I know and knew how to spell the surname of Dr. C. Everett Koop. My spell-checker, however, doesn't so it corrected it to the place where a chicken dwells and I didn't notice.
I have fixed that post. My thanks to every single person who uses the Internet for letting me know about this.
Very little remains of The Tonight Show from the years Jack Paar hosted. What we have here is almost 19 minutes from the festivities from September 21, 1960 with Hermione Gingold, Shelley Berman and Cliff "Charley Weaver" Arquette, plus announcer Hugh Downs is in there. You may note that the conversation is clearly less planned and more spontaneous than anything you'd see on the major talk shows today. You may also notice that this is not The Tonight Show.
The show was originally called Tonight. After Paar had been there a while, it was quietly renamed The Jack Paar Show. When Paar announced his departure, it was quietly changed to The Jack Paar Tonight Show and then when he left, it became The Tonight Show. Here it is from not long before that happened…
I recall the tumult and bickering when Ronald Reagan nominated Dr. C. Everett Koop to be Surgeon General of these United States. Reagan's staff had assured Conservatives that Koop would run his department the "right way," meaning that the science that emanated from it would conform to what they wanted it to be. Today's equivalent of what was expected of him then was that he would proclaim that rape was not a justification for abortion because, of course, women never get pregnant from "legitimate rape." Democrats lined up against him but Doc Koop gave a pretty sane, mature performance before the committee and he was soundly confirmed.
He turned out to be one of those nominees who was ultimately loved by those who'd opposed him and called a quisling by those who'd backed his candidacy. He was against abortion but to the frustration of many, refused to use his office to advance their goals in that area. At a time when the Reagan Administration was trying really hard to ignore AIDS, he made sure it didn't, often to the point of public correction of the "facts" cited by Republican leaders. And he did more than anyone else I can think of to make smoking less fashionable.
There are some problems that are solved in part by just embarrassing people. Once upon a time, smoking was cool and adult. Now, it's widely regarded as a filthy and foolish habit practiced by folks who lack the strength of character (or wisdom) to quit. C. Everett Koop, who died the other day at the age of 96, had a lot to do with that, which means he had a lot to do with saving a lot of lives. We could use more like him.
Every March — to celebrate my birthday and for no other reason — the Souplantation restaurant chain stocks its soup bars with my favorite soup, their Creamy Tomato Soup. I am only a modest fan of tomato soup elsewhere. It's theirs I like so much that I will be hiking (literally hiking) to the one nearest to me many times throughout the month for a bowl or two. Or nine. You might like to join me in a bowl (not literally in the bowl or even sharing the same bowl).
In some cities, Souplantation goes by the name of Sweet Tomatoes. You can find if either is near you at this site…and while you're there, sign up for their Club Veg so they'll e-mail you really good discount coupons. The only thing better than good soup is cheaper good soup. Anyway, it starts on or around March 1. Most Souplantations seem to change their offerings on Saturday so it may not be there Friday. If you go and enjoy it, join me in nagging them to make it a regular. Tell the manager of the one you visit and also call their Customer Service Line. Thank you.
Matt Taibbi on The Grand Sequestration. I don't always agree with this guy but I think I do on this one. Our putative leaders aren't all that concerned with doing what's right for the country. They're more concerned about not pissing off their bases…and maybe some of their major campaign donors.
I'm afraid I agree with Alex Pareene that reporter Bob Woodward has become a very poor example of what a reporter should be. This is an opinion I've held since about half past Wired, the book he wrote about John Belushi. Even if he got the details of that story straight — and there's some question that he did — he sure seemed to miss the human side of what he was reporting on…and it was the kind of story where only the human side mattered.
Since then, Woodward has become somewhat larger than whatever he writes about. Pareene says the same thing I've believed for some time about Woodward; that important folks talk to him because he's Bob Woodward, they give him their versions of whatever happened, he decides which one to believe and then that's it. Usually, he opts for the one that seems to include the juiciest-sounding inside details…and then the people who want to believe his story think he's a great journalist and the ones who don't think he's lost it. Me, I think he lost it a while ago and I don't trust him even when he's revealing bad things about politicians I already distrust.
And as the article notes, some of Woodward's credibility on All the President's Men has slipped away. It does appear that he and Bernstein distorted some of the truth, not about Nixon or the story they covered, but about how they covered it and how good their sources were. I don't think they were worse than the average good reporter but they also weren't a whole lot better. A lot of their notoriety comes from the fact that they were working for the Washington Post, aka "The newspaper Nixon hates." Others in the press exposed as much of the Watergate story as did Woodward and Bernstein but no one else was as directly attacked by the White House for their reporting. That meant that when Nixon went down, no one else looked as heroic and vindicated. It's a shame they became such celebrities because they were more valuable to us as reporters.
As I've mentioned many times here, I was and am a big fan of Allan Sherman. I write poems and lyrics for a lot of my projects — in fact, I'm writing lyrics for a cartoon show this evening — and my two heroes of lyric-writing are Mr. Sherman and MAD's Frank Jacobs. Oh, that Sondheim guy's all right when you need to rhyme "personable" with "coercin' a bull" but the guys who really inspired me were Sherman and Jacobs. Frank still turns up in the pages of MAD every now and then.
Sherman had a very brief career as a comedy star. He set some sort of record for going from living on unemployment insurance to having the hottest act in show business…then back to living on unemployment insurance. Others have done it but no one's done it faster. The story of how he made it into the Big Time has been told by many, including him in his autobiography, and you can read it in this piece by Stan Cornyn, who was working for Warner Brothers Records when Sherman did for them what was then the fastest-selling record in history: My Son, the Folk Singer.
One interesting detail (interesting to me, anyway): In his autobiography, Sherman said he got in with WB Records because a friend of his — Louis Quinn, a character actor on the TV show, 77 Sunset Strip — knew the execs there. Cornyn says it was George Burns who arranged things. Maybe it was both.
I'm hoping Mark Cohen can straighten it out. Mark is working on an exhaustive biography — Overweight Sensation: The Life and Comedy of Allan Sherman (Brandeis U. Press. 2013) and I'll let you know when it's time to order copies. In the meantime, one thing he's dug up is Sherman's parody of "Seventy-Six Trombones" from The Music Man. This was recorded live on January 18, 1963 in Santa Monica at, I think, the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium…
Amidst the complaints about Seth MacFarlane, one finds another category of Oscar gripes on the web at the moment: Complaints about folks omitted from the "In Memoriam" montage.
I suppose it's inevitable. No matter how many names you include, there are always a few folks who, true, were in a movie once but don't make the cut. Someone could certainly justify not including Larry Hagman, Sherman Hemsley, Phyllis Diller and Richard Dawson — folks whose names are known to us because of their TV work, not their few film credits. Still, if I were putting the show together, I think I would have cut one chorus of "We Saw Your Boobs" to have time to include them, a few more on the cusp…and especially, Andy Griffith. A Face in the Crowd will continue to resonate for a long, long time.
Most of the online lists I see that ask "How could you leave this person out?" mention Ben Gazzara and Whitney Houston as shocking omissions. They were both in last year's montage. Some mention Frank Pierson. He was in this year's montage. Someone hasn't been paying attention.
This will be a short one. My mother died on October 4, 2012. She was covered for the last 55 years of her life by a health plan paid for by the federal government in connection with my father's pension as a government employee.
Yesterday, she received a letter from the insurance company that begins as follows. Keep in mind that though it came to me, it was addressed to her…
Maintaining consistent health care is important for you and your family. While we've been directed to end your group-sponsored health plan coverage effective at 12:01 AM on December 1, 2012, be assured that you still have many options for continuing her health care coverage.
…and then it goes on to suggest various health plans she may wish to buy, all of which are described in an enclosed brochure.
So I'm trying to figure out how her insurance company, which I notified of her death the day it happened, doesn't know she's gone and waited almost three months to tell her she was no longer covered and to try and sell her a new policy. Especially since maintaining consistent health care is so important…
Something about the latest Firefox update is incompatible with something in the latest WordPress update. WordPress is the software that makes the pages that comprise this website.
When you come to this page, Firefox is supposed to check to see if things have changed since the last time you came here. If not, it displays the version of this page you downloaded on that last visit. If something has changed — say, if I've posted a new item — then it downloads the new version and displaces the previous version. For some reason, it's not doing this for everyone and a few friends report they aren't seeing any messages I posted since about last Thursday. If they reload the page a few times though or flush their caches, all is right with the world.
A slightly less severe version of the problem has to do with the videos I embed. I have all of them in their proper places but — again, in a few cases — they turn up in the wrong windows. This is again a problem of your computer "remembering" stuff it's supposed to forget. Try refreshing the page a few times and see if that doesn't solve matters. If it doesn't, try this: Pick out a post with the wrong video displayed. Click on its subject line and you'll be taken to the individual page for that item. It should have the proper video in place. If it doesn't, one refresh oughta make things right. Then read forward or backwards a little and all should be right with the world. I assume the next release of either WordPress or Firefox will come about soon and will correct this.
If you ever have this problem with a browser other than Firefox, pretty much the same solutions apply. There is absolutely nothing I can do on my end…and you're probably having the same problem with other sites but if they don't update as often as I do, it may not be as noticeable.
After Stan Laurel died in February of '65, a man named Gene Lester proposed to CBS that there be a big, prime-time special honoring Mr. Laurel and also Mr. Hardy. Lester was an acclaimed photo-journalist, a friend of Stan's and a devout fan of The Boys, and what he had in mind was an hour or two of clips and "talking head" tributes telling the story of the World's Greatest Comedy Team. As the star of a then-current CBS series and a friend of Laurel's, Dick Van Dyke was the obvious host.
The notion was accepted and an hour-long special aired on November 23 of that year and apart from Van Dyke hosting, it in no way resembled Lester's concept. He'd been shoved aside and it had been transformed into a jumble of a variety special with many stars including Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers, Tina Louise, Bob Newhart, Louis Nye, Audrey Meadows…and somehow, they even got Cesar "he's always available" Romero to appear on it. A few of those folks even had a slight connection to Laurel and Hardy. Most did not and the material they performed had little to do with the honoree. The show aired in Red Skelton's Tuesday night time slot and was taped on the stage Red used with most of his crew involved.
Here's poor video of the show in two parts. The most interesting thing in it — and there isn't a lot of him in here — is Mr. Keaton, making what was probably his last appearance. Keaton died a little more than two months after this special aired…and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd asked that no such "salute" be done for him. Fans of Laurel and Hardy seem pretty unanimous in disliking this tribute and many mentioned that a different salute — one assembled and hosted by Chuck McCann for local New York television — did the topic justice and was pretty much what Gene Lester had in mind. I wish I could show you that one but here's the one CBS ran…
Vince's Pizza was located on Westwood Boulevard about three blocks north of Santa Monica Boulevard. That's a generic image above, not a photo of an actual Vince's Pizza. I doubt any memorabilia exists of the place and as you'll see, I don't know much about it. It was the place my family got pizza in the sixties and it was pretty good pie. They had a drive-thru window but I don't recall my father ever actually driving-thru.
Vince's went away some time in the early seventies, replaced by a drive-thru dry cleaner. Two things did it in. One was a sudden boom in pizza places. Once upon a time, there were so few of them that people actually went to Piece O' Pizza, which served very poor pizza. For those who knew what pizza could/should be, Vince's was a godsend. It was the only place to get a quick, good take-out pizza for miles around…and then, one day when there were others, it wasn't. But there was another, obvious reason for Vince's success when it was a bustling business establishment.
Located right nearby — at the intersection of Santa Monica and Westwood Boulevards — there were three (at times, four) huge liquor stores. It was like the Liquor Store Capital of the World on those corners…and people sometimes wondered why they were all congregated there. After all, it's not like one liquor store sells entirely different liquor than another liquor store. Why so many competitors all bunched together?
The answer is that once upon a time, there was a law that prohibited the sale of beer, wine or spirits within a certain distance of the U.C.L.A. campus and therefore the student housing. The intersection of Westwood and Santa Monica was just outside that distance.
Most nights but especially Saturday, those three or four stores were packed with students. If there had been ten stores there, they all would have done good business. And what did all those students do after they'd picked up beer and booze and were headed back to the frat house? They drove through Vince's and picked up a pile of pizzas!
My parents learned not to brave Vince's on a Saturday or even a Friday night. Other evenings, if you went early enough, were fine. But one Saturday night I recall, we phoned in to order a pizza that we'd come pick up and the lady on the phone basically told us not to bother. "We're running at least an hour behind," she said. "Our ovens can only cook so many pizzas at one time." We took her advice and went in the other direction for Chinese.
The law forbidding alcohol from being sold closer to campus was repealed and, of course, other pizza places opened — including, shrewdly, one at the corner of Santa Monica and Westwood — so Vince's lost most of its advantages. All it had to offer was great pizza and there were a lot of places you could get one of those in the area. And maybe, now that I think of it, it wasn't so great. It was just greater than the pizza at Piece O' Pizza, which wasn't hard to be. My mother could achieve it with a Chef Boyardee mix.
Our friend Jerry Beck (aka The World's Foremost Animation Authority) has reopened his old blog, Cartoon Research. Resume going there to read important articles on the world of cartoons…like this one by another friend of ours, Keith Scott, on the true history of the character Foghorn Leghorn. A lot of folks think Foghorn was just a rip-off of the Senator Claghorn character on Fred Allen's radio show. Eventually, he was…but not at first.
Anyway, it's good to see Jerry's still blogging away. If you're interested in animation, his is a must-visit site.
Joan Walsh writes about the reaction to Seth MacFarlane's Oscar hosting. One good point she makes is that MacFarlane probably did pretty much what the Academy expected of him…and with material that was approved and rehearsed and put on the official Academy TelePrompters. There's a tendency to think of the host of one of those things as the sole perpetrator of whatever he or she perpetrates. Not so…ever.
Ms. Walsh notes that there once was a time when we had a continuity of Oscar hosts; when you could expect that next year would be the same guy as this year. The change to what we have now has probably led most of them to go into it there with the sense that it's their one and only chance to host the Academy Awards so they'd better promote themselves all they can while they can. My notion of an ideal host is a guy who'd keep things moving and would keep the focus on the awards and their winners…but everyone would probably then view him as not making much of a contribution. That's why a lot of potential hosts wouldn't use Bob Hope or Johnny Carson as their role model. They'd use Ricky Gervais. I doubt Mr. MacFarlane is too troubled by the suggestion that he was too outrageous and offensive for Establishment Hollywood.
The premise behind picking him was apparently to attract young male viewers and I wonder how much impact the host can ever have about something like that. The star of the show last night, for instance, was never going to be its host. It was always going to be Argo and Lincoln and Anne Hathaway and the salute to James Bond and such. If you tune in for the host, you're going to be disappointed because most of the show is about the award for Outstanding Production Design and the host becomes largely irrelevant. Maybe what the Academy needs to do is to just get someone who can do a sharp, not-about-themselves monologue and then get out of the way. It also wouldn't hurt to have someone whose presence would lend an air of importance to the proceedings but I'm not sure who that might be in today's Hollywood. Maybe the Geico Lizard.