Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Briefly Noted...

I'm still fixing my main computer but in the meantime, I fixed something else. A bunch of you wrote me that the video link to Craig Ferguson's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner that I posted here no longer worked. Well, I found a new link and installed it in place of the old link. So it works now.

By the way: Do you folks all know how to capture a YouTube or other embedded video to your harddrives for later viewing? It's not difficult. If you're using Mozilla Firefox as your browser, there are several plug-ins that will do it for you. If you're using something else, there are several websites where you enter the address and it does the work for you. KeepVid is probably the simplest of the bunch and it will work for many sites. There are also free software programs like YouTube Downloader, as well as software you can pay for if you absolutely insist. However you get them, you'll then need an FLV Player to play the clips and there are plenty of free ones on the 'net...this one, for instance.

Anyway, if you see a clip you like, you might want to grab it while you can.

• Posted at 9:49 PM · LINK

Computer in Ill Health

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay! It's been far too long since I got a %@*#! virus on my computer. I don't think I lost any data this time but I'm losing much of my evening doing a cleanup and reinstall of Windows and please, Mac users, don't write me to extol the glories of your never-get-a-virus format. I've spent too much time and cash setting up and learning a system that usually works jes' fine for me. Switching over would take me more time than recovering from a dozen viruses. I have nothing against Macs. It's just too late for me to go that route.

I'm on my backup computer while I run various correctives on the primary. In the meantime, I can't get to recent e-mail and I'm too far behind on stuff to post here at a normal pace. This will change but probably not tonight, maybe not 'til tomorrow. If you don't like it, go form an angry mob to track down and lynch the guy who sent me a worm that was too fresh for my virus checker to intercept.

Back soon.

• Posted at 8:12 PM · LINK

Jack Hanrahan, R.I.P.

A sad end to a sad story. Emmy-winning comedy writer Jack Hanrahan died Monday at a nursing home in Cleveland. Jack is the guy we wrote about here...the man who somehow went from writing for shows like Laugh-In, Get Smart and Sonny & Cher in Hollywood to being homeless in the streets of Ohio. He was 75 and, as a friend of his e-mailed me this morning, "had been suffering from just about everything."

The saga of Hanrahan is recounted here so I'll just add what I can: I knew Jack briefly in the early eighties. The word "jolly" comes to mind. He was a very funny man, the kind of person who created a party atmosphere wherever he went...always glad to see everyone, always prepped with the latest joke. He was a great joke writer but he was also a great joke teller, and those skills don't always go together.

When he was teamed with his friend Phil Hahn, he was half of the hottest comedy-writing team in town. They went very rapidly from writing greeting cards to writing for MAD Magazine to writing cartoon shows for Hanna-Barbera to writing top, prime-time TV shows. I didn't know Phil or Jack then but got to know them later, after they'd gone their separate ways, and could easily believe something I heard back when I was starting out in TV. When I started out, I was teamed with a clever gent named Dennis Palumbo.

Our agent one day mentioned the names of Hahn and Hanrahan and warned us, as he warned all teams, that when partners split, they don't automatically each get 50% of the team's career. Producers worry that the sum is greater than the parts, especially when one guy is loud and gregarious and the other is relatively quiet. Sometimes, they fear that the loud guy has all the ideas and the quiet guy is just the one who knows how to type. Or sometimes, they fear that the loud guy is the one who's good at selling and the quiet guy is the one who really does the writing.

I don't know what it was like when Jack and Phil were alone in the room working on a script — each spoke well of the other — but Jack was the loud one and Phil was the quiet one. After they parted, they both had trouble establishing new lives in Hollywood. Phil did pretty well, working on top variety shows, often as head writer. Jack...well, Jack had problems.

Like I said, he was a great guy to be around. When you hear how it all ended, you just have to shake your head and sigh.

• Posted at 8:41 AM · LINK

Today's Video Link

I linked to this a few years ago here but the link went away...so here it is anew. It's the famous sketch from The Soupy Sales Show featuring Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis, Trini Lopez and a lot of pie shells full of shaving cream. Guess what happens.

• Posted at 7:49 AM · LINK