At the conclusion of the new British movie, Pirate Radio, a bit of text appears on the screen that informs you of what a splendid four decades rock & roll has enjoyed, since 1966. Proof of the contention is provided in the form of quick glimpses of 40 years worth of LP and CD covers, from Sergeant Pepper to Jay-Z. The images of album-cover art keep piling up, until there are too many of them, and each becomes indistinct and cog-like: small bits of a collage, not individually discernible.

If this was the message the filmmaker was trying to impart — that the soul of rock & roll was obscured somewhere along the runaway assembly line — Pirate Radio might have been taken as a subversive commentary on a society obsessed with leisure and amusements. That’s not the message.

Once, when entertainment was something you needed to seek out, you’d pay a dime — previously a nickel, later a quarter — to listen to your favorite pop music tune through a juke box. If you got to hear your favorite song for free, on the radio, which might happen no more than five or six times each day, it was a two-minute interval of pure pleasure. Actually owning a record was a rare luxury. They were sold in limited quantities in tiny nooks of Woolworth’s, and in the back of some neighborhood drug stores, where children were discouraged from congregating.

Go, cat, go: Bill Haley's Comets rocking around the clock

That was the tail-end of the era depicted in Pirate Radio, which attempts to tell the story of the how the emergent teenage music overcame the rabid opposition of corporatist squares, an inevitable victory attained because joy is much better than gloom. Hundreds of screenplays have previously worked this theme, from “Rock Around the Clock” in 1956, past the “T.A.M.I. Show” of 1964, to the best of the genre, “American Hot Wax,” the 1978 biopic of DJ Alan Freed (which features a brief role for the unpleasant upstart comedian Jay Leno.)

It looked as though Pirate Radio had the potential to surpass the lot, with the advantages of a skilled writer-director, Richard Curtis, a decent budget, an engaging cast, and an under-worked subject in the short, happy life of unlicensed offshore broadcasters, who for a short while beamed their signals from the North Atlantic into Swinging London.

The movie works best when Curtis is left to do his miniaturist thing, and there are a couple of small, understated scenes that are at least as good as his earlier work in “Four Weddings and a Funeral” and the “Vicar of Dibley” TV series.

In one moment representative of the best of British cinema, a disconsolate newlywed DJ, just cuckolded on his wedding night by a colleague, takes silent solace from sitting on a coach with two chums, wordlessly dipping his bourbon-cream biscuit in a mate’s mug of tea. In another standout segment, a shy, middle-aged DJ, inarticulate and socially dysfunctional when not introducing records, can’t think of a single thing to say after meeting the son he abandoned at birth. The son becomes equally mute and panic-stricken — and an audience’s impulse is to look away from something so realistically intimate and touching.

Director Curtis: too much music, man

The film’s problem is that there aren’t enough of these inspired quiet moments of character study. Unexpectedly, in a rock & roll movie, there’s far too much rock & roll, and most of it is the wrong sort entirely. The historical pirate radio stations, such as Radio Caroline and Radio London, filled a need by broadcasting hit parade music interspersed with rapid-fire chatter from American-influenced DJs. The repertoire of Number One hits in the UK in 1966, spun from 45 RPM platters, included essential rock classics such as The Spencer Davis Group’s Keep On Running, The Walker Brothers’ The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore, and Georgie Fame and The Blue Flames’ Get Away — none of which is heard in the movie soundtrack. (But you lot can listen to them at Mog.com, by clicking the preceding links.)

The ‘66 British chart-toppers also included a fair bit of what we would now call unlistenable schlock: Tom Jones’ maudlin “Green Grass Of Home,” Frank Sinatra’s cloying “Strangers In The Night,” and Gentleman Jim Reeves’ just-plain-awful “Distant Drums.” Incredibly, those three chestnuts held the Number One position for a combined 15 weeks.

Recognizing that no contemporary CD soundtrack-buyer is going to pay for such schmaltz, even if it was what Pirate Radio listeners were accustomed to back in the day, the filmmakers elected to pull the old switcheroo, substituting how it should have been, for how it was. And so, director Curtis (who would have been sipping his Ribena as a seven-year-old when Radio Caroline was in its heyday) contrives to depict a Top 40 station as featuring an Album Rock format, when they are two entirely different beasts.

This blatant misrepresentation is further confounded by having his DJs play tunes that wouldn’t be recorded for another 12 months or more after ‘66, such as Procol Harum’s “Whiter Shade of Pale,” John Fred & the Playboy Band’s “Judy in Disguise (With Glasses),” and Leonard Cohen’s “So Long Marianne.” While it’s true enough that Noel Harrison had a minor hit with Cohen’s “Suzanne” in 1968, it’s absurd to think that any Top 40 radio station might ever have subjected its listeners to Lenny’s idiosyncratic moaning.

Do we split hairs? I think not. Evidently the budget of Pirate Radio exceeded $50 million, owing to the director’s penchant for recreating period details with painstaking accuracy. To spend a fortune trying to accurately depict obscure gauges, meters, and broadcasting instruments, and then take an inauthentic approach to the music selection, is to reveal the director’s priorities. No Beatles. No Lovin’ Spoonful. However, there are two tunes by the Turtles, including “Eleanor,” which the pirate DJs seem to have been prescient enough to play two years before it was even written. (Top that trick if you can, Jimmy Savile.)

Sir Jimmy: Gifted, but not clairvoyant

Not that you’d blame poor Curtis for being disinterested in the music. Who wouldn’t be? When you’ve spent your entire life submerged in the Baby Boomer rhythm, as we all have, it’s hard to imagine that it ever might have been fresh, interesting, or anything you’d ever go to effort of tuning in. Rock & roll is just too readily available a commodity to command any attention these days.

There’s a bit of dialogue in an earlier rock movie, the Monkees’ 1968 release, “Head,” where one of the bad guys taunts our heroes, regarding their obsession with the usual caprices such as sex, drugs and rock & roll: “Be careful of what you wish for, fellows. One day you just might get it.”

I would say that adage applies to a force-fed diet of endlessly recycled tunes, most particularly when they are so obviously being used to accompany someone’s desperate attempt to sell you something. The makers of Pirate Radio want to sell you a glimpse of how much fun  broadcasting used to be, but you’ll find it more satisfying to stay home and catch a re-run of WKRP in Cincinnati.

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• 11/22/09: Anyone with any degree of interest in the real pirate radio should visit http://radiolondon.co.uk/, a comprehensive, addictive site run for more than 10 years by Chris and Mary Payne.

Getting George's goat

I got a kick out of The Men Who Stare at Goats, the new film that spoofs and distorts the US Army’s real-life 1970s experiments with the paranormal. The movie follows Hollywood’s earlier goofball tradition of having civilian goldbrickers make yuks at the expense of the military, viz., “The Wackiest Ship in the Army,” “Operation Petticoat,” and other hoary artefacts, none of which could ever be called good.

Reviewers have griped that much doesn’t quite sit right with Goats, and I can vouch that viewers at my screening went away complaining, a few seeming a bit irritated and tetchy. Since Jeff Bridges has a meaty role in the movie as a hippie army officer, critics have made comparisons with his previous appearance as a pot-head in “The Big Lebowski.” That’s just wrong. His cartoonish Lebowski character, the Dudester, is unrelated to this Goats assignment, where he plays a fictionalized version of Lt. Col. James B. Channon, U.S. Army (ret.), an American original, about whom much more needs to be said.

Colonel Jim: No cartoon, he

Channon was, and remains, no cartoon. Even overlooking that fundamental mis-representation, Goats, as a movie, still gets trampled by Lebowski, cloven-hooves down.

The film can’t contain its sniggering response to the historical fact that America’s armed forces leaders were once officially intrigued by the potential of the human spirit. In mining this incongruity and extracting the cheapest kind of slapstick, Goats quickly slips out of its pen, and lopes off in no particular direction. The presence of three-and-a-half good actors — Bridges, George Clooney, Kevin Spacey, and Ewan McGregor — keeps the project airy and watchable. However, the incidents on which the movie was based deserved a less-dismissive treatment.

Channon, commissioned by the Army to imagine and report on New Age approaches to the military, created a self-described concept paper, known as the First Earth Battalion Manual, which addressed this windy question: “Understanding that we must work through people, how can our Army establish and maintain control of changing, interdependent systems to maximize force readiness?” His thoughts, along with some rather good illustrations created by the Colonel himself, are on the web, here.

Channon comes across in his notes as the kind of out-of-the-box windbag you’d want to keep around your organization, as a challenge to the orthodox elements, knowing that one day he’d piss you off for good. It was his good fortune to be advancing his progressive/wingy ideas in the 1970s, when there was a receptive audience for creative approaches: new ways of seeing, in the phrase of Carlos Castaneda.

Castaneda almost certainly influenced Channon. The anthropologist and author sold eight million books, and created a large following from his early ’70s epic, The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge. He made it seem nearly plausible that anyone so interested might hang out with all-knowing elderly Mexican shamans who could teach you cool stunts, like projecting yourself through space, or inhabiting the body of a wolf, or, on a more accessible level, gobbling fistfuls of peyote buttons. That certainly seemed like a more interesting proposition than what we were doing at the time, which was cutting high school classes in the Toronto suburbs and making off for the Towne & Countrye Mall.

When Castaneda landed on the cover of Time magazine, it may have been the Army’s reveille call to do due diligence on this turn-into-a-wolf tactic. Sure enough that the usual bag-of-tricks wasn’t winning the day in Viet Nam, so it would have been irresponsible to leave any avenue unexamined. Jim Channon grabbed the peyote buttons and, to his credit, ran with them.

The Colonel’s currently a large part of a Hawaii based think tank, Arcturus Research, and gets paid big bucks by corporations for his “imagineering” services. Ever the stoic new age soldier, he appears to be bothered not in the slightest by being depicted on the silver screen as an acid-head laughing stock, conducting death-stare experiments aimed at a herd of de-bleated goats. It makes a kind of sense that the entertainment industry would know exactly what to do with a figure such as Jim Channon, which is to dismiss him as a fruit-bat, and add a laugh-track to his message of human potential. The cineplexes thrive by a business model of convincing people to live vicariously, while consuming giant portions of junk food. The movie studios will adapt to the times, making even Mickey Mouse an angrier, more cynical figure, if that’s what it takes to maintain their brand equity in a cruel and unpleasant age. Messages of self-actualization are strictly for Bollywood cinema-goers.

Left as big media’s last proponent for the notion of being all that you can be – a line deployed by the Goats movie to invoke knowing snickers – is Oprah Winfrey, whose promotion of the human potential movement seems just a wee bit insincere and unconvincing. (In pitching her upcoming webinar to publicize her latest crappy, middle-brow book discovery, she exclaims, “I can’t wait to tell all y’all about it!” Tell all y’all? Stow it, sister.)

Oprah and her doctor buddies, Phil and Oz, will encourage you to put down the crack pipe, and take off those last 50 or 60 pounds, and end that abusive relationship with the kid’s nanny, but you’ll never catch them offering astral projection lessons or encouraging alternate consciousness experimentation on the television machine. Bad for ratings when your audience is away somewhere in a spirit trance.

Armies might entertain some fresh ideas every other generation or so, but when it’s time to get cracking, the old response will do just fine: send your kid overseas as cannon fodder. So, yes, I enjoyed the Goats movie as a kind of harmless goof, but when the popcorn’s finished, you wonder what exactly is so hilarious about soldiers imagining war might one day become something else, or smart people envisioning that our poor, unhappy race could eventually become something better than what it is.

Jerry, man...

Advertising whiz Jerry Della Femina, who not only lived but epitomized the high life depicted in the TV series “Mad Men,” once tried to sell light beer and couldn’t.

He writes in his entertaining 1971 bestseller, “From Those Wonderful Folks Who Gave You Pearl Harbor,” how his brilliant campaign for Gablinger’s Diet Beer, a product of Rheingold Breweries, failed to persuade suds-lovers to switch brands in order to cut calories.

Forced to explain how his judgment could have been so wrong, the ad maven whines that he didn’t initially understand how beer-drinkers — being some sort of primitive blue-collared species — actually took pride in their distended guts, and considered the word “Diet” as anathema.

Others would simply say that both the product and its ad support missed the mark by miles.

Gablinger’s happened along, way back in 1967. A decade would pass before Miller Lite and Natural Light from Anheuser-Busch would emerge to create a sector category. Today three of the four leading beer brands are “light,” as are six of the top 10. That would make these diluted brews the new normal. And that, in turn, would force some brewing industry executive to spur the introduction of an Extreme Light as the new, um, light.

Beer at its most ephemeral

Hence, Molson Canadian 67: a beer so light, that, as the joke might go, you hardly need bother. As much as I’d like to think that the “67″ name is there to honor the year of both the birth of Gablinger`s and the Canadian centennial, it actually refers to the number of calories in a 12-ounce bottle. That compares with an even 100 calories in conventional light beer, or 150 or so in the full-strength variety. (Here’s a private message for Stephanie DeSutter of Molson, who spun the following prevarication to Marketing Magazine: “When people automatically think there’s anywhere from 200 to 250 calories per bottle of beer, there’s definitely a great opportunity for a brand like 67 to come in and make that calorie call-out.” Which people? Badly misinformed people who can’t read the nutritional information on their beer label? That’s the market you’re targeting?)

There have been other ultra-low calorie lagers before, and they’ve all been rejected by consumers. I used to buy something called Alta, a product of the Blitz-Weinhard brewery in Portland, that also hit the scales at 67 calories. It was quite tasteless indeed, but kept a fellow hydrated, and the price was right for school-kid budgets. I can’t imagine that the new Molson product will be any better, or any good at all, but the marketers seem determined to avoid Jerry Della Femina’s last-century missteps.

The National Post newspaper reports that Molson is using a blog-trolling service called Radian 6 to scope out comments about the new brew, and an article adds that the company will “respond to those consumers in what it calls ‘Direct to Drinker’ engagement.” I guess we’ll see exactly how that works, but if you’re planning on engaging this blogger, Ms. DeSutter, please leave the stepped-on suds in your office.

The original Mad Man?

Now, if Jerry Della Femina had personally showed up on your granddad’s doorstep, and instructed him to drink Gablinger’s, well, things might have played out differently. JDF is a biggish gentleman whose shaved-head-and-beard was a trademark in the days when he, along with Shel Silverstein, Yul Brenner and the fictive pair of Mr. Clean and Lex Luther, were the only lads sporting that particular look. Then Kojak and Michael Jordan joined the gang. Now, the denuded-skull-with-goatee is the other side of the new normal, accompanied by a weak beer in front of you, to complete the image.

Last week, Mr. and Mrs. J.T. Grossmith showed up in town, following a year-long road trip hither and tither, during which time we’ve failed to keep in touch using Skype.

J.T., the male component in the couple, has affected the Full, Complete Jerry Della Femina, but, to his credit, wouldn’t accept a Molson Canadian 67 when I offered to treat him at the neighborhood pub, and agreed to a glass of white wine. Something about a shaved head seems to accentuate a man’s eyes, and I was surprised to see that I’d never really paid any attention to J.T.’s peepers during the 30 years of our friendship. His are what I would call extraordinarily cop-like, which I may elaborate upon during a future occasion: say, if I ever get around to scribbling that police-procedural novel I think I may have in me.

Perhaps, if Ms. DeSutter and her team are open to a marketing opportunity involving strategic product placement, I may call the book “Badge 67,” and it may feature a bald, cruel-eyed detective who watches his waistline by drinking watery lager — and is miserable, as a consequence. I’m keeping most of the plot under my hat, but part of the dramatic tension will come as the detective searches high and low, both in lowdown dives and swell joints, looking for the miscreant who stole two-thirds of the flavor from his bottle of beer.

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• More about struggling beer brands, in Mitch’s April 2009 post about Rolling Rock.

Excuse me, but didn't you used to be Jay Leno?

You’d probably question the motives of an architect who forever groused about the high cost of building materials, and be suspicious of a surgeon who constantly worries out loud about the expense of all those darned gauze pads. Therefore, you need to wonder why NBC, the television network, has taken to carping about the exorbitant investment incurred in order to broadcast quality television programs.

Let me disclose, before we go any further, that I own shares in the General Electric Company, which operates NBC — although this is nothing to brag about, believe me. As a stakeholder, whose stake is currently worth quite a few drachmas less than I originally paid, I naturally support management’s efforts to improve shareholder value, if that is the appropriate phrase to use when you actually mean, “Give me back my god-damned money, you imbeciles.”

The network’s programing gurus determined that the guru-like move was to stop trying to fill the 10 p.m. slot with shows that no one wants to watch, and, by the way, cost an arm and a leg to produce. They wondered: Why not just show a test-pattern? Why not sell the hour to the Hair Club for Men?

Then some better-grounded executive ejaculated, no, no, we can’t do that, but why not move Jay Leno’s Tonight Show up to 10, and put that Conan guy in Leno’s old spot? Brilliant, the management team exclaimed.

Bud Collier: Never ashamed to pay you to watch his TV program

Apprised of these developments, and determined to keep an eye on my investment, I tuned to the Leno program during its first week in the new time, and found it encouraging in its flagrant mediocrity. It was so dreary, I deduced, that it’s going to drive viewers to other, more compelling, entertainment options: nightly re-runs of Beat the Clock shown on the Bud Collier Channel, or viewing pornography on the Internet, or staring at a dripping faucet, or perhaps reading a library book of modern poetry published in the original Italian. Well, forget the last one.

Faced with this outcome, GE would be bound to sell NBC to Rupert Murdoch, or some other pigeon, and perhaps several of the many billions that will change hands may trickle down in the form of a shareholder dividend. (Yes, I know: highly unlikely that GE’s Jeffrey Immelt would let loose of any portion of the mazuma, but a fellow can dream, right?)

Moving Leno to ten-oh is one of those classically dumb corporate decisions that will rank up there with Ford’s exploding Pinto and Schlitz’s additive-enhanced beer. I can’t remember how your charming host used to come across when he was regularly seen around midnight — but, to paraphrase the old Mickey Gilley song, he don’t get any prettier when you’re fully aware that closing time has been extended by an hour-and-a-half.

In truth, it’s just plain unsettling to watch Leno anxiously pitching his repertoire of lame topical jokes, effusively greeting the predictable queue of has-been actors promoting their tired old projects, and basking in the over-rehearsed adoration of his studio audience of casually-turned-out mongoloids. There are some zany stunts larded in, as well, but it’s best to pretend these didn’t occur.

To say something positive, however, the spectacle shows every sign of having been put together on the cheap — which, after all, was the founding premise.

Having grown up watching a fair bit of Canadian television, I’m familiar with the visual symptoms of this rigid adherence to budget, as well as the underlying logic, which is: (1) “Why use two cameras, if you can get away with one?”; and (2) “Where does it say you need three musicians for a trio? Fire that sax player.”

If you’re accustomed to the usual showbiz aggrandisement, this will seem unorthodox. We’re used to generations of promoters inflating the value of their attractions in order to impress the yokels, from Sam Phillips introducing Elvis, Jerry Lee, Johnny and Carl Lee as his Million Dollar Quartet, or George Hamid calling his Atlantic City amusement joint the Million Dollar Pier. But even adjusting for decades of hyper-inflation, NBC’s Leno hour seems like The Seven Hundred Dollar Talk Show, and that would probably include the budget for the store-brand cookies and fruit punch served nightly in the Green Room.

Since NBC seems determined to emulate a Canadian standard of mediocrity in its daily schedule, the broadcasting colossus may want to import another tactic from their media colleagues north of the border. Canadians, much like citizens of other nations, haven’t been spending as much time as previously watching the listless nonsense on commercial television. This resulted in lower ad revenues — an obvious problem for Canada’s TV networks — so the station owners did what they’ve always done, and went to the national capital and demanded that suckers’ money be used to support their failing for-profit ventures. The federal broadcasting regulator obligingly sent a platoon of mid-level bureaucrats outdoors to help load bags of funds into the trunks of waiting limousines.

I’m reasonably certain that the Obama administration would respond similarly, if asked politely. Think this through: When, inevitably, NBC is driven out of business through the Leno misstep, and forced to hand over the keys to the studio to Rupert Murdoch, what will follow? Roger Ailes will run the NBC News department, Glenn Beck will take over the Leno slot, and President Obama will see his war against Fox television being fought on two fronts. Who needs that? Better to simply provide a generous federal subsidy to the TV networks, same as to the banks and auto industry.

That would be my suggestion, which I offer not as a GE shareholder who may stand to turn a buck from a bail-out, but as a concerned television viewer and supporter of the President.

Oh, well. Why pretend? It’s my suggestion only because I want GE stock to remain in double digits, at least until such time as I can unload it. If you were seeking altruism, I’m afraid that you may have been inadvertently reading the wrong blog.

Taster's choice? Hard to imagine

Howard Schultz, the visionary behind Starbucks, is worth $1.1 billion, which makes him one of the most successful businessmen of the Boomer cohort, and I’m saddened to read that he has completely lost his mind.

I began to question the lad’s commercial sense a year ago, when Schultz introduced instant oatmeal into his stores, and insisted it was a superior offering, absolutely the best oatmeal ever. I tried it. It was swill. At the time, you had to wonder the extent to which Schultz’s instincts would eventually decline, and I pondered the seemingly ludicrous notion that Starbucks might soon try to sell instant coffee to accompany the dreadful reconstituted oatmeal.

Well, as you’ve probably read, Schultz has gone and done that unlikely thing — but it’s even worse than that.

During the coming 72 hours, Starbucks will try to persuade you, by giving away samples of their new instant coffee, that the buck-a-cup synthetic is just as good as the three-dollar brewed coffee they’ve been pouring.

"You see? I told you it wasn't that bad..."

Toward what end? In the highly improbable case that the instant may not taste like something procured in bulk by the provisioning agents at the state Department of Corrections, Starbucks will have succeeded in conditioning their patrons to trade down, thus reducing their corporate revenues. Indeed, if discerning coffee-drinkers come to realize that the powdered substitute ain’t that bad, what is to prevent them from gravitating toward the neighborhood Wal-Mart, where the canny consumer can snare an entire month’s supply of the stuff, at the same price Schultz seeks for a single cup?

The question is moot, of course. Everyone knows that instant coffee is never going to be equivalent to the real stuff, in the same way that shaking a dose of generic “coffee whitener” on top of your joe is not the same as mixing in a daub of half-and-half. You can fib to yourself (or to your company’s directors), as Schultz has done, but it’s madness to think that you can pass the con along to your customers, and not suffer the consequence. There was a media buyer I used to visit, a fellow named Roy Chernoff, who used to offer up truly terrible instant coffee, out of an Old World impulse to be hospitable. I’d sip it politely and suffer silently, because Roy was a gentleman, and because I wanted very much for him to give me money. That was an altogether different set of circumstances from allowing Howard Schultz to think that I’m prepared to hand him cash to revisit my wretched-coffee-with-Roy moment. Heck with that.

What has gone wrong at Starbucks? It’s not simply that management seems anxious to diminish their brand by offering inferior new products. I’d say it’s more an issue of general entropy, the usual course of what happens when time passes by.

It isn’t Schultz’s fault that he’s become a stumble-bum overseeing an empire-in-retreat. It’s simply, sadly, that it isn’t 1984 any more, and the old acumen is likely to have suffered some wear-and-tear.

Ah, if we could all go back to the day when Howard and his buddies, all those baby boomer businessmen, used to be so adorable, as they opened their head shops and jeans stores and macrobiotic food kiosks and used record and comic book stores and leather outlets and stained-glass studios, sandblasting the walls and stripping the floors of the cheap retail space in the hip neighborhood, playing that same Moody Blues LP over and over again, filling the world’s nostrils with the stench of patchouli oil. They began as outsiders up against the forces of mainstream retailing, hipsters with a practical cut-throat streak.

Up here in Canada, once upon a time, the government even went so far as to tax funds from struggling wage-earners and redistribute them over to the little whipper-snappers who dreamed of opening up a funky candle store somewhere near the Farmer’s Market. And damned if the government didn’t want the money back — ever! It was free! Why? Just because it was so irresistable to encourage a rebellious, disaffected B.Comm.-grad who was starting a fresh new business venture in the cruel, cold world. Not very many of the hip capitalists endured for longer than a few months. As for the working-class families who financed these experiments, for their contributions they received the privilege of continuing to pay income tax until death. Hardly equitable, but that’s Canadian economics  for you.

“My dream is to bring lattes and chai tea to the masses,” is what Howard and all the other Howards might have inscribed in their high school yearbooks. (And if you’d told them then and there that they would survive only to become the kind of people who would just-add-water to packets of Nescafe and Quaker’s Oats, they probably would have threatened to idealistically pop you in the snoot.)

Things change — indeed they do — but I still can’t see this development at Starbucks as anything less than the curtain coming down on the age of the groovy entrepreneur. For Schultz won’t be content with merely trying to sell instant coffee. Watch for other, more absurd product introductions in the months to come: The world’s greatest instant chocolate pudding, accompanied with a superb spoonful of Dream Whip. The ultimate Spam sandwich on Wonder bread, topped with excellent mock-mayonnaise. A breakthrough in instant orange-y drinks, that you’ll swear is tastier than Tang, garnished with one pristine ice cube.

This isn’t what anyone would admiringly declare to be retro-chic. I fear it’s just time running out.

And so we’ve gotten past another Meatless Monday. Our house, containing nothing but Paul McCartney fans, has been adhering to this practice since the composer of “C-Moon” and “Biker Like an Icon” and other classics, instructed us to knock off eating flesh for 24 hours at the beginning of each working week. Yes, you’re right, and I suppose if he told us to jump off the roof, we’d probably do that, too. You can meet the Beatle’s meaty theories by clicking here.

Make mine a Quarter-pounder; hold the hamburger, please

I had a drink last week — two, if you’re keeping track — with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. Casually, I asked her if she was still a vegetarian. “Ppff,” she said. She gave that up years ago, after her GP finished an examination with this assessment: “That diet you’re on has worked wonders. Congratulations, you’re now officially anemic.” Beside which, her occupation frequently requires extended stays in danger zones such as France and Belgium, where someone who declines the horse-meat or blood-sausage course is forever identified as L’Étranger, and that`s never conducive to closing deals.

Nonetheless, I find I’m not at all missing the dead animals on the table on Mondays, and we’re seriously considering expanding the program to add a Weggie Wednesday, or possibly a Flesh-free Friday. Part-time vegetarianism, it can be said, has something going for it. It allows you to feel virtuous on occasion, although not to the extent that your friends can’t stand listening to you, or being around you. Though it strikes me as a good idea, I would never proselytize for Meatless Monday, the way Sir Paul has taken it upon himself. I cringe to think of his former spouse, the lamentable Heather Mills, as she applies her lunatical passion to promoting the cause of veganism. If Heather Mills is the face of the vegan movement, kindly hand me a cheeseburger — unless it’s Monday.

It happens that our having adopted these once-weekly dietary principles coincides with my recent discovery of the 1947 recording by the great Johnny Mercer, backed by no less than the King Cole Trio, of “Save the Bones for Henry Jones (‘Cause Henry Don’t Eat No Meat.)” This seems to be one of those many nonsense tunes popular with hep-cats in the ’40s, along the lines of Mercer’s “I’m a Cranky Old Yank in a Clanky Old Tank,” except that the lyrics could be read as an anti-vegetarian diatribe against the title’s Mr. Jones:

Our banquet was most proper
Right down to demi-tasse
From soup to lox and bagels
And pheasant under glass –- class!
We thought the chops were mellow
He said his chops were beat –- reet!
We served the bones to Henry Jones
‘Cause Henry don’t eat no meat
He’s an egg man
Henry don’t eat no meat.

These striking phrases, from tunesmiths Danny Barker and Vernon Lee, are clearly intended to depict the carrot-fancying Mr. Jones as a sorry specimen of post-War manhood. They endorse, in syncopated fashion, the skepticism of the old dialect-humorist Finley Peter Dunne, who wrote: “Most vegetarians I ever see looked enough like their food to be classified as cannibals.” (If that doesn’t strike you as clever, try reciting it with a comic Irish brogue and see if it makes a difference.)

McCartney has cranked out the occasional novelty ditty himself, and can more than hold his own in that genre, as he demonstrates through his verse about the sergeant-major being a lady suffragette. You’ve therefore got to wonder why Macca hasn’t applied his lyrical talents to creating an answer to the Henry Jones slur. Or perhaps he has, and it can be found on the never-played B-side of one of his countless releases.

And, since we seem to have strayed onto the subject, whatever happened to the good old Answer Record? These days, public discourse takes the form of idiots screaming polemics at each other on talk radio. Previously, when radio stations programmed empty-headed music instead of cretinous chatter, you’d have records arguing with each other: “Eve of Destruction” countered by a “Dawn of Correction,” “King of the Road” rebutted with “Queen of the House.” The notion seems beyond quaint by current entertainment industry standards, where divergent views in the hip-hop community may pass unnoticed — unless a performer is unlucky enough to be fired upon by Uzi from a passing car driven by a fellow artist.

But who are we to question the ways of Sir Paul? If he deigns to ignore the scornful provocation of Johnny Mercer, and chooses a dignified silence in reply to the mocking piano riffs of Nat Cole, that, my friend, may be the purest form of eloquence. Of course, it’s also possible that Paul is no longer capable of achieving anger, having purified his spirit and softened his mind by four decades of abstinence from the butcher’s counter at Waitrose.

In which case, I’ll answer on his behalf, in the form of the following Johnny Mercer-versus-Johnny Lennon mashup:

He’s an egg man. They are the egg men. He don’t eat no meat.

Kyle be switched! Low-brow Brit TV is jolly fun

Mr. Jeremy Kyle — “Jezza” to his mates, apparently — is Britain’s current answer to the stateside TV schlock-peddler Jerry Springer. This sounds like it should constitute at least one redundancy, because Springer, London-born, is extremely popular with UK audiences, in their blind rush to embrace all things Americanisher. This Yankee-loving impulse leads to puzzling sightings, such as the ubiquitous presence of Coors Light in pubs (having appropriated the tap that once might have issued Theakson’s Old Peculier or Charrington Toby), and British Burger Kings offering “Diddy Do-nuts,” a product concept Sean Combs probably thought of and rejected years ago, at the start of his career.

Back to Jezza. I caught a bit of his act last week on the ITV network, and he was singing loudly from the Maury Povich hymnal that morning, letting us know the true DNA-confirmed identity of the baby-daddy would be revealed only after prolonged shrieking and scowling by the momma, a spotty fat girl with lank hair, who offered up a chain of memorably East-end utterances. One I cherish is: “It weren’t like he were a proper father, then, weren’t it?” (I’d attempt to provide a link to the episode, but I suspect we’d all end up transfixed for the entire working day, staring at Jezza’s human train-wreckage, stuck wondering about what it all means.)

William Hogarth may have been the original Jeremy Kyle. Little comfort in that, ducks

The unappealing girl’s Hogarth-inspired appearance and Dickensian syntax recalls the mighty old unapologetic Great Britain of yore, increasingly scarce these days. You can get an excellent cup of coffee and a nice plate of risotto anywhere in the country, and other formerly scarce commodities are plentiful, but the time-honored British shite, the tea-cozy, the Ford Cortina, and the musical recordings of George Formby, have all gone away somewhere. Where?

The brief time spent with our Jezza sent me out in search of other artifacts of bygone England, which is a way of justifying how I wound up spending part of a Saturday afternoon in Blackpool, Lancashire. What little I previously knew of Blackpool was from the great Kinks’ song, “Autumn Almanac,” where Ray Davies, in some sort of character, sings: “I like my football on a Saturday, /Roast beef on Sunday’s alright. /I go to Blackpool for my ‘olidays, /Sit in the open sunlight.” Never a more perfect description of each of the eternal English verities.

I can report that the seaside resort on the Irish Sea is likely the same in 2009 as it was previously, except that there are fewer visitors and possibly a greater proportion of female beach-sitters wearing black robes to preserve modesty — as prescribed by their religion, one presumes. It’s a traditional delight, is what it is, and they don’t even put quotation marks around traditional while they’re trying to sell you traditional Blackpool Rock, traditional three-quid fish ‘n’ chips, and a collection of some of the grubbiest-looking traditional B&Bs seen outside of the area of Paddington Station in the 1970s.

The souvenir shops sell last season’s T-shirts pledging loyalty to Everton FC (Blackpool’s local squad, the Seasiders, have struggled since the transfer of Sir Stanley Matthews, back before Hogarth’s day), and pink cowboy hats, which seem to be purchased and worn by groups of drunken young women in the Yates Wine Bar, a popular spot to drink, scream, and fall down, during the course of those pre-wedding hen parties. The fellers, off from Liverpool, Leeds and Bolton on their separate stag outings, appear in T-shirts custom-made for the occasion, affixed with suitably misogynous slogans. Plenty of affordable fun for the whole family.

This is a scene designed to make progressives queasy, and nostalgics all wistful-like. Donkey rides on the beach. A big clanking roller-coaster. Jellied eel and jars of lager. All in counterpoint to what is going on everywhere else in the land, where the old ways belong to the last millennium.

The previous evening, we’d stumbled into the Trafford Centre in Manchester, a truly grand post-modern retailing showplace that provides some unusual visual touches, including, in a food court, a convincing recreation of a pre-Katrina New Orleans street scene. Here’s your vibrant new Britain, packed with the prosperous young seeking out Gap clothing, 10-pin bowling, first-run American movies, and other modern good-life accouterments. We dined inside the mall at a chain tapas joint, taking our time with a decent bottle of Rioja. It was a nice evening, but one we might just as well have experienced in Dubai, or Duluth.

Blackpool, on the other hand, has strippers, and lewd comedians. It was pointed out to me somewhere on the promenade that, on certain street-corners, the eastern European sex-trade workers are as common as seagulls. Couldn’t tell you about that. I can attest, however, that Bass ale and Carling lager are still vended openly in pubs, and that pinot grigio and Mojitos are not the potables of choice, as is the case one hour’s drive south. I raise a glass of something to good old Blackpool, where I’d guess that any early school-leaver on the dole can still get blotto and go off onto the beach after last call, with some bloke she can barely see, and show up on telly a year or so later, appearing on the Jeremy Kyle program to await the result of a DNA paternity test — providing persuasive evidence that, in spite of appearances, maybe there will always be an England.

One of the very cool new applications on LinkedIn.com is the feature that encourages users to keep track of, and comment on, books they’ve recently read. Useful for the LinkedIn community, but especially useful for the gizmo’s sponsor, Amazon.com, which must be mining the data like there’s no tomorrow — which there may not be, judging from what appears to be the typical jamoke’s usual reading habits. Not that I’m any better, as the following list reveals, all too obviously. It was pointed out to me over lunch by my friend Phil Diamond, that the downside of sharing your book list with the planet at large is that everyone now knows what you’ve been reading. ”Is that bad?,” I asked Phil. He answered, inscrutable as ever, ”It’s just not the same stuff I read.” Which, I guess, must be why he says to-may-toe, while I say to-mah-toe. The following — admittedly, a little fiction-heavy, with at least one Jerry Stahl too many — is what I’ve lately racked up, between trying to get a couple of things done. They`re listed sequentially, and linked to Amazon. Feel free to comment: except Phil, who already commented.

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The Getaway by Jim Thompson

Jimbo`s masterpiece

Recommended: I return to this book every couple of years, and grow ever more impressed with each re-reading. Thompson, the sly master of 1950s-era American pulp fiction, gets everything right in this novel. And then, just when he’s got the reader convinced of the book’s many merits as escapist fiction (in at least two senses of the term), he pulls a series of gearshifts and fast left-turns that no other writer would have imagined or attempted, and connects all the spaces between Macbeth, Freud, and Dante’s Inferno. Even after repeated readings, it’s still hard to accept the depth of Thompson’s bleak vision, and impossible to figure out how he pulled off this remarkable feat.

Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee

Recommended: Lee’s twee, a poet and he knows it, and you suffer the first chapters until he finally gets going. When he hits his stride, describing his mother’s odd life in the Cotswolds in the earliest part of the 20th Century, you’re entitled to sit up and take notice. His often reprinted passages about his sexual initiation, the cider with Rosie referenced in the title, are funny and humane, and ring beautifully true. By the time he’s explained what the motorcar did to the 1,000-year-old ways of village-life he was born into — geography measured in terms of the speed of horse-travel, eight miles an hour — your eyes should well up.

The Hunted by Elmore Leonard

Dutch being, you know, Dutch

Formulaic mid-’70s Leonard pot-boiler, this time set in Israel, where his rough-housing buddies and their uneasy gals exchange sharp dialogue and fire big guns at each other — including an Uzi, which makes sense, given the locale. I read this one over an evening in a hotel room in Swindon, England. Could not have been more perfect.

Love Without: Stories by Jerry Stahl

An uneven collection of short stories spanning 20 years that will add nothing to Stahl’s reputation, hard-won from his outstanding novel “I, Fatty.” The first tale seems to be an earlier, undeveloped version of his novel, “Perv: A Love Story.” Others are period pieces from late-’80s Playboy Magazine, and one is a scatological rant against Vice-President Cheney. Giving the devil his due, the references to the private lives of the Three Stooges and Stevie Nicks’ post-performance pleasures are nothing short of uproarious.

Dead Liberty by David Craig

Cold War-era thriller by the great Welsh novelist James Tucker, using his ’70s pseudonym. A rewarding, convoluted tale of one journalist’s role in the attempted escape by a middle-class family from East Berlin, that holds up well nearly 40 years after publication, and may be one of Craig’s very best books.

Downtown: My Manhattan by Pete Hamill

Gotham`s all reet with Pete

Recommended: A fine writer’s valentine to the Capital of the World, which underlines the big-heartedness that made and sustains the great metropolis. In contrast, lesser places such as Toronto, with their condescending cruelty toward fellow inhabitants and disinterest in the world beyond, are revealed as simply not worth thinking about. Writes Hamill: “Where I came from, the rules were relatively simple. Work. Put food on the table. Always pay your debts. Never cross a picket line. Don’t look for trouble, because in New York you can always find it. But don’t back off either. Make certain that the old and weak are never in danger. Vote the straight ticket.” Words to live by from a book that fires the spirit.

Inventing Niagara: Beauty, Power, and Lies by Ginger Strand

Ms. Strand has, perhaps, 200 reasonably acceptable pages in her 300-page-plus first-person account of the history of Niagara Falls and its bi-national communities. What grates is her awful tendencies to place herself in the forefront of this narrative, whether she’s annoying the librarians at the public library on the New York side, or laughing at the attendees of a Red Hat Society gathering in Ontario. A kindly, patient editor might have reined in the author’s worst instincts, but there is no such mediator in sight. Consequently Ms. Strand’s worthwhile sections on the rise and fall of the border-hopping Niagara Falls Museum are watered down by dreary self-referential remarks about her boyfriend Bob, her circle of Manhattan friends, and her father. She possesses a certain kind of naïveté not uncommon to contemporary U.S. authors, whereby she views events as either being American or Not American, and feels a pathetic obligation to delineate and explain the distinctions to an uninterested readership. This extends to her erroneous definition of the Bloody Caesar as a “Bloody Mary with Tabasco,” and Canada’s National Drink. No need to tell her about Mott’s Clamato; the information wouldn’t conform with her cookie-cutter reasoning apparatus, or her proclivity for stringing together smug, facile paragraphs. Caution to student writers everywhere: There may be an okay book buried somewhere in this sloppy, sophomoric volume, but the author is too occupied with drawing attention to herself to let her subject matter or material take center-stage.

Rock Springs by Richard Ford

Fine fiction: See the Fords going by

Recommended: Ford’s rare gift is the ability to tell small truths using spare, unadorned language. These 10 short stories reveal the lives of ordinary residents of Montana and the Great Plains, where Calgary and Winnipeg are large, exotic centers heard on the radio but never seen. Men hunt, fish, and keep their anxieties unspoken. Women leave. Cars are stolen, guns used to threaten. Fists sometimes kill. This is an important collection that takes the Hemingway formula into a compelling, unsettling new direction.

Perv: a Love Story by Jerry Stahl

Published in 1999, this coming-of-age tale set in the earliest 1970s is a showcase for the developing talents of Stahl. The flaws in this book are considerable, and stem from the author’s determination to show off his Terry Southern-like tendencies. Other portions are satisfying and admirable, but Stahl’s need to be regarded as edgy ultimately sinks the story.

The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell by Mark Kurlansky

Fascinating study of the 300-year decline of the role played by the oyster as an consumable, and an economic enterprise, in New Amsterdam and New York City. Filled with historic asides and detours, and leading toward an inevitable environmental nightmare, author Kurlansky has great material, and a well-honed storytelling sense, but is in the unhappy position of having to convey more than anyone would want to know about this subject.

Dem-a-loot, dem-a-shoot, dem-a-wail

When a big movie comes unexpectedly out of a little country, it’s an event to remember, and everyone will  recall the 1973 release of “The Harder They Come,” the Jamaican reggae-infused gangster film. I first watched the movie as a high-school kid during the Nixon presidency, Spiro Agnew still a contemporary political figure, and me thinking, “Whew, I need to see this again.” Which I have done, many times in various cities. Bought the soundtrack, too, along with anything I could get my hands on by Desmond Decker and the Aces, or the Maytals (later Toots and the Maytals), and then the entire Wailers catalogue. We spent years amusing ourselves by reciting the script’s best lines, waiting for the most inappropriate occasions to begin imitating the Trenchtown patois: “Gimme break, mon” and “Don’… fawk… wid me!”

Jimmy's shirt: It sure would look good on you, dad

It would seem like a wonderful idea to base a stage musical on this landmark movie. The first British version was staged in 2006, and moved to the West End last summer, to positive reviews. The original cast is now appearing in a touring edition, which I caught in Toronto last week.

It’s always a hell of a thing to see what the passage of 36 years has done to our culture. The film used a cinema-verite technique to depict reggae as, in Bob Marley’s phrase, Rebel Music, imported from the teeming Third World. Now, the music is as safe and familiar as any other packaged consumable. The Canon Theatre had a big display for Red Stripe Jamaican lager — in contrast to the obvious reality that when the Rude Boy scene was emerging, the brewers must have been terrified that their trucks would be looted by rechet-carrying yoot. More galling still: the distinctive jersey worn by Jimmy Cliff in the film version, an item I’ve searched for high and low and would have gladly paid a fortune for on E-bay, was being sold at souvenir stands at a brisk rate to ridiculous middle-aged men exactly like myself.

The performance is lively and spirited, and all the other verbs reviewers use when what they’re really trying to say is that the show isn’t all that good. The story has lost something — actually, a few things — in translation from gritty movie to slick musical. You get the feeling the producers’ first choice would have been to obtain rights to that other Jamaican-themed movie, the 1993 John Candy comedy “Cool Runnings,” but that was a Disney film and you know what those Disney people are like to deal with. Momsers.

Instead, they’ve Disneyfied all the rough edges out of a story that, to begin with, was perhaps not that much more than the sum of its rough edges. What’s left is one of those frenetic song-and-dance musicals with a few comic turns, done in tribute to the swell old music of bygone days, viz. “Ain’t Misbehavin’.” That’s well and good, except three of the show-stopping ensemble numbers in this production have been imported from somewhere that isn’t “The Harder They Come.”

You get Jimmy Cliff’s “Wonderful World, Beautiful People,” always a treat to hear, but not part of the original film, perhaps for the reason that it has nothing to say about the story line. You also get “Day-O,” made famous by Harry Belafonte, as a sop for those who would leave might leave the theatre disappointed after seeing a musical that’s supposed to take place in the Carribean that doesn’t include “Day-O.” Worst of all, you get not one, but two renditions of the Jackie Wilson classic, “(Your Love Has Lifted Me) Higher & Higher,” and that’s two more than were required. Wilson was a great artist, who experienced a severe myocardial infarction while onstage, just as began to sing the lyric of that song that begins, “My heart….” He probably deserves a West End musical of his own, but what he surely does not deserve is to have his signature song plopped mindlessly into the mandatory church-gospel scene of a mediocre stage play. Wilson wasn’t mediocre, and, for that matter, neither was he West Indian, which gives you an early sense of how quickly things veer off-course.

The cast is good, and the singing is very fine. Rolan Bell makess a plausible Jimmy Cliff stand-in, and Chris Tummings does a better-than-adequate job belting out Toots Hibbert’s “Pressure Drop.”

Unfortunately, this just serves to recall how all the uneven pleasures of the movie have been flattened into a flavorless paste in the musical. The first glimpse of Toots on screen was potent enough to raise him to top billing in his group, and then to ceaseless global acclaim. The character played by Tummings, as seen on film, was an intriguingly conflicted figure, a sympathetic authority figure who determined that it was a necessary part of keeping the peace in raucous Kingston, to turn a blind-eye to the ganga trade.

The musical encourages a re-examination of the movie — and the movie is a superior work, in every respect. Viewers who haven’t seen the film for several years will be delighted to recall such wonders as Bob Charlton’s quietly malevolent portrayal of the local music tycoon, Hilton, a pale, pipe-sucking presence who dictates what the islanders will hear on the “heet parade.” His assistant is a benign Sino-Jamaican, which draws attention to the simple reality that the former colony is and was far more complex and multi-dimensional than its image might lead you to first think. The musical discourages this kind of complicated thinking, to its detriment.

Admittedly, some especially violent sequences from the celluloid edition would be difficult to assign to live actors. Jimmy Cliff’s character, provoked, attacks his tormentor with a knife, and is sentenced to be lashed. The film vividly shows Cliff being flogged by authorities, while his bladder involuntarily empties. The voice heard over these images is that of the sentencing magistrate, as he thoughtfully delivers his verdict, offered with regret, but also calculated to encourage rehabilitiation and maintain public order.

This depiction is intended to be considered antideluvian and brutal — but today seems nearly enlightened, compared to the contemporary American practice of providing wholesale lengthy incarceration for non-violent offences.

Another striking scene from the movie that failed to make it on stage involves the Jimmy Cliff character, who while seeking work, wanders into the estate of a wealthy Upper St. Andrew housewife, played by Beverly Anderson. There is a half-moment of mutual sexual tension, as the lady of the house mildly flirts — and then the Jamaican class-structure inevitably and abruptly kicks in, as Ms. Anderson haughtily dismisses him from her grounds.

Prime Mininster and Mrs. Manley

Art meets life: That actress became the wife of Prime Minister Michael Manley, a mixed-race politician who won election after shrewdly becoming the first candidate to usurp the emerging musical movement by employing a reggae campaign theme, “Better Must Come.” The international ambassador and exemplar of reggae, and the tiny nation’s great poet, Bob Marley, was another Jamaican of mixed-race, who touched audiences on every continent.

The power of the music, and of the movie, is a slice-o’-life authenticity that still resonates through the generations. The stage play is a stylized slice-of-show business that offers an extended brand experience, some heart, but not too much mind or soul. Fifteen minutes after leaving the theatre, you’re thinking you’d like to go home and watch the movie one more time on DVD.

I’m sorry if this offends anyone, but I think I’ll miss Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, more than I’m going to miss Michael Jackson.

Gidget — who even knew she had a name? — died today, at 15. She gained favorable notice for a series of TV ads that ran from 1997 to 2000, promoting the fast-food chain, a unit of YUM Brands that offers particularly unpalatable tortilla-wrapped food items. It regularly occurs to people who have been out late drinking and forgot to eat dinner that it might not be an entirely bad idea to stop at Taco Bell and pick up a couple of bean burritos. Gidget, with her appealing manner, and her passionate cry of “Yo quiero Taco Bell!” made it possible to imagine that such thoughts could be something other than a radically self-destructive impulse. This is by no means a tiny accomplishment.

Unlike Michael Jackson, Gidget completed her assignment on behalf of Pepsi-Cola (the former owner of Taco Bell) without managing to set her head on fire, and developing addictions to prescription analgesics as a consequence.

Alas, poor Michael

We discover, after her passing, that Gidget was a female who was assumed to be male; her dubbed voice was that of Carlos Alazraqui, the dialect comedian. Jackson’s gender issues were, of course, much more complex.

Chihauhuas average a litter size of three. Jackson was one of 10 children, including Brandon, who was stillborn. Four pounds is a decent weight for a chihauhua, and Gidget seems to have maintained an acceptable body mass index, despite the documented high prevalence of obesity among Americans of Hispanic extraction, and her employment promoting the caloric, fat-laden products of the Taco Bell organization. Jackson reportedly weighed 112 pounds at his death, which indicates that his endorsement must have applied mainly to the fructose-free version of Pepsi-Cola.

A 40-ounce cup of Pepsi, which is what they’ll offer to serve you at Taco Bell,  contains 500 calories. A pair of those bean burritos is going to come in at 700 calories. The cola will perk you up, and the heavy lunch will put you to sleep, potentially creating a cycle of dependence. Watch out for that.

A coroner’s report said Jackson suffered from alopecia, and wore a wig. Chihauhuas, which typically live 10 to 17 years, are sometimes known as Mexican Hairless dogs.

As for Gidget, she seems today like a groundbreaking entertainment industry figure, who bridged previously offensive media stereotypes with today’s common depiction of Hispanic-Americans as a diverse and vital component of a multicultural society. Some have argued that Jackson’s popularity in the 1980s paved the way toward greater understanding between the races, leading to the presidency of Barack Obama. That could be, but I don’t think I want this discussion to go there. Obama is leading the world to a safer, saner place; Jackson died too young; “Beat It” is a great tune. We can agree on all that.

Sally Field was the original television Gidget. She’s still on TV, in a real stinker of a weekly drama, and promoting that osteoporosis drug in a series of commercials that is just painful to watch. Gidget the dog never stooped (pardon the disease-specific joke) to endorsing prescripton drugs. For his part, Jackson didn’t need to push pills; he allegedly had 19 doctors happily writing up enough scripts to get him through his final mid-life crisis.

The best you can say about Gidget, the Taco Bell Chihuahua, is that, though she appeared mainly in commercials, and though she was undeniably a canine, she brought two distinctive and seldom-seen  characteristics to the human-dominated modern entertainment industry.

Talent. And dignity.