Pop Culture

For an unsuspecting visitor, the bubble-gum-pink Valley Village home of songwriter and artist Allee Willis is a winking, delightful shock. Out front there's a bowling ball garden. And the lawn? It may look like grass, but it's actually hundreds of baby palms that are mowed down to teeny-tiny blades of green every week. The William Kesling-designed property was commissioned by MGM in 1937 as the studio's party house.

Like the world, last week I was devastated by the news that Michael Jackson had suddenly left the room. This blessed artist commanded the stage with the grace of an antelope, shattered recording industry records and broke down cultural boundaries around the world, yet remained the gentlest of souls. Michael Jackson was a different kind of entertainer. A man-child in many ways, he was beyond professional and dedicated. Evoking Fred Astaire, Sammy Davis Jr.

As the old year fades, it's time to sift through the mountainous kilobytes of pop-culture detritus that has piled up on our computers and in our brains over the last 12 months. Let's figure out what worked, what didn't and what's best forgotten in the new year. Today we examine the best and worst comebacks of 2007: Which of our cultural icons were we glad to see back in the Google search zeitgeist, and which of them do we think were best left . . . unsearched.

They made viewers laugh, stay up late, sing along and play games. How personalities such as Lucille Ball, Jack Paar and Merv Griffin influenced the small screen is explored in "Pioneers of Television," a new PBS miniseries that starts Wednesday. The four programs -- covering sitcoms, late-night shows, variety shows and game shows -- include hundreds of clips and the observations of small-screen pioneers and people who knew them.

Germany and beer go together like Porsches and the autobahn, but health-conscious residents are turning from the country's traditional beverage in favor of juices and bottled water, sending suds sales down to the lowest levels in 15 years. According to a government report released last Tuesday, the amount of beer sold in Germany fell to the lowest point since 1993 -- dropping 2.7% last year to 22 billion pints.

It was not the most comforting of e-mails: "May God honor my sword by slaying Wael Abbas." Cyberspace can be a messy, dangerous place, especially if you're Abbas, who with keyboard, digital camera and a bit of cunning has become one of Egypt's most popular bloggers. His posts, often with scratchy video, catalog police torture, political oppression, labor strikes, sexual harassment and radical Islam.

Newspapers have always written about the nation's disasters -- but so have balladeers, enshrining death and heroism and crime in songs about virtually every newsworthy event: the 1889 Johnstown flood, the last train ride of engineer Casey Jones, the sinking of the Titanic. These songs were popularized in sheet music and phonograph records, and some of the mournful tunes later wound up on the radio.

Learning your ABCs can be a tough proposition in India. Not the alphabet; even Indians who can't speak English fluently know their letters. But pity the poor soul who strays unprepared into the world of newspapers, magazines, documents, signs, billboards -- in short, anywhere there's text -- only to find that minding your Ps and Qs, literally, can be a headache. That's because this land sometimes seems to have as many initials, acronyms and abbreviations in usage as it does people.

IN THE long and often embarrassing history of intellectuals' attempts to grapple with pop culture, there are, at least, a few high points. One of them is the work of the late Leslie Fiedler, the garrulous and provocative critic of literature who could write equally well on Nathaniel Hawthorne and circus freaks.