Paying the Piper

First off…congratulations to everyone who entered Thrilling Days of Yesteryear’s giveaway of two copies of actress Piper Laurie’s just-published memoir, Learning to Live Out Loud.  The response was pretty good, though admittedly not in the same numbers as the previous free Steve McQueen book swag…something to which I’m going to attribute to the fact that the thought of reading a tome in which Carrie White’s ma is ravished by a future President of the United States is off-putting at best.  (Let me just state for the record that I’ll be glad to get both of these copies out of the house.)

The winners in the giveaway are none other than Yvette of in so many words… and the Mythical Monkey himself…who revealed to me his secret identity via e-mail but I have to keep mum otherwise I’ll put the kibosh on his crime fighting activities in the burg where he resides.  I don’t know about you, but I get a secret satisfaction knowing that evildoers are stopped dead in their tracks when they look up in the sky and wail “Sufferin’ cats!  It’s the Mythical Monkey!”  (Okay…maybe it’s not that frightening…but work with me here—I’m trying to get a movie franchise going.)

You may have come across this blurb about how there are still a few bugs in the system regarding the EAS (Emergency Alert System), which got its first test this Wednesday at 2pm—several DirecTV subscribers reported that while the test was underway the Lady Gaga song Paparazzi played in the background (I would assume this would meet the criteria for a national emergency, but that may just be me) and Time Warner Cable and Comcast subscribers were entertained by QVC upon the test’s completion…on every freaking channel.  (This was, of course, corrected in due time…but not until the Rachael Ray dinnerware had officially sold out.)

Here in the Classic City, CharredHer’s entire channel lineup became affiliates of C-SPAN…and the reason that I know this is because I heard my mother in the living room shortly after the test screaming for me to “come and fix what’s wrong with the TV.”  I had to explain, of course, that this was beyond my superpowers…my parents are the least tech-savvy people in the universe; they constantly have to be supervised lest they screw something up while in the simple process of channel surfing, for example.  But fortunately for us all, the situation resumed normalcy and the reality TV show delights (rolls eyes) of TruTV were restored to the House of Yesteryear.

The activity on the blog might slow to a trickle for the next week or so because I have fortuitously received a pair of assignments from the generous Mark Tepper of Radio Spirits fame…and the first one has an unusually tight deadline, so I’ll be working to get that completed in the interim.  Fortunately, Savannah, GA correspondent Philip Schweier has sent me musings about some recent films he’s watched, which I will strategically place on the blog to compensate for my absence.  Now if there are no more questions, I need to find out who’s been into my Ho-Ho’s stash…