Monthly Archives: November 2012

When Bill Clinton gave his big speech at the Democratic Convention, I watched and enjoyed it in the context of something that would help "my guy" win. I also downloaded it to my harddisk.

The other day, I came across that download, started to just watch the beginning…and 50 minutes later, had watched the whole thing. With no election outcome in doubt, it was a very different and in many ways, more extraordinary bit of communication. Leaving aside who he is and what he did as president (much of which I liked), he really is a great speechmaker, a breed that is in short supply. There are a lot of politicians out there I'd gladly vote for but I have no desire to listen to them talk. Former President Clinton's spouse and his former running mate are two of them.

Listening to this now, I was struck by how measured it was. I thought of a hundred places where he could have stuck the knife deeper into Romney but didn't. He sounded passionate. He sounded humble. He did not say that if Mitt Romney is elected, America is doomed or that the opposition ticket is not comprised of decent human beings. He just explained his point of view without being condescending. That was one of my many problems with George W. Bush. He acted like he found it an annoyance to go out and talk to The People…and he explained things to them/us like they/we were small, uneducated children.

Clinton is so natural that when there was one audience shot (you'll see it in there) that showed his words on the TelePrompter, it reminded me that he wasn't speaking extemporaneously and that he uses one. I knew it but he was so "at ease" up there that he made me forget.

So here's Bill Clinton doing what he does so well. If you don't have time to watch the whole fifty minutes, move the slider to 39:20 and just watch the last ten minutes. You can find a thousand "Why Romney Lost" explanations out there, most of them probably valid to some degree. I think the biggie is the stuff Clinton explains so well here: The math in Romney's plan was vague and it didn't add up. No matter what Mitt said the last few weeks, everyone knew that he was going to make sure that rich people paid less at a time when the country can't afford that and his explanation that he would make up for it via loophole-closing was not believed. Listen as William Jefferson Clinton shows you how to make a political speech…

Penn Jillette tells us something we all already knew: That Donald Trump is kind of a putz.

Does Trump have any real constituency? I understand that when he was pretending to be a presidential candidate, there were people who lined up behind him because he wasn't (a) Barack Obama or (b) Michele Bachmann, Rick Santorum, Mitt Romney, Ron Paul, Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich or Herman Cain. The first group was and is to some people the Gay Kenyan Socialist Anti-Christ and the second group is people who didn't look like they could beat him…so folks were grasping at straw men. But is there anyone who really admires Donald Trump? I fear he's going to be a role model for a lot of untalented folks who'll think there's money in being a prominent a-hole.

Michael Tomasky thinks that when Republicans talk about reaching out to minorities and opening up the tent of their party, there's a problem: They really don't want to do these things and only want to sell the same old solutions which have either already failed or which most of the country doesn't trust.

This, my friends, is a fairly recent raccoon photo I took in my backyard one night a few weeks ago. I keep chasing them away — sometimes, four or five of them at a time — but they don't go far. They regroup in my neighbor's yard and then select a lookout to peek through the hole in the fence to see if I'm gone yet. That's what this one was doing. Once I've scared them off seven or eight times, they usually get the message and move on. I don't feel good about this as they're so cute and obviously so hungry. Still, I decided that it was for their own good, my own good and the own good of the cats I feed.

For a time, I tried getting rid of them with Dried Coyote Urine. The operating premise of this product is that the raccoons come around, smell the familiar (to them) scent and assume coyotes lurk nearby and therefore wherever they are is no place for a raccoon to be. I didn't quite understand this. These raccoons were birthed in this area where there are no coyotes. Were they born with an inbred, instinctive recognition of this aroma?

Nevertheless, some folks on the Internet said it worked great and as we all know, the postings of total strangers on the Internet are never wrong. I went through a couple of shaker cans of the stuff, sprinkling it liberally around my property but did not see that it forestalled a single raccoon visitation. I got to wondering if maybe living outside as they do had caused all of them to develop bad colds. I know when I have a cold, I couldn't smell Dried Coyote Urine to save my life.

Eventually though, my cynical side decided it was a scam. I'm figuring some guy was living out in the desert on barren land where nothing could be built and nothing could grow. One day he turned to his wife and said, "Hortense" — you just know she was named Hortense — "Hortense, there's gotta be some way to make some money off this property I own. So far, it's only good for coyotes to piss in." And Hortense said, "Well then, maybe you can create a demand for that."

He gave her a look and said, "A demand for coyote piss? Are you outta your mind, woman? What in the name of Euell Gibbons could I tell people that would make them rush to buy coyote piss? Plus, it would be dangerous to collect it and a bitch to bottle it and —"

"Sell it dried," she replied. That would be easier than bottling it. As for why you'd tell them they needed it, I dunno. Tell them anything. Tell them it wards off flu. Tell them it grows hair. Tell them it scares raccoons away. Anything."

"That's the stupidest damned thing in the world," he told her. "People aren't going to pay good money for…Hey, wait a minute. What was that you said about driving raccoons away?"

I'm convinced it worked something like that. The same companies also sell other kinds of dried animal pee, each of which is supposed to scare off a different animal. I haven't tried any of the others and won't, though I briefly thought of one that would be worth the gamble. When Christopher Hitchens was alive, they could have packaged a dried version of his urine and I would have tried a few cans. Anything to scare off people who come to my door and using all the same techniques and rhetoric of folks selling magazine subscriptions, try to get me to adopt their religion.  I wish they could be scared off as easily as the raccoons.

By the way: It's the reflected flash from my camera that creates the glowing eyeball effect you see in the above photo.  The raccoons don't really have a sense of magic hypnotic powers emanating from their eyes.  But the Jehovah's Witnesses do.

David Blaine does amazing physical feats and he also does some pretty decent magic tricks. I suspect the tricks have caused a lot of folks to assume that the physical feats must therefore be illusions and that he's not really holding his breath that long or going without food for that long…but he does really do some of those seemingly-impossible things.

Here's a twenty-minute talk he gave about how he was able to hold his breath for seventeen minutes. You may wind up thinking he's crazy to attempt this stuff or you may admire him for it. But I'll bet you think of him in a different light after you watch it…

Here are obits for Lucille Bliss in the L.A. Times and the N.Y. Times. Lucille did a lot for the animation community and she was very good at what she did so it's nice to see her getting this recognition.

Several folks have written me to ask about this line in the L.A. Times one…

She lost her job as Elroy Jetson, she told interviewers, when she wouldn't work under a stage name that would hide the fact that she was a grown woman playing a little boy, which is a common scenario in cartoons.

Lucille used to tell several different stories about being cast as Elroy and then Joe Barbera either reneging on an offer or imposing certain conditions…or something. I haven't watched her long interview for the Archive of American Television but I'll bet there's a version in there. As respectfully as I can, I'll just say that none of the stories I heard from her on this make a lot of sense to me.

True, it was quite common for grown women to voice little boys in cartoons but I can't think of a single case where that fact was ever hidden. The credits of The Jetsons did not even specify which actor played which part…and the person who finally performed the role of Elroy was Daws Butler, who was the same age as Lucille. H-B publicized that a grown man was voicing a nine-year-old boy so I can't imagine why they would have made it a Deal Killer that a grown woman conceal her identity.

In the case of The Jetsons, that show went through a lot of changes from conception to debut. At one point, George and Jane were to be played by Morey Amsterdam and Pat Carroll. There were a lot of folks who were going to be in it and weren't for no other reason than someone changed their mind about casting. I suspect that's all that happened with Lucille. She thought she had the job and then someone said, "No, let's go with Daws." A few obits however are saying she was the voice of Elroy.

When one wades through oral histories, it helps to remember that not everything interviewees say is the truth even if they honestly remember it that way. On the other hand, I have occasionally heard an account of something, dismissed it as fiction, then come across supporting evidence that it was true. An actor friend of mine told me an incredible (as in "difficult to believe") anecdote about an appearance he once made on a game show. I didn't call him a fibber to his face but I sure thought that. Six months later, the episode was run on what was then called Game Show Network and there it was…pretty much as he'd described.

It's been a while since I brought you up to date on the animal situation in my backyard. I still have possums. I still, despite my best efforts to shoo them off, have raccoons. And as you may recall from not that long ago, I was feeding four feral cats back there — Max, Sylvia, Lydia and The Stranger Cat. In May of this year, the Stranger Cat died, having lived a lot longer than stray cats usually do in an urban environment.

More recently, Max suddenly stopped coming around for the twice-daily buffet, which for him was sometimes served nine times. Actually, he was gone for about ten days — odd behavior given how he was always hungry and I always fed him well here. In fact, for the month or two before, he'd rarely left my yard. Anyway, after the ~10 day disappearance, he came back once for a meal and hasn't been seen since. It's about three weeks now and while the return of Max would not surprise me, I'm assuming it ain't gonna happen.

Which leaves me with Sylvia and Lydia. Lydia is the cat I trapped and took in for a kitty abortion and spaying. Sylvia was Max's girl friend who was quite deferential to him. If I put out a big bowl of food for the both of them, Sylvia would sit and watch Max eat his fill, then move in and munch on the leftovers. Given Max's capacity to inhale Friskies, it was difficult to put out enough that there would be leftovers.

I tried the "two dish" strategy to no avail. If I placed them close together, Max would dance back and forth between the two, eating a little out of this one, then a little out of that one, then some more out of the first one, etc. Sylvia would sit patiently by, acknowledging that he had first dibs on both. If I positioned two dishes some distance from each other, Sylvia would just wait and watch by whichever one Max selected. Often, her duties involved chasing Lydia away from whatever chow was out.

Max was otherwise quite affectionate and protective towards Sylvia and they would sometimes sleep, literally, with her lying partially across him. I guess Max made a good mattress. Since he vamoosed, she has bonded with Lydia and they sometimes nuzzle and lick each other's fur clean. When they eat, they eat at the same time and if there's only one bowl out, they politely share. I'm not sure I see any signs of either missing Max. Maybe I'm just projecting because I do, even though I'm now spending about an eighth as much on food.

Here's radio personality Bob O'Brien interviewing Jerry Lewis for seven minutes. This is from a few years ago and it's Jerry being Jerry without being Too Jerry…

And speaking of What About Dick?, my buddy Ken Plume did a great interview recently with its creator, Eric Idle. It runs about an hour and should play in the little audio player I've embedded below…

Billy Connolly rehearses for his big number in What About Dick? Not the toughest song in the world to learn. Those of us in the audience got it in about ten seconds…

A couple of restaurant chain owners are howling that because "Obamacare" now seems inevitable, they have to raise prices and/or lay off employees. This is just Bad Loser Whining from folks who'll raise prices or cut employees any time they think they can get away with it. When one says he has to cut 20% of his work force because of the Affordable Care Act, someone ought ask him why he had those employees in the first place if his business can function without them. Last time I was in a Denny's, they didn't seem to have a lot of unnecessary folks on the payroll.

The fellow who runs Papa John's has been saying that he'll have to raise the cost of a pizza something like fifteen cents. That sounds fine to me if it gets those poor delivery folks some decent health care. If I ordered from Papa John's, I'd gladly pay it. If I was Scrooge-like, I might pay it and then tip fifteen cents less but no matter. We're talking trivial amounts here and there are those who say he really only has to raise them a nickel.

As Matthew Yglesias notes, it's not that much different from the airlines realizing they can make more money by charging you to check luggage. It's just a way of getting more money from folks like you and me.

The folks who make Hostess Twinkies and Wonder Bread have been in financial trouble for some time…since about when I stopped buying their products.

They've announced they're shutting down operations and "liquidating" their company, which means some other firm will acquire their brand names and recipes and will see if they can do a better job of selling that stuff than the current management. I am not claiming sole responsibility for their demise; just suggesting a lot of people gave up on them for the same reason I did. Wonder Bread just came to feel to me like the brand of idiots. I'm not sure if the other loaves on my grocers' shelf were that much better but due to some combination of its texture, reputation and the absence of the words "whole grain," I just came to feel ashamed to have it in my cart.

By the time they did offer a "whole grain white," it felt insincere on their part. Forgive the analogy but they felt like a few Republicans who are out there now making grudging, transparent attempts to court the Latino vote. Maybe the new owners of the franchise can rehabilate the image of what were once valuable trademarks. I'm going to guess they can compete better in the cupcake ends of things than the bread department. We're more tolerant of products that seem to mock the concept of Good Nutrition if they're of the dessert, Guilty Pleasure variety.

There was a time when I was hooked on Hostess Orange Cupcakes. Today, I don't eat anything with that much sugar in it and the last few years when I did, I shied away from Hostess. If you were going to ingest that quantity of calories, I decided, there were better things to spend it on. At one point when they came out with "100 calorie" packs of their Twinkies and cupcakes, I went back and tried them but the experiment caused me to swear off their products for good. The size of a Twinkie that got the calories down to that acceptable number was so small as to be unsatisfying and it made me more acutely aware of how many were in the full-sized version.

Still, I remember devouring a lot of the full-sized orange cupcakes back when I didn't care about matters of the waistline. I was actually something of a connoisseur. When I travelled and spotted Hostess Orange Cupcakes in a city far from my own, I'd always try a package just to compare. The product was pretty consistent but I do recall that the ones I sampled in Reno, Nevada were a wee bit more flavorful and the ones in Chicago had neater swirls on top.

The Orange Cupcakes were my favorite of the Hostess line, followed closely by the Chocolate Cupcakes and then the Twinkie. I never got much into their other offerings. Even as a kid, Ding Dongs were too sweet and insubstantial for me.

This is not a farewell to those foodstuffs as I'm sure they'll be around, baked by someone…and perhaps it will warm my heart to see them on the shelves. I'll feel comforted that (a) a souvenir of my childhood is still around and (b) that I have the good sense not to eat that stuff anymore. For now though, if I were the current management, I'd really be embarrassed. If you can't make money offering something that unhealthy to the American buying public, there's something really wrong with you.