Idea: Pop Culture Twitter Lists
It’s been five years since Twitter introduced Lists and frankly I never found a use for them. It’s not that I don’t see the value in curated lists, but I never remembered to look at them, preferring to watch my complete stream of tweeters, signal, noise, and all.
But I finally came up with a use for them. So without further ado, here are a bunch of Pop Culture Twitter Lists you can follow, in apparently random order, with notes about what you’ll find there.
(You can also see them with nicer formatting but without the notes, and easily to subscribe to them, here on Twitter).
- Saturday Night Live: 75 cast members, including “featured” players
- Parks & Recreation: 10 cast members
- Community: 8 cast members
- 3rd Rock From the Sun: 5 cast members, mainly Joseph Gordon-Levitt
- SCTV: 5 cast members
- Roseanne: 6 cast members, but mainly Roseanne being weird
- The Breakfast Club: 4 cast members, but mainly Molly Ringwald, who has a brand new advice column and I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about that.
- Doctor Who: 19 cast members, mainly Doctors and companions
- Star Wars IV-VI: 9 cast members from the Original Trilogy
- Night Court: 3 cast members, but mainly Markie Post
- Cheers: 5 cast members, but mainly Kirstie Alley
- Modern Family: 11 cast members
- Married… With Children: 6 cast members, but mainly David Faustino
- Silver Spoons: 5 cast members
- 30 Rock: 9 cast members
- Rocky Horror Picture Show: 3 cast members, but really just Susan Sarandon
- The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air: 7 cast members
- Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In: sadly just 3 cast members, but what cast members they are: Lily Tomlin, Ruth Buzzi, and Goldie Hawn. I’d watch a movie starring all of them.
- Boy Meets World: 6 cast members
- Friends: 6 cast members
- The Mindy Project: 10 cast members
- Stephen Tobolowsky: This is just Stephen Tobolowsky
- Family Guy: 6 cast members
- The Simpsons: 7 cast members
- Mad Men: 9 cast members
- Orange is the New Black: 21 cast members plus the real Piper and Larry
- Breaking Bad: 15 cast members
- Seinfeld: 9 cast members, including a few memorable guest stars
- Saved by the Bell: 8 cast members
- Beverly Hills 90210: 9 cast members
- The Office (US): 16 cast members
- Family Ties: 5 cast members, and you should be following Justine Bateman’s blog about going back to college and being a Computer Science undergrad as an adult
- Growing Pains: 7 cast members, but mainly Kirk Cameron. You’ve been warned.
- The Brady Bunch: just 2 cast members, and really just Florence Henderson. I’m surprised there aren’t more.
- Star Trek: The Original Series: 4 cast members. Oh my.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: 10 cast members. Make it so.
- Happy Days: 3 cast members
- The Facts Of Life: 8 cast members. After much internal debate, I decided to omit the characters who didn’t make it past Season 1 (although once again I can’t believe nobody’s talking about Molly Ringwald’s advice column).
Am I missing your favorite cast that’s on Twitter? Let me know at @ironicsans and maybe I’ll add it when I get a chance.
(Wow, a bulleted list of links sure highlights how dated my site’s design feels)
Update: I’ve since added…
- Girls: 6 cast members
- Transparent: 8 cast members
- Game of Thrones: 20 cast members
- Orphan Black: 7 cast members, and they’re all Tatiana Maslany
Next year, Tim Burton’s version of 
As George Bush prepares to move out of the White House at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, and Barack Obama prepares to move in, I thought I’d take a virtual trip around the country and see what’s going on at other locations with the same address. 
As summer ends, so does the blockbuster season. It’s time to stop watching movies all day and start attending classes. But wait! What if there were a way to do both? I thought it would be interesting to see what lessons are taught in the movies, so I’ve rounded up 10 classroom lectures from a variety of films. See if you can remember what movie each lesson is from. Answers are at the end.
featuring sketches and commentaries from a quarter century of celebrity trials.
In the courtroom:In 1975, Steve was passing through Philadelphia on his way to Hollywood, when a photojournalist friend offered him a press pass to watch the moving of the Liberty Bell with him. As luck would have it, the bad weather that day prevented the photographers from getting the shots they needed, but the fact that an illustrator was present meant that the media could at least get an artist’s rendition of the event. The Philadelphia Daily News was impressed by his work and asked if he’d ever done courtroom sketching before. He hadn’t, but he was willing to give it a try. For nearly 30 years since then, Steve covered court cases for every major media outlet, drawing his courtroom pictures with color markers. A drawing Steve made of Judge Lance Ito, his staff, and all the major players from the OJ Simpson trial hangs framed above the juror box in Judge Ito’s courtroom.
Outside the courtroom: Steve finally made it to Hollywood, where he has a prolific career drawing storyboards for major motion pictures including The Day After Tomorrow, Along Came Polly, and Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights. Steve also does fantasy and sci-fi illustration and is working on a book of stories from his illustration adventures. Here’s an example of his storyboard work for The Day After Tomorrow:
In 2008: Mike Huckabee’s Christmas campaign ad featured a bookcase in the background which resembled a cross. There was some debate in the media over whether or not the cross was a subtle but deliberate attempt at using transfer. Of course, Governor Huckabee’s statement in the ad that “what really matters is the celebration of the birth of Christ” is a much less subtle attempt to further align himself with the church.
As I was wading through this week’s issue, I realized that whoever writes the headlines (the copy editor, I think) has an interesting sense of humor and a penchant for puns and cultural references. Some of the headlines are better than others. I went through the stack of unread issues that’s been piling up in the living room and picked out some of the best and the worst headline puns and references from recent weeks. Whether you think they are the best or the worst probably depends on whether you like puns. Here are some examples:
Nearly every episode of the 1970s sitcom 
Occasionally during downtime on a particularly slow photo shoot, I’ve played this game with my assistants. Everyone takes out a piece of paper, and numbers it from 1 to 50. Then you get 10 minutes to write down every state you can remember. Finally, you compare it to the master list and see who got the most answers. 10 minutes seems like more than enough time to remember a list of 50 items, right? And yet somehow I’ve never managed to get more than 48 of them.
Sometimes I get dangerous thoughts in my head, like “I wonder what it would look like to see every ad in Times Square all on one page.” So when I knew I’d be passing through Times Square this weekend, I made sure I had my camera. For the purposes of this nearly purposeless project, I considered storefront signs the same as ads if they were flashy and glitzy like Times Square ads tend to be.
Shoulder the burden.
Each “-ist” website has its own cute logo following the same theme: a few sillhouettes of buildings, other architecture or landmarks, followed by “citynameist.” Each one also features a different colorful background. The original Gothamist logo, above, was designed by Sam Park, of 
The radio station 1010 WINS is for New York City what CNN Headline News is for cable television. It’s just nonstop headlines, weather, and traffic, repeating every 22 minutes. Their slogan is, “You give us 22 minutes, and we’ll give you the world.” Their website, 
The crown jewel of the 1010 WINS Art Collection is Peace Grannies on Trial for Times Square Protest. For 
It’s a classic struggle for every artist. How do you illustrate a 
The influence of conceptual artist 
Nearly five years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, audio tapes were released featuring conversations between 911 operators and people trapped in the World Trade Center. For the event, the 1010 WINS artist created this commemorative work. On the day the tapes were released, a cell phone was so clearly important — a modern technological luxury but also an icon of this day in history — that it seemed like an object as large as the towers themselves. Or perhaps slightly larger, in black and white, looking a bit like it was photocopied and then faxed a few times before being scanned in for a montage.
The ashy, veiny hand reaches out, gas pump nozzle in hand, a stream of “S”es pouring forth from its spout like precious drops of gasoline. Together, the hand and pump give off an eerie glow as Honest Abe looks onward, his gaze obstructed by an exaggerated dot screen. George Washington is barely visible, shrouded by an orange shadow of depression. The 
The poster for Adam Sandler’s new movie Click asks the question, “What if you had a universal remote… that controlled your universe?”