Category Archives: To Be Filed

Have you been shelling out $70 apiece for the DVD sets of the early seasons of Saturday Night Live? Well then, you won't be overjoyed by this post that tells you you could have gotten them a lot cheaper if you'd waited. Over at Amazon, prices have been slashed to what seem like closeout levels.

At this moment — knowing Amazon, it could change any minute — you can pick up Season One for $16.99. Season Two is $22.49. Season Three is $22.99. Season Four is $19.49. And Season Five is a whopping $47.49, which I think is what Amazon sold each of these for when they first came out. So Season Five will probably get down near the twenty buck level before long.

Clicking on the above links will take you to where you can order. This site receives a tiny commission on each one you buy through our links. If anyone does, I will use the money I receive to take my friend Vince Waldron to lunch at Souplantation next month. Vince is the one who told me about these bargains so he is deserving.

And by the way, I have no idea why Amazon lists the stars of Season Three as "Don Pardo, Lenny Pickett, Darrell Hammond and G.E. Smith." It may have something to do with being disoriented from selling all those $999 Groo books.

Several folks have e-mailed me with the information that company called Olive Films has licensed a batch of esoteric or little-known movies from Paramount Pictures for DVD release. Among these is Otto Preminger's Skidoo.

We have waited a long time for a bonafide DVD of this bizarre movie. I think I'll wait a little longer before I assume it's actually going to happen. I'm just sorry Otto isn't around to do a commentary track.

My pal who practically lives at airports, Joe Brancatelli, tells us where to find the best chow at many of the major ones. One of the few places he recommends that I've tried is Ike's in the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport. I told you about Ike's back in this post. It was the only airport restaurant I've ever been in that I would consider going to again by choice, not because I was at an airport and therefore had limited options.

Joe also mentions some top restaurants that aren't far from airports in case you have a layover and feel like a short cab ride to superior cuisine. These days, once I'm past the TSA people, I don't feel like venturing out and in again. I wonder how many people besides Joe do.

And he may not have heard this yet but they're about to open an outlet of Pink's Hot Dogs in the Tom Bradley Terminal at LAX. If it's anything like the world famous original outlet of Pink's on La Brea in Los Angeles, it will not make Joe's list. I have friends who when visiting L.A. say, "I've absolutely gotta try Pink's." Disabuse yourself of this idea right now. It is neither obligatory nor a good idea. Pink's is, at best, an average hot dog stand with a grand, inexplicable reputation. Bad parking, mile-long lines, clumsy service, unspectacular franks. At LAX, they might be an okay alternative to other airport food…but so is anywhere that isn't Burger King or Sbarro's.

I send you to a lot of Fred Kaplan articles but this one's especially good. It's about how the line that Dick Cheney is currently selling — the one about how the Obama administration makes us less safe by treating terrorists as criminals — is really at odds with both the policies and the successes of the Bush-Cheney administration in that area. Even the guys Cheney worked with there didn't agree with him on how these matters should be handled.

As I mentioned in this post from just last August, I take one very expensive prescription medicine. (And I take two cheap ones. Before I lost all that weight, I used to take nine prescriptions of varying price tags.) At the time of that posting, I said the medicine cost me ten bucks a month through my insurance and that if I didn't have that insurance, it would cost me $320 a month.

Things have changed in five months. The prescription now costs me $25 a month and the pharmacist tells me that if I didn't have insurance, it would be $525. And again, that's per month, which (assuming no further increases, which is probably a silly assumption) is $6,300 annually. The monthly cost if one were to buy the exact same thing in Canada — made in the same factory with the same formula — is $280.

There are a lot of things wrong with our health system but there's a biggie right there. Some people, pure and simple, cannot afford $6,300 a year, even for medication on which their health depends. Republicans want people to be able to shop around and buy health insurance from any state in order to get the best price. How about letting us shop around and buy from Canada if that gets us the best price?

And this is even too later to be up writing scripts.

A lot of you were moved by (and forwarded and tweeted) the article I linked to about Roger Ebert's current condition. If you read that, you'll want to read Ebert's latest journal entry in which he discusses the article and the reaction to it.

Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for telling me about this. Shelly, by the way, is resuming her cabaret career after too long a hiatus. Sunday, April 18, she'll be singing songs of the sixties at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. I'll post details here soon but if you're in Southern California, you might want to enter that date in your Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar or whatever you use. Some folks, I hear, still have calendars on paper.

Joe Conason reminds us that there's nothing surer: The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. Wealthy folks have never done so well.

The thing I find most interesting is that this information comes from a report that the Internal Revenue folks prepare each year on the incomes and tax liabilties of the 400 richest taxpayers. According to Conason, this report was available to the public when Clinton was president and is available under Obama…but George W. Bush did not allow it to be distributed during his terms. Gee, I wonder why.

This is kinda funny. The infamous Dame Edna is about to open in a new Broadway show — kind of an evening with Dame Edna and Michael Feinstein. This morning, they held auditions for Dame Edna's understudy and the job went to a gent named Scott Mason.

No one expects Mr. Mason will ever go on in the role but he'll be listed in the program book and maybe he'll get a few bucks out of it. If I were running this operation, I think what I'd do is send Mason out every night after the show in costume to sign autographs at the stage door. And while he's doing that, Barry Humphries — who plays Dame Edna for real — will be able to slip out unnoticed.

White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said today that President Obama would "love to" appear on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart…but not The Colbert Report. This undoubtedly pleases both Mr. Stewart and Mr. Colbert. Mr. Stewart will get a great guest spot out of it. Mr. Colbert will get an awful lot of material out of it. And of course, after Colbert's made an enormous fuss, President Obama will appear on his show…

Harry Shearer makes a good catch: The U.S. Justice Department no longer disputes that your country and mine has tortured prisoners in its custody.

Maybe Jon Stewart could have the Daily Show staff reach back to the Clinton Impeachment days and make up a montage of clips showing Senators and Congressfolks explaining how we had to follow The Rule of Law at all costs.

When Republicans are asked to present their ideas for Health Care Reform, they usually offer one or both of two ideas. One is to allow insurance companies to sell across state lines. Ezra Klein has a good explanation of why that's a very bad idea. It's the same reason why it was a bad idea to allow credit card companies to do the same thing. It leaves the companies governed by whatever state will be the most lax in its regulation.

The other thing Republicans mention is tort reform and limiting malpractice awards…and they don't even think this would safe enough to really affect the cost of health care. They just want to slap down trial lawyers and to protect the rich from the poor. Someone oughta point out that not that long ago, a lot of the same G.O.P. leaders felt that there was nothing more important in this world than to keep the heart of a woman named Terri Schiavo beating. Okay, but one of the things that kept her (technically) alive was the large malpractice settlement that paid for her frighteningly-expensive health and hospice care. If Republicans had their way, she would have gotten about a third of what she actually received in that lawsuit.

Real Time with Bill Maher returns to HBO on Friday. Here's a little video monologue that Maher did for the web.

This is way too late to be up writing scripts.