Monthly Archives: August 2020

Let me see if I can post a few things that aren't about the hurricane or the pandemic or the Republican Convention or protesters being shot…

Hey, Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen in Beverly Hills is functioning again. I even got a take-out order from them a couple weeks ago. It's one of those establishments that not only serves comfort food but the place itself kind of is comfort food…if you know what I mean. You used to be able to go there and see Doris Day and Bob Newhart and Harvey Korman and Red Buttons and George Burns and Walter Matthau…and once, I had brunch there with Phil Silvers and when he started telling me a story about Milton Berle, the door from the street opened and Milton Berle walked in — and joined us!

The last decade or so before it closed, the "celeb" list was pretty much Larry King, Larry King, Larry King, Larry King and — every once in a while — Larry King. There's about a four-block area in that part of Beverly Hills where it was pretty much impossible to eat without seeing Larry King. I figured out that there had to be about eleven of him wandering the streets there.

Anyway, here's a little video report on the current status of Nate 'n Al's. The building it's in was supposed to have been torn down by now to make way for something wholly unnecessary but The Pandemic has thrown a lot of plans into chaos so who knows? All I care about is that Larry King is eating well.

A couple of features on this blog may not be working for the next week or so. As you may know, we run on a great software called WordPress and as you might imagine, the fine folks who make WordPress are always updating it and improving it…and their latest update doesn't seem to like a number of things in the way I set this blog up, lo these many years ago.

If I had all the time in the world, I could fix them all, A.S.A.P. but I seem to be absurdly busy, especially given the fact that the world is about two-thirds shut down. So I'll get to them, I'll get to them. In the meantime, many of the special articles I have on this site — like my old POV columns and the I.A.Q. section — may be unreachable for a while.

The changes in WordPress seem to have played havoc with the many comment threads on one of my other websites, oldlarestaurants.com, so I'm closing it down altogether. The essays that I wrote there about favorite eating spots in my past will be moved to the articles section here once I fix the menus here that get you into the articles section here. Just think of it all as yet another thing in our world that ain't functioning the way it's supposed to.

• So…which makes you feel older? That Macaulay Culkin is 40 years old? Or that Sean Connery is 90?

Over at Esquire, Charles P. Pierce notes that the National Weather Service alert for Hurricane Laura actually includes the word "unsurvivable" in it. I think they only mean that for the hardest-hit sections which may (let's hope) be sparsely-populated areas. But it's going to be awful. Pierce then goes on to write…

Meanwhile, of course, huge hunks of Northern California are burning down. And all of this happens during a worldwide pandemic. I may be crazy, but this doesn't seem like the best time to have an administration that believes the climate crisis to be a Chinese hoax and that, generally, judges science to be whatever makes the president look less bad.

Oh, well. At least the folks in the path of Hurricane Laura can take some comfort in the fact that whatever happens, Trump will stop by and lob some rolls of paper towels at them.

Here's Jonathan Chait with the latest Trump outrage. The headline is "Trump Sabotaged Coronavirus Testing to Keep Numbers Low." Here's a key paragraph…

There has been a weird reluctance to take Trump's comments seriously or literally. But the accumulation of evidence is quite clear. Trump's public comments, reports of his private position, and the reports by officials of the latest change all point to the same conclusion: Trump is overruling public-health officials and sabotaging coronavirus testing because he believes keeping the case counts misleadingly low will make him look better.

In other news, Trump insists that if we all stop going to the dentist, America will be free of cavities.

I am of the opinion that these political "conventions" (actually infomercials disguised as conventions) don't matter a whole lot. Last night's combined coverage of Night #2 of the Republican National "Convention" on NBC, ABC and CBS totaled 5.46 million viewers. That may seem impressive until you hear that America's Got Talent, all by itself on one channel, got 5.58 million. Maybe Melania should have done some backflips. I wonder how many of the folks who tuned in the infomercial aren't yet sure who they're going to vote for. I'd be surprised if it's more than a few dozen.

Trump's gotta be pissed at the numbers. He sometimes acts like cares more about TV tune-in than actual votes. If his convention was clobbering the Democrats', he'd be citing that as proof the election is over and he gets renewed for another season.

On the 'net, you can find plenty of articles and headlines that say Trump can or will win. They come from three sources. You have your Trump supporters who want to believe he can still win and are trying to convince themselves and others…and in some cases, I think they just like saying it because it pisses off people they like to piss off.

Secondly, you have the folks who want Trump to lose but who subscribe to this theory: Even when your guy is way ahead, take nothing for granted. Act like he's way behind and campaign accordingly. Elections have been lost by folks on the winning side getting so complacent, they turned it into the losing side.

And then there's the Ancient Science of Clickbait. News organizations can't keep running the same "Biden's ahead by 8-9 points" news story. At some point, it stops being news.

I've been looking at the polls and relating them to the electoral college totals and I think political analyst Charlie Cook is correct as of today…

Go through the top-line results of high-quality polls such as those from ABC News/Washington Post, CNN, Fox News, and NBC News/Wall Street Journal, to name just four, and you'll find that majorities of voters do not like Trump personally, they do not approve of his handling of the job overall, and they disapprove of his entire approach to the coronavirus. When asked about personal attributes, Trump fares poorly in most surveys and trails Biden in most of the categories when the two are compared. He trails Biden by about 10 percentage points nationally in the higher-quality surveys and is behind by at least 5 points in all 20 states that Hillary Clinton carried (plus D.C.), as well as Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. Those states alone total 307 electoral votes.

Of course, the key phrase there is "as of today." In a normal year, we wouldn't be too worried that something would come along to change the whole dynamic of the race between now and the time the votes are counted. Throughout the Trump Administration, we keep finding ourselves dealing with major issues — like the virus and the George Floyd matter — that were nowhere on our radar two weeks before they began filling the entire screen. And we also haven't been as worried about the votes being counted or the loser respecting the will of the voters. These are strange times indeed.

My longtime pal Rob Word occasionally digs into his vault or his closet or wherever he keeps old tapes of interviews he did in the past. Here, he resurrects an interview he did a long, long time ago with Steve Allen. The other day here, I alluded to how NBC threw away almost all the episodes they had of Mr. Allen's Tonight program. And here we have Steve talking about that and other topics…

You needn't write me to report that something screwy has happened with one of my other sites, oldlarestaurants.com. I know about the problem with all the comments not showing up. They're there. I can see them but you can't.

This is, like every damned thing in the news, way beyond my expertise to fix. Folks who know a lot more about the website's software than I do — which could mean anyone — are trying to make things right. If they succeed, I may ask if they can do something about the wildfires, the pandemic or the White House.

I watched as much of the first night of the Republican Convention as I watched of the first night of the Democratic one: Just about nothing. But I saw enough in quick clips to know that I am not the G.O.P.'s target audience. This event is not about trying to convince people who think Trump is a dangerous, criminal, inept, lying Chief Exec that they've got the guy all wrong. It's about convincing those who are inclined to like him for one or more reasons to stay the course, spread the word, donate money, don't give up, get out the vote, etc. The Democratic affair was pretty much about the same things.

As is so often the case, we seem to be in one of those Too Much News periods. We have hurricanes, wildfires, another seemingly unwarranted police shooting of a black guy, big companies going under and/or shedding jobs, an asteroid heading our way, a new flavor of Chicken McNuggets, various new folks testing positive for COVID-19, various glimmers of a vaccine, Jerry Falwell Jr. confirming he's just as big a hypocrite as we all knew he was, et al. Perhaps it will inspire you to read what Jerry Seinfeld wrote about how he won't give up on New York…or just about anything else.

And I know you'll enjoy watching my pal Mike Peters talk with me this evening…unless you're a Trump supporter. He's a political cartoonist (with a Pulitzer Prize, no less) and while I'm going to try to talk mostly about cartooning, some political stuff is bound to creep in…though I'm not sure he can be nastier to Trump than he was to Bill Clinton. You can watch it on the very page you're looking at now…

The Politifact folks fact-checked some (not all) of Donald Trump's speech tonight. As usual, he said a lot of things that are not true and, as usual, many of his supporters prefer to believe his claims instead of the truth.

When Steve Allen founded and hosted The Tonight Show, it was simply called Tonight. Very little footage from that show remains but here's twelve amazing minutes — a live remote with Steverino in New York chatting with the team of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis out in Hollywood. This is reportedly from November 11, 1955..and in case you're curious, Dino and Jerry dissolved their partnership and made their final appearance together on July 25, 1956…so about eight and a half months later…

• The official Republican platform for this year mentions no issues at all. It just says that they totally and completely support every single thing done by the guy with the 55% Disapproval Rating. Sounds like a winning strategy to me.

Abraham Riesman delves into the history of the 1966 Broadway show, It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman, and into a recent attempt to revise and revive it. The show did not last long in New York in '66 but it does get revived now and then, probably to the sheer commercial appeal of putting Superman on stage.

I didn't see the original version but I've seen several local productions and I don't think it's a very good show. The storyline puts Superman through a psychiatric crisis which doesn't make a lot of sense and isn't something we want to see Our Hero experience. It also has the problem that the plot doesn't go anywhere. At the end of the Li'l Abner musical, Abner and Daisy Mae get married. At the end of the Annie musical, Little Orphan Annie gets a good home.

At the end of It's a Bird…It's a Plane…It's Superman, everything is exactly as it was when things started. Name me a successful play where that's the case. (I'm not saying there isn't one but you'll probably have to think for quite a while.)

Several folks sent me links to this article and asked me why I thought DC Comics had placed so many restrictions on the original version — like no Lex Luthor — and seems so uncooperative with the recent revival/revision. I cannot explain the workings of DC Comics for the last few years and, insofar as I can tell, neither can anyone who worked at the company.

In the sixties? I dunno. I only met longtime Superman editor Mort Weisinger once — very briefly and (amazingly) on his very last day of being the editor of the Superman comics. Everyone I've ever met who worked with him said he had a reason for everything he did and that reason was usually to bolster the power of Mort Weisinger. My guess is that if they'd hired him to work on the musical, he would have been more cooperative…but that's just a guess. Anyway, it's a good article even if we don't understand why some of the things that happened happened.

• Kellyanne Conway leaving her job with Trump. Husband George stepping down from his job trying to defeat Trump. I have the feeling Randy Rainbow will be working late tonight.