My beloved and indulgent family gave me a copy of Surely You Can’t Be Serious: The True Story of Airplane! for Christmas. I think part of the motivation for this (other than it being on my wish list) is that everyone in my family wants to borrow it when I’m done. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Fun fact I’ve learned from the book, which I did not know previously. Remember “Gunderson”?
Whatever happened to that guy? Would you believe he went on to bigger things?
Mike the Musicologist sent me a text the other day mentioning that there’s a superseding indictment against Democratic Senator Robert “Buffalo Bob” Menendez.
This seems like reason enough to link the NYT: “What We Know About the Menendez Bribery Case”.
Donald Wildmon has passed away at 85. I believe he was mostly forgotten now, but I remember a time when he was a hugely controversial figure in American politics.
Rev. Wildmon was a Methodist preacher. As the story goes, one night at Christmas he and his family gathered around the warm glowing glow of the TV set…and Rev. Wildmon discovered that the TV was full of what he considered to be vulgarity.
To make a long story somewhat shorter, he ended up founding an organization called the National Federation for Decency, which later became the American Family Association. AFA was one of the leaders in the controversy over the National Endowment for the Arts:
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The effectiveness of the AFA is questionable. They don’t seem to have any impact on “Last Temptation”, but they got 7-11 to pull “Playboy” and “Penthouse”, and were partially responsible for Proctor and Gamble pulling advertisements from “50 TV shows”.
I’m a First Amendement absolutist, and I didn’t care much for Mr. Wildmon or his organization at the time. But now that I’m older, and see stuff on TV airing during children’s waking hours, I wonder if the man may have had a point.
Of course, there’s alway the V-chip, which didn’t come into existence until 1996…