Someone needs to know the answer to this puzzler: When was the first time that someone referred to Superman as "The Big Blue Boy Scout?" I was asked and I didn't know. Do you? Drop me an e-mail if you think you can help.
Here's the programming schedule for Thursday at the Comic-Con International.
The whole thing will be up as of Sunday. I suggest that if you're going, you take the time to sit down, study the schedule and make notes about what you'd like to see...including back-up selections in case your first choice picks are filled to capacity. The con website has an online tool this year that may help you do this. One of the reasons I think I enjoy the con so much is that I arrive with a printed schedule that tells me where I have to be at every moment for panels, meetings, meals, interviews, etc. And when I don't have something firm to do, I have notes suggesting events or exhibitors I may wish to visit. That website is full of helpful information and it will get fuller as we get closer to Preview Night and what follows.
The Emmy nominations are out and the big news for some is that Conan O'Brien's short-lived Tonight Show got one, whereas Mr. Leno's did not. I suspect the following...
That while it may have been some voters' way of flipping the bird to Mr. Leno, most were more interested in flipping it to — in order of ascending targets — Jeff Zucker, NBC and network programmers in general.
That the voters who voted the Coco ballot were voting for him being cancelled, not for what he actually did on the program...or maybe just for what he did on the program its last week or so.
That Mr. Leno is not bothered much, if at all, about this. He's used to it by now. (Jay is, I'm told, more bothered when reporters say he's never been nominated or won. He was nominated a number of times, albeit a while back, and his Tonight Show won for Best Musical or Variety Series in '95.)
That Mr. Letterman is more upset that his show wasn't nominated.
And that Mr. Stewart and The Daily Show will win in that category...or if he doesn't, a Mr. Colbert will.
I came across one site which said that this will have some impact on whether Jay survives on The Tonight Show. It will have none whatsoever. It didn't have any impact that he wasn't nominated for 10+ years. The only thing that will matter there is if (a) the numbers go up and down and (b) if a more promising alternative seems to be possible.
One of these days, I'll have to write a piece on the Emmy Awards. In Hollywood, there is one sense in which they mean a lot because everyone loves to get awards, if only for the potential career/salary boost. In another sense, I don't think anyone really thinks the process is configured to select the best...and the more you know about how that process works, the less likely you are to believe that. Unless, of course, you win one in which case you might briefly convince yourself that the system is momentarily, and only in your category that year, infallible. But like the Oscars, no one can really say for sure what any particular "win" means...and one seems to care about that.
The above chart is making the rounds and it says that if we slapped a big tax on sugary, carbonated beverages, our nation's revenues would go way up while a lot of waistlines went down. Sounds like win/win at first glance but it seems to me like Voodoo Economics...to borrow a phrase that George Herbert Walker Bush once correctly applied to the financial theories on which he later based much of his administration. I started to write a post about why this didn't make a lot of sense but I see Kevin Drum has, as usual, beaten me to it. Basically, there's too many theories in this theory, starting with the assumption that if you got fewer calories from Dr. Pepper, you wouldn't feel okay with eating more Reese's Peanut Butter Cups.
And even presuming the logic is sound, there is the question of how much government should try to regulate this kind of human behavior. You know, if we slapped a huge tax on the making of Brittney Spears CDs, people might stop making them...and while we all might like that result, is that a legitimate function of our elected officials? Well, okay, maybe that's a bad example. But yes, obesity harms people. So does alcohol and we saw how well it worked to try and force everyone in The Land of the Free to stop consuming that stuff. Those folks are not consuming oceans of calorie-rich cola because there are no other available liquids. It's a choice, arguably a bad choice but not necessarily one Uncle Sam should be trying to stop us from making.
I'm not fighting for my freedom on this issue. I gave up carbonated drinks, with sugar and without, fifty months ago. It just seems like an excessive intervention into our lives. If (major "if") we feel that national obesity is a public concern that needs to be addressed, maybe we oughta address that problem head-on rather than to pin it all on one of the eighty zillion ways people get fat. There are skinny people who drink Pepsi and fat ones who drink Diet Pepsi...so if the idea is to punish people who get fat drinking non-diet Pepsi, the effort is misdirected. And if the idea is to just raise revenues, we oughta look into curtailing into the kind of tax/farm subsidies that brought us those gushers of High Fructose Corn Syrup in the first place.
I am not up to the task of writing this but the passing of one of the world's great comic artists must be noted here. Victor de la Fuente, often called the master of the form in the Spanish comic art community, passed recently at the age of 83. The obits merely say it was after "long years of illness."
He was a master of realism on the comic page, especially in westerns such as Tex Willer and Les Gringos. Not nearly enough of his work has been published in English but there's much to be said for admiring the pictures he drew. Tom Spurgeon has a much better piece on the man than I am capable of writing.
The great Spanish tenor Placido Domingo began his career with small roles, including a part in the first Mexican production of My Fair Lady, in which he did not get to sing this song. But he sang it later in many later venues and here he is singing it in English and then in Spanish...
The other day here, I linked to a letter from Watergate conspirator John Ehrlichman to cartoonist Garry Trudeau. This brought the following message from the fine comic book creator, Paul Chadwick...
I know you're a fellow Watergate aficionado so you might find this interesting.
After resigning, Ehrlichman moved his family back to Bellevue, Washington, where his daughter Jody became a classmate of mine. Nevertheless, I was startled to find this villain from my newspapers appear as a guest speaker in my American History class. To talk about Watergate? No. To recount his experiences as a navigator on American bombers flying missions over Germany in WWII.
He was so charmingly self-deprecating, casting himself not as a war hero but as a terrified kid struggling to do his job, that I couldn't help liking the guy. His modesty, intelligence and depth messed with my political cosmology. It made me a follower of his subsequent tribulations, if not exactly a fan.
After all, he actually put into writing — checking a box next to "approve", if I recall correctly! — his go-ahead for Liddy's crew to burgle the office of Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist, looking for private agonies with which to destroy the whistleblower. A dirtier political trick is hard to imagine.
I remember that after his divorce, Ehrlichman gave up on his legal appeals and simply reported to prison. He wrote novels, producing a decent Washington potboiler, The Company, that was made into a TV miniseries with Jason Robards playing a Nixon-like President Richard Monckton. I recall the scene where Monckton laughs with raspy glee at his mechanically elevating desk on Air Force One, supposedly installed by LBJ. I wonder if that bit was true.
Ehrlichman also, I recall, wrote an article for an art collector's magazine about art in the Nixon White House. He recounted an anecdote about being seated next to painter Andrew Wyeth at a state dinner. He boned up on Wyeth's work in order to make conversation. But Wyeth had learned Ehrlichman practiced Land Use law before working for Nixon, and spent the dinner discussing a zoning dispute in which the artist was entangled.
He eventually remarried, tried to syndicate a radio commentary (I never heard it, and I was seeking it out), and Wikipedia tells me he worked for an Atlanta hazardous materials firm. It also has this tidbit:
Shortly before his death, Ehrlichman teamed with novelist Tom Clancy to write, produce, and co-host a three hour Watergate documentary, John Ehrlichman: In the Eye of the Storm. The finished, but never broadcast, documentary, associated papers, and videotape elements (including an interview Ehrlichman did with Bob Woodward as part of the project) is housed at the Richard B. Russell Library for Political Research and Studies, at the University of Georgia in Athens.
Now that apologia would be a treat for us Watergate geeks.
Google results seem to suggest that Ehrlichman's immortality rests on his poetic comment on the Oval Office tapes about how it would be a good distraction from the widening Watergate scandal to let FBI director-appointee L. Patrick Gray's confirmation hearing drag on — that they should leave Gray "twisting slowly, slowly in the wind." Fair enough, but that line came first from Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, describing a hanged man.
A well-read fellow, Ehrlichman.
Well, nobody ever said he was stupid...although he may have seemed so when he appeared at the Watergate hearings and tried to justify some of the things he tried to justify. In all my readings, Ehrlichman always came off as a smart, efficient fellow who played the Washington game precisely the way he believed it was supposed to be played, and certainly the way Nixon wanted it to be played. In many ways, he went to prison because someone had to, and even Nixon's greatest enemies weren't about to put him behind bars. I do think the man broke the law and I have no problem believing the theories that he specifically ordered the infamous Watergate break-in.
But in his post-prison appearances, he did come across as a bright, sympathetic guy...at least when he wasn't trying to justify past behavior. His Watergate book, Witness to Power, was a mixed bag. He dumped on Nixon but must have known a lot more than he included. At least it felt like he was attacking his former boss just enough to sell books, not enough to give historians a true, unfiltered peek into the Nixon White House. I never read his roman à clef novel but I made it through much of the mini-series made from it and thought it was just dreadful with Robards struggling to portray Nixon without portraying Nixon. Richard Monckton? Yeah, that couldn't possibly be the same guy, could it?
Thanks, Paul. I've only had the opportunity to meet two Watergate figures. One, on a couple of occasions, has been John Dean who struck me as the smartest of the bunch — the one who figured out first that the jig was up and it was time to make a clean breast of it and turn state's evidence. The other was Charles Colson. I met him soon after he got into his Christian Fellowship line of work and sat horrified through a lunch where he talked about how much money there was to be made off anything that could be properly marketed to that audience. I'll have to write about that lunch one of these days.
July 7, 2010
