Category Archives: Uncategorized

Fred Kaplan, who's been ahead of everyone else on telling us what would happen in Iraq, has some (slightly) hopeful thoughts. Basically, he thinks, what the Democratic Congress is now doing may pressure Iraq into getting its act together.

Maybe because I saw the smoke live when it began and/or because my friend Carolyn lives near it but I've been following the Griffith Park Fire with extra interest. Or perhaps, come to think of it, it's because of that great day Carolyn and I recently spent up there at the L.A. Zoo, feeding the hippos. Whatever, when I awoke this morning, my first thought was to rush to the TV and see how containment is doing and to make sure the zoo is not in harm's way. At this moment, the fire is 40% contained and the zoo is fine. It's also not threatening the newly-refurbished Observatory, despite what the above photo would suggest.

I got this info from Good Day L.A., the morning show on Fox Channel 11, which is following the fire as, it would seem, their "B" story today. They have reporters on the scene and they cut to them occasionally…but considerably more air time is going to the latest updates on American Idol, a show that has yet to snag my interest…and don't think I'm not happy about that.

Last night after the 11:00 news shows were over, I watched some live coverage of the fire on RawNews, an HD-digital channel that the local NBC station offers. It features unstructured footage and live broadcasts and last night, what it had on was the raw feed that some of the station's mobile units were sending back to the station…fascinating, informative stuff. But this morning, for some reason, they're just showing video of the newsroom crew sitting around, discussing what they're covering today…and their website suggests they're about to start airing a camera feed from the Phil Spector trial. One of these days, some local station will turn one of its extra HD channels into All News, All the Time, and we'll all be glued to it when something like the Griffith Park Fire occurs. For now, we have to take it where we can get it.

You won't make it through all ten minutes of today's clip but see how far you get. This is a ten minute art lesson from Jon Gnagy, a man who alternately motivated and disheartened countless aspiring artists of the fifties. Mr. Gnagy was a pioneer of early television, doing his first broadcasts in 1946. (A Gnagy art lesson was reportedly the first thing transmitted when the big antenna atop the Empire State Building in New York was installed.) Throughout the fifties, he had a series of syndicated TV shows called, variously, You Are An Artist or Jon Gnagy's Learn to Draw.

By any name, what he offered was a fifteen minute program in which he'd do a drawing in about ten minutes and you at home would be expected to draw right along with him and wind up with the same thing. This was not humanly possible. An accomplished professional trying to keep up with Gnagy and replicate his actions would have failed…so you can imagine how well I did when I was nine. He'd be adding the finishing touches, like the smoke curling out of the chimney…and I'd still be sketching in the foundation line of the log cabin. So there were two possible reactions at home: You could think, "If I practice enough, someday I'll be able to do what he can do." Or you could think, "Boy, I really don't have a talent for this" and you could forget all about becoming an artist.

My response was closer to the second than the first, though I kept at it for a time. I even got my parents to buy me one of the Jon Gnagy art kits that were sold during the commercials. It turned out to be a box containing a pad of cheap drawing paper and an array of charcoal sticks that broke the first time they came into contact with the cheap drawing paper. More frustration. More feelings that maybe I should forget all about drawing. A lot of acclaimed artists (including Andy Warhol) would later cite Gnagy's TV instruction as important and inspirational, and I'm sure it was to some. I'm just wondering how many people gave it up because of the guy.

I used to have an ongoing, friendly debate with a gentleman named Burne Hogarth. Burne was an acclaimed illustrator, comic strip artist and art teacher. I'd see him at conventions or since he lived near me, run into often him at the drugstore, and we always somehow got back into it. I was (and still am) of the opinion that even hopeless amateurs should be encouraged to draw…or at least, not discouraged. What they produce might not be worthy of hanging in a gallery but it can be fun and perhaps theraputic. You don't have to be Dennis Rodman to go out and shoot some baskets and you don't have to be Picasso (or even Burne Hogarth) to sit down and paint a painting. Burne's side of the argument was that someone who doesn't know how to fly a plane shouldn't be allowed a seat in the cockpit, and that we shouldn't dignify what an amateur draws by calling it drawing. Or something like that. I'm probably making his position sound less reasonable than it was but that's easy to do when you have a weblog and the other guy is dead.

Anyway, we spoke of Gnagy. Hogarth knew him and respected the man's attempts to educate the masses. When I said I thought Mr. Gnagy had soured a lot of souls on The Joys of Drawing, Burne's attitude was, "Good." If Burne were around today, I think I'd take this video over to his house and see if he could draw what Gnagy could draw in ten minutes with the bad charcoal.

Here then is Jon Gnagy on his show teaching us how to draw a grist mill. I not only don't know how he did this, I don't even know what a grist mill is. I also was never able to keep up with The Galloping Gourmet and make a beef bourguignon as fast as he could…

I was looking at local news websites for information on the Griffith Park fire…which is still raging and still awful. Over on the page for KABC Channel 7, I found the following, which I guess is the result of some online poll…

Online polls usually strike me as silly and rigged and indicative of absolutely nothing. But for some reason, I think this is an accurate, inarguable reflection of public sentiment. Except that the "Yes" vote is probably about 3.5 percentage points too high.

One thing we like to do here at newsfromme.com is to plug our friends' business endeavors. I have this friend named Bob Logan, who's a filmmaker, writer, director, all those things. He's directed some successful comedies like Meatballs 4 and Repossessed and he's working now on a movie that will bring the old F Troop TV show to, as they say, The Silver Screen. I was especially impressed with a movie he did a few years ago called Up Your Alley, which was a comedy about homeless folks. You wouldn't think that would be a fertile topic for humor but it was. A few years later, Mel Brooks — working with about a million times the budget — made Life Stinks, also a comedy about the homeless, and I liked Bob's film a lot better.

In fact, Bob's film was a triumph of making a professional-looking movie for almost no money. I don't recall what he spent but it was probably about what Mr. Brooks spent on donuts for his film. To share his expertise with the world — and, let's be honest, make a few bucks — Bob is now conducting classes in how to do what he did on Up Your Alley and other film endeavors. He calls it The One Day $99 Film School and I'll bet the folks who take it learn an awful lot in that one day. End of plug.

Last Friday, we blogged on here about a story in Newsday on the current state of long-running comic strips. The article set some sort of world record for errors per square inch. In almost all cases, the folks they identified as currently writing and drawing certain strips are not only not working on them, in some cases because they're dead.

As you may recall, I phoned the reporter that day and told him what he'd done. It's taken until this morning for Newsday to acknowledge any errors. Here is what they ran, in toto…

The current artist for the comic strip "Blondie" is John Marshall. Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli are the artists now for "Archie," and "Mary Worth" is drawn by Joe Giella and written by Karen Moy. June Brigman is the current artist of "Brenda Starr," working with writer Mary Schmich. For "The Phantom," Paul Ryan is the current artist and Tony DePaul is the current writer. The credits were given incorrectly in an Act Two story Saturday.

Actually, no. The credits were given incorrectly in a story that ran on Thursday, not Saturday. And the above list doesn't address all the mistakes in the piece. Nothing in it, for example, amends the erroneous statement that Alex Raymond once assisted on the Blondie strip. Moreover, the original piece says that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ziegler, John Saunders and Stan Drake are all producing certain features when, in fact, those gentlemen are all deceased. Saying that someone else is doing those jobs would leave a reader with the impression that all four of those gents are still around and just aren't doing those jobs at present.

An incomplete correction, of course, only matters if someone reads both the original article and the correction, which is unlikely unless it's through my links. Newsday puts theirs in a "corrections" section that few readers probably ever see. I had trouble finding it on the website and I was looking for it specifically because I already knew the article was flawed and had complained. I have no idea where the correction is in the printed paper, if it's even in the printed paper. But I'll bet you it isn't prominent.

Many newspapers, when they correct an article that's available online, will post the correction on the same page. Newsday doesn't. At this moment, if you go to the page with the original piece on it, it's just as wrong as it ever was. There are some comments that readers have posted but the link is hard to spot, and those criticisms are only there because outsiders took the time to post them. Newsday hasn't corrected that page.

This may all sound trivial but ever since I got involved in comic books and strips, I've watched a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles that just plain got things wrong. It's mind-boggling to me how many mistakes there are in such pieces. A few, I can understand. I've made some doozies in my own writing but the volume in some articles is staggering, especially given the easy availability of on-the-record sources. Even worse, of course, is when there is little or no willingness in some news organizations to issue corrections and it's all done a lot to shake my faith in journalism of all kinds and topics.

The guy who wrote that Newsday essay was not a moist-behind-the-ears intern. He is, amazingly, an editor and staff writer at the paper who is on the verge of retirement after forty years there…but he didn't take the ten seconds to Google "Blondie" and find out who currently does the strip. Is the person writing about Iraq for that paper adhering to the same standard?

A large chunk of Griffith Park is aflame at the moment. No homes are threatened. No one has been injured (yet) besides someone the news reporters were calling an "arson suspect" an hour ago, but he now seems to have turned into a "person of interest." The park has been evacuated and they're talking about what to do about all the animals up in the L.A. Zoo, just in case. Awful news.

It looked even scarier about an hour ago when I was trapped in a traffic snarl on Los Feliz Boulevard. Between the park evacuees and the emergency vehicles and the people stopping to look, cars were moving at about the speed of a tortoise on valium. The view from my car looked a lot like the above news photo and I don't have to tell you how much more chilling that can be in person.

Hundreds of fire fighters are on the scene. Most of them seem to be giving interviews to local news crews. There also seem to be around thirty helicopters up there. Two are doing water drops and the other twenty-eight are getting live shots of those water drops.

Well, at least that's how it seems.

The other day here, I wrote about the Rodney King Riots of fifteen years ago in L.A. I just remembered one moment from it that I will always treasure. The fires had all been knocked down. The riot was, for all intents and purposes, over though we weren't yet certain it wouldn't erupt again.

There was a hillside and one of the newsmen in a chopper showed it to us and said that fire fighters, most of whom had been putting out conflagrations for a day or two without sleep, were laying out tarps and lying down to nap. Back in the studio, the anchorman said to him, "We can't see them…can you swoop down and give us a better look?" The copter reporter said, as respectfully as he could, "We could…but we're afraid that if we go any lower, the sound of our copter will wake them up. And if anyone deserves a rest, it's these guys."

The anchorman hastily withdrew his request and the copter went no lower. I liked that. I love news coverage but I also like the idea of them getting out of the way of people who have work to do in a time of crisis. Or even naps to take after it's over.

I'm not embedding a video today. Instead, if you can spare twenty minutes, I'm going to send you to another site to watch something I can't embed here. It's a clip from last Friday's episode of Bill Moyers Journal on PBS — an interview with Jerry Miller.

Jerry Miller was the 200th person freed from prison by a program called The Innocence Project. Basically, it's a concern that uses DNA testing to identify people who've been wrongly convicted. Mr. Miller spent twenty-five years behind bars for a crime that he didn't commit. It's an extraordinary story…not that an innocent man went to prison. That, sadly, is not all that unusual. What's extraordinary is Miller's attitude and his lack of anger about the whole ordeal.

Here's the link. Go watch Moyers interview Jerry Miller.

A few years ago, I broke the filthy, disgusting habit that is the New York Times crossword puzzle. With the newly-freed time I suddenly gained from this, I began leaving my house and sometimes even earning a living. But I couldn't resist having a go at this one, the clues for which were authored by the famed crossword enthusiast, William Jefferson Clinton. I was especially amused by 116 Down. The clue is "A party I don't attend" and the answer is three letters, starting with "G" and ending with "P." Hmm…GAP? GYP?

Tonight, the American version of Deal or No Deal airs its 100th episode. I was intrigued by this program when it first went on the air. Many of my friends dismissed it as a mindless game show. "You don't have to know anything," they said…and they were right for the most part. But I still found it intriguing for the situations its presented, and I liked the way Howie Mandel handled the proceedings.

My interest in it came and went, and some time around Show #50, it really plunged. I still have the TiVo set to grab episodes but I rarely watch much more than the first three and last five minutes of any game. When the big numbers are eliminated early, I don't even watch that much. There have been a lot of those games — probably more than the producers like — and I guess that when they keep touting a potential million dollar win, you get spoiled. All the padding and stalling and dramatic music really wear on you when the most the player can win is a measly $25,000. (On an episode last night, a lady opened all the large amounts long before the end. She ultimately won a dollar, setting a new record "low.")

I've also come to find the value system of the show to be occasionally vapid. I have no trouble with what some see as the "greed" aspect of it. I don't view it that way. As in any negotiation or any investment, there's a time to get out and a time to stay in, and success hinges on finding that sweet spot between too early and too late. That's one of the things that's compelling about the show. A friend of mine, commenting on last night's big $1 winner said, "She should have quit while she was ahead." Yeah, but she was "ahead" after the first offer. That's not what the game is about.

What I do find silly is the idea that you pick, say, Case #8…and then it's a sign of courage or something admirable to keep saying, "I'm absolutely certain the million dollars is in my case." Uh, why? It's one thing to have confidence in your new invention or your new screenplay or your new strategy. I'm not sure it's always admirable to have blind faith in something like that but at least it's faith in your skill or talent or cleverness or informed judgment. I don't get the point of having faith in your random choice.

But then I've never believed there's a lot of value in blind optimism. The few times I watched Fear Factor, I was repulsed way before they got to the part where the contestants eat fried mule anus. At the beginning, six contestants are all saying over and over, "I will win, I will win, failure in not an option." Well, it's not only an option…it's the future for five of them. Five of them are going to lose. I'm all for positive thinking but I've never felt there was any value to believing your victory is predestined. I've always found that if you're aware of the possibility of failure and realistic about its probability, you can do more to avoid it.

Deal or No Deal also has an odd admiration for the taking of risks. In fact, they seem to have instructed the "advisors" — the friends who come along to coach the contestant and root them on to financial victory — to keep saying, "Remember…you're a risk-taker!" Contestants are picked to be on the show because they're not wealthy or successful, and winning a hundred grand or more would truly change their lives. So if they're "risk-takers," taking risks hasn't gotten them very far in the past. More to the point, if there's a skill to playing Deal or No Deal, it comes from knowing when not to be a "risk-taker." There are points where picking another case represents very little possible loss so you go on…and then there are points where one wrong selection and you're going home with chump change. So you stop.

In spite of all this, there's still something I find mesmerizing about the game especially when — as the American version hasn't in its first 99 shows — it gets down to a choice between the top prize and a far lower one. (I think the only time any U.S. player had only two cases left and one held a million, the other was $750,000…so there wasn't a whole heap of suspense there.) The show however is produced in local versions all over the world…including a Canadian version hosted by Howie Mandel!

The following clip is from the British version, where the host (or "presenter," as they call him) is a man named Noel Edmonds. The show differs a bit from the American version in that there are no lovely models. They bring in 22 contestants and each selects a case at random. Then one of those people is chosen to play the game and pick the other cases, one by one. It'll all become clear in the clip but the main thing you need to know is that the folks opening the cases in lieu of the models are contestants who weren't selected to play this round. Also, of course, the top prize is in pounds — it's £250,000. Last time I looked, the British pound was worth a hair under two bucks in American money so 250,000 of them is the equivalent of a little under a half million clams U.S. If that seems horribly lower than the usual top prize in this country of a million dollars, remember that on the American show, the top prize is in one out of 26 cases, not 22, so the odds are a little different.

But enough of this. Here's what happened on the British Deal or No Deal in January of this year…

You think people hated George Tenet before? Wait'll they read the article by Tim Shorrock over at Salon. I'll quote just a little so you can see what the new scandal is…

While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.

When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation.

In the past week, people who ordinarily can't agree what month of the year it is have been united in their distaste for Mr. Tenet. I'm not sure if all of them can get worked up over the issue of war profiteering. It seems to be the kind of issue that should inspire outrage and doesn't. But this sure won't help Tenet's image.

Didn't see it.

The other day, I was telling a friend of mine about a memorable show that ran on Los Angeles TV in the late sixties. It was called Groovy and it was an afternoon "teen dance party" show on KHJ, Channel 9. What made it unique from dozens of other knock-offs of American Bandstand (and many such shows that preceded that one) was that when it debuted, Groovy was done from the beach in Santa Monica.

The following is not any sort of official history. It's what I remember and some of it may be incorrect. I'm putting it up here mainly to see if I can jar any other memories (or photos or — dare I dream? — videos) loose. I recall the show premiering around March of '67 and ping-ponging back and forth between the 4 PM-5 PM time slot and 5 PM-6 PM, Monday through Friday. I believe it was done live when it started and then, for reasons that will become obvious as I tell you more about it, its producers began taping it an hour or so before it was broadcast. Once or twice, it got "rained out" and a slapdash broadcast was assembled in the KHJ studios over on Melrose.

The show went through several versions but its first and most notable period was when it was done from the beach and hosted by the gent seen in the above photo. His name was Michael Blodgett and he had a nice little acting career, which included the unforgettable Beyond the Valley of the Dolls (from which that is a still) before he moved on to considerable success as a novelist. He was a pretty good host on the Groovy show but I suspect even he would admit that he wasn't the main appeal of the show. The main appeal was young ladies in very tiny bikinis — and by "young," I mean sometimes fifteen or sixteen years of age, if that old.

Much of the show was, of course, teens dancing to records. There was one real musical act each day…usually a group that would come on to pantomime/lip sync to their current record, which made for an odd sight. There would be these musicians acting like they were playing on the beach…with their amps and electric guitars plugged into absolutely nothing. Most records of that era ended with the track fading out and I guess the acoustics out there weren't great insofar as hearing the playback was concerned. As a song drew to its close, you could see the performers become unsure if it was through so they'd keep "playing" and then one guy would stop and maybe another. And then you could tell someone had yelled, "It's not over! Keep playing!" And they'd scurry back into mime mode. Very odd stuff.

But the real "treat" — the reason thousands of depraved Southern California males tuned in — was the daily Bikini Contest. Blodgett would do short interviews with five or six young ladies selected not for their loquaciousness but for the elegance of their figures and the brevity of their swimwear. You got the idea that whoever was picking the contestants was rating them by subtracting their I.Q.s from their bust measurements. Blodgett would ask each where she went to school, what she liked to study and if she had any hobbies, and the lasses would giggle through their replies. Then each would parade down a little runway to show off her physique to hoots and hollers from the crowd. That day's musical act would be the judges and they'd select the victor. Usually, whichever lady looked the sluttiest would win passes to Gazarri's on the Strip or the Cinnamon Cinder or some other local dance club.

Other things I remember about the show: The cameras were always panning the crowds who were there to watch the proceedings. At least once per show, someone would either flash or moon or give the finger. (This, I assume, is why they stopped broadcasting live.) At the very least, you'd see an awful lot of young teens smoking and/or brandishing bottles of liquor. One person who worked on the show told me that they got very few complaints about the flashing or the mooning or even the 14 year old girls popping out of their microscopic bathing suits…but there were constant objections to the smoking and drinking.

I also remember a corollary to something I'd already formulated by then, which was the Cheap Movie Swimming Pool Scene Rule. That's the rule that says if you're watching a cheap or even medium-budget movie and there's a scene by a swimming pool, someone is going to fall or be pushed in with all their clothes on. There was no pool on Groovy but there was an ocean…so at least once per show, someone who wasn't dressed for it would get carried out against their will and thrown in the water. You can just imagine the hilarity of that.

I have a few other memories — including the story of a girl from my high school and her travails in the Bikini Contest — but I'll save them for a follow-up posting which, I hope, will contain additional info that someone reading this will send in. One thing I'm really not clear on is how long the Blodgett/Beach era of Groovy lasted. I do remember tuning in one Monday and discovering that with no advance notice, it had turned into a different show. Groovy was suddenly shot indoors at KHJ with all the dancing teens fully clothed. This version — which was quite ordinary and therefore inferior to The Lloyd Thaxton Show. a dance party series over on Channel 13 — was hosted by local deejay Sam Riddle. Later, Riddle was replaced by another local radio guy, Robert W. Morgan. By then, it was well on its way to becoming one of those shows that is watched by so few people that when it's cancelled, no one notices.

So does anyone have any stills or footage from the beach/Blodgett version of Groovy? Does anyone else at least remember it? Come on. Someone must have been in Los Angeles in the late sixties and watching TV besides me.

I'm close to giving up on The Washington Post, which has become quite a different newspaper from what it was in the days of Woodward and Bernstein…and I don't mean that it was usually Liberal back then. I mean that it was usually correct. The current editors have a pro-Bush slant, which is of course their right. I read a lot of news that comes out of that viewpoint. But like Fox News, they occasionally get so enthusiastic that it impacts the accuracy of their reporting. On May 3, they ran a story that…well, here. I'll quote the first paragraph…

Democrats Back Down On Iraq Timetable
Compromise Bill in Works After Veto Override Fails

By Jonathan Weisman and Shailagh Murray
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, May 3, 2007; Page A01

President Bush and congressional leaders began negotiating a second war funding bill yesterday, with Democrats offering the first major concession: an agreement to drop their demand for a timeline to bring troops home from Iraq.

Note that this was a Page One report and it's pretty explicit. Congressional leaders, it says, are negotiating with Bush and have withdrawn their insistence on a timeline to end the war. Today, they issued the following correction and it is now — in smaller type — the preface to the online version of the article…

A May 3 Page One article about negotiations between President Bush and congressional Democrats over a war spending bill said the Democrats offered the first major concession by dropping their demand that the bill it include a deadline to bring troops home from Iraq. While Democrats are no longer pushing a firm date for troop withdrawals, party leaders did not specifically make that concession during a Wednesday meeting with Bush at the White House.

Translation: We said they offered it but they really didn't offer it. So the entire premise of our headline story was at best misleading and at worst, completely false.

Before you click, you ought to know that this runs a little under 68 minutes. It's a live interview and "town hall" meeting that John McCain did last Friday at the headquarters of Google up in Northern California. The questions are a little out of the ordinary, which is good, and it's a much more interesting chat than you'd get if McCain was just being interviewed by a Chris Matthews or Larry King.

There are some good comments in there, though I think McCain gets (and takes) too much credit for "straight talk," especially when he seems to be so fervently back-pedalling from certain past positions that might now cost him votes among the so-called Religious Right. He's asked about reconciling his once calling Jerry Falwell an "agent of intolerance" with his willingness to go to Falwell's university, speak and be photographed alongside the man. McCain responds that he met with Falwell and they settled their differences…

…to which a lot of us have to say, "Huh?" Jerry Falwell is the same person he always was, saying the same things, pushing the same agenda. If he was an "agent of intolerance" then, he's an "agent of intolerance" now. I don't think McCain is saying that a private conversation convinced him that he was wrong about Falwell, is he? So what changed?

Shortly after that, an audience questioner asks McCain a multi-part question about atheism. McCain gives him a quick, semi-responsive answer — that a McCain administration would never fault people for whatever they believed — and moves on a bit too rapidly. He also gives a pretty disingenuous (I think) reply to a fair question about who's "won" the Iraq War if we've lost. Frankly, I think it poisons the whole public debate about the Iraq War to try and reduce it to a matter of winning and losing.

Your reaction to this video may differ from mine but mine was that I liked McCain for the first part of it…up until around the third or fourth audience question when he struck me as getting fitfully evasive and more apt to give glib dismissals of tough queries. He also seemed a bit too interested in showing the audience how funny he could be. Anyway, it's a revealing discussion and you might want to take the time to watch some or all of it. Thanks to Tom Galloway, who was somewhere there in the audience, for letting me know about it.