Second Deal

Watched the return of Deal or No Deal (out of synch) last night. For reasons I can't explain — it may just be the expertise of Howie Mandel at hitting all the right notes — I liked the show during its brief run a few weeks ago. This time though, I could already feel myself losing interest in the game, especially in the first half hour where you know the contestant ain't gonna take no deal.

The producers seem to have solved one problem. During the first week, it was way too obvious that much of Mandel's dialogue was dubbed in after the fact. I think they did it a few times last night but it was a lot less noticeable. Still, the show still had some awkward edits, especially during the entrance of their pointless cameo guest, Donald Trump. The Donald came on to "advise" the contestant about whether or not to take the deals being offered him…but of course, Trump really couldn't add anything. It's the contestant's bank account on the line, not his, and there's no decision involved of the kind about which Donald Trump might be considered an expert. I wish Trump had just said, "I have no clue what you should do. I'm just here to plug The Apprentice and let everyone stare at my hair."

It was also kind of funny to see television's two biggest germophobes — Mandel and Trump — on the same stage, grudgingly hugging the contestant.

Two other points: The player last night walked away with $359,000. If you were paying attention, you might have expected he'd get to that amount because it was flashed during the opening montage of scenes from the show. Also, it struck me as odd that they seem to have replaced several of the models on the show. Just what is it that a beautiful woman could do that would cause the producers to say, "We've got to get rid of her. She doesn't know how to stand there and open a briefcase"?

A friend on the inside tells me the producers are well aware that the show can get repetitive and that they have a lot of plans on how to add new elements and surprises, so I'm not giving up on it yet. I just may be carressing the Fast Forward button while watching.

Drop the Trop?

As far as I know, there's been no official announcement but a lot of folks in Las Vegas are assuming the Tropicana Hotel is a goner. The place has stopped accepting advance reservations beyond April 15 and there's a news story out in which one of the companies that implodes Vegas hotels is openly discussing the challenge of razing the Trop's twin towers at the same time. The rumor is that two separate but connected hotels would be built on the land.

If this is all true, it's one of those good news/bad news things. I haven't stayed at the Tropicana in well over ten years…since I had the second-worst hotel room and some of the worst meals I've ever had in that city. I have yet to hear a report from anyone that suggested my experience was atypical or no longer the norm. But I always enjoyed walking around the place, especially the pool area, which was one of the most pleasant places you could stroll or sit and escape the relentless sound of the slot machines. I remember sitting there for most of one afternoon once with a note pad, jotting down ideas for a script, watching a colorful array of tourists, bathing beauties and even some tropical birds pass by. And the long-running entertainment at the Tropicana, the Folies Bergere, was and is probably the best "classic Vegas" production show in town. (You can see a few seconds of it over on this page.)

I guess the sad thing, if there is a sad thing, is that an entire era is going away. I don't think I'll miss any of those places on an individual basis but something's being lost in that city beyond gambling money. The Tropicana opened in April of 1957. Only four standing hotels in Las Vegas — The Frontier, the Flamingo, the Sahara and the Riviera — are older and I don't think anyone expects the Frontier to be there much longer. I might not stay in any of those establishments (the Flamingo, once in a while) but their existence provided a nice connect to the heritage of the city. Everyone loves stories of Old Vegas. They may not want to stay in the hotels that represent it but they love the stories.

If I had the bucks to open a small hotel-casino in that town, I'd buy the rights to one of the defunct names — the Sands or the Thunderbird or one of those. And then I'd deck the place out like it was 1958, with pit bosses and dealers in tuxedos, and piped-in music from that period. You probably couldn't stock the place with older slot machines but I would have a showroom with the best impersonators I could get of Frank and Dean and Sammy and even Liberace. And whenever I could, I'd book the real Tony Bennett. There'd be a guy at the door named Vinnie and I'd price the tickets so you could afford to tip him twenty bucks to seat you at a good table. I'd have a kid who sang like Wayne Newton playing the lounge there…although if I waited long enough, I might be able to get Wayne. I'd also pay Shecky Greene to walk around the casino, shake hands and tell everyone stories about mobsters, hookers and people getting beaten up in the back room.

I think people would flock to it. The Palms is about to open the first Playboy Club since the last one closed in 1986. They were irrelevant and silly then but irrelevant and silly have a way of becoming retro and hip, and I bet you won't be able to get into that Playboy Club for months after it begins welcoming patrons. Old Vegas is due for a comeback soon, too. It'll start just as soon as they get rid of the last of it.

Mopping Up…

Quite a few of you have written to inform me of the origin of Pancake Day. This e-mail from Brent McKee seems to provide a good summary…

Pancake Day is actually Shrove or Fat Tuesday, the last Tuesday before the commencement of Lent. It's the last day for eating an assortment of tasty treats. In England — from which Canada and most of the United States derives its traditions — this meant pancakes. In Newfoundland, the tradition is to put trinkets like coins and rings into the pancake. The person who finds a particular trinket has good luck in a particular area — the one who finds the coin will get rich, the one who finds the ring will get married in the next year, and so on. In some areas of the United States, the tradition varies. In Detroit, for example, you never hear of "Pancake Day", it's "Paczki Day" (pronounced "punchky") where they eat "paczkis" which are sort of a Polish fruit pastry which seems to resemble a jelly donut. In New Orleans, the tradition is (besides getting women to show off their breasts for beads) to eat "King Cake." As in the Newfoundland tradition, a trinket of some sort is found in the cake, with the person who finds it becoming "king" of the party.

Yeah, but what do you get in the free pancakes at IHOP? Or don't I want to know? I don't want to know.

I've also received a number of e-mails from folks telling me their horror tales of shopping at Radio Shack…and from two different folks, their unhappy experiences working in those establishments. Almost everyone mentioned the policy Radio Shack once had (I remember this, too) of demanding your address and phone number any time you made a purchase, no matter how tiny. I once bought a 10-cent battery there and had to give them that info, despite the fact that I was already receiving six or seven copies of every Radio Shack catalog. It took me a while to figure out, as I'm sure others realized, that the thing to do was to give them a bogus address and phone number.

Two people within the confines of KNBC wrote to me, separately, that they know their hi-def signal is occasionally out of synch and that they can't understand either why no one there is concerned about it. I'm not so much concerned about it as amazed. At every station, there's a department called something like Master Control that is responsible for monitoring the outgoing broadcast 24/7 and making sure it's as close to perfect as possible. The folks in those divisions are usually fiercely diligent…although once, I was in the NBC network Master Control in New York and the guys in there were watching The Price is Right on CBS because they'd been tipped off that there were major bikinis in the Showcases at the end. And once, I was in Master Control at ABC and the guys there were watching porn, which struck me as just plain dangerous. They were one wrong button-push away from replacing Grace Under Fire with Grace Under Fred. But that kind of behavior is not typical. Usually, they catch transmission problems and do everything necessary to correct them, long before any viewers phone in.

Lastly, many have written to tell me of other "Who's on First?" variations that have been done in recent years besides the one by the Credibility Gap. This Wikipedia page lists a lot of them, including one I wrote. I still think it's an incredibly stupid routine that works in spite of itself.

Synch Hole

Several hours later, the hi-def feed on KNBC Los Angeles is still out of synch. I think it's less pronounced than it was earlier but Mr. Leno's mouth is not moving precisely in accord with his audio.

To answer a couple of questions I've received: No, it's not my set. All the other channels are fine. And I talked to my friend Earl Kress who lives out in the valley and it's out of synch on his TV, too. He's noticed it several times in the past, too.

I just called NBC again and a bored-sounding operator heard me out and said, "I'll report it." Betcha nothing changes tonight.

This just amazes me. You'd think there'd be some NBC executive sitting at home, watching his or her network on a big hi-def plasma screen who'd notice this, call in and demand it be fixed. Apparently, they either can't afford good sets or they don't watch their own channel.

Mail Call

My longtime friend Dan Gheno gets a good letter-to-the-editor published in the New York Daily News. It's about halfway down this page.

That Synching Feeling

I'm watching Deal or No Deal on our local NBC affiliate, KNBC, via their high-definition feed. This is about the seventh time I've tuned to this channel since I got my new TV and it's about the fifth time the video has been out of sync with the audio.

It's also about the fifth time I've called KNBC about it and don't think that's easy because the only phone number they seem to have listed is for the KNBC Newsroom. Each time, I call there and someone forwards my call to what they say is the appropriate department. I explain to the person who answers there what the problem is and they always say, "Let me forward you to the people who handle that," and they proceed to forward my call back to the same guy in the KNBC Newsroom, who of course has nothing to do with that.

He then tries forwarding me to someone else and eventually, I get to someone who seems to actually be in charge of the transmission they're beaming to all of Southern California. This person says something like, "Not again" and promises to get it fixed right away. The last four times, it hasn't been fixed, at least before I gave up and turned to a regular-def channel.

I don't understand this. I can't be the only human being watching NBC in high-def in this half of the state. And yet, in spite of how difficult they make it to reach the person in charge of their broadcast, I seem to be the only person calling up to say, "Uh, excuse me, but could you get the actor's lips to match the words coming out of their mouths?" It's like watching Godzilla except for the parts with Raymond Burr. I think I know where the guys who weren't good enough to work for RadioShack are getting jobs.

Shacking Off

RadioShack has announced they'll soon be closing between 400 and 700 of their 7000 outlets. Blogger Rudy Panucci has a thought…

I've got a suggestion: How about actually having stores filled with electronics and the parts needed to repair them, and hiring sales people who care about what they're doing and have a clue about what they're selling?

You can read what else Rudy has to say but when I read the above, I thought, "He's right." The last few times I've been into a RadioShack — and I've been to maybe four different ones in the last year to pick up a cable or an adapter or something — there's been no one in the place with a clue as to what they had, let alone what to do with it. As Rudy notes, all the people there know how to do is to try and sell you a cell phone.

I went into one a few months ago to buy an extra-loud ringer for my mother's phone. The salesman told me they didn't have any such device and that I should buy a whole new phone with a loud ringer on it. I explained that her phone already had a loud ringer on it and that we wanted something louder. I easily found just such a device on the store's shelves and the salesguy — who said he'd been working there for more than two years — looked at the thing and said, "Gee, is that what these do?"

I bought it, took it to my mother's home, installed it and discovered it didn't work. I took it back and, lucky me, got the same clerk who suggested maybe I'd installed it wrong. (You plug the phone into it and it into the wall. A blind Amish person could get this one right.) I finally got him to exchange it for another one on the shelf…and watched as he put the one I said was broken back in its box and back on sale for someone else to buy.

I'm sure the rise of the Internet has hurt RadioShack sales since it's now possible to order any electronic part in the world online with a few mouse-clicks. But I wonder if World Wide Webbing has also harmed the company by draining the supply of folks who have a little bit of "tech" sense but are willing to work for minimum wage. I'm guessing those folks now have better options and RadioShack is stuck with too many of the ones who think that when a piece of software says "Press any key to continue," they're supposed to look for a key that says "any" on it.

Silent Movie Memories

Here, recommended to me wisely by Marty Golia, is a short but very good audio story from NPR on the Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax. I wrote a brief article on the esteemed film palace some years back and you can read it here. Or you can go off this site and read a longer one here.

You can also visit the website of the Silent Movie Theatre where, they say, a book on the history of the place will be out in May of this year.

Don Being Don

Want to see some clips of Don Knotts at his best? Want to see them on your own computer screen? The folks over at LikeTelevision have put up some on this page. Matter of fact, there's a lot of neat non-Knotts stuff on their site you might enjoy.

A couple of folks wrote me to point out an interesting point I should have included in some post. As I mentioned, Andy Griffith did something very wise by allowing Don to run away with The Andy Griffith Show. Ron Howard, who was then playing Andy's son, seems to have learned well. Years later, he sure profited by allowing Henry Winkler to run away with Happy Days.

Set the TiVo!

Jon Stewart is on Larry King Live tonight. I wish Costas was guest-hosting but I don't think he is.

Dennis Weaver, R.I.P.

Sorry to say I never got to meet Dennis Weaver. I always liked him as an actor and respected him as a human being. The obits (like this one) only touch upon the fine non-acting work he did to make the world a better place. Especially impressive were the efforts of L.I.F.E., a group he headed up that fed hungry people and probably saved an awful lot of human lives. His work for ecological causes was level-headed and never hysterical, and I hope it continues without him.

Weaver had a pretty glorious career in television, starring in many a series. He practically stole Gunsmoke from Jim Arness, then went on to do Gentle Ben and Kentucky Jones, which were both good shows. Then Fess Parker turned down the lead in McCloud, Weaver was cast and you had a perfect match of actor and role. Even Parker later said that Weaver was better in the part than he would have been.

I never heard a bad word about Dennis Weaver. Once, when he was suggested for a part in a show I wrote, a very important network person grinned and said, "He's always money in the bank." Translation: He was always good in what he did, never caused trouble and audiences loved him. I'm sorry that project never went forward because I really wanted to meet the man and tell him how much I admired him.

Recommended Reading

For several weeks now, I've been having a very civil and mutally-enlightening e-mail debate with a friend about Iraq. Neither of us has an opinion set in concrete, though I tend to think our presence there is making things worse and he leans towards believing we could still wind up being glad we've done what we've done.

I asked him to suggest an article I could link to here that would make the best possible case for his position. He came back with a piece by Lawrence Kaplan written for the New Republic magazine. No matter how you feel about the war, you might want to read it and also this brief rebuttal by Matthew Yglesias.

I still would love to believe Iraq is not the biggest mistake ever made in the category of U.S. Foreign Policy. If someone else can point me to an article that makes a stronger case, I'd like to read it and link to it.

Jersey Boy

Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, always talked about being raised in Paterson, New Jersey. It was his hometown and he was proud of it. Returning the favor the town of Paterson is tooling up to celebrate what would have been Lou's 100th birthday with a big Lou Costello celebration. This article will tell you all about it. [Warning: It's one of those sites that will ask you for your age and sex and zip code.]

One correction to the article: Lou most definitely did not write the team's signature routine, "Who's on First?" It was an old burlesque routine that they cleaned up and polished and made their own. It's also, as has been noted by several scholars of comedy, one of the most contrived bits of all time, founded as it was on the dubious premise that "they give baseball players odd names these days." Really? Was there ever a baseball player named Who? Or anything remotely like that? The piece actually made more sense when the satire troupe called The Credibility Gap parodied it and had a rock promoter deciding that at his concert, he was going to put The Who on first. There really was a rock group called The Who.

But of course, logic doesn't matter when they're laughing, and people laughed long and hard at Bud Abbott and Lou Costello arguing about an infield peopled with interrogative pronouns. Costello, when he was on target — which wasn't all the time — was a great comedic performer, and Abbott was one of the best straight men ever in comedy. They were probably better than a lot of their movies, most of which I find a lot more tedious now than I did when I was eleven.

It Only Plays "Candy Man"

You know what I wish? I wish someone would make an MP3 player that looks like a Pez dispenser. That would be great. That would be so neat. But of course, it'll never happen. Or will it?

Recommended Reading

Good article on Jon Stewart and what he might do on the Oscar telecast. It's a Los Angeles Times piece so you may have to register. But is that so much to ask?