This is an educational short from the ’70s that is available at the Internet Archive.

BevMo!, a Californian beverage retailer, offers Moxie for sale. It is bottled by Real Soda In Real Bottles of Palos Verdes, under authority of the Monarch Beverage Company.

I did not know any of this until yesterday, my first trip to BevMo!. I’d been looking for Moxie for years and years, but I’d resigned myself to the idea that I was only ever going to find any by buying a case shipment off of an Amazon Marketplace seller for 60 bucks. And yet… there it was at BevMo!, on the soda shelves.

Woohoo!

It’s true. The first drink tastes like a nice, licorice-flavored soda, followed by an aftertaste that will kick your ass when you’re not looking.

But I’m sold. I’ve already bought my second bottle, chilling in the fridge as I write this. “Original elixir” is right; it’s very unique. It’s a beverage of fierce individuality.

Take seven classic Dr. Seuss stories, then imagine them sung by Highway 61 Revisited_–era Bob Dylan. That’s what you get on "_Dylan Hears a Who":http://www.dylanhearsawho.com/, an anonymous project being distributed for free on the Web, everything from the music on down to the CD label and tray card. It’s a very polished, lovingly-made parody.

Still, I’ll be frank: I don’t consider it an unqualified success. I found some of the longer tracks pretty tedious to listen to after about four minutes (a few are longer than nine minutes!). But if you are a Dr. Seuss fan and you like Bob Dylan even a little bit, you will find something on here to enjoy, and enjoy a lot.

My favorite tracks (in descending order): “Green Eggs and Ham”, “The Zax”, and “Too Many Daves”. You will also find “Oh, the Thinks You Can Think”, “Miss Gertrude McFuzz”, “McElligot’s Pool”, and “The Cat in the Hat”.

P.S. Listen to it with the Flash player embedded in the site, and you get the pleasure of listening to it with all the clicks and pops of a classic vinyl LP!

A tear-jerking little story about star-crossed lovers, with an unlikely scenario: rats in a science lab. Could have been nominated for a 2007 Academy Award as an animated short, but got bumped by the likes of No Time for Nuts and Lifted. Those are good shorts in their own right, but still… One Rat Short was robbed.

Call me crazy, but I really didn’t think this was that terrible. You want terrible? See Masterminds, another of Roger Christian’s movies. How that escaped the kind of bad publicity that Battlefield Earth got, I’ll never know.

A very intense scene in the middle of the movie (others have spoiled it already) forced me to leave the room overwhelmed with nausea—even though there was no explicit violence involved at all. Sometimes psychological horror is the most powerful kind. Fortunately I was watching it on video, so I was able to come back to it later and persevere to the end—and I’m glad I did! Overall it’s a chilling, enthralling twist on a story that could easily have been another clichéd tale of sexual predation.

This is not the same “Crash” as is on IMDb’s Top 250 list. I’m not sure why it’s showing up on here as such.

I have an unusual connection with this book, written by Linda Fink about raising her two sons. One of her sons was my boss for about seven years!

I ended up getting this for Christmas from my “secret Santa”! Woohoo!

My Man Godfrey is of course a classic in American cinema. The Criterion Collection edition is worth seeking out even if you’ve already seen this film. Listening to the excellent commentary by historian Bob Gilpin is like getting a miniature lesson in film literacy. Also included is an audio recording (with slide show) of the Lux Radio Theater adaptation of the story, which like the movie starred William Powell and Carole Lombard. Last but not least, there is a brief montage of outtakes full of flubs and salty language (the saltiest from Lombard!).