Over the weekend, I was channel-surfing and caught the end of the "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" movie, featuring Peter Frampton and the Bee Gees in the Beatles' roles. It was so bad that I couldn't look away. I only saw the last twenty minutes or so (alas, I missed Steve Martin's version of "Maxwell's Silver Hammer"), but it was enough to get a renewed feel for the zeitgeist of 1978. The long hair. The horrible clothes. The music: Barry Gibb's falsetto version of "A Day in the Life," followed by Billy Preston dressed up in a gold suit singing "Get Back," with the final reprise of the title tune to close the movie, featuring a group cameo by everyone who was hot stuff in Hollywood that year: George Burns, Carol Channing, Helen Reddy, Keith Carradine, Tina Turner, Leif Garrett... It was surreal. Certainly nothing I would have paid to see in the theater, even in that long-lost year.
Tookie: Are you in the "Save Tookie!" or the "Die, Tookie! Die!" camp? Me, I'm down with capital punishment for gangsta quadruple-murderers. I don't care how many children's books they write in prison. I was listening to Matt Drudge's radio show on the way to work last night and he mentioned that some people thought that the death of comedian Richard Pryor might generate a groundswell of support for Tookie. As if people were going to say, "There! You've got one dead black man, you don't need any more!" All I can say is, "Ahnold, be the Terminator you were elected to be."
