Scattered Curiosities Albort Einstone

Court jesters have been associated with positions of authority throughout time in memorial from the Pharoah Neferkere to the conquests of Atilla the Hun to the Battle of Hastings and through the Age of Discovery. These wisecracking wearers of the "cap and bells" have gone by various titles: minstrel, juggler, jolly, clown, comedian, joker, harlequin, and fool. Join Albort as he gets acquainted with the innocent and clever funambulists of Bloody Mary, the King of 1,000 slippers, the Virgin Queen, and the Bard of Avon. You will also discover what made Lord Minimus so anomalous, Archibald Armstrong so dastardly and the Groom of the Stool so indispensable.

1986 (a 365-day time frame fraught with discharge of toxic material, skyjackings, and espionage) was dubbed the International Year of Peace by the United Nations. And why not? The U.K. and Netherlands officially ended the 335-Years War, Hands Across America was raising funds for hunger and homelessness, the late Martin Luther King Jr. was honored with a Federal Holiday, and Pee-Wee Herman bridged the gap between adult and child, encouraging all humankind to be themselves. The curiosities of MCMLXXXVI also include the pirating antics of Captain Midnight, the theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman, the scandalous Iran-Contra affair, and premiere of Perfect Strangers.

Since The Simpsons debuted over three decades ago, Albort’s Jeopardy game has been embiggened exponentially. But for the Simpsons, he would never have known about Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Howard Hughes’ Spruce Goose, or William Alton Carter’s Billy Beer; and that’s just scratching the surface. This episode celebrates the random factoids learned from the longest-running animated sitcom and highlights the real-life personalities some of its characters are partially modeled upon, such as Joe Quimby/Ted Kennedy, John Frink/Julius Kelp, Clancy Wiggum/Edward G. Robinson and many more. Woo-hoo!

How many movies have you seen that feature a wardrobe montage, a protagonist tearing out an IV to hastily leave the hospital, post-coital bed-sheets that magically only cover the woman’s chest, or characters uttering stale lines like, “We’ve got company”, “No time to explain”, or “He’s behind me, isn’t he?” All are examples of clichés but they aren’t just confined to films and television. Join Albort as he dissects some of the common clichés used in everyday language from the ‘bee’s knees’ to ‘cat’s pajamas’ to ‘the early bird catching the worm’. You’ll also get familiar with Pipe Dreams, Pink Elephants, Drug Store Cowboys and meet the "most fecund maker of American slang." Gadzooks!

It's been fifty years since Atari’s revolutionary game, Pong, ushered in a Renaissance for video arcades in America and gave rise to the animatronic house bands of Chuck E. Cheese and Showbiz Pizza. Albort experienced it in real time and invites you to join him for a stroll down memory lane with detours at the 1982 World’s Fair, Blockbuster Video and the hilarious antics that take place within “Shadowrama” all while avoiding the Noid. As a bonus you’ll get familiar with the “pleasure principle”, time shifting, parallel visual processing, the innermost thoughts of Pac-Man’s enemies, negative option billing and the “Netflix Effect”.

This is the final episode of our four-part Better Half mini-series containing six lectures apropos to the First Ladies from the Cold War up to the present time. What is known of the First Ladies of the United States we have covered up to this point comes down to us via the press, memoirs, what can be divined from letters, paintings, anecdotes, and personal artifacts. Following World War Two, fashion became ever more critical as visual media embedded itself into politics. We begin with a material girl who hated the dry-cleaning in WASHington DC so much, she shipped it to KC to be done properly, one whose favorite press time answer was "No Comment", a multi-linguist beauty reportedly "full of the devil", a billboard-busting, millionaire First Lady that word-skirmished with Catwoman, "a good piece of literature on a shelf of cheap paperbacks" circuiting a leper colony, a fashion model dancing instructor credited with a life-saving blip, a promiscuous FLOTUS who shook hands with a serial killer, a "Glamourous paragon of chic" going to war with drugs attired in "misappropriated" crimson finery, a FLOTUS to have three Air Force bombers named after her and a private cabin on the Love Boat, the first to be a lawyer/Senator/Secretary of State/Presidential Candidate/Grammy Winner, the only First Lady with a master's degree in Library Science, the first African American First Lady, the nation's second foreign-born FLOTUS single-handedly takes on cyberbullying, and a Quaker City sports junkie controversially uses her rightfully earned title.