Category Archives: Uncategorized

One of the many surprises of Election Night was that the Obama-Biden ticket won North Carolina. They didn't win it by much. The McCain-Palin ticket got 2,128,462 votes in that state while the Democratic slate received 2,142,625. By contrast, in 2004, Bush got 56% of the vote to Kerry's 44%, almost the same margin by which Bush beat Gore there in 2000. Before that, Bill Clinton lost the state twice in narrower contests.

So how is it that Barack Obama won this time there? We could probably name many reasons having to do with the economy and the war…and those reasons would all be valid. But I'd like to suggest one other that may have contributed to that 14K vote margin. That reason is Andy Griffith.

Andy Griffith is a sainted figure to some in North Carolina. I don't know if it's still the case — the shows are out on DVD and there could be some oversaturation — but not long ago, The Andy Griffith Show was rerunning eighty thousand times a day in that state. You could tune in at any hour and catch the one were Gomer places Barney under citizen arrest or the one where Aunt Bea entered the pickle-making contest or some other classic. Actors who were on that series, even once or twice, have literally made their retirement incomes by appearing at events in North Carolina to sell autographed photos. That's how revered Mayberry is to the folks down there.

Andy's been a longtime Democrat but the video he did with Ron Howard was one of the few times he's gone public over something like this. A friend of mine in that state says it was big news that may not have swayed any of the die-hards but carried considerable weight with many on the fence. If Sheriff Andy said it was jes' fine to vote for that Barack Obama fella, it was jes' fine. And of course in landing the valuable endorsement of Sheriff Andy Taylor, Obama also got the support of Ben Matlock.

We'll never know how much impact that little video had. I'm not even sure how many people ever saw it or heard about it. But I'll bet it got Obama some votes in that state that he otherwise wouldn't have gotten…maybe even 14,000 of 'em.

This weblog has included frequent mentions of a friend of mine named Frank Buxton…and I still can't quite wrap my brain around the fact that I am friends with the guy who hosted the TV show Discovery when I was ten. Discovery was one of the few truly entertaining "educational" programs ever done…like another, a decade later, called Hot Dog. Frank was also responsible for Hot Dog.

I wasn't sure if Hot Dog was by the same Frank Buxton because there was also the Frank Buxton who wrote, directed and produced shows for Garry Marshall's company like Happy Days and Mork & Mindy. And one of them, I guessed, was the guy who with Woody Allen created the movie, What's Up, Tiger Lily? Since Woody was involved in Hot Dog, I assumed the Frank Buxton who produced that show was also the Frank Buxton from Tiger Lily but then there was also the Frank Buxton who voiced cartoon shows like Batfink and I wasn't sure if that was the Frank Buxton who wrote the definitive book on old radio. (It's called Big Broadcast, 1920-1950: A New, Revised, and Greatly Expanded Edition of Radio's Golden Age, the Complete Reference Work and it's currently out of print but well worth tracking down.)

So I was confused about all these different Frank Buxtons. That's before I found out that they were all the same guy.

Amazingly, I haven't fully described the length and breadth of this man's accomplishments and expertise. He covers a few more of them — and offers video clips of many — over on his new website. When you click your way over to www.frankbuxton.com, as you will if you have a lick of sense, make sure you catch them all, especially his appearance on The Tonight Show with that Carson guy and the clips from Discovery and Hot Dog.

I know a lot of brilliant people. Frank is about eight of them. Go visit his site and see why I'm so impressed.

There are Republican Senators on my TV screen explaining that building new power plants and housing projects will not create jobs but giving huge bonuses to CEOs will.

Concluding my diary from yesterday…

A few minutes before Noon, we're dismissed for lunch and told to report back at 1:30. As we file out, a video extols the glories of many nearby eateries…and I'd been thinking of hiking down to the Grand Central Market, where wondrous foodsellers abound. But it's semi-rainy and it takes forever to get an elevator down, which means it'll take forever-and-a-half to get an elevator back up to the 11th floor. It also dawns on me that if I come back early, I can probably claim one of the few seats where I can work on my laptop. So I decide to just duck down to the in-house cafeteria, come back up and begin writing.

On the way out of the waiting room, I bend over to pick up something and hear the sound of trouser-fabric tearing. This is not a good sound to hear, especially out in public.

A hasty sprint to a Men's Room stall later, I check and discover that I have somehow — don't ask me how, I have no idea — engineered a seven-inch tear in the front of my jeans. It starts just to the left of the fly about halfway down and continues on into my inseam. I figure that if I hold my laptop case in the proper position, no one will notice it. Later, I discover that depending on how I sit in any chair, I am subject to some interesting breezes.

In the cafeteria, I eat a very good hot turkey sandwich and some very bad mashed potatoes. How is it, I wonder, that there are bad mashed potatoes in this world? It's not like this is a complicated recipe. I'm not sure if they're instant or not…but if they're not, they should be. The basic Betty Crocker mix yields a better result.

And now it's 1:15 and I'm back at the same little desk in Room 302, waiting to hear if I have to report somewhere. The place is packed — barely enough chairs for the number of bodies. The Van Nuys courthouse, where Scott and I had our little mini-con, offered a room that looked like a shabby bus terminal but it was a lot more comfy than this one.

The potential jurors seem like a nice mix of Angelenos, weighted a bit heavy on minorities, especially Hispanic and Asian. It's hard to guess what all these people do for a living but I'd guess more blue collar than white collar and not a lot in managerial positions. One gent — the one who was using this workspace before he was called to a courtroom and I commandeered the desk — was obviously a lawyer or the next best thing. He spent his whole time here on his laptop and cellphone, talking about depositions and filing paperwork with some judge. What are the odds another attorney will want this man on a jury he has to convince?

As I eye the others in the room, I ask myself, "If I were on trial for a murder I hadn't committed, would I worry if these people would be the ones passing judgment?" There are a few I'd insist my lawyers exclude but all in all, they look like a smart crowd. Then again, I think the first O.J. jury came out of this room.

We wait. And wait. And wait some more. Two more long trials are announced and on these, we have the option of opting out. This time, most people do, perhaps because the folks who could serve on a long case are still elsewhere in the building, being considered for that 90-day one. There are also two more trials where we can't demur, where we have to go to the courtroom and be considered for service…but as ever, my name is not called.

So I sit here, alternately working on this and on an article that's due, congratulating myself on the wisdom of bringing the laptop and getting back from lunch early enough to grab this little desk. Every so often, I shift in the chair and feel something that reminds me I'm now wearing split-crotch jeans. No one calls my name.

Around 4:15, they announce that there are no more trials so we'll be dismissed. Our names will be called and as they are, we're to yell "Here!" to prove we haven't snuck out prematurely, then we're to come up, turn in our badges and receive a certificate that we've completed our service. I wait and wait as perhaps 200 people are called…until my name is finally heard, about three from the end. I head up and out, keeping my laptop case strategically in front of me. The paper I receive will excuse me if I am summoned again for jury duty within the next year.

All done. There's a long uphill hike to where I parked, made more awkward by the need to walk with my computer held over my zipper, but that's all that stands between me and the resumption of life. I march with several of my fellow jurors, none of whom got anywhere near a jury box, either. A lady who lives out in Marina Del Rey tells me this is the fifth time she's served in eight years and her experience has been like mine. She never gets called, either.

She doesn't think it's Luck of the Draw. She thinks some higher power has just decided that folks like us will never be on a jury. I tell her I'm convinced that even if I was picked to be questioned, one attorney or the other would bump me. "That's what I mean," she says. "Some higher force has decided you'll never get seated on a jury so there's no point calling your name."

I ask, "Couldn't this higher force prevent me from getting picked for jury duty in the first place?"

She says, "Higher forces can't do everything. By the way, why are you walking like that?"

Interesting Muppet facts.

I won't be posting this 'til I get home but right now, it's 11 AM and I'm in Room 302 on the 11th floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in picturesque Downtown Los Angeles. That's right: Mark has jury duty.

The summons said I had to be here at 7:45 AM which for a night person like I am sounds like greater punishment than is likely to be handed out in any courtroom in this building today. Fortunately, I discovered that if one takes an online orientation course, one can report a little later. Last night, I watched the videos and answered questions…and as my reward, I got to be here at 9:30. So I drove down in a light rain, parked where they tell you to park and hiked several blocks to this imposing structure. The route between the lot and here is quite long and by some distortion of science that otherwise exists only in M.C. Escher prints, it's uphill in both directions.

I am here under the assumption that I will not get on a jury…not that I will try not to, but it's hereditary. My father had jury duty many times. Never got on. My mother was once an extra playing a juror on L.A. Law…and remind me to tell you that story some day. She had an interesting encounter with Jimmy Smits. But the folks who pick real jurors wouldn't cast her. The last time I had jury duty, I sat there all day talking comics with one of my best friends, Scott Shaw!, who by coincidence had jury duty the same day I did. I didn't even get called to go off to a courtroom and be considered for an actual jury.

I got here on time…and don't think that's easy. The hard part was fighting my way onto an elevator amidst a horde of people who didn't seem to understand that when a car full of people arrives, you have to wait until they get off before you can get on. I finally boarded a car thanks to a lawyer (I guess he was a lawyer) who was directing traffic while he negotiated a plea bargain for some client on his cell phone.

One disadvantage of reporting late was that all the good seats in the jury waiting room were taken before I arrived. This included the dozen-or-so seats where I could have had a little table on which to use the laptop I hauled here along with me. Some were occupied by folks who had not brought laptops or work to do and who didn't seem to notice (or maybe care) that some of us had. I was about to go over to one and propose a seat swap but before I could, someone else with a laptop did and got rebuffed. And rather rudely at that. So I had to wait until a number of folks were called away to courtrooms before I could pounce on my present workspace.

The way this works is that we sit here and every so often, they call out names picked at random and those folks report to other locales in the building where they will be interrogated on their suitability and availability to serve for the particular trial. If they don't get selected, they come back here and their names are put back in the pool. The first such pick was for a trial which we could refuse because it will last an estimated ninety days.

When the lady who calls the names said that, there was a loud "Whoa" from the room and it sounded like everyone would be declining. But a surprising, perhaps encouraging number of folks said yes, they'd be willing to serve on a jury that lasted that long. These people have either a stirring sense of civic duty or an employer who pays full wages when you're on a jury. I have neither so I'd have declined if they'd called my name which, of course, they didn't. Two more groups of prospective jurors have since been called and my name was not among those the lady mispronounced.

So what do I do instead? Well, now that I have a little desk space, I can sit here and work and write stuff for the blog. It's 11:16.

For reasons I shall explain when I return, I may be gone from this weblog for a day or two. Nothing serious. In fact, it may turn out to be kind of funny. Anyway, I'll be back soon and I'll try to get (reasonably) caught up on e-mail when I do.

Congrats to my pal Larry DiTillio, who received the Morgan Cox Award last evening at the Writers Guild's gala award ceremony. The Morgan Cox Award is given for tireless, vital volunteer work for the guild and I can't think of anyone who's done more of that than Larry. Whoever made this choice knew what they were doing.

From now on, every time a stranger around me is doing something really stupid and annoying, I'm going to immediately shake their hand. This way, I can be sure it's not Howie Mandel.

An awful lot of folks who read this blog apparently also speak French. I got a lot of messages like this one from Jean-Daniel Brèque…

In the short Cannes 1972 feature you posted today, Hitch says, more or less:

"Hello, this is Alfred Hitchcock speaking from aboard the good ship, Michelangelo. I think this ship is a good place for a suicide, for there is a pool without water.

"I'm looking at the Palais du Festival. I think I see a woman without clothes. No, it's a man without clothes. I think.

"Hello, I see you have a tie. In my movies, even the women have a tie. But they wear it like this (mimes strangling)."

Thanks to all who wrote. Since you all said he said more or less the same thing, I guess you're all right. For all I knew, he could have been selling Amway products.

As we mentioned back here, most people pick too-easy passwords for the many places on Ye Olde Internet where they need one. It seems to me that this will often be the case when you're trying to come up with one that you can remember. Yes, it's possible to think of one that would be hard for a person (or of greater threat, a computer program) to guess…but you should also use different passwords on every or nearly every site.

All of that made me decide I should, first of all, forget about trying to remember passwords. I just now use a different one for every place I need one and I don't try to keep them all in my mind. I keep them in Roboform, which is a fine program that stores your passwords, credit card info and other data. They have a pay version and a free version…and frankly, the free one isn't much good except for testing it out on your system and, if you like it, upgrading to the one that costs cash. But even then, it's only thirty bucks.

I've directed my Roboform to store all its sensitive data on a flash drive I keep plugged into a USB port. I can take it out of the computer and carry it with me…and when I do, my passwords and such aren't even on my computer. If you do this, it might be a good idea to back the flash drive up to something else…which I do.

So what about the passwords? I just use gibberish. You can generate your own like this: gfuir9u or vrfe5ori or cf984Nfd but it's easier to use GRC's Ultra High Security Password Generator. It's free and you can add it to your browser toolbar so you can access it immediately whenever you need a new password. If a site requires one of 8-12 letters, I just zip over to the U.H.S.P.G. and copy 8-12 letters off whatever they've generated for me. Couldn't be easier…or as I like to think of it, couldn't be 1jokwdT!

Above is a photo of the DeMille Barn, so called because Cecil B. DeMille shot The Squaw Man in it in 1913 and many other films followed. It was not then located where it is now. It was at Selma and Vine and later, to preserve such an important relic of Hollywood history, it was moved to several different pieces of real estate and it also changed owners a few times. In 1983, a group called Hollywood Heritage acquired the place and stuck it in its current whereabouts, which is on Highland Avenue in a lot where people park to go to the Hollywood Bowl. Inside, Hollywood Heritage operates a small museum that you can read about on their website.

This afternoon, I went up there to speak at "An Afternoon of Remembrance," which is an annual event put on by the animation community. The Animation Guild, ASIFA and Women in Animation all stage this ceremony, which is kind of like a gang memorial service for everyone in the cartoon biz who died the previous year. A little tribute speech is delivered about each person and some speakers talk about more than one person. I was there to memorialize Greg Burson, Steve Gerber and Harvey Korman.

I was fortunate they were all friends whose last names began with letters in the first half of the alphabet. The ceremony goes (mostly) in alphabetical order, starting today with John Ahern, and there were 54 names to get through. The speeches are supposed to last no more than three minutes each but…well, I got there at 1:15 for the milling and refreshments. Eulogizing commenced a little after 2:00 and I departed at 4:15, which was how long it took to get to the late Mr. Korman. If I'd stayed to speak about Dave Stevens, I might literally still be there. Fortunately, Bill Stout came in to handle that.

Korman was #26 on the list. There was a 15-minute intermission just before we did him so figure 13 speeches per hour. To get through 54 people could take more than four hours. But since most in the audience are there to speak and since many leave after they're done speaking, the crowd thins out. The place was half empty by the time I had to go. I doubt there were many there to hear the tributes to the fallen whose surnames begin with "W," which makes me feel bad for their friends and any family members who might have attended.

To my friends in the animation community, I want to say: Let's stop doing this. I absolutely appreciate the respect for the deceased and their contributions to cartoon-making but there's got to be a better idea. Most of us show up because we feel obligated. I would have felt terrible if there'd been no one who knew them well who could speak for Burson or Gerber. I did feel bad about having to leave when I did and not hear L-Z but (a) I had other responsibilities and (b) I couldn't sit for four hours and listen to people talk about how great I was, let alone about other people. Let's think of another way to honor these folks…please?

A couple of folks who read the previous posting have written to ask me what a rape case has to do with the Death Penalty since, after all, they usually don't sentence someone to die for the crime of rape.

I thought it was obvious but just in case others are wondering: A court system that could send an innocent man to prison for 25 years for rape or any other crime is a court system that could send an innocent man to the gas chamber. The Innocence Project, which is not the only group doing this kind of thing, has notched 232 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States since they began doing this in 1989. That includes seventeen who had served time on Death Row.

No one expects a Zero Defect System in our courts but I think a lot of folks have their heads in the sand over how often judges and juries put the wrong person behind bars. At the very least, there needs to be more willingness by officials to investigate and admit error. Jerry Johnson was telling people for years that he, not Timothy Cole, had committed the rape for which Cole was convicted. That's the kind of thing that can be fixed.

I've just been reading a number of news stories on an amazing DNA "innocence" case down in Texas. And with this one, you kind of have to read a number of them because no one report seems to have all the maddening details in full. Here's one and here's one and here's one and now I'll try to summarize the whole ugly tale for you…

In the mid-eighties, a sicko who some called "The Tech Rapist" was terrorizing young women at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. It was assumed he'd been caught and his career ended when a young man named Timothy Cole was convicted of the 1985 rape of a 20-year-old woman. The woman identified him from a police lineup but Cole maintained his innocence, pointing out (among other things) that the victim described her assailant as a heavy smoker. Cole had terrible asthma and didn't/couldn't smoke.

In court, Cole's lawyer tried to suggest that another man, a fellow named Jerry Johnson, was the actual guilty party. The victim's i.d. was too compelling, however, and Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was offered one of those plea bargain deals where he could get probation if he confessed but he refused, insisting he was not going to say he'd raped someone when he hadn't.

In 1995, Johnson began confessing to the rape. In fact, he repeatedly told authorities he'd done it but no one paid any attention to him even though he had a history of similar crimes. Indeed, DNA testing would later prove that he, not Cole, was the rapist…proof that came too late to help Timothy Cole. In 1999, Cole died in prison from heart problems related to his asthma. Last Friday, a judge said, "I find to a 100 percent moral, factual and reasonable certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault [the student]" and he ordered Cole's name cleared. It's a nice gesture but a little tardy, don't you think?

How many things went wrong in this case and how often do they go wrong, individually or collectively, in others? The victim identifying the wrong man is the least of it. There's no way to prevent that from happening but then we have the situation where Cole was basically told, "If you admit you did it, you'll get out of prison and if you insist you didn't, you'll stay there for a long time." That's a horrible choice for him and a horrible choice for society. But I guess it does make the prosecutors' lives easier when someone confesses. So the accused have to be given some incentive to do that whether they're guilty or not.

A lie would have gotten him out but standing by the truth put and kept Timothy Cole in prison. Then along comes a convicted sex offender…one who had also been a suspect in the case so it's not like he was some stranger who was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He says, "Cole didn't do it…I did" and the authorities ignore him. Could that have had anything to do with the fact that it's embarrassing to admit you put an innocent man in prison? That it's easier to pretend that other confession couldn't be legit and to hope it will just go away? One might even suspect that when you have a serial rapist around, there's great pressure on law enforcement to make an arrest…so maybe they were a wee bit hasty to pin it all on Cole and once they had, they couldn't go back.

My friend Roger and I sometimes debate the Death Penalty, which I'm largely against because I think our judicial system is too inefficient to be trusted with that power. Roger's attitude is that even if the wrong guy is occasionally convicted and executed, that's no great injustice because the kind of person who winds up wrongly on Death Row is the kind of person who's probably guilty of something else heinous, anyway. Still, of this case, I don't think even he'd say, "Well, how do we know Timothy Cole didn't rape someone else?" He'll more likely say, "No system is ever going to be perfect. This kind of thing is going to happen once in a while." I suspect "once in a while" occurs a lot more often than any of us might like to think.

There's been much chatter, at least in my e-mailbox, about the status and fate of MAD Magazine. There's also been discussion over on the weblog of Mike Snider, one of that publication's wittier contributors.

I call to your attention this posting in which Mike graphs and discusses its circulation slide. Notice the descent did not begin with the popularity of the Internet. It probably has more to do with a general and growing disinterest in this country in the basic concept of buying magazines of any kind.

I also call to your attention this posting in which Mike responds to the news that MAD will be trimmed back to quarterly status. I think he's wrong, by the way, that it will soon cease publication completely. My feeling is its overlords will always keep some publication on the newsstands called MAD, even if it doesn't bear a great resemblance to the MAD we know and love.

And I especially call your attention, assuming you have any left, to this posting which is about Frank Jacobs, who I still think is the funniest poet and lyricist of our day.

Meanwhile, MAD artist Tom Richmond is reporting over on his site about recent reports of financial woes within Time-Warner that are probably not unrelated to what's going on with the magazine. As he also notes, some MAD fans have been fantasizing that some wealthy guy will swoop in, purchase MAD from Time-Warner and keep the publication going in the grand tradition. I'd say there's about a 0% chance of the corporation ever selling off so famous a brand name for any amount of money. Conceivably, they might allow an outsider to license the right to publish the magazine called MAD so they don't have to…but that would suppose there's someone out there who loves the thing enough to lose millions of dollars a year just to see it continue. Maybe they can apply for a federal bailout…