Saturday, October 25, 2003

Recommended Reading

Frank Rich has a good piece on how the Bush administration is trying to massage TV news coverage on Iraq. This link will take you to the New York Times site, for which a free sign-up is required. This link will take you to a Singapore newspaper that has the whole column online, sans subscription.

• Posted at 9:26 PM · LINK

Stan the Man

IGN FilmForce has posted the second and final part of Peter Sanderson's article on Stan Lee and the book about him. Here's the link and, as before, I recommend the piece although I disagree with some of its conclusions. Peter's one of the sharpest guys around about this kind of thing.

• Posted at 4:54 PM · LINK

P.S. on Siegfried and Roy

As predicted here, animal rights groups are using the attack on Roy in their campaign to stop animals from being used in performing sitiations. Here's an article that will tell you about a recent charge and the denial.

Also: I told a story about a magician I worked with named Mark Kalin who used a tiger in his act. According to this report, Kalin has jettisoned the performing cats. There will be more of this.

• Posted at 3:25 PM · LINK

Fantastic Memories

The Siegfried and Roy show in Las Vegas is apparently history now. For those of you who never saw it, trust me: It was odd. And it had something in common with the cover of Fantastic Four #1, the comic that launched The Marvel Age of Comics. I wrote about it originally on this page but I have since moved that little essay over to the section I call NOTES from me.

• Posted at 2:29 PM · LINK

Tonight on the Lifetime Network

The TV series Wild Card has a Halloween episode written by Len Wein and Marv Wolfman. Consult, as they say, your local listings.

• Posted at 11:08 AM · LINK

Set the TiVo

Tomorrow night, we set the clocks back, meaning that all the TV channels have to stick in an extra hour of programming. Game Show Network is inserting an episode of To Tell the Truth and another of He Said, She Said. The latter was a silly, short-lived show hosted by Joe Garagiola that later morphed into a more successful game show called Tattletales. The former is an episode from the Garry Moore era and one of the games features three men, all of whom claim to be William Hanna of Hanna-Barbera fame.

As for exactly when these episodes air...well, that's kind of a game show in itself. My TiVo says they're on at Midnight and 12:30 AM. That's Pacific time but I'm not sure if it's Pacific Daylight Time or Pacific Standard Time. The TV Guide online listings say it's on three hours later, and the Game Show Network site doesn't mention them at all. So take a guess and if you're wrong, don't worry. We have lovely parting gifts for you.

• Posted at 12:28 AM · LINK