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Starting on Saturday, September 3rd an authentic vintage 1920's train will run on the express 2/3 track in Manhattan throughout September (specifically, from 12 to 6 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays). Originally operated by the Interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) system, the train began service back in 1917 and will once again be operational. Customers who have the opportunity to ride the vintage train will be transported back in time to the Prohibition era with authentic details such as rattan seats, ceiling fans and drop sash windows, as well as a custom branded interior featuring Boardwalk Empire-inspired period artwork.

Yeah, I know, I'm a little late with this one. Usher, would you please show that heckler to the door? Thanks. I'll wait until he's... oh, okay, good now we can talk.

Last night, I was trying to look something up when I realized that I never got around to doing my customary overview of the books, movies, and home video I enjoyed in 2009. I've managed to hit every other year since 2005, but somehow '09 got away from me. Well, anyone who knows me knows I can't tolerate that sort of inconsistency! Luckily, I was able to find my handwritten notes for that year -- yes, I keep notes about these things -- so I've now been able to put together the official Simple Tricks and Nonsense 2009 Media Wrap-Up.

(I realize, of course, that this information is likely of very little interest to anyone but myself. I'm only going to the trouble of making a blog entry at this late date for my own records, and to satisfy my OCD. Thanks for your understanding. If you're vacillating about whether to read on, it might help you to know that I'm not going to bother with any commentary on this one, it'll just be lists of titles.)

I struggled all last week to compose one of my occasional political cris de couer, this one motivated by the nonsense currently going on in Wisconsin. If you've been in a cave for the last month -- and I know at least one of my Loyal Readers whose circumstances could be described as such -- Wisconsin's Republican governor is using a budgetary crisis, which he seems to have engineered himself, as a pretense to try and force his state's public-sector labor unions into giving up their collective bargaining rights. In shorter words, he's union-busting. But he's not busting all the public-sector unions. No, he's only after the ones whose members tend to vote Democratic. The Republican-leaning police and firefighter unions are safe. Which means this whole exercise is transparently partisan and blatantly ideological. I'm not interested in debating the pros and cons of unions -- Kevin Drum pretty much sums up my opinion here, and says it better than I could anyhow -- but the more unsavory political truth of the Wisconsin deal makes me mad. It is only the most obvious example of how Republicans nationwide are trying to take advantage of a shaky economy to ram through a radical right-wing social agenda that they haven't managed to accomplish in decades of trying. In other words, they're trying to kill things Republicans hate on principle anyway, while saying they have to do it to get the economy going.

Bullshit.

Here's the thing: if you really care about cutting the deficit, then you've got to be willing to at least consider letting the Bush tax cuts expire. The tax rates during the Clinton years were hardly onerous -- they were lower than the taxes in the prosperous 1950s -- and they'd go a long ways toward balancing the books. And you also ought to be trying to find a way to convince the wealthy -- who seem to think they're above paying taxes -- that they are still part of this country, even if they live behind locked gates, and it's immoral of them not to contribute to the common good. Oh, and you'd get serious about making corporations pay their fair share too. And while I'm pipe-dreaming anyhow, how about re-regulating the financial industry that caused this mess anyhow? And sending a few CEOs to jail? Or at least taking their solid-gold parachutes away from them and giving the money to the employees who got laid off to bolster the stockholders' dividends last quarter... but noooo, that's class warfare and we can't have that. Not unless it's being waged on the middle-class people who actually do the work in this country and are fast on their way to becoming vassals of a new feudalism. The sad thing is, a lot of them seem to actually want that...

Yeah, anyhow that's the gist of what I've been trying to write, but the damn thing just hasn't wanted to come together in a satisfying way, so tonight I decided "Screw it, let's do a nice harmless meme." And as fate would have it, SamuraiFrog recently provided one...

So, I've continued to dip from time to time into Vega$, that late-70s TV show starring Robert Urich as a T-Bird-driving private eye which I briefly discussed last summer. I haven't made it through the first season yet, and honestly, I'm not sure if I'm going to bother completing it. The show is entertaining in the bubbly, has-been-celebrity-watch fashion of many series from this era (Charlie's Angels, Fantasy Island, etc.), but it's ultimately pretty disposable. No, actually it's downright confounding, because you can see how this show could've been so much more. All the pieces were in place for it to be a groundbreaking peek at the grime beneath the glitz of one of America's greatest fantasy cities, with a compassionate hero who struggles with his own dark side even as he fights to ensure justice for the victims he encounters. In other words, it could've been very much like Miami Vice would turn out to be only a few years later. (Remember that Vega$ was created by Michael Mann, the producer of Vice; Mann didn't create Vice, but he was responsible for the show's look and tone, and I'm not surprised that his earlier work contains seeds that flowered on the later show). But Vega$ is what it is, sadly, and even if it were to be remade today in a grittier style, I think the horse has already bolted on the thematic territory I'm talking about. It's been done, and fans of the original Vega$ would no doubt gripe about how everything has to be "dark" these days, just I've done myself with remakes of old shows I like. C'est la vie.

Anyhow, one of the more amusing aspects of the show is the frequent guest appearances by old-timey entertainers and Hollywood B-listers trying to keep their careers going just a little longer. And the episode I watched the other night, "The Pageant," contained not just one, but two of these guest appearances by well-known faces that added up to a real doozy of a laugh. The plot was unusually serious for Vega$, involving a serial rapist preying on contestants in the "Miss Casino" beauty pageant. The first young lady to get attacked is the daughter of a state senator who hires our hero, Dan Tanna, to find and stop the perpetrator without the publicity attracted by regular police activity. The senator was ably played by none other than Robert Reed, better known as Mike Brady on the classic sitcom The Brady Bunch, seen here at the height of his mid-70s perm-and-mustache phase. And the senator's daughter? None other than... Maureen McCormick, a.k.a. Marsha Brady.

This casting was so startling and funny to me that I can't help but think it had to be intended as some kind of stunt. I can actually hear the voiceover in my head saying, "Tonight on Vega$: a Brady Bunch father-and-daughter reunion in the City of Sin!" I compared the dates of production and it turns out that only four years had elapsed since the end of The Brady Bunch in March 1974 and the airing of "The Pageant" in November 1978, so audiences of the day would surely have noticed the pairing of two such familiar faces. I wonder if anyone back in '78 found it unsettling to hear Mr. Brady discussing Marsha's rape with a two-fisted PI? Did the producers of Vega$ have some kind of perverse goal in casting actors so strongly associated with a squeaky-clean family comedy? Maybe they were trying to make the rape seem extra-tragic by having it happen to one of America's favorite TV daughters? Or is it actually possible that McCormick and Reed were cast independently, without anyone even considering the Brady Bunch angle? It's possible I suppose... but it still feels like a stunt to me.

It seems like I've been mentioning Doctor Who quite a bit lately, and even though I always try to include sufficient background information when I'm blathering about something I suspect my readers might not know about, I imagine this show remains pretty esoteric for a lot of you folks. So in the spirit of being a good blog host, I thought this charming image might be helpful (Who fans are welcome to peruse it as well... it's pretty fun!):

see more Lol Celebs

Ed. Note: Looks like in order to see it at full size, you'll have to click the image to jump to the source page, then click it again to enlarge. Sorry for the runaround... I didn't realize it would be that big a deal when I started this post!

The next couple of entries probably aren't going to be of any interest to anyone except me -- and isn't it cute that I think any of my entries are of interest to anyone except myself? -- but these are housekeeping-type things that I feel obligated to do in order to satisfy my own OCD-fueled mania for lists and historical accounting, and I need to do them pretty damn quick, too, since the first month of 2011 is already gone. Anyhow, if for some reason you are interested in reading on, here's everything on which I wasted my meager leisure time during the previous year...

You may recall me mentioning a while back that the classic sci-fi TV series Doctor Who was filming an episode right in my own backyard, specifically Utah's Monument Valley. Well, now you can catch a glimpse of the result in the official trailer for Series 6. (In case you don't know, the Brits call a television season a "series," and what we think of as a series is a "program" -- well, technically, a "programme" -- and yes, I realize this trailer won't make a lot of sense to people who aren't familiar with the show. To be honest, I haven't seen enough of the most recent season/series to consider myself "familiar" either, but hey, it's Doctor Who, and it's Utah, so I get that much at least...)

When I was a teenager watching the super-low-budget '70s-vintage Doctor Who in my bedroom late at night, I never could've imagined the show coming to America. Back then, every alien world or historical time period the Doctor visited looked suspiciously like a rock quarry just outside of London, a windswept heath right out of Thomas Hardy, or a really cheap plywood set. To be honest, that was part of the show's appeal for me, because it was so different from what I was used to, and everything looked so... British.

The show is different since its 2005 relaunch, with more variety in its real-world locations and CGI enabling the producers to create (mostly) realistic and truly unearthly virtual places, but there's still something constrained, for lack of a better word, about the show's overall look. I think it's the difference between the cozy, worn-in landscape of the U.K., and the rugged, wide-open spaces I'm familiar with out here in the western U.S. Which means I'm itching with curiosity to see what such a quintessentially British series is going to make of such an iconic American landscape. I hope it's more than just that wonderful helicopter shot we see in the trailer, that the producers really took advantage of being here. I suspect they did, what with all the talk about "somewhere different, somewhere... brand new."

Incidentally, although this marks the first time Doctor Who has filmed in America, I know of at least one other episode that was set here, and once again, the action took place in the deserts of Utah. Well, in tunnels that were supposedly beneath those deserts, but still, close enough. Salt Lake City was explicitly referenced, in any event. It makes me wonder who on the Who staff has the fascination for my home state....

Hm. You know, the modern incarnation of Doctor Who is produced by BBC Wales. It occurs to me that my own ancestors were Mormon converts who originated from Wales. Now isn't that an interesting coincidence? Is it possible the producers feel some inexplicable pull toward this dry, desolate land so far from their own green hills, like something in their blood? Sounds like a Doctor Who storyline right there...