As I mentioned back here, I've been involved lately in an interesting project — a series of public service animations featuring Professor Garfield. Professor Garfield looks a lot like regular old lasagna-eating Garfield except he has glasses and his adventures teach valuable lessons. I will soon be voice-directing another batch of these but I wanted to mention that the first group, which school young kids in Internet Safety and in how to avoid Cyberbullying, can now be downloaded free to your iPad. This is assuming you have an iPad. I don't but you might.
If you (like me) have no iPad, you can view the spots the primitive, old-fashioned "online" way by going to this website. It'll feel ancient and low-tech but it'll work.
If you're desperate to get a hotel room and admission to Comic-Con, you have another chance tomorrow. That's when a bunch of package deals (hotel + 4-day-pass) open up. The hotels (there are four of them) are in Mission Valley, which is not as far as it sounds — five or six miles — and there's a shuttle bus from them to the convention center. Here are the details.
Not long ago here, we had some chatter about comedian Woody Woodbury, who sure sold a lot of funny records in his day. The discussion seems to have prompted announcer (and comedy album historian) Christopher Bay to do something about the paucity of Woody Woodbury fan material on the Internet. He's set up this new Facebook group devoted to the mirth-inducing Mr. Woodbury and it's already full of clips and excerpts and things that might make you want to visit.
And here's one of those tales of how not only is it a small world but the Internet is making it smaller every day. I joined Christopher's new group and promptly got a message from my friend, Elaine Ballace. Let me tell you where I know Elaine Ballace from. Elaine was one of the other kids in the classroom on Welcome Back, Kotter when I was a story editor there in 197something. She was one of the students who sat behind John Travolta or Ron Palillo and occasionally got a few lines. I once wrote a nice little bit for her where she played a cheerleader and when I see her, she still reminds me of it.
Anyway, Elaine saw I'd joined this group and wrote to ask me if I was a friend of Woody Woodbury's. I wrote back no, I've never met him; just admired his work is all. She wrote back that she was a friend of his. In fact, they had lunch just a few days ago...and she promises to invite me along, next time they get together. Boy, I love the Internet, if only for things like this.
If you live in or around Los Angeles and you have plumbing, you need the contact info for my plumber, Bobby the Plumber, who happens to be The Greatest Plumber in the World. This is not only my opinion. It's the opinion of several of you who hired him based on this item I posted and later wrote to thank me. If you don't have his number, go to that item and get it. Sooner or later, you'll need it. And you'll thank me.
Actress Barbara Billingsley gets mentioned not once but twice in the Arts section of today's New York Times. She's in an article about a new boxed set of the complete Leave it to Beaver that's about to come out. And she's mentioned in an article about the thirtieth anniversary of the movie, Airplane, in which she speaks jive.
I'm told the Leave it to Beaver DVD set is quite wonderful. Of course, I'm told this by our pal Stu Shostak, proprietor of the oft-plugged-here Shokus Internet Radio, and he produced the special features for this set. It contains all 233 episodes of the series which, I'm afraid, is about 228 more than I was ever able to watch. This is not a case of a show I liked as a kid that now seems dated. I didn't even like the show when I was the Beave's age. Nevertheless, an awful lot of people do and if you're one and you want to sit through a 37 disc set of it, you'll want to click on this link and order yourself one.
And while we're at it, here's a link to get a copy of Airplane on DVD in case you need one. If you haven't seen it lately, you need one. It really is a laugh-out-loud funny movie and I remember that wonderful sense of "discovery" we all had in the audience when I first saw it. The film was new and there was no real buzz or word-of-mouth about it yet. Everyone in the Village Theater that night ran right home and told their friends to go see it. And none of us can use the word "surely" in a sentence now without referencing that movie. Really? Has it been thirty years?
You can now purchase Eric Idle's concert based on The Life of Brian — Not the Messiah — in many forms. Here's a link to order the DVD. Here's a link to order the Blu-Ray. Here's a link to order the CD. Soon, I will probably be offering a link that will arrange for Eric to come to your home and sing this little number in your patio.
The CD, by the way, is actually a CD-R, meaning that when you order a copy, they make one up special. There is apparently no mass-distribution CD release so you probably won't find it in your local CD store. That is, assuming you even have a local CD store.
Here's Eric leading us in song. Five more repackagings of this and I'm going to start to feel about Monty Python the same way I'm starting to feel about Cirque du Soleil.
June 26, 2010
