Monthly Archives: October 2004

We are, I suspect, long past the point where any opinion piece is going to sway anyone's vote for Bush over Kerry or Kerry over Bush. Still, I can't help but link to articles that I think make good points. The Orlando Sentinel is hardly a Democratic newspaper. They endorsed Bush four years ago but like many papers that did, they're against him this time. Here's the editorial.

What the heck happened with Ashlee Simpson's second musical number last night on Saturday Night Live? If you watched the live, East Coast feed you saw her introduced by host Jude Law…then the music started and her voice, obviously pre-taped, was heard but it wasn't coming out of her mouth. Instead of carrying on, she stopped all attempts at singing (or maybe lip-syncing) and went into a silly dance, then walked off the stage. The cameras held on her back-up band for about twenty seconds, then the director went to a commercial. During the show's closing when the cast gathered on stage, she apologized to the audience and said her band started playing the wrong song…but it sure looked like what had happened was that she had pre-taped the vocal for her number and someone began its playback too soon, catching her and the on-camera musicians unaware.

When the show was broadcast three hours later on the West Coast, the audio had been remixed to remove the playback of her vocals. So her number started and the music was a little odd, like everyone wasn't playing the same notes. Then she looked puzzled, did the silly dance, then walked off and the band played a bit 'til the director went to commercial. In other words, it did look like what she described in her closing statement…but that's only because the engineers had removed her vocal playback.

It is, of course, not at all unprecedented for performers to pre-tape all or part of their vocals and then lip-sync to that when the audience thinks they're singing live. Happens all the time, especially when the performance involves intricate choreography, but it makes audiences feel cheated so it is vigorously denied. Usually. It appears Ms. Simpson got caught doing this.

I don't think it's a big deal. I'm just kinda curious what will happen when this episode airs again. As mentioned before on this weblog, Saturday Night Live occasionally "fixes" things for reruns, replacing a messed-up segment with better footage from the dress rehearsal taping. When they rebroadcast the famous episode in which Sinead O'Connor concluded her second musical number by tearing up a photo of the Pope, that moment is not seen. They inserted some or all of the dress rehearsal performance which ended with her ripping up a different, non-controversial picture. Whole sketches have sometimes been taken from the earlier taping. Assuming Ashlee Simpson's second number went well when she did it in dress, that's probably what will be seen whenever last night's episode is broadcast in the future.

Jann Wenner, publisher of Rolling Stone, writes a good endorsement of John Kerry. I'm not as sold on the Senator from Massachusetts as I'd like to be…but I agree with the negative assessment of Bush, and think Kerry could be a pretty lousy president and still be better than what we have now.

By now, you've probably watched Garfield and Friends, Volume 1 to the point of wearing grooves in the DVDs. You're just dying to get another two dozen episodes of the popular cartoon series that got me nominated for a couple of Emmy Awards I didn't win. Well, you've still got about six weeks to wait until they release Garfield and Friends, Volume 2 but you can order it right this sec from Amazon. Among the guest voice performers in this set are Pat Buttram, Louise DuArt, Frank Buxton, Carl Ballantine, Chick Hearn (yes, the late basketball announcer), Greg Berg, Jesse White, Stan Freberg, Gary Owens and June Foray, all appearing with the great Lorenzo Music, Gregg Berger, Thom Huge, Frank Welker, Howie Morris and Julie Payne.

In answer to a couple of questions: This set includes "Invasion of the Big Robots," which was the episode where Garfield makes a wrong turn and finds himself on an episode of a different cartoon show that looks suspiciously like a cross between G.I. Joe and The Transformers. It also includes "Video Airlines," which is the one that features frequent references to the movie, Kung Fu Creatures on the Rampage II.  Hope you like Volume 2. Hope you buy Volume 2.

Here's the kind of thing that drives up my cynicism about politics in this country, especially when it works. (The fact that the folks surrounding the President of the United States think it will work is bad enough.) It's the new TV commercial in which the Bush folks claim that John Kerry voted to slash our intelligence budget by $6 billion, and they imply that this was after 9/11. Fred Kaplan explains why it's less than honest.

Corey Klemow (Corey, your tape is in the mail) comes through with a link to a site that has the Triumph "Spin Alley" segment up.

I can't help but notice that a couple of the lines uttered by Triumph (Robert Smigel) sound like they were dubbed-in later. I would like to believe this was done just for editing reasons or because something he said at the event was inaudible. I'd hate to think they wrote lines later and added them in.

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog in "Spin Alley" after the third Bush-Kerry debate…a segment shown tonight on Late Night with Conan O'Brien. I think they should forget about having Conan replace Jay and just give the job to Triumph.

Someone will probably post a clip online. If you see one before I do, let me know so I can give the link.

You can now get my buddy Leonard Maltin's indispensable Movie Guide on your Palmtop or Pocket PC Computer. Go here to do this.

If you're interested in seeing old episodes of Saturday Night Live that haven't been rerun to death, you'll want to set your TiVo or VCR next week. Very late Saturday night (aka very early Sunday morning), NBC is rerunning in full the 12/12/81 episode hosted by Bill Murray. This is from the season where Eddie Murphy blossomed, though I recall this particular show being dominated by Joe Piscopo and Father Guido Sarducci. I also recall it not being very good.

There's a bit of history in that episode, which was from the show's seventh season. The first five were the ones Lorne Michaels produced with the original cast, more or less. Most of the sixth was produced by Jean Doumanian and that year was generally regarded as a grand disaster. Late in that season, Doumanian was fired and Dick Ebersol was brought in to turn things around. One of the things he did was to re-hire Michael O'Donoghue as the show's creative center. "Mr. Mike" had been an influential writer during the first Michaels era but this turn of duty was contentious and unhappy. O'Donoghue, the story goes, kept writing and lobbying for bits that could never get past Standards and Practices…and in the opinion of those around him, weren't worth fighting for. In this episode, he contributed to the writing of a skit called "At Home with the Psychos" about a mutant family living near a nuclear facility. The sketch did air but without one prop that the art department whipped up under O'Donoghue's direction. It was a "blowhole" (like that of a whale) that one of the Psychos was to wear…but it looked too much like a vagina. Even others on the show's crew got fed up with O'Donoghue's attempts to get the silly thing on the air.

The final straw came a few days later when Ebersol held a post-mortem meeting with the cast to discuss what all agreed was a weak episode. O'Donoghue (the story goes) burst into the room and began insulting everyone, telling the cast members they were devoid of talent. Shortly after that, he was fired and that was the end of Michael O'Donoghue's involvement with Saturday Night Live.

Meanwhile, all next week, the E! Channel, which has mostly been running episodes of SNL from the Will Ferrell years goes back through the nineties for most of the Halloween episodes. These include a few episodes that Comedy Central rarely, if ever, reran when they had the package.

This checklist by the Knight-Ridder news agency lists 178 campaign promises made four years ago by George W. Bush. Despite his party's control of Congress for most of that period, they estimate he has kept 46% of these promises. By contrast, Bill Clinton — though saddled with an opposition Congress — achieved about 66% of his campaign pledges. Obviously, these cannot be exact comparisons since some goals are harder to realize than others and since 9/11 did alter a lot of priorities in Washington. Still, I was surprised at how many of Bush's own proposals never made it through the House and Senate.

Frank Rich discusses the fuss over Kerry mentioning that Dick Cheney's daughter is a Lesbian…and Rich somehow manages to tie it in to the current embarrassments being visited upon Bill O'Reilly.

ABC has dropped their option to air the Miss America contest, dealing a severe blow to the pageant's pocketbook and prestige. Barring some major renovation that brings in Johnny Carson to host and has the contestants compete nude, I can't imagine any of the other networks picking up this brontosaurus. The pageant operators will probably put together a syndication arrangement whereby companies that participate in Miss America promotions sponsor the event, and that could allow the hoary institution to continue for quite some time without going topless.

Still, I think it says something nice about our national sensibility that the public has rejected this silly event with its shallow values and blatant commercialization. True, the Tony Awards get low ratings but they have a prestige that the beauty contest lacks. Does any little girl these days dream of growing up to be Miss America? A few boys, maybe…but no girls.

Here's a QuickTime excerpt from Monday's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart in which Mr. Stewart summarizes his view of what occurred the previous Friday on Crossfire.

Lately, fewer of my e-mail correspondents are interested in selling me drugs and more want to loan me money. Here's an e-mail that just now arrived, somehow making it past my intricate series of Spam filters…

Here is Buford Craft. I write to you because we are accepting your mortgage application. Our office confirms you can get a $220.000 loán for a $252.00 per month payment. Approval process will take 1 minute, so please fill out the form on our website.

Now, there is zero chance I will ever order drugs from a stranger on the Internet. I don't really need any drugs but if and when I do, I'll get them from a slightly more reputable source…say, buying them from that guy who came up to me the other night in a parking lot and asked if I wanted to score some "dynamite crack."

And I don't need to borrow any money, thank you, but if and when I ever do, it won't be over the Internet…and it especially won't be from someone who calls himself "Buford Craft." Where, I wondered, did the presumably-overseas person who composed this message pick up that name? I mean, the guy was clever enough to insert an accented letter "a" into the word "loan" so no Spam filter would flag it. Couldn't he figure out that Buford Craft was not a name that would suggest a stable, reliable business associate? I wouldn't buy live bait from someone named Buford Craft.

So I googled Buford Craft…and don't waste your time. All you'll find is that someone by that name was a pallbearer at a funeral in 1970, and the obit is posted on the web. I'm guessing the loan shark just scours the Internet at random for proper names and plugs them into these inviting e-mails. Perhaps an automated bot does it, the same way it scans for domain names and e-mail addresses.

But the nice part is that whoever transmitted this e-mail wasted his time — and not just because almost none of us will fall for this racket. Most of these things, I'm told, are sent out by people and programmers who work on commission. If they somehow manage to snag a sucker and deliver them into the main scammers' clutches, the e-mailer (Buford, in this case) gets a fee or a cut. Just to see what would happen, I clicked on the link that was included to take me to the website where I was to fill out the form…and got a dead end. No website there. They probably either fled or were closed down. You can't trust anyone these days.

Today on the news, I saw George W. Bush saying over and over that he will never allow a new military draft. I usually think Bush believes what he says even when I think he's dead wrong. In this case, he didn't convince me he wasn't thinking, in the back of his mind, "If and when we need more soldiers, we'll find some way to draft them without calling it a 'draft.'"

Actually, I would have believed him if he'd said, "No one running for president can swear to you that a draft will never be necessary because no one can anticipate what battles America may have to fight." I think that would have been an honest statement. I also would have believed Bush if he'd come out with some explanation of how, apart from a draft, this country can increase the size of its army. The most likely answer, however, is something Bush probably wouldn't want to say because it's what Conservatives always accuse Liberals of doing: Throwing money at a problem.

I don't think it would be a bad idea to make military service more financially attractive. We say we love our soldiers but we don't seem to pay them very well. Earlier this year, I wrote this post all about this.

I also heard Bush say that Kerry will say anything to be elected. This was just before he said, "If you vote for me, I'll buy you a pony."