Saturday, November 20, 2004

Dubya: The Movie

When they make a movie of the life of George W. Bush, who should play him? There's only one person.

• Posted at 3:42 PM · LINK

Oops!

Got my Podhoretzes confused. I just corrected the previous item to note that I was linking to a piece by John Podhoretz and not his father, Norman Podhoretz. Some days, you can't tell your Podhoretzes without a scorecard. Thanks to Harry Podhoretz McCracken for catching my Podhoretz error.

• Posted at 10:13 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

I never thought I'd be linking to an article by John Podhoretz but a lot of things are topsy-turvy these days. Like a surprising, encouraging number of Conservative voices the last day or so, Mr. Podhoretz is condemning the recent Republican rule change that will allow Tom DeLay to remain as their leader even if, as expected, he is indicted. I do not completely concur with this piece. Podhoretz's main concern seems to be not that the change is wrong but that it's bad politics, and his view that DeLay is the victim of a zealous partisan prosecutor sounds more like spin than fact. Nevertheless, I thought the piece was worth a link.

• Posted at 1:15 AM · LINK

Harry Lampert...In His Own Words

As most of you know, I am often found at comic conventions moderating panels and interviewing the great and near-great. At the Comic-Con International in San Diego, back in 2000, writer-historian Ron Goulart and I did a tag-team interview of Harry Lampert and Marty Nodell. Harry, who passed away last week, was the artist on the first Flash story and Marty, who is happily still with us, filled much the same post on the first Green Lantern story. The panel ran around 75 minutes and was videotaped for posterity by a devoted preserver of comic history, Mike Catron. In Harry's memory, Mike has edited a 30 minute version of this panel that emphasizes the Lampert conversation, and has made it available online in QuickTime movie format. Here is where you can view it.

• Posted at 12:41 AM · LINK

Set the TiVo

If you're a fan of the TV show Taxi and/or Andy Kaufman, you might want to catch/record the Saturday Night Live rerun airing late Saturday night/early Sunday morning on NBC. They're scheduled to air the full, 90-minute version of the show that originally ran on May 15, 1982, hosted by Danny DeVito. At the time, Taxi had been cancelled by ABC and not yet picked up, as it soon was, by NBC. So the monologue is DeVito complaining about the abrupt termination, and bringing on some of the cast members for a "final bow," then there's a filmed segment in which he extracts revenge by blowing up the ABC building. One wonders if NBC had decided at that point to take on Taxi and this was a way of hyping the show's merits...or if they hadn't yet decided and this episode inspired that decision. Perhaps neither occurred.

Also on this episode, faux wrestler Andy Kaufman showed footage of his famous match against real wrestler Jerry Lawler, and apologized to real wrestlers everywhere for mocking their profession. I think this may have been Kaufman's last live appearance on SNL. The following season, he was "voted off" the series forever. NBC is skipping around those years in picking their reruns so perhaps they'll run the two episodes where that happened. Next week, they're supposed to run the 5/14/83 show hosted by Ed Koch.

• Posted at 12:22 AM · LINK