Monthly Archives: August 2008

I'm watching TV, waiting for John McCain to appear to formally announce his veep pick. If I were staging this event, I don't think I'd have brought high school cheerleaders in to warm up the crowd.

There's a big banner up that says "Country First" and people are waving signs that say that. McCain will probably deliver his customary disclaimer about how he doesn't question Barack Obama's patriotism.

I'm channel-hopping and all the pundits are saying the selection of Palin was a "daring choice." I think that means they want to see some polling data before they say whether it was a good idea or not. On the other hand, they all seem to think that the referee should step in now and stop the Biden-Palin debate before it happens.

McCain's speaking. I'm going to go listen.

It's kinda nice to think that this country is about to either elect a black man as president or a woman as vice-president.

Just woke up to hear that the G.O.P. ticket is McCain and Palin. I'll bet I'm not the only person who'd barely heard of the lady in question and who thought immediately of Michael Palin walking into the Vice-Presidential Debate and asking, "Is this the right room for an argument?"

Well, it's always enjoyable when all the news analysts turn out to be wrong. When I went to bed, it absolutely had to be either Pawlenty or Romney.

If I watch Obama's speech, I won't get a script finished tonight. So I'll watch it tomorrow or maybe save it 'til Saturday.

Instead of half-watching the convention today, it's been more like quarter-watching. Tim Kaine's speech demonstrated why he wouldn't have been a great pick for the veep slot. Then again, Joe Biden's brief talk tonight and his longer speech the other night weren't that much more exciting. I missed Al Gore and will have to catch him on some website.

Maybe it makes sense as politics but from a "show business" sense, I wish they wouldn't release speeches in advance. As I'm writing this, Keith Olbermann is reading excerpts from Obama's big speech well before the Senator himself takes the stage to deliver it. That's a good way to lessen the drama of the moment.

I'm going out for a walk. The TiVo's recording it all while I'm out, just in case anything memorable happens. I don't expect it but you never know.

This article in the Los Angeles Times discusses where to get the best rotisserie chicken in L.A. But it might be of interest to folks outside that area because it tells you a lot about what to look for in a good rotisserie chicken and those guidelines apply elsewhere.

They're partially wrong, I think, about supermarket rotisserie chix. Sometimes, you get one that's been sitting there under the heat lamps since the days they gave Green Stamps with them…but you don't have to settle for that. When you get to the market, zip over to the department that prepares the birds and ask if and when they'll have a fresh batch. At least, it always works for me at local Ralphs markets. If you don't get there too late in the day, there are usually birds coming off the turntable and they can be awfully good for an hour or so after.

The same is true with the hens you can get at Costco. For some reason, it always amazes me that Costco sells a perfectly ordinary-sized rotisserie chicken. I always feel like because it's Costco, it's going to come with about eighty drumsticks, thirty thighs and a dozen breasts.

Otherwise locally, I used to like the Zankou mini-chain but they became inconsistent about the time one of the owners decided to kill another and himself. At Hollywood and Gower, there's a place called Al Wazir that now does Zankou better than Zankou. (Zankou, for you outta-towners, offers a Mediterranean-style roaster which customers slather with a special garlic paste. When they were good, there was nothing better.)

What I really miss is a local chain called Chicken Natural that used to offer chickens cooked with nothing more than a little lemon juice. You can do a lot of interesting things to make a chicken tasty but nothing beats just cooking them fresh and simple. Wish we still had Chicken Naturals around.

My friend Bruce Reznick just wrote me that he's signed up to be notified when John McCain announces his vice-presidential pick. He's going to be notified by telegram.

Just found the negative of the photo I scanned for the previous item here. It's from the 1975 San Diego Con.

Here's a photo I took of Jack Kirby at some early San Diego Con (I think) back in the days before it was even called Comic-Con International. I seem to have a lot of photos of Jack in one of his two natural habitats, the other being "seated at his drawing table." This one is "surrounded by admirers," which he always was at any gathering of folks who knew anything about comic books.

At cons today, I meet a lot of people who feel a genuine sense of loss that they never got to meet Jack…never got to shake the hand that drew some of their favorite comics, never got to tell him that they were their favorite comics. When fans first started telling me this a few years ago, I was a little startled. It was like, "How could you not meet Jack Kirby?" He was always so accessible, so approachable. For a couple of decades, all you had to do was show up at a San Diego Con (or one of many others he attended) and be willing to wait in line for twenty minutes. Or if you had his phone number — and everyone did — you could call up, talk to him and maybe even get an invite to drop by the house for coffee.

And then I remind myself: Jack died in '94. Since then, an awful lot of humans have discovered his work, which remains increasingly in print. There's something about it that grabs readers in a way that few comics can. He drew stories that radiate, as Jack himself did, a certain energy and excitement. Larry Lieber, who wrote scripts for Jack at one point, has said, "If Jack drew a rock, it was fascinating. It was like the rocks had personality." And as someone else (I think it was me) pointed out after Larry said that, at one point, Jack drew a whole pile of personality-filled rocks which they called The Thing and it was one of his most personal, enduring characters.

Jack would have been 91 years old today. Of all the personal, enduring characters he was involved with, the most personal and enduring is turning out to be Jack.

The bidding for that Batmobile listed on eBay ended at $110,000 with the reserve unmet. My guess it was Alfred the Butler trying to sell it without Master Wayne's approval. I never trusted that guy.

If you don't want to buy a used Batmobile, you can pay to have someone build one for you. Thanks to Brent Cleever for the link.

The class I teach at USC had its first session today so I missed most of the convention and have been catching up via TiVo. It's not a bad way to view it since you can speed through an awful lot of nothing.

My overwhelming impression of the evening was annoyance at myself. I half-believed all those pundits and talking heads who said that Hillary and her supporters would fracture the party, driving a wedge that could never be healed. I don't know to what extent that possibility was exaggerated by wishful Republicans and/or reporters hyping a possible story…and to what extent skillful negotiation prevented a train wreck. But it sure turned out to be a lot of worry about something that didn't happen.

I was disappointed in Joe Biden's speech…a couple of good lines but it didn't sound like him. I'm also a little tired of speeches where the idea is to end each sentence with a catch-phrase and encourage the audience to join in on it. There was also another thing about it that bothered me but I want to think about how to phrase what I'm feeling so I'll save that for a later post.

Bill Clinton was great. He's always great at this kind of thing…but you know who surprised me? John Kerry. I never thought of him as a great giver of speeches but tonight, a mere four years too late, he seemed to have learned how it's done. It didn't get a lot of TV coverage so I decided to embed it here. If you have thirteen minutes, give it a look.

Okay…so when she was running against him, Hillary Clinton faulted Barack Obama for a lack of experience. Now that she's supporting him, she has to backtrack from those statements and also watch as the McCain forces use them as a club against "her" candidate.

And when Rudy Giuliani was running against John McCain, he called him unqualified for having a lack of experience in the executive end of government. Now that he's out stumping for McCain, he's decided McCain's experience makes him utterly qualified to be president.

I guess it's always been like this in politics. I'm just wondering if the era of YouTube and digital video libraries is going to cause candidates to start realizing that the words they say today, they may have to eat tomorrow.