minutes to spare today, spend them watching this video. It's called Great and it snagged the Oscar for Best Animated Short Film at the Academy Awards in 1976. It's actually sorta animated — a combination of various media used to tell the story of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, a 19th century British civil engineer and architect. That may not sound like an interesting subject but I saw this film at an animation festival shortly after it came out and spent years trying to find a place to see it again.

It's a British film directed by Bob Godfrey, a very clever filmmaker who is often credited as inspiring Terry Gilliam's animation for Monty Python. If you watch this film, you'll see why people say that…

Writing this blog can be very educational. Since I posted this morning about Buster Keaton's first TV programs, I've received a number of e-mails telling me things I didn't know and setting me straight on some things I got wrong. I'll have a post up in a few days expanding and correcting this morning's.

We need to have at least a couple of renditions of Tom Lehrer's "I'm Spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica" in this countdown so who better than Cali Rose and The CC Strummers, a ukulele group based in Culver City, California? Unlike others who sing this song, they're actually singing this in Santa Monica — at the The Martin Luther King, Jr. Auditorium in The Santa Monica Library. There'll be more of this song before the countdown's over…

The latest…

Performances for Gypsy will resume as scheduled on Sunday, December 29. Due to continued illness within the company, our 2 PM matinee and 8 PM performances today have been cancelled. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please check with your point of purchase to exchange or refund your tickets.

Should we be suspicious that they don't say the performances tomorrow will be with Audra and other key members of the company? I dunno. But there's still time to get tickets for tomorrow's matinee performance at Stubhub. The above press release says it's at 2 PM while Telecharge and Stubhub says it's at 3 PM. There do not seem to be seats available for the evening performance on either site.

It's hard for me to type the words "Saturday Morning" without recalling what Saturday Morning used to mean to me. Saturday Morning was when I'd get up early — earlier than my parents, at least — and go into the living room. I'm thinking back to when we only had one TV set in the house and that's where it was. I'd turn on the set, adjusting the volume to a level where I could hear it but they couldn't.

My parents' chairs for TV-watching were too far from the set for me so sometimes, I'd sit on the floor. Most times, I'd move a chair from the dining room into place before the set and put a TV tray in front of it. At some point during a commercial, I'd run into the kitchen and get a bowl of cereal or something else for breakfast, then eat it in front of the set.

What I was watching was, of course, Saturday Morning Television which was mostly cartoons. Three networks — NBC, ABC and CBS — programmed for my demographic, my demographic being anyone who was likely to ask his mother to buy whatever cereal I favored at that moment. At various times, it was Sugar Frosted Flakes, Cocoa Puffs, Trix, Sugar Rice Krinkles (they don't make that anymore), Sugar Smacks or a few others that were only favorites for about one box or so. Often, one would be a favorite because there was a much-desired prize in the box.

My true favorite, if I was being honest and I occasionally was, was Cheerios. I loved Cheerios — the plain kind in the yellow box, not any of the inane variations now available. It was one of my favorite things to eat and still is. I swear on my oath as a 24-year blogger that I'm eating Cheerios — dry, which is how I like them — as I write this. I'm so glad they've never really changed them. If they'd had cartoon characters on the box all the time, I might never have eaten anything else ever.

Not all the shows I watched were cartoons. For a while, the local CBS channel ran a film show starring Buster Keaton. I don't think this was network. I think it was just the L.A. station filling the time slots before the network feed kicked in. Whatever it was, it was my introduction to a magical person who would become one of my favorite performers. I had no idea at the time that I was watching one of the low points of his career because he was still, to me, pretty funny.

Not a whole lot is known about this series so here's what I understand: Keaton's first TV series was called The Buster Keaton Comedy Show. It was done live in 1949 and only watchable in or around Southern California. Live shows then were only repeatable if someone made kinescopes of them — literally pointing a movie camera at a TV screen and capturing the image on film. If anyone made any of The Buster Keaton Comedy Show, they've never been seen to this day.

A year or two later, someone said to someone else something like, "It's too bad we didn't do those shows on film. We could make some money syndicating them." So they then made filmed episodes of The Buster Keaton Show, using much of the material that had been used in the live telecasts. Both shows, of course, relied heavily on gags and ideas from Keaton's earlier, better work.

A writer-producer-director named Clyde Bruckman was heavily involved with them. Bruckman was a colorful gent who worked with many of the great comedians of the silent era and early talkies, including Keaton, Laurel & Hardy and the Stooges. In later years, he was sometimes hired to work on comedy films and then sued for passing off script material from earlier films as new, never-before-filmed material. This new Keaton show was filled with jokes that Keaton and others had done before.

The Buster Keaton Show was syndicated in 1951. Two years later, its producers redid the opening titles to name it Life With Buster Keaton and they syndicated them again, reportedly representing it as a new show. That's why when you see surviving prints of the program, some have one title and some have the other.

Also reportedly, only thirteen half-hour episodes were ever made. I do not think the local CBS channel had all thirteen. I think they had six or seven and would run them over and over and over as long as they ran the program at all. The episode embedded below is the one I remember most vividly. I may have seen it ten or more times. You may have seen it on this site about ten years ago.

Don't think of it as a great comedian at his worst. Think of it as a guy who was still pretty good at the age of 56…and yes, I know he may look older in this but that's the way a lot of 56-year-old humans looked back then, especially if they'd had as rough a life as Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton. I think of it as a fond memory and one of the things that got me very, very interested in the kind of people who did the kind of films he did…

It's been mostly cloudy and cold in Los Angeles with occasional drizzle and sprinkles, and that's what the National Weather Service is projecting most days for as far ahead as they project. But their forecast for January 1 is mostly sunny and 72°. That's because that's New Year's Day and Nature wants everyone who watches the Rose Parade and the Rose Bowl from snowy and freezing climates to hate us.