austin_dern

Now, I want to talk about something trivial. I've been listening to X Minus One broadcasts, from 1957, in the car. They're introduced by Walter O'Keefe mentioning Nightline, the radio series for NBC which promised to take people behind the scenes to all sorts of interesting things going on late at night. The advertisements --- and Walter O'Keefe has one near the start of most every episode at least among this set of recordings that I had --- promise that you'll get to hear stuff like what goes on at those fancy nightclubs you just can't get into, or the big Broadway plays or the like.

The show as best I can make out was a sort of magazine format gathering stuff that should entertain you if you have tastest similar to the program director's. X Minus One, adapting stories from Galaxy Science Fiction magazine, was part of the entertainment. I was curious what else got included in the banner. Unfortunately I can't quite make it out because I've been away from my hefty old-time radio encyclopedia, and searching on the web has produced ... well, you know, there's this little news show produced by the ABC network with the same name.

I knew searching the web would give me search engines claiming that I surely meant ABC. What annoys me is the number of sites that talk about NBC's Nightline, referring to the program Ted Koppel hosted for so long. I realize some of these are typos and would be fixed if anybody on the Internet cared to fix their typos. But for crying out loud, people who're writing about ``NBC Nightline's `To Catch A Predator' series''? Just ... look, just sit down before you hurt yourself on something.

Trivia: In May 1914 Willie Hammerstein put on a playlet titled Electrocution, featuring a character shown being executed in an electric chair, complete with sparks, crackling, and flashes of electricity. Public outcry had the show stopped after two performances. Source: The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville, Anthony Slide.

Currently Reading: Weeds: In Defence of Nature's Most Unloved Plants, Richard Mabey.