Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Recommended Reading

Joshua Micah Marshall takes note of the fact that even William F. Buckley (no wild-eyed Liberal, he) thinks the war in Iraq was a colossal mistake, and lays out a simple case against it.

Over in the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof admonishes people who call George W. Bush a liar. I buy some but not all of his argument. Okay, it destroys polite discourse to call Bush that...but the alternate explanation that Kristof supplies is that Bush unknowingly took this nation to war based on false pretenses. Is that really a nicer thing to say about someone? I don't see how calling someone a liar "polarizes the political cesspool," to use Mr. Kristof's terminology, but saying that the person allowed himself to be duped into a war that cost thousands of lives and billions of dollars is keeping things civil. If I were in that position, I think I'd almost prefer that they call me a liar. Secondly, a lot of the reason we have nutcase conspiracy theories in this country — about the Clintons or Bush or any of our leaders — is that the leading reporters of news (like, say, The New York Times) aren't doing a good enough job of asking hard questions and testing the validity of accusations and rumors.

One trivial point of interest in the above: Kristof's review says that the name of Michael Moore's movie is Farenheit 9/11. Mr. Moore seems to think it's Fahrenheit 9/11, and the rest of the New York Times is siding with Moore. Even their weather reports spell the word "Fahrenheit." Remember when the Times was famous for not making that kind of mistake?

• Posted at 11:33 PM · LINK

Sign-Up Sneakiness

Earlier, I mentioned that if you need to sign up for things online but don't want your regular e-mailbox clogged with the resultant Spam, it's easy to get a special e-mail address at Yahoo or Hotmail or even e-Garfield just for that.

Several of you have sent me descriptions of methods that might even be easier. One is BugMeNot, which is a database of communal usernames and passwords for free websites that require registration. If you want to access the New York Times site, for example, and don't wish to sign up, you go to the BugMeNot site and you can look up a username that someone else got for this purpose.

Another is Mailinator, which is a clever idea. It's an open-to-all temp mail service. Let's say you need to sign up for the Prune Growers Monthly site and don't want to open a Hotmail account just for that. You make up a name and affix the Mailinator domain to it. Let's say you pick "Stupidface." You sign up on the site as Stupidface@mailinator.com, then you can go to the Mailinator site, log in as Stupidface (without a password) and the response e-mail will be there for you to see. Mailinator keeps it online for a few hours, then deletes it but in the meantime you've set up an account for Prune Growers Monthly without giving them your real e-mail address. Neat.

Thanks to Kip Grey, Stuart Kaufman and others who sent one or both of the above tips.

• Posted at 1:06 AM · LINK

Vegas News

I'm told that Steve Rossi, former partner of Marty Allen, is now doing a show at the Lady Luck Casino downtown. Over the years, I saw dozens of comedians portray bad lounge singers. The first was my pal Bill Kirchenbauer as the obsequious Tony Rolletti on Fernwood Tonight. Then came Bill Murray's character and Andy Kaufman's character and dozens of others...and I used to say I'd seen countless spoofs but had never seen a lounge-style singer terrible enough to justify the take-offs. (I didn't phrase that well but you know what I mean.)

A few times, I came close. There was a gent who used to play at various clubs Burbank and whose act consisted wholly of what some call "Ego Songs." These are songs where you're never more than half a sentence from a personal pronoun..."I've Got To Be Me," "I've Got the Music In Me," "For Once In My Life," "My Way," "This is My Life," etc. There ought to be a law that says you can't sing more than one of these in your act unless someone has heard of you.

Then there was a lady singer at the old Playboy Club in Century City. Her whole act was Ego Songs and for her closing number, she performed the single most egregious act of on-stage self-adoration I've ever witnessed. She sang the Peter Allen song, "Quiet, Please...There's a Lady On Stage," which Allen wrote about his mother-in-law, Judy Garland. But this highly-unknown vocalist had altered the lyrics so it was about her — she was the Lady on Stage in her interpretation — and she kept singing the line "Stand for the ovation," over and over, demanding the audience stand up and applaud her. Some did, but only because they were getting up anyway to leave.

That lady was more sad than laughable, so I still said I'd never seen a truly ghastly singer in the lounge tradition. Then I saw Steve Rossi at the old Bob Stupak's Vegas World hotel. He was so slick, so full of himself, that I couldn't believe it. It was like a self-parody of a self-parody of a self-parody...entertaining in a very bizarre way. If Rossi's still at the Lady Luck next time I'm in Vegas, I'm going to go, just to see if he's managed to ratchet the self-parody up to an even higher level. If he could hire some former bevertainers to sing back-up and add in a juggler, he'd just about have the ultimate Vegas act.

• Posted at 12:46 AM · LINK

Clinton Clip

The link I posted earlier for Bill Clinton's BBC interview has since changed. This one works at the moment but I don't know for how long. If you want to see the section that some folks are describing as an "outburst" or as Clinton losing his temper, it starts around 16 and a half minutes in. (The whole show is around 48 minutes.) As you'll see, it doesn't quite live up to the hype.

• Posted at 12:19 AM · LINK