11,502 stories by "Trav S.D."
World Sword Swallowers Day happens every year for the last Saturday in February. It falls a little early this year. We hope you will use the opportunity to peruse the Travalanche Sword Swall…
Born 100 years ago today: illustrator, author, designer Edward Gorey (1925-2000). While primarily celebrated for his book illustrations, Gorey did cross over into stage and screen success br…
Born 100 years ago today, Hollywood's original poet of violence, Sam Peckinpah (1922-1984). I reckon it was always forgone that Peckinpah would not live to see this day. The man consumed vas…
Founded 100 years ago today, that seminal American organ of taste, craft, wisdom, and discernment (and almost always several good laughs), The New Yorker. The New Yorker was the innovative b…
February 21 is International Tourist Guide Day, sponsored by the World Federation of Tourist Guide Associations. As it happens, I had the great honor to be invited to speak to their local af…
Singer-songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie (b. 1941) was back in the news just a couple of weeks ago, and I bet she's glad that we're living under a tsunami of catastrophic headlines, for hers was…
Having frequently come across clips of the original CBS broadcasts of the game show What's My Line?, which ran from 1950 through 1967, I grew curious about its host John Charles Daly (1914-1…
There are a number of people on my calendar to write about today; with the government currently attempting to erase LGBT community, trans people in particular, I figure I'd better go with ce…
February 18 is the birthday of Billy DeWolf, Adolphe Menjou, "Little Angie" Rossitto, Hugo Haas, Allan Melvin, Edward Arnold, George Givot, George Kennedy, George Kirby, Jerry Fujikawa, Jack…
Few are the American actors as significant and solid yet as unknown and forgotten as Arthur Kennedy (1914-1990). Kennedy's chief claim to enduring fame is his having created key roles in the…
Back in 2016, some P.A. on a documentary asked me if they could use a clip from one of my old vaudeville shows at Surf Reality circa 1998 in a new film about burlesque, and I said yeah and p…
February 15 being National Wisconsin Day, we now add it to the small number of American states to which we are paying tributes in a series, making a sort of midwestern trilogy with our two r…
Comic strip artist Carl Thomas Anderson (1865-1948) was born of a Valentine's Day, just like Jack Benny, Gregory Hines, and tellingly, Teller of Penn and Teller. Teller is just as silent as …
The big year for Susan Oliver (Charlotte Gercke, 1932-1990) was 1964: in that one year she was the female lead in Jerry Lewis's The Disorderly Orderly, the Hank Williams bio-pic Your Cheatin…
This ad was the best image I could find recording the existence of vaudeville harmonica player Ted Waldman (1899-1987), who was born of a February 12. You can see him and his brother Al ment…
Four Marxes, Three Dimensions
Australian country singer Chad Morgan (1933-2025) passed away last month, and thanks Eve Golden for my belated introduction to him. Australian country music is very much a thing, and it make…
Mia Farrow's birthday is February 9; February 10 was the birthday of her father, the less remembered writer and director John Farrow (1904-1963). John Farrow's self-reported early life sound…
I apologize in advance because for the rest of the day and surely for several days afterward your head will be full of the songs of Gerry Goffin (1939-2014) and Carole King (b. 1942) " I mea…
This one goes to my favorite Iowan, Lynn Berg! It's National Iowa Day. In writing this blog, I've been aggregating things I like about this state for years, believe it or not. As a member of…
This is a public apology " published permanently into the public record for all to see. Ten years ago a very good friend launched a monthly theatrical series and cast it with about two dozen…
We are kvelling big time for our friends Rich Martin and Meagan Hennessey of Archeophone Records, for chalking up two Grammy Awards for the album I told you about last August Centennial: Kin…
February 6 is the birthday of singer and actor Fabian Forte (b.1943), known to audiences of his own day merely as Fabian. Fabian lives at the center of a Venn Diagram including two sets of m…
I'm always late to the party! Somehow I never got word that Stewart F. Lane, visionary Broadway producer, author of Black Broadway: African Americans on the Great White Way (2015), and part-…
February 5, 1969 was the air date of the one and only broadcast episode of the TV comedy sketch show Turn On. Turn On has become legendary as the shortest-lived tv series ever, because not o…
