Tuesday, December 7, 2004

Today's Political Question

Hmm. Donald Rumsfeld says he expects that American troops can be withdrawn from Iraq within four years. Wasn't it just a few months ago that George W. Bush was saying that John Kerry was wrong for trying to set any sort of "artificial timelines" for something like that?

• Posted at 1:47 PM · LINK

This Just In...

The Grammy nominations have been announced and here's what's up for Best Comedy Album...

• Come Poop With Me, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog
• The Daily Show with Jon Stewart Presents...America: A Citizen's Guide to Democracy Inaction, Jon Stewart and the Cast of The Daily Show
• The Funny Thing Is..., Ellen DeGeneres
• Live at Carnegie Hall, David Sedaris
• The O'Franken Factor Factor — The Very Best of the O'Franken Factor, Al Franken

Some people may be startled to see that the nomination is listed for Triumph and not for Bob Smigel but, hey, it's the music business. More people are probably startled to learn that there are still comedy albums.

• Posted at 1:18 PM · LINK

More on Bob Haney

I thought I'd post some thoughts about Bob Haney that might have seemed out of place in an obit, and these tie in with Irwin Donenfeld, who passed away last week. They were here on this weblog but I've moved them to a page over in NOTES from me.

• Posted at 1:00 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Barry Scheck discusses the vast inequalities in sentencing in criminal cases. [Washington Post, you gotta register] Basically, he points out that the punishment doesn't always fit the crime; that some lesser offenses receive the harshest jail terms. He might also have mentioned that sometimes, a man hacks two people to death — like his most famous client did — and gets to go out and play golf. But O.J. aside, Mr. Scheck is doing wonderful work straightening out aberrations of the justice system and freeing the wrongly-convicted, and his piece is worth a read.

• Posted at 9:11 AM · LINK

Sportsman Schulz

In the category of Books Every Fan of Comic Art Must Own comes It's Only a Game, a collection of the "other" comic strip by Charles M. Schulz, the one he rarely mentioned in interviews because it was not successful. Between '57 and '59, with Peanuts not yet the hit it would soon become, Schulz also produced a sports-oriented three-times-a-week-plus-Sunday comic panel, working with cartoonist Jim Sasseville. (Sasseville was then also helping Schulz produce material for Peanuts comic books published by Dell.) The strip, which covered every sport Schulz and Sasseville could think of, started with a modest list of subscribing newspapers. A year later, it still had the same modest list...and with Peanuts requiring more and more of his time, Schulz decided to pull the plug on It's Only a Game. All in all, it lasted 63 weeks.

Still, the resultant feature is a nice reminder that Charlie Brown's maker was a multi-faceted cartoonist, not just a guy with one idea, and we have Nat Gertler to thank for putting them all into this inexpensive (a little over ten bucks) volume. Here's a link to order your copy from Amazon. I suggest you do.

• Posted at 12:35 AM · LINK