James Arness, RIP

For all the Gunsmoke fans..



He embodied the American male hero of a bygone era--honest, strong, and relatively silent until he needed to say something, and when he did people listened. Yes, just a character, but Gunsmoke would not have persisted for all those years without that character.

With that here's this week's musical selection, a song from another 60s-era TV show based on what made Dodge City famous (in real life)..

Break Time

Taking a bit of a break this week so blogging will be light but wanted to mention the new show that premiered on AMC this past Sunday night. "Rubicon" follows another really good show called "Breaking Bad", which ended its season Sunday in a thriller (and has become must-see TV for me).

The Rubicon premiere was very good but I'm wondering where the show will go. It seems to be bordering on a Bilderberger/Trilateral Commission angle, which would be harmless (X Files was a conspiracy show but focusing on aliens was harmless as well) but with the main character's wife and child having been killed in the WTC on 9/11 they may go in a more twoofery direction.

Another troubling aspect--the show had several mainstream media papers sending a coded message message (about something) through their crossword puzzles, which starts a train of mysterious happenings. Whether these messages were sent by lower level employees in the papers or their owners is unclear at this point but the show ended with a group of older white guys celebrating someone's death in their upscale home, so we'll see.