The Six Million Dollar Man and the Gestalt of the Gerald Ford Years

I haven’t seen so much as a clip of the Six Million Dollar Man since the program actually aired in the 1970s. For all intents and purposes, Steve Austin has been living exclusively inside my head for the last 35…

The Before and After of Molly Webber: A Very Brady Makeover

Remember the Brady Bunch episode “My Fair Opponent,” in which Marcia takes pity on a plain girl in her class named Molly Webber, and ends up making Molly so popular that she winds up beating out Marcia herself for the…

Vietnam Steps Into the Regal Beagle

Confession:  Three’s Company has never been must see TV for me. Unless I’m gawking at one of Mr. Furley’s denim ensembles, I rarely pay the show the attention that it deserves. But that all changed one recent Saturday while chasing…

Michael Chabon’s Latest, “Telegraph Avenue,” Drops Today, Sept. 11, 2012

Living in San Francisco’s shadow, Oakland and Berkeley in general and Telegraph Ave. in particular don’t get the exposure they deserve. Telegraph’s glory days are behind it, and in front of it. It is between trends at the moment, the…

Neil Armstrong’s First Obituary

Considering it happened in the era of rotary phones and “dumb” cars that didn’t have power anything, the success of the 1969 moon landing is all the more remarkable. The only failure of the event was Neil Armstrong’s flubbed speech.…

KALX, You’re Still Great; Alameda County Waste Management, Not So Much.

It’s funny peculiar that within a week of downloading one of those super apps that lets you listen to any radio station in the world including police scanners, I ended up doubling down on KALX. Isn’t that always the way…

Movie review: The Van (1977)

 * * * Year of Release: 1977 Length: 92 min. Rating: R Genre: Teensploitation, custom vans/vansploitation Starring: Stuart Getz You know Stuart Getz from his Brady Bunch appearance as Charley, the affable red-haired loser Marcia breaks a date with (“something…