Too old for Scooby, too young for assisted living

I think I mentioned the comedian who claimed to do a spot-on impersonation of President Millard Fillmore. So who is going to argue that the voice and mannerisms he adopts to play our 13th president are not accurate? No one but some tall trees and a few Galápagos Giant Tortoises are still alive from Millard the F's days around here. So for all we know, he's got the Fillmore moves down to a T.

Speaking of moves, a note from a friend still in the radio business pointed me to this:

"Night Moves" was the song that finally - FINally! - made a star of Bob Seger, after he had been on the periphery for so many years. It came out in autumn of 1976 and has become a mainstay of the "Heartland Rock" genre on classic rock radio. "Against The Wind" was a hit in the summer of 1980 and was about Seger's time as a cross-country runner in high school. At that, it was featured in the "Forrest Gump" soundtrack when Forrest took to running cross country. The Gump movie came out in 1994, so by my simple arithmetic, Tod's east coast Italian writer friend was 13 at the time, and he would have been among the only 283 Americans who did not perch in movie houses in 1994 giving his tear ducts a workout to the Gump story. I don't buy his claim, not that he offered it up for sale, but if you have been within a hundred yards of a radio or TV or random speaker, you've heard those songs.

But there are the decisions that radio programmers live and die by (job-wise). If you're not playing the songs people want to hear, or, worse, if you're playing songs they DON'T want to hear, your boss will soon show you to the door and not want to hear about it.

Were you ever in a group, talking to friends, and suddenly someone's friend comes out the blue and starts speaking Lithuanian to his friend, and you're standing around dumbfounded? It happened to me the other night, in English, not Lithuanian. But I am a baby boomer, and this Scooby-Doo show came along after I was out of high school and (presumably) concentrating on more important things.

Gunnar and his bat

So I do not know anything about Scooby and his fun pals, but Gunnar Henderson of the Baltimore Orioles seems to! He took his Scooby bat to the All-Star game the other night and stopped by to deliver his Scooby-Doo impersonation while competing in the homerun hitting contest.

I don't know if it was a good mimicry; the announcers seemed to like it. For all I know, that's what Millard Fillmore sounds like.