Daily Loaf

When Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew aired, I wondered why Dr. Drew was venturing into the realm of substance abuse instead of sticking with what made him famous: dispensing sex and love advice on his call-in show, Love Lines. This month, Dr. Drew reclaims his throne as the Oprah of American sex with the new reality show, Sex Rehab with Dr. Drew. And by reality, I mean the show features celebrities — though I use the term “celebrity” very loosely. Read the rest of this entry »

The Creative Loafing team prides itself on producing more Daily Loaf content each week than any individual could ever possibly comprehend. As such, you’re bound to have missed at least one worthwhile story from the pages of this blog over the last few days. Here’s a “greatest hits” list from the week that was, broken down by section:

NEWS

MUSIC

Movies, food, sex and Punky Brewster after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m embarrassed to confess that I had no idea who Gertrude Berg was before I watched You-Hoo, Mrs. Goldberg, an enlightening if somewhat stock documentary from director Aviva Kempner (The Life and Times of Hank Greenberg). A radio and television pioneer, Berg enjoyed a long career playing signature character Molly Goldberg, a stereotype-shattering Jewish matriarch who maintained a decades-long run in the public eye. Berg starred in and wrote every episode of the radio and TV incarnations of The Goldbergs (and we’re talking thousands of shows), in the process inventing the sitcom and many of the tropes we find commonplace today.

Read more of Joe Bardi’s review after the jump …
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The Walking Dead, Robert Kirkman and Charlie Adlard’s incredible tale of ongoing survival horror, is THE most consistently great comic book series on shelves today. It’s so good, that it’s being developed into a television series for AMC (the same folks airing the critically acclaimed drama Mad Men). Image Comics has been publishing The Walking Dead for almost six years now and there hasn’t been a bad issue yet. Trust me, I have them all. This wealth of a back-story should give AMC plenty of fantastic material to work with when the show finally gets started next year.

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It’s no secret that I love big beautiful women. Recently two new television shows focusing on curvaceous women popped out, catching my attention like over sized breasts springing out of an undersized corset.  Is Hollywood finally getting away from its infamous worship of the anorexic female form, or are these new shows just a thinly veiled attempt at exploitation?

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With the economy in the crapper and sites like RedTube, YouPorn, and PornHub making free porn readily available, the adult industry has been forced to find new ways to get folks to pay for jack-off material.

In the long term, the answer seems to be 3-D or virtual porn, but for now adult companies like Hustler and New Sensations have increasingly turned to the porno parody. XXX spoofs of popular television shows have been the saving grace of the adult industry. Read the rest of this entry »

Journalist Walter Cronkite is dead at 92.

The word for “anchorman” in Swedish is kronkiter. That tells you an awful lot about how important Walter Cronkite was to broadcast journalism. He so thoroughly defined a role that the job took its name from him.

I believe his genius as a broadcaster was in coverage of the live event. He gathered information — as a reporter — then knew precisely when to use it (or, rather, download it). He learned how to talk over pictures and not insult the intelligence of viewers by explaining the obvious. He always knew the background, the interesting personal histories, of the people he was covering. And that’s what made his broadcasts superior to those of the other networks. 

He also was a great student. In the late 1950s, when he realized that the space race was coming, he learned everything he could about the tools and the technology. And that’s why he beat the socks off of all the other networks during the coverage of the space program in the 1960s. When the inevitable launch delays occurred, all the other networks could say was, “Well . . . there appears to be some delay. The rocket is still on the launching pad . . . .” But Walter not only knew the problem, he could tell us about it in terms we could understand. 

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The Hillsborough medical examiner told a group of reporters outside his Temple Terrace offices that he found no evidence of trauma or head injury that would have caused the sudden death of TV pitchman Billy Mays. Instead, he found evidence of heart disease, including an enlarged left ventricle and an oversized heart weighing in excess of 500 grams, that would be consistent with a sudden death even in somebody as young as 50, as Mays was.

The coroner is withholding any final cause of death until further tests, including toxicology tests.

RIP, sweet pitch…

The list of recent celebrity deaths continued over the weekend as one of Tampa’s celebs, TV infomercial pitchman Billy Mays, was found dead in his condo bedroom Sunday morning after he didn’t wake up.

The New York Times reports:

The Tampa Police Department said Mr. Mays was unresponsive when discovered by his wife on Sunday morning and was pronounced dead at 7:45 a.m. by the Tampa Fire Rescue Department. An autopsy is expected to be completed by Monday afternoon, said Lt. Brian Dugan of the Tampa Police Department, who was one of the first responders to Mr. Mays’s home.

On Saturday afternoon, Mr. Mays was on a US Airways flight from Philadelphia that apparently ruptured a front nose tire when it landed at Tampa International. Mr. Mays told a Fox News affiliate in Tampa that he had been struck hard on the head by a falling object when the plane landed.

No passengers from the flight reported injuries to emergency personnel who were at the landing scene, according to Brenda Geoghagan, a spokeswoman for the Tampa International Airport.

That evening Mr. Mays, who was scheduled to have hip-replacement surgery on Monday, told his wife, Deborah, that he was not feeling well, and after eating dinner he went to bed, she told investigators. Lieutenant Dugan said there was no initial indication that the airplane incident had played a role in Mr. Mays’s death.

UPDATE: A noon newser is set at the Medical Examiner’s Office to release preliminary results of the investigation into Mays’ death. Stay tuned.

Taylor Oliver's "one face of shaman": A photo of an image on an analog TV screen.

The recent transition to digital television marks the end of Dad making you grab the TV antenna and stand on a coffee table in the far corner of the room because the picture got fuzzy 30 seconds before the end of the big game. No more wrapping rabbit ears in foil trying to get a better reception. Many would say this is a good thing: clearer, sharper images, so clean you can see the pores on Angelina Jolie’s nose. But analog’s not dead yet. Tampa Bay artist Taylor Oliver keeps analog images alive — with photographs. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are anything like the master of sexual disaster, Rabid Nick, your boob tube was on 24 watching Jack Bauer kick ass last night.  However, undoubtedly many of you were watching terror threats of a different variety: the premiere of the latest season of The Bachelorette. Having been jilted on a previous season of The Bachelor, Jillian Harris has not given up on finding her knight in prime time television armor.  Her claim to fame is that she can figure out a man simply by analyzing the toppings he puts on his hot dogs.  Wow.  Don’t worry, if you watched, none of us will judge you for being vapid.

(Video and More after the jump)

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The story is just breaking, but TMZ is reporting that 1970s TV and Mel Brooks/Burt Reynolds film regular Dom DeLuise has died in a Los Angeles hospital. [UPDATE: A better obit is at Airlock Alpha.}

Captain Chaos, the voice of Pizza the Hutt, the mobster Don Giovanni from Robin Hood: Men in Tights and one of the funniest men ever to sit on a talk show couch is no more.

Check him out as Caesar in this clip from History of the World Part I, after the jump:

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I was recently contacted by Underground Xpress, a local Tampa underground video program that covers local music, local bands and other local talents. The creative epicenter and host, Lady Grace, agreed to an interview about Underground Xpress.

How and when did UX start?
I took up videography in July of 2008 and wanted to start an internet video podcast as a learning project. Music immediately came to mind as the main concept because I have spent the majority of my life supporting the local music scene. I wanted to stick with something that I love but I also didn’t want to limit the focus to just music. The words Underground Xpress came to mind because I knew that I would want to cover more than just music and support all sorts of underground arts.

Now I had the idea, the name and I knew how to do the video podcast. Now all I needed to know was whether or not I could pull the whole together. Host it, film it, edit it and so on, when I was really only just learning everything for the first time. So…I got a video camera and a friend and I went to a concert that night to film it and interview the band. I guess we needed to see what we were made of. That night we interviewed and videotaped our first band. and as they say…. The rest is history. Now UX is on public access and the internet and it is becoming the newest source for Underground artists to be supported and promoted locally and nationally on the world wide web.

What inspired you to start Underground Xpress? Read the rest of this entry »

I had a dream the other night that I was on a transatlantic flight on its way to Africa. I was sitting next to a man in a brown jacket, clown pants and Jesus sandals who kept repeating, “Down we go.” That should have given me a clue to the unfortunate end to my dream, or nightmare, but it didn’t. Suddenly, the no-smoking sign started flashing a blood-red color and the pilot got on the intercom and said something along the lines of, “We are going down, hold on to your fucking hats.” I couldn’t really make out what he said, but I’ve always thought that would be the best way to break the news to the passengers. If we’re going to die, I don’t want to hear, “Ladies and gentlemen, I’d like to bring an unfortunate situation to your attention. Blah, blah, blah.” Cut to the chase, man! Anyway, to make a long story short, we plummeted thousands of feet into an island and, magically, I was the only survivor. That is the point when I woke up. And for some batshit crazy reason, the first thing I thought of was an episode of The Office when the employees play Desert Island. This taught me something about myself: Apparently, if I were the sole survivor of a plane crash on a deserted island, the most important thing to me would be what movies I was carrying on me and how I could watch them. So, if that were to happen, and if there were a television and DVD player on this said island, these are the movies I would take… Read the rest of this entry »