Blogging is more often than not about social networking, breast beating and sharing criminally neglected tips and tricks. But sometimes it’s about people helping people. Take the case of my friend who runs the (Unofficial) Frank Sinatra Jr. Website. After an obscure dispute with members of a certain celebrity family, my friend’s site was suddenly buried in the Google rankings. The odd thing is, his site used to be the first thing to come up when one did a search for “Frank Sinatra Jr.” Now the official Sinatra Family site is number one, and my friend’s is nowhere to be found.
Well, I have a little notoriety of my own to squander, and recently I’ve noticed that it doesn’t matter what sort of crap I blog about; it eventually shows up pretty high in the rankings. So I’m hoping to kill two birds with one stone: helping a friend regain his hit count and paying tribute to a great entertainer at the same time.
What could be more ephemeral that a restaurant? Most are out of business within two years. Even the ones that stick around eventually start to suck, or worse get really successful and popular and then start to suck. It’s no wonder folks used to ask for menus from their favorite restaurants to take home as souvenirs.
Thirty years ago, my best friend’s parents subscribed to Phoenix’s first cable television service, a single station called ON TV. It had a very limited schedule of programming; in fact, some days they just ran the same movie all day, over and over. What I remember most clearly was Robert Altman’s “Nashville” running on an endless loop. We must have seen that movie a half dozen times, but never all the way through at one time. The funny thing is, when I finally saw “Nashville” years later from beginning to end, it didn’t strike me as all that different than when I saw it in discontinuous hunks.
America’s foremost humorist, Neil Hamburger, is no stranger to the internets. He hardly needs me to talk up his work or to flog his fabulous line of must-have releases. But he has a new one out, and I can’t stand idly by.