For those interested, my latest novel, Nox, is now available through Amazon.com both in paperback and e-book format.
Starting tomorrow, September the 9th and for five days, the e-book version of both Nox and Chameleon will be available for FREE to anyone interested in picking it up. Before reading Nox, I strongly recommend reading both Mechanic and Chameleon, both of which are also part of the Corrosive Knights series.
To get the Chameleon e-book, click on the link below:
The subject matter is intriguing and opens the door to what may lie in the future regarding the next generation of the internet, an internet that will be considerably faster and far more secure.
One of the more intriguing things to be found on Sirius/XM satellite radio is the RadioClassics channel. This particular channel is devoted to replaying the radio dramas, mysteries, horror, and comedy of the past before television essentially took over the medium.
Nonetheless, in listening to the radio classics station I’ve found that much of episodic television originated here. Gunsmoke, for example, was a popular radio mainstay for many years before reaching television and making its mark there. Likewise, if you ever find Lucille Ball’sMy Favorite Husband playing on radio classics, you quickly discover that this show was very obviously the genesis/basis for I Love Lucy, perhaps the most groundbreaking -and arguably still one of the most popular- of all sitcoms.
While some of the shows on the radio classics channel haven’t aged all that well, particularly some of the many comedies (though I can’t get enough of the wonderful Jack Benny Show), there is one show among them all that intrigues me the most: Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar.
This detective series starred many different actors in the title role of Johnny Dollar, an insurance investigator who managed to get himself into plenty of hard-boiled (and action packed!) mysteries. Of those various actors who played the title role for the series 12 year run, the most intriguing of the lot is easily Bob Bailey, and the best of the best of the series are the 5 part episodes that allowed for greater character depth and mystery. The series, alas, ran In this particular format for just a little over a year, but I can’t get enough of the stuff.
I sniffed around Amazon and found the following link for a 2 DVD set of some 732 (!) episodes.
I suspect the 732 episodes presented here are what remains of the 811 total episodes of the show recorded, which means that a little less than one hundred of them may be lost forever.
Still, this set, priced at a very reasonable $10, gives you more than enough Johnny Dollar to last you many, many hours of drive time (indeed my iTunes lists the total run time of these two DVD discs at a whopping 10.9 days worth of listening!).
So, if you’re in the mood for something truly unique and entertaining -and, no, I don’t receive any royalties from the sales of these discs- you might want to give Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar a look.
So I was in one of those “lulls” with my Netflix queue. While waiting for a couple of movies to be released in the next few weeks, I had my pick of films I was curious about but not necessarily waiting with bated breath to see.
Among them I chose The Guard, a 2011 comedy featuring Brendan Gleeson and Don Cheadle. I recalled the movie received positive reviews upon being released even if the film seemed to disappear rather quickly from theaters without garnering all that much attention from audiences.
So I gave it a whirl. I didn’t expect all that much, which made what came next all that more delightful.
The Guard is, to put it bluntly, one of the most consistently funny films I’ve seen in a very long time. From the beginning to the end I found myself laughing out loud at the situations presented and the very clever dialogue.
The story: Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Gleeson) is a walking contradiction of a police officer. He operates in a very small town in Ireland and is viewed as a “loose cannon” by those around him. He is alternately vulgar, seemingly corrupt (to a point), and, some may think, dim witted. However, there’s much more to Boyle than meets the eye. Over the course of the film, he becomes involved with a group of shady, violent, and surprisingly eloquent (!) drug runners as well as a very “fish out of water” American FBI agent (Cheadle) who is hunting them down.
Those expecting big action sequences will likely be disappointed. However, those same people should be won over by the movie’s clever and hilarious script. If, like me, you’re a little too accustomed to American English, feel free to use the subtitle feature to capture every delicious bit of dialogue.
It is rare to see a comedy that manages to sustain its energy level throughout its run time. Though The Guard wasn’t one of the films I was “dying” to get to on my queue list, I’m very happy to have given it a try. Highly recommended.
These are the most telling numbers regarding what the movie earned over the weekend (I’ve bolded the truly jaw dropping stats):
According to studio estimates, the colorful toddler-targeting entry, which is being distributed by Kenn Viselman Presents (Viselman formerly found massive success as producer of The Teletubbies), earned a truly awful $448,131 from 2,160 theaters in its debut three-day weekend.
That gross yielded a per theater average of $207. Yes, you’re reading that correctly: $207!
Just how low is that? Let’s pretend that the average ticket price for each customer was about $7 this weekend. That would mean that only 30 people saw Oogieloves at each theater — across all its showings — over the past three days.
Yikes!
Perhaps the worst part of all this is that, according to the article, the movie’s budget was an incredible $20 million to produce and another $40 million to promote!
Yikes, redux!
Saddest of all was the fact that I caught actor Chazz Palminteri on one of those morning shows on Friday promoting the film. He seemed like he was pleased with it and happy to have worked on something intended for very, very young viewers. But…he’s Chazz Palminteri. Whenever I think of him, what floats in my mind are mob/crime dramas. Adult fare like The Usual Suspects. Yet there he was, surrounded by people dressed in the Oogieloves’ costumes. Needless to say, he looked really out of place.
Looking at the cast of the film over at IMDB.com, I was surprised to see so many recognizable names among it. Did they actually appear on film or simply provide voices to the characters? I don’t know.
I’m not all that interested in finding out, either.
Starting tomorrow, September the 9th and for five days, the e-book version of both Nox and Chameleon will be available for FREE to anyone interested in picking it up. Before reading Nox, I strongly recommend reading both Mechanic and Chameleon, both of which are also part of the Corrosive Knights series.