It's Friday the Thirteenth but don't fret. If things go bad, you can just tap your troubles away…
This song by Jerry Herman was written for the Broadway show Mack and Mabel and it's performed here by Anna-Jane Casey and the John Wilson Orchestra. Wilson is the guy who looks like Stephen Colbert…
A few weeks ago, I told you here and here of my problems with Time-Warner e-mail. I wish I could report that things have gotten better but they haven't and I lack the time/strength to get back on the phone to them.
To refresh your memory: When someone writes to me at one of my addresses at one of my domains, the message is instantly forwarded to my Time-Warner account and I pick it up from there. What I did as a workaround was to open a Yahoo e-mail account and have my messages sent there also. So I pick up my e-mail messages from Time-Warner and I pick them up from Yahoo…and they should arrive in both inboxes at the same time, give or take a second or three. The Yahoo messages all show up instantly for me to download, read and maybe answer.
What about the copies that go simultaneously to my Time-Warner account? Well, roughly 80% of them come in promptly. Approximately 18% show up here somewhere between an hour and twelve hours after the copies of the same messages that come to me via Yahoo.
The remainder do not show up at all…and it isn't because of differences between the Spam filters at Yahoo and Time-Warner. Their filters do flag different messages (Yahoo had to be taught to send me my banking statements) but I check both Spam filters.
Anyway, I've given up trying to get this fixed. If and when it fixes itself, I'll let you know. For now, I'll just get my e-mail from two separate sources, delete the dupes and hope that between the two accounts, I get at least once copy of each.
One of my favorite moments from the Phoenix Comicon was visiting with the lovely Julie Newmar, who continues to amaze all with her age-defying existence. When I was much younger, I — being male — appreciated Julie mainly for her jaw-dropping beauty…and certainly there was plenty there to appreciate. Eventually though, I came to realize that she was also a darned good actress in both serious roles and comedic, and as I've gotten to know her, I've discovered that she's pretty smart, too. It is rare to find all those gifts in one package.
She was brought in as a guest of the con and I was going to stop by on Friday and say howdy but I think the end of the line was somewhere in Scottsdale. People across a wide range of ages were queueing up to meet her and get an autograph, and the wait was long enough without me going up and distracting her from greeting and signing. Saturday though, a friend told me there was a brief lull there so I scurried over and spoke with her and met her brother who was assisting (I guess) with crowd control as there were usually crowds there that required controlling.
It dawned on me that another friend of mine who was at the con had told me it was a long-held dream to meet Ms. Newmar so I went and fetched Wendy Pini. You know Wendy, the beloved artist and, along with her partner/mate Richard, creator of Elfquest. I've known Wendy for over forty years…since before she met Richard, even. She is also quite lovely and smart…and lately doing things besides Elfquest. Check out the graphic novel/webcomic, Masque of the Red Death if you are of age.
So I went and asked Richard if I could borrow Wendy for a minute. He was good with it so I took her over to introduce her to Julie…and it was an instant mutual admiration society between the ladies — especially later when Ms. Pini presented Ms. Newmar with a copy of the Masque of the Red Death graphic novel. Julie thought it was wonderful.
Julie even hauled out her own camera and had someone take the above photo of the three of us — me surrounded by two fabulous babes. I wish Carolyn had been with me so I could have made it three…but she was back home working on the forthcoming Volume Three of The Complete Pogo. After that book goes to press, maybe I can take the three of them to dinner and look even classier.
Thank Heavens that Google has finally fixed the egregious flaw in its logo. It was driving some of us crazy.
I enjoyed this conversation between Jerry Seinfeld and David Letterman. It's Dave interviewing Jerry about the latter's Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee series. What struck me is that Dave actually seems to be enjoying the conversation. I don't think anything drove me away from his talk show more than the sense that he was bored with most of his guests.
He mentions in the interview that he's looking for a job. I'd sure like to see him do a weekly hour where he just chats with someone he finds interesting.
Here's the premise: Richard Dunn was stuck all night in the Las Vegas Airport so what did he do? He made a music video. It's a clever, well-made piece of work.
But I have to wonder…how is it that anyone is stuck all night in the Las Vegas Airport? Vegas is an all-night city with cheap lodging. Downtown on a weeknight, there are several decent hotels with rooms for $25 a night. For under $100, you could take a cab down there, stuff yourself with food, sleep in a real bed and grab a shower, stuff yourself with more food and take a cab back to the airport.
If you don't have that kind of money, you could take a public bus to one of the big casinos, sit around there all night, watch some free entertainment, have an all-you-can-eat breakfast buffet at one of several hotels, put one $2 bet on a roulette wheel and then take the bus back to the airport…for under twenty bucks.
Or you could hang around a deserted airport and make a music video…
A little while ago, Albert Brooks tweeted, "When can we officially say that going into Iraq was the worst idea the country has ever had?"
I don't think anyone in power will ever say that unless they can blame it on their political opponents…and withstand the charges of being anti-military for claiming all those soldiers died or were maimed for no good reason. But Fred Kaplan does have a good explanation of what's been happening over there lately.
The Rialto Theater in Pasadena. But it is tempting…
About five minutes ago, a pleasant-sounding lady called me…
HER: Mr. Evanier, I'm Brenda with the Los Angeles Home Improvement Center. You spoke to me last October about improvements you wished to make on your home.
ME: No, I didn't.
HER: Oh, yes you did. You spoke to me and said you'd be ready to make those improvements about now and that I should call you back.
ME: No, I didn't. We never spoke. You're lying to me.
HER: If you'd just give us a chance to give you a free estimate…
ME: How can I trust a free estimate from someone who lies to me? You could tell me it'll cost $14.00 to build me a new garage and then I agree to it and you build it and hand me a bill for seventy kazillion dollars.
HER: We wouldn't do that…
ME: You started our relationship by lying to me. You told me your name was Brenda and then you lied about us speaking last October. You want to prove you're trustworthy? Tell me this. Is your name really Brenda?
HER: No, it isn't.
ME: See? First thing out of your mouth was a lie. And you're also not very bright because you're spending all this time talking to someone who obviously isn't going to let your lying company come over and give me a free estimate. Go call someone else on your list and tell them you spoke to them last October and they said to call back now.
HER: Goodbye.
I'm really starting to enjoy this.
Today, Stu Shostak welcomes a real writer to this program; not like that clown he had on last week. My pal Phoef Sutton got his start writing for Cheers — that's pretty impressive — and later worked for Newsradio, Boston Legal, The Naked Truth, Bob and many more. He's a smart, talented guy with much to say about those shows and the television business. Don't miss this one.
Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there and then. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond. Then shortly after a show concludes, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. It's the best deal in cyberspace apart from all the free porn.
Joe DeLillo speaks with some of David Letterman's former writers about his legacy.
My friend Tracy Abbott (herself, a former writer for Dave and also for Jay) sent me this article and asked what I thought of it. I was a huge fan of Dave on NBC, a lesser fan of his early CBS shows…and I've rarely watched him the last ten years or so. I thought he was great for a long time but I also think people tend to praise him for inventing a lot of things that others did before him…and also things for which his writers, including the ones interviewed for this article, deserve serious credit.
One reason Dave's early shows seemed so revolutionary is the unavailability of the talk show that Steve Allen did for the Westinghouse company from 1962 to 1964. If ever a program turned that format on its head, it was that one. Not only did you never know what was going to happen on it, it was obvious that Steve rarely knew. I have a strong belief that whenever someone next "reinvents" the talk show, they'll be doing something very much like what Mr. Allen did fifty years ago, especially the last months of that series.
Speaking of the uniqueness of Letterman in the article, Gerry Mulligan asks, "Who knew the name of Jack Paar's stage manager? Also, the whole idea of letting the home audience see the internal workings of the show — taking the camera into the green room, the control room, even the show's offices." That wasn't the modus operandi of Mr. Paar but Steverino did all that, including making his stage manager a character on the show.
The stage manager was named Johnny Wilson. If the producers thought an interview was getting dull, they sometimes sent Wilson out to hit Steve Allen with a pie that Steve didn't know was coming. No one on Letterman's staff would dare do anything Dave didn't know was coming. (This, by the way, is all my opinion. I didn't discuss this with Tracy.)
On one episode — and this was planned — Wilson hit Steve with a shaving cream pie. Then Steve pied him back. Then Wilson fled into the audience where every person had been supplied with a plastic raincoat and a couple of pies to throw at the stage manager and at each other. It was quite an amazing moment in television history.
I have heard that all or most episodes of this series still exist and that the Steve Allen estate is sitting on them, waiting for the right moment to market them. If this is so, I wish that right moment would come soon. You'd see an awful lot of things that Carson, Leno, Letterman and others later did…and an awful lot of things they would never in a billion years do, mostly involving putting the star on the spot to do something slightly dangerous. Or, scarier, to ad-lib.
Here's a 16 minute segment from that series featuring a then-unknown musician named Frank Zappa. The show had a much more leisurely pace than might feel right today but note how Steve was utterly unprepared for the spot. As was done often, the show's announcer, Johnny Jacobs, brought on the guest and introduced him, not only to the audience but to the host. Steve Allen apparently knew little about it before: No pre-interview, no questions or jokes on cards, etc. Today, that would all be planned out and even rehearsed…
Tucker Carlson seems out to prove he's everything Jon Stewart says he was…and less.
Here is a way-too-brief (and too focused on those who went on to stardom) oral history of The Groundlings, a wonderful improv troupe/school in Los Angeles. I spent a fair amount of time on the periphery of that organization. You couldn't really be a part of it if you were convinced you had no business being on a stage. But I admired everything about it and darn near everyone I ever saw perform there.
Tim Murphy runs down a list of conspiracy theories involving Hillary Clinton. It's hard to believe that even the spreaders of some of these theories believed they were true; just that they might be profitable.