Category Archives: Uncategorized

Here's what Jerry Lewis is up to, these days. He doesn't sound too thrilled with his reduced/retired role in the upcoming Muscular Dystrophy telethon and makes it sound like he's not going quietly, if at all. No mention of the Broadway musical of The Nutty Professor.Thanks to Craig Robin for the link.

Kliph Nesteroff writes an interesting history of Dino's Lodge, a famous restaurant up on the Sunset Strip which bore Dean Martin's branding though he actually had little to do with the place. Even more interesting is Kliph's account of how Jerry Lewis tried to compete with his own restaurant a few blocks away.

The Writers Bloc, which holds wondrous author events in Beverly Hills, has an intriguing one set for the evening of Thursday, August 18. Penn Jillette, the larger 'n' louder partner in Penn & Teller, has a new book coming out entitled God, No! Signs You May Already Be An Atheist And Other Magical Tales. He will be signing copies there but first, he'll be interviewed by top comedian Kevin Pollak. So there's two guys who are always entertaining and a controversial topic. How could that not be fun?

If you want to be there, you can get a reservation (you don't have to pay in advance) at the Writers Bloc website. I think I have a conflict for that date but if I can get there, I will. Those conversations are always enlightening.

One of the two recipients this year of The Bill Finger Award was a fine gent named Del Connell, who probably wrote more comic books than you've read…and a point I forgot to make either in the press release or in my presentation was this: These included some of the best-selling comics ever published, particularly the adaptations of the more popular Disney movies. Some of those comics went into five and six printings and sold well into the millions.

A key reason for this award is to put the spotlight on a comic book author whose body of work has been unfairly overlooked. Del was not under-credited. He was simply not credited at all. So we're pleased that the award is spawning articles like this one which tells people a little about this extraordinary man and his accomplishments.

Quoted in the piece, by the way, is another anonymous writer for Western Publishing — a man named Vic Lockman. It is often assumed, and I think it's still in the Guinness book, that the late Paul S. Newman was the most prolific writer of comic books ever. This may be so. But if anyone ever topped Newman, it was probably Lockman…and I'll bet less than 5% of the folks reading this who consider themselves comic book experts have ever heard of the guy. Just as most of you never heard of Del Connell. Alas, both Lockman and Connell worked for a company that didn't credit their talents or even retain records of who did what, so the majority of their work remains unidentified.

On my way home from the Musso & Frank Grill, I stopped in at a Ralphs Market for a number of items, most of which were cat food. Yes, I am still feeding strays in my backyard…and since several of them have bad teeth, they can't chew the dry food. Softhearted me buys them wet food — usually canned Friskies, which come in many flavors. Like most folks who buy pet food, I take my own tastes into consideration. I buy them a lot of varieties containing turkey or tuna because I like turkey and tuna. It only stands to reason that the cats in my yard will like those things, too.

When I started buying these at Ralphs, they were three for a dollar. Then they went up to 40 cents a can. Then back to three for a dollar. Then back to 40. Then they were 50 cents a can for a long time. Then they went back to 40 for several months. I'm curious (though not that curious) if the actual cost of production ever fluctuates or if what I'm paying is just a matter of what the Ralphs folks think they can get at a given moment. The price of oil allegedly varies because at times, oil is harder to obtain. But all cans of Friskies cost the same and one assumes that the prices the Friskies people pay for beef, chicken, salmon, tuna, turkey, whitefish, etc., do not all rise and fall in unison.

The last few weeks, I've been paying 50 cents a can…but take a look at the above photo I snapped with my iPhone camera last night.

I don't know why this kind of thing annoys me so. Maybe it's because I figure so many Americans can't do math and so are ripping themselves off. You can buy any twelve cans of the Friskies for $6.00. You could buy four each of the salmon, the mixed grill and the turkey…

…or you can buy the Friskies Variety Pack, which consists of four cans of the salmon, four cans of the mixed grill and four cans of the turkey. The Variety Pack is $6.95 and as you'll notice in the picture, they were almost out of them. Which means that a lot of people who can't add are taking advantage of the Quantity Increase.

So I spent a large part of this evening in my car. I was heading up to the Musso & Frank Grill in Hollywood (a great place to dine) to meet my friends Bob Ingersoll, Thom Zahler and Roger Price for a post-con dinner. I was driving up Highland at about the time the riot broke out at Grauman's Chinese Theater. Here's a quick summary from the L.A. Times…

Los Angeles police set up a "mobile field jail" in Hollywood on Wednesday night to help corral an unruly crowd that crashed the Electric Daisy Carnival Experience, a documentary about one of the nation's largest electronic music festivals.

As the event got out of hand, large crowds spilled into the street around Grauman's Chinese Theatre on Hollywood Boulevard, with some people throwing bottles at police. Witnesses said others were dancing on a police car, taunting police and "planking" — lying down in the street. Fights among people in the crowd also broke out sporadically. Police in riot gear shut down streets around the theater, while dozens of police cruisers responded to the disturbance.

Multiple people were detained on suspicion of throwing objects and failure to disperse. Police said they used force in multiple instances to tame the crowd, including firing nonlethal bean bags.

Hollywood and Highland shut down on both directions…as there I was, trying to drive up Highland to Hollywood and then take Hollywood to the restaurant. It usually takes twenty minutes from my house. It took an hour and twenty, and I'd still be en route if I hadn't found a way to pull off Highland and take back streets. They were also jammed but not as jammed.

The thing that struck me was that the local news radio channel, KNX, was largely useless, at least before I finally got to the restaurant. There were a half-dozen helicopters hovering over the scene and police cars zooming about…but the folks at KNX couldn't tell us what had happened other than that there was some sort of "police action disturbance" at Hollywood and Highland and we should "avoid the area." Uh, which area, guys? If I'd known which surrounding streets were involved, I might have been able to plot a good alernate route.

I'm finally home. The same may not be true for Bob, Thom and Roger. They're staying at Hollywood and Highland.

I haven't run one of these in a while since my last few Costco visits have been free of anecdotes. Yesterday's was rather unexciting. I made the dumb mistake of grabbing a free sample of a Korean barbecue chicken that they sell frozen. Note to self: Never taste anything that might be spicy unless there's a drink of water available. At the place where they sell the ready-to-eat BBQ chickens, I encountered a lady who was determined to inspect every one of about 30 chickens to find one that might be half-a-percent bigger than the others.

Anyway, I bought a same-size BBQ chicken and a new laptop and a tonweight of paper towels and some big bags of baking soda and a helluva lotta cat food and a few other items. Then I got into a line that made me wonder if the Windows 7 on the laptop might not be obsolete by the time I made it through checkout. But what the heck? It's Costco. You're saving a buck. You can wait in line for that.

Behind me — fortunately, not ahead of me — there was a family with three carts loaded with food and household supplies. You could not have added a box of toothpicks to those carts, so full were they. Obviously, they were stocking a new home…and apparently in one trip to one store: A case of coffee, a case of creamer, a case of filters, a case of sugar, etc. The man who was the father (I guess) was holding a box of cookies that couldn't be added to any of the carts and I said to him, though he had not asked, "No, you may not go before me."

Got a laugh out of the guy. He then said to me, "I love this place. Get all my shopping done in one stop." You got the feeling that pleased him more than the savings…and I can understand that. Saving time is a good thing, too.

As he said what I just said he said, his wife (I guess) leaned in and reminded him, "We have to stop at Ralphs Market and get that brand of olive oil I like. I don't know why they don't carry it here."

The father rolled his eyes and said to me, "Well, almost one stop shopping."

You may think you know how to play the game of Monopoly…but odds are you've been playing it the wrong way.

Albert Brooks on Presidential Rebuttals.Thanks to Vince Waldron for the lead.

Cory Franklin and many others inform me that the Dinah Shore clip is from May of '63, many moons before the Beatles visited Ed in February of '64.

Restaurant critic Jonathan Gold gives his rules for tipping, which pretty much translate to "Give everyone 20%."

For what it's worth, my policy has been to tip 15% in restaurants to which I'll probably never return and 20% to 25% in those I'll patronize again. I also overtip delivery people.

Even the New York Times thinks it's an event that Skidoo is out on DVD.

And I sure hope people understand that I don't write about this movie because I think it's great cinema. I write about it and discuss it with the constant subtext of "What the hell were these people thinking?"

I awoke this morning in a daze and had actually hosted three panels before I realized I was back home and Comic-Con 2011 was over. Incidentally, Comic-Con 2012 is sold out.

No, it isn't but it will be, about ten minutes after the tickets go on general sale online. The ones offered at this year's Comic-Con sold out each day in record time. I don't know when the rest will be available but whenever they are, they won't be available for long. You can bitch 'n' moan all you like about this and spread, as some do, bogus rumors that the con is moving to Vegas but none of that will change the cold, hard fact that if you want to go next year, you need to be alert and on your toes and decide well in advance. (From what I can tell, by the way, Comic-Con is about as likely to move to Las Vegas as it is to relocate in the Sea of Tranquility. And not just because this year, daytime temperatures on the same dates averaged 108° in Vegas and 72° in San Diego.)

The crush is obviously because people have a very good time at this event. My observation is that this often has much to do with going in with realistic expectations —

Yes, it's going to be packed and it'll be slow going in most aisles. Yes, there are going to be tons of things there you can't afford to buy. Yes, you'll buy some of them, anyway. Yes, it's going to be a hassle to get around outside the convention center, too. Yes, you won't be able to see a tenth of what you'd like to see or meet all the people you'd like to meet. Yes, yes, yes…

— and it also has to do with doing a little advance planning, like making a schedule in advance and figuring out what you most want to do there. I often now hear people saying something about the con that I believe I said first and if so, I want credit for it: "The convention you want to attend is in that hall. You just have to find it."

I should probably amend that to read "The convention you want to attend within the realm of human possibility" because, well, if you want to go to a con where every old comic you seek for your collection is findable for a buck, that ain't gonna happen. And I did have a couple of folks gripe to me that there weren't enough panels with Golden Age comic creators, which is a lot like complaining your birdbath isn't full of bald eagles splashing around. As near as I can tell, there were three human beings at that convention who worked in comic books before around 1960. There was Stan Lee, who doesn't do panels about the old days. There was Jerry Robinson, who was the subject of his own spotlight panel. And there was Ramona Fradon. Maybe there were one or two others I missed but not enough to fill even one of our old Golden Age Panels. I wish it was otherwise.

Anyway, I continue to be amazed at how efficiently run the convention is. The first morning, I looked out the window of my hotel and then tweeted the following:

I am at a hotel in San Diego with a lovely view of a line I'm glad I don't have to stand in.

Then I got in the shower…and so help me, by the time I was dry and dressed, that line was gone. Don't write me about the problem you had. It's impossible to run an event of that size without some things going wrong. I'm sure your particular dilemma occurred just the way you say it did…but it was also atypical. Not much goes wrong at these things. Not much at all.

I'll surely think of more things to write here in the coming days. In the meantime, if you want to see what the convention looked like, photographer Pat Loika has compiled a set of snaps by himself and others that should give you some idea. As with any camera eye's view of the con, there's a disproportionate number of folks in costume but that's the nature of this beast. As I mentioned, my relatives see the press coverage and wonder what Mark went dressed as this year. Oddest get-up I did see: There are usually so many guys dressed as The Joker that I hardly pay them any attention…but this year, there was a black guy made-up that way and the white greasepaint was flaking off his face, making for a very strange, bi-racial visual. I was in too much of a rush to shoot a photo but I expect to see the image in some DC Comics mini-series before long.

More, as they say, to come…

And are we sure they didn't pick this weekend to close the 405? Jeezus.

I will write more when fingers relax from that clenching-the-steering-wheel grip.

Apart from a general inability to blog, I'm having a grand time here in San Diego. My faithful laptop seems to be breathing its last and iBAHN High-Speed Hotel Internet Access is (as usual) about as high-speed as a glacier on Valium. I'm doing this much on my iPad, which is okay for short messages but not conducive to anything of any real length.

But let's focus on the important stuff, shall we? All these years of convention-going, I've never had any idea how much I was walking. I mean, I knew my feet felt like Dick Cheney had ordered the Gitmo treatment for them but how many miles was I actually logging?Turns out it's a lot more than I'd have guessed: Yesterday, I covered 6.7 or so says my Omron Pedometer. Since the Omron folks also make those blood pressure monitors I came to not trust (link to old posting would go here were I not on my iPad) I am skeptical of precise accuracy…but the count of steps does seem to be valid. Maybe Comic-Con is healthier for me than I thought?

There will be more here when I can put more here via more efficient means…and when I don't have four panels to rush off and do. I guess what I'm doing here is blaming my failure to update the ol' blog on technology…and when you get right down to it, isn't that pretty much what technology is for?