Ancient Burial Chambers! Assassins! Laughs!
Processing new information about old events.
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Even just the title “Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter” is good for some laughs.
And then there’s Elvis and JFK at the nursing home in “Bubba Ho-Tep.”
And meanwhile, “Mars Attacks!” is currently “free, with ads” on YouTube.
As a child, my doctor’s office was downtown Paducah, and we would often walk past the Irvin Cobb Hotel building while shopping. I don’t recall if it had already been converted into an apartment by then (mid 70’s), but I remember interesting “characters” down near the entrance on the street level. You are the first person who I’ve actually heard who has stayed at the hotel.
Oh yes. Characters. Like I said, it was a hot-plate hotel and long past its prime. It hadn’t been converted when I stayed there in 1979. Wasn’t the worst in my travels – that would’ve been a Memphis dive that had been kicked out of the Holiday Inn chain long ago, and etched the name of the motel with PROPERTY OF right on the glass of the TV tube.
Thanks for listening!
The resurrection of the mummy and the now sadly neglected Irvin S. Cobb led me to follow the Cobb trail through Wikipedia and then onwards. I had only been vaguely aware of Cobb as the author of two still -unwatched Ford films admittedly not first rank but for any Ford completist worth pursuing. There were many journalists in the Cobb tradition; Robert Benchley, FPA, Alexander Woollcott, and even earlier George Ade (who James might consider for a post-mortem sometime). What might be the connecting link is that excepting Ade they all became more broadly known in other mediums. Benchley is perhaps the prime example.
However, it is the Cobb connection that I dimly remember in the early days of television. His granddaughter Buff Cobb was with her then-husband Mike Wallace the other half of the Mike and Buff show. It was not a Dorothy and Dick type show of celebrity chat but more serious stuff of politics and world events.
One final tribute to Cobb. His directions for his funeral(found on Wiki) are a wonderful circumvention of piety and po-faced religiosity. His ashes I would add can be found under a tree in Paducah hopefully near the home of the “red likker” Cobb wrote about.