Friday, February 6, 2004

Elsewhere on the 'Net

You know what we need? More stories about gay penguins. Thank God that Burgess Meredith didn't live to see this.

• Posted at 11:06 PM · LINK

Bernie Allen

Just found out that longtime Vegas comedian Bernie Allen died in mid-January at age 87. The man born Bernard Kleinberg had an amazing life. He was wounded in World War II, about three minutes after he first set foot in the field of battle. Back home in the states, he became a funny diner owner, but one who longed to perform. Once, on a bet from a customer, he went down and crashed the annual telethon that Jerry Lewis (and then-partner Dean Martin) were doing for Muscular Dystrophy. He actually got on the air, made a little speech, then went back and collected on the wager. Later, after the diner went out of business, he became a funny cab driver. It was while plying this trade in New York that he was "discovered" by Rocky Graziano. He picked up the former prize fighter outside the Stage Deli one night and amused him so much that Graziano, who was becoming a kind of show biz entrepreneur, took him under his wing. Graziano changed Bernie's name and helped him develop an act and start getting booked in clubs. Before long, Bernie Allen became a favorite in night clubs, first in New York and then (at the recommendation of a Mr. Sinatra) in Vegas, though he never forgot his roots as a gate-crasher. He became notorious for showing up at events to which he was not invited and barging in, often as his German general character.

His German character got him a brief film role which he bragged about for the rest of his life. In The Producers, he was the auditioning Hitler who tried to sing "The Little Wooden Boy." Later, he had roles in a number of movies and TV shows, usually playing either a mobster or a Vegas comedian. He played the latter in a quick scene in Raging Bull.

Shortly after filming his role in The Producers, Allen gave up show business for a time and became a private detective. In 1972, after the team of Marty Allen and Steve Rossi broke up, Rossi offered him a partnership. Bernie chucked the detective biz and toured for several years in an act billed as "the real Allen and Rossi." By the time it broke up, he had moved permanently to Vegas and he thereafter became a fixture as a solo act, playing every casino in town, usually in the lounge but also opening for stars and appearing in revues. For the next three decades, Bernie was always playing somewhere in town...even, the last few years, doing "stand-up" from a wheelchair. Whenever I saw him, he always managed to make me laugh.

• Posted at 7:18 PM · LINK

Ten Years Ago Today

Almost every day of my life in the last ten years, someone has asked me a question about Jack Kirby. And every day of those ten years, something I see or something that happens in my world causes me to think about Jack and to recall something I was privileged to hear him say. Often, it has nothing to do with comic books, the medium in which he was a declared master. Jack's mind was forever exploding in different directions, few of them predictable and not all immediately understandable. He was unable to drive a car because he could never focus on going in one direction, and conversations with Kirby often went much the same way. He would say something to you that didn't make immediate sense but you'd smile and nod, because Jack was a lovely man and he spoke to everyone, including some gross inferiors, as an equal, and with a great sense of openness and force. In hindsight, some of us came to realize that the bizarre associations and fragments of thought were all coherent and usually brilliant, as well. It just, you know, could take a while to put the pieces in order such that you could see the picture.

What I'm getting at is that today, ten years since he left us, he is still an active, positive force in many lives. Things he said that once seemed overdone are now demonstrably true. Things that seemed true then seem truer today. Time has proven how much of a lead Jack had on mere reality.

I find myself missing Jack while at the same time feeling he is around. His concepts still form the bedrock of so much popular fiction and again, it isn't just limited to comic books. Important authors, artists and filmmakers in a wide array of forms acknowledge his influence, and many of the characters he created or co-created are forever a part of American culture. It's hard to think of a guy like that as dead. Very hard.

• Posted at 4:49 PM · LINK

Last Night Late Show

At the taping for last night's Late Show With David Letterman, a demonstration went wrong and a snowboarder was injured, apparently not seriously. Nevertheless, the taping was halted and that episode was not completed. If you'd like to know what it was like for those in the studio audience, an attendee posted this message to the Letterman newsgroup. (I hope that link works. Linking to newsgroup messages is an inexact science.)

• Posted at 11:08 AM · LINK

Spy Where?

I mentioned computer viruses earlier. We all have to have a good anti-virus program installed to scan for them (I use Norton) but we also want to keep an eye out for Spyware. These are programs or little files that websites put on our computers in order to find out things about those who surf their sites. Usually, the info they collect is pretty harmless but (1) it's none of their business anyway, (2) sometimes it isn't harmless and (3) Spyware on your computer can reduce its performance level. So we want to keep our computers free of this stuff. The three leading programs that detect and delete Spyware seem to be...

• Ad-Aware - They have a free version and a pay version, and the former will probably be enough for most folks.
• Spybot Search & Destroy - Free but they request donations.
• Pest Patrol - You can download a copy for free that will scan your system and find Spyware. But you have to pay $40 for the version that will remove the intruders it locates.

Now, you're probably wondering which of these you should use. If you want to be truly Spyware-free, the answer is "all of them." I update and run all three about once a week and each finds something the others didn't. In some cases, that's because one program finds out about a given piece of Spyware before the others do. In other cases, the folks behind these detectors simply disagree on how much info a cookie has to gather before they declare it Spyware. I recommend you try at least one...and make sure you update it before each use.

• Posted at 2:36 AM · LINK

Presidential Blogging

Former president Jimmy Carter is publishing a weblog of his travels.

• Posted at 12:07 AM · LINK