Posted on Wednesday, September 3, 2014 at 10:32 PM
We've been having a little trouble with computer issues here…issues that took this site offline for about 90 minutes. This kind of thing will stop soon.
I've received a few messages about the seat-reclining issue. They range from utter agreement to one guy who said basically, "I pay for a reclining seat and I'm going to recline my seat and I don't give a crap about whoever's sitting behind me and if he even dares ask me not to recline my reclining seat, I'll probably punch his lights out." Remind me never to sit behind that person.
I am reminded of a flight I was on a few years ago. We were running way late and just before we were to land in Memphis, a flight attendant got on the P.A. system and explained to everyone that we had aboard a delegation of Italian educators who were touring America as part of a cultural program. They were seated in the back of the plane and when we landed, they'd have about six minutes to make a connecting flight on another airline that would take them to New York where they were to be honored at some sort of United Nations event.
"Could we please ask everyone when we land to remain in their seats for a few moments and allow our guests from Italy to exit the craft first?" There was general head-nodding and agreement throughout the cabin.
We landed, the seat belt light went off — and suddenly, a family of three leaped up and clogged the aisle as they struggled into jackets and took their own sweet time about getting luggage down from the overhead compartments. The folks from Italy were unable to pass.
The flight attendant scurried up to the family of three and asked, "Are you rushing to make a connecting flight?" The father said no. The flight attendant reminded him about the Italian educators. The man loudly announced, "I don't give a shit" and continued not giving a shit as he purposely slowed down his actions. I almost said something but figured an argument in the aisle wouldn't help get the Italian folks to their flight.
Finally, having made whatever point they thought they were making, the family of three cleared out and the Italian visitors sprinted for Gate Whatever. I never heard if they made it.
You encounter people like those aisle-cloggers from time to time…angry people who are always looking for a way to assert their right to not care about anybody else but themselves. You have to remind yourself that most human beings are not like that.
Leonard Maltin is bidding farewell to his wonderful Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide. The 2015 edition, which goes on sale this week, is supposed to be the last. I have a feeling it won't be but he doesn't seem to feel that way so we'll go with his view of it. I do understand though that in the age of computers, it's a lot easier to look things up online than to page through a 73,000 page paperback. Here, Leonard has some remarks about the end of what has been a 45 year labor o' love for him, his spouse and his crew.
We should weep not so much for the end of that book in book form as for the end of what Leonard calls "curated information," which refers to someone actually doing the legwork to confirm facts before releasing them to the public. Every single human being who has a page at the Internet Movie Database can tell you more than a dozen things that are missing or just plain wrong on their page. I have witnessed first-hand (and occasionally aided) Leonard's mania to get things right.
I received a paperback copy free last week but have paid for the Kindle edition because I think it will be handy to have in that format…and frequently consulted.
(P.S. If you're in the Los Angeles area, Leonard is signing printed copies this Saturday at 5 PM up at Book Soup on Sunset. If you see his wife Alice there, get her to sign your copy, too. She's really the brains of that operation.)
The other day, my buddy Paul Harris wrote about seat-reclining problems on airplanes. The airlines are squeezing more and more seats into their planes now and it's becoming a problem for us tall people when the seat in front of ours reclines. Actually, I've always had a problem with this and I'm only 6'3". I have no idea how people taller than that cope.
For whatever it's worth, I never recline my seat intentionally. I sometimes hit the button by accident but I've never found it makes me any more comfortable. Because of that, I'm in agreement with Paul's suggestion that this capability be eliminated.
And maybe we'll get our wish. As this news story notes, there's been an increasing number of fights on planes because of seat-reclining. They sometimes even lead to flights having to make emergency stops due to brawlers. Something's gotta change.
In 1952, comedian Johnny Standley had one of the best-selling records of all time in this country…and it was a comedy record at a time when it was unprecedented for a comedy record to get anywhere near the top of the charts. Soon after, Stan Freberg matched his feat with "St. George and the Dragonet."
Mr. Standley's record was called "It's in the Book" and what we have here is a video of him performing it. I first heard a truncated version of it on the Soupy Sales TV show when I was a wee lad. Every week or three, Soupy would have one of his puppet performers, Pookie the Lion, mime to it…and it took me a long time to figure out what the record was and who'd performed it.
The fellow who introduces him is the famed bandleader, Horace Heidt, who also sold a lot of records…
Lately, I've been making my way through the Blu-ray set of The Dick Van Dyke Show, watching almost every episode in sequence. I've skipped over a few like the Walnut episode because I've just seen 'em too many times. And I've skipped over 3-4 per season because I just thought those were misfires. I might go back later and watch the weaker ones individually. I feel like I might enjoy them more when they're not viewed in the middle of a string of great episodes.
I continue to be impressed with how good the good ones are…and how many of them were good ones. The writing is strong. The cast is great. Just watching Mr. Van Dyke move and react, even in scenes where he is not the focal point, is a joy. I can't think of another TV performer who can match him for always knowing exactly what he was doing and doing it in an interesting but still natural manner.
You may be wondering which episodes I don't like and which are my favorites. Generally, I never bought the premise that the Rob-Laura marriage was so precarious that it was threatened by a chorus girl kissing Rob…or Laura seeing an old beau. So most of the ones about jealousy don't do it for me. I find most of the "Sally can't find a fella" ones unsatisfying since they all pretty much have to end with Sally still not having a fella. And I can't explain why but the ones where Rob gets conned into directing the school play don't interest me.
My favorites are most of the others. Out of 158 episodes, there are maybe 15-20 that are shy of snuff to me. That's a very good batting average. I don't think any of the other classic sitcoms I like — Bilko, Car 54, Bob Newhart, a few others — scored so well. There's a complete set of Sgt. Bilko on the horizon and I'm sure I'll get it and I'm sure I'll watch every one and I'm sure Phil Silvers will be terrific in every one…
…but I don't think I'll come away as satisfied. For all its wonders, Bilko episodes basically had two endings: (1) Bilko's scheme doesn't work to make him rich and (2) Bilko's scheme does work to help someone in need of help. The Dick Van Dyke Show was about a lot of different things.
One thing I like about it is how a lot of the problems were resolved. At the time The Dick Van Dyke Show went on, the standard sitcom resolved its problem with a trick or a scheme. Lucy gets Ricky to demand a raise and that gets him fired so to get him unfired, Lucy and Fred and Ethel dress up in various costumes, go to the nightclub where Ricky worked and then walked out when they learned Ricky Ricardo was no longer playing there. (The plots of a lot of episodes of I Love Lucy hinge on the premise that when Lucy puts on a wig, no one — not even her husband — can recognize her.)
On the Van Dyke program, the problems were usually solved by someone deciding to stop being a jerk. Jerry the Neighbor realizes he was wrong to insult Rob's work on The Alan Brady Show. Alan Brady decides to stop being furious about Laura going on national TV and blabbing about his toupee. Rob decides he was wrong to be worried about Laura wanting to have a career.
I don't know about your life but in mine, problems are more often resolved by someone realizing they were wrong than by someone disguising themselves. (The Dick Van Dyke Show even did the "raise" storyline. Buddy and Sally were quitting because they didn't get a raise. Rob finally got them one not with a charade but by convincing Alan's Business Manager that he was wrong not to give them one.)
Rob and Laura study the rock in the basement.
As I wrote here, my life changed a lot — and only for the better — when I attended the filming of an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. It was the episode entitled "Your Home Sweet Home is My Home Sweet Home" — the one about Rob and Laura thinking about buying a home with a big rock in the basement. It wasn't one of the best ones but that didn't matter. It did the trick. I'd already decided I wanted to be a writer. After that evening, I had a better idea of what kind of writer I wanted to be and what it meant to be one.
I watched that episode the other evening. I think I can hear myself laughing in the audience but maybe not. I remember being mesmerized by those people on stage…including Carl Reiner, who wasn't in the episode but did do the audience warm-up and hosting duties. On my TV now, it all looks so effortless and apart from a few screw-ups and filming halts, it did that evening at the studio, too.
In the episode, a realtor hands Rob a business card. Later, there's a scene where Laura is in the kitchen of the house they're trying to move out of and she opens a closet and brooms and mops fall out. The brooms and mops didn't fall properly on the first take so the director yelled "Cut!" and they stopped and there was a wait of maybe five minutes while the crew re-rigged the closet for another take.
Mr. Reiner and Mr. Van Dyke both began talking to us in the audience, trying to keep our mood up so our energy (i.e., laughing ability) wouldn't dissipate during the downtime. Dick had that business card and he began doing magic with it, palming it and making it appear and disappear.
I was real impressed by a lot of things I saw that night that were beyond my ability…but I thought I could probably learn how to do that. The next day, I went to the library, checked out a magic book and taught myself the card trick. I got to be pretty good at it…and of course, every friend and family member I had had to watch me do it again and again and again. I could never act like Dick Van Dyke and I could never sing like him or dance like him (or anyone) or even fall down like him…but I was just as good — if not better — at making a business card appear and disappear. At least I was until I got older and my hands got bigger. Now the only thing I have on him is that I do an even worse British accent.
I have two more discs of the Blu-ray set to watch…two-thirds of the last season. I think I'll take my time on those instead of watching them all back-to-back in a day or two. I'll savor them…and then I'll go back and watch the ones I skipped. It really was a great series.
We are, like you, taking Labor Day off but only from blogging…and not even from that since I'm writing this. I have deadlines on other writing. Today's involves a very stupid barbarian who loves cheese dip and who'll be wreaking havoc in a twelve-issue series you can read, one issue per month, throughout the year 2015. Formal announcement to come.
The death of Stan Goldberg was not, of course, unexpected to those of you who noticed the word "hospice" in my earlier mention of his stroke. Still, it was jarring because Stan was such a good, sweet person who in terms of his approach to work was everything a cartoonist should be. He worked very hard and even into his eighties, loved what he was doing and was frustrated when he had no assigned work on the board. He and I had once talked of doing a graphic novel together that he'd draw, more or less in the Archie style — stories of dating and relationships in the real world. I'm sorry we never went forward with it.
I'm also sorry Stan didn't make it out to Comic-Con one more time. The National Cartoonists Society gathering last May was held at the Omni in San Diego, one of the hotels that houses people when they attend Comic-Con. Stan was so happy to be there and at one point, he pointed across the street to the big San Diego Convention Center and said, "And I want to go back there for Comic-Con in 2016."
I immediately thought but did not say that his health would not allow it…but then I remembered that not so long ago, it seemed inconceivable that Stan and his wife Pauline would have been well enough to come out to San Diego for the N.C.S. affair — and here he was, standing outside the Omni with me. Sadly, I was right the first time.
Veteran comic book artist and colorist Stan Goldberg died earlier this evening, the result of a stroke he suffered two weeks ago. He was 82 and had made a miraculous recovery from an auto accident last year. I saw him and his lovely wife Pauline, who was also recovered from the crash, at the National Cartoonists Society gathering at the end of last May. He was so happy to be back with his friends and fellow cartoonists.
Stan was a cartoonist for most of his life and a more devoted one, you could never find. He was also a charming man who was always willing to talk about his days as Marvel's star colorist or the many decades he spent drawing Archie and other comics in much the same style. The number of pages he produced in his lifetime was staggering.
I wrote about the details of his career in the earlier piece linked above. All I can add here is how much I liked and admired that guy. He was one of the greatest of the greatest generation.
Bob Bergen (great voice actor and teacher of great voice acting) was the first of several folks to give me the solution to my Too Many Screeners problem: Take them back to the TV Academy. They send them to folks serving in the military, sez Bob. I'm going to do that…and I'll even take them the screeners I got from sources other than the Academy. Betcha they can handle those, too.
Thanks to all who sent in ideas, even the ones who suggested shipping them all to them.
Jon Stewart discusses the new movie he directed and the accusation that he's a "self-hating Jew."
I used to hear and not understand that last term. It seemed to me that if someone had self-hatred, that was a problem that didn't have much to do with their religion. They just had very low self-esteem, the way lots of non-Jews have. Then someone told me it doesn't mean that. It denotes, or is supposed to denote, a Jewish person who holds antisemitic beliefs.
Okay, fine. But as the wise scholar Inigo Montoya once said, "I do not think that word means what you think it does." When I've heard the term used, it's used by folks who either think it means what I used to think it meant (i.e., very low self-esteem) or who hurl it at anyone who doesn't support every single action by Israel 110%.
This site was down for several hours this morning. As I mentioned, I've changed hosting companies and there was one misconfiguration that took us offline. The folks at Chunkhost promptly fixed it and if you can read this, all is well.
If you can't read this…well, what I'm about to say won't matter but here's the reason a few people can't read this site on its new server at the moment. There is this thing on the Internet called a DNS. It stands for Domain Name Server. Websites are not really located at addresses that have easy-to-remember names in words, usually ending with ".com" or ".net." They're located at numerical addresses. When you type in or try to go to an address like www.newsfromme.com, your request goes through a Domain Name Server somewhere which translates words into numbers and sends you to the appropriate numbers-only address.
When I moved this site to a new hosting company, its numerical address changed. We sent out the electronic equivalent of a Change of Address card. It goes to all the Domain Name Servers and in this case, told them to change all requests for newsfromme.com from the old numerical address to the new numerical address. If you can read this, your DNS got the message.
However, some Domain Name Servers are slower than others to update and some of them inexplicably revert. That happened with me this morning and it's unrelated to the other problem we had. Time-Warner Cable can't get my e-mail to me promptly and now their Domain Name Server is confused. Sometimes, when I go to my own site this morning, everything is fine and sometimes, it sends me to the old address, which is no longer functional. This should all resolve itself shortly. And like I said, if you're reading this, it doesn't matter. Your DNS is working properly.
I need some advice here. As a member of the Television Academy and the Writers Guild and a couple of other groups, I am periodically deluged with "screeners" — DVDs of current motion pictures and television programs. They're sent to us free in the hope that we'll vote for these movies and shows when we vote on awards.
There are hundreds of these things piled up and filling boxes in my home. I may even have a few crates of 'em in my public storage locker…and I'll tell you how long I've been getting them. I have at least four boxes of screeners on VHS tapes. I might even have one or two on Beta.
I have not watched all of them, of course. No one who gets screeners in the quantity that I get screeners watches all the screeners they get. You couldn't. But I watch some and, truth be known, a few have perhaps left me more inclined to vote for what I saw for some trophy. At least one or two have left me less disposed.
But I welcome them all and have even done some the honor of placing them on the shelves where I store DVDs that I intentionally purchase and wish to keep in my library. That still, however, leaves a helluva lot that I don't know what to do with.
Some of what's currently on my kitchen table.
The nature of screeners has changed. When I first began getting them, they were usually accompanied with stern, lawyer-authored letters and warning stickers ordering you to watch them and then destroy them like you were a C.I.A. agent receiving hush-hush top secret instructions which could doom Democracy if they fell into enemy hands. You were threatened with incarceration if you sold them and the death penalty (or worse) if you did anything with them of a bootlegging nature. Your copy, you were warned, was encoded with tracking information that could lead the FBI to you faster than you could say "Efrem Zimbalist, Jr." — that is, if you could even say "Efrem Zimbalist, Jr." I can't.
I never understood two things about those warning letters. One was that why they were so worried about someone bootlegging a DVD of a TV show that could be recorded off the air or a movie that could be rented in two weeks from Netflix. At one point, this perhaps made a wee bit of sense as we sometimes got screeners of films that wouldn't be released on home video for a few months. But the time between a film's theatrical exhibition and its availability on DVD and Blu-ray has now narrowed to almost nothing. Moreover, the same ominous warnings came on a DVD screener of an episode of Sex in the City that I still had on my TiVo and which would rerun five times the following week on HBO.
I'm against copyright violation but I have to wonder: Has any pirate ever not pirated because he didn't get his copy of the movie free and had to go rent one? Is there really a lot of dough to be made by duping and selling a DVD of two episodes of Pawn Stars? You probably couldn't even pawn the thing.
The other thing that puzzled me was whether the folks who wrote these letters really understood what they were writing. What all the threatening notes and stickers seemed to be saying was this…
We know you didn't ask for this video but we sent it to you anyway and you're in big trouble, fella, if you don't handle it the way we tell you to handle it!
Can I really get arrested for what I do with an unsolicited gift? And is trying to intimidate someone like that a good way to get them to vote for your movie as Best Picture of the Year?
Anyway, the screeners pile up here and I'm trying to figure out what to do with them. I'm not going to go to the trouble to destroy hundreds of DVDs. Too much effort. And I think it's tacky and probably illegal to try and sell them…and besides, there can't be a lot of money to be made there.
Someone I asked suggested I post a list here and offer to mail a few to any readers of this site willing to pay postage. I don't want to spend my time taking and filling orders.
I could just throw them out but that seems either wasteful or like I'm just handing them out to strangers. On trash night, there are people who come by in trucks and go through the garbage bins in this neighborhood, looking for stuff they can use or sell. I guarantee they'd grab these. (I once saw a homeless guy on Hollywood Boulevard set up with a display of screener DVDs for sale.)
Is tossing them out for the trash-rummagers my best option? It may well be. But before I take it, I'm putting the question out for suggestions. Even though those threats from the studio are kinda vacuous and empty, I'd like to not violate the spirit of their silly, unenforceable laws. I also have environmental concerns.
I can't be the only one to have this problem, though few have perhaps allowed the accumulation to reach the magnitude of mine. Is there a practical way to recycle hundreds of DVDs — some in cardboard folders, others in elaborate and expensive special bindings — in a way that the studios bless? Is there some charity that could use them? An agency that ships them to servicemen and women? Anything like that? Drop me a line if you have a great solution.
We like Neil Patrick Harris, especially when he's doing big production numbers. Here's a pretty big one he did back in 2013 to kick off the season of Disney trying to see how much money the corporation could wring out of Christmas that year. This, by the way, is not in any way an insult or gesture of disrespect towards that grand holiday and institution. But wishing someone "Happy Holidays" is war…
Does this blog look any different to you? We've moved. In fact, I've moved all my blogs to a new hosting company, Chunkhost. It should mean more speed for you and it definitely means fewer bucks for me.
So far, I'm really happy with Chunkhost. If you need a company to host your web presence online, go take a look at them. And if you go there through my link and sign up, I get a teensy cut of the action.
