Here it is the end of September of 2021 and I’m working on another blahg. 
If you’ve been following along, I celebrated 100 blahgs not that long ago and did a review of the last fifty in my two most recent blahgs. This is number 102 if you’re counting but who’s counting? I wonder if anyone ever wonders what inspires me. The truth is that I was going to sit down and write about something completely different but then the topic for this blahg started to nag at me and I thought I could getting some traction with the theme. We’ll see.
Recently I started reading a book that my daughter Emily gave me for Father’s Day. Before I get to that, let me divert for a minute and talk about the most recent book I just finished reading before I started this new one. I had been on a sort of kick in reading the first three novels in the “Cool and Lam” series by Erle Stanley Gardner. Cool and Lam is a fictional American private detective firm run by Bertha Cool with Donald Lam as her main operative. Gardner published 29 books in the series from 1939 to 1970. The first book in the series was “The Bigger They Come” followed by “Turn On The Heat” which was the second published book in the series. I discovered, however, that this wasn’t the second book written in the series because Gardner had written 
“The Knife Slipped” after “The Bigger They Come.” Here’s what Wikipedia says about it: “Originally written to be the second book in the Cool and Lam series but rejected by Gardner’s publisher, The Knife Slipped was found among Gardner’s papers and published for the first time in 2016.” Hard Case Crime published “The Knife Slipped” and after reading it, and enjoying it even more than “The Bigger They Come”, I was drawn back in again to that gritty thirties Los Angeles noir. I don’t have the next book “Gold Comes In Bricks” so I decided to look around for something else to read.
I love shopping at thrift stores because sometimes you find great records by artists you never heard of or biographies about great hollywood stars. 
Recently I was at a local thrift store and came across a copy of the book “Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood” by Eileen Whitfield. I thought that I would add it to my collection of biographies and autobiographies of famous actors and actresses but didn’t expect to get to it for a few years. I started perusing it on the ride home, luckily my wife was driving, and I was hooked by page one. The author, Eileen Whitfield, did an amazing job detailing the life of the great Mary Pickford. It’s a fantastic read and I certainly didn’t want it to end. I don’t usually write reviews of books but I had to hop over to Amazon and write a glowing review. Buy, steal or borrow this book. You won’t be disappointed.
After I had finished the Pickford book I was going to take a break from reading for a while. 
A couple of days later, however, I had to go have blood-work done and I grabbed up the book my daughter gave me for Father’s Day, “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green. Green is the author of “Turtles All The Way Down” and “The Fault In Our Stars.” I hadn’t heard of the first book but I was aware of “The Fault In Our Stars” and that it had been made into a movie. I believe my daughter Emily and my son Noah read “The Fault In Our Stars” and enjoyed it. I haven’t read anything by Green before so picking up this book to read while waiting for blood-work seemed a good idea. Frankly, I just wanted to be able to say to Emily that I read it. I’m about half-way through the book and I don’t like it. That’s unfortunate. It’s basically Green reviewing a number of topics from Canada Geese to Diet Dr. Pepper to Scratch and Sniff Stickers. He writes about each of the topics and adds a bit of personal insight or narrative and then gives each topic a rating on a scale from 1 to 5.
The problem with this book, so far of what I’ve read, is that the information that Green supplies on each topic is superficial and feels like it’s skimmed from Wikipedia. His personal narratives ramble and sometimes have no point or are just not that interesting. I was telling my wife about the book and remember saying that it was “god awful” and that this guy likes the sound of his own voice. Now, we get to the theme of this blahg. Saying that someone likes the sound of his own voice is not a compliment. It’s akin to saying he’s full of himself. Maybe Mr. Green’s two novels are better reads but “The Anthropocene Reviewed” feels like he was flaunting his fame by offering up something that he was sure his followers would read just because he wrote it. Most of the topics are not his own and there’s better information to be found on each topic without Green’s narrative bogging it down. I’ll finish the book but the only good thing I can say at this point is that it at least inspired this blahg.
I’m done with Mr. Green for now. I want to talk about me, now. I don’t think the sound of my voice is more important than anyone else’s or that what I have to say on anything is better than what anyone else has to say. I try to add insight to what I post here and I try to add information that isn’t just culled from one source. Yes, I’ve been known to quote Wikipedia but there’s lots of other information out there to be found and if you’re going to do your research, do it well. Eileen Whitfield’s book on Mary Pickford proves that point. A well researched and well written book will grab readers and keep their interest. I try to do that in these blahgs.
I’ll be honest, I’m not always a fan of my own voice but sometimes I do take pride in the things I say. I’m a performer at heart and I guess there’s a need in me to be able to have people see or hear me perform. Recently my son Noah posted a video on his Analog Resurgence account on YouTube. He was reviewing a 1970’s 16mm broadcast camera that he had picked up earlier this summer. When he was home around the beginning of August he did a test role with me as the star. When he posted the video, the comments section blew up with comments about the “comedy gold” of his dad. You can check out that video below.
That’s what you get when you hand a microphone to your Dad and ask him to ad-lib. I was just rambling but apparently some people liked what I had to say. Again, this wasn’t about hearing my own voice but liking the fact that people appreciated my ramblings.
I don’t want to take away from Noah’s videos so I’ll give a shameless plug for his YouTube channel Analog Resurgence. You can check it out here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCL9A6v7YSOOVXwCpao6Bszg. If you feel inclined, and I hope you are, you can follow the links on his pages to financially support him at Patreon. After reading all of the comments about me on that particular video, I joked with my friend Bryan that I should have my own series of YouTube videos called “Crazy Stuff Noah’s Dad Says.” If I was bolder I would substitute the word Stuff with the word S__T. You fill in the blanks. Maybe people were just being kind about my humorous ramblings and I’d really not find any followers. I’m not even sure if I have followers here. Hello? Hello? Is there anyone out there?
As I’ve said, I’m not always a fan of my own voice but then not always means that sometimes I am. I’ve done a few video blahgs here and even once did a whole blahg with short videos of me reading some of my own poetry, MORE POETRY FROM THE MIND OF SCOTT HENDERSON. I guess that’s the performer or exhibitionist in me. I’ve also posted some sketches from my once brilliant radio career as part of “Dead From The Neck Up.” Along with my friend Stephen Dafoe and production and occasional voices from my friend Bryan Dawkins, we had three seasons of radio sketch comedy that probably was listened to by none. If you go to my website, www.falseducks.com, you will find a menu at the top with links to some information about Dead From The Neck Up and some of our audio sketches and videos of us in the studio more than 25 years ago. Our last aired show was a Christmas special in 1995 and we didn’t do another one until Christmas last year when we celebrated 25 years since our last show. We wrote and recorded The Dead From The Neck Up 25th Anniversary Covid 19 Quarantine Special. I think that deserves another posting:
I’m hoping that we can produce a new show this year. Stay tuned for that.
I really enjoyed performing in Dead From The Neck Up and some of the sketches still hold up well. Yes, I did voice work in the show but listening to these shows today isn’t about my voice talent but rather performing something I had written. I believe Stephen Dafoe was the better voice talent and hearing him perform material I wrote still gives me a thrill. It was always fun playing off of Steve and here are a couple of examples:
Two Guys Proxy Service # 1:
Two Guys Proxy Service # 2:
Eataway Laundry Soap
I wrote all of those sketches but sometimes it was fun just to do the voice work in sketches written by my friend Bryan:
Hatman:
I enjoyed doing the following sketch but I was called on to do either a John F Kennedy, Robert Kennedy, or Teddy Kennedy imitation and I just couldn’t do it. You can hear me doing my Ronald Reagan imitation at the beginning and end. Bryan did JFK’s voice and Stephen did Robert and Teddy’s voices. I like my Reagan imitation in the sketch.
Kennedys for Gun Safety:
The point of all of this is that if you want to listen to the sound of your own voice then have something good to say. Be entertaining or try to educate. I like the entertaining bit myself. Doing Dead From The Neck Up was really more for ourselves and the reunion special was something we all wanted to do because we missed the performing. I’ve got a backlog of the old shows that I haven’t digitized from the old reel to reel recordings. I’ve been encouraged by my children to finish the digitization and post them as podcasts. I’ve often thought about a False Ducks podcast but I think I wouldn’t have the voice for it. I’d have to be entertaining for a long period but I like the short bursts of comedy sketches. I only have to be “on” for those few minutes and then I can move along. I can play a character and those are more fun most times than being me. If I want to be me then I’ll write a blahg…like this one.
I rate this blahg a 66 out of 5 or a 0. But ask me again tomorrow. I’ll probably change my mind by then.