The long-range weather forecast for the Comic-Con International (July 23-26) calls for Mostly Sunny during the days with highs around 72°. Evenings, it'll be Partly Cloudy and get all the way down to 66° - 68°.
And for those of you who still think the con should move to Las Vegas, the forecast for that town for those dates calls for highs around 110°, lows around 86° and unusually high (for Vegas) humidity. Still wanna go there?
If you haven't seen it, we highly recommend Role Model, a one-hour special produced for Turner Classic Movies. It's Alec Baldwin interviewing Gene Wilder and it's one of the best conversations I've ever seen about an actor's career. Mr. Wilder is disarmingly candid and frank...and I don't know how many questions Mr. Baldwin asked which were edited from the show, but all that were included elicit pretty interesting responses. If you've ever liked Gene Wilder in anything — and I don't know how you couldn't — you'll enjoy this very much.
It runs on TCM this coming Saturday, July 18. It's on at 4 PM on my satellite dish but your cable company or source may have other ideas.
I just checked to see if the Turner folks were running this in conjunction with some Gene Wilder films, which is how they usually program such things, but no. Earlier, they're running a bevy of Dick Tracy movies from the forties, culminating in the 1990 flick starring Warren Beatty. Afterwards, they're going Jonesing as they run Tom Jones, Carmen Jones, The Devil and Miss Jones (the 1941 film with Jean Arthur, not the similarly-named porn epic) and Cinderella Jones. Oh, well.
I get disappointed a lot by public officials, both Democratic and Republican...and not just because, for example, Democrats I vote for don't all act like Democrats. I get disappointed in them as human beings of integrity and candor. What's more, I'm disappointed in people who don't get disappointed in the kind of bull they get from the candidates they voted for, or who refuse to admit it. I could understand you voting for George W. Bush but not to you pretending he was pretty much the kind of president you hoped you were getting.
Bill Clinton disappointed me because I thought he was smarter on a personal basis than he turned out to be. Al Gore has sorta/kinda disappointed me because all his talk about saving the planet, though it's done much good, has more or less turned out to be a way for Al Gore to have a career in the public arena without running for anything. John Kerry has somewhat disappointed me by being John Kerry. I think all three of those men made (or would have made) better chief execs than the men they ran against but given the quality of their opponents, that's not a huge compliment.
And no one's disappointed me more than John McCain, who once upon a time was a Republican I could have seen myself voting for. I'm still not sure how much he's changed and how much the mask has slipped, though I'm sure it's some of each. There was a time when his rep for "straight talk" (or at least, straighter talk) was somewhat deserved and he seemed willing to occasionally call bullshit on his own party where warranted. The "maverick" brand did apply, at least a little.
Yesterday, he was on Meet the Press and he delivered a performance that was to Partisan Hackery what Nadia Comaneci was to the uneven parallel bars. Did you know Sarah Palin didn't "quit?" She just changed her priorities.
Here — watch it at this link. I can't bring myself to embed it here.
I don't know John Ostrander all that well. He's written some terrific comic books and the few times we've talked, he's seemed like a pretty good guy. So I sure don't like hearing that he's been battling glaucoma and that he's racked up some huge bills (medical and travel) in an attempt to save his eyesight.
As I understand it, John has health insurance. When we hear the sad fact that 86.7 million Americans have no health insurance, we often make the mistake of assuming those are the folks at risk; that everyone else is protected. Well, guess again. One of the umpteen reasons the system has to change is that even a lot of folks who have Blue Cross or Aetna or Some Color Shield or one of those other plans can wake up one morn and discovered their continued existence depends on treatments and medicine that are Not Covered.
But I'm not here to turn John's plight into a commercial for Health Care Reform. I'm here to turn it into a commercial for John. A number of his friends have formed comix4sight, an endeavor that is collecting donations and running auctions to raise the necessary funds. Go to that webpage and see what you can do to help. Please.
Dahlia Lithwick tells us what will happen in the just-now-commencing confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. It'll be a lot of square dancing as she pretends to have no controversial viewpoints and a lot of Senators pretend they just might stop her appointment.
A few days ago here, I introduced some of you to Big Daddy, one of my favorite musical groups. Several of you have admonished me for not recounting the Big Daddy legend so here it is...
In August of 1959, the group — which played the kind of music most groups played back then — was booked on a USO tour of Southeast Asia. Someone made a wrong turn and they wound up missing in action...captured by Laotian revolutionaries and abandoned by the United States which then had a non-interventionist neutral policy towards the region. There was also no one at the U.S. State Department who cared a lot about rock 'n' roll bands or thought it would be a shame if one disappeared forever.
They were held captive for decades...but returning U.S. troops passed on rumors and eventually in 1983, a Special Forces brigade made a daring rescue and our heroes finally returned to American soil. They had missed all that happened to music in the intervening years and didn't like what they now heard on the radio. Convinced that contemporary youth would appreciate the classic sound, they began "fixing" current tunes, rendering them in the only good style of music...the style of the fifties. And that's pretty much the story of Big Daddy as it was told in the press releases for their albums.
Here's another example of them at work. This is what they did to the Michael Jackson song, "Billie Jean."
But before we get to that: Reader William Pelletier tipped me off to something wonderful. Though Big Daddy's albums and CDs are all out of print, Amazon sells an MP3 digital download of Cutting Their Own Groove for a mere ten bucks, or you can buy individual tunes for 69 cents each. This is a very good album and you can order it — or just preview samples of its songs — over on this page.
End of plug. Here's the Big Daddy version of "Billie Jean."
July 14, 2009
