Fred Kaplan on the upcoming Petraeus report to Congress. You get the feeling we're going to be in Iraq longer than even the Bill Kristols of the world want us to be? And they want us to not leave until a lot of things that are never going to happen happen.
Well, I finally watched as much of last night's Republican Debate as any sane man or even I could take. There's something really wrong when the most rational person on the stage is Ron Paul. Still, it's nice to know that if we ignore all the independent reports and about 90% of the military experts and keep saying "The Surge is working and we can win this thing," it will be so. I think if I were a Republican voter, I'd be insulted that these guys think that's all we want/need to hear.
Slate is presenting previews this week of Dead Certain, a new book by Robert Draper. Draper was granted great access to George W. Bush to write about him and going by the excerpts so far, it's hard to see why. We may be past the point where anyone's opinion of Bush is really going to change much but if I were managing his p.r., I think I'd figure, "This guy doesn't need any more print in which he comes off as a boob." Several years ago, someone in his posse — Rove, I believe — was quoted as saying that the more America saw and heard of Bush, the more they liked him. I don't know if that was ever true but it sure hasn't been true for a long time.
My best friend (male division) is a much-loved gentleman named Sergio Aragonés. Today's his birthday but he's asked that we not make a big or even a medium-sized fuss about it...so here's a small, marginal-sized fuss. And because people keep writing me to ask, I'll mention that the Groo 25th Anniversary Special is printed. Copies are allegedly on a FedEx truck to me at this very moment and also heading for all the places such material is sold. I don't know if there will be copies in your store this weekend — or at the Baltimore Comic Convention where the Birthday Boy is appearing — but Groo is back in all his inept glory. And that's all I have to say about this being Sergio Day. Thank you.
I haven't seen one in years but when I was a kid, I was a big fan of Bat Masterson, a western TV series starring Gene Barry as a more gentlemanly kind of cowboy. It was on the network from '58 to '61 and after that, it was not to be avoided in syndication. The show was a light-hearted one with a good sense of humor, and I recall it as kind of fun and entertaining.
Our link today will show you the last few seconds of an episode, leading in to the end credits and — most importantly — the show's theme song. I thought it was a great tune but I could never understand why its composer thought "young" rhymed with "Bat Masterson." Those words didn't rhyme then, they don't rhyme now and they will never rhyme in the future. And the mysterious part is that it's not like there aren't a lot of words that rhyme with "son." The first line could have been, "Back when the west had just begun" or "Back when the west was not yet won" or "Back when the west was overrun." I came up with those in under two minutes when I was ten. How long might it have taken the guy who wrote it to stick a real rhyme in there?
I also didn't understand if there was reason, apart from the fact that it did rhyme, that the song called him "The man who had the fastest gun." I didn't see all 100+ episodes but in the ones I did catch, I never saw Bat actually outdraw anyone. He rarely touched a gun at all and folks in the storylines often commented on — and even admired — his dexterity and elegance in using a cane instead of a pistol. (Apparently, the real Bat Masterson, who bore little resemblance to the one Gene Barry played, was a heckuva gunman but he did carry a cane — because after a gunshot injury, he needed it to walk.) Yet in the theme song, it said he had the fastest gun and the show's logo had him holding a tiny pistol. This is the kind of thing I spend way too much time thinking about.
On a whim, I just checked my TiVo and I see that the old Bat Masterson show runs on the Encore Western channel, which I can get on my satellite dish. So I just set up to record a couple and I'll report back here in a few days as to whether they're still good or if, like certain shows of my childhood, they appear to have been refilmed to make them cheap and stupid. In the meantime, here's that great closing theme song, complete with its odd rhyme and gun reference. Some sources say the vocalist is Bill Lee, a prolific studio singer and member of several noted singing groups but I don't know that this is so. I also don't know that it's not. Note also in the credits that William Conrad took time out from narrating Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, as he was doing at the time, to act in this episode.
September 7, 2007
