Pickles (comic strip)

Pickles is a daily and Sunday comic strip by Brian Crane focusing on a retired couple in their seventies, Earl and Opal Pickles.Pickles has been published since 1990.

Cast

Inspired by Crane's in-laws, the strip describes their efforts to enjoy retirement, which instead proves quite imperfect for both. Earl Pickles is characterized as having a bald head, glasses, and a bushy white mustache, and wears suspenders. Opal Pickles is characterized as somewhat chubby, bespectacled, and is often seen wearing purple polka-dotted dresses and white sneakers. When sitting, she is usually seen with her pet cat in her lap. Both characters were drawn with their eye pupils visible through their glasses during the strip's early years, but their glasses were later whitened so that they are opaque to readers.

The cast includes their dog Roscoe and their cat Muffin; their grandson Nelson Wolfe and his parents—their daughter Sylvia and her husband Dan, a wildlife photographer.

Awards and honors

Dethklok

Dethklok is both a virtual band featured in the Adult Swim animated program Metalocalypse and a real band created to perform the band's melodic death metal music in live shows. Both bands were created by Brendon Small and Tommy Blacha. The music heard on Metalocalypse is performed by Brendon Small, with others needed for live concerts and albums.

The first official Dethklok album was released on September 25, 2007, entitled The Dethalbum. The album debuted at number 21 on Billboard Magazine's Top 200 list. The band released Dethalbum II on September 29, 2009, and toured with Mastodon, High on Fire and Converge. The band's third album, Dethalbum III, was released on October 16, 2012. The soundtrack to the special episode, Metalocalypse: The Doomstar Requiem was released on October 29, 2013.

Fictional background

In the Metalocalypse series, Dethklok is depicted as an extremely popular and successful death metal band. The band's fan base includes billions of metal fanatics, who frequently endanger themselves to watch the band perform live. With their widespread commercial success and lucrative sponsorship contracts, Dethklok is ranked as the world's seventh largest economy by the end of the second season.

Pickles (surname)

Pickles is a surname. Notable people with the surname include:

Beverley Craven (album)

Beverley Craven is the debut album by British singer Beverley Craven. It was released in July 1990. The album was fully written by Craven herself.

Craven signed to Epic Records in 1988, and initially recorded the album with American producer Stewart Levine (of Simply Red fame). The initial results, however, were not of Craven's liking and, with the agreement of her label, she restarted from scratch working with Paul Samwell-Smith, who eventually produced the whole album. Levine's production of her songs were eventually released as b-sides to some of her singles, under the label "West Coast Version".

Released in July 1990, the album was initially a flop in the UK, with its singles and the album failing to reach the charts. She found however some success around continental Europe in 1990 and toured there to support the release. Craven made her first UK tour in early 1991, which was successful. In April 1991, the original lead single "Promise Me" was re-released, and this time it was heavily promoted. Appearances on British TV led to exposure of the single and it eventually peaked at #3 in the UK in May 1991, becoming her biggest hit.

Joey (1985 film)

Joey, also known as Making Contact, is a 1985 West German/American fantasy film from Centropolis Film Productions (now Centropolis Entertainment). The film was co-written and directed by Roland Emmerich. The plot concerns a boy (Joshua Morell) who loses his father, but makes contact with what he believes is his deceased parent via a small phone and is terrorized by a demonic ventriloquist dummy named Fletcher who is possessed by a demon and summons demons to threaten his friends as only the boy must go into the spirit world to destroy this evil in a battle of good vs. evil. The boy develops the power of telekinesis, which soon gets out of hand.

Release

Joey was released in North America as Making Contact. The North American version was heavily cut and ran 79 minutes. Since, Joey has been released as a 2 disc DVD set featuring the original 98 minutes version along with the edited North American cut.

References

External links

Joey (Bob Dylan song)

"Joey" is a song from Bob Dylan's 1976 album Desire. It was written by Dylan and Jacques Levy, who collaborated with Dylan on most of the songs on the album. In a 2009 interview with Bill Flanagan, Dylan claimed that Levy wrote all the words to this song. Like another long song on the album, "Hurricane", "Joey" is biographical. The song is about the life and death of mobster Joey Gallo, who had been killed on his birthday at Umberto's Clam House in Little Italy, on April 7, 1972.

Meaning

The song treats Gallo sympathetically, despite his violent history. Gallo had been accused of at least two murders and had been convicted of several felonies. But in the song he is given credit for distrusting guns, being reluctant to kill hostages and for shielding his family when he was being killed, and makes him appear to be an unwilling participant in the crimes of his henchmen, thus not deserving his fate. As a result of the sympathetic treatment, critics such as Lester Bangs harshly criticized Dylan and the song. Bangs described it as "repellent romanticist bullshit." However, Dylan claims that he always thought of Gallo as a kind of hero and an underdog fighting against the elements. Besides his status as an outsider, Dylan was likely also drawn to the fact that Gallo's best friends in prison were black men. In addition Gallo was able to gain sympathy in artistic circles by passing himself off as a cultured person victimized by the "system".