The Concert of a Lifetime

This photo is one of the most glorious things I have ever seen: Two of the greatest American songwriters of all time performing together live on stage. Anyone who wasn't at Billy's musical farewell to Shea Stadium yesterday really missed something incredible.

If I could assemble a fantasy lineup for a concert, Billy Joel and Paul McCartney would definitely be the headliners. (I might add Frank Sinatra in his 1950s prime, but I don't want to get greedy.) Just imagine the set list! Uptown Girl followed by Jet followed by We Didn't Start the Fire followed by Hey Jude followed by Piano Man? I'm getting chills just thinking about it.

The fact that these venerable troubadours performed together at all gives me hope that maybe the Billy and Paul Concert Tour isn't far behind. I think these guys could really rock Wrigley.

Now it's your turn. Who would perform in the Concert of Your Lifetime?

What's up with the Muppets?

What's with all these reminders of my childhood lately? Still reeling from news of the ShowBiz Pizza documentary, there has now been a recent spate of online Muppet sightings. It started on the Fourth of July with a Muppet video rendition of Stars and Stripes Forever. Now the Muppet marketing continues with a few more, including Statler and Waldorf surfing the Net for some quality entertainment:



While not particularly hilarious, I have to wonder about the presence of these videos at all. Since Disney bought Kermit and Company several years ago, there has been precious little new Muppet material for fans to sink their teeth into. Sure, the original Muppet Show is being slowly released on DVD, but can't we get some new Muppet mayhem before the rest of the original Muppeteers retire?

It looks like some of the Muppet characters have their own user channels on YouTube now, so perhaps these videos mean there is more on the horizon. Let's hope so. But let's also hope they find some funnier material than having the Swedish Chef hum along to classical music.

On a related note:
I've always loved celebrity guest appearances on Sesame Street, especially when they feature talented musical artists riffing on their hit songs. Heck, there's a CD box set chock full of them.

The latest artist to hit the Street is Feist, who sends up her "1, 2, 3, 4" with a fantastic supporting cast. Enjoy!

ShowBiz Pizza: The Documentary!

For readers of this blog who grew up in the Midwest, when I say the words "ShowBiz Pizza," the first thing that comes to your mind is probably the image of a large and horrifying robotic gorilla wearing a yellow sequined jacket while banging on a keyboard.

For readers who did not have the pleasure of growing up with trips to ShowBiz Pizza, you're probably already feeling left out.

ShowBiz Pizza was a 1980s birthday party destination for many a lucky child. It had very cheesy pizza, a ball pit, lots of arcade games (Skee-Ball!) and non-stop performances by the animatronic Rock-A-Fire Explosion band. Fats, the aforementioned oversized ape, led the band in a variety of songs over the course of your meal, along with Billy Bob the Bear and several other characters that I sadly somehow still remember the names of. I guess it made a big impression on me, both because of the terror it inspired and the fact that it was the 1980s and this was the most impressive--albeit scary--form of live entertainment that I had ever witnessed.

Fortunately for me, I grew up and moved past it. Some people have not.

Today I came across this post, which informed me of an upcoming documentary devoted to the subject of ShowBiz Pizza and the all-growed-up children who collect and rebuild the animatronics from the Rock-A-Fire Explosion bands. I first read about this phenomenon almost a year ago, but never took the time to blog about it. Here's the movie trailer, which will give you a better idea of what we're dealing with.




I'm all for nostalgic trips down memory lane, but is this really worth all the money and effort? Then again, maybe it is:

Cubs Fans: Read My Cubs Blog

One of the reasons that I haven't been updating this blog quite so frequently of late is because I have been spreading myself a bit thinner in the blogosphere.

From now on, all blog posts related to the Chicago Cubs will appear on my new Cubs blog, Nearly Next Year. This is probably good news for those of you who didn't care about my Cubs posts anyway. :-)

My latest post explores which celebrities might play the roles of certain Cubs and Cardinals players if Hollywood ever decided to make a movie about the heated rivalry between the two teams. Check it out!

Google Is Making You Stupid (Me, Too)

The latest way to rage against the Google machine is to say that everyone is now dumber for having used it.

In an article for The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr argues that the ease with which we can find information online and jump from page to page is changing the circuitry of our brains and preventing us from engaging in the "deep reading" that we used to enjoy in the pre-Google era. Carr writes:

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

And you know what? He's absolutely right. As a pathetic case in point, I didn't even read Carr's entire article, even though I'm interested in the topic and offering my own two cents on it now.

For an easier-to-read illustration of how short your reading attention span really has become, check out Michael Agger's How We Read Online. You don't read much of anything online, do you? You're scanning headlines, looking for bold text and pull quotes, and spending less than a minute on a page before a link takes you somewhere else.

When I graduated from college, I looked forward to having the free time to read quality books of my choosing and continuing my own personal education by reading. I was going to use technology to better organize the information I found online. Instead, my Google Reader has way too many feeds, making me a lazy reader. And Delicious has become my personal clearinghouse for viral YouTube videos and links to banal trivia. Things worth reading? They're few and far between.

Even this blog was meant to serve as a way for me to process my thoughts on all the brilliant and useful information that I read online or in all the books I would be reading for pleasure. But I can feel my mind being melded by Google's information overload and I can probably count on one hand the number of books I've read in the last year. At the same time, there is a long list of books that I've started reading and never finished. My online reading habits have overtaken my off-line reading habits!

It's well past time for me to turn over a new leaf, so I'm going to force myself to read something in its entirety. I just renewed my library card...now who has book suggestions?