Monthly Archives: July 2012

Fred Kaplan on Mitt Romney's overseas escapades. The odd thing is that if Romney had intentionally insulted several nations over there, pissed on their protocol and mooned the Queen, he probably would have raised his favorability ratings with a certain portion of the electorate here.

Richard A. Muller is a physicist who's been going around for years now saying that Global Warming is a hoax and that the teensy amount of climate change that may be occurring is not caused by human activity. He's the kind of guy global warming deniers cite when they want to say, "Look, look! We've got some scientists on our side!"

Or at least they did. Last year, he changed his mind and said Global Warming was real and now he's saying it is being caused by what we do, mainly in the area of carbon dioxide emissions. This is kinda like Eric Cantor suddenly deciding "Obamacare" makes good financial sense. So you might want to read this article that Muller just wrote entitled "The Conversion of a Climate-Change Skeptic."

Pat Buchanan has had a pretty lucrative career frightening whites about how the world will end when they are no longer the majority race in this country. If ever there was a pundit (and occasional candidate) on the national scene viewing everything through that "them or us" prism, it's Buchanan.

In his latest column, he's predicting doom for the G.O.P. as the Hispanic population increases…and maybe it will be if the face of the Republican party continues to be guys who talk like Pat Buchanan. Somehow, I think the subtext of this column is Buchanan's fear that his party will have to give up on his kind of condescending attitude to non-whites. Matt Taibbi has more to say about the column.

I didn't see Stan Lee down at the Comic-Con but I saw the next best thing…his doppelgänger, Fake Stan Lee. Fake Stan Lee is kind of a goodwill ambassador for himself, roaming the con and presiding and getting people to yell "Excelsior!" into his camera. He also loves for some aberrant reason to trash Scott Kurtz's booth.

Anyway, if you haven't caught any of Fake Stan Lee's earlier con reports, check 'em out. There's a link to a couple at this end of this year's video here, which also features some moments from his very funny guest appearance at our Quick Draw! game…

My piece on legibility the other day brought a lot of response, all of it on my side. Since I'm not opposed to quoting folks who agree with me, here are some excerpts starting with Jim Hanley…

You're not alone in thinking that art direction is often inimical to readability of books and magazines. I think, though, that it's been an issue for a lot longer than you think. David Ogilvy was particularly critical of bad art directors, as far back as the mid-sixties. His Ogilvy on Advertising is a book of which I've given away many copies, over the years. In it, Ogilvy speaks about the disregard he encountered among art directors about making copy readable. He cites a large body of research he did that sans serif fonts, all caps, reverse type, and italics were more difficult for people to read. Still, he described a constant battle to keep them out of work that came from his shop.

I don't know if he was active long enough to see the abominations that desktop publishing brought to publishing, but I have no doubt that he'd be equally appalled by the yellow type on a green background you described. Or pretty much every page of Wizard Magazine, when it was still around.

His dictum was that if these type choices worked, The New York Times would use them. And, to date, I'm pretty sure they don't.

Boy, I'm thankful every day that I don't have to look at Diamond's Previews anymore.

From John B. Traylor…

I could not agree with you more. I worked in the printing industry for over 45 years and with the rise of self-publishing and art directors as you mentioned the quality has really suffered. When I began my career in printing everything was still hot metal (at least where I worked) and the Linotype operators who were setting type actually would catch errors in the copy. By the time I retired all the copy came in either over the internet, disk or thumb drive. By that time we were supposed to print it just as it came in warts and all.

Jan Kasick wrote a very long message of which this is a fraction…

The last book I brokered was assigned to the kind of art director you can't stand. He looked at every page and practically wondered out loud, "Hmm, what can I do on this page to get people to notice my contribution?" If this had been an art book, he might have been justified although if he'd been assigned your Jack Kirby book, what he would have been wondering was, "How do I get everyone to notice me more than Kirby?" We had to keep rejecting pages that were not legible and every time we did, he grumbled that we were insisting he "dumb down" the book's design.

Jim Houghton writes…

You're 99% right, Mark. "Real" designers are actually interested in communication through design — which means, among other things, being able to read the words. And you are 150% right about designing onscreen. Us old fogeys had to actually know that 5 pt. type is not readable, but them young-ass designers are looking at a screen that's blowed up real good. I get sent ads all that time that are gorgeous — if they were actually going to get printed that large.

You're also right about not getting designy at the expense of the work that you're supposed to be showcasing, especially if it's Jack Kirby.

But you're wrong about reversed type. Okay for small bold headers, if you don't mind being mildly tacky, which I can live with. If you mean it's okay for body copy, though — okay, it's not as bad as lime green text on a middle grey web page. But nobody should be asked to read quantities of reversed body copy. Says the old fogey. Who knows about dot gain.

I can live with reversed type in small quantities. I can even put up with text over graphics on rare occasions. One person who didn't want their message quoted here told me a story about a time he called for the text to be in bright yellow over a very dark photo in a magazine article about espionage and spying. Then they decided that didn't work so he picked a bright yellow picture and indicated that they type should be in black. Then his assistant changed the photo but forgot to switch the type back. You had to hold the page at a certain angle with bright sunlight bouncing off it to be able to read the text. He received praise from one of his peers for the clever statement he was making about those paragraphs, turning them into a hidden message in keeping with the theme.

More on this another time. I just noticed what time it is. Thanks to all who wrote even if I didn't quote you.

In 1978, following the triumphant end of The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Ms. Moore returned to CBS in a variety series called Mary. It featured a "family" of performers — Michael Keaton, Jim Hampton, Swoozie Kurtz, Judith Kahan, Dick Shawn and David Letterman. Some sources erroneously report that Merrill Markoe was one of the cast members. Merrill, who later was involved professionally and personally with Mr. Letterman, was a writer on the show but not a performer.

Things did not go well and the program was terminated after three episodes so that Mary could have a do-over. Six months later, she came back in a different variety series called The Mary Tyler Moore Hour that didn't succeed, either. I knew a few of the writers on each version and they all felt that the problem was Mary. I suppose Mary felt the problem was the writers.

I was working on variety shows at the time and was asked to come in and talk to someone about joining the staff of Version #1 but I had another job that conflicted. At the time, I was disappointed as I'd once had a massive crush on Ms. Moore. A week or so later, a writer I knew who did work on it, Jeffrey Barron, told me I was fortunate. He'd once had a crush on Laura Petrie and all the good feelings he'd ever had about her were gone by the end of the first run-through. By the second, he said he'd never be able to watch The Dick Van Dyke Show again.

Our clip is from that first version and you can see a lot going wrong here, starting with their taking a tune that had a little soul in it when Wings recorded it and giving it the Lawrence Welk treatment. It's also a musical number performed by folks who weren't singers or dancers and seemed to even know it. You can especially feel Mr. Letterman's dislike for what he's doing out there. Then again, Dave's had a pretty good career acting like he hated everything he was doing in front of an audience…

The musical version of The Nutty Professor is currently in previews in Nashville. Here's a gushy but not-uninteresting profile of its director, Mr. Jerry Lewis.

The mystery person in today's Laurel and Hardy photo has been identified! His name is (or more likely, was) Fernando G. Toledo. a writer for the Spanish movie magazine, Film Selectos. He was visiting the set when Stan and Ollie filmed the Spanish language version of their feature film, Pack Up Your Troubles and he wrote an article about it. The I.D. was sent to me by Myles Lobdell, who found it on a forum where it was figured out by Laurel and Hardy experts Dick Bann and Piet Lindner.

As you may know, the early Laurel and Hardy sound films weren't dubbed for foreign markets. They actually filmed each movie several times — once in French, once in Italian, once in Spanish, etc. — bringing in actors who spoke the language in question for each version. Stan and Oliver read their dialogue from an off-camera blackboard that showed phonetic translations. That's what they were working on when that picture was taken.

By the way: I'm going to continue posting photos of Laurel and Hardy but after we pass #300, they'll become a once or twice a week feature and they'll be bigger. I may also repost some old ones in larger versions. For some reason, I really like it when I can look at my blog and see Stan and Ollie looking back.

Tonight, Jimmy Fallon's guests are Bill Cosby and Fred Willard. Mr. Willard was booked before his recent arrest and is enough of a mensch to not cancel because of it.

I'm not embedding this because it's a C-Span video and anything with Congress on it seems to cause everything to freeze up and not work. It's Senator Al Franken taking to the Senate floor to eulogize his late writing partner, Tom Davis. I'm of two minds about this, one being that it does seem like a self-indulgent squandering of the peoples' time. On the other hand, every single Congressperson and Senator does things like this and some of them do a lot more of it than Franken…and it is an interesting speech.

A lot of it was about a sketch Franken and Davis wrote for Saturday Night Live in which Julia Child (played by Dan Aykroyd) cut herself and bled to death on her show. I don't recall that as being anywhere near the finest work for Mssrs. Franken, Davis or Aykroyd but some folks — including the three of them plus Ms. Child — loved it. What I do find kinda funny is to imagine them doing that sketch…and there they are backstage afterwards with several of them still dripping stage blood…

…and Franken says to the other two, "Hey, that went great. You know, I think I'll mention that on the floor of the United States Senate if I ever get elected as — oh, I dunno…maybe the junior senator from the great state of Minnesota."

Somehow, I don't think that was said. Here's a link to the video…and do be careful. It is, after all, C-Span.

Can you see what's different about me today? Give up? I'm on my backup computer. Don't be embarrassed that you didn't notice. I'm sure you would have, eventually. My regular computer got one of those virusy things and it's been removed but I'm doing a deep, deep scan of every nook, cranny and byte to make sure it's outta there and that'll tie up that terminal for a few hours. So that's why I appear to you to be on the other side of my office.

It's a busy day with not much time for blogging, I fear. I could fill a lot of this page quickly if I quoted all the messages I've received from folks telling me about the book they bought or the article they wrote that was all but illegible due to Art Director malpractice. I'll quote some (not all) of them in the next few days.

Yesterday, I spent a (thankfully) brief amount of time quashing a bogus death report on the 'net. Someone for some reason posted on a forum that a certain aged actor I know had died. The actor had not…and something about the way the guy announced it made me suspicious. It was just too casual. I called the actor's home and got his voice mail…and I didn't leave a message because I really didn't want to explain to him why I was calling. Just wanted to hear his voice. So I called his agent and asked, "So, have any of your clients died in the last 48 hours?" She said no. I asked about the actor in question. She said she'd spoken to him a half-hour earlier. The Internet posting was three hours earlier so I wrote to its author, told him it was wrong and without responding to me, he deleted it from the forum. It seems to not have travelled.

Lastly before I get to work: Comic-Con appears to be officially over. I finished unpacking. Bye for now.