Saturday, February 5, 2005

Funny Papers

My buddy Mike Peters made me laugh out loud with this installment of his fabbo newspaper strip, Mother Goose & Grimm. Browse his whole site by going here, and don't miss his latest editorial cartoons.

• Posted at 3:57 PM · LINK

Garfield Stuff

No one has yet sent me a list of what's on Volume III of the Garfield and Friends DVD series. But they've sent it to this site.

Somewhere in there, you'll see an episode called "Mistakes Will Happen." If you're ever writing a show like this and you want to really go over budget and create all sorts of production problems, trying doing a cartoon where you deliberately insert drawing and animation errors. We actually had to have things done over because they'd done them right.

• Posted at 1:39 PM · LINK

Throat Culture

There's a new theory making the rounds that Deep Throat, the legendary source for Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, was none other than George Herbert Walker Bush, the former president. The argument for this sounds flimsy, though I suppose it's possible. Pat Buchanan and Henry Kissinger, who are also sometimes mentioned, are in the same category to me. They're possible...but I sense the speculators are grasping too hard for it to be a "name" revelation — someone we've all heard about — rather than some little-known FBI agent or White House clerk. It seems more likely to me that when the day comes that Deep Throat's identity is revealed — supposedly, the day after he dies — those who've followed this matter are going to be awfully disappointed. It'll feel like one of those too-cute murder mysteries that thinks it's clever to reveal the killer's identity at the end and have it be someone who didn't appear before in the scenario, yuk yuk. We all hate that and I think we're going to hate it when Woodward's famous parking lot buddy is exposed.

The thing I find intriguing about the whole matter is how many smart, important men — top journalists, folks who've had important jobs in our government — have put their investigative powers to work on the riddle and come up with different names. Which means that most of them are dead wrong. John W. Dean, who is by no means a dumb guy, has named (I think) four different people. That means he's been wrong three, maybe all four times. Men who were close to Richard Nixon have collectively named maybe twenty, including each other, in a lot of logical, carefully-reasoned decisions that were as wrong as wrong can be. I wonder if Woodward, when he puts together some story that involves major deductions on his part, ever pauses to wonder: "Gee, I'm utterly confident in my conclusions...but so are all those smart men who think they know who Deep Throat is but are wrong. Maybe I'd better not be too sure..."

• Posted at 9:13 AM · LINK

Accidental Humor

Got four minutes to hear a funny phone call? George Noory does a radio show about bizarre subjects, and I don't listen to it but my friend Carolyn sometimes does. Over on his webpage, he has the audio to a message that someone left on an answering machine and...well, like I said. If you've got four minutes, go over there and click on the link that says "Funny Phone Call."

• Posted at 12:13 AM · LINK

February 6, 2005 • Current • February 4, 2005