Week 1 of the 2011 Elbo Room Spring Trivia Tournament

Birds flying high You know how I feel Sun in the sky You know how I feel Breeze driftin’ on by You know how I feel It’s a new dawn It’s a new day It’s a new life For me And I’m feeling good (CUE HORNS AND ORCHESTRA!!) That’s right. I’m treating this tournament as…

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The ten worst superhero TV shows of all time

Let me state for the record. I am a major fan of superhero drama shows. Whether the shows are a retelling of the Les Miserables / Fugitive “man on the run” ethos (The Incredible Hulk) or just plain campy fun (the 1960’s Batman series), I do enjoy watching some costumed do-gooders battle the bad guys.…

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Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future – a failed attempt at interactive television

I don’t know what it is about science fiction shows that causes their fans to go absolutely nuts when the show’s low ratings doom it to cancellation. The networks put the program in a bad timeslot, they cry. The story was just getting good, they moan. We at least deserve a full-length movie to wrap…

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If you have kids, please attend the March 15th conference on preventing cyberbullying

I’m writing this blog post today because I’ve seen it happen too many times in our modern technological society. Once upon a time, if you didn’t like someone, you wrote their name on the bathroom wall in school – so-and-so is a slut, so-and-so is gay, filthy concepts in a filthy stall. Then came the…

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An Albany Cookbook from the 1960’s

While clearing out some boxes of old junk, I came across this vintage cookbook.ย  It may have been printed in the mid-1960’s or early 1970’s, and it was produced by an organization called the Albany County Home Bureau. Okay, this caught my attention. The spiral-bound cookbook featured dozens of recipes from Capital District homemakers and…

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So now I own a 2005/06 Saturn Ion…

January 9, 2011. I finished my three days of photography for the Premier Basketball League (one night in Quebec City, then two nights in Barre VT), purchased some tasty homemade Vermont fudge for my Street Academy trivia teammates, took some early-morning winter photographs along the Vermont roadways, and headed home. I entered the rampway from…

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Visiting my new ophthalmologist, Dr. Gesshoo

My life is undergoing more rewrites than Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark.ย  And one of those rewrites involves my eyesight. My mixture of nearsightedness and astigmatism has been a major curse for me.ย  Yes, I endured the endless taunts of “four eyes” and “windshield face” in school.ย  Yes, my glasses got busted up in schoolyard…

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Former Albany MVP fired from hoops team at halftime

I really want to celebrate when former hoops stars from the Capital District achieve success.ย  That would certainly include the way Jimmer Fredette is playing right now, no question.ย  And how about Jamario Moon?ย  This guy can say that in his professional career, he was the teammate of Dwyane Wade, Chris Bosh, LeBron James, Shaquille…

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Saturday Morning Mel-O-Toons

They were probably the cheapest cartoons ever made for broadcast. Their source material actually came from phonograph records. In 1960, a company called New World Productions created over a hundred six-minute cartoons, called “Mel-O-Toons.” The cartoons, specifically designed for television broadcast, were a mixture of fairy tales, Biblical stories, folk legends and the like. The…

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