Some of my best TV memories come from the early days of cable, back before it had really found its place in the entertainment world. I was especially fond of the newly introduced Disney Channel, before the introduction of superfluous productions like Hannah Montana and High School Musical, when Disney dug into their vaults and replayed classic programs that really exercised the imagination.

Many of them, even back in the '80s, stood as quintessential examples of retrofuturism, a pie-in-the-sky view of what the future will hold, with fantastic and often laughable ideas of what space travel would soon hold for us.

Telstar Logistics has just reminded me of one of Disney's best, titled Man and the Moon, in which guest narrator and rocket genius Wernher von Braun describes the way in which we will achieve lunar flight and life in orbit, 13 years before Apollo 8 and 43 years before realization of the International Space Station. (I just love the way he says "atomic re-ack-tohr.") ... Continued

Esquire magazine has just announced their official endorsement for Dublin Dr Pepper, my personal choice for best soda ever and the only DP to have never succumbed to the pressure of using cheaper high-fructose corn syrup over genuine, pure cane sugar.

The concoction in question is available only from a small-town bottling plant in Dublin, Texas. You can purchase it directly from the bottler — where you can also get a tour of the crazy Laverne & Shirley bottling line while you're there — or at distributors lying within a 44-mile radius of the plant.

Those, such as myself, who've enjoyed the Dublin recipe say it's better than any DP you can get elsewhere, a sentiment that Esquire's Chris Jones seems to share, referring to it as "nature's perfect candy, plus fizz."

Of course, Jones also says it's probably not worth driving to West Texas just to taste it, but that's moot since Dublin, which lies only about 100 miles southwest of Dallas-Fort Worth, isn't considered anywhere near West Texas, anyway.

Those of you with coulrophobia should jump to the next blog entry now.

A couple of weeks ago, artists Chris Hausbeck and Dawn Exton officially revealed Keeshan Delight Number 9, a giant, bobbing clown head that continuously "springs" from the top of a 40-foot grain silo at Wild Bill's Nostalgia Center in Middletown, Connecticut.

The enormous fiberglass head that was used in the project was discovered wasting away at an antique shop. It was reportedly modeled after Howdy Doody's sidekick Clarabell the Clown, originally played by Bob Keeshan, who later went on to play Captain Kangaroo.

The head was restored, a support structure was built inside the silo and the whole thing was rigged together with a mechanism that lifts the giant, grinning noodle to the top of a pole every 60 seconds. The head is counterbalanced with a 600-pound ball of antlers, whale vertebrae, mortar shells and random bits of rusted metal, which just add to the piece's overall creepiness.

See more imagery, including video of the contraption in action, at the links below.

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While I was researching the "Cemetery Safari" chapter for my upcoming book Weird Oklahoma, I came across an unusual burial site west of Tulsa that was entirely enclosed within a strip-mall parking lot. Once sacred ground, it's now a conspicuous patch of grass in a sea of asphalt, a quirky spectacle to the shoppers forced to drive around it on their way to Radio Shack.

The handful of graves had become an absurd sight gag that punctuated the often indiscriminate momentum of American progress. And it got me thinking: were there others like it? Surely this wasn't the only time the deceased had stubbornly spoiled the aesthetics of a well-drafted parking lot. I mean, the good spots had already started going to the handicapped; it was only a matter of time before the dead horned in on the action, too.

And you know what? I was right. In fact, I found even more than I expected ... ... Continued