Monthly Archives: October 2005

And here's another video link to another act that uses a not dissimilar gimmick in a different way. This one's six minutes and the best stuff is in the last part. (And just out of curiosity: Does anyone know who these guys are?)

Here's a neat little magic trick (video link) from Japanese TV. It's one of those where it's pretty obvious how it's done but it works anyway.

The Boardwalk Hotel in Las Vegas will close on January 9, 2006 with a demolition date to be announced shortly. Once it's down, they'll start building Project City Center, a $5 billion hotel/condo complex on the land. The Boardwalk is that garish blight covered with circus imagery situated on The Strip between New York, New York and Monte Carlo. Who'll miss it? Fans of cheap lodging, connoisseurs of clown decor and especially those of you who love a really rotten, inedible all-you-can-eat spread. The last time I was there, the Surf Buffet had two unique distinctions. It was the only buffet in Vegas that was open 24 hours. And it was the only buffet in Vegas where people would pay, go in, look at the offerings in the steam tables and say, "Uh, let's go to Denny's."

The one time I was there, it was with a bunch of friends who'd just finished performing in a show at another hotel. It was late and no one was ready to go to bed, individually or collectively. Various places to go were nominated and discarded until someone made a joking comment about the Surf Buffet and I didn't laugh. Suddenly, it was, "What? You don't know about the Surf Buffet? Hey, we've gotta take Mark to the Surf Buffet." There was a sudden, giggling concurrence and I guess I should have been worried, especially as they made it clear to me that this was not about eating.

I saw why when we got there. I think it was something like six bucks and that included one "steak" that could have been used as carbon paper. They were nominally cleaning the place and someone had taken down the little cards on the sneeze-guard that identified what was in each serving station which made for quite a game show: "What do you think that is? Goulash or cheese?" One of my companions sampled a dish and we all asked her what it was. "I have no idea" was the reply. I asked, "Animal, vegetable or mineral?" and she couldn't even answer that. We finally cornered one of the employees who was in charge of keeping the trays full and demanded to know what was in that one. He told us, "Creamed chicken with dumplings" but there were definitely no dumplings and I'm still not sure about the cream or the chicken. For all I know, after we left they could have moved that dish to the Dessert section and declared it Peach Cobbler or some kind of mousse.

How…bad…was the Surf Buffet? Let me put it this way: If they'd brought out a huge can of Franco-American Spaghetti-Os with Sliced Franks and dumped the contents (cold) into a serving dish, there would have been a run on it. Diners would have trampled their own children to get to something that vaguely resembled food. We nibbled, sampled, mocked the cuisine unmercifully and I think we might have then gone to a real restaurant had not our Surf Buffeting killed all appetites. To be fair, I had some carrot sticks that weren't bad, and the Sierra Mist almost had the proper ratio of syrup to CO2.

I have since heard that the Surf Buffet has been improved…which, of course, removes its entire raison d'être. I mean, if you're going to go someplace to eat in Vegas, you only have around eight thousand better options. The whole point of the spread at the Boardwalk was to heckle your meal. The "open all night" distinction has also lost its punch since the Riviera introduced a late night buffet…

…so I say, drop the place. Tear it down…the whole building. And make sure you get that bogus slot machine out front where every pull's a winner and every winner gets a cheapjack key ring if he walks past every slot machine in the place to go in and claim it. I'm all for preserving the great, historical sites but the Boardwalk is to Vegas what a cold sore is to Cindy Crawford's upper lip. As I've said in earlier items, it's sad to see the cheaper places in town go out of business but cheap, in and of itself, doesn't do it. Not when it gets you a place that looks like a bad Red Skelton painting and a buffet where the tastiest item is the Sweet 'n' Lo.

Yesterday on Countdown with Keith Olbermann, the host read an item about Bill O'Reilly's possible retirement. You don't often see a newsguy motivated to get up and start singing and dancing in glee but you do in this video link.

In March of this year, I announced here that Rhino Handmade, which specializes in limited-edition collectors' CDs, was prepping My Son, the Box, an assembly of almost everything Allan Sherman ever did. We're big fans of Mr. Sherman here so this was welcome news to us…and of course, by "us," I mean me.

It was apparently welcome news to many of you since you've been sending e-mails asking us when it'll be out and why absolutely no other site on the whole Internet (including the Rhino Handmade site) seemed to have any mention of it unless they got it from here. One of you even accused us of being delusional about this alleged CD set and caused us to doubt our own sanity.

Well, the Rhino Handmade folks still haven't announced it or mentioned it on their site but Amazon is now taking advance orders for My Son, the Box and they say it'll be out on November 8. That seems soon for a product that has yet to be publicized anywhere but, hey, at least it's on its way.

However — yes, sadly, there's a "however" — I should caution you that I'm not sure yet what's in this collection and that it probably won't be exactly what I described back in March. Word is that the set was delayed and some cuts were excluded because of legal problems with some of the tunes Sherman parodied. So before you send off the hefty price — $140! — you might want to wait for an official contents listing. I still think it'll be a must-have item for lovers of great song-spoofing but it's better if you know what you're getting before you spend that kind of dough. More information should be available very soon…especially if this sucker's going to be out in three weeks.

Variety selects The Top 100 Icons of the last hundred years. And there are some other interesting articles over on their anniversary website.

Have I mentioned here that my pal Lee Goldberg (a prolific writer of TV and books) has a weblog? That it's full of info on the writing business? That you oughta visit it every day or so? I don't think I have so I will now. Lee has some nice memories of the late Charles Rocket in this post, by the way. (Hey, Lee! We're about due for another lunch…)

I am told the entire debut episode of The Colbert Report can be watched online at this link. You'll need to have Windows Media Player installed with the sarcasm filter turned off.

Veteran comic book and strip artist Tom Gill has died of heart failure at the age of 92. Gill was born in Brooklyn and his career as a professional artist began with a staff job at the New York Daily News. He was never certain what year but he was there in time to draw a map of Pearl Harbor that ran in the paper the day of the infamous bombing. He later worked for the New York Times and the New York Herald Tribune and for the latter, he drew a short-lived strip about a cab driver named Flower Potts. Around 1948, he began drawing for comic books and notched a 20+ year run on the Lone Ranger comics for Western Publishing (Dell, Gold Key). He did dozens of other comics for Western, specializing in westerns and — as he put it — "anything with a horse in it." His Fury comics, based on the TV series about a stallion, were especially striking and other artists used them as reference for horse-drawing. Gill also drew comics for Harvey, Toby Press, Marvel and other companies, and illustrated a fair amount of childrens' books for Western. When the Man From U.N.C.L.E. TV show was big, Gill illustrated dozens of books and activity books based on the series.

Of all his many accomplishments, Tom was proudest of his 50+ year stint as an instructor at the School of Visual Arts in New York. There, he taught over 2,500 students, many of whom went on to become prominent in the field of comics, advertising design and animation. A few of them assisted him on his comic book work before graduating to their own assignments, including Joe Sinnott, Herb Trimpe and John Verpoorten. He was also justifiably proud of his work with the National Cartoonists Society, serving several terms as its vice-president. The N.C.S. awarded him its coveted Silver T-Square award in 1964 and its award as Best Comic Book Artist in 1970. (He was then primarily doing the Bonanza comic book for Gold Key. A few years earlier, he drew a few issues for the company of The Owl, a new super-hero creation of Jerry Siegel.)

I met Tom at a New York convention about ten years ago. Veteran artist Dick Ayers, who sometimes worked with him, introduced us by telling me, "You're about to meet one of the real giants of our business." He was right, but Tom sure didn't conduct himself like he thought he was a giant. He was funny and charming and genuinely pleased that I knew who he was…and when I told him how much I admired the work of some of his students, like Joe Sinnott, he beamed with pride. Last year, we had him as a Guest of Honor at the Comic-Con International and I got to spend time with him and interview him. He had a true love of art and cartooning and talent…and it showed.

Here's a link to the Reuters obit and here's a link to a recent article about Tom. He was just what Dick Ayers said he was.

I had a political-type post in mind to write here. Then I read E.J. Dionne, who said the same thing I was going to say but said it better. It's about how people who cheered on Ken Starr's investigation and chanted "rule of law" are now horrified that Patrick Fitzgerald's investigation and "rule of law" may harm someone on their side. Also, of course, folks who defended Clinton back then are just fine with the parts of the current investigation that parallel that which once outraged them.

Comedy writers who have to write topical material pray for news items that lend themselves to dozens of easy jokes. This one is worth at least a solid week of Leno monologues.

Matthew Yglesias reminds us what the Valerie Plame/CIA matter is really about. It's about the fact that we have American soldiers dying in Iraq because, once upon a time, there was this fear that Saddam was close to having nuclear weapons. Remember them?

I think Stephen Colbert's one of the ten-or-so funniest people to grace my Sony Trinitron this century. The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is probably my current favorite show and he's probably the best thing on it apart from Stewart…so you figure a whole half hour of the guy has gotta be great, right? Well, I'm still assuming it will be and that the first outing of The Colbert Report was an okay first step. I mean, someone's going to figure out that Colbert's snotty screen personality needs more "normality" to play against. Out there alone, he's like Costello with no Abbott, and the whole show plays at the same snide attitude without interruption. The correspondents on The Daily Show are funny because they have Mr. Stewart there to play straight and to represent our amazement at the bizarre things they say and do. On last night's first Colbert Report, it was the other way around: Because he's the host, Colbert's odd style becomes the norm and his guest, Stone Phillips, was the guy who was out of sync with the rest of the world. Not as humorous that way.

Based on the promos, I was expecting The Colbert Report to be more of a parody of The O'Reilly Factor and other shows where the host sells a worldview and berates all who challenge it. Perhaps that's what they have in mind. (Bill O'Reilly, by the way, is Jon Stewart's guest tonight.) I wouldn't judge a show of this kind by its first episodes. After all, it took a long time for The Daily Show to become The Daily Show. Still, I have to admit I was a little disappointed by how much of the first Colbert Report was just Colbert arching that eyebrow towards Camera One. I hope this won't be another in the long list of shows that prove some people are just better as Second Bananas.

The American Society of Magazine Editors has picked forty magazine covers that they say are the "top covers" of the last four decades. I'm not sure what the criteria are. Got the most attention? Sold the most issues? Some of the covers seem to be special because of the concepts, some because of the art direction and some just because they were on important issues. Here are the choices.

I somehow missed the news item when former Saturday Night Live cast member Charles Rocket was found dead on October 7 but I saw the reports today that his death has been ruled a suicide. What a sad ending for a man who — and this compounds the sadness — will probably only be remembered for being on SNL during a season everyone hated and for uttering the "f" word on live TV. This article provides a long and compassionate view of the man.

UPDATE: The above link doesn't seem to be working all the time. Here's a link to a newsgroup posting that reproduces the text.