Thursday, August 12, 2004

Consumer Issues

Last year, I purchased (online) a couple of Vornado portable heaters from Costco. Today, I received an e-mail from Costco telling me that the models I'd received were the subject of a recall — something about them having a tendency to burst into flames or some other technicality like that. The message told me how to get my heaters replaced or repaired at no cost to me. (If you have Vornado heaters, go to their website and check out the details.) Maybe this happens all the time but it's new to me, and I was impressed with Costco making the effort to alert its customers.

Actually, I make jokes about their vastness and the fact that you can't buy a small anything there. But the more I go to Costco or order online and the more I read about how they run their business, the more impressed I am.

Also: If you live in Los Angeles, you might want to check out Restaurant Watch, a free site that monitors the Hygiene Inspection Violations in our local restaurants. You can build a little online database of the places you dine and you'll see the results of inspections and you can even be e-mailed when the places on your list are reinspected. What I found out is that I've been laboring under a delusion. I'd assumed that the expensive, ritzy-looking eateries I frequent would be among the cleanest and that the "dives" with cheap food would be questionable. Turns out, on my list, it's the other way around. One of my favorite "slightly expensive" place to eat — a place I dined last week, in fact — just got a score of 70 to barely earn a "C." That is very low. (There's nothing lower than a "C." 69 or below, they post the number instead of a letter, and those establishments usually scurry to correct flaws and get re-evaluated. Either that or they get closed down.) On the other hand, the two Sizzlers I occasionally visit both scored in the nineties for an "A," as did many places I wouldn't have expected.

By the way: If you do sign up there, don't read the details of those inspections. Even the ones that get the top grades have something wrong back in the kitchen. You don't really want to know what's in your frankfurters, either.

• Posted at 12:01 PM · LINK

Pryor Questions

My buddy Bruce Reznick sends me this link to a conversation with Richard Pryor. A bunch of stand-up comics ask him questions, one of which is pretty stupid.

• Posted at 10:18 AM · LINK

If Happy Little Bluebirds Fly...

Alan Keyes sings a chorus of "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" for news cameras. Somehow, I think it's going to take more than that for him to get the gay vote.

• Posted at 9:25 AM · LINK

Mousie

Paul "Mousie" Garner, who died last Sunday at age 95, was a veteran performer, starting back in the halcyon days of vaudeville. He was never much of a star but he was a nice man who loved to talk about the business and especially about his affiliation with the Three Stooges. Back when it was Moe, Larry and Shemp performing on stage with Ted Healy, Mousie was the pinch-hitter, filling in when Shemp was out. Several decades later, whenever the Stooges were down a member, there would be talk of Mousie rejoining the troupe...and at one point, "Curly" Joe DeRita briefly toured with Garner and another comic, billing themselves as "The New Three Stooges."

All of that gave Mousie the right, I suppose, to bill himself as part of the famous act and since he outlived the others and was so accessible, he was the go-to guy when any Stooger chronicler needed someone to interview. He actually did more than serve as a standby Stooge, but not a lot more. The times I chatted with him at autograph shows, we talked about his association with Spike Jones and also with Olsen and Johnson, who sent him out in the touring company of their Broadway smash, Hellzapoppin'. He would say that he planned to "semi-retire" from show business when he hit his hundredth birthday. I'm not sure what that meant since he sure didn't seem to be working the last few decades...but it's still a shame he didn't make it to retirement age.

• Posted at 9:12 AM · LINK

Advice Sought

My pal Earl Kress and I have been playing around with video editing on our respective PCs and I think I need to solicit some counsel here. As I said, we have Windows-based PCs and we're looking for the perfect piece of software. We have some DVDs full of clips (not copy-protected) and we want to import them into an editing program, do some edits, add some simple wipes and dissolves and maybe dub in music and add titles, then build a menu and export to a new DVD. Sounds simple? Well, it oughta be. Earl has been fiddling with Pinnacle Studio 8 and it seems to do most of the things we want except that there doesn't seem to be an efficient way to get files off the DVD and into the program. I've had the same problem with Adobe Premiere Pro. This is above and beyond the obvious problem that all forms of video will be obsolete by the time I could possibly learn Adobe Premiere Pro.

We've tried a number of programs that claim to convert VOB files to MPEG-2 but they all seem to either truncate the clip, get the sound off-sync or fuzz up the video. Shouldn't one be able to take clips off a DVD and edit them without any of these things happening?

Of course. So I'm hereby asking if anyone here has stumbled across the perfect program(s) to do what we want. And are you converting files to MPEG-2 or AVI or what?

• Posted at 1:40 AM · LINK