Monthly Archives: August 2006

We are experiencing e-mail problems at this time. A few of your messages to me may have bounced. A few more may still bounce. Some might not bounce but might not get through. All will be fixed eventually. Sorry.

As I said last night here, I don't consider Johnny Carson's remarks in that clip to be racist.

What are racist remarks? Well, these kinda qualify, wouldn't you say?

It's starting to look like one other Senator, in addition to Ted Stevens, placed a "secret hold" on that bill to make government spending more accountable. It's not confirmed yet but Robert Byrd may have also done the deed. For what it's worth, my opinion of Byrd is not as low as my opinion of Stevens…but it's close.

Over at Cartoon Brew, they're reporting the death of veteran cartoonist Ed Benedict at the age of 94. Which would mean he was almost born in the same year as the cave people he drew so well for The Flintstones. Ed was mainly a designer for animation and he is generally given credit for the early Hanna-Barbera shows including Ruff 'n' Reddy, Huckleberry Hound, Yogi Bear and those cave people. (There are or were a few old-timers around who felt that others, like Dick Bickenbach, did more on those shows than is sometimes acknowledged. I'm agnostic on the issue but I thought it should be acknowledged.)

In any case, Benedict was certainly a terrific cartoonist…the kind whose very presence on a project could set the style for everyone else around him. He was especially effective in the fifties as studios were moving away from the ornate Disney look and wrestling with the new, minimalist U.P.A. look for animation. Benedict could work in either style but he was especially good at bridging the gap, managing to simplify the animation in a way that increased the expression and personality instead of diminishing it. Just drawing with fewer lines is simple. Anyone can do it. It takes the kind of talent Ed Benedict had to use fewer lines but to make them count for so much.

The Cartoon Brew obit and attendant links will tell you more about Ed Benedict than I ever could. I never met the man but I sure met and loved the drawings.

Back on August 21, George W. Bush held a press conference that…well, let's put it this way. You have your people out there who think the man is a terrible president and that there's something wrong with him in terms of being able to think or communicate. And you have your people who think he's a great leader and that he's fully in command of everything he's saying and doing. Both groups seem to think that this particular press conference inarguably proves their case. If you'd like to watch it, you can decide for yourself.

At the time it occurred, I couldn't link to it because the only place I could find the whole thing was the C-Span website, which seems to receive its tech support from Larry the Cable Guy. But Steve Billnitzer, a loyal reader of this site, figured out how to view it despite Larry's best efforts.

This link should work in most browsers. You'll need to have Real Player installed to view the clip, which runs a bit less than an hour. You'd think, in this era of Google Video and You Tube and ifilm that someone would establish an online source for all the major political speeches and press conferences. Yeah, you'd think that.

By the way: That's an rtsp link, those letters standing for Real Time Streaming Protocol. In theory, your browser is supposed to connect to an rtsp link and allow you to view the clip but not to download it…and in many cases, you don't want to download it to your harddisk because those files can be very large. But if you come across an rtsp link and you want to download it, it's a cinch with Net Transport, a file downloader that can download almost anything and run manage several download links at the same time. You can download a trial version of the program at the Net Transport website. Sometimes what you happen to do is open a media file in Windows Media Player or Real Player's standalone player, look on the Properties or Clip Info page and get the exact web address from which the media file is coming, then paste that address into Net Transport.

See what wonderful stuff you can learn from this site? I'm feeling so helpful today that I think I'm going to put up another ad to encourage tipping. My PayPal account is low and I need to buy some real odd junk this week.

Here's our last clip from The Night of 100 Stars, at least for now. It's in two parts which total around 11 and a half minutes.

Here's some trivia for you. Star #4 wrote the tune he's conducting. Star #10 went to junior high school with me. You may notice an odd similarity between Star #17 and Star #18. And you're about to see the lousiest part that Maureen Stapleton ever had in her whole career, as well as Joe Namath in a moment almost as embarrassing as when he modelled panty hose or when he was drunk and trying to kiss a lady reporter…

Okay, that's Part One. Now, click and watch Part Two…

To the surprise of absolutely no one, it turns out that "The Masked Senator" who's held up a bi-partisan bill to make government spending more transparent is Ted Stevens of Alaska. He was unmasked by bi-partisan detective work done on a thing called the Internet which, as I understand it, is a series of tubes.

So no one's surprised it's Stevens. What's amazing is his stated reason for doing what he did. Ted Stevens is the guy who fought for and got $453 million to build a bridge in his home state…a bridge that would only be of use to a very small group of people.

So then along comes this bill to establish a database of government spending so that our elected officials will be more accountable as to how they spend our money. The bill has wide support from both sides of the aisle and the database is only supposed to cost $15 million. So why does Stevens try to stop it? Because he's afraid it will cost too much.

You have to feel sorry for people who have to write political satire these days. How do you stay ahead of stuff like that?

If you liked the interview with Conan O'Brien I just linked to, you might enjoy the hour he spent last week being quizzed on The Charlie Rose Show. It's online at Google Video and while they usually charge a buck or so to watch one of these, they also have occasional "free" days and one is going on at this very moment. You can watch it here. If it's not free by the time you get to it, either pay the modest charge or check back each day until it's free again.

I should say that I thought Mr. O'Brien did a fine job hosting the Emmy Awards the other night. Lately on his own show, I've grown a bit tired of the catch-phrases and "audience lines" and repeated bits. Emmy night, he had his act perfectly tailored to the event. I'm a little more confident that he'll be able to make The Tonight Show work for him and vice-versa when that sea change occurs.

Russell Steele writes to ask, in reference to the clip I linked to here…

Just wanted to make mention of the Tonight Show piece where Carson went to the CPO Sharkey set to razz Don Rickles about breaking his cigarette box. I remember howling at that when I was a child. I had to flinch a couple of times while watching it now due to, no other way to say it, Johnny's racist remarks. By the time he got to the "cotton picking" line, my jaw just dropped. Just curious as to your reaction these many years later.

My reaction is that I still think it's funny — though probably less so than it was then — and I don't think Johnny's remarks were racist. I think they were a parody of the kind of thing Rickles was doing at the time, starting with when he hit Don with his own signature line, calling him "you big dummy," and continuing from there. Rickles's act today is kind of "old hat" so to see someone doing to him what he did to others is also a bit dated.

This gets back to something I was discussing here the other day. If someone utters an offensive remark and no one actually takes personal offense, is it an offensive remark? I say no. Offense is in the eye (or, I guess, ear) of the offended. This is a philosophy of mine that I developed during all the years I dealt with networks and their Standards and Practices departments. There'd be a line in a script that, if you really wanted to, you could interpret as being insulting to, say, the Irish. A quivering Broadcast Standards lady would come in and say, "That's got to go. The Irish Anti-Defamation League will picket the network. Irish Senators will challenge our broadcast licenses. Small Irish children will weep and older Irish women will faint in the streets." And so on.

And then you'd talk the Standards Lady out of cutting the line and it would appear on coast-to-coast television and be seen by millions and there'd be absolutely no protest. No complaints whatsoever. Or you'd get a few postcards from people who weren't Irish but who'd say, "I just know the Irish-Americans will be deeply offended by this." In other words, someone was concerned about it being offensive but no one was actually offended enough to pick up a phone and call the station.

It would amaze me how often this happened…and you have to remember that some people will write in letters of protest and call up in shock and indignation over the damnedest things. If you have some character in a show say, "I don't like asparagus," you may well get a flood of mail and calls from asparagus lovers and asparagus farmers and The National Asparagus Council (I'll bet there is one) and so on. It is stunning when you don't get protests over something…but quite often, you don't — and over things that one might think would bring villagers with burning torches, molten tar and feathers aplenty. If someone who seemed the slightest bit serious about it were to go on TV and say, "Let's kill all the Jews," okay, that's inarguably offensive and I doubt anyone would dispute that. But if it's arguably offensive, it probably isn't; not unless and until the targeted party takes serious offense.

Carson's lines in that bit don't bother me because, well, it's Johnny Carson. Does anyone think the man was a racist? Is there one anecdote anywhere of Johnny Carson mistreating a minority? I consider myself kind of a Carson scholar and I've sure never heard one. In fact, it's actually Johnny Carson imitating Don Rickles so it's even farther removed from Carson's own reality. You can't just take the words literally. It's like the difference between Lenny Bruce saying "nigger" in his act and some prominent White Supremacist saying it in front of a rally. It isn't the same word in the two different contexts and the former probably did not offend anyone personally, at least not if they understood how and why Bruce was saying it.

I'm not saying remarks can't be offensive. I just think that if no one is personally offended — or in the case of a statement heard by millions, almost no one — then the remark is not offensive. Because it didn't offend. If and when it does, we can discuss it then.

Wanna read a good interview with Conan O'Brien? It's over at The A.V. Club wing of The Onion and it's in two parts. Here's Part One and here's Part Two.

Keith Olbermann tears Donald Rumsfeld a new orifice. If you haven't read Rumsfeld's remarks the other day before the American Legion, go read them first. Then read Olbermann.

UPDATE: Here's another option: Click below to watch a video of Keith Olbermann delivering his remarks. It runs a little under seven minutes.

Fred Kaplan on…oh, never mind what it's about. Just go read it.

A bunch of you wrote in to ask what kind of Pocket PC I'd purchased. I bought one of these — the Hewlett-Packard iPAQ 2495. So far, I'm pretty happy with it but I'm not looking for a lot in a PDA so I'd probably be happy with about 85% of all the ones manufactured these days. The main thing I need it for is taking my phone book, calendar and "to do" list with me, and having a way to jot down notes and play games.

I picked this one because I've had good luck with H-P products, including my previous PDA which served me well long after it had become an antique. I also wanted something that accepted Compact Flash cards because my digital cameras all use them and I have quite a few here. And of course, it was being featured by Costco and I'm easily hypnotized by Costco. They sell coffins now and I'm thinking of stocking up, just because I love buying things from that place. When I see them selling hand sanitizer in ten barrel lots, it's all I can do to not purchase an eighty year supply.

Why, someone asked, didn't I get one that integrated a cell phone? Two reasons. I think those are a little clumsy to carry around and also, I'm really happy with the "hands free" cell phone hook-up I have in my car. I have a little dashboard cradle and I can just pop my Motorola cell phone into it and drive about, keeping my hands on the wheel, talking (when necessary) on the speakerphone. When I reach my destination, I pop out the cell phone and take it in with me. If I'd switched to a combination cell phone and PDA, none of that would work. I'd have to get the guy out again to install a completely new cradle/holder in my car.

Now then, a query: I use Microsoft Outlook for my contacts, calendar, task list, etc. — everything but e-mail. I want to stay with Outlook since it interfaces so neatly with almost everything but I find its task list clumsy and close to useless. You just list tasks and check them off when they're done. You can't mark something as high priority, can't mark a task as started but not completed, can't even (easily) connect a date or time to a task.

Does anyone make an add-on that will add that kind of functionality to Microsoft Outlook, allow you to sync with a handheld, and then have all that data available to you in both places? I need to have a task list on both my desktop and my handheld that can manage that trick. I'm willing to go outside Outlook if I have to. So far, the Personal Information Managers I've tested on the Pocket PC are also useless. They're as cluttered as a cable TV news screen and the extra info you enter into your task lists there doesn't seem to make it back to the desktop when you sync up. Anyone have any suggestions of what might make Mark happy?

"Hey, Evanier," I hear America saying. "We love these clips you've been linking to from the 1985 Night of 100 Stars special. You couldn't possibly have another one of those to embed in your wondrous website, could you?" Well, since I hate to let anyone down, here's an odd one that features Whoopi Goldberg…

William Rivers Pitt on an upcoming ABC mini-series that, he says, will attempt to put the blame for 9/11 on the Clinton administration.