Fried-day on my mind

Another week down. What is up?

I was remiss in not mentioning the recent passing of two musical greats, Ray Charles and Robert Quine. Ray Charles managed to get some press in between Reagan Funeral Watch coverage, but Quine deserved some notice, too. He was an influential punk guitarist who lived a tortured existence and ultimately killed himself via a heroin OD. I had heard of him earlier with Richard Hell and the Voidoids, but it was his later work with Matthew Sweet on the great albums Girlfriend and Altered Beast that really turned me on to Quine.

In happier news (for him, anyway), you've gotta love the life that William Davidson's leading right now, at least if you're a sports fan. In the last few months, three teams that he owns have won their sport's championship. Dude owns the Tampa Bay Lightning, the WNBA's Detroit Shock, and the Detroit Pistons, who just pulled off a monstrous upset of the LA Lakers. Best of all is the 81-year-old Davidson would go to all the games wearing his Members Only jacket, mellow as can be. Of course, he's a billionaire, so he's probably got a Members Only jacket for every day of the year. And he wore one to hoist the Stanley Cup and the NBA championship trophy, whatever the hell that's called.

Bill Clinton's autobiography is about to be released, and it's expected to be a megaseller. The thing is 900 pages long. Not surprising, when you consider how long-winded the guy can be. I hear there's a whole chapter on the meaning of "is." I can't wait for Dubya's autobiography, which will come out in comic book form. (rim shot)

This poor guy spent an eternity stuck in his apartment because of bad elevators.

Some good new DVDs are on my wish list: The first SCTV set, the Simpsons Season 4, and the Freaks and Geeks set. I first got into SCTV in the late 1970s (yeah, yeah, I'm old) when it ran on Toronto's Global TV. It eventually moved to NBC, which buried it late on Friday nights before replacing it with the super-lame Friday Night Videos; in its last few years, it was on Cinemax, but we didn't have cable in the podunk town in New Hampshire that we moved to (Kingston). Many compared it to Saturday Night Live, but it was much better than that show; a better comparison was Monty Python. The core cast was ridiculously talented: John Candy, Eugene Levy, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, Andrea Martin, Catherine O'Hara and Joe Flaherty, as well as Martin Short and Harold Ramis. I can't wait to see those old shows in their original format again, instead of the heavily snipped versions that ran on Nick at Nite in the early '90s. The first set of DVDs is of the 90-minute NBC shows; future releases will feature the older shows. Hurray for DVDs!