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A little over a year ago, I attended one of the best shows I've ever seen. Teatro ZinZanni is a combination of Dinner Theater and a smaller version of Cirque du Soleil. It's about a 3-4 hour experience during which you eat and watch incredible performers performing around and above you…and if you drink, there's plenty there to drink. Frank Ferrante — oft-touted on this weblog for his must-see Groucho replication — was the Master of Ceremonies that visit in his non-Marx identity as Caesar…but the whole cast was splendid and I have a hunch it's even a great way to spend an evening when Frank isn't in the show.

I mentioned in my report that there was an outpost of Teatro ZinZanni in San Francisco (where we went) and also one in Seattle. That was true then but it won't be true for long. The one in S.F. is losing its venue at the end of the year due to real estate problems. This came as bad news to many, including those of us who often get to San Francisco but rarely to Seattle. Happily, this is not a permanent condition. It has just been announced that ZinZanni has secured a new home in S.F., not far from the old base of operations. Unhappily, it may be some time before it's up and open for business…but I'm pleased to hear that branch is not gone forever.

Stu Shostak has a great guest today on Stu's Show. It's my buddy, Willie Ito…truly a legend in the field of animation. How many other people do you know who worked with Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera, Chuck Jones, Bob Clampett and Walt Disney? Willie started in the business as an in-betweener on Lady and the Tramp. He then moved over to Warner Brothers and worked in layout on Looney Tunes. Then he worked with Clampett on the Beany & Cecil cartoon show. Then he went to Hanna-Barbera where he was one of the key designers of their shows from 1962 through 1977, starting (I believe) on The Jetsons. And then he went back to Disney and worked on their comic strips…and at various points in there, he drew comic books for Western Publishing and…

Well, a pretty impressive career, wouldn't you say? Bet Stu doesn't get through half of that, especially if he starts by discussing Willie's childhood, some of which was spent in an internment camp during World War II. (December 7 is a good day to discuss that.)

As if that weren't enough, Willie will be joined in Stu's studio by another great animation artist, Jerry Eisenberg. But I told you about Jerry the last time he was on the show. There will also be call-ins from audio wiz Joe Bevilacqua to talk about his new audio book on the life of Alan "Fred Flintstone" Reed, and I think I'm going to be on briefly to note the fifth anniversary of Stu's Show. Like just talking to Willie isn't enough.

Wanna hear all this? Of course you do so I'll remind you again how to do that. You have two choices…

1. Listen live for free! Stu does his show Wednesdays starting at 4 PM Pacific Time. That's 7 PM Eastern Time and if you live in other zones, you can probably figure out what time it starts on your computer. It runs two hours. Sometimes, it runs more than two hours. Go to the Stu's Show website at the proper time and click where they tell you to click. Then you can minimize that window on your computer and listen as you do other things.
2. Listen later for 99 cents! Shortly after the live webcast, each show becomes a podcast and you can download it as an MP3 file from the Stu's Show website and hear it at your convenience. This is a great bargain and while you're over there, browse around. You'll probably find plenty of other shows in the archives that you'd enjoy hearing.

So tune in today…and if you miss it live, remember that Stu's running a sale at the moment. Go to his archives, place four shows in your online shopping cart…and when you check out, you'll be charged for three.

Let's all thank Greg Ehrbar for telling me where we can also listen to a pretty good 30 minute interview of Mr. John Cleese. And this is the real John Cleese…not one of those Basil Fawlty imitators who looks only vaguely like him.

Some of you have noticed and pointed out to me that this site has slipped out of the purview of Google and can no longer be found there. There is a reason for this.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, someone hacked into my file server and secretly implanted another website within my own. This is known as "cloaking." Deep within the bowels of my software, there was a hidden directory full of software that ran a site selling pills to aid men in achieving erections. It was linked somehow to a server in India which, in turn, could have been linked to a server anywhere else in the time-space continuum. Anyway, I cleaned it all out…or thought I had. It turned out I missed a piece or three of it which I just now expunged.

In the meantime, the Googlebot Spiders — and wouldn't that be a peachy name for a minor league baseball team? — had come across the boner pill ads and they took my sites out of their indices. I am now trying to get them to put me back. We'll see how long this takes. Until I am reaccepted, this site will not be found in its usual Google results.

As it happens, I had already decided to do a revamp on this blog around or about the first of the year. I will be changing to another software and doing a whole redesign in the process. All the old messages will still be available though they may be offline for a few weeks…and there may be a day or two while I'm configuring the new software that we'll be closed for street repairs. Don't be surprised at what you see here for a while.

Master author-animator J.J. Sedelmaier bids a fond farewell to telephones with wires on them. They'll get the one on my desk when Charlton Heston pries it from my cold, dead fingers.

Number eighty-four in a series…

Rick Santorum is living proof of the old adage that Life imitates Google.

Good night, Internet. Don't let anything exciting happen on you while I'm asleep.

Here's a darn good article by Todd Leopold about the heritage of MAD magazine. Not much in there about the current publication, which I think is quite funny and worthy of purchase. Leopold writes mostly about Al Jaffee and the illustrators who've survived from his generation. But check it out and click on the links, some of which will take you to good articles that expand on what Leopold writes. And especially check out the gallery of Tom Richmond caricatures of himself and his fellow artists.

Herman Cain is apparently still denying he had a 13-year sexual affair with that lady in Georgia, even though no one who wasn't gung ho to see him in the White House believes the denial. One Cain supporter friend I have is online blaming it on the media, which apparently also was responsible for all those stupid things Cain said in speeches and interviews. I have no great respect for most reporters these days but I don't think candidates who lecture people about "personal responsibility" should turn around and argue that it's someone else's fault when foolish remarks come out of their mouths.

There are many obvious reasons why Cain is still denying it. I doubt one of them is that he's afraid of criminal prosecution even though adultery is technically illegal in Georgia, where some of the alleged adulterizing took place. This article includes a map that shows where it is and where it isn't. You may also be interested in the wish lists of some of our current politicians and candidates for office. They're all folks who will tell you they want government to get out of our lives…but they do want it to tell you who you can have sex with and to dictate what the two of you are allowed to do.

In the past here, I've posted raves and Amazon links for the two collections of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics — Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. Upon reflection, I would like to back off somewhat on my enthusiasm not for Mr. Sondheim's brilliance but for the presentation of it in these books. Initially I think, my delight at the idea of the project overwhelmed my common sense. I'm deciding that I like the contents of the books but don't much like the books themselves.

There is, of course, a problem with any book of lyrics. Lyrics are written to fit with the music. Remove the music and you force the lyrics to stand alone…something they were never meant to do. Sondheim himself has referred to this problem on many occasions. Often, he has noted that when Oscar Hammerstein wrote, "O, what a beautiful morning / O, what a beautiful day," he wrote something that appeared trite and hackneyed on the page…but once it was married to Mr. Rodgers' melody, it became a soaring, effective lyric. It could not be evaluated or appreciated without the tune affixed to it. And here, we have Sondheim's life's work offered up without the tunes affixed…and in the case of most of the cut tunes, unavailable even to those of us with every darned CD of his work.

Sondheim is fond of saying, "Content dictates form" but I don't think the content has dictated the right form here. It should have led to a smaller page format somewhat less than the 8" by 11" size chosen. Since lyrics are read as a series of short lines, the wide page meant a multi-column layout that I find distracting and confusing, especially due to the indents and offsets to differentiate lyrics from Sondheim's annotative interjections and also from the stage directions included. The quantity of content — the sheer number of lyrics — did not, alas, dictate a respectable font size. We got one that is legible, yes, especially to those of us with 20/20 vision…but there is a reason no hardcover novel is ever set in so tiny a typeface. It's not comfortable to the eye and in a sense, it diminishes the importance of the material it conveys.

The publisher would, I'm sure, argue that there was so much to be covered and that it was impractical to expand to three or four volumes…or more if they'd made the pages smaller. That is probably so but it doesn't make this presentation of the material any easier to read. There is a format that would have, however.

These books cry out to be released on Kindle and similar devices. They would allow the lyrics to be read in one column with the type size adjustable for the reader's comfort and with Sondheim's annotations presented in a differentiating font. Better still, this whole thing should be in some format for tablet computers that would allow the lyrics to be linked to recordings of the songs…so you could read the words, then at your option, click and hear the song performed. It would not have to be the original cast recordings; just performances that the author felt served his work well. I sure I'm not the only person who is referencing back and forth between the book and their CDs…or in the case of shows I know well, supplying the tunes as I read, mentally singing along where possible. It would be so much nicer to be able to click and hear Bernadette Peters and musicians instead of my rotten, non-professional voice a capella.

Since there is no e-reader format available, I wonder if that's because someone is working on it for future release. I hope they are and I hope it'll have the melodies somehow attached. That is the form that I think the content dictates.

One other gripe and I hate when publishers do this. It is now possible to order the two books in a boxed set…an option that was kept (or kept quiet) from us die-hard fans until after we'd bought the two volumes, sans box. We could reasonably have been expected to do this as soon as they were available…and now we could reasonably be expected to wish we'd waited. And maybe, it was unreasonably expected, some of us will be thinking of buying these books again to get the box. That's a premeditated strategy with DVD sets these days: Wait 'til a month or two after most of the orders are in on the last one and then offer the version the loyalest fans will want.

That said, the boxed set will make a peachy Christmas gift item for some. I may order it for myself and then give the books without the box away as gifts. I just wish they'd told us a few weeks earlier that a box would be available. (Before someone asks: No slipcase of any kind is planned for the Pogo series with which I am involved.)

Anyway, everything I said about the importance of Sondheim's words being collected like this still stands. I just wish the format served those words better. And I wish that when I ordered the second book on Amazon months ago, there'd been a little box that said, "Hey, we're bringing out a boxed set two weeks after this one. Wouldn't you rather order it?" Because I would have, especially if like those volumes of the O.E.D., they'd included a magnifying glass.

Apparently, absolutely nothing happened in the world while I was asleep. Good.

On one episode of his show a few weeks ago, Bill Maher offered some guest million-to-one odds that Herman Cain would not be…I forget if it was President of the United States or just the Republican nominee. But either way, he won. He does not have to pay that guest one million dollars on a dollar bet.

I always thought it was a safe wager. I frankly never understood why anyone was behind that guy. I understand support for Romney or Paul or Gingrich or Perry or even Bachmann…but Cain? He had no experience in government and no evident interest in learning about it. Asked what he would do about most problems, his answer was usually something like, "I'll get together experts who will advise me." Hey, you and I could do that. It wasn't so much that he didn't know what was up with Libya as that he didn't see why anyone would expect him to know. He was the only candidate who acted like "What would you do about Iraq?" was a "gotcha" question.

And then he'd complain that no one was discussing the important issues.

Good night, Internet. See you in the morning.

Hey, you want to see the same picture of Dave Coulier every day? Then make a daily visit to http://samepicofdavecoulier.tumblr.com. Personally, I prefer the same picture of Bob Saget every day but there's room in this world for different tastes.

I'm watching CNN and they're waiting for the big announcement from Herman Cain who's apparently going to go outside his headquarters and make it whenever he feels like. Every so often, they cut to their reporter on the scene who has nothing to say but has to say something anyway. What he said a few minutes ago is that he spoke to an unnamed person in the Michele Bachmann camp who said that Bachmann had spoken with Cain but he didn't know when or what was said. He further said that the unnamed person in the Bachmann campaign had said that they'd heard from some Cain supporters that they're prepared to support Bachmann if Cain withdraws from the race.

If I ran a news operation, I think I'd set up a simple rule: When there's no news, just say there's no news.

Jeffrey Clem writes…

I worked at KFC in high school, back in 1977-79, when it was known as Kentucky Fried Chicken. We had a minimum of two cooks on duty regularly, with a manager and 2 counter-persons. Maybe "cook" is overstating what we did, but we did cook the chicken. We'd grab the chicken from the walk-in refrigerator, prepare it for cooking by cleaning, washing (in egg/milk mixture) and flouring it and then either pressure-cook or deep-fry it (original or crispy?). We used 2 different thermometers — one for checking the pre-cook temp of the chicken (to make sure it hadn't somehow gone bad in storage) and another for checking the post-cook temp. We also checked random pieces of chicken from a given, freshly-cooked batch by gently peeling back breading/skin and looking at the meat to see if it was white, as opposed to pink.

I tell you all of this because I am not sure where I fell in that recent description you posted from the anonymous gentleman when he discusses how things are done nowadays. I do know that me and my fellow employees really did work our asses off for what was, even then, chicken-feed (pun-intended), but that's what most high-school jobs end up being, so that we'd eventually develop some kind of decent work ethic and learn how to humbly eat shit.

I ate at a KFC recently for the first time in decades and I saw no evidence that any food was prepared on the premises in any way that was even close to what we did back then. At that time, customers could sort of see behind the front menu-wall and heating-units that there were work areas that involved cleaning, washing, flouring and submerging the chicken in hot shortening (it wasn't called grease until it hit the floor and was, therefore, useless to us).

Reading your recent post about Five Guys Hamburgers and KFC brought back some of those memories and I thought I'd self-indulgently share them with you for a little, possibly-valuable background insight as to how it used to be done.
By the way, Five Guys would be perfect if they served milk shakes (and by that I mean real shakes, not the crap most fast-food joint squeeze out of machines).

Yeah…as I said here before, I think someone could make a fortune if they could open a fried chicken restaurant that would serve the exact same chicken KFC served around 1970. At least at the stands I went to, it was moist and fresh and the batter was the ornament for the chicken rather than the other way around. And you could tell it was actually cooked on the premises.

I can think of a lot of things that I think would make Five Guys even better, starting with a smaller size of fries and burger buns that didn't go quite so soggy on you. I am told however by folks who've tried suggesting things that the company is very polite in telling you that they think they know what they're doing and they really don't want or need your suggestions. I still like their cuisine and the simple way they do business. Have I ever mentioned here that the chain does no advertising and offers no discounts? I don't necessarily admire that but I like the way they're willing to stand or fall with their product on word of mouth. Anyway, thanks, Jeffrey.