The Latest Peter David News

The latest Peter David News is that there isn't much Peter David news. His wonderful wife Kathleen updates matters over on her blog. It sounds like he has a lot of work and therapy ahead to bounce back from this. It also sounds like with Kathleen's help, he'll get 'er done.

A fascinating feature of the Internet is that news of something like this can spread instantly and an avalanche of well wishes can instantly result. The 'net is so filled with expressions of concern and love for Peter that another writer told me he was considering announcing he'd had a stroke just to see what he'd get. In his case, it would probably be a few messages from folks who'd loaned him money reminding him not to die in debt. But Peter is a different case and I hope he's seeing all those messages. They can only have a good impact on him.

Party! Party! Party!

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You gonna be home tonight? I am. The worst parties I've ever been to in my life were on New Year's Eve, plus I had a couple of near-collisions with drivers who'd partied way more than one should when one is driving. One seemed too drunk to be walking. So I always stay here and usually try to finish some script that was due that year before that year ends. Tonight, we can also all watch the Fiscal Cliff negotiations and see Congress drop the ball.

But you can also bring the party to you. For several years now, my friends Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun have hosted a great party you can listen to on your computer or cellular device. It's New Year's Eve Live with Stu and Jeanine and it runs six hours starting at 7 PM Pacific Time which is, of course, 10 PM Eastern. If you dwell in some other time zone, you can probably figure your start time out from that. Listen in for a little music and lotsa talk with a bevy of spectacular guests — some live at Stu's house and some phoning it in. I'll be phoning it in shortly after Midnight on the west coast.

Who else? Here's a partial list: June Foray, Hank Garrett, Rose Marie, Stan Livingston, Peter Mark Richman, Geri Jewell, Fred Frees, Francine York, Randy West, Christopher Bay, Vince Waldron, Joe Alaskey, Joan Howard, Jill Howard, Bob Illes, Steve Beverly and Wesley Hyatt. (My apologies to those I couldn't fit in the above illustration.) Various folks will be chatting at various times…and there will also be phone-in trivia contests with actual prizes and a few surprises. You may especially enjoy hearing Stu get increasingly drunk and be unable to work his audio equipment.

How can you hear such a thing? Go to the Stu's Show website and you'll find many ways there to join the party. I listened to much of it last year and enjoyed it a whole lot and I find that it helps to put a lampshade on your head. Or better still, the entire lamp.

Today's Video Link

We always link to news stories about MAD and here's the latest. Notice how editor John Ficarra has stopped aging and is actually getting younger. So is Al Jaffee…

VIDEO MISSING

Plane Talk

When you fly, you're ordered to turn off all electronic devices during take-off and landing. There seems to be a lot of debate going on as to whether there's any good reason for this. Those who say there is don't seem to be able to say what that reason might be…or at least, they don't want to take the responsibility for lifting that rule and then there's some big air crash that gets blamed on a passenger using his iPhone to play Angry Birds.

I have the feeling we're not only about to see the end of that rule but the introduction (if it hasn't been tried already) of airlines competing by advertising they offer the best Wi-Fi signal throughout your flight. And maybe free loaner Kindles (or some other such device) in First Class.

My Tweets from Yesterday

  • Today's potatoes are from: S&C Ranching in Warden, WA. As if I had to tell YOU that. 20:33:37

Peter David News

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2012 wouldn't let us get away without another dose of bad news. Peter David, a fine writer and good friend, has suffered a stroke that has impaired his vision and paralyzed most of his right side. He was on vacation in Florida when it occurred and is awaiting further prognosis or diagnosis or some kind of nosis.

This is one of those moments — we all probably have way too many of them — when you wish there was something really helpful you could do…but there isn't anything. At least, not yet. You can think good thoughts about the person and if you believe it helps them or you, pray — but that's about it. And Peter would be the first guy to be frustrated to be in that position if it was a friend of his who'd had the stroke. I'll let you know if I hear anything else but it'll probably be posted to Peter's weblog…which at this moment seems to have crashed due to heavy traffic. The blog will probably be back shortly and Peter will probably be back not long after that.

Today's Video Link

For the last few years, my ability to travel — or even plan things locally — was diminished by my need to be available to an ailing mother and also a lot of killer deadlines. I've not made it to an awful lot of events I would have liked to attend and shows I would have liked to have seen, including two musicals by an actor-songwriter named Lin-Manuel Miranda. I didn't see his Tony award-winning musical In the Heights when it played Los Angeles, I missed his follow-up — Bring It On: The Musical — when it played L.A. and I've now missed it in New York since it closes tonight. I've missed many others but those two I wanted to see because I've become a distant fan of this man.

I became aware of him when he was responsible for the greatest wedding party video ever and if that's all he'd ever made, fine. I'd still think highly of him. But he's gone on to write and/or perform a lot of things that…well, I guess I should just say I've liked what I've seen and hope I'll see more.

Several folks told me Bring It On: The Musical was terrific and I hope/trust it'll come this way again. I have a special interest in it because a few years ago, a very real producer of very real shows asked me to write the book for a musical about the world of competitive cheerleading. Oddly enough, in another of the endless string of coincidences that I call my life, the call came to me when I was a guest at a Mid-Ohio Con in Columbus, Ohio — and Mid-Ohio Con was sharing the convention center back there with a cheerleading competition. As I sat in the lobby there getting the offer on my cellphone, I was literally surrounded by teenagers rehearsing what the show would be about.

So I snuck into their hall to do a little research and spent some time thinking about stories and themes and such. I also wound up lunching at a food court there with three 14-year-old girls in cheerleader outfits, asking them questions about their world and getting some odd looks from Mid-Ohio Con attendees passing by.

Soon after, the producer heard about Bring It On: The Musical and called to say, "We're too late." Which we were…so that was that.

(By the way: You'd be amazed how often this has happened to me…and I'm not talking about offers from folks who are kidding themselves to believe they can get a show produced on Broadway. I'm talking about producers who've either actually done it or done similar, successful things. I've had about a dozen of these proposed…and then after a few meetings or sometimes even before any, they fall apart for reasons that have nothing to do with me, often problems with the rights to underlying material. Fortunately, I have long since learned not to count on things until they're a lot farther along than any of these ever were so I've avoided disappointment. In fact, these days when I get offered something of the sort, my attitude is kind of like, "Great! I can't wait to see why this one won't happen!")

Anyway, that's one reason I'm curious to see Bring It On: The Musical. Two more are the general excellence of Mr. Miranda's work and clips like this one. This is from this year's Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade, which means it's the cast shivering in the cold and lip-syncing just for the TV cameras, not the parade-goers, but I still like it. See if you do, too…

VIDEO MISSING

The Numbers

Would you believe there are still people in little rooms counting the votes in the last presidential election? Obama's lead has grown slightly since November 6. Here's the current tally and it shows Obama beating Romney 51.06% to 47.21%.

I still love the fact that when Dick Morris and others were predicting a Romney win, two or three points was going to be a "landslide." But when Obama wins by three or four, that's not a landslide. That's not even a mandate to change anything. That's just "Mitt Romney wasn't a very good candidate."

Another Dave 'n' Jay Post

Oprah Winfrey has this show on her network called Oprah's Next Chapter. The premise, I guess, is to do a more in-depth, audience-free interview with some biggie and they're rerunning all or most of them on Sunday, January 6, culminating in the debut of a new one with David Letterman. If you get that channel, I'd recommend the conversation with Stephen Colbert and I'll be setting my TiVo to snag the Letterman one, assuming I'm able to turn anything on here with my Harmony Remote One by then.

Oprah's folks released — and some sites are treating it as Breaking News more important than the predicted (by some) impending collapse of our economy — that Dave Letterman said the following of Jay Leno…

I've never met anyone quite like Jay. And I will say, and I'm happy to say, I think he's the funniest guy I've ever known. Just flat out. If you go and see him do his nightclub act — just the funniest, the smartest, wonderful observationist and very appealing as a comic. Therefore, the fact that he is maybe the most insecure person I have ever known — I could never reconcile that.

I stared at that quote for a few minutes to make sure it wasn't Leno talking about Letterman. Reverse the names and take out that part about a nightclub act and it would be at least as applicable. I suspect a lot of folks who've had brushes with either man or both lately would consider it an act of projection.

It is also worth remembering that apart from an hour or so together spent doing that Super Bowl commercial with Oprah, Dave and Jay have not spoken in something like twenty years. And those are twenty years during which both have been through a lot of successes and failures of varying magnitude and have had ample reasons to envy and/or resent each other.

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I do not pretend to know either man like a personal friend…but via brief encounters and watching them for afar: Well, I have to say Leno has struck me as one of the most secure people in show business. Financially, he's set for many lives. Personally, he seems to have a famously happy marriage. In terms of employment, there's a real question as to how much longer he'll be hosting The Tonight Show but (a) that's been true at times for two decades now and he's usually triumphed and (b) it's not like when it does end, he'll be ashamed of his short run and then have nothing lucrative to do that he loves doing.

Moreover, Jay strikes me as a pretty secure guy in an area that I think explains a lot of his success on the Tonight Show. He is unthreatened by other comedians. He loves to see other performers do well. He is comfy doing a sketch where he plays straight man to someone like Fred Willard or Gilbert Gottfried, and is willing to hand large chunks of his show over to "correspondents" (other comedians) to, hopefully, soar. A friend of mine who was involved with both shows once remarked to me that when it came time to send someone else out on stage or on a remote to be funny, Jay would want the funniest guy they could get and Dave would want to use one of the stagehands.

There's a story about Jerry Lewis that may be apocryphal but the lesson is not. Supposedly, a writer (supposedly Neil Simon in his TV-writing days) writes a ten-minute sketch for a Jerry Lewis TV special. The writer hands in the sketch early in the week and Jerry says he loves it and doesn't need any rewrites. But as the week of rehearsals goes on, Jerry begins dropping out many of the best lines and trimming it down…and in some versions I've heard of the tale, the sketch gets turned into three minutes of Jerry making funny faces. In others, it's eliminated in its entirety.

The writer goes to Jerry after the show and asks what was wrong with it: "Didn't you think the writing was funny?" Jerry replied, "Hysterical. That was the problem. I don't want to go out there and have the writing be funny. I want me to be funny."

I heard that story several times from comedy writers of Simon's generation, usually in tandem with tales of Milton Berle cutting everyone else's best lines out of a script. They'd say, "Berle isn't satisfied to be in a routine that the audience is laughing at. He has to be the only person in it they're laughing at." Berle was famously threatened by other comedians. So was and is Lewis. And I think one of the reasons Letterman's show has suffered over the years is that it's become all about Dave and no one else.

This is a complaint I've heard from some of his writers. They all write reams of material that goes unused. Some nights, Dave would rather repeat recent monologue jokes than use new ones. Scripted bits are discarded in favor of Dave just sitting there, rambling about whatever he's pissed off about that week. He's sometimes very funny doing that but the buzz from inside is that's not why he's doing it. He keeps a good, well-paid writing staff because he knows a successful series requires a good, well-paid writing staff. But when it's time to decide what to do on the show tonight, he doesn't want someone else — even if that someone else is an unseen, unheard writer — to be the funny one out there.

(And while I'm judging talk show hosts from afar, I might as well mention that I think this is one of the problems Conan O'Brien has had the last few years. He has on some very funny people and then when they're in his guest chair and scoring, he tends to try and top them or at least turn their hilarious anecdote into a two-person routine. Leno has many shortcomings as a talk show interviewer but one he doesn't have is stepping on a guest's punchlines or trying to pull focus away from them. Jay seems to appease any need he has to be the funny one out there with his monologue and then the rest of the program can showcase others. And Craig Ferguson is better at this than any of them. He knows how to be funny without taking anything away from a guest.)

So I guess I'm just fascinated that David Letterman thinks Jay Leno is so insecure. There may be some sense in which that is true and I'm eager to watch the whole interview and hear the context of that remark and any supporting evidence. I'm not saying he's wrong so much as I'm curious as to in what sense he might be right. Maybe it is just a twenty-year-old observation that isn't as applicable these days or maybe Dave sees something that isn't evident to us.

Word from inside the Leno Camp is that Jay isn't going down (i.e., off) without a fight. All the audiences for the late night shows are at levels that would have gotten them cancelled ten years ago and the demographics — appealing to younger audiences — are therefore becoming more critical. Leno at worst can just go on the road and make tons o' cash doing something he loves — stand-up — for the rest of his life. One of his writers said to me not long ago, "Jay used to say his mission in life was 'tell joke, get check, tell joke, get check…' Now it's more like 'tell joke, get Maserati, tell joke, get Porsche…'" So even if Jay does get thrown over again for a younger guy, he'll do fine. Dave on the other hand doesn't seem to have anywhere to go, at least professionally, once his show ends. Maybe that has something to do — either way — with this whole subject of insecurity.

My Tweets from Yesterday

  • Imagine the Fiscal Cliff is a footstool. Then imagine the country is Rob Petrie… 22:32:13

Today's Video Link

I found this oddly interesting. It's a full hour news broadcast from September 1, 1986 on KTLA Channel 5 here in Los Angeles. There are stories about a local air crash and a survey on air safety, Mommar Qadaffi threatening America, a little boy being endangered by a gorilla, Ronald Reagan phoning into the Jerry Lewis Telethon and more.

Of special note is the sports segment done by a very young and mustached Keith Olbermann. If you just want to see Keith, click here. If you want to see the whole hour, it should be right there below…

Climate Change

Another potential disaster relating to the Fiscal Cliff: Cuts to our ability to predict weather in this country. Accurate forecasts of storms like Sandy saved a lot of lives. The National Weather Service might not be able to make them that accurate next year.

Back when he was a Senator, Rick Santorum was throwing around suggestions and proposals about doing away with the N.W.S. and assuming private services (like Accu-Weather, a big donor to his campaigns) could fill the gap. What he didn't get was that the private firms base most of what they do on supplementing and reinterpreting the N.W.S. data. Take it away and everyone would be at a huge disadvantage.

Remote Possibilities, Part 1

Recently, I purchased a Logitech Harmony One remote control device — a jazzy little thing that oughta be able to control the four video devices in my office — the TV, the TiVo and two different DVD players. (Why do I have two different DVD players? One is a carousel with my 300 favorite DVDs in it. It doesn't play Blu-rays, isn't good for quickly inserting one disc and only plays Region 1 DVDs. The other plays Blu-rays, is good for quickly inserting one disc and play all-region DVDs.)

So I set up an "activity" called "Watch DVD 1." This is supposed to (1) turn on the TV, (2) turn on the first DVD player and (3) set the TV to HDMI1, which is the proper input select to watch the first DVD player. This does not work. It does (1) and (2) but will not do (3). None of the commands I program will get the input to the proper selection. I try many different configurations and finally give up and call Logitech Tech Support.

I spend time on the phone with someone there who I guess is not on the same continent on which I find myself. I do not mind that he is in some far away land. I do mind that he doesn't seem to have a clue as to how to fix the problem. I spend — this is not an exaggeration, I assure you — one hour and 46 minutes with the two of us fiddling with settings and the problem remains utterly unsolved throughout. The Logitech people advertise that their device will work with any video component that has its own remote but it doesn't seem to be able to control the input settings on a Philips TV.

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At the close of that hour and 46 minutes, the gent tells me I need to call the Philips TV people and ask them if this particular model has HDMI-CEC functionality. I ask him what difference that will make. He doesn't seem to know but he says I should find that out and call them back. I get the feeling that his mission in life at this moment is just to get rid of me and "HDMI-CEC" is just some phrase he saw on one of his screens.

He gives me my "incident number" and I hang up. Almost immediately, I receive an e-mail which reads in part…

We care about your experience with Logitech Customer Care. Our records show that your case has been resolved. If you're not satisfied with the result, have further questions, or never received an answer, please call us.

Apparently, "never received an answer" is a likely option after they believe my case has been resolved. I'm going to call them back but first, I call the Philips people. A very nice lady there informs me that no, my set does not have HDMI-CEC functionality…and like me, she has no idea what difference that could make. But I thank her and then call Logitech again.

I enter my "incident number" and a voice informs me that my remote is not eligible for service and it tells me basically that I should go online, browse through their support database and solve the damn problem myself. I have already determined their support database hasn't a scintilla of data about my problem so I call back without an incident number and get another person in the same foreign clime. I give him the incident number, he looks me up…and then seems determined to replicate the previous call. Like the fellow before him, he doesn't know anything about this device. He's just reading an onscreen troubleshooter on his computer, asking me the same questions it asks him, which are the same questions the other gent asked. He's even saying the exact same polite phrases like, "May I call you by your first name?" and "Thank you very much for that information."

After a half-hour of déjà vu — and I don't mean the strip club — I say to him, "Listen, sir, I'm sure you're very good at 99% of the calls you get but I think I need someone higher-up in the company. If you can't solve my problem, who do you send me to? If you go through all the same steps as the last guy, we're both going to be here for another 75 minutes and then you'll send me to this other person. How about if you just send me to him now?" He says he will put me on hold and find out about this.

When he returns, he tells me that there are technicians there who know more about this stuff than he does but they are all busy now and it's close to closing time. He will have one of them phone me. It might not be until tomorrow but one of them will phone me. I say "That'll be fine" and I ask him where he is located. He says, "I am in Manila, Philippines." Why does that not surprise me?

You know what will surprise me? If I get a call back from someone who can fix this. Stay tuned.

Today's Video Link

The way chess should always be played…

Today's Political Comment

My right-wing friend Roger briefly had a few moments of Liberalism before the holidays but now he's back to the idea that it would be an act of unspeakable evil and treason and depravity for Washington to raise taxes even a nickel. Any Congressperson who so votes will never be forgiven or voted-for…or so he says. Somehow, I think that in any coming election, he'll still vote for the more conservative of the two candidates even if that person did vote to raise someone's taxes.

The point I keep making to him is that there may not be one single person in our government who won't vote to raise taxes. It's a foregone conclusion that someone's taxes will go up. Republicans seem to be selling this idea, to the nation and to themselves, that it doesn't count if taxes go up for the poor and middle-class. This has always, I suspect, been the Grover Norquist position: A tax increase is only a tax increase if the Koch Brothers pay more. If the low-earners pay more, that's not a tax increase. That's the 47% finally kicking in with a down payment on their fair share.

My pal Kevin Drum offers up some simple numbers here. If Obama gets what he seems to be proposing, taxes go up 3.84% on the top 1% of earners. If Republicans get what they're proposing, they go up 2.91% on folks at the bottom…like, say, Roger. He'd pay more and then cheer the G.O.P. for holding firm and not raising taxes.

Presumably, they'll all someday arrive at a formula where both sides pay a little less than the above numbers. But fighting over that formula — that's the reason we're about to go off that Fiscal Cliff. Somehow, I imagine it like that last big drop on Splash Mountain at Disneyland where everyone gets wet and about a third of the women flash their breasts. Wheeeee!