Monthly Archives: December 2006

Tonight, an estimated one million revelers are expected to cram into Times Square in New York to welcome in the new year. Another 100,000 are expected to fill the Vegas Strip in Nevada for much the same reason.

But let's talk about really crowded places. Let's talk about the Whole Foods Market near my house this afternoon. Compared to that place, Times Square and The Strip tonight are going to look like two big Rob Schneider Film Festivals. Pregnant women were filling their carts with baby food just in case they delivered before getting out of there.

Jeez, it was packed over there today. You may already know this because you may have been among the people cramming into that store. If you weren't, you were certainly a rare and wise exception. I'm guessing a good 80% of all the human beings alive on this planet today were in that Whole Foods Market around an hour ago, with the vast majority hurriedly repositioning themselves into whichever checkout line I wheeled my cart. As I finally approached someone who would ring up my purchases and take my money, I remembered one item I'd forgotten and would have to live without. If I'd gone back to get it, all the other groceries in my cart would have expired by the time I got out of there. That includes the box of salt.

Just as I cleared the door and caught a glimpse of parking lot, I ran into a friend of mine named Laurie Bakerman…a woman of extraordinary grace and talent. She is also, sadly, reckless with her own safety as she insisted on defying my warnings about going inside and attempting to shop.

She told me her husband Steve is a devout reader of this weblog. Steve…I wouldn't expect her home before Memorial Day. And not necessarily the next one or the one after.

Juan Cole writes a pretty concise overview of what the removal of Saddam Hussein from power meant to Iraq and how his execution further changes things. This is a Salon link so if you ain't a member, you may have to sit through some advertising but it's worth it.

I can't believe this is on YouTube but it is. It's a clip of Bill Holly, who was a kids' TV host for about two years on Los Angeles television. The clip says 1966-1967 and I guess that's right, but I thought it was more like 1965-1966. He was on KHJ, Channel 9 and this footage is from a brief time when that station had somehow stolen the Popeye cartoon package away from a rival. (Before and after, Tom Hatten hosted the spinach-eating sailor's exploits on KTLA, Channel 5.)

The clip starts with some news footage about viewers picketing the station because they thought Holly's program had been cancelled when he was, in fact, just on vacation. This sounds to me like a publicity stunt that Holly and/or someone at KHJ arranged, rather than a real protest. The person who posted this material on YouTube says they can be seen in the clip and that they obtained it from Mr. Holly, which makes you wonder. Then there's a clip of Holly doing some magic…and I remember his shows generally being more entertaining than this. I also remember one period when his show turned into an exact carbon of the classic Soupy Sales format, complete with dog gloves and hurled shaving cream pies.

It's amazing that any film at all exists of Bill Holly. Most local TV stations did their programming live, well through the sixties and even when it became possible to record on videotape, they either didn't or they promptly erased and reused the tapes after broadcast. I wasn't a regular watcher of Mr. Holly's shows. He was on TV during the period when I thought I'd outgrown that kind of programming…but I caught him occasionally because KHJ was also running Laurel and Hardy films in the time slot that adjoined his, and I've never outgrown Laurel and Hardy, not even for a minute. Still, it's nice to see Bill Holly again. It's always nice to see any of those guys — Tom Hatten, Skipper Frank Herman, Engineer Bill Stulla, Sheriff John Rovick and all the rest who were such a part of so many childhoods in this town.

Dahlia Lithwick lists the top ten abuses of Civil Rights of 2006. They all have two things in common. One is that they're all a matter of the Bush administration deciding it could do any damn thing it wanted and that they were accountable to no one. The other is that one of these days, some Democratic president is going to try one of these and all the people who've excused the current leadership will be talking impeachment.

Yes, this weekend is your last chance before 2007 to show your appreciation for this website by sending a tip. I wouldn't ask but I just won a couple of auctions on eBay and I need to replenish my PayPal account to pay for some really weird stuff I'm buying. So if you've been thinking of giving, now would be a great time.

The best fonts of a comic book nature come from Richard Starkings and his company, Comicraft. If you have any desire for any of these fine specimens of lettering, have it on January 1. That's when they're having their annual New Year Sale and the fonts are $20.07 each. Yes, that's a substantial increase from the last New Year Sale when they were only $20.06 each but these are inflationary times. Every so often, they also have a sale during the Comic-Con International but you don't want to wait until then. Make up your shopping list now and order on Monday.

One reason I don't travel more is that I keep encountering nightmare stories like the one I'm going to link you to. Will Allen III is an experienced traveller but he recently blogged about a dreadful experience he had, taking his family to Disney World in Florida. Here's Part One of his report, here's Part Two and here's Part Three. Hope this kind of thing never happens to you and I really hope it never happens to me. In fact, given the choice, I'd much rather it happened to you than to me.

Before we leave the subject of Nathan Lane in our video linkage, I want to send you to two more clips, neither of which are embeddable here. This one is from the TV series, Norm Crosby's Comedy Shop, which was syndicated in 1978. It's an appearance by Stack and Lane, a comedy team of the day. Before the lovely Shelly Goldstein sent me this link, I was wholly unware that Nathan was ever part of a comedy team. The performance, which runs a little under four minutes, will tell you why they were so obscure.

Then I shouldn't link to this because I don't want to give even tacit approval to the secret and illegal videotaping of live performances but it's just too good, and I have to make up for the previous clip. This is seven minutes from the recent Broadway production of The Odd Couple starring Mr. Lane and Matthew Broderick. It's shot poorly and unethically from the balcony but it's still funny. This is the top of Act Three, where Oscar and Felix aren't speaking because the latter refused to go with the former to the apartment of the Pigeon Sisters and…well, you know the storyline. You know how this goes. You even know that it's not spaghetti, it's linguini. The last line of this clip is the line that Neil Simon says consistently receives the longest laugh of anything he's ever written. Every time I've seen the show, it sure has.

Just saw someone on a cable news channel — one of the CNNs, I think — cheering the death of Saddam Hussein…and this wasn't an enslaved Iraqi who was happy about this. I could understand and maybe even enjoy the glee of someone who suffered actual damage under the Hussein rule. This was some lady who lived in Ohio or something, and she just thought hanging ol' Saddam was the greatest thing in the whole world. After all, a very bad man got executed. She was so happy about this that, just for a moment, you could forget that there are still plenty of other very bad men out there. Some of them have the potential to be more destructive to Ohio, if not the entire world, than Saddam ever was.

She repeated at least twice, the oft-heard line that "Saddam gassed his own people." I always thought that was an odd way of arguing that he was a murdering dictator…like it wouldn't have been so bad if he'd only gassed someone else's people. That, we could forgive and maybe even respect.

It's when you gas your own people that someone's got to put a stop to you. Eventually. The alleged gassing of his own people took place in March of 1988 and this country did a lot of friendly business with Hussein after that. (Incidentally, I said "alleged" because some pretty strong arguments have been made that the story isn't true. I don't know if it is or it isn't; only that it wouldn't make him any less of a monster if it turned out to be a bogus report.)

Joshua Micah Marshall, over on Talking Points Memo, made the following comment about Hussein's execution and the whole Iraq War in general…

This whole endeavor, from the very start, has been about taking tawdry, cheap acts and dressing them up in a papier-mache grandeur — phony victory celebrations, ersatz democratization, reconstruction headed up by toadies, con artists and grifters. And this is no different. Hanging Saddam is easy. It's a job, for once, that these folks can actually see through to completion. So this execution, ironically and pathetically, becomes a stand-in for the failures, incompetence and general betrayal of country on every other front that President Bush has brought us.

Probably true. The news out of Iraq lately has been awful, just awful. 106 American soldiers are dead in December, making it the bloodiest month of the year…and you have to remind yourself that that number doesn't reflect all the pain and loss. It doesn't include dead non-soldiers, for one thing, and there are a lot of those. It doesn't measure arms blown off or the inevitable lasting emotional scars that come in any war. It also doesn't measure dollar cost or the fading of worldwide honor or any number of other downsides which must be weighed against whatever good we think we're achieving. This situation continues while Bush remains at his ranch, reading My Pet Goat or whatever he's doing while he decides on a new Iraq strategy one of these days.

I mean, it's just like with Katrina: What's the hurry? We can take our time. We're getting things accomplished. Why, just the other night, we killed a guy who'd gassed his own people.

I probably don't have to post this but better safe than sorry. The end of the year is a special holiday for those who send out virus-laden attachments. If you get a message that says "Happy new year" or "Enjoy the fireworks celebration" and it has any sort of file embedded or attached, beware. I've gotten about a dozen in the last twenty-four hours, all safely deflected by my e-mail screener, virus checker and a bit of common sense.

Actually, you need more than a bit of common sense. The one time I got a real, life-disrupting virus on my computer, it was in spite of all those protections. Someone — and I'm pretty sure I know who it was — sent me a nasty one and I saw it unopened, recognized it for what it was and moved to delete it. As sometimes happens, the mouse hand did not do what the brain told it to do and I clicked on the file, thereby opening it and triggering its payload, instead of right-clicking for a deletion. Big mistake. I not only had a virus in my computer, I had one that was so new that none of the virus-nuking companies — Norton, McAfee, etc. — had heard of it yet. A week later, my virus checker (I think I had McAfee then) would have stopped it or removed it but the day I got it, it was uncharted territory. So keep an eye out for booby traps. What I went through that time would be a lousy way to start your year.

Here's seven minutes from a vintage episode of The Soupy Sales Show, including a lip-sync to his recording of "The Mouse," which I never thought was much of a tune or dance. The off-camera voice you hear heckling him at the end is that of Frank Nastasi, who was the foil when the Soupman did his show in New York.
The stuff that comes before the song is the kind of material that endeared Soupy to many of us. He was just out there, ad-libbing on live TV with no idea what he was going to say or do, enjoying the hell out of his own predicament.

As I wrote in this article, I used to watch him, wishing I could be one of those people in the studio you always heard laughing. I can't think of anyone who has a TV show today who would have the guts to go out there so unprepared and to just wing it. He was a brave man, that Soupy.

In the interest of airing both sides, I thought I'd link to an article that argues that Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon was right and proper. The author is Richard Ben-Veniste, who was a member of the Watergate Special Prosecutor's Office at the time. I don't think I agree but his view is worth considering.

I'm watching the news coverage of Saddam Hussein's impending execution, which the cable news folks are covering with a kind of smug excitement. They always like it when they think they've got your attention. Larry King just told us that if they're in the middle of a commercial break and they get word that Saddam has been hanged, they will cut out of that commercial break instantly. This is great because I wouldn't want to be watching an ad for eHarmony.com and miss the precise moment. I mean, there's news that can't wait for thirty seconds.

Much of the discussion is about how it's vital that Hussein be hanged "respectfully" and that his corpse not be mistreated. This is good to know. It's okay to kill a guy but no one wants to see him embarrassed.

What I'm kind of waiting to hear, and I haven't yet, is who benefits from executing him now. I'm not questioning that he deserves the ultimate penalty, whatever that is. I'd just like to hear someone finish a sentence that begins, "This will be help bring peace to Iraq because…" Given the price so many have paid to topple this regime and bring Hussein to trial, it would be nice if we got more out of this than the satisfaction of one less bad man in the world.

Timothy Noah on why Gerald Ford was wrong to pardon Richard Nixon. I agree with Mr. Noah's view and his reasons for it.

The other day here, I wrote about Stan Lee appearing on an episode of To Tell the Truth around 1970. Someone posted it to YouTube so — through the courtesy of Anthony Tollin, who told me it was there — I can embed the whole appearance here…

A few years later, Robert Kanigher was a similar guest on To Tell the Truth. Mr. Kanigher was a longtime writer-editor for DC Comics and at the time, Wonder Woman was making a brief comeback as a symbol of feminism. Kanigher had been Wonder Woman's main writer so the game show had him on, along with two other men pretending to be Robert Kanigher…and if I'd gone just by the answers that were given, I'd have picked the wrong guy. Because the real Bob Kanigher got all the questions wrong and the impostors got them all correct. I suspect that wasn't the first time that had happened on that show.