Hey, you know those flight attendant admonitions to turn off your cellphones and other electronic devices? Well, we may not be hearing them much longer. American Airlines will be offering wi-fi (for a fee) on their flights and others will follow. This article explains about it and quotes my old pal Joe Brancatelli as being skeptical about the whole thing, at least from a business standpoint.
You can waste a heckuva lot of your life watching video interviews conducted by the Archive of American Television, which is a project of the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences — i.e., the Emmy People. They sent out interviewers to record oral histories with everyone important in the TV field they could snag and a lot of these conversations are available online. These are not short chats. Some of them are six hours or longer, and there are some very good people to be heard.
A complete list of the ones you can watch right now can be found here, and every week or so they put a few more up. They recently released an interview with Herbert Stempel, who was one of the contestants at the center of the quiz show scandals...and they just posted the interview George Carlin did with them in December of last year.
The entire Carlin interview runs three hours and like I said, you can find and watch it online. Here's the last five minutes of it, including a couple of questions that are especially poignant in light of his passing a few months after this interrogation...
We've been following the case of Juan Manuel Alvarez, who in 2005 parked his SUV on some commuter train tracks in Los Feliz and caused a wreck that killed eleven people and injured more than 180 others. I had a little trouble fathoming why the trial of this guy had to take more than about twenty minutes.
Alvarez begged for forgiveness and claimed that it hadn't occurred to him that anyone on the train would be injured. Yeah, I can see where you might not think that parking your SUV on train tracks and dousing it in gasoline could possibly do any harm.
Today, a judge sentenced the guy to eleven consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole. His Honor further said he wished he'd been able to just sentence him to prison "forever," as if that would be longer than the sentence that was imposed. Frankly, I'll be very surprised if Alvarez serves out more than eight life sentences even though stupid dies hard.
I didn't post much yesterday because I was in a recording studio, directing voice tracks for The Garfield Show, a new animated series starring everyone's favorite lasagna-guzzling feline. It debuts in Europe later this year (I think) and on the Cartoon Network in '09 (I'm told).
The folks in the above photo are as follows: The guy on the left is Frank Welker, the new voice of Garfield and, I believe, the "workingest" voice actor in the history of the business. To the right of Frank is Gregg Berger, the voice of Odie the Dog and hundreds of other characters on this show and others. Just to the right of Gregg is Andy Morris, the best danged audio engineer in the business. The man in the checked shirt is comedy legend Stan Freberg, who was playing a guest star role as a really snotty villain. The other guy with facial hair is the brilliant Wally Wingert, the new voice of Garfield's "owner," Jon. The lady is Audrey Wasilewski who, when she's not doing on-camera work, speaks for Garfield's lady love, Arlene. And the fellow in the green shirt is me.
It was a long day's work but I had the easy job. The other folks had to squeak and grunt and scream and make dog sounds and interpret all manner of silly dialogue. I just had to sit there, enjoy their performances and occasionally push a button and say, "Let's try that line again." Someone wrote to ask me recently what the secret is to directing the voices for a cartoon show. It's very simple, really. You hire the right actors, hand them their scripts, then get the hell out of the way.
I guess a Slow News Week is when the media pays the kind of attention they're paying to who the candidates may pick as their running mates. I keep reading stories that treat it as Breaking News that Obama's announcement "may" come soon and that McCain's will probably follow. No, that's not news. Neither are the various "short lists" — you know, it'll definitely, absolutely, positively be one of these three people...unless, of course, it's someone else.
A lot of these conjectures say it won't be Joe Biden since he's from a state that has very few electoral votes and which Obama is certain to carry anyway. Hey, didn't that Cheney guy come from a state that has very few electoral votes and which Bush was certain to carry anyway? It annoys me a little that this kind of logic is getting tossed around by reporters and pundits who are pretending they can give us insight into a situation where they're pretty clueless. They all make it sound like they've obtained access to Obama's short list when it's actually their own supposition they're giving us. It also annoys me, of course, that I haven't been vetted for the Veep job. What the hell are they waiting for?
And I guess it's a little annoying that all this speculation out of nowhere is about how picking this guy or that gal may help or hurt Obama's chance of winning. The choice of either running mate — Obama's or McCain's — matters partly because of that but also perhaps a tiny bit because (let's do this in boldface:) that person stands a good chance of becoming the "leader of the free world." They won't be the next one but they might be the one after owing to death, impeachment, resignation or because the position makes them a front-runner to succeed as a candidate.
I have no particular faves to fill out the bottom of either ticket. Ideally, I guess, I'd like to see Obama pick someone who'll help him win, if not because of the state they're from then because they'll be a great candidate who'll go out and play not Attack Dog but something nicer and equally effective. It might be nice if that person was also qualified to actually be President of the United States, too. And I'd like to see John McCain pick someone who all of America will agree would be an absolute disaster as a Vice-President. I'm thinking Dick Cheney.
Anyway, we'll know soon enough. Obama will apparently announce any day now via a text message that will go exclusively to those who've donated to his campaign. The rest of us will have to wait another twenty seconds before it's on every single news site. Don't you just hate it when you're the last to know?
August 21, 2008
