The Archive of American Television has posted their complete oral history interview with George Carlin. The entire chat, which runs around three hours, was conducted last December and in it, Carlin discusses his career in enormous depth and detail. I haven't watched all of it yet but I intend to. If you'd like to join me, go to this page and start with Part One.
Donald Rumsfeld (you remember him) had an op-ed in the New York Times the other day which seems to bear little resemblance to reality. And now along comes my man Fred Kaplan to remind us of the reality.
You following the Coleman-Franken recount in Minnesota? The latest headlines say Coleman is ahead by 120 votes but if you read a little further, you realize that number is kinda meaningless because there are more than 3000 challenged ballots that haven't been figured into the total. No one knows how many of those will eventually yield countable votes...and those aren't even random ballots which one might assume would break roughly along the same ratio as the already-tallied ballots. These are ballots that the Coleman or Franken observers specifically had pulled out of the piles for later examination. There are also hundreds &mdash perhaps thousands — of disqualified absentee ballots that have never been counted and some of those may wind up being tallied.
In some cases, it appears that the two campaigns are playing a little game here, trying to manipulate current news reports. The premise here is that if you can look like you're ahead (or gaining) for a while in the news, that will give you a certain legitimacy as the winner, above and beyond what the final totals say. If Coleman loses when the vote is ultimately certified, he'll be out there arguing that the results are a lie and saying, "I was ahead for weeks! Suddenly, at the last minute, they claim I lost!" But of course, he may be "ahead" right now because of which ballots have been removed from the count and put into that "challenged" pile or which absentee ballots simply have been wrongly disqualified and therefore uncounted. Franken's side is probably challenging ballots with something similar in mind — to win the daily press coverage, claiming that the gap is narrowing, as a means of winning the election.
There are a lot of statisticians out there, trying to predict the outcome. Nate Silver, who had a superb track record in forecasting the election, is seeing a Franken win by between 48 and 136 votes...but it seems to me that there are too many unknowns (including which ballots the judges will admit) for any prediction to have much gravity right now. And even Silver says his analysis could be off by "at least" 200 votes...which kinda means he thinks Franken will win unless the other guy does.
I don't think anyone knows as much about who will win as they think. All I think we can say is that Al Franken's in a good position. He's either going to get a Senate seat or a very interesting book out of all this.
Another animated commercial from the Jay Ward Studios! This one's for a cereal called King Vitaman that I believe was only marketed in portions of the country.
The voice of the King was done by Joe Flynn, who most of you will recall from the TV series, McHale's Navy. He's the guy on the right in the above photo. During the sixties when that show was big, a number of cartoon studios tried casting Mr. Flynn to do voices...but he was one of those performers, it was felt, whose magic wasn't present when you didn't see him. They'd record him, listen to the track later and then hire someone else. Hanna-Barbera did a show called The Hair Bear Bunch in which they modelled one of the characters after Joe Flynn, recorded him for a few episodes...then decided that veteran cartoon actor John Stephenson doing a Joe Flynn impression sounded more like Joe Flynn than Joe Flynn.
The King Vitaman spots — there was a whole series of these — were one of the few times that Mr. Flynn's voice was heard in animation. The other two voices in this spot are Daws Butler (as the bad guy) and Bill Scott (as King Vitaman's aide)...
November 26, 2008
