Monthly Archives: May 2013

Here's another one I might have put up before but if so, it's been a long time and it's worth another look. It's Tom Lehrer singing the names of all the elements that were known at the time he wrote this song…

A gent named Ed Delgado sent me this and it seemed like it oughta be up here…

To paraphrase the old sports-talk intro: "Long-time Reader, First-time Emailer"

I was interested in your thoughts regarding Liberace and, indirectly, the Catholic Church. It's always of interest to me how the non-Catholic world views Catholicism. We have been accused of taking Genesis literally, hating homosexuals, and hating women. That's a lot of hate for an outfit whose founder stunned his audience by telling them to turn the other cheek and pray for their enemies! For the record, the Vatican is on board with evolution, does not promote anyone carrying a "God Hates Fags" sign, and, although there are no women priests, has a tradition where some of the greatest Doctors of the Church were female (St. Catherine of Siena, St. Theresa of Avila, etc). As much as many in America want the church to bend to the times (and there are good reasons for some change), I don't know if the faithful will be impressed by a church that makes their decisions just so that it can curry the favor of Bill Maher or the movers and shakers in show business.

The church does say that homosexual activity is a sin. But in the Catholic world, it is the same sin that straight people commit when they sleep around so it shouldn't be a shock when the bishops make declarations against same-sex marriage. I've been going to Mass and paying attention for over 40 years and I don't recall any priest saying that homosexuals are basically evil. I do recall sermons during the AIDS crisis in the 80's about how we would be wrong to scapegoat or stigmatize the gay victims of this disease. No one called us "hateful" back then.

Your comments about your Catholic friend ring very true. We do feel a profound disappointment in our leadership. I honestly don't know how I would react if my nephews or younger brother was molested by a priest but I'm guessing it would take a lot of rosaries to repent for what I would do to him! That being said tho', I bet it would be hard to find anyone more betrayed by these perverts than their fellow priests who have done nothing wrong. These men, who have given up so much to follow their vocation, are now in the position of cleaning up after their former colleagues (and possibly close friends) who have damaged the church due to their irresistible (I guess) impulses. It's actually disgusting to see that enemies of the church now feel emboldened and justified to make comments suggesting that the church is a huge pedophilia ring.

As disappointed as we are, however, I don't know too many people who have decided to up and quit the church. Maybe it's just the circle of people I know, but I think that people who take their religion seriously know that it doesn't just hinge on the actions of your local minister, priest or rabbi. Then again, it may be the old saying that if you look around to find the "perfect church," it will become imperfect as soon as you join it!

Anyway, I enjoy your posts very much and will always think of you and Mel Tormé during Christmas time.

Frankly, I can't imagine the Catholic church doing anything that would win the approval of Bill Maher unless they have a big going-outta-business sale with black hookers.

I do feel sorry for those who have pursued their faith in good faith and for the many good priests who feel their calling has been in some ways dishonored. I think the public reaction is understandable given how the first instinct of the church leadership when confronted with reports of molestation did not seem to be, "We have to make sure the guilty parties are punished" but rather "We have to keep this inside the church." If Jerry Sandusky had been an elder of the clergy instead of a football coach, he would not now be in a prison cell. He'd be living the rest of his life comfortably in The Vatican, probably priding himself on his forgiveness of those who thought ill of him.

I would take issue with the comparison of gay sex out of wedlock to straight sex out of wedlock. The analogy would work if gay sex within wedlock was possible for all. At least, that would be consistent. As it is, the policy seems to be, "You cannot have sex until you are married — oh, and you gay people in the back…you can't get married!" To forbid marriage to gays is to essentially force them all into so-called adulterous relationships…so they're kind of screwed two ways either way.

But thanks for your thoughtful letter, Ed. I don't disagree with anything else in it except that in my lifetime, I've encountered a lot of people who were sure they'd found the "perfect church" and it was their mission in life to drag you out of your imperfect one and into theirs.

My right-wing friend Roger thinks CNN has a liberal slant. At times, he thinks anything to the left of him is not only liberal but intentional liberal bias. To him, a news source that skews left is one that announced Obama had won instead of Romney.

Personally, I have two opinions of CNN. One is that their reporting is often just plain not very good. This is not to say that I think Fox News or MSNBC are a whole lot better. Secondly, I think CNN hasn't given up on the notion that they can lure some of the Fox News audience away by actually seeming "fair and balanced" — and their idea of balance is to occasionally skew stories in both directions.

Kevin Drum flags a good example of them spinning to the right. The headline says, "Poll Shows Majority of Americans Oppose Obamacare." That would make you think a majority of Americans want to repeal it, which means it's misleading. 43% supports it. 35% wants to get rid of it. 16% thinks it should be changed to do more. CNN adds the 35% and the 16% to get a majority…but "oppose" is not an accurate way to describe the feelings of the 16%. Just as "news organization" is not an accurate way to describe CNN.

I may have linked to some version of this before but if I did, it's been quite a while. It's one of those commercials that I saw incessantly as a kid…and after it stopped running on TV, it continued playing over and over and over in my head for decades…

On Saturday, I cancelled my DirecTV subscription. On Sunday, I got a call from a gent who works in their "How Do We Get You Back?" department, addressing me like I was a lost lover who'd inexplicably walked out on them after, in this case, almost twenty years. "Was it something I said? Something I did?" He offered all manner of inducements including new DVRs and a lower rate. For a moment there, I thought he was going to offer to send the DirecTV staff hooker over to engage in a little pre-paid pay-per-view.  If you know what I mean and I think you do.

I don't believe it would have made a difference if he'd offered me these things two weeks ago but they weren't going to lure me home after I'd bought a new-model TiVo, paid for lifetime service on it, had Time-Warner Cable installed and began ripping out both of my DirecTV satellite dishes and all their wiring. Oh, take a look: This is my new TiVo…

Over the last few weeks, I talked to quite a few folks at DirecTV trying to solve the problem that drove me away, the one I wrote about here. I said to every one of them, "I'm going to have to cancel my service," but it wasn't until I'd taken a hike that this guy came after me. And by then, it was too late.

So now we come to my problems with Time-Warner Cable and I'm hoping this is the last time I'll be writing on this topic. They did their installation on Saturday. The lady who took my order on the phone last week didn't understand what I wanted so the installer showed up without the right equipment. He made a call and was soon joined by a supervisor who brought what was needed and together, they got me up and running…I thought. I noticed that the "package" I'd ordered did not include a few channels I wanted. I didn't notice that I wasn't getting a number of channels I was supposed to be receiving.

Sunday afternoon, I called up and added their "Choice Tier," a package of thirty more channels, twenty-two of which I'll never watch. The gent on the phone activated it and while he was still on the line, I checked…and I had some of the channels but not all. I had CSpan2 but not CSpan3. In an act of what I fear was antisemitism, I had every religious-oriented channel except Jewish Life TV. (A new riddle I made up in the middle of typing that last sentence: Why is Glenn Beck like my spell checker? Because neither one recognizes antisemitism.)

I began randomly flipping to other channels I was supposed to be receiving in the new package and the others and found many to be missing. One was MeTV. When I told the man it wasn't coming through, he consulted his computer and informed me, "Time-Warner doesn't carry MeTV."

I said, "I have a brochure here your installer gave me yesterday. It says MeTV is Channel 137. It's in your 'Variety Tier.'"

He looked again and told me, "No, I'm afraid you must have an old brochure there or something. I'm going down our channel listing here and I don't see anything called MeTV." Well, that was disappointing and a little annoying. That was one of the channels I really wanted.

The man sent all sorts of reauthorization signals from his end and then assured me, "Your missing channels should all appear in the next hour or two. If they're not there in two hours, call us back."

Two hours later, they weren't there and half of my other channels — including ones I had been receiving — we're gone. I briefly wished I hadn't been so brusque with the DirecTV guy and wondered, "Maybe if I sent flowers —?"

I called Time-Warner Tech Support and they couldn't stop the bleeding from afar and wanted to set up a service call for several days in the future. They can always get an installer to your house to begin service but if it then isn't working right? Well, that can take a while. I told him that wasn't acceptable and I even pulled a smidgen of rank by asking, "I'm the producer of a show that airs on a Time-Warner channel and Time-Warner cable can't fix it so I can watch my own show?" You hate being difficult like that but unfortunately, it often works. It caused him to kick my case over to a higher-tier Tech Support division and they began walking me through other possible remedies: Change this setting, reboot that, change another setting, etc. Finally, he asked me to make sure all the cables between my TiVo and the cable box were secure, especially the USB cable.

I checked and told the higher-tier Tech Support guy, "The USB cable is not secure because it's not there." I'd had two installers here and neither one had plugged in that one cable.

The fellow on the line said, "I can send someone out day after tomorrow with one…unless you have a USB cable around." I told him I only had about ninety of them here. I plugged one of them in place and instantly, all my channels appeared…

…and there on 137, right where I said it was and the guy at Time-Warner said it would never be, I found MeTV. I don't know why this kind of thing still surprises me.

This is for my friend, Alan Brennert, whose new novel is selling like hotcakes! That's right: People are pouring maple syrup on copies and eating them. Here's a golden moment from Monty Python that always makes us snicker and guffaw. (By the way, Snicker and Guffaw are the names of the agents who made Alan's book deal)…

Cartoonist Scott Shaw! has been my friend since the woes of Fred Flintstone fell into the category of Current Events. Scott's always doing worthy, fun things and now he's…well, here. I'll let him tell you in his own words…

I'm looking for professional cartoonists who live in the Los Angeles area to volunteer for an extremely worthwhile charity event, the 16th Annual Pediatric Picnic for the City Of Hope on Saturday, June 1, from 10 pm to 4pm in Duarte, California. We will be drawing cartoons for the young cancer patients of the City of Hope Hospital and their families.

A number of highly-qualified cartoonists have already stepped forward to help but we still need about a dozen more volunteers to handle the somewhat grueling demand of drawing requests for children who ask for sketches of everything from Hello Kitty to Wolverine, in every style from classic Disney to dynamic superheroes to manga and animé. Therefore, we need experienced professional cartoonists who are kid-friendly, patient and creatively flexible. Drawing supplies and food will be provided. You'll be working hard for six hours (with bathroom breaks, of course) but I guarantee that you'll have a great time drawing for an appreciative audience of sick kids who can really use a little fun to brighten up their lives. This event is for these young patients and their families only so it's required that you leave your families at home.

The City of Hope is celebrating its 100th year Centennial Anniversary and we want to help us make this year's Pediatric Picnic a memorable one! If you're interested in joining us to lift the spirits of a number of young cancer patients being treated at the City of Hope hospital, please e-mail me ASAP and include your cartooning background and your e-mail. Thanks!

He's done this before and I know that everyone who's gone and sketched for the kids has found it to be a very challenging-but-rewarding experience. If you can help, help.

For reasons that will be obvious in this video, I was a fan (at age 18) of The Golddiggers, the troupe of young ladies who graced The Dean Martin Show and anything else produced by Greg Garrison. I thought they suffered from an assumption that has been too often made in show business; that if a woman is marketed as "eye candy" (hate that term), she must not be good for much of anything else. Some of them were pretty good at singing and dancing and even comedy.

I said that last sentence once to a writer friend and he said, "I'll grant you the singing and dancing…but comedy?" And I reminded him that this was a Greg Garrison show, which meant not enough rehearsing and too much conspicuous editing. I liked Garrison and thought he did the impossible just getting his shows taped each week…but there were episodes where you wouldn't guess that Bob Newhart and Dom DeLuise were ever that funny.

Back when I used to poach in the halls of NBC, I always made a point of dropping by the stage where Dino taped on those rare moments when he actually graced his own stage. I never saw Dean rehearsing because he didn't…but I'd usually find either Lou Jacobi or Nipsey Russell running through a sketch or the Golddiggers blocking a dance number in not that much more clothing than they're wearing in this clip. So either way, I was happy.

This is the opening of their "prime time access" series that ran from 1971 to 1973. The first season had as its hosts, Charles Nelson Reilly and Larry Storch. This clip is from the second season where Charles and Larry were replaced with Lonnie Schorr and Jackie Vernon. Each episode featured a guest star…and I believe some of the guest star spots were tied-in with Dean's concurrent show. Garrison liked to bring in celebrities and have them tape appearances on several different installments of one or more series at the same time. I once heard Jonathan Winters say with a note of sarcasm, "It was fun working for Greg. When you taped a bit for him, you never knew what show it was going to turn up on." I think Jonathan, without his prior knowledge, was on a couple of episodes of this…

Jason Togyer has much to say about the story of Liberace and the cleaning fluid…

If I recall correctly, it happened in Pittsburgh. Liberace was playing at an popular nightclub/roadhouse called the Holiday House, east of Pittsburgh, when the incident happened. (The Holiday House has another important place in pop-culture history — the Three Stooges' frequent appearances at the Holiday House in the late 1950s helped resurrect the trio's performing careers. But that's another story.)

A couple of interesting footnotes: His life was saved by a technology that had just recently been introduced in the United States — dialysis. The news reports about Liberace's life-saving treatment, supposedly, helped spread the popularity of dialysis in the U.S. as a treatment for kidney failure.

Liberace was nursed back to health by the doctors and nuns of St. Francis General Hospital, and became a hospital benefactor (though apparently never as large as the hospital had hoped).

In 1986, St. Francis Hospital named its lobby after him, and Liberace performed at the dedication. I always found it a bit ironic that the lobby of a Catholic hospital was named for Liberace, given that the church has never looked kindly on gay people, but there you go.

The hospital closed a few years ago, and I have no idea what happened to the Liberace memorabilia in the lobby.

It always struck me as…well, bizarre that so much of America was long in denial that favorite performers like Liberace and Paul Lynde were gay — and not just gay but obviously gay. I mean, those gentlemen probably found it politically and socially correct to formally deny it — Liberace even sued reporters who alluded to it — but they sure didn't try to hide it on screen. If you were a gay pianist and you wanted to make your sexual orientation obvious, what would you do? You'd do an act like Liberace's. Yeah, it's odd that a Catholic institution would have been so respectful of him, especially given that there's never ever been a gay priest. The fact that they thought there'd be mega-donations from the guy explains a lot.

I feel bad for folks — Catholics, in this case — who support a faith in good faith and then face contradictions and double-talk and sometimes even criminal action from their leaders. The revelations of pedophilia and the attempts to cover it all up and protect the molesters had to have shaken any good Catholic to the core of his or her soul. And then you have things like the other day when Pope Francis said that atheists who do good in their lifetime will be redeemed by Jesus and he will meet them, apparently in Heaven. The Vatican quickly issued a clarification that said no, they don't get in unless they really, really renounce atheism and get with the program. In other words, doing good is not an EZ-Pass. Somewhere in The Vatican, there's probably a whole division whose job is to "clarify" (i.e., spin and rewrite) the words of the one man on the planet who is supposed to be infallible.

I have a friend — an older woman — who's about as devout a Catholic as you can be without becoming a nun…a career she still contemplates. She easily put the gay thing aside by pretending that, you know, Charles Nelson Reilly just had a colorful way of speaking. The child-molesting and the church's handling of the matter were very painful and injurious to her, given how much of herself and her emotions she had invested in her faith. We got to talking about that one time and she shook her head sadly and said, "I still haven't figured out why it suddenly became okay to eat meat on Fridays…and now they expect me to accept this!"

I mentioned back here that though I love Carl Reiner, I had to wince a bit at some of the easily-caught (but not) errors in his new book, I Remember Me. Here's one that leaped out at me as I paged through it tonight…

During the 1964 presidential campaign, Jackie and I, along with other forward-thinking Democrats, Henry Fonda, Barbara Rush, Jackie Cooper, Joan Staley, Tippi Hendren, and Eddie Fisher, volunteered our services to help elect Lyndon Johnson and his running mate, Hubert Humphrey and keep the country from falling to Richard Nixon and William E. Miller.

And no, I don't understand how someone could remember William E. Miller and forget Barry M. Goldwater…

UPDATE, added the next morning: And as many of you have noted in e-mail, the woman's name is Tippi Hedren, not Hendren.

Mark Cohen, author of the fine new biography of Allan Sherman, is off on a multi-state signing 'n' speaking tour. But before he left, he released another forgotten treasure he dug up — a parody of "Small World" from Gypsy. Sherman wrote a lot of song parodies he never put on records, in most cases because he couldn't clear the rights to parody. Here's one…

Yesterday, I bid a bittersweet farewell to a couple of old friends — DirecTV and my steam-powered Series 2 office TiVo. The antique TiVos in other rooms will be replaced when I get around to it.

I made the change for a couple of reasons. With DirecTV, I could get both the east and west coast feeds of the major networks so I could record Leno at 8:35 and Letterman at 11:35. The new model TiVo I got — the TiVo Premiere XL4 — can record four shows at the same time so I can now record both shows from one feed — and would if I still cared as much about either as I once did. I think I'll still "Season Pass" Jay, mainly for the monologues while they last. I also wanted some channels that my local Time-Warner service (my new provider) offers but DirecTV does not.

But my main motive was this: DirecTV is changing their signal in a way that will no longer work with real old satellite receivers. I had real old satellite receivers because they had the best interface with TiVos. The DirecTV folks told me they'd be sending me three new satellite receivers since my old ones would soon stop working. I told them not to bother since their new receivers don't have a low speed data port. They said, "Okay, we won't send them" and then they sent them. I tried one and it didn't play well with my TiVos so I sent them back and decided to get rid of my old TiVos and DirecTV. I'm not sure yet how I like the new TiVo or Time-Warner Cable but will report here when I decide.

I do know that for some reason all the channels I'm paying Time-Warner for are not coming through, including the channel that airs the show I produce. They're working on it…and reducing my bill until I have what I'm supposed to have. I do know that so far, I find the new TiVo screens much more difficult to navigate than the old ones but maybe I'll get used to the new interface. Man survives by adapting to his environment and his video equipment. In fact, to some of us, those are the same thing.

Hey, you know the show that was called The $10,000 Pyramid and then it was The $25,000 Pyramid and eventually it became The $100,000 Pyramid and I think there were a few other price changes in there? I'm talking about the real version of this show, the one hosted by Dick Clark (and at nighttime for a while by Bill Cullen). Yeah, you know that show. Here's a list of someone's picks for the ten best celebrity players, complete with video examples of their expert Pyramidding. Congrats on making the Top Ten, Teresa.

The subject line of this post, by the way, is from a Pyramid card that Mr. Clark had framed in his office when I worked for him. It was from some kind of April Fool's Day prank played on a celebrity contestant, giving him an impossible topic to describe. Dick told me the victim was William Shatner but game show experts tell me it was Clifton Davis. I think Shatner would have been more fun.

From the original company of the Broadway show, Wicked: Kristin Chenoweth teaches the green person how to be "Popular." Yeah, that's pretty much the way to do it…