News of the Week: Random Notes, Ernie Kovacs, and You Can Finally Eat Soup in Cough Drop Form

In the News of the Week ending January 24, 2025, are hard soup, breakfast prunes, and a comeback for Barnes & Noble.

Postcard photo of the cast of Kovacs Unlimited (Picryl)

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This and That

Random notes, jotted down during the coldest week of the season …

This might be one of the oddest/funniest sports things I’ve ever seen. Because of rights issues, the live Australian Open feed is using Nintendo Wii-looking avatars for the players.

January is the traditional time when people quit social media forever (and late January is the traditional time when they return to it). I quit all social media cold turkey over ten years ago and here are a few reasons why you should too.

The CEO of an AI music company says that people don’t like making music. This isn’t remotely true, of course, but these AI companies won’t be happy until all “music” is just “sounds” made by “computers,” without all those messy, inefficient humans getting in the way.

I don’t watch NCIS: Origins but I’ve seen the commercials and I could never watch it. Why? The lead actor is supposed to be a young Mark Harmon but he looks nothing like him. Now, that ordinarily wouldn’t be a problem on a TV show, but Harmon has been acting for what, 50 years? We know what he looked like when he was young!

Speaking of looking young, look who I found in this 1983 employee training video for the Boston-area Lechmere stores. He can be seen throughout the video, but the best part is at 15:13.

(Here’s a hint: dancing!) You can find the answer at the end of the column.

How Barnes & Noble Made a Comeback

Last year, the bookstore chain opened 60 new stores. This year they plan to open 60 more, which is wild considering it wasn’t too long ago people thought they might go out of business. Here’s how they turned things around.

Uploaded to YouTube by PBS NewsHour

Soup Drops Have, Uh, Dropped

Do you love chicken noodle soup but wish it wasn’t so messy, so hot, so … liquid?

Progresso now has soup drops! They’re cough drop/hard candy-sized drops with the flavor of chicken noodle soup! I wonder how they’d taste sandwiched between Ritz or oyster crackers?

Each order comes with an actual can of Progresso’s chicken noodle soup, probably in case you’re disappointed in the taste of the soup drops and want a bowl of real chicken noodle soup.

But hurry! The soup drops will only be available for a limited time.

Your move, Campbell’s.

Take A Good Look

Ernie Kovacs was a talented guy. Comic, actor, writer. He was also a great host of TV shows, including the ABC game show Take a Good Look.

My friend Ernie Smith at the terrific newsletter Tedium has the story on how one of the show’s episodes, long thought to be lost forever, was recently found and uploaded to the Clown Jewels YouTube channel yesterday.

Maybe this find comes just in time for a well-deserved Ernie Kovacs renaissance.

Headline of the Week

Lonely Sunfish in Japan Gets Cardboard Human Friends

RIP Jules Feiffer, Joan Plowright, Jeannot Szwarc, Garth Hudson, and Christian Juttner

Jules Feiffer was one of most influential artists in comics and cartooning history, winning a Pulitzer for editorial cartooning in 1986. He was also a book author and illustrator, screenwriter, and playwright. He died last week at the age of 95.

Joan Plowright was a distinguished British stage and screen actress who won a Tony for 1961’s A Taste of Honey and received an Oscar nomination for Enchanted April. She was the wife of actor Laurence Olivier. She died last week at the age of 95.

Jeannot Szwarc directed Jaws 2 and Somewhere in Time as well as dozens of episodes of many popular TV shows. He died last week at the age of 87.

Garth Hudson was the organist for The Band and its last surviving founding member. He died Tuesday at the age of 87.

Christian Juttner was a former child actor who appeared in such films as Return to Witch Mountain and I Wanna Hold Your Hand, and on TV in The Bionic Woman, Bewitched, and The Magical World of Disney. He died in November at the age of 60.

This Week in History

Lucy Has a Baby on I Love Lucy (January 19, 1953)

The episode was titled “Lucy Goes to the Hospital” and was watched by almost 74 percent of U.S. households.

President Reagan’s Second Inauguration Held Indoors (January 20, 1985)

Exactly 40 years before President Trump held his inauguration inside because of the cold, President Reagan held his inside too.

This Week in Saturday Evening Post History: Prunes (January 21, 1950)

I actually love prunes, but it’s one of those foods I never, ever buy.

January Is Prune Breakfast Month

What can you do with prunes? Well, you can put them in Prune Pudding, a recipe from a 1913 issue of our sister magazine The Country Gentleman, or you can include them in this Hawaiian Pineapple Fruit Pie, also from The Country Gentleman.

I know, you’re thinking, but pudding and pie aren’t really “breakfast” foods. Fair enough. So here are recipes for a Caramelized Banana and Prune Breakfast Bowl from Britney Breaks Bread; Scrambled Eggs on Toast with Prunes from Sunsweet; Stewed Prunes with Greek Yogurt and Cinnamon from Mediterranean Living, and these Prune Muffins from Food.com.

Next Week’s Holidays and Events

U.S. Open – Bowling (January 26–Feb 2)

Yes, the U.S. Open of bowling! We don’t talk about bowling anymore, but it used to be a very popular sport and on television all the time.

National Puzzle Day (January 29)

One of my favorite daily puzzles is Connections at the New York Times. You have to figure out the connections between four groups of words of four words each. It’s not always easy (don’t assume the connection on first look!) but it’s a cleverly-designed, fun game.

Did you figure out who was in the Lechmere video? It’s Tom Bergeron, long before hosting Dancing with the Stars and America’s Funniest Home Videos.

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Comments

  1. Bob, I love your column too! I’m catching up on a few of them now! I did not know Jeannot Szwarc had died! He worked on “Night Gallery,” a show which influenced me to become a writer years later. Oh, and he directed Desi Arnaz in the episode “A Death In the Family.”

  2. I agree with Myles. It bothered me at first that the actor playing Gibbs does not resemble Mark Harmon, but I soon became hooked. Interesting characters, good story line, definitely worth a look.

  3. Myles, I’ll have to check out NCIS: Origins. I was a big fan of the original show for at least 10 years. Once Cote de Pablo, Michael Weatherly and Pauley Perrette were gone, it wasn’t the same (for me) without them, but it’s still popular. They kind of watered-down the franchise with too many versions, and I believe have scaled back.

    Bob, thanks for the link on Barnes & Noble. I’m really impressed with the CEO, Mr. Daunt. He’s very clever and shrewd on his fusing the best aspects of smaller bookstores with the corporate ones dictated by being a chain. He’s also found ways to coexist and even excel in the age of Amazon.

    If I can’t go into a Barnes & Noble to look at the books myself, I’ll miss out on all kinds of new books I had no idea even existed on particular topics like classic cars and Googie architecture/retro futurism to name two. Then I might discover books on other unexpected things by accident walking around that I’ll end up buying.

    Lucy’s real life baby (Desi Arnaz, Jr.) did NOT play Little Ricky on ‘I Love Lucy’. There were baby actors* the first few years, then Keith Thibodeaux from 1956-’60 in the later half hour shows, and in all 13 of the Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour (continuation series) between 1957-’60. He was kind of like a 2nd son to Lucy, and was friends with Desi Jr.

    (*One of my favorite episodes involved Lucy and her ‘frenemy’ Carolyn, and her feeling her little Stevie was superior to little Ricky. The exchanges were not pleasant).

  4. I was baffled by Connections. And I found it maddening that the connections were flashed for only a second. Why?! What would be the harm in letting them linger for thirty seconds to a minute so we flops can get a stronger sense of how the game works?

    I’m dismayed by the revival of Barnes and Noble. It threatens readers, real readers, who tend to be deeply introverted and self lacerating, and who love Amazon because it caters to the hermit a true booklover wants to be.

  5. Hey Bob, love your column.

    The thing about NCIS:Origins, and I do watch it, is that it’s not about Mark Harmon. It’s about the character Leroy Gibbs. And how he became Special Agent Leroy Gibbs (played by Mark Harmon).

    Similar to the way different actors have played James Bond.

    It’s very intense and very different….just wanted to point that out.

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