Thursday, March 2, 2006

Today

Before this site kicks over to tomorrow's date, I want to thank everyone who sent birthday greetings today. I'll try and answer them all but I still haven't responded to all the "get well" messages I got when I was in the doctor place. So it may take a while. Nice to hear from so many friends and even a fair amount of total strangers.

• Posted at 11:52 PM · LINK

Nigerian Larceny

I've wondered here in the past if anyone ever falls for those e-mail scams that tell you you can share in someone's inheritance of a huge amount of money. Apparently, someone does.

• Posted at 8:05 PM · LINK

Animated Antics

I love magicians and I especially love magicians who invent brand new tricks and do things on stage that no one else has ever done. You don't catch Sylvester the Jester doing the linking rings or the cups-and-balls...or if he did, he'd put his own, animation-inspired twist on those hoary illusions. Sylvester bills himself as "The Human Cartoon" and replicates on stage, many effects you'd find in a good Tex Avery short. In the course of one show, he is electrocuted, decapitated, stretched and squashed, and even has a few holes blown in him. It's all very original and very well-done and very funny.

You can find out where to see him at his website but for much of March, I can tell you where to see him: In a late show, Friday and Saturday nights, at Theatre West in Hollywood. Located appropriately near the old Hanna-Barbera studio, the Jester will be destroying himself on stage for your amusement, and I intend to get up there and see this happen. If you love magic or cartoons, you'll enjoy what he does...and I'm guessing one or the other applies to everyone who visits this site.

• Posted at 1:31 PM · LINK

Jack Wild, R.I.P.

Jack Wild is the kid who, at age fifteen, played the Artful Dodger in the movie of Oliver and stole, not only people's purses but the movie, as well. Shortly after that, he became the human star of the popular Saturday morning series, H.R. Pufnstuf. After that, he has a brief moment of glory as a pop star and after that...

Well, "after that" was not kind to Jack Wild. He had problems with alcohol and tobacco and life in general. Sid and Marty Krofft, who'd produced H.R. Pufnstuf, became like surrogate uncles to Jack. When I worked for them, he'd occasionally visit the office or turn up at a party and I always enjoyed talking to Jack. A lot of folks felt sorry for him but I never got that he felt sorry for himself...not even the last time I ran into him. It was about three years ago and most of his voice was gone due to cancer of the mouth, one of the nastier things that can happen to a human being. Jack had a little card he'd show to people to explain why he couldn't talk and we had an odd, sad conversation with him responding mostly in mime and little grunts. He was proud that in spite of everything, he was still doing occasional acting jobs.

Jack died on Wednesday. He was 53. Here's a link to an obit.

Lennie Weinrib, who was the voice of H.R. Pufnstuf, just phoned me from Chile, where he now lives. He said, "Tell the world that Jack Wild was the nicest, most talented kid I ever met in all my years in show business, and that we're all just devastated at the news." I can't put it any better than that.

• Posted at 1:17 PM · LINK

Cruising Palmdale, The End

Back on KCAL, someone just said, "This started out as a routine traffic stop as part of an investigation of a stolen vehicle. The woman didn't want to go to jail." So to try and stay out of prison, she stole a police SUV and drove it around for 75 minutes. Good way to avoid a stolen car rap.

KCAL's news coverage has ended and they've returned to regular programming, which is people arguing in the TV courtroom of Judge Mathis. A woman is claiming her ex-boyfriend kept refusing to get a job and wasn't paying back money he owed her and had promised to pay. The ex-boyfriend is claiming that because of her drunken misbehavior, he was also driven to drink so it was her fault he was unable to find work. For some reason, these people thought it would be a good idea to go on television, air their private dispute, argue over which of them was the bigger drunk and let Judge Mathis settle it. This makes about as much sense as stealing the police SUV.

And how far are we from the day when they'll arrest someone like the lady who was driving around Palmdale and Lancaster, then bring her directly into a TV courtroom? Having just watched the arrest, we'll be able to then watch the trial. Judge Mathis can sentence her and then later in the day, Judge Judy can rule on her appeal. By evening, we could have the prisoner on Fear Factor for possible execution. Or just let Simon Cowell insult their grooming.

It might work. Couldn't be a greater miscarriage of justice than the O.J. trial.

• Posted at 11:33 AM · LINK

Cruising Palmdale, Part IV

Actually, she's been mainly in Lancaster the last fifteen minutes or so. On Fox, they're monitoring (but not letting us hear) some conversations the woman is having on the police radio with authorities. They're discussing (a) whether she's faking her emotional distress, (b) whether if she is, she's doing it to try and establish some sort of defense for when she winds up in court and (c) whether she's just enjoying the attention of all the helicopters overhead and news coverage.

This just in: She's stopped, police have stormed the vehicle and they have her down on the ground and under arrest. And now they're leading her away to another police car. Hope she doesn't steal this one, too.

• Posted at 11:18 AM · LINK

Cruising Palmdale, Part III

I'm switching channels and watching the pursuit on different stations. Someone on Fox News just said that this vehicle would have probably have had a full gas tank at the beginning of the shift, but of course we don't know when that was. I'll report back if there's any more useful information like that.

• Posted at 11:10 AM · LINK

Crusing Palmdale, Part II

More than seventy minutes ago, the woman stole a police vehicle and she's been driving in circles and running stop signs and red lights ever since, often weaving over to the wrong side of a road. A newsperson just said, "We have unconfirmed reports the woman is extremely agitated." You think?

• Posted at 11:01 AM · LINK

Cruising Palmdale

I'm watching a police chase on TV at the moment. A woman has stolen a police SUV — they say it's a Ford Expedition — and has been driving around and around mostly the same streets in Lancaster and Palmdale for more than an hour. The newsfolks on KCAL Channel 9 are locked into that awkward position of having to say the same things over and over...and they really don't know all that much to begin with. At the moment, we're kind of on Tire Watch, wondering how long it'll be before a shredding left rear tire renders the vehicle undriveable. Stay tuned.

• Posted at 10:53 AM · LINK

Weapons Against Spam

I have no idea what I'm doing up at this hour, either. But while I'm here, I might as well post something about bogus e-mails that pretend to be from PayPal or your bank or some other business institution. I get about twenty a week that tell me there's some problem with my account at Chase Manhattan Bank and, of course, I've never had a nickel in Chase Manhattan.

If things like this are causing you any confusion or problem, here's an idea you might want to consider: Dedicated e-mail addresses. A lot of people think they can only have one or only manage one. Actually, you can many different ones and if you bank, let's say, at Bank of America, you could have an e-mail address that's only for your correspondence with Bank of America. Once you've set it up, you can just assume all e-mails that purport to be from Bank of America but arrive at other e-mail addresses are phony.

I have a separate e-mail address for each of about two dozen companies with which I do real business. That doesn't sound as difficult to manage as it might because they're all set to forward to one master "business" e-mail account so when I download messages, I download them all at once. It's simple then to have the program I use to manage e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and wonderful) filter the incoming e-mail on that account and sort the messages into separate folders — the ones from my bank into one folder, the ones from the Gas Company into another and so on.

How can you get so many different e-mail addresses? Well, I control several domains and each domain gives you unlimited e-mail addresses @ that domain. You could achieve the same thing with several of the free e-mail services online. G-Mail, for instance, will let you sign up for as many accounts as you like and you can set each account to forward to another. If you're on AOL, I believe they still give you a number of screen names on each account.

Multiple e-mail addresses can be very handy for weeding out unwanted e-mail or separating the e-mail you really care about from the stuff you sort-of care about. I have a couple of accounts that I use when I have to sign up for something on a website — "junk mail" addresses, you might call them. If you have everything coming to one e-mail address, it swells the mailbox you care about and when you download your important e-mail, you have to download all those ads and newsletters with it. Most of my "robotic" e-mail — mass mailings from companies I've ordered from, for example — goes to one special address which I download once or twice a week. This separates them from my main e-mail account which receives messages several times a day.

Multiple e-mails and e-mail forwarding are easy to set up with most programs. Just something you might want to consider.

• Posted at 6:23 AM · LINK

March 3, 2006 • Current • March 1, 2006