Having been born and raised in New England, I have a proper appreciation for seafood. I love it. Now that I am in Southern Maryland my appreciation has been slightly altered, but remains strong.
See, in New England they have real fried clams -- the ones with the bellies. Yeah, when I was a kid there were a few places that wimped out and sold fried clam strips (I'm looking at you, HoJo's!) but if you went into those places you kind of skulked in, hoping your friends didn't see you while at the same time being embarrassed for your parents who were the ones who dragged you in there in the first place.
In Southern Maryland, the big things are oysters and crabs. Now I like oysters, but fried oysters just don't hold a candle to fried clams. (And crabs -- they're darned tasty but the people around here boast about crabs only because they don't have lobster!)
So we've been looking for a place around here that serves decent fried clams and it turns out there's a little hole-in-the-wall diner a couple of miles away that has them. I hope to check it out this week. I really am tired of driving 500 miles to Cape Cod every time I get a hankering for clams.
(The very best fried clams we ever had were from another hole-in-the-wall place off the rotary by the Hyannis airport. The place was there for only one season and has been mightily mourned ever since.)
And while I'm gorging on what I hope are fried clams that live up to their local reputation, I thought I'd give you a recipe to try for yourselves.
Enjoy.
http://leitesculinaria.com/75621/recipes-clam-shack-style-fried-clams.html
Small House of Everything
Thursday, March 6, 2014
Wednesday, March 5, 2014
BAD JOKE WEDNESDAY
A busload of politicians were traveling down a country lane when it veered off the road and smashed into a large tree. A nearby farmer happened on the scene, inspected the wreckage, then dug a large pit and buried the politicians. A few days later, the county sheriff drove by and saw the wrecked bus and the nearby grave and the farmer told him about the accident and that he had buried the politicians. "Good heavens! They were ALL dead?" the sheriff asked. "Well," the farmer replied, "a couple of them said they weren't, but you know how all them politicians lie."
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
OVERLOOKED TELEVISION: TALES OF FRANKENSTEIN
Tales of Frankenstein: The Face in the Tombstone Mirror (1958)
Just as Victor and Igor did when cherry-picking body parts for their monster, so too did Hammer Studios and Columbia Pictures did when they partnered to produce this failed television pilot, taking a standard Hammer plot and throwing in stock scenes from several Universal pictures.
British actor Anton Diffring (The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Beast Must Die) plays Baron Frankenstein to Don McGowan's (The Creature Walks Among Us, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold) Monster. Also featured in the half-hour pilot are Helen Westcott (Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Monster on the Campus), Ludwig Stossell (Ramar of the Jungle, From the Earth to the Moon), Richard Bull ("Nels Oleson" on Little House on the Prairie; he passed away last month at age 89), Raymond Greenleaf (Pinky, All the King's Men), Peter Brocco (Radar Men from the Moon, Johnny Got His Gun), and Sidney Mason ("Inspector J. J. Burke" in the 1952 series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist).
The show was directed by Curt Siodmak, brother of director Robert Siodmak and the screenwriter of many classic horror movies: Donovan's Brain, The Wolfman, Black Friday, I Walked with a Zombie, House of Frankenstein, Son of Dracula, The Beast with Five Fingers, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Bride of the Gorilla, The Magnetic Monster, and the list goes on and on. Siodmak also acted as associate producer and provided the story for Tales of Frankenstein: The Face in the Tombstone Mirror. The actual scripting duties went to Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, legendary names in the SF and mystery fields. According to IMDb, Jerome Bixby, the SF writer/editor whose story "It's a Good Life" was one of the most memorable The Twilight Zone episodes, had an uncredited hand in the teleplay as well.
Enjoy.
https://archive.org/details/TalesOfFrankensteintheFaceInTheTombstoneMirror-Pilot
Just as Victor and Igor did when cherry-picking body parts for their monster, so too did Hammer Studios and Columbia Pictures did when they partnered to produce this failed television pilot, taking a standard Hammer plot and throwing in stock scenes from several Universal pictures.
British actor Anton Diffring (The Man Who Could Cheat Death, The Beast Must Die) plays Baron Frankenstein to Don McGowan's (The Creature Walks Among Us, Tarzan and the Valley of Gold) Monster. Also featured in the half-hour pilot are Helen Westcott (Abbott and Costello Meet Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Monster on the Campus), Ludwig Stossell (Ramar of the Jungle, From the Earth to the Moon), Richard Bull ("Nels Oleson" on Little House on the Prairie; he passed away last month at age 89), Raymond Greenleaf (Pinky, All the King's Men), Peter Brocco (Radar Men from the Moon, Johnny Got His Gun), and Sidney Mason ("Inspector J. J. Burke" in the 1952 series Craig Kennedy, Criminologist).
The show was directed by Curt Siodmak, brother of director Robert Siodmak and the screenwriter of many classic horror movies: Donovan's Brain, The Wolfman, Black Friday, I Walked with a Zombie, House of Frankenstein, Son of Dracula, The Beast with Five Fingers, Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, Bride of the Gorilla, The Magnetic Monster, and the list goes on and on. Siodmak also acted as associate producer and provided the story for Tales of Frankenstein: The Face in the Tombstone Mirror. The actual scripting duties went to Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, legendary names in the SF and mystery fields. According to IMDb, Jerome Bixby, the SF writer/editor whose story "It's a Good Life" was one of the most memorable The Twilight Zone episodes, had an uncredited hand in the teleplay as well.
Enjoy.
https://archive.org/details/TalesOfFrankensteintheFaceInTheTombstoneMirror-Pilot
Monday, March 3, 2014
INCOMING
- Cameron Judd, Beggar's Touch, Caine's Trail, and Cherokee Joe. Westerns.
- T. M. Wright, The Place. Horror.
Sunday, March 2, 2014
Saturday, March 1, 2014
VOODA (1955)
How many white jungle queens does it take to change a light bulb? I have no idea, but surely, out of all the umptitty-ump white jungle queens out there in Comic Book Land and Pulpland, there has to be at least one who knows how to do it. I mean, there's a passel of them out there.
And one of them is Vooda. Seriously, that's her name.
In the June 1955 issue (#26), Vooda is talked into starring in Hollywood's latest jungle epic, replacing a shallow star in "The Intruders." And in "The Trek of Danger," Vooda is tricked into going on a long journey, allowing an evil rival to convince the natives that Vooda has died. Alas, Vooda's outfit is pretty modest throughout. No tiny leopard skin outfits for this jungle queen!
The jungle is a pretty big place -- big enough for a few more jungle characters. In "Trapped!," Kimbo the Jungle Boy faces off against the evil witch doctor Taglee and an ancient powerful weapon; in the end Kimbo proves that good outlives evil. (Doesn't it seem like kids in the Fifties had to be reminded of that over and over again?) In "Congo Champ," Zaan, a clean-cut boxer who has retired to his family's small farm in Africa, is thinking of going back into the ring when two crooked promoters kidnap his father, hoping to force Zaan into signing with them. (Again, Fifties kids learn a moral lesson: Things should be "acquired by honest means, the only true reward for any man.")
Also in this issue, two one-papers: a funny animal strip featuring Koko the Kongo Kid and an unfunny strip in which Uncle Otto has a dream.
To comply with postal regulations, comic books usually had a two-page print story in each issue. This time it's "The Ape Trail!" White boy of the jungle Ken Hammond crosses paths with a mad scientist who has been transplanting the brains of humans into the bodies of apes.
As you can tell, none of this is very P.C., and the truly innocent among us might well ask why there were no black jungle queens. The "white man's burden" has always been a racist concept, but those of us who grew up with Tarzan and Bomba and Sheena can still enjoy such stories while rejecting the conceit behind them.
http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=38983
And one of them is Vooda. Seriously, that's her name.
In the June 1955 issue (#26), Vooda is talked into starring in Hollywood's latest jungle epic, replacing a shallow star in "The Intruders." And in "The Trek of Danger," Vooda is tricked into going on a long journey, allowing an evil rival to convince the natives that Vooda has died. Alas, Vooda's outfit is pretty modest throughout. No tiny leopard skin outfits for this jungle queen!
The jungle is a pretty big place -- big enough for a few more jungle characters. In "Trapped!," Kimbo the Jungle Boy faces off against the evil witch doctor Taglee and an ancient powerful weapon; in the end Kimbo proves that good outlives evil. (Doesn't it seem like kids in the Fifties had to be reminded of that over and over again?) In "Congo Champ," Zaan, a clean-cut boxer who has retired to his family's small farm in Africa, is thinking of going back into the ring when two crooked promoters kidnap his father, hoping to force Zaan into signing with them. (Again, Fifties kids learn a moral lesson: Things should be "acquired by honest means, the only true reward for any man.")
Also in this issue, two one-papers: a funny animal strip featuring Koko the Kongo Kid and an unfunny strip in which Uncle Otto has a dream.
To comply with postal regulations, comic books usually had a two-page print story in each issue. This time it's "The Ape Trail!" White boy of the jungle Ken Hammond crosses paths with a mad scientist who has been transplanting the brains of humans into the bodies of apes.
As you can tell, none of this is very P.C., and the truly innocent among us might well ask why there were no black jungle queens. The "white man's burden" has always been a racist concept, but those of us who grew up with Tarzan and Bomba and Sheena can still enjoy such stories while rejecting the conceit behind them.
http://comicbookplus.com/?dlid=38983
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