Brandon's Buzz

“There is nothing more compelling than a human face who is communicating. I don’t think there is anything more compelling on TV than flipping the channels and seeing Mr. Rogers lean forward and go, ‘I like this, do you?’ It stops me every time, because there is somebody at home there.”

— Emmy-winning former “Guiding Light” headwriter Nancy Curlee, speaking to Soap Opera Weekly in 1994 about what ails the genre. (The point she goes on to make is that soaps thrive when their foundation is real emotions and real events. Speaking of which, my thoughts about the unfathomably tragic “GL” cancellation are forthcoming, I swear.)

“The urinals in the Singapore and Amsterdam airports have little pictures of flies etched into them so men have something to aim for.  This reduces maintenance costs.”

— the “go figure” entry from last week’s edition of Mr. Smarty Pants Knows, my favorite column in the Austin Chronicle.  (If anyone out there remembers L.M. Boyd’s homespun canards from your newspaper’s lifestyle section, you’ve got a pretty good idea the kind of trivial territory Pants swerves fabulously into.)