Phyllis Diller Shares the Spotlight with My Dad, Freddie Baby

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"What I don't like about office Christmas parties is looking for a job the next day." That's just one of the many funny lines made famous by trailblazing comedian Phyllis Diller, who would have turned 98 today. Did this keen observation of corporate life qualify the flamboyant Phyllis to perform for managers in training? It's debatable. But every year on her birthday I recall the time in 1969 when Westinghouse Electric Corporation sent a group of newly promoted supervisors, including my father, to watch her nightclub act.

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Confessions of a Font Addict

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Die Nasty. Dream Orphans. Beat My Guest. Highway to Heck. No, these aren’t names of punk rock groups or titles of angst-ridden, teen-penned poems. They’re names of fonts. Four evocatively named fonts that co-exist among the hundreds of others in my Mac. Fonts that compete on a daily basis to be chosen for use in one of my literary or graphic masterpieces (ahem). I’ve rarely met a font I didn’t fall in love with. I’ve cruised the Internet super highways by night, luring new fonts to my harem. I’ve risked system contamination, blindly downloading free fonts from fly-by-night sites with seedy names like FontLust.com. Rogue fonts now reside alongside legitimate fonts that automatically enter the neighborhood every time I install new publishing software. Ah, but this indiscriminate font love now poses a major digital dilemma: I simply have more fonts than I can fathom.

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Merry ‘Nice and Naughty’ Christmas Greetings from The Beatles and The Stones

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In the early 1960s, The Beatles came off as cute and cheeky, while the Rolling Stones - marketed by manager Andrew Loog Oldham as the anti-Beatles - were perceived as snide and snarky. Here's a look at how these two very different bands greeted the public at Christmas time.

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Vacancies Abound…in Frank Zappa’s Surrealist-Furnished Motel

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I've stayed in my share of dreary motels, haughty hotels, Socialist-designed apartments with poster-board walls, and even nuclear plant "guest houses" (don't even ask) in villages with names that lacked vowels, but I've never experienced anything quite like Frank Zappa's 1971 mind-blowing movie, "200 Motels." But then, I never dropped acid, either. (Becherovka was the only substance available to numb the reality of the Motel Moskva in Brno, Czechoslovakia, the worst of my many lodging nightmares). Every time I thought I was losing my mind - traveling the weary road on business trips in the 1990s - I remembered the opening line of a movie I once saw, and suddenly I didn't feel so alone in my misery: "Ladies and gentlemen, you can go mad on the road." So goes the intro to Zappa's "surrealistic documentary," which opened at London's Piccadilly Classic Cinema in the U.K. on this date in 1971.

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Of Daddios and Raddios

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Some of my fondest memories are of the times spent carpooling to work with my dad in the early 80s, gauging his reaction to the hits of the day and the humor of the morning DJs. "Those dirty bastards," he'd chortle at the double-entendres of the radio hosts. Here's a little ditty about Daddy for his birthday.

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