Category Archives: Uncategorized

It's inconceivable you won't want to read a brief but interesting oral history of the movie, The Princess Bride. And make sure while you're over there, you also check out the reunion photo.

A suggestion: If you're a fan of this movie but have never read the book, read the book. And if you can somehow get your hands on a hardcover, read it in hardcover. I'm not sure I can explain why but it's a book that is drastically diminished in paperback. I suspect it's even worse on Kindle.

The original 1973 edition was not a big success and I don't think I even heard about it at the time. A few years later, a friend of mine named Mark Hanerfeld found a pile of them in a New York bookstore for a buck apiece. He bought something like fifty copies and mailed 'em to all his friends, myself included. This was the first edition, which had certain type printed in red ink. Later editions sometimes tried to save bucks by printing in black but differentiating that text via a different font. It ain't the same. It ain't as good. (You probably won't get your hands on a first edition, by the way. They seem to go for $900 and up nowadays. That's a photo of a copy at above left.)

Anyway, it's quite a wonderful book in its original form with the two colors of type and the separate scene that you had to send away for…and I did. I believe some subsequent pressings have come close to replicating the reading experience in format but I haven't paid much attention to them. I still have that First Printing that Mark sent me, gloat gloat.

If you want to know what the Occupy movement is all about, here are some charts that explain it.

For a limited time, which means until people get sick of it again by Thanksgiving, McDonald's is bring back the McRib…the sandwich which has made more comebacks than Chevy Chase. The McRib, by the way, is funnier.

I will not be rushing or even strolling through the Golden Arches to get one. Back when I liked fast food a whole lot more than I do now, I sampled a McRib and found it — how do I put this? — pretty awful. I actually like McDonald's burgers for what they are…which is familiar, safe food you can grab in a rush even when far from home. And I've been known to breakfast in a hurry with a Sausage Biscuit with Egg…plus McDonald's fries were among my favorites until I discovered Five Guys.

But you know what my favorite thing ever at McDonald's was? Back in the late seventies or early eighties, the ones near me in L.A. all carried their version of a steak sandwich. It looked kinda like the McRib. It was longer to fit on a french roll and it had inch-long pieces of onion on it which provided most of the flavor. The meat itself was chopped ground beef like a hamburger although with what seemed like much better quality than they then put into their burgers. And I seem to recall they only offered it late in the day, after 4 PM or so, with commercials that sold it as a reason to bring your dates to dinner at Mickey D's. And there's a way to really impress a woman. ("You're taking me there? Wow! Let me get these panties off…")

I remember this vividly but after typing the above, I did a Google search and the only near-mention I could find was this from a Wikipedia list of discontinued McDonald's items…

Beefsteak Sandwich — test-marketed in New York and other East Coast markets in 1980 and as far west as Chicago were part of a McDonald's "Dinner Menu", offered only after 4:00 p.m. The Beefsteak Sandwich was essentially an elongated hamburger of a different quality served on a short French roll, similar to a sub or hero roll. Packets of steak sauce (A1 sauce in Chicago) were available for the sandwich.

I'm sure they had it in Los Angeles and I think it was called a Chopped Beefsteak Sandwich…or something that made clear you shouldn't expect a genuine piece o' steak within. In any case, it didn't last long and I remember lamenting its disappearance. It was an honest creation: Real good meat and real onions grilled simply and served on a real roll. I suspect if they'd used cheaper beef, deep-fried it and slathered cheese on the thing and called it the Mr. McSteak, it would have been a hit.

A few months ago, I spent a delightful evening chatting and spinning anecdotes with my friends Paul Dini and Misty Lee. Microphones were present and the conversation was then sliced 'n' diced into three episodes of their weekly podcast, Radio Rashy. It's a pretty good series, well worth hearing even when I'm not on.

But as it happens, I'm on again. Last week, we spent another evening telling stories, they edited it into three parts and the first installment is now online for your listening/downloading pleasure. The second and third episodes will follow in the coming weeks.

And I'm not on it but you also might want to listen to this: A gent named Bil Paterson is hosting a BBC Radio special on the history of the Classics Illustrated comic books. This is to mark the 70th anniversary of those comics that so many kids read and based book reports on instead of reading the real works…kind of the Cliff Notes of their day. It's a 30-minute special and I haven't had time yet to listen to it but I thought I'd better get the link up here now for you because these BBC Radio online links have a tendency to disappear on us. So listen or download now if you're interested. Thanks to Greg Ehrbar for telling me about this one.

An interesting confession from longtime Saturday Night Live cast member Darrell Hammond…

Hey, want another great weblog to visit? I mean, besides this one. My pal Bill Steinkellner is one half of the team of Bill and Cheri Steinkellner, award-winning authors of teevee shows and Broadway shows and all sorts of fun things…and Bill is also a best-selling author as well as being the best danged teacher of improv comedy I've ever encountered. He also writes cute li'l short-short stories that he posts every week on his weblog. Go read a handful of them and you'll be clicking back for more.

Last Sunday was the ceremony in Washington at which Will Ferrell was presented with this year's Mark Twain Prize. It airs next Sunday on PBS. This article at Salon by Mary Elizabeth Williams vigorously defends the selection…and it seems to me Ms. Williams is missing the point of those whose objections have made a defense necessary. As I read it, "they" (those whose eyebrows shot up higher than Groucho's during a particularly lascivious one-liner) aren't objecting to the choice so much as the timing. And they are perhaps uncomfy with the Kennedy Center surrendering to economic concerns, picking the guy who'll sell tickets to the award ceremony over someone who has been around long enough to see his or her work endure for a few generations.

I started to write a long piece explaining how I feel about this. Got three sentences into it when I suddenly experienced a jolt of déjà vu and said to myself, "Wait a sec, Evanier. You've written this before." So I searched this blog and found out that, sure enough, I had. Here it is. (And where was that jolt all those years when I wrote Scooby Doo? Hmm?)

Here's a list of good articles available online about Woody Allen. The best one is the first one they mention — the long piece by Kliph Nesteroff.

The big Groo News is that there is Groo News. I promised many folks that when we had a firm release date for the Groo Vs. Conan mini-series, I would report it here. I can report here that the first issue will be out the third week of April of 2012, the second and third will follow in May and June, and then the final issue will be out the week of next year's Comic-Con International, which is in July.

The first two issues, which are by Sergio Aragonés, Tom Yeates and Yours Truly (with coloring by Tom Luth) have been completed. Sergio and I are working on #3 this week. In this deathless series, Groo the Wanderer sorta/kinda meets Conan the Barbarian and they battle to the death not one but several times. Also running around the pages are Sergio and me, and it's all a very silly story that we hope you will enjoy. End of plug for that.

Plug For Something Else: Sergio continues to produce Sergio Aragonés Funnies, a regular comic from the fine folks at Bongo. In some ways, I like this comic better than Groo the Wanderer because I get paid exactly the same (i.e., zero) but I don't have to do any work on it. Pick up a copy wherever the best comics are sold.

Ten candy bars you'll never eat.

Obviously, the most tragic cost of the Iraq War is the human cost — the lives lost or shattered.

But there is also a dollar cost and it's pretty damn high. What else could we have bought with that money?

Not all that far from where I live is the coffee-shop-that-isn't-a-coffee-shop. It's called Johnie's and up until around 2000, it was just your average place to go and get a sandwich, a piece of pie and a cuppa joe. Once upon a time before that, it did a lot of business but that was long ago and far away. That area once housed some of the city's largest department stores and I would guess that their demise, as the trend in retailing moved towards malls in other locales, was why commerce at Johnie's declined.

At the turn of the century, the place was sold to the company that operates the 99-Cent Store chain. They acquired it, I guess, because it was a prime hunk of real estate even if it wasn't a profitable place to have a coffee shop. The chain owns a lot of land in that area. There are actually two 99-Cent Stores within a two block area and I keep waiting for them to have a price war. I'm imagining one becoming a 98-Cent Store and then the other one parries by becoming a 97-Cent Store and so on…

Since the new owners took over, Johnie's is no longer a coffee shop. It's a filming location. The article I'm about to link to probably underestimates how often it's used for that. I drive by it maybe four times a week and I'd say that at least one out of every four times, I see trucks and trailers and cameras filling its parking lot. Someone is shooting a movie or a TV show or perhaps a commercial there. It obviously makes a lot more money in that capacity than if it was still selling patty melts. (Not far from it there used to be a gas station that operated in the same way. It had stopped being a place to fill one's tank and instead was a location for movies and TV programs that needed to shoot a scene at a gas station. Its pumps had been painted to reflect an imaginary brand name.)

Here is the article I just mentioned. As it explains, a movie museum is going in across the street and some are wondering and maybe worried about what it means for Johnie's. I'm guessing it won't change anything but you never know. It could increase business in that area enough that Johnie's will go back to serving meals. That would be a shame because it's a great location to film but it always had really lousy food.

[This the second of I-don't-know-how-many posts about my days of playing semi-serious Blackjack in Nevada casinos. If you want to read the first part, it's over here.]

You're not a real Blackjack player until you get thrown out of a casino. I wasn't so much thrown as gently tossed…and the odd part was I hadn't done anything.

The casino was the Las Vegas Club downtown. This would have been around 1985 or so. At the time, I was wearing a big, clunky Casio watch (I think it was a Casio) that did all sorts of things a watch hadn't done before and didn't really need to do. It had an utterly impractical calculator on it. It had a timer and several highly musical alarms. It had the capacity to store around 50 phone numbers. I wore that thing for about a year and at no point did any of that come in handy. The calculator was confusing and hard to operate because its buttons were so tiny.

The timers were even harder. I'd set an alarm to go off at 5 PM and find out unceremoniously in the middle of the night that I'd set it for 5 AM. And it took forever to program each phone number in.

The real uselessness of the phone book feature was underscored if one asked the question, "Which fifty numbers do you put into it?" If I put in the 50 I most often called…well, I knew all those numbers by heart. I didn't need to scroll through them all on the watch, which was a very slow process. But if I put in fifty I didn't have chiseled into my memory…well, those were fifty numbers I almost never needed to call. Still, the watch seemed cool at the time so I wore it for a few months.

So I was playing double-deck at the Las Vegas Club and I was winning. I was counting cards so I had an advantage…enough to put me six hundred dollars up, which was about how much I'd just dropped at Binion's Horseshoe next door. We came to a moment when the dealer shuffled, which meant that I had no advantage. At the point of shuffle, the "count" starts over and the odds of me winning are exactly the same as they are if I'm not counting.

The hand just before the shuffle, the deck was quite favorable to me so I'd wagered $100, which was a big bet for me at the time. When the dealer shuffled, I was afraid to pull it back because it might flag me as a counter. That's one of the ways they identify counters: Counters want to lower high bets after a shuffle.

I decided to let it ride and was glad I did when the dealer dealt me a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to my left was dealt a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to her left was dealt a Blackjack. Then the person sitting to his left was dealt two face cards and the person sitting to his left was dealt a Blackjack. Five players, five winning hands (the dealer busted out) and four Blackjacks, which paid 3-to-2. Not mathematically impossible at all, of course, but it did look very unusual. We and a few folks watching all let out a whoop! and the pit boss came scurrying over to see what the whoop! was all about.

He looked and something looked very fishy to him. Fishier than a mermaid from the waist down.

Now, if you know Blackjack, you know there was no conceivable way a counter could have known this was coming…and if I had, I'd have bet a lot more than a hundred bucks. There was also no conceivable way a cheater could have made this happen; not unless he'd somehow bribed the dealer to stack the deck. And if you did figure out some way to force the dealer to deal mostly Blackjacks, you wouldn't do it with bets ranging from $20 to $100, which was what we had out there. You'd head immediately for the High Stakes tables.

Still, the pit boss looked at all those Blackjacks out there laughing at The House and you could see a thought flashing neon behind his retinas: Something is wrong here! I don't know what but I'd better do something! His eyes fell on the watch I was wearing and he ordered the dealer to pay off the bets, then close the table.

All the players took their winnings, shrugged and headed for other tables. I tried to do that but the pit boss grabbed me by the wrist just below the watchband and said, "All tables here are closed to you." I asked why and I reminded him that the cards had just been shuffled. I also told him to take his hand off me.

He doggedly repeated, "All tables here are closed to you." Then he pointed to the watch and said, "Especially on account of that watch."

I said, "It has a calculator and a phone book on it, plus a little alarm that plays 'Happy Birthday' on your birthday. Here…you can examine it." I started to take it off but he stopped me. He said, "I don't have to explain nothin' to you," then he pulled a card out of his pocket and I could see it was the Nevada Trespass Act. Once you are read that, you are formally on notice that you are being ejected from the premises and you're subject to arrest if you don't go promptly. I told him to save his breath and I headed for the cashier to turn my chips into cash.

On my way out, a slightly over-the-hill showgirl who was passing out coupons outside offered me one to get me to return to the Las Vegas Club. I've never been back, not because I fear arrest and not because I hold a grudge. I just figured that if I do go back there, I might lose. If I don't, I will always be $750 ahead on that casino…and that's a healthy kind of revenge.

That was one of the only two times I ever got into trouble playing Blackjack. The other was the time in Laughlin when I was briefly suspected of having printed the money I was betting. I'll tell you about that next time I write one of these.

Many folks inform me that the reason Penn Jillette may not be tweeting these days is that he's in New York taping his participation in the next season of Celebrity Apprentice. Do they not let those people tweet about matters, even those unrelated to the show? Perhaps.

In any case, I don't believe Penn & Teller are splitting up. I'm just kinda curious what it is that caused Robin Leach to leap to that conclusion.

Robin Leach is reporting in a Las Vegas newspaper that Penn & Teller have split up and he likens the news to the divorce between Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin. Teller responded by tweeting…

Robin Leach certainly knows how to generate a misleading headline. P&T are NOT splitting up. You heard it here first.

Penn, who usually tweets umpteen times a day is on a mysterious hiatus from it. A few days ago, he posted…

Fixing to get ready to disappear into NYC until sometime into November. I won't be writing tweets or reading twitter. But, I'll be back.

So it sounds like something's changing about their working relationship but that it doesn't quite fit the definition of the two of them "splitting up." One assumes that if nothing had changed, Teller would not have said it was a "misleading headline." He would have said the entire article was a total lie. We shall see.