Category Archives: To Be Filed

It's been a while since I did one of these and not because I haven't been to a Costco. I just didn't find any interesting stories there while I was purchasing my five-year-supply of dental floss and my ten-year-supply of chicken wire. (By the way, someone wrote me that next time I was in Costco, I should pick up a lifetime supply of cole slaw. I already have that. For me, a lifetime supply of cole slaw is no cole slaw. I keep mine right next to my lifetime supply of no candy corn.)

So yesterday, I was driving back from San Diego and I needed to stop for lunch and gas. I arbitrarily got off the 5 in San Clemente, which is a good place to look for such things, and I guess my instincts secretly picked the off-ramp. Without consciously choosing to do so, I wound up driving past Sonny's, which is one of my favorite Italian restaurants. If you're ever in or passing San Clemente and you want a good, cheap place for a plate of pasta, try Sonny's.

I didn't, yesterday. Just wasn't in the mood for Eye-talian so I kept going, browsing San Clemente in search of lunch and petrol. Before long, I found them in the same place: The Costco in San Clemente. Spotted it. Noticed a Pollo Loco next door. Figured I could dine at Pollo Loco, then gas up at Costco. And hey, while I was there, I could pop into Costco for that most futile of goals, "just a few items." I decided to do Costco first, then the Pollo Loco. As it turned out, I dined so well on free samples at Costco, Pollo Loco was unnecessary.

So lunch was free. Of course, I did spend $300+ on cat food, electronics stuff and cleaning supplies while I was there. But lunch was free.

One of the snacks on which I snacked was the combined sampling of two products Costco sells: King's Hawaiian Sweet Rolls and a heat-and-eat package of shredded beef cooked in Jack Daniel's barbecue sauce. A nice, friendly lady at the end of an aisle was heating the beef in a small microwave, then scooping the meat onto rolls to make mini-sliders we could try. "They make their sauce with real Jack Daniel's Whiskey," she announced. "But the cooking process burns off all the alcohol."

As I helped myself to a sample, I said, "Good…because I'm driving." But the truth is there's about as much chance of me ingesting alcohol as there is of me feasting on cole slaw and candy corn. Less, even. I've actually tried cole slaw and candy corn. As I turned to continue with my Costcoing, an older woman customer asked me, "Is that true? About the alcohol burning off? Because I shouldn't have any of that if it doesn't."

I told her I was pretty sure it was safe and pointed to an eight-year-old who was not being restricted from helping himself to a sample. This woman was probably seventy and she said, "You were being cautious because you're driving…"

"That was just me being silly," I explained. "But even if there was alcohol in there, the portion size is too small to get a mosquito tipsy."

"That's good to know," she said. "I haven't had a drink in almost thirty years. What it did to me…I couldn't ever go through that again. Maybe someone like you can handle it…"

"Well actually, ma'am, I've got you beat. I haven't had a drink in sixty years and seven months."

"Really? How old are you?"

I said, "Sixty years and seven months. I've never had a drink in my entire life."

"Really? Not even beer? Or wine?"

I said, "Not even beer or wine. About thirty-five years ago, I had a Nyquil. I gather that's kind of like Jack Daniel's for people with bad colds."

"Never had a drink," she muttered to herself. And as she was muttering, my eyes fell on her shopping cart which was full of Grand Prix cigarettes. Maybe a dozen cartons of them.

"So you didn't have to quit because you never started," she exclaimed. "I wish I'd taken after you."

I had to get back on the road but there are times you'd hate yourself if you didn't say something. I said, "What you should really do is not take after my mother. Have you got two minutes for me to tell you about her?"

The New Yorker offers a long, eloquent endorsement of Barack Obama. Those of you who are already planning to vote for him might want to peruse it to remind yourself why.

Next time Ken Levine and I have lunch, I'm going to make him tell me the name of the agent who attacked him in this story. Because it just might be the same agent who did the same thing to me once…though the odds of that are slim. There are a lot of agents who do that kind of thing.

Michael Kinsley applies some logic to some claims of the Romney campaign.

Glenn Fleishman tells us of his experiences appearing on Jeopardy!

Why do shows that tape many episodes per day still make everyone change clothes so it looks like they came back another day? Doesn't everyone know by now that shows tape many episodes per day? They're fooling no one, you know.

From a 1965 episode of The Merv Griffin Show, here's the pre-hairy George Carlin with his famous routine about the Indian Sergeant…

So here I am on my laptop, sitting poolside at the Town & Country Convention Center and Resort. (A tip to you should you ever stay here: Don't make the mistake I did of arriving late in the evening. This place is a maze of bungalows and towers. There are few signs to tell you how to get to your room and none of them are large or lit. The staff is friendly but their skills at giving directions remind me of that Monty Python videogame where the only way to reach your destination is to do the exact opposite and turn left when Eric Idle tells you to turn right and so forth. It wasn't until I decided to adopt that approach that I located my room after twenty-some-odd minutes of driving around, turning and parking where I was told to turn and park but shouldn't have been.)

This is the final day of the San Diego Comic Fest, a small (deliberately) convention that aimed to capture some of the lost spirit that existed at San Diego Cons of the seventies. In that goal, it has been most successful. Everyone seems to have had a good time, mostly talking about The Good Old Days. There has been very little commerce. No one is hyping a new movie or videogame, and one can "do" the entire Dealers Room in thirty minutes or less. If you didn't want old toys or books from the seventies, you could probably buy the place out for under a grand.

I've been working on a script here by the pool. I'll post this, hit a men's room, sit for a "spotlight" interview at 12:30 and then probably hit the asphalt. I've had a good time here seeing friends and recalling another time and place but it's almost time to return to Today. That is typed with mixed emotions which I'll try to explain once I've gotten home and figured them out for myself. See you later.

Because they'd just dropped the voting age from 21 to 18, George McGovern was the first person I ever voted for who was seeking the office of President of the United States. It was a symbolic vote, true. I went to the polls late in the day and the networks — the ones Richard Nixon always claimed were his sworn enemies — were already proclaiming McGovern had been crushed in a landslide.

It felt good to vote for the man but it had been frustrating to support him…and for much the same reason it's frustrating at times these days to support Obama. You had the strong feeling that the folks out there voting against George McGovern had no idea who he was or what he stood for. At times, listening to people say why he had to be defeated, I wondered: Had I missed some speech in which Senator McGovern had called explicitly for the United States to surrender all its weapons, do away with Freedom and apply for statehood in the Soviet Union? His detractors all seemed so certain that was not just his secret agenda but his avowed one, as well.

McGovern was an intelligent man who would later be proven right about…well, not everything but about a lot more than most candidates. He also seemed like a decent man. He had been a war hero but he instructed his campaign officials not to exploit that in advertising. No man running for president thereafter would make that kind of mistake. Polls showed that few knew and many, because of his anti-war positions, assumed he'd been a draft dodger.

A man who had a house near where I lived at the time had big Nixon-Agnew signs stuck in his lawn. When I tried to engage him on the topic, he told me that, as people tend to do in elections, a vote for his candidate was a vote to save America and a vote for the other guy was a vote to destroy America. I've never thought any election quite came down to that but '72 seemed particularly overhyped in that manner. Less than a year later, I read a well-researched and sourced article that itemized things McGovern had advocated that the campaign-mode Nixon-Agnew team had said were dangerous, Commie ideas but which the second-term Nixon-Agnew administration was now adopting. And of course, McGovern had the satisfaction of seeing not only those positions enacted but both his opponents resign in disgrace. Much of what brought Nixon down was related to a campaign to deliberately lie about and smear George McGovern.

I don't recall McGovern taking any victory laps or going on TV to say, "I told you so." If he did, he was justified but I don't think he did that. I attended a speech he gave at UCLA around 1978 and it was wholly about the future. What little he said about the past was only what was necessary to argue for his visions of what that future should be. It was mainly about equality for women and minorities, and I have no doubt that he had a lot to do with things advancing in those areas. He was a man with considerable influence on his country and it's sad to think that so many merely regard him as a Big Loser.

25 Foods You'll Never Be Able To Eat Again.

Another Merv Griffin Show clip. From 1980, Merv welcomes Lucille Ball to his stage for a somewhat fawning conversation. At one point, she makes reference to a student of hers named Stuart sitting in the front row. That's our pal Stuart Shostak, host of the oft-plugged-here Stu's Show. He was then taking one of Lucy's classes and later went to work for her for a time.

Stu is only one of several friends I have who speaks of Lucy's greatness. I'm afraid I never quite saw it the way they do. I thought she was a solid, hard-working comic actress who was good when she had good writing behind her…but I'd never rank her up with great TV comics like Silvers, Van Dyke, Groucho, Hope, Gleason and Carney (and I rank Carney way ahead of Gleason) or many others. Just my taste. Here she is…

I'm coming to you live this weekend from the San Diego Comic Fest, here at the Town & Country Resort and Convention Center in the 619 area code. Some of the folks who launched Comic-Con International are, quite independent of that huge entity, staging a small con that is intended to have the look 'n' feel of one of the early San Diego Cons at the El Cortez. Attendance and subject matter is limited. The dealers room can be fully traversed in about a half-hour. Most people here seem to know most of the other attendees. I'm having a nice time just sitting and doing one of two things: (1) Telling stores or (2) Listening to stories. Most of the stories are about one of two things: (1) People who created great comics or (2) People who contributed to great comic conventions of the past. The topics and the pace make for quite a fine vacation. I'll write more about it in the days to come.

I owe Kevin Drum another lunch just for his fine blog posts that explain current events in plain, fact-supported English. Here he is telling you all you need to know about the 9/11 attacks in Benghazi and the ginned-up controversy via which Republicans hope to score a few electoral votes.

As I mentioned in the first message here about my mother's passing, there was a slight (ha!) complication when she began dating the man who would later be her husband and my father. He was Jewish. She was Catholic. He wasn't overwhelmingly Jewish and she wasn't overpoweringly Catholic but each was more than enough of what he or she was that it got in the way. Mostly, relatives of theirs decided it should get in the way and for a time, it did.

They dated on and off for years…which means they broke up repeatedly. They were fine with the diversity of religion but others in each family were not. At one point, they even decided it would never (could never) work and my mother went off and married some other guy whose main appeal was, apparently, that he ate bacon. That union went away quickly and soon she was back with the Jew.

Their love for each other kept bringing them together. And some of that had to do with Abraham Ribicoff.

Some of you may know that name because Abraham Ribicoff was Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare to President John F. Kennedy. Before that, he was governor of Connecticut (to date, its only Jewish one) and before that, he was the Congressman in the district wherein dwelled the people who would later be my parents. In 1952, he made an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate and was defeated by Prescott Bush, father of George Herbert Walker Bush and grandfather of George W. Bush. If Abe had won, we might have been spared two of the worst presidents this country has ever had.

One other thing you should know about Abraham Ribicoff: He looked like my father. Or maybe my father looked like him. It works either way.

Whichever it was, my father couldn't travel far in Hartford without someone coming up to him and saying, "Congressman Ribicoff, can you do anything about the sewer system?" Sometimes, he'd explain to them that his name was actually Bernie Evanier but sometimes, he'd shake their hand and promise to look into their sewers.

One night in 1950, my parents were out on a date and an irate woman stormed up to their table and shrieked, "Congressman Ribicoff! I've seen enough pictures of your wife to know that that floozie is not your wife. If you're going to have an affair, you could have the decency to not flaunt it in a public place. I'm going to make sure the entire world knows that Abe Ribicoff cheats on his wife!" And with that, she marched off to tell the world and my parents-to-be howled with laughter. I sure hope this isn't why Ribicoff lost to Bush.

Years later, after they had me, they would still sometimes laugh about that lady and tell me of that evening. Neither ever said this to me explicitly because it's not the kind of thing you tell your son…but I can read between most lines. I suspect that as the date progressed, my mother figured that since she'd been branded a floozie, she might as well be a floozie. Maybe it wasn't the first night they slept together but something more significant than just that woman made it a date they'd never forget.

Soon after, they decided that no matter what others said, they were going to get married. Bernie had briefly and timidly toyed with the idea of moving to Los Angeles. He didn't really have a career in Hartford — just a series of short-term jobs that led nowhere. He also liked the thought of living somewhere where people wouldn't keep asking him to do something about the Soviet Union getting "The Bomb." When he shared his toying with Dorothy, she liked the idea. If they could get away from disapproving relatives, this marriage could last a lot longer than her first one. So they decided to go west.

In one or two future installments in this series, I will tell you of the two things that totally healed the breach; that made both sides of the family accept and bless their matrimony. One was having me. The other was my mother learning how to make great latkes. Anecdotes to follow.

From The Merv Griffin Show, 1969: A conversation with Woody Allen, who's there to plug his first self-directed movie, Take the Money and Run. Also on the couch: Moms Mabley. There's a parlay…