Monthly Archives: March 2006

Michael Kinsley, who isn't one, tells us why there's hardly any point these days in being a billionaire.

On June 7 of last year, I posted the following item on this weblog…

George W. Bush's approval rating is now a full twenty points lower than Bill Clinton's was on the day he was impeached.

The correct number is now thirty. And according to some polls, more than that.

We're waiting for the results in our survey about embedded vs. non-embedded video links. So far, I've received more than 40 votes and it's unanimous for…well, I don't want to influence the vote. But I sense an early trend here. (On the other hand, I am using Diebold machines to count…)

In the meantime, we're going to offer one embedded video link and one non-embedded one. The embedded one is an intermission trailer for 7-Up that was inspired by an earlier and more famous trailer. It was also, one suspects, inspired by the cartooning skills of Robert Crumb. And yes, I think that's the late, great Paul Frees supplying the voiceover. Here's that video clip…

And now, over on a site that isn't set up to allow the embedding of video links, here's the original intermission trailer. And isn't it odd in this day of product placements in the movies and TV shows themselves to see what's basically a commercial with no product placement?

Walter Cronkite, who once famously told us the Vietnam War was a stalemate, doesn't have as optimistic a view of the Iraq situation.

If we believe his official bio, cartoon mogul-director Joe Barbera is 95 years old today. There are animation historian people who claim Mr. B is a year or two older than that, and that decades ago he fudged a bit on the topic. Either way, March 24 does seem to be his birthday and that's good enough for us.

I had the pleasure of working for Mr. Barbera for several years. Even when we disagreed — and I'm not proud to say that was often — I respected him and found him charming. Ultimately, it was probably a more pleasurable experience to fight with Joe Barbera than it was to get along with some of the other cartoon producers who hired me. I found him brilliant and clever and ruthless and compassionate and…well, I'll tell you what. In honor of his birthday, I'll tell a quick Joe Barbera story…

I had an office on the west side of the Hanna-Barbera building — the side that faced Cahuenga Boulevard. Outside my window was a small forest-like area and sometimes, one might espy sexual activity occurring in those bushes. There was a prostitute who sometimes worked out on Cahuenga — we called her the Hanna-Barbera Hooker and talked about getting her a Wilma suit — and she was known to service her clients without travelling far. Eventually, she got tired of the security guards shooing her away and/or calling the police but for about a month there, she sometimes conducted business not far from my window.

Neither Mr. Barbera nor his partner stood on a lot of ceremony and they both worked long hours and with incredible energy. If something had to be discussed, they often wouldn't stand on the ceremony of summoning you to their offices. Bill Hanna would come to my office to complain that a script I'd written had too many scenes or so much action that it would go way over budget. Joe Barbera would come to my office to say that he loved the script I'd written and he only had a few tiny suggestions which would only mean rewriting every word of it.

One day, Joe walked in to talk about an outline I'd prepared for a proposed series. "It needs a bigger finish," he said.

Just then, I noticed shrubs rustling outside and knew what it was. I motioned to the window and said, "How about something like that?"

J.B. walked over, peeked out the window and said, "I like it but Bill will say, 'It'll cost too much to animate.'"

As you've no doubt noticed, I have recently been embedding video links in this here weblog. You click on the picture and you see a little video clip which is actually situated over on Google Video or YouTube or ifilm. I have mixed feelings on how this is working.

The good thing about them is that you just click and you get to see the clip and it will usually not be preceded by an ad. The bad thing is that the embedded links sometimes cause this page to load slower. The little window I embed calls up a still picture from the other site and if that site's busy, it may not appear on this page immediately.

I don't know which is preferable so I've decided to conduct a survey. The cut-off time will be Noon (my time) on Sunday. At that point, I will tally all the votes and that will be the policy for this site. I will keep linking to video clips of interest no matter how the vote comes down but this will determine whether I embed the video links (as I've been doing lately) or if I just put up a link like this one or this one or even this one. So write and give me one of these two answers…

• EMBEDDED VIDEO CLIPS, YES! – Yes, I like the little windows that I can just click on and watch a video clip on your site, Mark! It does not interfere with my browsing at all.
• EMBEDDED VIDEO CLIPS, NO! – No, I would prefer to just have a normal link that I can click on and go see the clip on another site if I want, Mark! And yes, I know this may mean several more clicks or sometimes sitting through a brief ad.

Send your votes to this special address: survey@newsfromme.com. You can tell me why you feel the way you do but I'll be satisified if you just send me a YES or a NO. Thank you…and please note that this may be the fairest election you've voted in for years.

Hey, wanna see a great job of baseball fielding? It's September 28, 2005, Tampa Bay Devil Rays versus Cleveland Indians. The ball is hit for what should be an easy single and Eduardo Perez is the baserunner heading from first to second. And he would have made it too, but the ball went near infielder Ronnie Belliard and…well, just watch what happened. (Perez was so impressed, he switched teams and joined the Indians.)

In a Las Vegas casino, that's where. According to a recent (unlinkable) article in The Wall Street Journal, around 1,800 people, including gamblers and hotel employees, have had their heartbeats restarted in Vegas casinos over the last nine years. It all began when a Vegas-based paramedic named Richard Hardman had the idea for a life-saving program. He noticed how often he and other rescuers were called in to treat heart attack victims and how there was always a security guard standing there, looking helpless and with no idea what to do.

Hardman went to executives of the Boyd Group, a company that owns many Vegas hotels, and proposed that they not only have defibrillators handy but that security guards and other staffers be trained how to use them. This was a much more involved process than it sounds because it involved studying the problem and compiling data on it and then the concerns of attorneys had to be addressed and local "good samaritan" laws had to be changed. Eventually, a pilot program was started and the first time it saved someone's life, other casinos saw the publicity and wanted in.

Across the country, among people who suffer cardiac arrest in public places, the survival rate is under 10%. In Vegas hotels, it's 53% and if the defibrillators are applied within three minutes of the collapse, that number goes up to 74%. Today in most casinos, there are enough defibrillators strategically dispersed — and enough people qualified to use them — that three minutes is quite possible.

So that's the answer to the question I asked earlier. Unfortunately, we do not have stats on how many people had heart attacks just because they were in Vegas casinos. But between the smoke and the buffets and the Blackjack dealers who can draw five cards to a 21 and beat your twenty, I'm guessing the number is high.

You may have noticed that every so often, I write here about TV coverage of high-speed car chases. I'm not sure why I find them interesting. It might be the odd mental state being displayed by someone who flees from police despite the fact that there always seems to be about a 98% chance of being caught and/or involved in a car crash. (And — oh, yeah — they sometimes wind up getting shot, too. Like there weren't enough other good reasons to not try it.) I may also be fascinated by the general cluelessness of local news anchors who have to ad-lib, sometimes for an hour or so at a time, without benefit of very many facts to impart.

It's also kind of fun to see something on your TV and you have no idea just how and when it's going to end. I mean, you can pretty much bet it's going to end badly for the guy being chased…but how bad? And how and where will it happen? And will any innocent people be hurt in the process? I love moments when what's on my television is completely out of human control.

Oddly enough, I don't like those World's Wildest Police Videos shows that make up about half the schedule of Spike TV. They're phony with their precision editing and phony soundtracks. Do people even notice that it doesn't matter which state or even country the pursuit is in, it's still the same helicopter reporter covering it? And that there's the same annoying sound effects track of police sirens and tire squeals and crash sounds even though there was no microphone at the actual chase that could have recorded the noises?

But I sometimes get hooked watching the real things, especially when they occur on streets I know. If you're so inclined, I'll tell you about a huge online library of video from Southern California police pursuits. It starts on this page of the website of KCBS and KCAL, which are channels 2 and 9, and which share a common news crew. Most of what they have there are edited reports from the local news but they also have "web extras," which are usually long and untrimmed. Some of them are the raw footage that the copter fed back to the newsroom even when the anchors weren't chiming in with their comments.

This may not interest you in the slightest. But if it does, you'll waste quite a lot of time over on that site watching crazed drivers and hearing about P.I.T. maneuvers and spike strips.

I know the answer to this and I'll post it later today. But it's an intriguing thing to think about…

What, according to The Wall Street Journal, is the safest place in America to have a heart attack? Now, they're not talking about having it in a hospital or at a fire station or in the back of an ambulance or at the home of some world-famous heart surgeon. We're talking about a place that you would not normally associate with treating such ailments. And I'll give you the hint that we're not looking for a specific place but a kind of establishment where some of us are likely to be once in a while. If you had one — and we're not recommending this, by the way — where are you most likely to receive quick and effective treatment from folks with no medical license?

Jacob Weisberg tosses out the idea that while a military draft would not work today in this country, the lack of one ain't working too well, either. I think he's probably right but that there isn't a single politician alive who wants to touch that third rail and discuss the matter, let alone change things.

In 1966, my father and I went to a movie at the Crest Theater, which was on Westwood Boulevard just south of Wilshire. I forget what the movie was but the trailer was for a film called Penelope starring Natalie Wood, Dick Shawn, Peter Falk and Jonathan Winters. I, of course, instantly noticed that it was a reunion of three of the leads from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. What interested my father was that Jonathan Winters was in it. (He may also have been interested in the scenes in the trailer that had Ms. Wood running around in her underwear. Come to think of it, so was his son. I was fourteen and I was interested in any woman running around in her underwear. If it was Natalie Wood, so much the better. But when you're fourteen, you're not that fussy.)

My father thought Jonathan Winters was the funniest human being on the planet — a not-uncommon opinion, then or now. "We'll have to see that," he said to me. A week or two later, we were back at the Crest seeing that. My recollection is that, underwear scenes aside, neither one of us liked the movie much. You got the feeling that a lot more thought had gone into Natalie Wood's wardrobe — she seemed to go through about ninety-seven outfits in 97 minutes — than into the script.

We especially disliked the paucity of Mr. Winters. Though billed as a star, he was in the film for what seemed like about two minutes. It was probably more than that but I'll bet it wasn't a lot more than that. Four minutes, tops. It was certainly not an appearance commensurate with his billing. His name on the marquee of the Crest was just as large as Natalie's. What's more, about half of his performance was obviously done by a stuntman…and most of it had been in that trailer. If you'd seen the Coming Attractions, you'd pretty much seen Jonathan's contribution to Penelope.

On the way out that evening, my father felt swindled and it wasn't because the movie wasn't very good. It was because he felt it had been misrepresented. A man who I guess was the manager of the Crest said to us at the door, "Hope you'll come back soon," and my father blurted out his dissatisfaction. He pointed to the marquee and said, "We came to see Jonathan Winters. You shouldn't have his name up there if he's only in the movie for three minutes."

Immediately, the manager whipped out four free passes, almost like he'd had them ready for us. "Please accept these with my sincere apologies," he said. Then he turned to an employee and said, "Go get the letters for the front and the ladder. I want to change something." Sure enough, the next day when we happened to drive down Westwood, the name of Jonathan Winters was no longer on the Crest marquee. Dick Shawn's was in its place.

I'm sure this all sounds trivial today but I remember the incident vividly. It was the first time I was ever acutely aware that you ought to speak up when things aren't right…and not just because you might get something (like free passes) out of it. You do it because few things that oughta be fixed ever get fixed if no one says anything.

It is, of course, possible to overdo this. I broke up with one lady friend because she seemed to go through life, finding fault everywhere and demanding that the world be corrected to her liking. It got very tiresome, especially when I found myself fixing things that really didn't need to be fixed, just so she'd stop telling me they did. A lot of people criticize because they like the attention it gives them and the feeling of power to make others jump through hoops to please them. There have been times in my life when my biggest complaint has been people with complaints. Still, it's just as wrong, if not more so, to suffer in silence.

So that's the memory I associate with the movie Penelope, which I haven't seen since '66. In fact, I can't recall ever seeing that it was running on TV or available on home video…but it's on Turner Classic Movies this Friday evening and I'm setting a TiVo. This is not a recommendation that you do likewise since I barely remember anything about it except for how quickly Jonathan Winters disappeared and that I didn't like anything except Ms. Wood's undies. Then again, how bad can a movie with Dick Shawn, Peter Falk and (briefly) Jonathan Winters be? Plus, it also has Lou Jacobi and Carl Ballantine…so right there, you have five of my favorite comic actors.

Still, tape or TiVo it at your own risk, especially if you want to see what Ms. Wood is and isn't wearing in it. I'm just watching to see if it's any better than I remember…and also, I want to run a stopwatch on Jonathan Winters's screen time. I have the feeling you could use it to time a boiled egg.

Larry Johnson writes about how the Bush administration uses the language in evasive ways. You know, they said Al Qeada was behind 9/11 and they said Saddam Hussein was indistinguishable from Al Qeada in the war on terror that began that day. But they never meant to imply that Saddam had anything to do with 9/11.

One of the most-visited pages on this website is this article that I wrote in 1999 about a brave comedian/puppeteer named Rod Hull. The late Mr. Hull was a huge star in some countries for his performances with Emu, a mean-spirited rubber bird who tended to attack everyone within reach.

Our video extravaganza today is a short clip (under two minutes) from an appearance Rod and Emu made on a Dutch TV show. It's nowhere near his best or funniest work but at least it'll give you some idea of what the puppet looked like and how much audiences delighted in its antics. Click on the little arrow and enjoy. [NOTE: This is an ifilm link and it doesn't seem to work for all browsers. If it doesn't work in yours, you can see the clip by going to this page.]

Alan Light sent me this link to a page of photos of prize-winning rabbits. Just go look and see if there haven't been times you've felt like that.