SteveCastellano.com

click for a closer look

Okay so get this.

On Thursday I posted about that cool book of modern piano music (published 1963) that I picked up on AbeBooks not long ago. Well you may be aware that I’m a bit of a fan of ABC’s Lost, as is my wife. And this evening we were catching up on the episode that aired last Tuesday. We get to the part where Jack Shephard (Matthew Fox) goes into his son’s room, where we learn that David Shephard (Dylan Minnette) is a musician. And bless her keen eye, my wife says to me, “rewind to that poster on the wall.” Sure enough, there’s a poster on the wall that looks like a dead nick of the New Music for the Piano cover that I just scanned the other day. Not only that, the poster on the wall is advertising a concert by someone named M. Gold. I think the fact that one of the composers featured in my book is Morton Gould is credible evidence that someone in the art department also has a copy.

We Lost fans love stuff like this.

The National Game

I uploaded three Hockey Night in Canada theme contest entries this morning. To rate and comment on them on the CBC Hockey Anthem Challenge site, follow these links:

The National Game
Better Get It In The Net
Precarious (which you’ve heard if you’ve been following my podcast)

You can also get from one entry to another under the “More from Steve Castellano” link once you get there.

I have never seen a Craig Ferguson monologue that was not funny. From the time, years ago, when the reformed alcoholic refuted rumours that he had started drinking again (“If I start drinking again, you’ll know“) to last night when he suggested that we save ourselves from the asteroid that is bound to destroy us in 30 years by sending up a giant piece of paper (“Scissors would be impractical, and they wouldn’t work”), whenever I have tuned this guy in he has been on. He gets up there and rambles on hysterically for 10 minutes or so every night, generating the equivalent of a feature performance every two weeks. Sure I’m not watching every night – maybe I’ve been lucky and missed all the off nights – and sure he has writers, but all I know is I’m seeing a guy making funny that’s consistently in the same league as Eddie Izzard and Dylan Moran.

And just to prove that I am not always “on”, I keep forgetting that CBS makes the last week’s worth of monologues available for streaming on the show’s web page. But right now I’m remembering, and I’m going to try to devote one lunch hour a week to getting caught up.