Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Second Deal

Watched the return of Deal or No Deal (out of synch) last night. For reasons I can't explain — it may just be the expertise of Howie Mandel at hitting all the right notes — I liked the show during its brief run a few weeks ago. This time though, I could already feel myself losing interest in the game, especially in the first half hour where you know the contestant ain't gonna take no deal.

The producers seem to have solved one problem. During the first week, it was way too obvious that much of Mandel's dialogue was dubbed in after the fact. I think they did it a few times last night but it was a lot less noticeable. Still, the show still had some awkward edits, especially during the entrance of their pointless cameo guest, Donald Trump. The Donald came on to "advise" the contestant about whether or not to take the deals being offered him...but of course, Trump really couldn't add anything. It's the contestant's bank account on the line, not his, and there's no decision involved of the kind about which Donald Trump might be considered an expert. I wish Trump had just said, "I have no clue what you should do. I'm just here to plug The Apprentice and let everyone stare at my hair."

It was also kind of funny to see television's two biggest germophobes — Mandel and Trump — on the same stage, grudgingly hugging the contestant.

Two other points: The player last night walked away with $359,000. If you were paying attention, you might have expected he'd get to that amount because it was flashed during the opening montage of scenes from the show. Also, it struck me as odd that they seem to have replaced several of the models on the show. Just what is it that a beautiful woman could do that would cause the producers to say, "We've got to get rid of her. She doesn't know how to stand there and open a briefcase"?

A friend on the inside tells me the producers are well aware that the show can get repetitive and that they have a lot of plans on how to add new elements and surprises, so I'm not giving up on it yet. I just may be carressing the Fast Forward button while watching.

• Posted at 2:22 PM · LINK

Drop the Trop?

As far as I know, there's been no official announcement but a lot of folks in Las Vegas are assuming the Tropicana Hotel is a goner. The place has stopped accepting advance reservations beyond April 15 and there's a news story out in which one of the companies that implodes Vegas hotels is openly discussing the challenge of razing the Trop's twin towers at the same time. The rumor is that two separate but connected hotels would be built on the land.

If this is all true, it's one of those good news/bad news things. I haven't stayed at the Tropicana in well over ten years...since I had the second-worst hotel room and some of the worst meals I've ever had in that city. I have yet to hear a report from anyone that suggested my experience was atypical or no longer the norm. But I always enjoyed walking around the place, especially the pool area, which was one of the most pleasant places you could stroll or sit and escape the relentless sound of the slot machines. I remember sitting there for most of one afternoon once with a note pad, jotting down ideas for a script, watching a colorful array of tourists, bathing beauties and even some tropical birds pass by. And the long-running entertainment at the Tropicana, the Folies Bergere, was and is probably the best "classic Vegas" production show in town. (You can see a few seconds of it over on this page.)

I guess the sad thing, if there is a sad thing, is that an entire era is going away. I don't think I'll miss any of those places on an individual basis but something's being lost in that city beyond gambling money. The Tropicana opened in April of 1957. Only four standing hotels in Las Vegas — The Frontier, the Flamingo, the Sahara and the Riviera — are older and I don't think anyone expects the Frontier to be there much longer. I might not stay in any of those establishments (the Flamingo, once in a while) but their existence provided a nice connect to the heritage of the city. Everyone loves stories of Old Vegas. They may not want to stay in the hotels that represent it but they love the stories.

If I had the bucks to open a small hotel-casino in that town, I'd buy the rights to one of the defunct names — the Sands or the Thunderbird or one of those. And then I'd deck the place out like it was 1958, with pit bosses and dealers in tuxedos, and piped-in music from that period. You probably couldn't stock the place with older slot machines but I would have a showroom with the best impersonators I could get of Frank and Dean and Sammy and even Liberace. And whenever I could, I'd book the real Tony Bennett. There'd be a guy at the door named Vinnie and I'd price the tickets so you could afford to tip him twenty bucks to seat you at a good table. I'd have a kid who sang like Wayne Newton playing the lounge there...although if I waited long enough, I might be able to get Wayne. I'd also pay Shecky Greene to walk around the casino, shake hands and tell everyone stories about mobsters, hookers and people getting beaten up in the back room.

I think people would flock to it. The Palms is about to open the first Playboy Club since the last one closed in 1986. They were irrelevant and silly then but irrelevant and silly have a way of becoming retro and hip, and I bet you won't be able to get into that Playboy Club for months after it begins welcoming patrons. Old Vegas is due for a comeback soon, too. It'll start just as soon as they get rid of the last of it.

• Posted at 1:31 PM · LINK

Mopping Up...

Quite a few of you have written to inform me of the origin of Pancake Day. This e-mail from Brent McKee seems to provide a good summary...

Pancake Day is actually Shrove or Fat Tuesday, the last Tuesday before the commencement of Lent. It's the last day for eating an assortment of tasty treats. In England — from which Canada and most of the United States derives its traditions — this meant pancakes. In Newfoundland, the tradition is to put trinkets like coins and rings into the pancake. The person who finds a particular trinket has good luck in a particular area — the one who finds the coin will get rich, the one who finds the ring will get married in the next year, and so on. In some areas of the United States, the tradition varies. In Detroit, for example, you never hear of "Pancake Day", it's "Paczki Day" (pronounced "punchky") where they eat "paczkis" which are sort of a Polish fruit pastry which seems to resemble a jelly donut. In New Orleans, the tradition is (besides getting women to show off their breasts for beads) to eat "King Cake." As in the Newfoundland tradition, a trinket of some sort is found in the cake, with the person who finds it becoming "king" of the party.

Yeah, but what do you get in the free pancakes at IHOP? Or don't I want to know? I don't want to know.

I've also received a number of e-mails from folks telling me their horror tales of shopping at Radio Shack...and from two different folks, their unhappy experiences working in those establishments. Almost everyone mentioned the policy Radio Shack once had (I remember this, too) of demanding your address and phone number any time you made a purchase, no matter how tiny. I once bought a 10-cent battery there and had to give them that info, despite the fact that I was already receiving six or seven copies of every Radio Shack catalog. It took me a while to figure out, as I'm sure others realized, that the thing to do was to give them a bogus address and phone number.

Two people within the confines of KNBC wrote to me, separately, that they know their hi-def signal is occasionally out of synch and that they can't understand either why no one there is concerned about it. I'm not so much concerned about it as amazed. At every station, there's a department called something like Master Control that is responsible for monitoring the outgoing broadcast 24/7 and making sure it's as close to perfect as possible. The folks in those divisions are usually fiercely diligent...although once, I was in the NBC network Master Control in New York and the guys in there were watching The Price is Right on CBS because they'd been tipped off that there were major bikinis in the Showcases at the end. And once, I was in Master Control at ABC and the guys there were watching porn, which struck me as just plain dangerous. They were one wrong button-push away from replacing Grace Under Fire with Grace Under Fred. But that kind of behavior is not typical. Usually, they catch transmission problems and do everything necessary to correct them, long before any viewers phone in.

Lastly, many have written to tell me of other "Who's on First?" variations that have been done in recent years besides the one by the Credibility Gap. This Wikipedia page lists a lot of them, including one I wrote. I still think it's an incredibly stupid routine that works in spite of itself.

• Posted at 12:23 PM · LINK

Monday, February 27, 2006

Synch Hole

Several hours later, the hi-def feed on KNBC Los Angeles is still out of synch. I think it's less pronounced than it was earlier but Mr. Leno's mouth is not moving precisely in accord with his audio.

To answer a couple of questions I've received: No, it's not my set. All the other channels are fine. And I talked to my friend Earl Kress who lives out in the valley and it's out of synch on his TV, too. He's noticed it several times in the past, too.

I just called NBC again and a bored-sounding operator heard me out and said, "I'll report it." Betcha nothing changes tonight.

This just amazes me. You'd think there'd be some NBC executive sitting at home, watching his or her network on a big hi-def plasma screen who'd notice this, call in and demand it be fixed. Apparently, they either can't afford good sets or they don't watch their own channel.

• Posted at 11:48 PM · LINK

Mail Call

My longtime friend Dan Gheno gets a good letter-to-the-editor published in the New York Daily News. It's about halfway down this page.

• Posted at 10:05 PM · LINK

That Synching Feeling

I'm watching Deal or No Deal on our local NBC affiliate, KNBC, via their high-definition feed. This is about the seventh time I've tuned to this channel since I got my new TV and it's about the fifth time the video has been out of sync with the audio.

It's also about the fifth time I've called KNBC about it and don't think that's easy because the only phone number they seem to have listed is for the KNBC Newsroom. Each time, I call there and someone forwards my call to what they say is the appropriate department. I explain to the person who answers there what the problem is and they always say, "Let me forward you to the people who handle that," and they proceed to forward my call back to the same guy in the KNBC Newsroom, who of course has nothing to do with that.

He then tries forwarding me to someone else and eventually, I get to someone who seems to actually be in charge of the transmission they're beaming to all of Southern California. This person says something like, "Not again" and promises to get it fixed right away. The last four times, it hasn't been fixed, at least before I gave up and turned to a regular-def channel.

I don't understand this. I can't be the only human being watching NBC in high-def in this half of the state. And yet, in spite of how difficult they make it to reach the person in charge of their broadcast, I seem to be the only person calling up to say, "Uh, excuse me, but could you get the actor's lips to match the words coming out of their mouths?" It's like watching Godzilla except for the parts with Raymond Burr. I think I know where the guys who weren't good enough to work for Radio Shack are getting jobs.

• Posted at 8:24 PM · LINK

Shacking Off

Radio Shack has announced they'll soon be closing between 400 and 700 of their 7000 outlets. Blogger Rudy Panucci has a thought...

I've got a suggestion: How about actually having stores filled with electronics and the parts needed to repair them, and hiring sales people who care about what they're doing and have a clue about what they're selling?

You can read what else Rudy has to say but when I read the above, I thought, "He's right." The last few times I've been into a Radio Shack — and I've been to maybe four different ones in the last year to pick up a cable or an adapter or something — there's been no one in the place with a clue as to what they had, let alone what to do with it. As Rudy notes, all the people there know how to do is to try and sell you a cell phone.

I went into one a few months ago to buy an extra-loud ringer for my mother's phone. The salesman told me they didn't have any such device and that I should buy a whole new phone with a loud ringer on it. I explained that her phone already had a loud ringer on it and that we wanted something louder. I easily found just such a device on the store's shelves and the salesguy — who said he'd been working there for more than two years — looked at the thing and said, "Gee, is that what these do?"

I bought it, took it to my mother's home, installed it and discovered it didn't work. I took it back and, lucky me, got the same clerk who suggested maybe I'd installed it wrong. (You plug the phone into it and it into the wall. A blind Amish person could get this one right.) I finally got him to exchange it for another one on the shelf...and watched as he put the one I said was broken back in its box and back on sale for someone else to buy.

I'm sure the rise of the Internet has hurt Radio Shack sales since it's now possible to order any electronic part in the world online with a few mouse-clicks. But I wonder if World Wide Webbing has also harmed the company by draining the supply of folks who have a little bit of "tech" sense but are willing to work for minimum wage. I'm guessing those folks now have better options and Radio Shack is stuck with too many of the ones who think that when a piece of software says "Press any key to continue," they're supposed to look for a key that says "any" on it.

• Posted at 6:17 PM · LINK

Silent Movie Memories

Here, recommended to me wisely by Marty Golia, is a short but very good audio story from NPR on the Silent Movie Theatre over on Fairfax. I wrote a brief article on the esteemed film palace some years back and you can read it here. Or you can go off this site and read a longer one here.

You can also visit the website of the Silent Movie Theatre where, they say, a book on the history of the place will be out in May of this year.

• Posted at 2:10 PM · LINK

Don Being Don

Want to see some clips of Don Knotts at his best? Want to see them on your own computer screen? The folks over at LikeTelevision have put up some on this page. Matter of fact, there's a lot of neat non-Knotts stuff on their site you might enjoy.

A couple of folks wrote me to point out an interesting point I should have included in some post. As I mentioned, Andy Griffith did something very wise by allowing Don to run away with The Andy Griffith Show. Ron Howard, who was then playing Andy's son, seems to have learned well. Years later, he sure profited by allowing Henry Winkler to run away with Happy Days.

• Posted at 1:08 PM · LINK

Set the TiVo!

Jon Stewart is on Larry King Live tonight. I wish Costas was guest-hosting but I don't think he is.

• Posted at 12:55 PM · LINK

Dennis Weaver, R.I.P.

Sorry to say I never got to meet Dennis Weaver. I always liked him as an actor and respected him as a human being. The obits (like this one) only touch upon the fine non-acting work he did to make the world a better place. Especially impressive were the efforts of L.I.F.E., a group he headed up that fed hungry people and probably saved an awful lot of human lives. His work for ecological causes was level-headed and never hysterical, and I hope it continues without him.

Weaver had a pretty glorious career in television, starring in many a series. He practically stole Gunsmoke from Jim Arness, then went on to do Gentle Ben and Kentucky Jones, which were both good shows. Then Fess Parker turned down the lead in McCloud, Weaver was cast and you had a perfect match of actor and role. Even Parker later said that Weaver was better in the part than he would have been.

I never heard a bad word about Dennis Weaver. Once, when he was suggested for a part in a show I wrote, a very important network person grinned and said, "He's always money in the bank." Translation: He was always good in what he did, never caused trouble and audiences loved him. I'm sorry that project never went forward because I really wanted to meet the man and tell him how much I admired him.

• Posted at 11:41 AM · LINK

Jersey Boy

Lou Costello, of the comedy team of Abbott and Costello, always talked about being raised in Paterson, New Jersey. It was his hometown and he was proud of it. Returning the favor the town of Paterson is tooling up to celebrate what would have been Lou's 100th birthday with a big Lou Costello celebration. This article will tell you all about it. [Warning: It's one of those sites that will ask you for your age and sex and zip code.]

One correction to the article: Lou most definitely did not write the team's signature routine, "Who's on First?" It was an old burlesque routine that they cleaned up and polished and made their own. It's also, as has been noted by several scholars of comedy, one of the most contrived bits of all time, founded as it was on the dubious premise that "they give baseball players odd names these days." Really? Was there ever a baseball player named Who? Or anything remotely like that? The piece actually made more sense when the satire troupe called The Credibility Gap parodied it and had a rock promoter deciding that at his concert, he was going to put The Who on first. There really was a rock group called The Who.

But of course, logic doesn't matter when they're laughing, and people laughed long and hard at Bud Abbott and Lou Costello arguing about an infield peopled with interrogative pronouns. Costello, when he was on target — which wasn't all the time — was a great comedic performer, and Abbott was one of the best straight men ever in comedy. They were probably better than a lot of their movies, most of which I find a lot more tedious now than I did when I was eleven.

• Posted at 12:20 AM · LINK

Sunday, February 26, 2006

It Only Plays "Candy Man"

You know what I wish? I wish someone would make an MP3 player that looks like a Pez dispenser. That would be great. That would be so neat. But of course, it'll never happen. Or will it?

• Posted at 11:13 PM · LINK

Past-Tense Places to Eat

I've added five more defunct dining establishments to our section, Great Los Angeles Restaurants That Ain't There No More. If you want to read about Tail o' the Cock, Wan-Q, Andre's of Beverly Hills, The Captain's Table or Alan Hale's Lobster Barrel, here's a direct link to the new page.

• Posted at 1:14 PM · LINK

One More TV Star Obit...

...though it may only mean something to folks who watched TV in Los Angeles in the sixties and seventies. It's for Edward Nalbandian. Now, who the heck is Edward Nalbandian? He was the proprietor of the huge discount men's clothing store down on Wilshire, Zachary All. In fact, he was Zachary All, which was a made-up name. Eddie turned up constantly on L.A. TV doing his own commercial spots and in one, which only ran eight times an hour for about five years, he said, of his store's prices on the new double-knit suits, "My friends all ask me, 'Eddie, are you kidding?' And I tell them no, my friend, I am not kidding." This line prompted rocker Frank Zappa to write and record a very funny, successful (at least in L.A.) record, "Eddie, Are You Kidding?"

I had one personal encounter with Eddie. I wrote about it in this article though I didn't use his name. But read down to the last part and you'll recognize he's the guy I was talking about. And if you'd like to know more about Eddie and Zachary All, here's a link to an article from The Los Angeles Business Journal that tells about him.

• Posted at 3:49 AM · LINK

More on Don

Here's a great photo of Don Knotts holding one of his five Emmy Awards and posing with Carl Reiner and Peter Falk. And I can't help but note that we have here three people who were in the movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

A couple other thoughts. Barney Fife was one of the all-time great TV characters and we have Andy Griffith to thank for that, and not just for casting Don. There have been a lot of stars who simply would not have allowed someone else to walk off with their program the way Andy let Don Knotts dominate The Andy Griffith Show. Oh, they'd let the producers hire someone funnier than them...but they sure wouldn't let him be funnier in that many episodes. Andy was wise enough to let Don be Don and it sure didn't hurt either man's career.

At the end of five years of Griffith shows, Don left. CBS offered very large dollars to keep him on their network and there was brief talk of a spin-off show that would have moved Barney Fife to a bigger city as a detective. Knotts wasn't interested. He'd signed with Universal to do movies and he did several...to sadly diminishing returns. It was mostly a matter of bad timing. The film industry was changing then and he was a few years late to be doing non-Disney family comedies. Even Jerry Lewis was no longer packing them in with that kind of material.

I don't know what Don's best movie was from this period — maybe The Ghost and Mr. Chicken — but the most interesting is probably The Love God?, which was a halting attempt to do something a tad more adult. The film was written and directed by Nat Hiken, the gent who'd brought us Sgt. Bilko and Car 54, Where Are You? I've always wanted to find a copy of the original screenplay for The Love God? — not the version Hiken directed but an earlier draft that was, legend has it, quite unlike the finished film and absolutely hysterical. It was to have co-starred Phil Silvers but Silvers was undergoing emotional problems at the time and declined. For reasons unknown, Hiken then despoiled his own script and made, as the last thing he did before he died, a not very good movie. I once got to ask Don about all this and he just shook his head and said, yes, Hiken had written a wonderful script and somehow — Don didn't know how — they wound up not making it.

There's actually a bit of irony to The Love God? Don's character was a meek little guy who was transformed into quite the ladies' man. In real life, Don was probably closer to that persona — or at least to would-be swinger Ralph Furley on Three's Company — than he was to Barney Fife.

When that film crashed and burned, Knotts decided to return to television and that's when he had some more bad luck. CBS still wanted him and he might have been a better fit in their schedule. But he couldn't do TV without a release from his movie deal with Universal...and Universal was mainly in business then with NBC, which wanted Don, if only to keep him off CBS. A deal was finally brokered which went something like this: NBC agreed to pick up a faltering Universal series, The Virginian, for another season in exchange for which the studio released Knotts to do TV...but only for NBC. Don reluctantly accepted the deal and soon regretted it.

NBC initially scheduled The Don Knotts Show for a great time slot on Thursday nights and pencilled in their other new variety series for the fall of 1970, The Flip Wilson Show, for a less-promising period on Tuesday. Then someone noticed a problem. On Tuesday, Flip Wilson would follow Julia, a sitcom with Diahann Carroll. That would put the only two shows on the network with black stars back-to-back, creating what some might criticize as a ghetto or some kind of schedule segregation. To escape this, they flipped Flip, giving Mr. Wilson the better berth on Thursday and consigning Don's program to a less-than-ideal day and hour. It was a pretty good show but it didn't get much of a chance. Wilson's show, on the other hand, thrived. A close friend of Don's once told me it was one of only two professional matters about which Don had lingering bitterness, the other being how little money he made off Andy Griffith Show reruns.

He was never out of work, of course. He still did movies and constant TV guest appearances before he joined Three's Company. But he never had that big hit he wanted as the one and only star of something. He was always teamed with someone like Tim Conway or cast in what was clearly a supporting role. Still, no one was ever more loved by audiences...and the times I saw Don in person and out in public, I got the feeling that he was aware of that but some part of him still could not believe it. When you told him how wonderful he was, he still blushed a bit and acted like you'd done him a tremendous favor, even though you were at least the eightieth person to tell him that in the past hour. But he was wonderful...in everything he ever did. If you don't believe me, ask anyone. They'll tell you.

• Posted at 3:29 AM · LINK

Saturday, February 25, 2006

On Another Blog...

Comic book retailer Brian Hibbs writes on his weblog about a just-completed trip to New York to see the new restaging/rethinking of Sweeney Todd.

Brian also writes about massive lines at the big New York Comic Convention that's going on this weekend. I'm hearing that the con is closing its doors to people who didn't secure advance tickets. That is, you can't just show up there tomorrow and buy a ticket to go in. I'm not sure how much of this is due to the Javits Center (which is pretty big) not being able to hold the crowds and how much is due to problems processing admissions. Probably both.

• Posted at 11:52 PM · LINK

More Sad News

The "authorized" website of actor Darren McGavin is announcing he passed away this morning at age 83. I always enjoyed his work on screen but I'm afraid I have no anecdotes or personal experiences to put up here about him. I mention this because when some famous performer or creative talent dies and I don't post something like I just posted for Don Knotts, I often hear from some fan who wonders why I ignored their death. Did I have a grudge against the person? Did I not think they were important? No, the answer is that I just didn't have anything to say I thought was worth saying.

And yes, I know that a lot of what I do think is worth saying is probably not worth saying. But that's how these things work.

• Posted at 7:05 PM · LINK

Don Knotts, R.I.P.

There's a group I may have mentioned here called Yarmy's Army — a social club for veteran comedians and actors that convenes once a month. I have been privileged to be an invited guest for several of their meetings and at almost every one, I found myself seated next to Don Knotts.

It's tough to get a word in edgewise in a roomful of comedians and I sure didn't try. At one meeting, I recall sitting there as Pat Harrington, Tom Poston, Shelley Berman, Howie Morris, Chuck McCann, Gary Owens, Pat McCormick, Harvey Korman, Jack Riley, Jerry Van Dyke and about a dozen other funny men swapped anecdotes and insults at a pace that made the Daytona 500 seem lethargic. People talked over one another, interrupted one another, topped one another and kept the conversation relentless for about two hours.

Of all the members, only one hardly said a thing. Don just sat there and enjoyed the show.

Which is not to say he remained absolutely silent. At one point in each meeting I attended — and I'm told this was typical — Don would think of something he wanted to say. He'd raise a finger, gesturing to indicate this and someone would notice and yell, "Hold it! Don wants to say something!" Suddenly, miraculously, everyone else would shut up and let him say his one thing, which would always get the loudest laugh of the night.

They wouldn't shut up for anyone else. But they shut up for Don.

Because they loved him. Everyone loved him. In a business where even your best friend can have some small resentment at your success, Don was utterly undespised. No one didn't like him, either as a performer or as a person.

When Yarmy's Army did benefits, as it has done for many worthy causes, many of its members would get up and perform. Don was not up to performing much. He hasn't been well for many years and — I don't know how many people know this about him — his eyes have been bad for quite some time. When he has acted in the last decade or two, someone has had to read the script to him and help him memorize and prompt him when he couldn't. That's how we did it when we had him as a guest on the Garfield cartoon show. I had another actor read each line to him and then Don would repeat the line, giving it that wonderful Don Knotts inflection.

So Don couldn't perform at these benefits but he could sure do his part to raise money. After the performance, it would be arranged to have him just sit in the lobby. There'd be a photographer, and you could have your picture taken with Don Knotts for ten or twenty dollars. I don't recall what they charged but there was always a line around the block. When he showed up at those Hollywood Collectors Shows, it was the same way. The line of people who wanted a picture or wanted an autograph — or just wanted to be able to say "I met Barney Fife" — was out the door and well into the parking lot.

I don't have to review his career and his many awards for you. There are many fine obits up, including this one over at the Los Angeles Times site, where you may have to register. I also don't have to tell you how good he was because you've seen The Andy Griffith Show and Three's Company and The Incredible Mr. Limpet and all those appearances with Steve Allen. I just wanted to get on here and tell you that the most beloved person in all of show business has died. Because that's what he was: The most beloved person in all of show business.

• Posted at 3:57 PM · LINK

Golden Oldies

Here's an interesting news story about proposed legislation that would demand "truth in labelling" for musical groups. There are many bands playing around the U.S. now which claim to be The Drifters or The Platters or The Supremes but actually have no one participating who was a part of the original group that became famous under that name. Under this law, an act couldn't call itself The Coasters unless at least one performer on stage had been a part of the original Coasters.

In principle, this sounds fair and logical, and I assume it would stop a lot of phony advertising. On the other hand, some of the groups around that do still have one original member are engaging in a bit of a sham to act like they're the original group. Suppose you paid good money to see an act that billed itself as The Beatles and out came three new guys with guitars plus Ringo on the drums. Or suppose it was Pete Best on drums (he was an original member of The Beatles, albeit briefly) plus three new guys. Wouldn't there be some amount of fraud being perpetrated there?

Several years ago, I spent an hour with a gent who was booking "oldies" acts for a casino showroom. During our conversation, he was interrupted by a call from an agent offering him a group that had been very hot in the sixties. I don't recall the name of the group but let's say it was The Electric Lemon. The agent said he could deliver them to play all their hits...and the talent booker said, "But I had The Electric Lemon here playing all their hits, two months ago."

I heard the agent on the speakerphone reply, "No, let me tell you what you had. That was one of several drummers who played with the original Electric Lemon, plus three impostors. He didn't even sing on their records. The Electric Lemon I represent has a guy who played the guitar and actually sang on all their records...plus three impostors."

• Posted at 10:15 AM · LINK

Cable Wars

If you haven't been watching Countdown With Keith Olbermann on MSNBC, you've missed some pretty good news reporting. You've also missed some very funny feuding with Bill O'Reilly, who's the competition over on Fox. Olbermann often points up O'Reilly errors or quotes some of the sillier things that Bill has had to say lately. O'Reilly, who routinely insults his political opponents while lecturing them about decorum, has fired back with some pretty pompous replies. His latest is to post a petition — this one, over on his website — which urges MSNBC to bring the back the previous occupant of Olbermann's time slot, Phil Donahue, and to get rid of what's there now (i.e., Countdown).

On his show yesterday, Olbermann devoted a whole segment to O'Reilly's petition and did a little montage of a fraction of the times Countdown has slammed the Fox News host. Here's a link to an online video.

• Posted at 1:39 AM · LINK

Obit Watch

Two weeks after he passed away, an obituary for Rickie Layne finally turns up in the Los Angeles Times. [Registration might be required.]

• Posted at 1:23 AM · LINK

Friday, February 24, 2006

Today

Happy 85th birthday to Abe Vigoda who, according to his website, is still alive.

• Posted at 10:43 PM · LINK

Who Banned Roger Rabbit?

China has passed a law against films that combine live-action footage with animation. You read that right. Here are the details.

• Posted at 5:31 PM · LINK

Today's 2nd Political Rant

A number of people have written to try and convince me that "Portgate" (can't have a scandal without a "gate" nickname) is a much greater outrage than I think. Among my correspondents are several folks whose opinions I respect and their arguments, plus some of the latest revelations in the matter, have me thinking they may be right. Note that I wrote "may be."

As you might imagine, I also got a couple of insulting messages. I don't think, these days, you can type the name of an elected official on the Internet without getting one of those. And I had a nice Bizarro World exchange with someone who has previously accused me of not giving Bush the benefit of the doubt, but thinks the White House is braindead on this one.

Here's a news story about the deal that I found remarkable. Note that this is from the Washington Times, a newspaper that routinely twists itself in knots to portray the current administration as flawless...

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was not aware a Dubai-owned company was seeking to operate terminals in six U.S. ports and that his agency was leading the review until after the deal's approval, an administration official said yesterday. Mr. Chertoff's spokesman, Russ Knocke, told The Washington Times the issue rose no higher than the department's assistant secretary for policy, Stewart Baker. "[Chertoff] was not briefed up to this until after this story started appearing in the newspapers," Mr. Knocke said. Mr. Chertoff is the third Cabinet official to acknowledge he did not know his agency had signed off on the plan as a member of the interagency Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). Both Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Treasury Secretary John W. Snow have publicly said they were unaware of the deal. But Mr. Chertoff's exclusion is more noteworthy because his department headed the CFIUS review and is in charge of security at all U.S. ports.

My first thought on reading this was, "So what? It's Michael Chertoff, the man who didn't know New Orleans was underwater." But it looks like everyone in the Cabinet was blindsided by this one. Even if the port deal was uncontroversial, this is not how we want our government to work, especially in the not-unimportant area of Homeland Security.

• Posted at 11:42 AM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

I think you still have to watch advertising to read articles on Salon if you're not a subscriber. But you might find it worth it to read this piece by political cartoonist Doug Marlette. He writes about the Danish cartoonist flap and death threats and things like that.

I was e-mailed by a reporter the other day who wanted me to answer the question, "How do you feel about cartoonists being threatened with death for drawing cartoons?" I don't think he understood my answer, which was that I'm opposed to human beings being threatened with death for anything they do, short of inflicting death or physical harm on another human being. It's not just cartooning that shouldn't result in death threats. Death threats are a bad thing in almost every situation except maybe cutting ahead of me in the checkout line at the market.

Anyway, the reporter thought I was unwilling to take a stand against censorship so I wrote a more formal statement of the obvious, about how it is inhuman for anyone to be harmed or punished for expressing an opinion, however offensive it may be to some. I actually think most people in the world believe that. Some just believe there are exceptions for certain things they hold dear.

You have to wonder what they're so afraid of. When I was attending U.C.L.A. many moons ago, there was a gentleman who showed up outside the Student Union every Friday around the lunch hour. He was an aspiring derelict who'd deliver a semi-coherent discourse about what was wrong with the world. I heard a little of it once and I couldn't figure out what the hell he was talking about...something about false prophets and bold men on horseback dressed in rags. This all led up to his big finish, which was always the burning of a Bible. He had a seemingly-endless supply of them and I don't recall if he told someone or if I imagined the reason, which was that he'd spent the previous twenty years as a travelling salesman. In every town, he said or I theorized, he'd swipe the volume the Gideons had placed in the top drawer of the bedside table and take it home for, I guess, possible future burning.

The Bible-burner was around for months, generally ignored. If he drew an audience at all, it was of students who wanted to laugh at his hysterical manner and wild-eyed fanaticism. But then someone took umbrage at the guy's finales and for a few weeks, there were petitions out and articles in the school newspaper about some proposal to ban the burning of sacred religious symbols or books or I don't know what the exact wording was. All I know is that it got the Bible-burner a lot of undeserved attention and that the folks who wanted to make him arrestible made even less sense than he did. One who harangued me to sign his petition seemed to have a genuine fear that the sacred tome was in some kind of actual jeopardy and had to be defended against one drunk with a Zippo lighter. I feel that way when people want to make it a crime to burn an American flag...or when it actually is a crime to deny the Holocaust.

In Austria, a British author was just sentenced to three years in prison for doing that. While one can understand why some countries are sensitive about the subject, I don't think the evidence of gas chambers at Auschwitz is so flimsy that it can't withstand a few people arguing against it. Using violence or imprisonment to stop an idea from being questioned or ridiculed is to demean the power of that idea. If something really is an eternal truth, it shouldn't matter if someone argues against it or draws an insulting cartoon about it or burns a copy of it. Instead, let's make it a crime, punishable by death, to mock or burn my work. That's the kind of stuff that needs protection.

• Posted at 1:02 AM · LINK

Thursday, February 23, 2006

News Worthy

Back when ABC, CBS and NBC had cartoons in their God-given spot on Saturday morning, those shows were occasionally truncated or otherwise abbreviated for "educational content." The FCC mandated that certain quotas of pro-social material be broadcast along with the Hanna-Barbera madness and the commercials for foods with high sugar content. A lot of half-hour shows became 25-minute shows so we could get little short segments that lectured kids on good nutrition or history. For a brief time, ABC had little consumer tips and I seem to recall writing a few of them that were vetoed because they would have rebutted certain commercials that were then being broadcast.

I only recall two kinds of spots that I thought were at all worthwhile, let alone entertaining. One was the Schoolhouse Rock segments that popped up on ABC, usually in the fringe time slots. They were cleverly written and well-animated and to this day, I'll bet a lot of folks my age can still sing, "Lolly, Lolly, Lolly, Get Your Adverbs Here." Last year, I attended a party where the great jazz musician Jack Sheldon performed with his combo. The number one request, and the number which caused all the adults present to flock around and applaud with glee, was when he sang "I'm Just a Bill," a number he performed for Schoolhouse Rock.

The other segments I liked then — and remember, I was more or less an adult in the seventies; I was writing some of the shows these spots appeared in — was a series on CBS called In the News. They were short summaries, ranging one to two minutes in length, of what was going on in the world, illustrated with news footage. I thought I was pretty well informed from my reading of newspapers and my viewing of adult newscasts, but the In the News segments often outlined a story with such clarity and lack of sensationalism that I'd find myself going, "Oh, so that's what that's all about."

The In the News segments were narrated by the gent whose photo I've posted above right...Christopher Glenn, a reporter that CBS usually had assigned to radio projects. I believe he also wrote — or at least, supervised the writing of — the spots which ran from 1971 to 1986. What prompted this posting is that I see that Mr. Glenn is retiring after more than 50 years in broadcasting, the last 35 of which he spent at CBS. Obviously, he did a lot of other things for the network but every time I hear his measured, authoritative voice on one of them, I'm reminded of what a fine job he did with In the News, and how it was one of the few things I didn't mind interrupting my viewing of Road Runner cartoons. A lot of those who today are doing more elaborate, allegedly "in depth" news reporting for an older audience could learn a lot from what he did for kids.

• Posted at 12:13 PM · LINK

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Look, Ma! No Hands!

This is scary. A new model of the Toyota Prius, available only in Japan at the moment, has a feature that will automatically parallel park the car for you. It involves a rear-mounted camera and some sort of on-board computer that figures out when the wheel should be turned and how much. Here's a video that displays this feature in action.

• Posted at 9:59 PM · LINK

On Now

I'm watching tonight's Larry King Live, which is an hour with Ed McMahon plugging his book on Johnny Carson. As explained here, I didn't care for the book but this interview is pretty good and you might want to catch one of the reruns tonight. It was obviously taped ahead because almost every time Ed starts to tell a story — and sometimes, even before he starts telling one — the producers cut to an appropriate clip or photo. But what really makes it work is that Bob Costas is the guest host, reminding us that he's the best interviewer working in television these days.

• Posted at 6:27 PM · LINK

Finally...

The Los Angeles Daily News runs an obit for ventriloquist Rickie Layne.

• Posted at 6:18 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

I'm obviously not a fan of George W. Bush but the latest controversy — this thing about outsourcing the operation of several U.S. ports to an Arabian company — seems like errant criticism. One can make a good argument that we shouldn't be handing a job this sensitive over to an outside supplier at all...that it should be done by the United States government. But none of the folks yelling at Bush today seem to be making that case. They weren't bothered when it was a British company that was running the six U.S. ports...but now that the company's being acquired by a state-owned business in the United Arab Emirates, all Hades is breaking loose.

Bush didn't help himself with the way he let this be announced. Donald Rumsfeld was put in the embarrassing position today of telling reporters he'd just heard about the deal over the weekend, even though it was approved unanimously on February 13 by the Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States, of which he is a member. And someone has to tell George W. that since his approval ratings started occasionally hitting 39%, even some loyal Republicans won't rubber-stamp everything he wants to do.

But really, what's the problem here? Is the company qualified to handle the job? If they are, they should be allowed to do it. And if they aren't, they shouldn't have the job, no matter what country is involved. I think Bush is getting a bit of a bum rap on this one.

• Posted at 12:12 AM · LINK

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

TeeVee on DeeVeeDee

People keep writing me to ask when a certain favorite TV show of the past will get released on DVD. The answer is that every show that was around long enough to now fill out a DVD set is probably on some company's "we'll get around to this eventually" list. A gentleman who packages such things for one of the major DVD houses told me recently that there's a bit of a glut on the market and there may be some slowdown. There also may be some drop in the budgets for special features ("Some people are starting to say it's not cost-effective") but no one is suggesting that there isn't still money to be made packaging runs of old shows. Here, with his permission, is an excerpt from a recent e-mail to me...

We still have clearance problems with a couple of shows that we want to put out. Mostly, it's a matter of music rights but there are a few shows tied up in disputes over who owns the home video rights. The point is we're even working on solving those because we want to put everything out we can. It's mostly now a question of when. When would be a good time to release this? Some months, there are just too many DVD sets out and your product can get lost or you'll wind up competing with yourself to have too many sets out. In some cases, there's reason to believe a certain show might get more attention down the line, like if there's a movie coming out based on it. We also have shows we want to put out, and we will put out, but we're having trouble locating negatives or good complete prints of a few episodes. All we have readily available are syndication prints that are missing a few minutes in each show. We don't want to use those unless we have to.

Coming out May 2 is the first season of That Girl, complete with audio commentaries and a documentary featuring Marlo Thomas and series co-creator Bill Persky. I recall the first season of that show being quite enjoyable, especially in the way Ted Bessell would play sexual frustration and how unbelievably sour Lew Parker was as That Girl's father. From our friends at Shout Factory.

On May 9, Paramount is bringing out the much-awaited DVD of the show variously called Sgt. Bilko, The Phil Silvers Show and You'll Never Get Rich — by any name, one of the best comedies ever done for television. Alas, this is one of the shows that has had clearance problems so they can't just release season by season. Instead, they've picked 21 episodes that they could clear, plus they have the never-aired pilot (which has Jack Warden playing Henshaw, the character played in the series by Allan Melvin) and a staggering number of special features, rare clips, commentary tracks, etc. This sounds like a must-get, and we can hope that if it sells well enough, that might give Paramount the financial incentive to try and mop up those clearance issues and do real season-by-season sets. You can advance order this one here.

There's already a one-DVD sampler release of a few old F Troop episodes and I guess it must have sold well since Warner Home Video is putting out the entire first season of the show on June 6. One hopes it will sell well enough for a quick release of the second and final season. (There were only two, and only the second was in color.) Always liked F Troop — one of the few sitcoms that ever made me laugh out loud.

What's nice about these three releases is that they're all of shows I can't watch just by turning on my TV. I mean, the Andy Griffith Show and M*A*S*H DVD sets are nice but my satellite dish gets two episodes of Andy Griffith per day, each of which run twice, and six episodes of M*A*S*H, four of which air twice — plus every so often, some channel airs a marathon. One time, my "TiVo Suggestions" feature got carried away and recorded 40+ episodes of I Love Lucy over one weekend. (I think my TiVo has a thing for Vivian Vance.) So buying a complete season of that show isn't that big a deal.

One of my few disappointments when I got DirecTV and the eight zillion channels that come with it was that about four zillion were running The Jeffersons. I was expecting lots of shows I wasn't previously able to see and all I got was six chances a day to watch Weezie and George yell at each other. I mentioned here a few months ago that I didn't understand why someone hasn't launched a couple of networks that run some of the hundreds of old TV shows that are not currently on TV Land. No one in the business seems to have a theory as to why this hasn't been attempted, especially now that the DVD market has prompted many studios to go into their vaults and do restoration work on their old shows. Dom DeLuise's Lotsa Luck is out on DVD. So is Good Morning, World. So is Nowhere Man and Have Gun, Will Travel and even Mister Peepers. None of these shows are currently rerun on TV channels as far as I know. If people are willing to shell out good money to own all of them, don't you think someone would watch them once a day for free?

• Posted at 12:39 AM · LINK

Monday, February 20, 2006

Border Incident

Over on Tom Spurgeon's fine site, The Comics Reporter, I explained (in this letter) about a bordered cover format that Marvel tried out in 1971. Tom asked about it, I answered...and I also explained about a cover border format that Mad Magazine test-marketed in the seventies. Folks are now writing me, asking where they can see an example of this Mad experiment so I thought I'd post the above.

Someone at Mad got the idea that it might boost sales to establish a decorative border format on their covers. Someone else, I guess, wasn't convinced this was a wise idea...so several issues were printed both ways. Some percentage of the press run had the yellow border on the cover, the rest didn't, and sales were charted. After a while, the bordered covers went away, never to be seen again. Which should give you some idea of how the test turned out.

• Posted at 10:47 PM · LINK

Where Walt Slept

One part of Disneyland that most people have never seen is the apartment built for Walt's private use. But you can take an online tour of it here.

• Posted at 9:20 AM · LINK

Remember Velvel

It's now been nine days since ventriloquist Rickie Layne died. The New York Sun ran a nice, detailed obit last Thursday but otherwise, I haven't seen a word anywhere on the 'net about it, apart from what I posted here last Tuesday. I assume the obituaries will be along sooner or later but I don't think this is how news reporting is supposed to work.

• Posted at 8:58 AM · LINK

Public Pythonvision

This Wednesday evening, PBS stations around the country are debuting Monty Python's Personal Best, a series of six one-hour specials composed of classic sketches from the original BBC Monty Python's Flying Circus. When I first heard about these, I thought it was just another way of repackaging that old material and therefore something I could miss. I love Python but I have the complete run on DVD and...well, let's just say there are some things I love but have seen too many times.

Turns out though that these specials may be worth catching. According to this article on the Python website, "Each show features a rich collection of Monty Python clips as well as new sketch material written and performed by the indvidual Pythons." Each of the five surviving performers hosts his own show and apparently they did actually pick their favorite sketches, not necessarily featuring themselves. (The Fish-Slapping Dance, which is just Palin and Cleese, is in all six shows.) They all pitched in to handle the episode spotlighting their late comrade, Graham Chapman, which is nice. But I have the feeling you could get a more entertaining show if they all just sat around and told anecdotes about him.

PBS is going to start rerunning the original Python episodes in April for the benefit, I guess, of those who love Python but not enough to buy the DVDs. It was back in 1974, of course, that PBS originally introduced Python to America...though not everywhere. For some reason, our local PBS affiliate, KCET, didn't start running them until the following year...so for a time, Monty Python had a special kind of cult following in this town. A small group of us knew their work from the records, from our trips to other cities and from the movie, And Now For Something Completely Different, which opened and closed in L.A. without a lot of attention long before KCET broadcast Python across Southern California. When they did come along though, they were an immediate hit. Almost right away, if you said "Nudge, nudge" in any public place, there'd be someone around who got the reference.

A KCET exec told me back in the seventies that Python was the third-best thing to ever happen to PBS fundraising. Reminding parents to support Sesame Street was the number one money-getter and second was to rerun the 1973 production of Steambath, which had Valerie Perrine naked for about ten seconds. Python got people to give cash, in part because Terry Jones taped a number of brilliant little pitches that KCET would run as part of their pledge breaks. They had Jones tied to a chair, looking like he'd been worked over by a couple of gorillas, pleading with us to donate or he'd endure further punishment. The exec told me that every time they ran them, they got a lot of pledges but they also got a few calls from people saying it was shameful that someone was beating up that nice man with the British accent. "We figure that's our target audience," he said. "The kind of viewer who really needs educational television."

• Posted at 1:19 AM · LINK

Sunday, February 19, 2006

Headlines That Annoy Me

U.S. rules shield industries from lawsuits

That's the Bush administration for you: Always watching out for the overdog.

• Posted at 5:09 PM · LINK

Game Show Stuff

It's been a while since I mentioned the old, black-and-white game show reruns that GSN airs in the wee, small hours of the morning. They have another five or so weeks of Beat the Clock, which can't end too soon for me. Every so often, I tune one in for about two minutes and marvel at the fact that the series was ever on the air. When those run out in early April, GSN will begin rerunning I've Got a Secret again, but not all of them. For reasons at which we can only guess, this time through, they'll be skipping all the episodes that were prominently sponsored by Winston cigarettes. That's an awful lot of shows to bypass but there will still be some good ones to catch again.

In the meantime, the reruns of What's My Line? are currently up to early 1962. The one that airs tonight (i.e., Monday morning) should be one with Olivia DeHaviland as the Mystery Guest. Tuesday morning, there are two Mystery Guests — Sargent Shriver (then the head of the Peace Corps) and Van Cliburn.

Deal or No Deal returns to NBC primetime with new episodes for a week commencing February 27, and then will join the weekly lineup on Monday nights. On March 3, GSN kicks off a two-day festival of old game show episodes featuring folks who won Academy Awards or hosted the ceremony often. Looks like some good things in there. Here's the schedule.

• Posted at 1:42 PM · LINK

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Hare Transplant

I was in the hospital when it was announced that Universal and Disney had concluded a deal that would send sportscaster Al Michaels to NBC while Disney would reacquire title to Oswald the Lucky Rabbit. For those of you unfamiliar with the history or confused by some of the newspaper accounts, I'll run through it for you as briskly as possible...

In 1927, Walt Disney's business was making animated cartoons of Oswald which were distributed by Universal Pictures. A gent named Charlie Mintz was the money man and go-between. When the cartoons became successful, Walt went to New York to attempt to negotiate a new contract with Mintz at a higher fee. Instead, Mintz offered him a worse deal. What's more, Mintz informed him that he had quietly signed contracts with most of Walt's key artists — pretty much everyone except Ub Iwerks — and that Universal owned Oswald. If Walt did not accept the new terms, Mintz would set up a new studio with those artists and make the Oswald cartoons without him.

Walt did not accept the new terms. He headed back to Hollywood and, legend has it, created his replacement character on the train home. Soon, the Charles Mintz Studio was making Oswald cartoons while Walt and Ub launched the new Disney star, Mickey Mouse. It is said that Walt never quite got over the shock of losing Oswald and he also learned a valuable business lesson. Thereafter, he refused all deals that might have diluted or endangered his title to studio creations, including The Mouse. Eventually, of course, Mickey was the hottest cartoon character of all time, dwarfing the popularity of Oswald, so there was some nice revenge there. Walt got a little more when Universal later dumped Mintz and handed Oswald over to Walter Lantz...and now, with the swap for Al Michaels, the justice is more or less complete.

What interests me here is that Oswald the Rabbit has a current value in spite of over fifty years of the character's owner being utterly indifferent about the bunny. The character's popularity declined throughout the thirties and in spite of a couple of complete redesigns. In 1943, Lantz stopped making Oswald cartoons altogether, preferring to focus on his other stars, including Andy Panda and Woody Woodpecker. Around this time, Lantz acquired ownership of Oswald but decades later, he sold his entire studio to Universal so they got him back. They didn't do anything with him, either. He was just a character in their merchandising catalog. When toy companies came to license Woody for some piece of merchandise, Oswald usually got tossed into the deal for nothing.

The old Oswald cartoons were rarely shown on television so for a decade or two, the only exposure the character got was in the pages of Dell Comics produced by Western Publishing. Lantz had a close relationship with Western and basically told them they could do anything they wanted with the rabbit and he would adjust his merchandising model sheets to match. As a result, he went through several more redesigns, eventually becoming a rather serious father type with two nephews, Floyd and Lloyd. It was pretty much the same relationship Mickey Mouse had with Morty and Ferdy, or that Donald Duck had with Huey, Dewey and Louie, also in Western Publishing/Dell Comics. In fact, quite a few of the scripts for the Oswald comics were revamped Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck scripts. None of the writers were too enthused over working with Oswald, so the editors would commission extra Mickey and Donald scripts and then change the names and (if necessary) the number of nephews. It was always one of their lowest-selling books.

Oswald pretty much disappeared even from the comic books in the sixties. Western had decided to give up on him before 11/22/63 but after that date, the notoriety of assassin Lee Harvey Oswald reinforced the decision. One of the editors there told me years later, "All the character was was a good name, and suddenly that name wasn't as good as before." Lantz occasionally asked Western to stick an Oswald story in the Woody Woodpecker comic book just for trademark reasons and to demonstrate that the character was still active. After Woody's comic book ended in the seventies, they didn't even have that.

So it's amazing that Oswald still has a following today. It's mostly in Japan where merchandise that harks back to the original Disney design is extremely popular...but somehow Oswald has endured and proven commercial enough that Disney wanted him back. Talk about your lucky rabbits.

• Posted at 7:51 PM · LINK

Friday, February 17, 2006

Starr Power

An outfit called Classic Comics Press has just announced that they'll be reprinting the full run of Leonard Starr's great newspaper strip, Mary Perkins On Stage. I think that's its official name. It's my understanding that some newspapers labelled it On Stage, some called it Mary Perkins and some used the double-barrelled moniker. By any handle, it's most deserving of collection.

The strip began on February 10, 1957 and ran until September 9, 1979. Some readers probably skipped it over, thinking it was just another soap opera. While it was occasionally that, Starr was quite determined to give himself something more exciting to draw than people kissing and crying. The storylines roamed the world, verging into taut adventure and intrigue, and those who followed one sequence usually got hooked and stuck with it forever — a modest but fiercely loyal readership. It also didn't hurt that Starr, along with his friend and occasional collaborator Stan Drake (The Heart of Juliet Jones) drew the best-looking women on the comic strip page. I'm looking forward to seeing them collected even though this could be another time I'm signing on to buy a series of books for many, many years.

• Posted at 10:07 PM · LINK

eBay Auctions In Which I Won't Be Bidding

Number one in a series.

• Posted at 7:14 PM · LINK

Barristers of the Bizarre

Folks write in now and then ask me what current comics I'd recommend. There are many but today's plug is for Supernatural Law, a clever strip by the best-dressed man in comics, Batton Lash. You can experience it two ways — on paper and online — and while I prefer it on paper, the online version is free and it'll at least give you a chance to sample the exploits of Wolff and Byrd, Counselors of the Macabre.

The second storyline for the webcomic, "The Life-Partner of Frankenstein," has recently been completed and can now be read in full at the Supernatural Law website. In the story, a descendant of the original Dr. Frankenstein carries on the life-creation work of his family...and we all know what trouble that always causes. In this case, the trouble is a monster named Henry, who craves a mate so Doc Frankenstein whips one up and she's named Freda but then...oh, just go read it. Don't let me spoil it for you. You'll enjoy it. Batton blends fantasy and law better than anyone this side of Justice Scalia.

• Posted at 3:48 PM · LINK

Friday Hospital Blogging

I don't intend to fill this site with medical news since mine is usually just as boring as yours. However, this story is too good not to share...

This morning, I was back in an embarrassing gown at Cedars-Sinai, having a procedure which is known as an Upper G.I. Endoscopy. Basically, they knock you out and stick a little camera down your throat to check and see if all is well in your stomach. This is not as unpleasant as it sounds, it's over in a jif, and all reports from within the Evanier tummy were good news.

So it's before they wheel me in to have it done. I'm lying on a rolling hospital bed/gurney with an I.V. in one arm and a machine that constantly takes my blood pressure strapped to the other. The nurse draws the curtain back and the man on the next gurney over can see me and I can see him. He is a rather well-known TV personality-actor, and someone I have met briefly on a few occasions. He recognizes me, I recognize him. We exchange greetings and he tells me he's there for the same thing I'm there for, except that in his case, they're going in the other end.

We speak for a few more minutes and then an orderly comes and starts wheeling him off to the appropriate room. As he departs, he yells back to me, "I DON'T WANT TO READ ON YOUR WEBLOG THAT I HAD A COLONOSCOPY THIS MORNING, EVANIER! DO YOU HEAR ME? I DON'T WANT TO READ THAT ON YOUR WEBLOG!"

• Posted at 12:38 PM · LINK

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Pasta Place

I haven't set foot in the place for, I'm guessing, twenty years...but I still feel a sense of loss at this news: The Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood is closing down this summer. It's located across the street from the KTLA TV studio where I worked a lot in the late seventies. The Old Spaghetti Factory, which was then relatively new, was a good place for lunch — decent spaghetti for a decent price in fun surroundings.

The cartoonist group I co-founded, C.A.P.S., had a banquet there once and we actually had some members complaining the food was too cheap. Our first banquet was at the Sportsmen's Lodge out in Valley and some groused that the meal was poor and that it cost too much. On both counts, they were right but there was a reason. If you go into almost any hotel and book a banquet, what your group will be served will be of lower quality than a comparable meal in the hotel coffee shop, and will cost more. So after the grousing over that event, I suggested we hold a dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory. It was five bucks a head, I think, for a plate of spaghetti with meatballs, a salad and all the bread one could stuff — this was late seventies, remember — and everyone loved the food. I was just congratulating myself on my choice of venue when a group of members approached me and said, "You know, Mark — we're trying to elevate the image and stature of cartoonists, and it's kind of embarrassing for us to have our banquet in a place where the dinner is five dollars a plate." I shoved their faces in the lasagna and walked out.

The building up on Sunset Boulevard has a colorful history. It was originally the Los Angeles home of the Columbia Broadcasting System, back when it was just radio, back before they'd built a larger building a few blocks west on Sunset. (That building is also supposed to be demolished soon, I hear.) In 1935, CBS moved out and left behind all their equipment, which was then used by the new inhabitant — The Max Reinhardt Workshop of Stage, Screen and Radio. By the early fifties, it was a Studebaker dealership and then Gene Autry bought it and opened his TV-radio company there. When Autry moved across the street, it had a few short-term tenants before the Old Spaghetti Factory moved in with its unique style of interior decoration, complete with indoor train cars in which you can sit and swirl pasta.

Word is they'll be tearing the place down later this year to begin building condos, probably with retail stores on the ground floor. I don't understand this new trend in Los Angeles of erecting condominium complexes in commercial areas but I guess some people like living over a Walgreen's in a heavy traffic area.

Yes, I know other Old Spaghetti Factories dot the landscape...although the only other one I ever went to more than once, the one right across from the convention center in San Diego, closed a year ago. But the one in Hollywood was just kind of "our place," once upon a time, and I guess I'm sorry I've neglected it all these years. Maybe I can get back there for a lunch before it all comes crashing down.

(My thanks to Jim Nestler, who's a Professor of Biology at Walla Walla College in Washington, for letting me swipe the above photo from his website. When I go up to Sunset for that lunch, I'll try and take a few of my own.)

• Posted at 9:37 AM · LINK

Coming to Your TiVo

First, the good news: I am told by one of my spies that the next service release of the TiVo software will add an undelete feature. You'll get a new folder on your screen that will say "Recently Deleted" or something of the sort, and when you delete a recording, it will go there and be recoverable until its space is needed for something else. This is a very good idea. The next service release is also supposed to incorporate some Internet-type features for those of us who have our TiVos hooked up to a high-speed Internet connection. These will include getting your local weather forecast and the ability to purchase movie tickets through your TiVo.

Bad news? There's no release date yet for the Series 3 TiVos, which will work with High-Def TV. And when they do debut, they may be without the Tivo to Go and multi-room capabilities. That might make me hold off on getting one...that is, assuming they ever come out and there isn't something better out on the market by then. So far, no one's done a personal video recorder as well as TiVo but let's not forget. There was a time not so long ago when no one had come up with a better piece of word processing software than Wordstar 4.0. Then someone did.

• Posted at 3:01 AM · LINK

Greased Lightnin' Afloat

As we all know, some casinos have been established on ships in order to avoid anti-gambling laws. They take people out beyond the three-mile limit where the nearby authorities have no jurisdiction. Okay. Now, the question is can you trespass on copyright laws if you're out at sea and therefore not in some country that is bound by them? That's what a new lawsuit is going to try and find out.

• Posted at 1:01 AM · LINK

Wednesday, February 15, 2006

Off the Reservation

As we warned you, it became possible at 9 AM this morn to book online hotel reservations for this year's Comic-Con International through their website. I haven't monitored the activity but others are reporting that by Noon, all the main hotels were sold out and the remaining rooms were off in distant zip codes. More rooms will become available later (especially around June 8, which is when credit cards are charged) but the scramble is on, and many will find no room at the inn.

This year, the convention rates for a single at the Hilton, Marriott or Hyatt hotels that are within walking distance of the convention center range from $175 to $219 a night, and they're sold out of those. A lot of people have already booked at those and other hotels without going through the convention even though that means a higher pricetag. Lodging near a convention center is usually contracted under a promotional arrangement designed to encourage conventions to come to town and give them loads of business. Each hotel will commit to making X% of their rooms available at a convention rate, then they'll sell the rest at higher prices — whatever price they can get. The convention rate for the Westin Horton Plaza, which is six blocks from the convention center, is $160 per night and I think they're sold out, too. Some online hotel bookers are currently saying they can get you in there for $465 a night and we can only guess what they'll charge for any rooms that become available in late June.

This, of course, creates a powerful financial incentive for the hotels to keep that X% as low as possible. The more rooms they don't make available via the convention plan, the more they can get for them. In future years, we may see fewer and fewer rooms available at a convention rate, and there's really nothing anyone can do about that.

It's rather amazing, in a way. I've been attending comic book conventions since 1970, the year of the first one in San Diego. I've gone to them all across America and recall a time when many hotels didn't want them and the ones that did take them were hesitant and treated us like a second-class booking. We were a young, non-spending crowd. We didn't come in with lavish expense accounts and run up huge bar tabs. We didn't book huge banquets or cocktail parties or take the higher-priced suites. We were a little rowdy and we had a tendency to disturb the "real guests." I even remember one hotel accepting a comic convention booking and then, when some other group wanted the place on the same dates, reneging on the commitment.

Sure ain't that way these days. Just in the hotel rates alone — never mind the cash we throw around in restaurants and on taxis and other local merchants — the convention has a major impact on the economy of San Diego. As Jack Kirby — who predicted all this way back in 1973 or so — would say, "Never underestimate the power of comics!"

• Posted at 3:32 PM · LINK

Today's Cheney Thoughts

Good to hear that the gentleman who was on the receiving end of Dick Cheney's shotgun blast is doing better. I frankly don't understand the appeal of "hunting" as he and the Veep practice it...and I put that in quotes because a friend of mine would have wanted it that way. He's a championship hunter with a whole trophy room into which I will not go because I can't stand to see all those mounted animal heads. On the phone the other day, he said (approximately), "What these guys were doing was not hunting. Hunting requires some skill and stamina and in some cases, a little personal risk. These guys were at a club where they arrange it so anyone can kill some birds and pretend it's hunting."

Either way, I don't see why anyone would enjoy it...but then, I never figured out why people enjoyed the original Star Trek, either. So I'm content that there are just some things in this world that thrill others without thrilling me, which is fine. We don't all have to love everything the same way and to the same degree.

A lot of websites seem to be getting all Grassy Knoll on us with theories as to why there have been the odd delays in announcing the news and in Cheney making any sort of public statement of regret. I admit it's odd but in these situations, the simplest explanation is the most likely. It may just be taking a long time for someone to teach Dick Cheney how to utter the words, "I did something wrong." This whole administration has had a bad tendency to confuse never admitting errors with always being right. They won't even admit that they might have been wrong to act on faulty intelligence. It's kinda like, "Whatever we did was correct, even if we didn't know what we were doing at the time." One presumes he will not take that approach in his interview on Fox News later today.

• Posted at 11:40 AM · LINK

Early Morning Blogging

I just finished a by-phone guest appearance on the fine New York radio show about comics, 'Nuff Said! It's been on for years, hosted by some combination of Ken Gale, Ed Menje and Mercy Van Vlack, broadcasting (now) over WBAI, which is listener-supported radio. For some reason, they thought having me on would bring in the pledges and I hope we got a couple. Over at their website, you may be able to locate info on how to hear old broadcasts. It's worth looking because there are some real gems in there.

While I was talking on the radio, I was simultaneously posting an old article on my website here. It's this one, a report on the 1996 (I said 1997 earlier) party celebrating the 100th birthday of the great ventriloquist, Señor Wences. I didn't write much in there about how Rickie Layne and Velvel did what I now think was Layne's last public performance...but he was there and folks who remembered him and Velvel from The Ed Sullivan Show were thrilled to see him there.

Okay, going to bed. And I just realized my doctor reads this weblog and will scold me for staying up so late. I'm still recuperating.

• Posted at 2:51 AM · LINK

Tuesday, February 14, 2006

On Your Mark...Get Set...

The hotel reservation service for this year's Comic-Con International opens tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM, Pacific Time. A few weeks ago, someone inaccurately reported it as 9:00 AM, Eastern Time, and a couple of my local friends were irate because they figured that meant getting up to be ready at 6 AM.

I don't know how many rooms will be available but it would not surprise me if they're all gone by the time the late risers log in. The last few years, I've had friends calling me in despair. They didn't get in quickly and found themselves faced with the choice of staying in New Mexico and commuting...or paying a per-night figure roughly equal to the price of a near-mint Action Comics #1. I cannot help these people. You have X number of hotel rooms near the convention center and Y number of people who want one, and Y is at least ten times X, maybe twenty or thirty times. It's simple math.

But don't give up too quickly. Anecdotal evidence suggests that a lot of people, well aware of the inevitable shortage, long ago made any kind of reservation they could get — sometimes, several — and they'll be cancelling some as we get closer to the date. Some hotels (I don't mean the ones available through the con) may be holding back rooms 'til later. Last year just before the con, when everything south of Disneyland seemed booked solid with a waiting list, a friend of mine innocently called a hotel within walking distance of the convention center and got a room at a decent price. The person who took the reservation told him, "For weeks now, we've been laughing at people who call and ask what you asked, but someone just cancelled."

So don't despair. But also don't call me.

Anyway, the gold rush begins tomorrow at the Comic-Con website. Let the games commence.

• Posted at 7:10 PM · LINK

Before Anyone Writes In...

I just realized that the last two items I posted here kind of go together. I hadn't heard about the death of Rickie Layne when I posted the link this morning to the video of Rod Hull but they were both great performers who manipulated very rude and funny puppets.

Just thought I'd mention the connection before dozens of you take the time to write in and make note of it.

• Posted at 3:47 PM · LINK

Rickie Layne, R.I.P.

Ventriloquist Rickie Layne, who made 38 appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show with his wooden friend Velvel, died Saturday at the age of 81. As this 2002 article in The Jewish Journal explains, Layne (born Richard Israel Cohen) owed his stardom to a recommendation from singer Nat King Cole.

Some additional details not in the article: The Sunset Strip nightclub mentioned in the piece was Ciro's, which was in the building where The Comedy Store is now housed. Cole's wife, Maria Cole, was playing there and her opening act, fresh from the Catskills and Miami hotel circuits, was Rickie Layne and Velvel. On October 23, 1955, Nat and Maria did the Sullivan show and told Ed about the wonderful Jewish comedian and his dummy with the Yiddish accent. Sullivan said he ordinarily liked to see an act before he booked it and that he wasn't travelling to the West Coast, where Layne was then working, for some time. Nat said, in effect, "Trust me on this one, Ed. Book the guy. If you don't love him, my next appearance with you is free."

Sullivan took the offer and Rickie Layne appeared on the January 1, 1956 episode of Ed's show, which was called Toast of the Town back then. Layne's lips moved more than Edgar Bergen's even but Velvel was hilarious and the act was immediately booked again, with many appearances to follow. Of all the acts that appeared on Sullivan's long-running variety series, only four others — Wayne & Shuster, Topo Gigio, Jack Carter and Myron Cohen — made more appearances than Rickie Layne and Velvel. He was one of Ed's main "go-to" guys when a given episode seemed in need of an extra comedy spot. (The Jewish Journal article says he made 48 appearances. It was actually 38.)

Alas, Layne's career did not much survive the end of the Sullivan program. He barely worked after the late seventies. His last public performance seems to have been in 1997 when there was a show/party at The Improv in Hollywood to celebrate the 100th birthday of the great Señor Wences. I should post an article I wrote at the time about that wonderful evening, but one of the things that made it special was the appearance of Velvel. Not long after, I was fortunate to attend a private party for Rickie Layne that celebrated his life and career, and to hear him tell wonderful tales of his years playing the Borscht Circuit. It was amazing how many hotel and showroom owners couldn't quite grasp the fact that the insults (and demands for better pay) that came out of Velvel's mouth actually were the views of Mr. Layne.

Oddly enough, the other day in the hospital, I watched an Ed Sullivan special on that in-house comedy TV channel I mentioned and saw a few seconds of Velvel in great form. I wish someone would assemble a special or a DVD of those acts presented in full. With so many people like this leaving us, those clips are all we have to remember the great art form represented by variety performers like Rickie Layne. And, oh yeah — Velvel, too.

• Posted at 3:42 PM · LINK

Rod Puppet

One of the most-accessed articles I have on my site here is this one about the late Rod Hull, who performed an odd but hilarious act with his creation, Emu. Richard Schultz tips me off about this brief online clip of Rod in action — not the best example of the Hull technique but it may give you some idea of what he did.

• Posted at 8:18 AM · LINK

Monday, February 13, 2006

Quick Comment

There have probably been funnier moments on television than the opening of tonight's Daily Show with Jon Stewart, as they covered the story of Dick Cheney's hunting accident. But I sure can't think of one just now. They have a video clip up over at Crooks and Liars.

• Posted at 9:14 PM · LINK

Jose, Can You See?

Those of you wishing to view episodes of The Bill Dana Show do not have to get yourself hospitalized to make this happen. A company called Corinth Films sells a DVD of six episodes. In fact, going by their website, Corinth Films sells nothing else. I have no idea what the quality of the video is...and $24.00 for a DVD of six half-hour TV shows seems steep to me but if you have to have 'em, there they be. The six episodes and the history of the show are described on the front end website, which is www.billdanaondvd.com. The installment I saw while in the hospital was, appropriately enough, the one on this DVD about Jose Jiminez (Dana) and Byron Glick (Don Adams) being afraid of donating to a blood drive. It featured a nice performance by Charles Lane, who always played a crotchety something, as a crotchety doctor and it amused me...but of course, I was full of antibiotics at the time.

• Posted at 5:20 PM · LINK

Briefly Noted...

The Los Angeles Times [registration might be required] joins the never-ending legion of those who write about Superman but are unable to correctly spell the names of both Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster at the same time.

• Posted at 2:17 PM · LINK

Monday Morning Home Blogging

And what a joy to be typing on a non-laptop keyboard sitting at my desk instead of with the computer balanced on a hospital table between my pitcher of water and a dish of mandarin orange segments left over from Friday breakfast.

Hello all. Thanks again for all the nice messages and I hope you enjoyed the hospital blogging, which did much to preserve my sanity. The staff at Cedars-Sinai (that's where I was) was uniformly efficient and helpful, but being in one little bed in one little room for four days...well, that's the most confined I've felt since I wrote Scooby Doo. My foot looks about like it did before the inflammation and I've switched from intravenous antibiotics to the oral variety. A few days of non-rigorous lifestyle and occasionally elevating said foot and all should be well.

Based on e-mails from several folks who've had Cellulitis, it looks like I had a minor case and managed to get it treated before it spread too far. Still, it's not an experience I would recommend to anyone.

I should tell you about Channel Six at Cedars-Sinai. Their TV offerings include all the local stations and most basic cable channels, plus a number of in-house channels, all but one of which feature documentaries on taking better care of one's health. The exception, Channel Six, is their "Board of Governors Comedy Channel," offering reruns of old TV shows. They have episodes of The Jack Benny Show, The Burns and Allen Show, The Bill Dana Show, The Andy Williams Show, and "best of" specials of Carol Burnett, the Smothers Brothers, Pat Paulsen, Johnny Carson. They kept rerunning a "Debbie Reynolds in Las Vegas" show and a special with Carol Channing and Pearl Bailey, and there were also David Copperfield magic specials, plus a very nice little magic special featuring one of my favorite sleight-of-hand artisans, Johnny "Ace" Palmer.

I hadn't seen a Bill Dana Show in years. I forgot how good it was, with Jonathan Harris and Don Adams stealing scene after scene from Mr. Dana, and how almost the entire production staff consisted of the same people working on The Dick Van Dyke Show that year. I'm told these shows are syndicated these days but not where I can see them; not without putting myself into the hospital again, which I have no intention of doing.

Yesterday, the entire in-house TV feed, including CBS, NBS, ABC, CNN, USA Network, etc., was about a second and a half out of sync. I imagined some poor guy in another room waking up from surgery, turning on his set and thinking, "Oh, no! What's happened to me?"

And that's about all I have in mind to write at the moment. Have to go put my foot up and enjoy my own bed for a while.

• Posted at 11:57 AM · LINK

Monday Morning Hospital Blogging

My doctor just came in, looked at my leg and ordered me to "enjoy the sumptuous breakfast here" — there's a risky prescription — and go home. Then he left because apparently the Emergency Room is full of people who've been accidentally shot by Dick Cheney.

• Posted at 6:14 AM · LINK

Sunday, February 12, 2006

Thinking Out Loud

I'm sure we're in for endless jokes about Dick Cheney joining Aaron Burr in the ranks of American Vice-Presidents Who've Shot Someone. But here's a question: Why is the man who's a heartbeat away from the presidency out hunting? The whole idea of hunting bothers me but leave that aside. Let's say it's a great, fun sport. Shouldn't the Secret Service still say, "Uh, Mr. Vice-President, we don't like you being around people with guns"? I mean, isn't there some unnecessary security risk in there? Even if everyone in the hunting party passes a rigid security clearance, the Secret Service is supposed to keep weapons away from the Veep. And if Cheney could accidentally shoot this poor guy, isn't there some danger of this poor guy accidentally shooting Cheney?

I always understood that when you run for public office of this magnitude, you agree to sacrifice a certain amount of privacy and freedom to the folks charged with protecting you. Anyone here remember Ronald Reagan claiming the reason he didn't attend church more often was because the Secret Service thought it was a security risk and asked him not to? I'm no fan of Mr. Cheney but couldn't he put off killing quail 'til he's out of office? There'll be quail then. There may not be a future for our economy but there'll be quail.

• Posted at 10:32 PM · LINK

One Reason Hospitals Are So Crowded

Dick Cheney with a gun.

• Posted at 6:34 PM · LINK

Odd Typo

It has just been pointed out to me that I titled the post before last "Sunday Morning Hotel Blogging." I thought I was typing "Sunday Morning Hospital Blogging." I don't know how my fingers made that mistake because this place is definitely not a hotel. At a hotel, they don't serve you rotten food, make you sleep in uncomfortable beds, have people screaming in the hallways in pain, or stick you with needles. Except in Vegas at the Imperial Palace.

• Posted at 12:16 PM · LINK

Sunday Afternoon Hospital Blogging

A lady in the next room went hysterical early this morning. I don't know what it was about because the nursing staff had a shift change before I could ask anyone...not that it was really any of my business, anyway. From what I could hear, it was a relentless stream of bad news that got to her. One new nugget was delivered and it was one grief too many. She began crying and screaming and taking it out on the staff here, which of course is thoroughly professional and in no way responsible for any of the woes that have befallen this poor woman. I mean, I assume she was not wailing about the stingy servings of apple juice.

She yelled and cursed and at one point, she pushed my door open and tried to come into my room, thinking (I guess) that it was some sort of exit or way out of her misery. The nurses gently steered her back to her room and kept her there until someone arrived who had her relocated. Within an hour, her room had been cleaned and someone else was wheeled in. I mentioned to one of the women who come in periodically to jab pins into me that it was a rapid turnover and she said, "I'm surprised it took an hour. They're jammed up down in Emergency and they're out of beds. People are waiting six, seven hours then getting told to go somewhere else for treatment."

I said, "That's awful. Is there some sort of epidemic going on?"

"No," she said. "It's like that most of the time." Then she stuck a needle in me and left.

• Posted at 12:07 PM · LINK

Sunday Morning Hotel Blogging

As I mentioned, being a patient in a hospital is altogether new for me. I've logged many hours in these buildings visiting friends or tending to parents. Apart from my appendectomy, this is my first time in the embarrassing gown and the uncomfortable adjustable bed.

I have a fair amount of memory of having my appendix out when I was a small lad. The event did not scare me but it scared my father, who was as compassionate and kind as any other man who was never up for sainthood. (If they gave Jews equal consideration, he'd be a shoo-in.) But he was a nervous man and the fact that he was nervous convinced me I was supposed to be. I remember that, I remember being wheeled into a big room and put to sleep and I remember waking up in a different place with the odd sensation that while closing my incision, the surgeon had absent-mindedly sewn me to the blankets and sheets.

This was, of course, a kids' wing of a hospital. There was a little playroom and as soon as I could walk, I was encouraged to go in there and play with the toys that were there, none of which interested me. That was until I found a small stash of 78 RPM records and a little parti-colored record player (remember record players?) on which to play them. They were all lame fairy tales except for one record, which was by Paul Winchell, who was already one of my five-or-so favorite people to watch on TV. On one side, he and Jerry Mahoney sang, "When You Come to the End of a Lollipop" and on the other, he and Knucklehead Smif warbled a little ditty called, "Run Little Rabbit, Run." For the next two days, until they let me go home, I played the hell out of that record. It wasn't so much that I liked the songs as that I liked the sound of Winchell. He made me feel like I was still in touch with my real world. I think the hospital may even have checked me out a bit prematurely because the nurses in that ward couldn't stand another chorus of "Run Little Rabbit, Run."

Where I am now, I'm in a private room. I have a TV with a pretty good array of channels but, alas, no TiVo. As much as I moan about the cuisine, right now if you gave me my choice of Dr. Hoggly-Woggly's ribs or the ability to pause, rewind and record shows for later viewing, I might opt for the latter. Spoiled by TiVo is what I am. Last night, I tried to watch A Fish Called Wanda on TCM but every time someone came in to take my blood pressure, check my blood sugar, check my oxygen, reinsert my I.V. needle, start a new I.V. drip, deliver the evening snack, etc., I had to turn the TV off for a few minutes and I finally gave up. I made it about as far as the scene where Kevin Kline dangles John Cleese out the window and that was it. When I get home, I'll haul out the DVD. I have watched a number of shows here I ordinarily do not watch and have been reminded why it is I never watch them. Exactly when was Bob Barker replaced with an audio-animatronic with one facial expression?

I also have my laptop here. That helps. And visitors.

I had an uncle once who wouldn't go near hospitals; not until they had to put him in them. He saw hospitals as negative places, buildings filled with pain and suffering and people with no hope. I see them as just the opposite: Places where everyone is committed to prolonging and saving lives. (Okay, have it your way: Everyone but the kitchen staff.) Somewhere on this weblog, I may have mentioned a friend who's an emergency room doctor at another hospital, the one to which I often take my mother. He's been there 20+ years and had many chances to be promoted out of the pace and messiness of the department. Which is exactly what he doesn't want. He thinks that job is what doctorin' is all about, dealing with an endless variety of real crisis situations and seeing some immediate good come out of his efforts. I lack a good 98.6% of the skills you need to be a doctor, starting with the ability to look at blood and injuries without diving for the vomitorium. The only three things I think I'd be good at would be bedside manner, taking Wednesdays off and billing. Whenever I'm around doctors and sense people going out in better shape than when they arrived, I think about how satisfying and blessed the job must be.

• Posted at 1:15 AM · LINK

Saturday, February 11, 2006

More Hospital Blogging

This afternoon at the WonderCon in San Francisco, someone went up to a friend of mine and said, "Have you heard anything about Mark? It says on his weblog that he's having major surgery." My friend panicked and raced to phone me. I assured him that I'm just in here with an infection which is being treated with intravenous antibiotics (I have an I.V. line in my arm as I'm typing this so it would be very insensitive to write in and point out typos). As you can see by scrolling down, I posted no such thing here but maybe I shouldn't be surprised. Almost every political posting here brings an e-mail from someone with the same level of reading comprehension.

Really, I'm doing well with this. The lower right leg is now almost the color of the old Crayola light orange crayons and we may see patches of flesh by morning. I'll write more about this stay when I'm not working on a laptop balanced on a tray over my thighs...but the hospital staff is terrific and the room is not depressing and, hey, dinner even tasted like one of the four basic food groups. I don't know which one but it was definitely one of them. Apart from the endless parade of women coming in to stick needles in me, it ain't that bad. I've worked on cartoon shows that were more unpleasant than this.

• Posted at 10:23 PM · LINK

Saturday Hospital Blogging

I'll get the important stuff out of the way first: The food has gotten a little better but only because Carolyn brought me a bag of ketchup packets that she scored at a Jack-in-the-Box on her way here. Last night, I had brisket that could best be described as duct tape with a little marbling. For tonight, I ordered the chicken tenders and a dish of canned pineapple and with luck, I may be able to tell which is which.

Now then. To the less important matters...

My system seems to be responding well to the medication. My lower right leg is no longer the color of Pepto-Bismol. It's more like Bazooka Bubble Gum that's been chewed so long that it's lost all its flavor. If what they're telling me is so, I may be home-blogging by Monday.
Thanks to all who've written with good thoughts, including the e-mail signed "Pat Robertson" who wrote that this was God's way of punishing me for not supporting George W. Bush. My laptop is configured to read e-mail but not to answer any of it. (I was reinstalling software to take my little Toshiba to WonderCon with me when this inflammation occurred.) I will write back to all of you when I can.
As I am lying here in bed typing this in an awkward position, lovely flowers have just arrived from the newlyweds, Paul Dini and Misty Lee. Thank you, Misty and Paul.
Biggest laugh I got so far here: Friday night, they had me on a gurney in a corridor of the emergency room for about an hour. You can imagine how comfy that is...it's like trying to levitate on a tongue depressor. So I'm lying there as people scurry and roll past and just to get my mind off the ordeal, I'm saying silly things to most of the nurses and patients that pass. Two firemen wheel in a guy, also on a gurney, who looks like he's been through something that makes my infirmity seem like a paper cut. His clothes are torn, he's scuffed and bleeding and parts of him are taped up or in temporary splints. Most of all, he just looks deeply depressed and I find myself head-to-head with him with each of us on our respective gurneys. I look at him and he looks at me and I feel like I should say something. So I say, "Race ya to the end of the hall!" There's a beat and then the guy, who I guess at that moment didn't have much in his life to smile about, starts laughing. He thanks me for that before they wheel him off for major reconstruction. But what he doesn't know is that the moment, especially his response, did as much for me as it did for him. I haven't felt a bit depressed myself about being here since then.

I'll try and post again tomorrow. If I don't, it'll probably be because I couldn't get the wi-fi here to work, not because the news is bad. Thanks again to everyone, including the total strangers and even you, "Pat Robertson."

• Posted at 2:40 PM · LINK

Friday, February 10, 2006

Friday Hospital Blogging

So it turns out I don't have a sprained ankle. I have something much nastier called Cellulitis which does not come from, as one might imagine, using a mobile phone too much. Matter of fact, they don't seem to know what causes it but it does make your lower legs swell up and turn the color of Pepto-Bismol. I am actually posting this from a hospital bed — the second one I've inhabited in my life. The first was when I had my appendix out at age nine and I think the meal they served me for lunch today was left over from my previous stay.

I'll probably be here 'til Monday at least so don't expect much posting for a while. Lunch aside, I am in no pain and my condition is already responding to treatment. No "get well" e-mails necessary. I intend to get better even if no one writes. Bye for now!

• Posted at 2:49 PM · LINK

Thursday, February 9, 2006

Cry Ankle

Change of plans. I won't be at that Quick Draw! event tonight in Santa Cruz but don't let that stop you from attending. We have a Plan B that should make for an entertaining event without me.

I seem to have sprained my right foot or pulled a muscle or I don't know what I did but it hurts like hell. I was lying down, taking a nap when it hit yesterday afternoon. One minute, everything was fine. The next, things were swelling and turning lovely shades of aquamarine. Ice and ibuprofen have helped a lot but I don't think you'll see me this weekend at the WonderCon in San Francisco. Not unless there's a miracle cure by morning. Others are being drafted to assume my moderating duties and I'm sure it'll prove how expendable I am.

Okay, I'm going to hobble back to bed. Good night.

• Posted at 3:34 AM · LINK

Wednesday, February 8, 2006

Today's Political Rant

Some Republicans are moaning that the funeral of Coretta King turned political. They're outraged that certain folks "exploited" the occasion to bash poor George W. Bush, who had to sit there and endure it and later be civil to those who'd bashed him. There's some truth to that but so what? The late Ms. King was a political activist and the people who turned out for the event sure seemed to love it. A funeral is for the friends and family of the deceased and if they think something's appropriate, no one else's opinion should matter, especially folks who didn't much like the Kings to begin with. I might buy the argument that a heavily-politicized funeral is unworthy of free television time but that's a separate issue...one that has to consider that the folks who decide to broadcast such events can't be sure of their political content before the fact. Certainly it isn't the fault of the speakers that the event is on C-Span, nor should they depart from what they think is appropriate just because there are cameras present.

For good or ill, the funeral of a political person is going to be a political event, even if no one gets up and issues calls to activism. Some of the speakers who showed up at the Coretta King memorial surely did so after consideration of how it might help them with black voters just to be there, regardless of what they said. I'm not sure people like George W. Bush or Hillary Clinton order a pizza without studying how it might impact their poll numbers.

Critics of that funeral — and I think there's something unceremonious just in being a critic of a funeral — have likened it to the tribute when Senator Paul Wellstone died. I actually watched all 3+ hours of the Wellstone Memorial and I thought the characterization of it as a political event was a gross and probably deliberate exaggeration. Perhaps ten minutes of it went over the line, some of it directed at Jesse Ventura who raced to the talk shows to pout that some people in attendance didn't like him. You'd think a guy who made his living for so many years getting booed could cope with that.

The Wellstone Memorial was inspiring to some Democrats because it included Democrats talking the way a lot of Democrats wish prominent Democrats would always talk. I think that's why a few Republicans felt the urgency to misrepresent and discredit it. At the San Diego Con a few years back, I got into a loud hallway argument with someone who called it a disgrace based on the 90 seconds or so of it he saw on Fox News. I kept urging him to watch a little more of the video (which was then up on the C-Span site) and he kept saying, "I've seen all I need to see." A lot of demagogues on both sides count on the eagerness of some to believe the worst about the opposition and to avoid evidence that might upset their worldview.

Watching clips of the Coretta King event, I actually felt a little sorry for George W. Bush. Like his father, he's not good at concealing when he's bored or restless with an event that isn't serving his immediate interests. He seems especially uncomfortable in front of audiences who aren't eager to believe every word he says. Frankly, I think it was nice that Bush was there, if only because that meant six or eight hours that he wasn't back in the White House, working for some legislation that Martin Luther King and Coretta would have opposed.

To my loved ones — assuming I have any left by the time I go — I say this: If there's a memorial, say or do anything you think is right or that will give you comfort and closure. If you all want to show up in clown suits, get out of one tiny car and spray the coffin with seltzer, that's fine with me. The only thing that would be inappropriate would be for someone to criticize what you want to do. It's not their event.

• Posted at 6:25 PM · LINK

There's No Such Website!

You probably know how this works by now but for the benefit of those who came in late, I'll go through it. We have here links and descriptions to five websites. Four of these are real, meaning that if you click the link, you'll be redirected to the site described — unless, of course, it's overloaded with traffic due to its being listed here. That has happened. One of the descriptions is bogus. Phony. Not real. We made it up. If you click on that link, you'll move to a page that will tell you so. Ergo, your mission is to figure out which is the website that ain't real. Go for it, dude.

Call It Macaroni - How many different shapes of macaroni have been produced around the world? More than you'd imagine.
Name That Candy Bar! - Can you identify popular candy bars just by looking at photos of their innards? Here's a website where you can hone this vital skill.
Bad Sweater Guy - A fellow models ugly sweaters he acquired while working at Marshall's, which is apparently the place to go when you want an ugly sweater.
The Loincloth Site - Want to make a loincloth? Pose in your loincloth? See other people in loinclothes? This is the site for you.
The Virtual Corkscrew Museum - Someone has actually amassed a collection of vintage corkscrews...and they're nice enough to share them with us.

This time around, the real but fake-sounding websites were suggested by Tony Isabella and Kevin Aitchison. They receive our thanks and nothing else, but the thanks oughta be enough for them. Thanks for playing There's No Such Website!

• Posted at 11:00 AM · LINK

Plug Plug Plug

Just to remind you all: Tomorrow (Thursday) evening, if you're in Santa Cruz in Northern California, there'll be a new edition of Quick Draw! at the Veterans Memorial Building on Front Street. Sergio Aragonés will be drawing. Scott Shaw! will be drawing. Bill Morrison will be drawing. Batton Lash will be drawing. I, with the help of the audience, will be telling them what to draw. Details are here, and a splendid time is guaranteed for all.

• Posted at 9:27 AM · LINK

Tuesday, February 7, 2006

Unset the TiVo!

June Foray's appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show, announced for tomorrow, has been postponed. They're covering the Olympics and the Grammys and they have no room for the woman who voiced Rocket J. Squirrel at the moment. It'll be rescheduled, they say, and you'll read about it here when it is. Might be a month or so.

• Posted at 9:07 PM · LINK

Age Mismatches

David Cook reminds me that in North by Northwest, the mother of Cary Grant (who was born in 1904) was played by Jessie Royce Landis (who was born in 1904).

Jim Newman reminds me that in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, the father of Dick Van Dyke (born: 1925) was played by Lionel Jeffries (born: 1926).

Galen Fott reminds me — well, actually informs me since I didn't know — that in the original New York company of The Fantasticks, 30-year-old Kenneth Nelson played Matt ("The Boy"), while 24-year-old Jerry Orbach played the older, wiser narrator El Gallo.

And Erik Peek, Eric Newsom, Steve Darnall and Alexander Pascover all remind me that in The Manchurian Candidate, Angela Lansbury (born in 1925) played the mother of Laurence Harvey (born in 1928).

• Posted at 3:07 PM · LINK

Today's Political Ramblings

A couple of folks have written to me to say they don't think I made it clear that even though Attorney General Gonzales wasn't put under oath, he can still be prosecuted for lying to Congress if it's determined that he did. Frankly, I think Gonzales could get up there and insist he's Captain Marvel and can fly around the room and there's zero chance of the Republican majority doubting him, let alone allowing a prosecution. But what I don't get is the argument for not treating him (or those oil company execs a few months ago when another committee leader waived the swearing-in) like anyone else. Why are some people put under oath and not others? Aren't they all supposed to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth? Why are there two classes of witnesses?

Here's another thing I don't understand. Gonzales kept talking about how Franklin Roosevelt and other past presidents had conducted very extensive electronic surveillance. Okay, that might be a good argument for why a president of the U.S. needs to do that. But the question before this committee and this country is whether Bush's actions violated the FISA law established in 1978. So I don't get how anything before that is particularly relevant. It's like they passed a law banning smoking in restaurants, and then someone got caught smoking in a restaurant and his defense was, "Yeah, but look how many people smoked in restaurants before that law."

It seems to me that the Bush administration position is that they think the '78 law was unwise and maybe, by their definition of the responsibility of the Chief Exec, even contrary to the Constitution. I don't know that I'd agree with that but it would be a more coherent, and perhaps more honest stance. But for some reason, they don't want to suggest the law is wrong; only that they can ignore it if they so choose. I don't think that's how this kind of thing is supposed to work.

• Posted at 10:57 AM · LINK

Younger Grandpa

Many sites seem to be discussing the raging controversy over the true birthdate of the late Al Lewis. A consensus seems to be emerging that he was definitely born in 1923, and he began saying 1910 when he did The Munsters. He was playing the father of Yvonne DeCarlo, who was born in 1922 and either (a) Lewis was afraid someone would think he was too young for the part so he fibbed or (b) the studio thought it might bother someone and they asked him to lie. I'm not sure either would be a very good reason but his being younger than Ms. DeCarlo seems to have been part of the reason.

Actually, there are plenty of instances of actors playing parents where the real ages don't match up. Maureen Stapleton was the same age as Dick Van Dyke when she played his mother in Bye Bye Birdie, and I'm sure other examples will come to me later. There might even have been something colorful about Al Lewis being younger than the woman playing his daughter when they were both portraying vampires. Maybe it's that they feared it would call attention to Yvonne DeCarlo's age and she (or the studio) didn't want that.

• Posted at 10:32 AM · LINK

Policy Statement

I agree with Bill Sherman's statement of political intent.

Browsing my e-mail, I sometimes wonder if some people understand that a weblog is something you do when you have time, and only when something pops into your head that you think is worth sharing with the world. My penchant for obits has caused some readers here to presume that if someone famous dies and I don't respond immediately with an anecdote, it must be that I have something against that famous person. No, I just may not have an anecdote or anything to say beyond the obvious or the time to write something.

• Posted at 10:17 AM · LINK

Monday, February 6, 2006

Grandfather Doesn't Know Better

Here's a big reason people thought "Grandpa" Al Lewis was born in 1910 when he was actually, they're now telling us, born in 1923. Kip Williams sent me a link to this interview in which Lewis was asked his birthdate and he gave it as April 30, 1910. And if he said it in one interview, he probably said it in others.

So what happened here? It's possible that whoever transcribed the interview misheard him but that sure doesn't sound likely. So either his family, which announced the 1923 date, is wrong...or Lewis, for whatever his reason, chose to lie about his age. But why lie to add thirteen years? And if that's wrong, a lot of stories he told are probably wrong too, including his war stories and his tales of getting involved in politics in the thirties. Among many other accounts that don't fit the corrected timeline is that he sometimes claimed to have been involved with the defense of Sacco and Vanzetti, who were executed in 1927. (Hey, maybe that's why they got the chair. They had a four year old kid defending them.)

My hunch is that the family is not wrong; that Al just thought it made him more colorful to have all those colorful experiences in his past and that he had to lengthen his past a bit to accomodate them all. But we may never know for sure.

• Posted at 11:24 PM · LINK

Briefly Noted

Testifying today before the Senate committee, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said, "President Washington, President Lincoln, President Wilson, President Roosevelt have all authorized electronic surveillance on a far broader scale."

Right. Washington was sending eels to spy on the British.

No wonder they didn't dare put this guy under oath.

• Posted at 7:39 PM · LINK

Piece on Paul

The New York Times has a nice article on DC Comics head honcho Paul Levitz. Why is it a nice article? Because it quotes me, of course.

• Posted at 6:41 PM · LINK

Today's Political Theory

Many years ago, Senator Arlen Specter from Pennsylvania was one of the main architects of the "single bullet theory" of the Kennedy assassination. I happen to believe that theory is correct and I have a new one. It's the "double Arlen Specter theory." My theory is that there are two senators from Pennsylvania named Arlen Specter who look exactly alike but who have totally different sets of principles and moral conduct.

Anyone who has followed this man's career (or rather, these men's careers) could cite many examples. No representative who has held office for any length of time has had quite the capacity to get both parties mad at him, often for the same actions. Browse Democratic websites and you'll see people cursing him as a Republican. Browse Republican sites and you'll see them cursing him louder as a "RINO" (Republican in Name Only). Ordinarily, I'd admire the seeming unwillingness to toe any party's line. But in this case, it's mostly a matter of one Arlen Specter subverting the other's agenda, making sure that any stand that puts principle over partisan concerns is soon neutralized.

The other day, UPI reported...

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, says President George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program appears to be illegal. Appearing on NBC's Meet the Press, Specter called the administration's legal reasoning "strained and unrealistic" and said the program appears to be "in flat violation" of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

Now, the lede is a bit overstated, given that Specter also said the problem may have been with the law itself. But it takes a certain amount of political courage to say as much as he did, and to make all those other statements about pursuing the truth, no matter who it embarrasses.

This morning, chairing the committee investigating these charges, we got an Arlen Specter who didn't feel the Attorney General needed to be sworn in before testifying. If you or I testified in a case involving a discrepancy of twenty dollars somewhere, we'd have to be sworn in and say whatever we said under oath. Judge Judy puts people under oath before she'll let them state their names in her TV court. Today, rather than spend the thirty seconds necessary to do that, Specter spent many long minutes defending that decision. He stated that the Attorney General had said he was quite willing to take the oath but that this particular Arlen Specter decided it wasn't necessary because, if I understand him correctly, somewhere there was precedent that showed this occasionally was not done and he didn't feel like doing it this time.

Sorry...I don't get it. The only conceivable reason to not take any kind of testimony under oath is to give the witness a smidgen of wiggle room if later, it's necessary to prosecute them for lying. This should not even be an option and I'll bet you that one of the Arlen Specters agrees. At least one of them must remember John Mitchell, a former attorney general who was convicted and sent to prison on charges that included obstruction of justice and perjury.

Some of you may be skeptical of my theory, and I can certainly understand that. You might be thinking, "Hey, how can Pennsylvania have two Senator Specters? States only get two senators and don't they have another one? No, not really. Take a look at some of the posturings and contradictions of this Rick Santorum guy who is sometimes passed off as "the other" senator from Pennsylvania. That's not a real senator. He's just some sham someone arranged to mask the fact that there are two Arlen Specters.

Come back later and I'll tell you about the three Joe Bidens. That's how many there'd have to be for there to be that many Joe Biden speeches and Sunday morning news show appearances.

• Posted at 2:04 PM · LINK

More Sidewalk Drawin'

Jay Shull, who reads this site, sends me a link to the work of another great pavement artist, Kurt Wenner.

• Posted at 10:15 AM · LINK

Grandpa Update

The press services are now correcting their obits on "Grandpa" Al Lewis, saying he was born in 1923, which would have made him 82 at the time of his death, not 95. I seem to recall a number of past instances where press reports confused his past with that of a couple of other gents in show business with the same name, and several Internet sites clearly had it wrong. So that may have been the source of the error.

• Posted at 10:13 AM · LINK

Paul Norris Honored

On a number of comic books I wrote years ago, I had the pleasure of working with Paul Norris, a fine artist and gentleman. Paul, who is 91 and sharp as ever, has many credits but I'll just mention two. He was the artist creator of Aquaman and then later, he wrote and drew the Brick Bradford newspaper strip for a little over 35 years. Others have said that Paul never missed a deadline in his life and while I can't attest to that, I can tell you that when we worked together, he was never not early with whatever he was drawing.

A few years ago at a San Diego Con, Stan Lee and I were wandering around, talking about something or other, and we wandered into a big auditorium where a panel of veteran comic artists was in progress. Stan mentioned he'd worked with everyone on the panel except one gent and asked who it was. When I told him it was Paul Norris, he said, "You mean, the guy who did Brick Bradford?" And then, with the exact same tone that some geeky fanboys have had when they asked me to introduce them to someone like Stan Lee, Stan asked me to introduce him to Paul Norris. Which I did. Paul couldn't believe that Stan Lee wanted to meet him and Stan couldn't believe that he was meeting Paul Norris.

Paul is a graduate of Midland Lutheran College in Fremont, Nebraska. Opening this week there is an exhibit of his artwork. Here's an article about his life and career, and there's some info there about the exhibit. If you're anywhere near Midland, check it out. But since you probably aren't, just read the article.

• Posted at 2:03 AM · LINK

Pavement Pics

Has anyone sent you a sample of Julian Beever's art? Mr. Beever does these remarkable chalk drawings on sidewalks that, when viewed from a certain angle, take on a 3-D effect. This website displays some of them. Take a look at the photos that show what the drawings look like when viewed from the wrong angle in order to fully understand what this man does. It's not humanly possible.

• Posted at 12:31 AM · LINK

Sunday, February 5, 2006

Myron Waldman, R.I.P.

Animator and animation director Myron Waldman died Saturday morning at the age of 97. His career dated back to working as a cel-painter on Betty Boop and Koko the Clown cartoons in 1930. The eminent cartoon historian, Mr. Jerry Beck, has posted a better obit than I could possibly produce. Go here to read it.

• Posted at 8:13 PM · LINK

Hard-Boiled and Singing

Here's a review of a stage production you can't go and see. In fact, I think the last performance is starting just as I'm posting this report on the matinee I saw this afternoon.

The Reprise! company in Los Angeles does these low-rehearsal, low-budget, high-talent interpretations of great Broadway musicals and they're just now finishing two weeks of City of Angels, a very fine show with a book by Larry Gelbart, lyrics by David Zippel and music by the late (and much-missed) Cy Coleman. For those of you unfamiliar with the show, it's about a writer in the forties who's not unlike Raymond Chandler. They're turning one of his hard-as-nails detective novels into a movie and he's selling out a bit of his soul for Big Bucks, working for an a-hole producer-director who's demanding change after change for no good reason. Anyone who's heard Mr. Gelbart discourse on what know-nothing execs have done to his own work will recognize a large part of the passion in his witty dialogue.

The stage is usually bisected. On one side, we see scenes from the novel as ace gumshoe Stone functions in a film noir environment, with costumes and sets in black-and-white to suggest that kind of world and movie. On the other, we see novelist Stine, who leads a more-or-less full-color existence, battling the idiot producer, cheating on his wife, breaking up with that wife and wrestling with his own rather confused conscience. Most of the actors in the show play at least two roles, one on each side of the stage, and both narratives get quite complicated, especially when one mirrors the other or they outright intersect. Somehow, the storylines resolve each other and the audience goes home very happy. At least, all the folks this afternoon who fled the Super Bowl to see City of Angels up at U.C.L.A. did. Gelbart's words are extremely clever and Zippel's music matches him, pun for pun and double entendre for double entendre. I think he even managed to get some triple and quadruple entendres in there.

Stephen Bogardus was Stine, Burke Moses was Stone and they both were terrific. So was Stuart Pankin, who played the producer who glories in messing with the writer's prose. I'd rave further but it would just make you sorrier you can't go see it. I'd go back and see it again if I could.

• Posted at 7:39 PM · LINK

Sunday Morning (Just Barely)

I've had the time to read up on the situation with the Danish cartoonists and I still don't have anything to write here apart from the obvious. What's more, I haven't seen any other bloggers write anything that I wanted to link to or even pass off as my own observations. Yes, cartoonists everywhere have a right to draw what they want. No, it may not be the smartest thing in the world to publish drawings that are going to get that many people that mad. Those two thoughts are not mutually exclusive.

I won't be watching the Super Bowl today. Carolyn and I are going to a play. You can get real good seats when you go on Super Bowl Sunday.

Sorry to read of the passing of Sonny King, a great entertainer who worked with Jimmy Durante and was a Vegas fixture for many years. He is most often mentioned for the historic achievement of introducing a kid named Jerry Lewis to a singer named Dean Martin. But Sonny, who I saw perform a few times when I first started trekking to Nevada, deserves to be remembered for more than that.

Lastly for now, this reminder: The WonderCon convenes in San Francisco this coming Friday. Unlike last year, when rain made for a messy weekend, the forecast calls for naught but sun, at least through Saturday. So that's a good sign. I'll be moderating a (for me) modest slate of panels and since I went to the trouble of making up the banner, I'm going to post it again...

• Posted at 11:58 AM · LINK

Saturday, February 4, 2006

"Grandpa" Al Lewis, R.I.P.

I never had the opportunity to really meet "Grandpa" Al Lewis, who has just passed away at the age of 95. [Correction: He was 82.] For several years, he fronted a restaurant in Greenwich Village where the main attraction was not the food but being seated and insulted by the man who'd played Grandpa Munster on The Munsters. On one trip to New York, the fine cartoonist Carol Lay took me there because, she said, all her friends loved going there and bantering with Grandpa. As it turned out, we arrived at the place only hours after it had closed forever.

It was a disappointment because I'd always found Al Lewis to be a crusty but colorful character. This obit will tell you the story of his career but basically, there were two high points: Car 54, Where Are You? and The Munsters. Car 54 was one of my favorite shows and Lewis was brilliant on it playing the chronic kvetch, Officer Leo Schnauzer. He was so good that at several points during the show's two season run, when the producers were having troubles with co-star Joe E. Ross, the decision was made to fire Ross and to elevate Lewis to co-star. Had the series returned for a third season, that would probably have happened.

It was The Munsters that made him famous and gave him his lasting nickname. I remember taking the Universal Studios tour at the time and seeing Grandpa Munster, in full blue-green make-up, coming out to sign autographs for folks on the tram. He managed to act quite cranky while obviously loving every second of it. Before and after that series, he had some fine screen roles, especially that of the hanging judge in Used Cars, a 1980 comedy that didn't get nearly enough attention.

Even into his nineties, Lewis remained an outspoken pain-in-the-butt to many, running for public office, broadcasting a local radio show in New York, and giving outrageous and outraged interviews whenever possible. It's sad to lose someone like that because he really was one of a kind.

• Posted at 2:28 PM · LINK

Frog Day Afternoon

This article in the L.A. Times [might make you register] discusses how the Disney folks are trying to resuscitate the popularity of Kermit, Miss Piggy and other Muppet characters. They'll be in two new commercials on Super Bowl Sunday.

The reporter probably didn't intend it as such but there's a sentence in the article that may nail the problem. It's the one that goes, "Every division at the company is contributing ideas to the renewal project." I have no inside info on what's going on over there but I do have some experience of seeing great characters get battered about in intra-corporate custody battles. The main problem those characters face is that they will never have another person as creative as Jim Henson guiding their fortunes. Even if someone that brilliant did come along, he'd never get the kind of authority and control that Henson had.

Speaking of Muppets: You may recall that last December, we noted here that the Internet Movie Database said that I had played the role of Ernie in his brief cameo in The Muppet Movie. I sent the folks there a message that said quite clearly that I had nothing whatsoever to do with that fine film and that the puppet (which did not speak in the movie) was operated by my friend, Earl Kress. Well, I'm pleased to note that the Internet Movie Database has changed their listing. Unfortunately, they've changed it to say that I just did the voice while Earl operated the puppet. In light of this, I'm going to do what any reasonable, sane person would do in such a situation. I'm going to give up.

• Posted at 2:04 AM · LINK

Update

Hey, we haven't checked lately to see if Abe Vigoda is alive.

• Posted at 12:23 AM · LINK

Friday, February 3, 2006

From the E-Mailbag...

The following message is from Bob Rivard. I'll meet you on the other side of it and reply.

I'm curious why the lack of commentary in support of the Danish cartoonists now hiding in fear for their lives from Islamofascist butchers? I know that threats of beheading and torture aren't quite as "chilling" as when conservatives merely criticize Doonesbury, The Boondocks, or Tedd Rall, but maybe the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund could divert some resources from protecting America's fearless cartoonists from Chimpy W. Hitler and offer support? I seem to recall your speaking up on behalf of cartoonists every once in a while, or is that some other website I'm thinking of?

Did I miss school the day the Danes invaded Iraq, supported Israel or suppressed Palestinians? Surely those notorious Danish imperialists brought this on themselves? Or maybe...just maybe...there really is, embedded in almost every country now, a death-welcoming fanatical murdering cult out there. One whose fundamental precepts, as they themselves express them, are really...get ready for a four letter word...evil. A cult which cannot be appeased, ignored, or convinced to accept diverse co-existence. One whose fundamental belief asks us to convert, supplicate, or die.

Does this make it any more clear what we might be fighting about in the middle east? Or 5 years ago in Manhattan?

In response to your first paragraph, there are two reasons I haven't posted anything yet about the Danish cartoonists. One is that I've been awfully busy with non-blogging concerns, including a script that's due and some personal and more pressing matters. I've had time to post fluff but not to really read up on the threats against these cartoonists and then — and here comes the second reason — to figure out what, beyond the obvious, I could add to the dialogue. I mean, we're all smart enough to operate computers. Don't we know that beheadings and torture, and threats thereof, are always wrong? They're wrong when used against cartoonists. They're wrong when used against non-cartoonists. Do you really need a guy who writes a weblog about possums in his backyard and Groo the Wanderer to come out against beheadings and torture? That's really going to make a difference.

And if you think I've discussed anyone's criticisms of Boondocks or Tedd Rall (isn't it Ted?) then yes, I think you're thinking of some other weblog. I have suggested that people who believe Doonesbury skews exclusively liberal are overlooking its savaging of Bill Clinton, Ted Kennedy and others but that's not at all an issue of government censorship. (I also didn't get around to writing anything about the Joint Chiefs of Staff of this country protesting a recent political cartoon by Tom Toles. If I had, it would have been that I think they have every right to protest such things but that all they're doing is looking thin-skinned and making a hero out of Toles.)

Frankly, I've never found your four-letter word very practical for discussing real-world problems and their possible solutions. Something motivates people who commit terror and atrocities and it isn't that Satan gives them marching orders and sends them out to destroy lives for no reason. I think my attitude is more like, "Okay, they're evil. Now let's move past that and figure out what to do about them."

No, I'm afraid it doesn't make it any clearer what we might be fighting about in the middle east. In fact, I'm finding that with each passing week and every Bush and/or Cheney speech, I'm less clear on what we're hoping to accomplish in Iraq and I see even less connection to 9/11. It isn't that I don't think there aren't folks out there — more than ever, I'm afraid — who pray for more American deaths. It's that I'm losing the thread of why what we're doing over there is making things better. Judging from the polls, I'm not alone.

I'll write more about this when I get more time. Which may not be for a while.

• Posted at 11:20 PM · LINK

Six of One, Half a Dozen of the Other...

I was intrigued by Paul Davidson's identification of Danny Teeson as the dancer who played Mr. Six, the elderly gent in the Six Flags commercial, and I decided to do a bit of Internet sleuthing on my own. The top picture above is a cut from the website of Professional Vision Care Associates, which is a firm here in California that specializes in unusual contact lens sets and other eye-related special effects for movies. On their site, they have a Client List and as you can see, it says that they did some work for Mr. Six in a Six Flags commercial. Okay.

The second picture above is from the Google cache of that page, meaning that it's what Google saw on the site a few days ago. As you can see, in the exact same place, the client is identified as Danny Teeson. (The colors on the various words indicate that those were the search words I used to find the page.) Here's a link to the cache page, though it will probably be gone very shortly.

There are a couple of possibilities here, one being that some expertly-crafted hoax is at work here...though I can't imagine why. But it sure looks like Mr. Six was played by Mr. Teeson and also that someone had the Professional Vision Care people change their website in the last few days to remove his name. And that's all the detective work I have time for now. Good night.

• Posted at 2:46 AM · LINK

Friday Possum Blogging

This fine specimen of possumhood was caught nibbling cat food on my back steps not ten minutes ago. Nice of the neighborhood cats to leave him some of their dinner, don't you think?

For more pics of the creatures that inhabit my backyard, go visit the section of this website called My Backyard. And see if you can pick out this possum's grandpa who is probably over there somewhere.

• Posted at 1:29 AM · LINK

Thursday, February 2, 2006

Old Guy Unmasked

Hey, remember those commercials for the Six Flags amusement parks that featured an extremely-senior citizen dancing his heart out? The character's name was Mr. Six and at the time, there was a colossal mystery as to who was playing him under all that make-up. Six Flags seems to have dumped the campaign but blogger Paul Davidson was determined to find out who portrayed the spry Mr. Six...and he claims to have the inside info.

• Posted at 10:09 PM · LINK

WonderCon Wonderment

The schedule is up for programming at this year's WonderCon, which commences a week from tomorrow in San Francisco. Here's the list for Friday, here's the list for Saturday and here's the list for Sunday...but you needn't click on any of them. If you're attending, you'll only want to attend my panels. You can get a list of them by clicking below.

• Posted at 7:54 PM · LINK

No Spit-Takes

Today on our sister site, Old TV Tickets, we offer up one from The Danny Thomas Show. And that seemed like as good a reason as any to post the covers to the two Danny Thomas Show comic books published by Dell. The great Alex Toth was hired to illustrate the one at left and, he says, that meant taking the artwork over to gain the approval of Mr. Thomas, himself. Though Danny had made a lot of money mocking the size of his own nose, he complained (Alex says) it was too large in the comic...but grudgingly allowed it to go to press as Toth drew it. The second and final issue was drawn by Russ Manning.

Please note: These are real covers of real comic books that were actually published. I did not whip them up in Photoshop.

• Posted at 7:28 PM · LINK

Broadway Not on Broadway

Some of the Broadway shows that have opened in Las Vegas haven't done well but more are heading to Nevada. Meanwhile, The Producers is a big hit in Israel.

• Posted at 12:50 AM · LINK

Wednesday, February 1, 2006

Reminder

Note to self: Remind your blog readers that the first lady of animation voicing, June Foray, is on The Ellen DeGeneres Show on Wednesday, February 8.

• Posted at 8:42 PM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

Message before last, I said that George W. Bush has — and I quote myself — "...this tendency to announce things and then forget about them." This brought two incensed, outraged e-mails from Bush supporters informing me that Bush is a man of convictions, that his word is like gold, that he has the integrity to do what he says, yadda yadda yadda. To these folks, I offer this news item that appeared on the wires less than 24 hours after the State of the Union address. Here's the first paragraph...

WASHINGTON - One day after President Bush vowed to reduce America's dependence on Middle East oil by cutting imports from there 75 percent by 2025, his energy secretary and national economic adviser said Wednesday that the president didn't mean it literally.

That's one of the problems I have with Bush: He rarely means anything literally. When he said during the 2000 elections that he was against "nation-building," he didn't mean it literally. When he pledged money to rebuild Manhattan after 9/11 or New Orleans after Katrina, he didn't mean it literally. Not long ago, when he said that wiretaps require a warrant, he didn't mean it literally and when he signed a bill that outlawed torture, he immediately issued a "signing statement" that asserted his right not to follow the bill he'd just signed. He even hides behind the tactic. At one point, he and his administration very much wanted us all to believe, as they apparently did, that there was a provable link between Saddam Hussein and the guys who hit us on 9/11. When this turned not to be provable, the administration fallback was that they really didn't mean it.

I sometimes debate about this man with friends who say they like him because he takes bold action and he's a man of conviction. Personally, I think "bold action" is a negative unless it's coupled with some qualifier...like, say, the right "bold action" or the smart "bold action." And as for being a man of conviction, I'm sorry. I just don't see it. I see a guy who was told our country was under attack and sat and read My Pet Goat for seven minutes. I see a guy who announces Big Plans, like building a space station on Mars...and then he lets them wither away and anonymous aides have to go around and say, "He didn't mean that literally."

I don't hate the man. Dismissing someone as a "Bush-hater" is a too common way of trying to not deal with legitimate criticisms of a guy we elected to do an important job. I don't wish him ill or failure or anything negative because, as far as I'm concerned, he's driving the bus we're on and if he drives off the road, we all crash and burn. He just keeps failing to convince me that he knows where he's going or how to get there.

Nevertheless, he is our president and he has my support. Of course, I don't mean that literally.

• Posted at 6:06 PM · LINK

Wednesday Morning

Mark is very busy for the next day or three so don't expect a lot of wonderment on this page. If you're starved for something media-related to read, I have some new posts up over at my Old TV Tickets site. Read all about Saturday Night Live With Howard Cosell, The Newlywed Game and other classics.

I caught some of the State of the Union address and agree with those who say these things are always boring and that there's a strong level of phoniness regarding what the assemblage does and does not clap for. With George W. Bush, there's an extra layer of artifice because he has this tendency to announce things and then forget about them. How's that hydrogen car program going?

You get the feeling that Bush's poll numbers are pretty much frozen at about a 39%-41% approval rating? That nothing short of dragging Bin Laden in with his bare hands is going to help him much? No one seems to want to say that because the right-wing media doesn't want to believe it and the non-right-wing media is trying too hard to prove they're not the left-wing media. And hey, what's with Chris Matthews and a few other reporters, who seem to flip a coin before each on-camera appearance and decide if Bush is in trouble or making a spectacular comeback? Make up your mind, people, and cite some real evidence to support whichever position you take. A lot of this seems to me like trying to pretend there's important political news when there isn't any.

Back to deadlines...

• Posted at 11:30 AM · LINK

March 1, 2006 • Current • January 1, 2006

Tuesday, February 28, 2006

Second Deal

• Posted at 2:22 PM · LINK

Drop the Trop?

• Posted at 1:31 PM · LINK

Mopping Up...

• Posted at 12:23 PM · LINK

Monday, February 27, 2006

Synch Hole

• Posted at 11:48 PM · LINK

Mail Call

• Posted at 10:05 PM · LINK

That Synching Feeling

• Posted at 8:24 PM · LINK

Shacking Off

• Posted at 6:17 PM · LINK

Silent Movie Memories

• Posted at 2:10 PM · LINK

Don Being Don

• Posted at 1:08 PM · LINK

Set the TiVo!

• Posted at 12:55 PM · LINK

Dennis Weaver, R.I.P.

• Posted at 11:41 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 12:35 AM · LINK

Jersey Boy

• Posted at 12:20 AM · LINK

Sunday, February 26, 2006

It Only Plays "Candy Man"

• Posted at 11:13 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 7:35 PM · LINK

Past-Tense Places to Eat

• Posted at 1:14 PM · LINK

One More TV Star Obit...

• Posted at 3:49 AM · LINK

More on Don

• Posted at 3:29 AM · LINK

Saturday, February 25, 2006

On Another Blog...

• Posted at 11:52 PM · LINK

More Sad News

• Posted at 7:05 PM · LINK

Don Knotts, R.I.P.

• Posted at 3:57 PM · LINK

Golden Oldies

• Posted at 10:15 AM · LINK

Cable Wars

• Posted at 1:39 AM · LINK

Obit Watch

• Posted at 1:23 AM · LINK

Friday, February 24, 2006

Today

• Posted at 10:43 PM · LINK

Who Banned Roger Rabbit?

• Posted at 5:31 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 5:27 PM · LINK

Today's 2nd Political Rant

• Posted at 11:42 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 11:25 AM · LINK

Today's Political Rant

• Posted at 1:02 AM · LINK

Thursday, February 23, 2006

News Worthy

• Posted at 12:13 PM · LINK

Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Look, Ma! No Hands!

• Posted at 9:59 PM · LINK

On Now

• Posted at 6:27 PM · LINK

Finally...

• Posted at 6:18 PM · LINK

Today's Political Thought

• Posted at 12:12 AM · LINK

Tuesday, February 21, 2006

Recommended Reading

• Posted at 12:50 AM · LINK