Knight Rider started a month earlier than St Elsewhere.

I remember William Daniels from Soap yet looking it up now that was just one episode. He clearly made an impression.

Joanna Lee's Plan 9 character Tanna was cool and fun.

Her writing careers seems to have been successful with scripts for high level productions and awards.

Even the term "sucks" has aspects of homophobia.

I was an avid reader of Mad Magazine starting around 1980 and in it I often read about 'disco sucks' in the US. I really didn't get it at all. Australia definitely still had discos all through the 1980s. Some were famous and the hottest place to 'rage' *. They were called nightspot or nightclub by the late 1980s as the term disco sounded passe. But yeah, we didn't really seem to have a 'disco sucks' movement here. When I was a teen in the 1980s, the tough cool kids all went to discos. There were the popular 'Blue Light discos' for under 18 year olds. Popular mainstream clubs in Melbourne included The Underground and Inflation in King Street, plus Razor, Lasers, Chasers, Manhattan Stage 1, 21st Century Dance Club. My brothers-in-law were pretty standard Aussie type men. They went to discos and got drunk. That was where the girls were, but they also bopped to their fave tunes and had a blast.

I started going to discos in 1987. They were great. All the different subcultures mixed together and had a blast. Tracks like Blue Monday -- Male Stripper -- Boom Boom -- So Macho were huge. When Blue Monday started, the crowd roared. It was unreal.

One of my fave 1980s disco track was Savin' Myself.

Years later I started playing '1970s disco mixes' that had been uploaded to youtube. Many of the tracks I recalled as still being played in discos in the late 1980s were actually old 70s disco, eg Groove Me. So even in the 80s actual 70s disco was still being played too.

Here is a list of some 1980s club tracks:

• Blue Monday

• Searchin' (I Gotta Find A Man) by Hazell Dean

• Whatever I Do (Wherever I Go)

• Slice Me Nice

• Boom Boom (Let's Go Back To My Room)

• Male Stripper

• Savin' Myself

• So many men so little time

• So macho

* In 1987 ABC started a music video TV series named after our term for what you did at a disco - and in 2023 it is still running.

There's a weird disconnect where after decades of watching TV soaps, action shows, sitcoms, and movies, you realise there is this same guy with medium sized roles in 1000s of things you've seen without really noticing him before.

I love James Hong. Though I didn't really watch the show he was in this cool Falcon Crest cliff-hanger scene. He was also in Dynasty and Dallas aside from super cools roles like in Blade Runner (1982), Big Trouble in Little China (1986), and even Chinatown (1974) fgs.

As kids we loved the Australian soundtrack album and played it to death. We later got the Rocky Horror Picture Show soundtrack too. Its version of Time Warp is much better and Sweet Transvestite is better too. With other tracks like Science Fiction and Touch A Touch Me, I prefer the Australian versions from that album.

Anyway when there was another stage tour of it in Australia (1984) mum took us kids to go see it alive on stage. It had Daniel Abineri as Frank N Furter and Stuart Wagstaff as the narrator. It was ace. The ushers were scary. We saw Ross and Pat Wilson walking down Bourke Street on our way to the theatre.

After that I saw the film on TV but admit I was disappointed as it wasn't the same as the stage show which I saw first. Later I saw the film again and enjoyed it more. The mid section feels a bit slow though.

In the 80s, at the stage show, audience members did not dress up in character. I saw it again in 1992 and that did not happen then either. The show is on the stage.

As a budding film fan I owned some movie review books in the 1980s.

A 1982 film review book by Steven H. Scheuer said of film 9 to 5 (1980) "it is amazing how far this film goes to avoid issues". I was just a teen and thought that was an odd criticism. As an adult I can see what they mean. In the film some issues are raised but they often get just a cursory treatment (Ray Vitte is a black mailroom clerk who can never get a promotion - the character amounts to being a tiny walk-on).

Really the film is more focused on being a comedy farce where three secretaries (Violet, Judy, Doralee) accidently steal a dead body from the hospital before kidnapping their obnoxious, embezzling, sexual harassing boss and locking him up for several weeks. Violet, Judy and Doralee make beneficial changes in the office prompting a promotion for the boss which opens up a position for Violet. Out of nowhere it is reported that Judy leaves the company to marry a Xerox rep and Doralee (Dolly Parton) leaves to become a country and western singer.

It is a funny film. Lily Tomlin as Violet gets all the best lines.

I just googled a Vietnamese bakery I know of, Tiger Bread Bakery & Café in Flemington.

One of the pics in google shows this item on sale, named as a "Neenish tart". So I guess some places do them.

They are these two colour jobs. Pretty common in bakeries.

Yes I seem recall many instalments end on a cliff-hanger that seems impossible to get out of. The next instalment then quickly resolves that with a magical Deus ex Machina and we're off on a new adventure.

I do recall one especially disturbing segment where Pinocchio and his friend Lucignolo are turned into donkeys, separated, and sent to work doing different strenuous jobs. Pinocchio's owner tries to drown him to make his hide into a drum but Pinocchio emerges from the water and announces the fish ate away all the donkey parts. Pinocchio meets Lucignolo again later. Lucignolo is dying of exhaustion and Pinocchio takes on his work until Lucignolo dies.

I've seen clips from movies including the 2002 Roberto Benigni film (which Italians don't seem to hate as much as Americans) and it was obvious from just the clips that many moments from the original stories are simplified or even skipped entirely in adaptations.

I read the original Italian language stories in my Italian language class. It was a serial with short instalments, filled with crazy surreal moments. Pinocchio dies at the end but the popularity led to him being brought back to life for more instalments. The later set of instalments are longer.

The nose growing bit only appears a few times. It is caused by lying in some cases but also occurs spontaneously at other times. At one point woodpeckers arrive to chip the nose back to normal size.

Le avventure di Pinocchio di Carlo Collodi

Before becoming Prime Minister Bob Hawke was active in the Trade Union area and in that era drank a lot. While at university (in the UK) he had set a "world record" by skolling two-and-a-half pints of beer in 11 seconds. This was University College, Oxford and Hawke was a Rhodes Scholar. Pretty sure calling it a world record was a student joke.

Hawke gave up drinking when he went into politics in 1980 and did not drink while he was PM. He started drinking again after leaving politics in 1993.

As a kid in Australia I knew this - probably from watching war movies on TV...

Hitler, has only got one ball

Goering, has two but very small

Himmler, is rather sim'lar

But poor old Goebbels, has no balls, at all

All episodes of Thunderbirds started with a teaser of moments to come.

A later series by the same producers, Space: 1999, did the same thing.

The original series was ace. Like Thunderbirds, each episode opened with quick cut highlights of the episode to come played with the cool opening tune.

Those 1960s single camera filmed series had such a good technical quality it future proofed them too. Star Trek and Jeannie favoured uniforms so the clothing fashions didn't date so obviously (too bad about the hairstyles.)

I loved the Mary Tyler Moore show (1970-1977). It is high quality with many great episodes. But it too has several episodes that while pretty good, definitely do repeat ideas from earlier episodes and feel like filler. It can be a slog to produce top quality week and week (each of the seven seasons had 24 episodes).

I never liked the boyfriend of the week episodes that suddenly introduce a new guy who is usually never seen or mentioned in any later episode. The rare case a boyfriend returns the explanations for where he has been never match up with what we actually saw on screen.

There were actually a couple of trapped episodes but they were really good ones. (All are snowed in for "The Snow Must Go On" and "Not a Christmas Story".) Every episode of the show had few sets so I think the trapped bit wasn't done as a time saver it was key to the episode.

The final few episodes were the worst featuring a fantasy episode and a clip show.

Here in Australia circa 1979-1982 all us kids at school loved The Brady Bunch, watching it every day after school. We knew it was goofy, cheesy and very "American" but we loved it. We found it odd that such a highly popular show ever ended. The story that went around school was that they only ended the show because the actor who played Cindy died in real-life. (This myth was actually due to confusion with Anissa Jones, who played a similar character in the less-known sitcom Family Affair.)

The Brady Bunch was actually in a roster of several US sitcoms that would be stripped in afterschool slots here: Bewitched, Get Smart, I Dream of Jeannie, Hogan's Heroes, Gilligan's Island, and (the least popular with kids) Here's Lucy.

I loved reading TV books and around that time was astonished to learn that many of these shows were even older than Brady (which from its garish fashions did look a little old). Others were made in the 1965-1970 period. I was surprised at such old shows being in constant rotation and still quite popular. Then I was even more surprised to learn that The Brady Bunch was not actually all that popular in its day, its popularity took off later. Same with Jeannie. Turns out it wasn't a weird unexpected thing that happened on Australian TV - that was the studio's production model. They would make a loss on a sitcom in prime time until it reached 100 episodes, hoping they'd later make the money back in multiple repeated runs stripped after school.

I don't know but Don Adams' brother Dick Yarmy was a guest star in a couple of episodes of Get Smart.

In one, as Brady, he got to participate in one of my favourite moments in the series. John Byner was also in it.

Yeah there are a few fruit / vegetable / berry / tree / herb terminology issues.

Fruit can be used in a botanical sense. In botany, a fruit is the seed-bearing structure in flowering plants, formed from the ovary after flowering.

In common language/culinary usage, "fruit" normally means the fleshy seed-associated structures of a plant that are sweet or sour, and edible in the raw state, such as apples, bananas, grapes, lemons, oranges, and strawberries.

The botanical usage includes many structures that are not commonly called "fruits", such as bean pods, corn kernels, tomatoes, and wheat grains. The section of a fungus that produces spores is also called a fruiting body.

Vegetable in common/culinary usage usually refers to parts of plants that are consumed by humans as food as part of a meal.

This definition is applied somewhat arbitrarily, often by culinary and cultural tradition. It may exclude foods derived from some plants that are fruits, nuts, and cereal grains, but include fruits from others such as tomatoes and courgettes and seeds such as pulses.

The original meaning of vegetable is applied to plants collectively to refer to all edible plant matter, including the flowers, fruits, stems, leaves, roots, and seeds.

In summary:

The term "Fruit" is used in both a cultural/culinary sense, and a botanical sense.

The term "Vegetable" also has two definitions, one cultural/culinary.

If you compare the culinary fruit and the culinary vegetable, it usually neatly divides foods into categories.

If you start bringing in botanical fruits, they will not always fit into our idea of fruit in a culinary sense. Botanical fruits will include some things that are considered a vegetable in the cultural/culinary definition of vegetable.

If you are thinking in the older sense of vegetable, then all botanical fruits are within that category, and all culinary fruits are also all within the category.

Also there is a culinary/common usage idea of what a berry is, but it is different from the botanical definition of a berry. This is where bananas and strawberries come in.

Banana trees are a herbaceous plant, herbaceous plant being a botanical definition.

> Herbaceous plants in botany, frequently shortened to herbs, are vascular plants that have no persistent woody stems above ground. Herb has other meanings in cooking, medicine, and other fields. Herbaceous plants are those plants that do not have woody stems, they include many perennials, and nearly all annuals and biennials, they include both forbs and graminoids.

> Herbaceous plants most often are low growing plants, different from woody plants like trees, and tend to have soft green stems that lack lignification and their above-ground growth is ephemeral and often seasonal in duration.

There is also the general term, "herb".

> In general use, herbs are plants with savory or aromatic properties that are used for flavoring and garnishing food, for medicinal purposes, or for fragrances; excluding vegetables and other plants consumed for macronutrients. Culinary use typically distinguishes herbs from spices. Herbs generally refers to the leafy green or flowering parts of a plant (either fresh or dried), while spices are usually dried and produced from other parts of the plant, including seeds, bark, roots and fruits.

> Herbs have a variety of uses including culinary, medicinal, and in some cases, spiritual. General usage of the term "herb" differs between culinary herbs and medicinal herbs; in medicinal or spiritual use, any parts of the plant might be considered as "herbs", including leaves, roots, flowers, seeds, root bark, inner bark (and cambium), resin and pericarp.

So essentially, the word "herb" is used is two different senses.