Monday, April 3, 2006

Recommended Reading

Fareed Zakaria offers an interesting view on the immigration issue.

• Posted at 11:33 PM · LINK

Supernatural Law

In Georgia, a comic book retailer named Gordon Lee was indicted more than a year ago for allegedly selling an adult comic book to a minor. The case went to trial today and something utterly unexpected occurred. The prosecution dismissed all charges and then re-filed to charge Lee under a similar charge covered by different statutes. They are, in effect, trying to start all over under slightly different rules.

The legal bills for Lee's defense, which look like they'll easily hit the $50,000 mark, have been handled by the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, a most worthy organization. Their website has a full report on today's developments here.

At the risk of making a Bill Frist-style diagnosis from afar, it sounds to me like the prosecutors are trying the old Bleed 'em Dry strategy. They're afraid they can't win on the merits of the case so they'll drag it out and make it expensive...and hope that the accused will agree to a fast plea bargain just to get the thing over with. This works more often in our nation than it should. I hope it doesn't here.

• Posted at 9:24 PM · LINK

Without Further DeLay...

The above Doonesbury strip ran on April 20, 2005. But it could be tomorrow morning's.

• Posted at 8:51 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

The L.A. Times is running a series of profiles on wounded and limbless soldiers returning from Iraq. Forgive me for going to a Vietnam memory on this but one of the things that turned me around on that war — I went from protesting the protesters to being one of them — was what I saw as a lack of compassion for the troops on the part of those who wanted the war to continue or even escalate. Put simply, I found myself marching among people who simultaneously screamed "Support our soldiers" while not seeming to place a very high value on the lives of those soldiers. When the parents and widows of fallen servicemen spoke out against the war or when the amputees made themselves conspicuous, there was an anger towards them for reminding us that, in a time of war, this happens.

I am not suggesting that the fact that there are body counts and soldiers crippled for life is, in and of itself, reason for stopping a war. Some wars are necessary. But if they're going to go and get blown up in our service, I think the least we can do is look at it.

The first part of the Times series is here, and you should be able to find your way to the others from there. It's very sad reading with occasional glimmers of inspiration, but it will help us to remember that the human cost of a war is not just in the number of fatalities.

• Posted at 12:43 PM · LINK

Just the Thing for the Kids

You can get a closer look at each of these wonderful items by clicking on it. You'll need a closer look because I'm showing you three examples of the weirdest toy I ever came across — the Lovable Smoking Traveler's Pet. I'm not sure what's so lovable about smoking or just who's doing any travelling here...but that's only the beginning of my bewilderment. When Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble were selling Winstons, they weren't the only Hanna-Barbera characters who had the habit.

I had a couple of these back around '63 or thereabouts. The premise was that you'd take the little plastic figure of Yogi Bear or whoever and wedge one of the little "cigarettes" into the hole in its mouth and light it. It was supposed to blow smoke rings...but when my friend Randy and I tried it with ours, I think we just got a few wisps of smoke in no particular form and then as the fake cigarette burned down, it started to melt the doll. In fact, I think the only part of it Randy liked was seeing Huckleberry Hound with his face melted. We let it go and the doll got shorter and lost its color and looked a lot like Droopy.

We found these in a crummy toy store on Westwood Boulevard. They were a dime or so apiece and there were many to choose from, including Popeye and (I think) Mighty Mouse. I remember thinking that the Popeye one should come with a pipe instead of the tiny cigarettes. There was no evidence on the packaging that the companies that owned the characters had sanctioned or even heard of these bizarre playthings that were made in Hong Kong.

But you have to admire the total lack of logic. First, there's the assumption that children are eager to see their favorite characters smoke...although, come to think of it, Randy and I did buy them. On top of that, they promote two things we really want to see kids do: Smoke and play with matches...although, again come to think of it, I've never smoked. Not once in my entire life, not even one puff. I always thought it was because I find the odor so repulsive but maybe, deep down, I just have a fear that my face will melt until I look like Droopy Dog. Perhaps these toys weren't such a bad idea after all.

• Posted at 9:35 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

If I'd put this up on April Fool's Day, none of you would have bothered clicking on the link...but it's legit. Here's what The New York Times has to say about it...

For the last few months, youtube.com has had available for streaming an advertisement for Rice Krispies, recorded by the Rolling Stones in early 1964. It's completely smoking. You don't see the band; you just see a parody of the British television show "Jukebox Jury," with screaming girls, disapproving grown-ups and exploding cereal boxes. "Pour on the milk-a-licious to the crackle of that rice," Mick Jagger sings. This is when the Stones had only begun to compose; they had just graduated from clubs to theaters, and were still known as a nasty rhythm-and-blues cover band. The question is, how can a Rice Krispies jingle be so hot?

That's as much as I know about it but it's our video link for this morning. If you can eat breakfast while watching it, so much the better...

While we're in a Krispie mood, here's a non-embedded link to another Rice Krispies commercial. This one features the great comic actor Lou Jacobi and the voice work of Frank Welker and Don Messick. I don't know about Frank but to do these, Don (who lived in Santa Barbara) used to get up very early in the A.M., drive down to LAX, catch a plane to Chicago and he'd actually record a couple of Kellogg's spots there the same day, then be driven to O'Hare to catch a plane home. This was before they had ISDN lines that made it possible for someone to record from anywhere in the world but it was possible then to do a phone-patch.

(Quick explanation of phone-patches: The actor is, for example, in a recording studio in L.A. but there's a telephone connection to the studio in Chicago so he can hear the other actors and the director and can take direction from that director. The L.A. actor is recorded in the L.A. facility and then that tape is FedExed or otherwise sent to Chicago to be edited into the mix. Nowadays, an ISDN set-up enables people in different corners of the world to be linked via digital connections and they can all be recorded at once. Or one guy can be in Rangoon and you can hear him and record him just fine in a studio in Tampa.)

Apparently, the folks making the Rice Krispies commercials didn't want to put Messick on a phone-patch. Since Don made an awful lot of money remaining here in Southern California, I can only imagine how much they had to pay him to go through that ordeal. But he'd fly there and fly back and then the next day, he and Frank would go into the Hanna-Barbera studios in Hollywood and record an episode of Scooby Doo.

YouTube also has two versions of my favorite musical Rice Krispies commercial online but on this one, the sound is way outta sync and on this one, the sound is a little out of sync and the picture is worse. I downloaded 'em figuring that when I get the time (HA!), I'd try to slip-and-slide and create one in-sync good copy but it may be a while. If someone else wants to tackle this, be my guest.

• Posted at 12:15 AM · LINK