Pop Culture Petri Dish

As is customary, there are a few things cultivating in the Dish, but for now it's all about the Bacchanalean food orgy that is Thanksgiving. The missus, dog, and I headed south to my parents' digs for a satisfying feast yesterday, and today we'll be having some Thanksgiving orphans over to our place for a second gorge-fest. That means today, in my universe at least, is Thanksgiving Day, too. In celebration and thanks, please find the winning entry in the illustrious 2007 Seattle Opera Hand Turkey competition, magnificently rendered by, um, me. Enjoy (or at least, don't chortle too derisively). The Petri Dish will also ape one of television's grand traditions and direct you to a re-run in lieu of original programming: Namely, this 2005 entry about the greatest Thanksgiving movie ever created: Blood Freak (guess what's gonna be post-turkey-gorging entertainment at the old homestead this evening?). Happy Thanksgiving, and may all your turkey comas be restful, dar...

For a lot of years it wasn't fashionable to be a fan of Rick Springfield, unless you were a swooning teenage girl. Rock snobs and insecure males everywhere dissed the musician/ General Hospital heart-throb during the height of his musical success in the Reagan Years. But with that teen-idol stigma packed away in the old Pop Culture Hope Chest like a beat-up high school yearbook, the music he made stands the test of time surprisingly well. Listening to his 1981 watershed record Working Class Dog (with its inescapably brilliant hit single, "Jessie's Girl") just cements this hypothesis. Pound for pound, it's one of the best power-pop records of its day, easily the equal in bright hooks and energy of anything the Plimsouls or Cheap Trick put out at the time (that's high praise indeed coming from this affirmed Cheap Trick nerd). He gave his rock more polish and gloss than the aforementioned two outfits, but avoided Journey's strident hamminess and Bon Jovi...

For decades, Robert Goulet was Mr. Perfect. With his old-showbiz helmet of pompadored black hair, bright blue eyes, chiseled jawline, and bell-clear baritone speaking/singing voice, Goulet (who died on October 30 at age 73 ) was less a traditional leading man than a larger-than-life cartoon of that leading man, and to his eternal credit he always seemed as keenly aware of it as anybody. He rose to prominence as the stage's first (and I'd argue, definitive) Sir Lancelot in Lerner and Lowe's monster hit musical Camelot in 1959. That voice and those features--both strong and distinctive enough to clearly communicate to the back rows of the most packed houses on Broadway--ensured him frequent employ on the musical stage, most recently in 2005 for a revival of La Cage aux Folles . But Robert Goulet became celebrity comfort food of the most welcome variety for me (and many of my generation) on TV in the seventies and eighties, logging in scores of talk-show appearances and gues...