"It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled seas of thought."
- John Kenneth Galbraith

"Excellence is a matter of doing a lot of small things well."
- Edward K. Thompson, 1907-1996

Scroll down to the Dedication
What's New archive for 1996
What's New archive for 1995

April 2001:

• Added Tracy Griffith drawing to the Artwork page.
• I still haven't found time to prepare another issue of Gallimaufry, but I do have plenty of material and still want to do it.

December 2000:

• Added a new drawing of Taiwanese actress Hsu Chi to the Artwork page.

August 1999:

• Added four new drawings to the Artwork page.
• I have plenty of material for more issues of Gallimaufry. I just need to find some time. Perhaps next month.

April 1999:

• Prepared issue number 2 of Gallimaufry: An occasional collection by Mike Harney.

March 1999:

• Prepared issue number 1 of Gallimaufry: An occasional collection by Mike Harney. A gallimaufry is a hodgepodge or collection of unrelated items. Mostly unrelated items in this case, but I think you'll find them of some interest.
• A few days after I first put issue 1 of Gallimaufry up, I added a movie and some music to the "Noted With Pleasure" article. I also added my recipe that approximates the best oatmeal cookies I've ever had.

November 1998:

• Added new drawings to other artwork. There are more than a dozen now.

September and October 1998:

• 23 October: Belatedly added "Tampopo" to Desert Island films.
• Added a new page for my other artwork, which features drawings I've done in the last couple of months.

Oct 1997 through June 1998 (summarized):

• Added a second postscript to my Overnight page after Linda Ellerbee happened upon it and then told Lloyd Dobyns and Bill Schechner (Overnight co-anchors) and Herb Dudnick (the esteemed inventor of Overnight) about it. They all ended up visiting and they all sent glowing e-mail to me. Made me feel rather proud of my small effort. Also made a correction on the page suggested by Bill Schechner.
• Corrected Apollo 12 photo caption on the Departments page. It's Pete Conrad, not Al Bean. Beano took the photo, though.
• Added contact and web site information for The Minor Chord to my essay on New Acoustic Music.
• Corrected references to RadioArt on a few Bob and Ray related pages at their request. It's "RadioArt," not "RadioArts," and it's a registered trademark.
• Because of a large number of e-mail requests for information on getting pictures or posters of Rita Hayworth, I added some suggestions and sources to the Rita Hayworth page.
• Corrected a few incorrect image links.
• Several other minor things not worthy of mention. Crap, I've gone and mentioned them.

16-Sep-97:

I've been doing a lot of cooking lately and plan to put several of these recipes on The Finley Quality Network. Some are my own inventions, such as a chocolate-pecan coated toffee I've called Mrs. London's Trafalgar (because it's actually better than any of her toffee, he said modestly), chicken fettucine alfredo, blackberry muffins with blackberry butter cream frosting and whole blackberries for decoration (can you tell I like blackberries?), and Mike's Caesar dressing and croutons.

Others come from a variety of sources (but mostly from Julia Child's complete repertoire, of which I am now a proud owner), and include:

• Potatoes Suzette
• Absolutely Deep Dark Chocolate Fudge Cookies
• Blackberry mousse
• Katharine Hepburn's Brownies (with Julia Child's traditional French chocolate butter cream frosting)
• Swordfish broiled in vermouth and served with lemon butter
• Baklava
• Bearnaise sauce
• Mousse au Chocolat avec Creme Chantilly
• Chocolate almond honey crunch candy
• Traditional French baguettes
• Chicken livers sauteed in butter, garlic, and white wine, served with sliced new red potatoes in white sauce and glazed carrots

The following is what I thought of whenever I saw the Philadelphia Cream Cheese commercial that suggested supplanting butter with cream cheese on English muffins. (Right after I thought, "Half the calories? Yeah, but tell me who doesn't use at least three times as much cream cheese as they do butter?")

“The object of the English muffin is to be a butter mop, and that’s why it is honeycombed with little holes, or butter wells.”       - Julia Child & More Company

   

2-Sep-97:

I haven't had much -- oh, all right, "any" -- time for the web site lately due to a lot of work, a fair amount of travel, and a sincere desire to do nothing but noodle around on the home system when I do happen to spend some time on it. I finally decided to put at least a couple of new things on, so here are some recent happenings of note (you know, television appearances and the like):

• In May, I was proud to be featured in an article in the Harney Update, a newsletter put together by Linda Harney MacDonald and distributed to those interested in the Harney name and heritage around the world. She wrote of my flight jacket artwork and included several pictures in the article. In a previous newsletter, she had mentioned my name in association with the rescue of "Mystery Science Theater 3000."
• Also in May, my good friend Haewon became a naturalized U.S. citizen. This is one heckuva year for her, because she's getting married soon, too. I got to attend her swearing-in at Faneuil Hall in Boston (not to mention feel all proud and such). The naturalization ceremonies took place in a rather historic room where George Washington once gave a speech and Thomas Paine had previously roused the rabble on an occasion or two. Four hundred other people were sworn in that day as well. I brought a picnic to celebrate Haewon's citizenship, which I am of the opinion perceptibly improved the United States. WCVB-TV (Channel 5, Boston) apparently agreed, because they taped us at our Marketplace picnic and included us in a news story on tourism that ran that night. Cool.

  

  

  

  Click on this thumbnail to see a portrait I did of Haewon last year:

  

• I spent pretty much all of June at the 9-1-1 Center in Cherokee County, Georgia, getting their Police, Fire, and Computer-Aided Dispatch software all squared away. I did get to come back on a couple of weekends to recharge my batteries, though. In all, I think I spent about two of the last eight months living at the Courtyard in Marietta, Georgia and commuting to the 9-1-1 Center in Canton.
• I also spent much of July continuing to work with Cherokee County almost exclusively, but from home, happily.
• I had a very nice birthday in August, although I was sick at the time. I took the day off and a pal visited with cake, ice cream, and a card. We went out blackberry picking at a local winery and later made French bread, chicken fettucine alfredo, and blackberry mousse for my birthday dinner. Yum. The next day, I got a raise at work and later a freshly-made pecan pie from my pal Becky in Savannah. It's a push as to which of all these was nicer, so don't make me pick one, okay?

• Labor Day was made quite pleasant with a scrumptious, non-traditional cook-in of crab whoopie appetizers, Black Angus filet mignon with Bearnaise sauce, Potatoes Suzette, and chocolate almond honey crunch candy. Double yum.

11-Apr-97:

• I came across a rather unfortunate typo in a Reuters story last night. "See here," you might be thinking, "Typos, thinkos, and spellos are not exactly out of the ordinary on the Reuters wire." Sure, but a couple of hours earlier, I had just finished wearing my editor's cap for my company's annual report text, so I was understandably still in a slightly feisty slash-and-burn mode. Since I am not currently in possession of an iron will, I wrote to the editor this time:

  In a story today at

  http://www.yahoo.com/headlines/970409/entertainment/stories/online_livewire_1.html

  the word "as" has managed to tip-toe away from "such" in the following sentence and should be given a severe talking to at your earliest convenience.

  Fancy stuff aside, other people are irked by sites' failure to pay attention to basics such spelling and grammar.

  I normally don't write to point out typos and thinkos in Reuters stories, but given the context...well, I can resist everything except temptation.

• In a recent e-mail, Roger Launius, NASA's chief historian, told me about some accuracy problems in one of my Desert Island Books, Chariots for Apollo: The Making of the Lunar Module:

  ... It also slides over a lot of detail in favor of a slick story and when we got into it we found that a lot of the engineers working on the program said the book could not be trusted because details are incorrect, dates are sometimes wrong, and from their perspective emphasis is sometimes misplaced.

  So, it sounds like a made-for-TV book: Enjoyable, perhaps, but don't rely on it to get the details right. Happily, in An Annotated Bibliography of the Apollo Program, Launius gives high marks to all the other Apollo histories that I thought were very good.

1-Mar-97:

• Overnight page: Added an outline of an average show to illustrate content, a transcript of another closing editorial, and an image of my signboard man on the anchor desk during the final week.

24-Feb-97:

• Added Dobyns's and Ellerbee's first show introduction to the Overnight page along with a picture of them from the first show, plus Pat Trese's remarks from the last show.
• Added Roving Redhead painting of Rita Hayworth by Philip Castle (of Time and other magazine covers) to Desert Island Glamour.

23-Feb-97:

• Expanded the NBC News Overnight page:
  • Transcribed complete versions of Schechner's and Ellerbee's closing remarks from the last show
  • Added six images from that show to the page
  • Added a link to a new page with pictures of the entire crew of Overnight
• Improved site map's sponsor list (that is, I changed the color so you could actually read them without changing your monitor's contrast to 100% and turning off your lights)
• Added Overnight crew link to the site map

19-Feb-97:

• Rearranged the index page and added a site map link to the logo graphic.

18-Feb-97:

• The Finley Quality Network site map is now ready. The map includes all of the major pages on the FQN. Just click on any item to go directly to the page. I'll be placing a link to the map on most pages as time goes on, but for now it's just on the home, Departments, and What's New pages.

16-Feb-97:

• Reworked the Departments page and added a bunch of stuff:
  • Added two more B-17 photos from the Geneseo airshows
  • Added three more stills from Dr. Strangelove to the Post-War, Pre-Millenium section
  • Added two other really awful lobby cards there, too
  • Added a graf on the Variety ad to the MST3K section
  • Moved the Julia Child graphic near the bottom

12-Feb-97:

• "I won't eat anything that has intelligent life but I would gladly eat a network executive or a politician." - Marty Feldman

  

• You can click on any of these three Sci-Fi Mystery Science Theater 3000 ad formats to see a larger, uncropped version. These are linked to on the MST rescue page as well:

        

• I forgot to upload the new version of the Bob & Ray picture mentioned in the 10-Feb-97 section. It's here now.

Recent additions up to 10-Feb-97:

• Added Dr. Strangelove title shot to Desert Island films.
• Maybe this was a slug head (a temporary headline) not really meant for the public. In any case, Reuters did use it last week: Plane Crashes on Golf Course, Misses O.J.
• Added an excerpt of a case history from Desert Island book Psychiatric Experiences of the Eighth Air Force, First Year of Combat.
• Improved the quality of the scan of the '80s Bob & Ray picture and paired it with its twin taken thirty years earlier.

Recent additions up to 7-Feb-97:

• Added Desert Island Dozen images for Twelve O'Clock High (autographed in-character pictures of Gregory Peck and Robert Lansing), Red Hot Riding Hood (a.k.a. Swing Shift Cinderella), Swing Time, Gilda, The Thin Man, 2001, A Midnight Clear, Hope and Glory, and Danger UXB.
• Added a couple of honorable mentions and links to photos of Béart, Horrocks, and Amis to Hollywood Glamour in the Desert Island Dozens. The owner of the eye and ear in my audio/video icon is now there as well, as one of the honorable mentions:
• Added links for several items in the Desert Island Dozen listings.
• Reorganized the books listing a bit and added Psychiatric Experiences of the Eighth Air Force, First Year of Combat while I was at it.
• Defined some background colors for some of the pages here, including a gradient blue background on this page.
• Changed the star background on the index page and despeckled the Discovery and pod a bit.
• A link to the Pamet Systems web site should be coming in the not-too-distant future. The index page will feature a panorama of photos that I took at Pamet Harbor on the bay side of Cape Cod. You can see the prototype index page I put together last week by clicking on this thumbnail of it:

Recent additions up to 28-Jan-97:

• We're proud to have Magic Chameleon's Tongue as a new sponsor on the Finley Quality Network.
• Link to David Grisman's DawgNet on the New Acoustic Music page.
• Added the snake-as-hoop story of Béla Fleck, Sam Bush, Kevin Murphy, and myself to the top of the New Acoustic Music page.
• To the existing Desert Island Dozen discs on my bio page, I've added Desert Island Dozens for Film, Television, Cartoons, Books, Periodicals, Humor on Tape, Hollywood Glamour, Sustenance, and Reserved Huts.
• Added American goldfinch to birds recently at the feeders.

What's New archive for 1996
What's New archive for 1995

29-Oct-1995 The Finley Quality Network is now on the air.

This site is dedicated to Bob & Ray, one of the greatest and weirdest comedy teams ever, and is devoted to the quest for high quality.

The Finley Quality Network was Bob & Ray's fictional network on their radio show, which started in Boston and soon moved to New York. Sponsors included the Monongahela Metal Foundry ("Quality steel ingots for the housewife") and Einbinder Flypaper Company ("You've gradually grown to trust us over thirty years"). I had the good fortune of meeting and talking with Bob Elliot a few years ago. It was a day I'll not soon forget. Ray Goulding had died about a year before, so, alas, I never did get to meet him.

Although this newborn site already has several images, the opening state is the merest morsel of what's to come. Stay tuned to the Finley Quality Network.

Entire contents © 1995-2003 by Mike Harney. World rights reserved. Steve Allen, this means you.