As a runner up, I would say that this one about creeping theocratic rhetoric and behavior, particulalry among American conservatives, is very effective in pointing out just how pervasive those things have become in our political and cultural discourse, and why it’s important to protect and restore secular ideals.

If you’re interested, the restaurant’s own website is here, and I’m pleased to see that it’s very reasonably priced, especially considering the location. There’s too many modest-to-poor joints in New York City that feel justified in charging prices and treating customers like they were in the Rainbow Room and not a coffee shop or burger joint. What’s evident, though, is that the sense of place borders on the eternal, which is a quality that has pervaded New York for a long time but is beginning to die out.

Wu and Usui have also produced other short films for clients ranging from the New York Times to MoMA to Pepsi, which you can view on the website for their production company Lost & Found Films.

Because this is a) a documentary and b) sponsored by the National Film Board of Canada, I don’t expect that you’ll see this at your local multiplex any time soon, but perhaps the fortuitous timing will get this booked into some smaller indie movie houses that might have otherwise not bothered. NFBC is also good about putting content online, so it might wind up on their website at some point too.

It’s not your imagination, cable TV reality shows are getting more redneck by the day. This Venn diagram comes from this article at New York Magazine’s pop culture blog Vulture, where you can see the full-sized version of the diagram. I guess dwarves and people with lots of kids are out of vogue, since I don’t see any of those on the list.

This post from the blog that accompanies the PBS documentary series “Independent Lens” also has some videos about the evolution of the logo from the 1990s and a comprehensive collection of EVERY logo going all the way back to when the network was still called NET (National Educational Television)

Chicago Tribune music critic Howard Reich writes about the recent passing of blues guitar legend Hubert Sumlin as just the latest in a string of passings of legendary Chicago bluesmen. The tradition of Chicago blues is dying out along with those old men, Reich says, and there aren’t a lot of younger musicians taking up where they are leaving off.

Being a sheltered white boy from Maine, I didn’t know anything about the blues when I actually LIVED in Chicago, so I can’t even share a story of the time I saw Pinetop Perkins or something. Well, actually, I did *almost* see Pinetop Perkins years later, but not in Chicago; it was in Portland, Maine, as a matter of fact, and he was supposed to play at one of the venues for Portland’s New Years Eve celebration, but he missed the gig because of the weather. So there you go. A few years after that, once we had moved to Massachusetts, I began listening to “Blues After Hours” on WGBH radio on Saturday nights, which always opened with a special tune created just for the show by Pinetop Perkins, so he and I eventually caught up with one another. I spent many Saturday nights playing Civ until the wee hours and listening to the great artists of blues music, not just from Chicago but St. Louis and Kansas City and the Mississippi Delta and everywhere else. That phase ended not long after Charlotte was born, when the host of the radio show, Mai Cramer, passed away. The show lingered on for a few more years with another host. WGBH pulled the plug on it in ’07, but I had moved on anyway. These days I don’t need to listen to the blues, because I got ‘em myself.

Here’s a video clip of Howlin’ Wolf, Hubert Sumlin, and Willie Dixon playing “Smokestack Lightning” back in 1964, just so you know what you’ve been missing:

While we’re on the subject of reboots, there’s apparently a persistent rumor that the long-awaited “Six Million Dollar Man” reboot is really going to happen, with Leonardo DiCaprio playing the title role. Last time this rumor made the rounds, Lee Majors made it known that he would *LOVE* to be involved, but he wants to play Oscar Goldman. I somehow suspect that wouldn’t happen, but who knows. According to that first link, at one point the plan was to use Jim Carrey as Steve Austin and play the reboot for laughs, so anything is possible.

And whatever happened to Steve Austin anyway? Seems like he got screwed over by the gummint like everybody else.

Through the magic of Netflix, Charlotte has recently discovered those sitcom evergreens of my childhood, “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family”. Growing up in the 1970s, I mostly missed the afternoon kid’s TV blight of animated advertising like GI Joe, He-Man, and Transformers and instead spent my afterschool hours watching Bugs Bunny cartoons and re-runs of 1960s sitcoms. Forty years later, the animated advertising is still there, sorry to say, but the chestnuts of television comedy aren’t — they’ve been relegated to night-time cable channels like TV Land, where people my age continue to watch them. The cultural disconnect is huge because the shared vocabulary of knowledge of our shared past is lost. I know much much more about life and pop culture of the generation ahead of me because I spent hours watching their leftovers. Charlotte has very little reference to life in the 1970s or 80s and no tie at all to those older times. So I was more than a little bit pleased that not only did she watch those two shows, she *loved* them. She devoured both series, watching every single episode of both of them over the period of the last couple of weeks.

Meanwhile…with Christmas on the way, we’ve been trying to find a “big” gift item for her, but frankly have been left cold by the idea of buying another electronic gadget or pointlessly excessive toy. Every time we have a purge of unwanted/broken/outgrown stuff around here, it feels like we would have been just as well served to make a pile of dollar bills and light them on fire for the warmth. Then, last weekend, as I was scouring Boston.com looking for things we could do for amusement on Sunday, I noticed that the Broadway adaptation of “The Addams Family” is coming to Boston in February. As is usually the case with recent Broadway shows that tour, the tickets aren’t cheap, but as soon as I saw that I knew it would be the perfect “big” Christmas gift. We all love to go to live performances, Charlotte has never seen a real Broadway show, it will be a big night out for all of us, and, I hope, an evening to remember. Plus, the timing of having it be “The Addams Family” is just perfect. The only downside will be having to wait seven or eight weeks to actually go.

So, while all that is going on, the scuttlebutt from Hollywood is that the guy who wrote and produced the show “Pushing Daisies” a couple of seasons ago has been given the greenlight by NBC to do a “reboot” of “The Munsters”. Of course, there has to be a modern twist, so the advance word is that the show will be an “edgy” one-hour drama, no doubt to cash in on the popularity of the fairy-tale drama “Once Upon A Time” and the slightly more horror-tinged “Grimm”. Which is too bad, because it means the whole thing will be a complete and utter failure; if it even makes it out of pilot season, it will die a horrible death after two episodes in prime time, because everyone LOVES the goofy antics of Herman and Grandpa, and will be completely put off by some gothic monster story. The reason there even IS a Broadway musical version of “The Addams Family” is because the several Hollywood film versions of it stuck very very close to the cherished shtick of the sitcom. “The Munsters” rebooted should embrace Fred Gwynne’s mincing Herman and Al Lewis’s New York-inflected Grandpa and find a way to make that work for an audience that loves nothing better than to reconnect with well-loved characters. Next thing you know, there’ll be a reboot of “Gilligan’s Island” that tries to be like “Lost”. I think Mary Elizabeth Williams’ take on it is probably the wisest: stop with all the remakes and find an original idea already.

Via Singularity Hub comes word that Square, the smartphone credit card swiper, is going to be sold at Wal-Mart. The device has been available through other electronics retailers for a while, but, as with everything else in retail, once WallyWorld gets its hands on something, it goes to a whole new level. Square makes it easy for almost anyone to accept credit card payments. You don’t even need to be a business to use their service, and they charge less than other credit card processors. Making the readers available through the world’s largest retailer is a brilliant move to grab a big share of that market.

The Register says that the end of the road is officially in sight for music CDs. According to their report, the record labels plan to stop issuing albums in CD format by the end of 2012, moving to all-digital-download distribution. Unquestionably this has been an inevitability for years, but I was surprised to learn from this story that they still sell so many more CDs than downloads even at this point. Of course, part of that may be because so many people don’t BUY digital music.

Also totally over: 3D. Not just 3DTV, which never even got off the ground in the first place, but the bloom is off the rose for 3D movies too. In the end, 3D has failed AGAIN for the same reasons it has failed every other time: it’s expensive, it doesn’t work all that well, it gives people a headache, and the content sucks donkey balls. To me, the bigger surprise was that anyone really thought this time would be any different.