Saturday, September 8, 2007

Recommended Reading

Michael Kinsley on the way in which a candidate's religion ought to matter to the voters.

• Posted at 11:15 PM · LINK

Fair Warning

Several friends of mine have all had the same catastrophe lately. I won't bother telling you what it is since you'll be able to figure it out from the following advice...

Do not store your e-mail on someone else's computer. I know it's sometimes easy to leave it all in the box on AOL or Hotmail or GMail or wherever it arrives. Do not leave it there. Use an offline e-mail program and download it to your computer. Read and answer it offline and then send your replies from there.

The program I use (I'm a P.C. guy) is called Forte Agent and it's very good. Most of you would be better served by Mozilla Thunderbird, which is a terrific program and it's free. The most popular e-mail programs seem to be Eudora Pro and Microsoft Outlook or Outlook Express. I tried but didn't like Eudora and I don't see what it does that Thunderbird doesn't do better and without cost. The Outlook programs were okay but I'm wary of having my ten tons of e-mail so integrated with my massive calendar and gargantuan contact lists and such.

But whatever you use, use something, for God's sake, to download your e-mail to your computer and then you must also maintain backups of it all. Because if you leave your past e-mails (incoming and/or outgoing) on some service, you will go there one day and find they are gone. And no one at that service will be able to help you get them back.

• Posted at 3:39 PM · LINK

Bruto and Blutus

Over in this item, I explained the difference between the Popeye foes Bluto and Brutus. Over on his weblog, the gifted artist Stephen DeStefano shows you what this means in visual terms.

• Posted at 1:32 PM · LINK

Planning Ahead

The jury in the Phil Spector/Lana Clarkson trial says that the case will go to the jury on Monday. If justice works the way it probably should, the jury will be out for about eight minutes — just long enough to vote once, hit the lavatories and gripe about how they could have returned the same verdict on Day One — and then they'll march back in and declare Spector guilty of second-degree murder. He will then be sentenced to fifteen years in prison and a lengthy, expensive appeals process will begin.

Since we all know how often justice does not work the way it should, I'm planning my killing spree. As I mentioned, if this guy doesn't get convicted, it's highly unlikely I would be. I'm white. I have some money and a couple of great lawyers. I'm in show business.

My friend Buzz Dixon wrote to ask, regarding my upcoming killing spree, "May we make requests?" The answer is no, Buzz. This is my killing spree, damn it. You're in show business. Arrange your own.

• Posted at 1:05 PM · LINK

Recommended Reading

I'm going to try to make this my last Bush-related posting of the weekend. But Fred Kaplan has a good article up that asks the musical question, "Just Whose Idea Was It To Disband the Iraqi Army?" It seems to have been the single-biggest mistake of the whole occupation if you don't count occupying in the first place...and everyone's pointing fingers at everyone else. It'll probably turn out it was a leftover policy of the Clinton Administration.

• Posted at 10:16 AM · LINK

Saturday Morning

Of all the things George W. Bush has said lately that strike me as unfortunate, I think the topper may be his recent claim that we're "kicking ass" in Iraq. Obviously, one can make a pretty good case that we're not kicking any asses but our own — but even if Bush is correct, it's a horrible way to look at the situation...like this whole operation is just about America proving it can beat anyone in a bar fight. Sadly, I think a large chunk of Bush's support on this war really only cares about that. The cost of the war in both human and financial terms can be ignored and so can the reality of Iraq's future. Just so long as we convince ourselves we're tough...and, oh yeah — that we weren't wrong to get into this war in the first place.

• Posted at 10:09 AM · LINK

Recommended Reading

Joe Conason with more about the statistics out of Iraq and the way they're being juggled to make "The Surge" seem to be working.

• Posted at 9:45 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

From 1931: It's Jack Benny in a ten-minute short subject called Taxi Tangle. Benny's early film appearances are interesting because he was just beginning to develop his stage/screen personality — the cheapness, the clueless vanity, the expertly-timed exasperation, etc. He had a nice film career from the moment movies could talk but he really didn't become Jack Benny until the radio program.

The guy playing the cab driver in the beginning of Taxi Tangle is Tammany Young, a one-time supporting player in silent comedies who went on to countless bit parts in talkies, including roles in almost any movie that starred W.C. Fields. Hal Roach once told me that when talkies came in, only about 15% of the actors who'd appeared in silent films were able to make a transition and still have real careers. Young was among that 15%, though he rarely got much more dialogue than he has in this short.

• Posted at 1:19 AM · LINK