Monday, January 03, 2022

Snow Day Matches

Woke up with just enough time to call out again. I still haven't heard from that company, and while I am feeling better, I still have a sore throat, a stuffy head, and am dead tired. After I told the manager, I went back to sleep until past 11. 

As it turns out...I might have called out anyway. When I did get out of bed, I looked outside and saw a winter wonderland. The snow was just heavy enough to make the roads slushy and nasty, though it didn't stick to the sidewalks at that point. I'm not sure I would have ridden in it. Fine snow started falling even as I gazed out the big front window. 

It was closer to noon by the time I finally got moving and had oatmeal for breakfast. Robert Morse continued to make trouble on Match Game '74, only this time he accidentally revealed an answer too early. Gene wasn't overly happy with that at all! Richard was more interested in drooling over an especially pretty blonde contestant. 

Let the next episode run while I did the dishes. Penny Marshall made her only appearance on the show in 1974. I'm not sure she really knew what to make of the lunacy. She was apparently a very shy person in real life and seemed rather like a dear caught in headlights. Betty White and Orson Bean had a lot more fun making jokes about "Lone __."

Went into apartment hunting for the next hour. Just because I can't see the apartments right now doesn't mean I shouldn't look for them. Alas, nothing new. Same apartments I've seen listed for the past three weeks, and nothing I can afford.

Worked on writing for a while after that. Joyce leads the others into the woods, explaining that they need to talk to Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum to get through the square. Richard's not really happy about that - he complains that they're a rather odd pair and is more likely to drive them crazy than let them checkmate them. Brett's looking forward to meeting them...

Didn't break for lunch until almost 4PM! Made a banana-orange smoothie while watching Jack Frost. I went further into this wintry special from Rankin-Bass at this Musical Dreams Movies blog review from 2020. 


Moved online for the rest of the night. Match Game Productions will be doing marathons in honor of Betty White all week, starting with her appearances on the 60's show and the first year in 1973. Betty goes back further with Match Game than a lot of people know. She appeared fairly frequently on the original 1960's version. In one of the few remaining episodes, she joined Joan Fontaine, Peggy Cass, Robert Q. Lewis, Bennett Cerf, and Henry Morgan to play for the Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.

Betty was so ubiquitous with the game and with game shows in general, she appeared in the pilot episode of the 1973 Match Game. Not five minutes in, she sparked the first riot of the series when the judge didn't match "friend" and "girlfriend." She also had the series' first winning answer on the Head-to-Head.

She first appeared in the series proper in episode 11, appropriately with her dear friends Charles and Brett. Brett became a regular pretty much immediately; busy Charles waited until the end of the year to join her permanently. Betty turned up fairly frequently in the sixth "comedienne" seat. Despite her own protests that she wasn't fond of being on the end, she always did very well there, never failing to come up with a funny answer or join the others in wacky antics. She saw McLean Stevenson show up without a shirt when the other men wouldn't lend him any, Carolyn "Morticia Addams" Jones be very happy to get a close-enough answer on the Audience Match, listened to Brett argue with her then-husband Jack Klugman, and witnessed the turntable get stuck and go the wrong way. 

But wait, there's more! Come to YouTube at 5 PM Eastern to see how well Betty did in the 1974 episodes!


Oh, and I will NOT be using Uber Eats for restaurant orders again. I ordered a vegetable stromboli and Pepsi from Tu Se Bella at quarter of 7. The guy called an hour later, claiming he was nowhere near my house and couldn't figure out where it was, even though he probably had GPS and I left instructions as to where it is. He wasn't there by 8. I called the restaurant at quarter of 9, and the lady said he'd be there in a minute. Called at 9:30 to find he'd canceled and went back to the store. I demanded my money be refunded. I know the house is hard to find, but it shouldn't take them two and a half hours to find it. That was ridiculous. She said she talked to him. I hope she did a lot more than that. He lost them a customer and wasted food. I ended up having leftovers. 

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