Category Archives: Uncategorized

Rush Limbaugh maintains his usual level of accuracy.

Hey, I thought I'd tell you about seven great free (!) programs I've found on the Internet…software that makes my life at this computer a lot easier. These are just for us PC users and you download and use these at your own risk. In other words, I wouldn't listen to me if I were you.

• There are now about eight skillion file formats for audio and video…and even when you have software that will play FLV files, it sometimes won't play all FLV files. Well, so far I haven't come across an audio or video file that VLC Media Player couldn't handle. I've directed all my file types to ignore Windows Media Player and other such programs and to just open with VLC. [UPDATE: Yes, there is a MAC version of this program.]
• My hard disk got cluttered with multiple copies of files, especially ones I'd downloaded from the 'net. The answer? Doublekiller will search the folders you specify and show you which files are exact matches even if they have different filenames.
• As I clean up my hard disk using things like Doublekiller, I wind up with a lot of empty directories. That's why I need Remove Empty Directories.
• Many programs like to add themselves to your startup groups so they'll load every time you boot or reboot your computer. You probably don't want all of them there and you sometimes don't know where they hide themselves. You can find out what's loading and from where with Startup Optimizer.
• I had a lot of files that I needed to rename and I didn't want to sit there doing it hundreds of times. So I downloaded Bulk Rename Utility and it enabled me to rename them quite rapidly. It takes a few minutes to learn but once you do, watch out.
• I've been through a number of font utilities, some of which cost serious bucks. But the utterly free Font Xplorer does everything I need.
• Need to convert your Mozilla Firefox Bookmarks to Internet Explorer Favorites? Or vice-versa? Or do you need to convert Chrome or Opera or Safari or some other browser's placeholders? Then you'll like Transmute.

Like I said: Use 'em at your own risk. But they've worked for me so maybe they'll work for you.

I just read a couple of articles about the budget crisis in California. I think someone owes Gray Davis a big apology for about half of the reasons they gave for ousting him as governor.

When Jud Meyers was a young boy (he doesn't say how young) he snuck away from home and without his mother's knowledge or permission, ran off to visit the offices of DC Comics. You might enjoy reading his story.

Speaking of Stan Freberg, as I was just yesterday here, there's a company called DRG Records which, of course, does not make records. But they do make CDs, and they've just issued a new 2-CD set of Freberg gems. It's called Stan Freberg: The Capitol Singles Collection and it features 35 of the best things Stan ever did. Thirty of them are recordings he did for Capitol as singles. (In a few cases, one was the flip side of another in this set.) The other five are routines he did either for his radio show or for his legendary album, Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America, Vol. I…but they're cuts that were later released as singles so I guess they qualify.

Wherever they came from, they're joyous creations and they're also very funny, too. Stan did smart material but he also — and this is easy to forget when the work is smart — was very funny. He's still very funny. I was over at his house last month and he was very funny.

In the meantime, a British company has brought out a CD called International Lampoon that has some of the same material on it but also has something else interesting. Stan did a lot of parodies of contemporary (then) records. He did a send-up of Mr. Presley's "Heartbreak Hotel" that would qualify him, I maintain, as the first-ever Elvis Impersonator. He did spoofs of Eartha Kitt and Harry Belafonte and Les Paul & Mary Ford and others. This new CD includes not only Stan's take-offs but the original material, as well. You can hear the hit Johnnie Ray song, "Cry," and then you can hear Freberg's burlesque of it…and so on. A clever bit of packaging.

One of the impressive things about Freberg was that it wasn't always necessary to know what he was parodying to enjoy his work. The Dragnet satire he did with Daws Butler, "St. George and the Dragonet," was a smash hit in Australia even before the Dragnet show was ever broadcast there. As a kid, I loved a lot of his records without even knowing they were based on anything pre-existing. Still, it's a great idea to match 'em up so folks who aren't familiar with the original can compare the mockery.

So these are two great CD packages. The only things wrong with them are the weird covers. The Capitol Singles Collection uses this bizarre caricature of Stan that was done for a British album of his work more than twenty years ago. It didn't look anything like him then and it doesn't look anything like him now. The International Lampoon sports a photo of Stan showing his flying saucer prop to Dick Clark. The saucer was the one that Stan's puppet Orville used to live in…but Orville isn't on the cover or, for that matter, on the CD. But Dick Clark, who isn't on the CD either, is on the cover. I don't understand any of this.

You can order the Capitol Records Collection from Amazon by clicking here and you can order the International Lampoon from Amazon by clicking here. Both come with great contents and stupid covers.

A few weeks ago one Saturday morning at 4 AM, I was driving around, looking for something to eat. Don't ask what I was doing up at that hour. You don't want to know.

But I was and I had a sudden need to eat something (anything) and not a lot of time to locate it. I remembered an "open 24 hours" diner in the area and headed there only to find that it's now a "closes at Midnight" diner. I wound up pulling into the only thing I saw that was open — a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl shop.

At 4 AM in this part of town, you can't get a prescription filled. You can't buy medicine or emergency supplies or even get Breakfast. If the future of mankind was riding on it, you couldn't get your hands on a Holy Bible. But you can get a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl.

A lot of them are open all night, I've noticed, and I wonder why. When all the other restaurants and fast food establishments have closed, why does it make economic sense for Yoshinoya Beef Bowl to be open? Do people have a lot of sudden, middle-of-the-night cravings for Yoshinoya Beef Bowls?

Apparently so because the place was semi-packed, albeit with people who looked like they had nowhere else to go. I found myself mentally asking them, "Why are you people here at four in the morning?", forgetting for a moment that if I had a reason to be there, it wasn't so impossible that they did. There was one couple there that looked like they were on a date. Is there anything more romantic than sharing a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl at 4 in the morning? Where's he going to take her when they want to go to someplace fancier? Arby's at dawn?

I bought myself a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl. In case you've never savored the experience, it comes in a styrofoam tub and part of the fun is figuring out where the styrofoam leaves off and the beef begins. They fill it full of rice and then they add in a load of fatty beef strips about the thickness of oxygen and there's also an oniony juice and little pieces of mushy onion. The onion parts are pretty good and the rest is…well, filling. Then again, so is eating the bowl, I'd wager.

I ate about a third of my sumptuous repast, which was more than enough, and pitched the rest. On my way out, I saw a homeless (obviously) fellow approaching and I immediately imagined what was about to happen. He'd ask me for a couple of bucks to get something to eat and being a generous sort but not wanting to give him cash he'd use for liquor, I'd offer to take him in and buy him a Yoshinoya Beef Bowl. To this, he'd say, "Thanks but I'm not that hungry."

It didn't go like that. He walked right past me and as I got into my car, I heard him ask the security guard out front if there was anyplace else around to get a meal. The guard told him no, not within walking distance. As I pulled out of the lot, I saw him wandering off. Even the homeless have some standards, I guess. And they're apparently higher than mine.

In honor of Joaquin Phoenix's, uh, memorable appearance with David Letterman last week, Time Magazine offers us a "Top Ten" list of what they call disastrous interviews with Dave. Some of them, like Drew Barrymore flashing her breasts at Dave, don't strike me as particularly disastrous by any definition…but the odd inclusion is the one where Andy Kaufman was slapped by wrestler Jerry Lawler. A sightless aborigine could tell that the whole thing was a stunt cooked up by Kaufman and Lawler but Time actually says, "…many have claimed that it was staged — just another Kaufman goof," suggesting that they're uncertain.

150 years ago, Oregon became a state. And 50 years ago, the Oregon Centennial Commission commissioned my hero, satirist Stan Freberg to create an original work to celebrate the glory of their state. It was called "Oregon, Oregon" and it was nothing less than a 21-minute musical comedy performed as a record and debuted on radio.

NPR reports that Stan has been asked to compose a new fourth act for what was formerly a three-act play. You can listen to a short story about this on that page but even better, there's a link via which you can hear the original version in its entirety. Take the time. It's quite wonderful.

Years ago, I saw this wonderful interview with Tip O'Neill, who was then the Speaker of the House. The following is a paraphrase from memory.

O'Neill said that in Congress, the job of each party's leader was to be able to count; that if you were ever surprised by any vote by more than a margin of more than one in the Senate or three in the House, you were utterly incompetent and should resign. And the importance of being able to count was that there are often (quite often) bills that you want to vote against and still see pass or vice-versa…so you have to make sure you don't accidentally pass or defeat a bill just because you're voting in opposition to the way you want to see it go.

He told a story about a Congressman from one state. There was a bill pending that would have been very good for this guy's state and he thought it should pass…but the hardcore part of his base back home was opposed to it. They were a small minority but he couldn't afford politically to tick them off. So he kept coming to O'Neill and asking, "Have you got the votes, Tip?" Meaning, "Will it be safe for me to vote against it so I can please the nut jobs?" And he was a happy man when O'Neill informed him there were enough votes to pass the bill even without his.

You get the feeling that's what we just went through with the Stimulus Bill? Arlen Specter made a statement the other day that an unnamed Republican senator who'd voted against it told him how pleased he was that it had passed. This article says a lot of G.O.P. legislators are delighted with portions of the bill they voted against.

Obviously, it's possible to be happy about one piece and unhappy with the whole. But it's also possible that the Republicans didn't dare obstruct this bill and that they were always going to deliver enough moderate votes to pass the thing. You think maybe?

The great cartoonist Jerry Robinson appeared at the New York Comic Con last weekend, interviewed by my pal Danny Fingeroth. This report will tell you a lot about what was discussed but I don't believe this line…

"The thing that's so impressive is how much work he's done on behalf of persecuted cartoonists and guys like Joe Siegel and Jerry Schuster," Fingeroth said.

Danny wouldn't mangle the names of Superman's creators like that but it's astounding how many people do. ("Joe Siegel" makes an appearance in the new book on the life and art of Dave Stevens, too.) I probably make too much of this but how difficult is it to remember it's Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster?

Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. How difficult is that? Especially when you cut-and-paste like I just did.

That mistake will not be made on March 5 at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. That's when it'll be my turn to interview Jerry Robinson (again) in conjunction with the Skirball's ongoing exhibition, "ZAP! POW! BAM! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books, 1938-1950." It opens February 19 and it'll be there 'til August 9, but try to get there on March 5 to hear Jerry. Tickets are now available at this link.

Also! Skirball associate curator Erin Clancey and I will be discussing the exhibit this coming Thursday on Patt Morrison's radio show, heard on KPCC radio, which is 89.3 on your FM dial. Patt's popular public affairs program is heard from 1 PM to 3 PM, Monday through Friday. Erin and I will be on the last twenty (or so) minutes of Thursday's show. We will not be mispronouncing the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

Two weeks from today, many of us will be descending on San Francisco for the annual WonderCon. I've been to most of these and always had a good time. No reason to expect this year will be any different. If you're within range, come and enjoy a huge hall full of interesting people to meet and fun things to purchase. There's even some exciting programming (here's the whole schedule) and I'll be hosting a number of panels (here's my schedule).

WonderCon is the perfect event for those who think the Comic-Con International in San Diego is too huge to handle. It's run by the same folks and they're really, really good at running conventions. (I've been to enough of them to know this.) It's large enough that there's never a moment you could be bored but not so large that you have to reset the time zone on your iPhone as you cross the dealer's room. Take a look at the schedule and the guest list and consider going.

For those who'll be in S.F. that weekend, two plugs: Frank Ferrante — oft-mentioned on this blog for his incredible simulation of Julius "Groucho" Marx — will be performing two shows in that town on Saturday, February 28 at the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco. Some tix may still be available but won't be for long. Go here to see if you can get in.

And on Monday, March 2, I'll be teaching a class in Animation Voice Acting at the Voice One workshop over on Third Street. I did this last year and they asked me back…so I guess someone got something out of it. If you're interested in how to work towards a career in that field, I'll be glad to tell you what I can.

I think that's everything for now. Here's one of those snazzy banners I make up if you want to click and see what I'm doing at WonderCon…

I'm receiving a lot of questions and comments about those CBS Anniversary clips I featured yesterday morning. Obviously, we don't know why certain people weren't there but I suspect most of the obvious absences were just because someone was not in or around L.A. at the time it was done. In some cases, they may have decided not to bring in everyone from a show with a large cast like M*A*S*H. They also, understandably, favored folks who were on the shows the network was then promoting heavily.

I assume you're all seeing how many in the first clip you can name. If you want to play a game with the second one, try to figure out which stars were shot separately and edited in. I'm pretty sure Bill Cosby's walk-in was an insert. And no, I don't understand why certain people were designated as Wednesday people and others were Thursday and so on. Some of those folks scored their greatest success on a series that was always (or almost always) on one day but the newsmen could have been on any day and so could some of the others.

Maybe I'm reading too much into this but do you get the feeling that most of these performers were really, really proud to be a part of this? Almost all of them have that "I just won an Oscar" look, like this was an important moment of personal validation. The Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses were happy that their place in history was remembered while the Sandy Duncans and the Jamie Farrs were thrilled that they were included in a group with the Red Skeltons and the James Arnesses.

As others have noted, of course, it's also a sad reminder of how many of these people are no longer with us…and how many are but don't work much. There's also a sense of "era" passing. You could do a special like this today and gather an equal number of performers who'd been on a CBS series…but I don't think it would have a smidgen of the impact of seeing Danny Kaye and Phil Silvers and Art Carney and Lucille Ball and so many others.

Back in this post, we linked to a video commercial for the short-lived revival of You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett trying to fill the stool of Groucho Marx. It recently brought this message from Eric Burns-White…

I'm a bit out of date — I've been ill — and so I'm making up several weeks on your blog. And I just reached the December 12 link to the Buddy Hackett You Bet Your Life incarnation from 1980. You asked if we knew about it.

Well, for me, Buddy Hackett's You Bet Your Life is the definitive, because it's the one I saw. And it harkens back to another illness. See, in 1980, I was 12 years old. Just old enough to have a nasty bout of — I think — tonsillitis. Not so nasty that I had to have them out, but nasty enough that for a couple of weeks I was desperately ill and stayed in bed. At the foot of that bed was a television, and we were in the odd situation of having really good cable (I grew up in Fort Kent, Maine. As we only received one American commercial station, plus one English Canadian one, two French Canadian stations and PBS, we got cable significantly before markets with lots of overlapping signals.) And every morning, around 11 am, You Bet Your Life with Buddy Hackett came on the television, on WVII TV out of Bangor, if I recall correctly.

This was a new kind of Buddy Hackett for me. I was young enough that I only rarely saw Buddy Hackett on Carson or the like, and I think I managed to miss his appearances on Merv or Mike Douglas or John Davidson. So for me, Buddy Hackett was the guy from the Disney movies — the one who acted a bit like an Idiot Savant and blowtorched bits of Herbie while Dean Jones tried to win the race. And here Hackett was, funny and as dirty as syndicated television would let him be, making jokes and mocking the duck and taking on the contestants.

I was enthralled. A lifelong love of the nightclub humor of Buddy Hackett was born of that illness — to the point that I was kind of stunned as an adult and saw Hackett was sometimes in the Disney films I had originally associated with him. How someone could take four letter words and double-entendres away from Hackett was beyond me.

Seeing that bit of Youtube, still recovering from an illness in my 40's, puts me right back in the person of that sick 12 year old boy who had his understanding of comedy expanded by the irrepressible Buddy Hackett all those years back. As I got older and fell in love with what's now called vintage or classic radio and television, I got to know the original Groucho Marx YBYL and I'd seen (and not been terribly impressed with) the Bill Cosby version, and there were days I wondered if I were the only one to remember Buddy Hackett's turn with the secret word. Thanks for letting me know I'm not.

Buddy Hackett was an interesting guy…in some ways, the last of a breed. He was darn near the last guy who would just get on a stage in Vegas and tell funny stories of the "Two Jews walk into a bar…" variety. But he was also a pretty good comic actor and a good enough ad-libber that his game show should have worked. I suspect it was done in by bad time slots and clearances. There was a period there where syndicators were all trying to establish a game show hit in the 11 PM time slot as an alternative to the local news. None of them ever caught on, and the Hackett You Bet Your Life was largely pushed for that slot, as I recall.

Turning to other matters: The other day, I linked to an odd video clip of The McLean Stevenson Show. I didn't know why someone had made an edited version of it with the opening, closing and commercials but without the episode itself. Brad Ferguson figured it out…

It's most likely an aircheck from WNBC-TV in New York. The station was making a record of the commercials it ran during the Stevenson show. It shows agencies that all their ads had been run as scheduled and without glitches, so pay the bill already. There was no reason to archive the program content. The reason your credit is there is because they'd run just enough of the opening of an episode of something to be able to identify it, which in effect would time-stamp it. That was most easily done by letting the credits roll.

Stations usually didn't keep airchecks for very long. Somebody out there must really be into McLean Stevenson.

Thanks, Brad. And it turns out that a reader of this site actually has a recording of the entirety of that episode so he's making me a copy. I'll get to find out what it was about.

A couple of folks wrote me messages like this one from G. Hallaran…

Since you worked on the show McLean Stevenson did after leaving M*A*S*H, maybe you can answer this question I've always wondered about. What the hell was he thinking? He left the best sitcom in history for a steady stream of the worst. Was the money that good for playing Hello Larry?

I only met McLean Stevenson on a few occasions (and not at all while Dennis and I wrote that episode) but I think I can give you an answer. It came down to a number of things, not the least of which was a feeling that he was sinking forever into the Supporting Actor category on M*A*S*H and that if he was ever going to move up to full stardom, that was the time. He also had some ugly battles with "the suits" (I think that's what he called them) at Twentieth-Century Fox, producers of M*A*S*H. Fox was a pretty cheap outfit and they really didn't like it when the show was a hit and Alan Alda and Wayne Rogers renegotiated for a lot more money. They seem to have taken their frustration out on McLean, treating him as a lot more expendable that he probably was.

At the time, Stevenson was having some problems of anger and temperament, and he got to really dislike the studio and vice-versa. He had a particularly nasty fight with them one morning when the show was going on location to shoot exteriors. It was a cold morning, the crew and craft services truck were late, and Stevenson blew up at the shoddy way he and the cast were being treated and, he said, practically walked off the show then and there.

At that point, one thing was going quite right in Stevenson's life. He was occasionally guest-hosting The Tonight Show and doing a darn good job of it. At the time, there seemed to be a very good chance that Johnny Carson was about to step down. In fact, there are those who claim Carson actually did quit and meant it but that he was persuaded to re-up before the news got out. NBC was talking about McLean as a possible replacement, and that had a lot to do with him deciding to jump networks and sign that NBC contract. If he'd wound up replacing Carson on The Tonight Show, leaving M*A*S*H wouldn't look like such a foolish move now, would it?

Since he didn't get Johnny's job, it was back to the sitcoms…and from there on, I think it was just a matter of the wrong shows or maybe the right shows done wrong. Good actors sometimes make bad movies or TV shows and it isn't always their fault. The trick is to keep the ratio under control and he obviously wasn't able to do that. I suspect there was a wonderful sitcom he could have done after M*A*S*H that would have capped his career in a different, more positive way. He just never managed to find it.

A good profile of one of our favorite cartoonist-people…Al Jaffee.

Someone once said that the way to understand the Screen Actors Guild was to note that its membership could be divided into two groups…

1. The crazed militants and…
2. The really crazed militants.

That's a joke but it's not without its truth. In past years, both kinds of crazed militants have managed to find common ground, link arms and behave like a union. In fact, at times it's been a very effective union that did right by its members and also by the entire industry. This year is not one of those times.

Actor Mike Farrell (a sane, smart man) wrote an overview of the problems and a report on a recent board meeting that should give you an idea of the situation.

It's starting to look like this thing will be resolved in our lifetime. The union's new TV-Theatrical Task Force will probably negotiate a deal with the AMPTP that will provide terms a wee bit better than what was previously on the table. This will not be a great contract and actors in the "Membership First" contingent will rightly say it's not good enough. But enough members will think it's time to end this thing and start rebuilding a shattered guild so it can fight again another day…and I'm guessing the offer will pass, though not in a landslide.

The M.F. group was not wrong about where they should go but they were probably wrong about how to get there. In the end, everyone has lost. If they can all manage to be good losers, they may be able to become a union again by the time the next contract has to be negotiated.