Category Archives: To Be Filed

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.

Fred Kaplan thinks that John Kerry should decline the post of Secretary of Defense if it's offered. Just to set a good example for Senator Kerry, if I'm asked, I'll decline too.

Sorry to hear about the death of Ray Zone…and though I knew Ray for years, I never knew if that was his real name. It was just so perfect. I mean, if you were a guy who was obsessed with 3-D movies and 3-D comic books and you needed a new name, wouldn't "Ray Zone" be a great one for you?

That was Ray's main interest and I can't recall ever talking to him about anything else. He was probably only about half-kidding (maybe less than half) that his mission in life was to get rid of all movies and comic books that weren't in 3-D. He knew everything about the various formats and history and the processes. In fact, he invented a new process that made possible that brief glut of 3-D comics we had in the early eighties, mostly from small publishers. Previously, the making of a 3-D comic book was a messy process involving pieces of panels being drawn on different layers of acetate and then someone had to apply white paint to the back of certain layers on the acetate and then…well, it took a long time to do a page that way. Ray invented a much simpler process that involved no overlays and even made it easy to convert an existing, drawn-for-2-D comic book to 3-D. I did one with him and it was amazing how, with no real technical advances involved, he'd figured out a much faster, better technique than had been used on the original 3-D comics of the fifties. Joe Kubert, who was one of the pioneers in that field, was reportedly agog when he saw how Ray did it.

Ray died Tuesday evening at the age of 65 and I do not know the cause. I do know he was one of the good guys and I always enjoyed seeing him and talking with him. The last time that happened was about five weeks ago — on October 3rd when I went to the Cinerama Dome to see It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World in its native setting. Cinerama isn't exactly 3-D but it's close and Ray was there for every screening in a lengthy film fest devoted to films made in Cinerama. He dutifully told me about the print we'd soon be seeing and the problems with it and with the projection equipment. He really, really loved movies with depth and his enthusiasm was contagious and grand.

I agree with this post by David Frum. The presidential election wasn't about who could offer people the most stuff. It was about who could offer people the most hope.

Ken Levine has up a great post about a talented lady named Shari Lewis. I loved Shari Lewis and had the pleasure of meeting with her a few times about a project of hers that I was hired to write. A very smart lady who managed to be both pragmatic and enthusiastic about, as far as I could see, everything she did. So go read it and while you're over there, bookmark Ken's site and read it every day.

(P.S. to Ken: Sorry I couldn't have lunch with you yesterday. I am just plain too dedicated to getting my assignments done…which is kind of what you learned from Shari.)

By now, you've probably heard Mitt Romney's explanation that he lost because Obama promised to give "gifts" and "free stuff" to poorer voters. That's apparently a bad thing, whereas Romney promised all sorts of six-figure incentives to the top 2% and lesser ones to poor folks and expected that to buy him the White House. There are many essays out there making that point and suggesting what it suggests about Mr. Romney. This one by Joan Walsh is as good as any. Ultimately, what Romney's saying is that it's not fair: I should have won because I pandered to both the rich and poor and he only pandered to the poor!

Here's about six minutes from a 1966 Jack Benny TV special. Benny had a half-hour series on CBS from the early fifties until he and his managers made a fatal mistake. They'd been airing on Tuesday nights, back-to-back with Red Skelton's hour-long program and the combo had been strong in the ratings. In early 1963 when the Fall schedule was announced, they discovered that CBS had moved Benny a half-hour later and inserted a new show, a sitcom, between him and Red.

Benny was upset that CBS had made this decision without consulting or informing him, and advance word on this new show was not promising. It was a rural comedy called Petticoat Junction starring a member of his old stock company from radio, Bea Benaderet. Benny loved her but didn't think she could carry a series and he became convinced the change would cost him much of his audience. NBC had made occasional inquiries as to whether he would like to jump networks and he decided the time to do that was before his ratings declined on CBS…so his manager Irving Fein negotiated a deal. Benny would do the Fall '63 season for CBS, then move to NBC as of the following year. As you might imagine, CBS was not happy with this.

Neither was Benny when Petticoat Junction turned out to be a big hit. Following Ms. Benaderet's show, he got some of the highest ratings he'd ever had in television. Then when he moved to NBC, CBS slotted another new rural sitcom — Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. — opposite him and he got killed and cancelled. If he'd stayed at CBS, he would probably have had his weekly series as long as Skelton had his, which was until 1970. (Skelton then moved to NBC also…and also only did one more year.)

After his NBC show went off, Benny appeared in a series of one-hour specials for them…about one a year until his death in 1974. This segment is from what I believe was his second special for them. I further believe the actor playing the stagehand is Bill Baldwin, who was the show's announcer and one of those men whose voice you heard everywhere in the sixties. And shortly after he exits, who should enter but a man with an even more ubiquitous voice?!

As you well know, the great Mel Blanc was in a horrible auto accident in January of 1961. At first, it looked like would not survive his injuries. Then it looked like he would but would never walk again. He beat that prediction, too. Sooner than anyone expected, he was back doing voiceover work — at first, from his home hospital-type bed and then going to actual recording studios. By late '64 (I believe), he was even appearing on TV occasionally again. I think the first time was on Benny's NBC series. They did the "Sí, Sy" routine and I remember a vast amount of joy at seeing him unexpectedly turn up on that episode. I also remember noting that he was seated throughout and the next few times I saw him on TV, he was also seated. Didn't walk, didn't even stand.

He may have worked on his feet on other shows before this one but I think this was the first time I saw that. He not only walks in and stands for the entire routine, he does a bit of a dance in there and gets a big laugh doing it. He also carries in a huge bass which he obviously had no idea how to play.

I thought this was a funny spot but more than that, I remember a feeling of delight that Mel Blanc seemed to have pretty much recovered from that terrible accident. I didn't know the man then but ever since I became aware of who was speaking for Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Barney Rubble and so many other characters I loved, I felt a certain kinship to the guy and it was great to see him up and around…

Not sure I agree with this column by Michael Kinsley. He says it's a sham that the networks on Election Night pretend "it could go either way" until polls close and they can announce what they've known for hours. He's right that they know…although at Fox News, no one apparently told Karl Rove. Still, there's something impolite about them announcing that the election is over before some of us even head for the polls. It's a matter of acknowledging that the winners are picked by the voters, not by CBS, AP, CNN, NBC, etc. They really are even if it doesn't always feel that way.

My "ex," Dennis Palumbo, writes about a patient of his. (Dennis was a TV writer when we were teamed. Now, he's a licensed psychotherapist and mystery author.) There are a lot of folks out there who aren't working…or aren't working at the levels they used to work. Coping with the frustration is a key to unjamming some of the jam.

I made another attempt to download What About Dick? and it downloaded fine. I then transferred the file to my TiVo and it plays fine there and looks pretty darned good since I downloaded the hi-def version. I still don't understand the storyline but, hey, you can't have everything.

A favorite movie of mine is The Comic, the 1969 feature directed by Carl Reiner and starring Dick Van Dyke as a semi-great silent movie comedian who makes a fine mess of his life. The film did not do great business when it opened because, I suspect, it looked like a light-hearted laugh riot and was actually grimmer and darker than audiences expected. Anyway, if you're in the Los Angeles area, you might want to know that the New Beverly Cinema over on Beverly Boulevard near La Brea is running it on Tuesday evening and that Mssrs. Reiner and Van Dyke will be appearing with it. As of this moment, tickets are still available so you can get yours just as I got mine.