« Previous Post | Main | Next Post »

Greil Monaco's Final No-Life Top 10-- Couch Pundit: The Clips Episode

I can't think of anything poignant to wrap up the blog with, so I thought I'd link to some old entries that still hold up. This is a long entry all by itself, and often links to even longer pieces, so look on it as a Couch Pundit Digital Omnibus, to be perused at your leisure. Here they are, then, my greatest hits.

1) I nailed Dennis Miller's sellout at the very beginning. Not like it was hard to do, since anyone watching his Tonight Show appearance in April, 2003 saw the same thing. Three years later, the biggest Dennis Miller news, besides that he'll be knocking them dead in Waukegan, is that he'll be joining Hannity and Colmes as a "commentator."

(No, this isn't Dennis from the SNL days-- see next entry.)

2) The Richard Speck Variety Hour. Back at the beginning, when this blog was intended to be a running review of the stupid stuff I watched on video, this entry was perhaps most popular. A news show on Speck's last days on death row included his jailhouse home movies. "Then, best-- or perhaps 'breast'-- of all, Speck goes topless, showing off two swollen, saggy teats that must have come from an overdose of black-market estrogen." It would make a great double feature with this classic with Fatty and Buster.

3) "Bye bye home schooling." Of all the things I've written for this blog, and maybe anywhere else, this may be the one where I did my best. And when I got an email from none other than Dave Marsh praising it, I knew I'd done okay. If you skim the rest of the rehash being served here, fine, but give this one a look, please. I like it maybe best of all.

4) The Sound of Monaco. Me, reading my one and only audio essay for the local public radio station. At the time, I was co-host of a call-in movie show (it's where the quiz got started) that became one of the most popular features on the station. I was teamed with a dithering idiot journalism professor, however, who was so bad that finally I said to the management, pick one of us and let the other go. They let me go, which, come to think of it, has been my usual reward for doing good work.

5) This picture. I came up with the headline, my older daughter, the artist extraordinaire, Photoshopped it in, complete with wrinkle. (And do click the above link and look at the kid's work-- she's great.)

6) My Bush gallery. Here are some of my favorites: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.

7) My Des Moines stories. At least the ones about the free Jimmy Smith concert and the awful-- or was it offal?-- traffic accident a friend of mine encountered. Plus the following, titled, "The 'Bowel Ride' kiddie exhibit in the center area of Des Moines' Methodist Medical Plaza":

I'm never in a good mood when I have to visit the doctor, but even my outlook was momentarily brightened by the sight of several small children giggling and scampering around in the main hub of the hospital, enjoying one of those maze things, in this case an extended tube big enough for little kids to crawl or even run through. It was only when I was right beside it that I saw what it was supposed to be: the kids were capering inside a blown-up simulation of the large intestine, and it was complete with graphically-labelled trouble areas. I don't think I'll ever forget seeing one mother talking to her toddler through a bloody-looking hole in the tubing labelled "Severe carcinoma."

8) Bob "Nosferatu" Hope, 1000 B.C.-2003 A.D. Here's my reverential farewell, written the day he died ("In other news, Hell freezes over"), as well as the Wikipedia favorite, "Bob Hope, Womanizer." Just because he's finally gone, we must never forget how much he sucked, both as a comedian and as a guy.

Even so, I have to admit, he was probably the handsomest 100-year-old in the country!

9) My comix. Unfortunately, I don't draw, and my daughters are too busy to do the artwork for me. So I had to resort to photos (Robert Blake in "Da Verdict"), or simply on the reader's imagination to fill in the pictures for my panel-by-panel scripts ("The Adventures of Dog-on-Fire" and "The Origin of Lighter-Fist").

10) This entry. Not a half-bad signoff, if I do say so myself, and-- for the first and last time-- I actually made it to ten! Somebody better see if Bob Hope came back to life!

Posted by Steve Monaco at September 7, 2006 1:45 AM

« The last Monday Movie Quiz | Main | Last week's last Movie Quiz winners »