Category Archives: To Be Filed

All over the 'net, I see this word: BOGO. It stands for "Buy One, Get One." Well, of course. If you buy one, you're supposed to get one. That's nothing special. But "Buy One, Get One" actually means "Buy One, Get Two." Or in a lot of cases, it means "Buy One, Get A Second One At A Reduced Price." So why isn't it BOGT? OR BOGASOAARP?

When I buy one, I expect to get one. After all, I paid for one. I think what they usually mean is "Buy One, Get One Free" so it ought to be BOGOF.

I also have a problem with that sign they have in places that sell delicate gifts like pottery: "If You Break It, You've Bought It!" Don't they mean "If You Break It, You Have To Buy It"? If I've already bought it, then I'm entitled to break it because it's mine.

One of our favorite commercials from another era…

I was trashed recently on a right-wing blog by someone who thinks I've been an apologist here for Brian Williams. I just read over what I've posted here about the revelations and I don't quite see how this blogger gets that. I think I'm largely indifferent to whether or not he stays on the air, just as I'm largely indifferent as to whether folks on Fox News who utter untruths stay on the air. I think false statements should be recognized as such by the viewership and I think there should be retractions and apologies and humiliation, all of which we're getting to some extent in the Brian Williams matter. But I can't recall ever calling for any broadcaster to be fired or hung in the public square.

One area where I think I really disagree with this guy…with most political bloggers, I suspect, is this: When I hear or read a "news item" which assaults one of my beliefs with bogus "facts," I do not automatically presume premeditated, deliberate lying for political motives. I think that's probably the third most likely reason. #2 would be sensationalism to sell newspapers or get tune-in or web clicks. And #1 would be sheer, non-fancy bad reporting. Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained as incompetence.

There's a movie I've mentioned here a number of times called The Night They Raided Minsky's. It was made in 1968, produced by Norman Lear and Bud Yorkin, and directed by William Friedkin. The releasing company, United Artists, declared it a disaster and Mr. Friedkin more or less disowned it. It was then heavily recut in the editing room, making it into quite a different and somewhat successful movie. I like it a lot despite some odd continuity and some hokey moments.

I saw it with some friends at the old Fox Venice Theater on Lincoln Boulevard out in Venice. Some time in the eighties, that theater went outta business and the building — shabby but still somewhat identifiable — is now an indoor swap meet.

Okay now, I hope you read the Trivia Warning above because you won't believe how insignificant this is…but when I saw the movie in early 1969, I noticed something that no one else on this planet would have noticed.

The movie is about the attempts of a local censor to shut down the Minsky's Burlesque house. At one point, the house comics (played wonderfully by Jason Robards and Norman Wisdom) work a ruse on the guy. There's a "naughty" book sold in and around the theater — one which, when held up to the light, shows some scandalous pictures about a harlot named Mademoiselle Fifi. Robards and Wisdom convince the censor guy played by Denholm Elliott that Fifi is soon to dance on the Minsky stage.

Here is a still from the scene in which they do this. That's (left to right) Robards, Elliott and Wisdom. As you can see, Mr. Elliott is holding the booklet up to the light…

It was at this moment in the Fox Venice Theater that young M.E. spotted this thing that no one else would have noticed or if they did, mentioned. I whispered to my friends, "That booklet was made out of a copy of MAD Magazine #115!"

My friends looked at me like I was crazy. How could I have known that? Well, I recognized the insides of the booklet which were visible for a few seconds on the screen. Here's a close-up of the booklet as seen in the above still…

And here's a two-page spread from MAD #115, which by the way was dated December of 1967. Obviously, the prop guy had a copy lying around and used it when it came time to construct the Mademoiselle Fifi book. This article was written for MAD by Stan Hart and illustrated by Bob Clarke…

That's really all there is to this. No one else has ever cared about this. You surely don't. But this is my blog and you were warned this was going to be ridiculously unimportant so you have no one to blame but yourself for the time you just wasted reading it.

• Many folks writing of who was not at the SNL40 bash are ignoring that someone could be ill, employed or not interested.

If I had more than 140 characters, I might have also added (1) unable to afford the trip and (2) not wild about trying to get in and out of New York between blizzards.

I'm hearing today of two cast members of whom people are saying, "How scandalous that this person wasn't there and featured" when the truth is that the person has not been well and either couldn't be there or didn't want to be there and look old and sick.

There were performers who were there and didn't get much (if any) attention: Victoria Jackson, Gilbert Gottfried, Rob Schneider, et al. If there's a snub, it's that the special placed more focus on current movie stars who once hosted than on cast members who were only cast members. But hell, they placed a ton more emphasis on cast members than on writers who were only writers.

• Lesley Gore has died. And I'll cry if I want to.

Shortly — probably within the next twenty-four hours — I will post to this blog the single most unimportant, pointless, "who the hell cares?" piece of movie trivia you've ever seen in your life. If you read it, and I'm not suggesting you do, you will be aghast that a theoretically-grown man could waste ten seconds of his life thinking about it and almost twice as along writing a blog post about it.

Hint: It involves the movie, The Night They Raided Minsky's. This will be utterly meaningless to those who have seen that film and even less important to those who haven't. You have been warned.

Back in the early sixties, former heavyweight boxing champ Rocky Marciano had a syndicated interview show called Main Event. Each episode consisted of several conversations which drifted in and out of talking about boxing and show business. I believe the show was offered to stations in multiple formats: A half-hour version, an hour version and the option of using the interviews individually to fill holes in the schedule, say after a movie or during a baseball rain delay.

Marciano was a great fighter I suppose but he was not a champion interviewer. Still, he had on a lot of the kind of guests no one can make uninteresting. Here are chats with Jersey Joe Walcott, Zsa Zsa Gabor and Jackie Gleason. The Gleason is the main reason I'm posting this…

The wickedly clever Merrill Markoe examines the "FAQ" page on the McDonald's website and comes away less likely to eat at one than before she waded through all those answers to tough questions and culinary transparency.

McDonald's is attempting to stop its declining sales by being more open about what's in their food and how they prepare it…and I suppose that's a good thing for consumers. It may not, however, be a good thing for their revenue. (I found this link, by the way, on the most excellent blog of the fine broadcaster, Mr. Paul Harris.)

The SNL40 special killed in the ratings. The "day after" reaction seems to be quite mixed and everyone is outraged about some omission. The more I think about it, the more annoying it is to me that the only way a writer seems to get any recognition is if they also became well-known as a performer. But then the show has too often measured the success of its creators by what they did after they were part of Saturday Night Live.

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Registration for this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego begins this week. If you want to attend, I suggest you hustle your cursor over to comic-con.org and make sure you know what you have to do and when you have to do it. Understand that con will sell out and it will sell out quickly and that many folks who want to go will not get in. He who hesitates is badgeless.

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The second issue of Groo: Friends and Foes comes out this week. If you didn't get #1, you may still be able to find a copy. It's very silly stuff. I'm spending today working on #8.

Steve Daly wrote this article which is sort of a defense of Brian Williams, though not a particularly flattering one. I'm not sure I buy it but I'm also not sure I care that much about this whole scandal.

Boy, that was long and self-congratulatory.

Gee, some people haven't aged well, either in terms of age or comedic ability. I was pleased that Laraine Newman looked so good because she's the same age I am. (Well, actually I'm about twenty minutes older.)

I think there were more technical errors in this special than they have in an entire season. It must have been a nightmare to service all those celebs, rehearse the ones who did things that needed rehearsal, get the ones who needed hair and makeup through hair and makeup, etc…

I'm not sure why they felt they needed musical numbers from Kanye West, Miley Cyrus, Paul McCartney, Paul Simon and a few others. I hope the Pauls were just having a bad night and that's not what their voices are like these days.

Shelly Goldstein messaged me that if anyone needs proof that Sarah Palin is focused on celebrity (as opposed to holding public office), you needed only to look at her participation and especially her gown.

You get the feeling Eddie Murphy had the limo double-parked outside with the engine running?

They gave about as little attention as possible to the period when Jean Doumanian produced the show…and Eddie Murphy aside, to the Dick Ebersol years. I think they missed a bet: Bring Gilbert Gottfried out and let him spend three minutes yelling about the period he was on the show. He would have stolen the evening.

I'll bet a lot of the folks who've written for this program weren't amused at the joke about not devoting any time to the writers. The inattention to them was really a slap in the puss.

Some of the clip packages remind you how highly SNL has always valued catch phrases. To some extent, the measure of a cast member is how many they manage to accumulate.

I kept waiting for them to bring Jon Lovitz out as his liar character and introduce himself as Brian Williams. But Seinfeld got to do the Brian Williams joke.

Some odd picks as to who got camera time and who didn't. There are folks who did 5+ seasons who got less attention than Jerry Seinfeld, Betty White, Louis C.K. and a dozen other stars who haven't been a particularly important part of the show.

I actually kept thinking about this: They reportedly invited everyone who was ever a cast member to be in the audience. For some, that was an invite to spend their own money for travel and lodging, plus expenses for dressing up and grooming, to sit in the back, be mostly ignored and maybe experience the awkwardness of being asked, "So, what are you doing these days?" Some of them had to be sitting there during the obit reel thinking, "I would have gotten mentioned if I'd died." (Which reminds me: Uh, Jim Henson?)

A friend of mine who was a regular on Laugh-In once told me (Oh, hell, I'll tell you who it was. It was Larry Hovis.) that those reunions were uncomfortable in the same way high school reunions can be uncomfy but ten times as much. Once upon a time, you were all more or less equal and making the same money. Now, one of you is getting a million bucks a movie and one of you is auditioning for laxative commercials.

Careers in show business can be capricious things having a lot to do with management and timing and factors that have little to do with how good you are. After Larry was off Laugh-In and Hogan's Heroes, he actually made a very good living for himself as a producer and writer and was in many ways happier…but he said there were folks who treated him like he was a derelict because he was no longer on a series. That must be the case with many former cast members of SNL. I'm sure some didn't show up for the special because they didn't want to subject themselves to an evening that made it clear the show didn't rate them as worthy of a mention, especially if they did their best work during the years Lorne Michaels wasn't in charge.

I understand why the special did that. Show Business does involve a kind of Natural Selection. When those folks were on SNL, they had to battle for screen time against peers who seemed to be eclipsing them in heat, if not in talent.

Still, I just have to wonder. Some former cast members weren't there because they're working. (Hey, did you know Tim Kazurinsky is playing The Wizard in the national touring company of Wicked that's still at the Pantages in Hollywood?) I wonder how many who weren't there weren't there because they're actively employed or happily retired…and how many weren't there because they didn't need the reminder that they're no longer a part of the most important comedy show ever on television?

I've been writing a lot about Gary Owens, who died the other day. I probably didn't post enough about the other fixture of Los Angeles media who died the other day, Stan Chambers. Here's Keith Olbermann with an excellent (and a bit emotional) farewell to that man…

A little over two years ago here, I posted this story about how my mother, not long before she left this world, was victimized by two separate caregivers. Both charged items to her credit card without her knowledge and one forged three checks on her checking account. My mother was at the time legally-blind but she had me monitoring her bank accounts.

I caught the crimes, got the caregivers fired by their agency and went to the police with what the detectives there described as "open and shut proof." Alas, as thievery goes, this was one of the less-pressing cases for them. My mother was not out on the street. She was not really hurting because of the financial loss, especially because she had me…so our cases went to the bottom of a very tall pile. As far as I know, they're still there.

Still, these outrages have something of an ending. The police may be too swamped and short-handed to go after the two ladies but I had my demon attorney, Paul S. Levine, go after the caregiver agency. I believe they lied to me when they told me this had never happened before in the history of their business, and that they also did not do enough to prosecute the thieves. They had been advertised as "bonded" and I believed this entitled me to reimbursement even though they told me it did not.

Since I told you the first part of this tale, I felt I should report that we just settled out of court for an amount of money I would describe as satisfactory. I would gladly give it back if that meant the two criminals would be properly prosecuted but it doesn't look like that's going to happen.

For all I know, they are still caregiving and perhaps even stealing from the aged and ill. If you have an aged or ill person in your life and they have a caregiver, you might do them a big favor by monitoring their financial transactions. Based on my experiences, about 97% of caregivers do not steal from their clients but that 3% can do a great deal of damage…and the victims are usually not in any position to realize it until that damage is done.

Oliver Morrison wonders why there's no Conservative Jon Stewart. I think the answer, as the piece suggests, dovetails with why there's no Liberal Rush Limbaugh.