Down the Amazon

Since this blog began back in the Mesolithic Era, many of you have clicked on my links when purchasing some goodie from Amazon. They have this affiliate program where if you do that, I receive a tiny cut of what you spend on that site, plus I also had similar links with Barnes & Noble and Movies Unlimited. The latter two never generated a lot of revenue. The former brought me several hundred smackers in commissions due to one Don Martin book they've occasionally had on a great remainder deal. That aside, B&N and Movies Unlimited have collectively sent me under a grand in many, many years. Amazon, meanwhile, has been good for $200-$400 a month…which is probably about what I spend at Amazon.

Due to a recent change in the laws of sales tax collection in California, Amazon has terminated its affiliate program for those who live where I live. I am not complaining. The new state law may actually be a fair and wise way to raise more bucks for a government that really, really needs to raise more bucks. I could have just altered my Amazon links to pay the moola to a friend outta-state and then split with him but I decided this was a good time to get rid of them and the others as well. The ones on old pages of this blog (of course) remain and I left a few here and there which weren't getting in the way of anything but they no longer yield payments to me. If you feel motivated to shove some bucks my way, I have my PayPal tipping link. And frankly, I'm just as thanked and complimented if you send money to my favorite charity, Operation USA.

I appreciate all the Amazon commissions over the years. Every so often, someone has written me to ask something like, "I'm about to buy a new Hi-Def TV through Amazon. How do I click to make sure you get your cut?" and that always makes me feel appreciated. This blog is one of many things in my life I don't do for money. I don't think I even do it to feel appreciated, though that's always nice. I think I do it for myself and if you get anything out of it, great. Anyway, I've never linked to Amazon (or Barnes & Noble or Movies Unlimited) for any reason other than that I thought a lot of you would enjoy what I was recommending…and now you'll know that's the case. And it will only be a coincidence if I only plug things I've written…

This Just In…

The vice-president, they say, now has a Twitter account. That may be so but I have a hard time imagining Joe Biden limited to 140 characters.

Anderson, Anthony…What's the Difference?

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I haven't been following this case in Florida — apparenty, this year's Crime of the Century — where a woman named Casey Anthony was charged with murdering her two-year-old daughter who was, the D.A. insisted, becoming an inconvenience to a life of partying. It's not that I don't care about life and death and justice but as we've learned by now, it's easy to get so interested in these matters that you feel like you have to follow every teensy development…and the media has found it lucrative to pump out a constant flow of teensy developments. Some of them are even true.

Heck, I'm having enough trouble not following the Dominique Strauss-Kahn case…and that ain't easy because it always seems to be hogging the margins of every news-oriented page that I actually want to read. Apparently, the latest there is that the alleged victim is being called a hooker and a drug dealer and she therefore couldn't possibly have been raped because, you know, no one ever rapes women involved in shady dealings. This seems like the mirror image of Ben Stein's stupid assertion that Strauss-Kahn couldn't be a rapist because economists don't do that kind of thing. The main conclusion I've come to in that case is that a lot of people are writing theories about what happened despite the fact that there are gaping holes in the public knowledge of what the evidence shows and what each side is saying transpired.

Anyway, back to Casey Anthony. The main thing I know about that trial is that TV trial-monger Nancy Grace long ago convicted Ms. Anthony in a couple of tirades. So when today's Not Guilty verdict came in, I tweeted the following…

What the jury probably wanted to do was turn Casey Anderson loose and sentence Nancy Grace to Death Row.

That's not a bad joke and it would have been a wee bit better if I'd gotten the lady's name right. It's Anthony, not Anderson. But Googling, I see that I'm hardly the only one to make this mistake. I count more than fifty news sites and folks who you'd think would be more accurate than the guy who writes Groo the Wanderer, all making the same mistake, often on pages where they also get it right. I guess that's part of where I got it.

The other part is that Casey Anderson is a character in the movie, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls. She's the one at the end (and in a flash-forward at the outset) who gets killed by a gun in her mouth. Maybe Nancy Grace should turn her efforts on crimes like that…you know, fictitious ones to go along with the fictitious reporting she does.

PAC Rat

Stephen Colbert has a Super PAC. If you aren't sure what that is, read this.

Go Read It!

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Here's a story that's right up this blog's alley: Evan Hughes recounts the saga of Harold von Braunhut, the man who gave us Sea-Monkeys and other goodies that you might order from comic book ads and live to regret. And I wanted to throw in here that the infamous Sea-Monkeys comic book ad, which made von Braunhut a tonweight of cash, was drawn by comic book artist-editor Joe Orlando. If you think you got swindled ordering the product, you should hear what Orlando got paid for drawing it.

Reckoned Amendment

Senator Rand Paul has said he's going to filibuster about the debt ceiling. His goal? To trade an increase in the debt ceiling for an amendment to the U.S. Constitution requiring a balanced budget.

I think that every time the press reports on someone's proposed amendment to the Constitution, it should also be reported that we almost never amend the Constitution in this country. The last time we did it was in 1992 — an amendment of little consequence or controversy that basically said that if Congress votes itself a pay raise, that raise doesn't take effect until the next Congress.

Want to know how long it took us to pass that one? Well, as I said, it passed in 1992. It was first introduced on September 25, 1789 and I did not mistype that. The amendment before that, which lowered the voting age to 18, was passed in July of 1971. It only took four months from the time it was formally introduced to the time it was passed…but we discussed and debated it in this country for at least a decade before that.

The first ten amendments are known as The Bill of Rights. Those are those ten rules that some like to set aside when they're worried about hijackers or Communists. They were ratified on December 15, 1791. That was a little over 219 years ago. Since then, we've passed seventeen more, which averages out to one every twelve or so years…so yes, we are overdue for a new amendment. But you wanna know how many are proposed each year by elected officials and other prominent government folks and pundits? Do you? Well, so do I. I'm going to guess it's a few hundred thousand. Someone proclaims, "We should pass a Constitutional Amendment that says blah blah blah" and then they get a bit of press because it sounds like they've actually done something…and then nothing ever happens.

Nothing will happen with Rand Paul's proposal. If it did, it would take years to hammer out the language of such a thing and everyone would lobby it to make exceptions for their pet areas. Democrats and Republicans could spend the rest of their lives and their kids' lives too, just debating under what circumstances, if any, taxes would or could be raised to achieve this balanced budget. Remember: A Constitutional Amendment requires approval by two-thirds majorities in both Houses of Congress. These days, I doubt if you could get a two-thirds majority in both Houses on the question of whether or not ice cream is yummy.

Someone needs to do something about the debt ceiling soon…like, in the next few weeks. I'm not saying an amendment of that sort would be good or bad. I'm just saying it's not going to happen…certainly not by the time we need to act and probably not at all. The press should have reported Paul's announcement the same way as if he'd said, "I'm going to filibuster until Martians start delivering pizza." That's about as likely to happen.

Shows in the Sky

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Here's a guide to different kinds of aerial fireworks displays. This may come in handy in case you're watching a display with other people and you want to say something pithier than "Ooooooh!" and "Ahhhhhh!" You can instead announce, "Hey, that's a Spider followed by a Crossette!" Imagine how impressed your friends will be.

Just as I don't have any good childhood memories of Halloween, I don't have a lot about the Fourth of July. I had a fine childhood but not because of holidays. A couple of years there, we traipsed over to a nearby park with a picnic dinner, camped out, ate and waited forever for a rather anemic show that seemed hardly worth the effort. After three or four such outings, there came a year when the conversation about going went like this: "I guess we'll go over and watch the fireworks at the park again this year." "Well, I'll go if you really want to see them." "Well, I'm only going because you want to see them." "I don't want to see them that badly." "Then why are we going?" That kind of conversation.

I also recall a year when my father drove me down to an unincorporated area of Los Angeles to buy some fireworks — mostly just sparklers — for home use.

It's funny. At the corner of Westwood and Santa Monica Boulevards in West L.A., there used to be three or four huge liquor stores. If you didn't know the reason, you'd wonder, "Why the heck are they all there, across the street from each other, competing like that?" If you were opening a liquor store, would you open it right next door to the biggest one in the city? Well, in this case, you might. There was then a law that alcohol could not be sold within a certain distance of the U.C.L.A. campus…because as you know, college kids would rather do without than drive an entire half-mile or whatever it was. That intersection — Westwood and Santa Monica — was just outside the No Booze Zone and there was therefore so much business that it could support three or four large sellers right there. Years later, the law was repealed, drink was readily available closer to campus and all the shops at Westwood and Santa Monica immediately went outta business or relocated. But it was so odd: For years, you couldn't buy so much as one beer a block north of that corner…but you could walk about 35 yards south and purchase an infinite amount of anything alcoholic.

It was like that with the fireworks. The county line ran down the middle of some avenue towards Inglewood, I believe. On one side of the street, selling a firecracker could get you from five to life. On the other side, there were like nineteen places that could sell you enough things with fuses to destroy the entire island of Doctor No. Obviously, their primary clientele was folks who'd take the purchases right back into the area where that stuff couldn't be sold. Otherwise, why would they all be clustered on the border?

We went to one of the nineteen places, bought a few small items…and then the evening of July 4, my friend Randy and I set them off in the backyard as my mother stood there with the garden hose, ready to soak us down immediately if we were suddenly engulfed in flames. It was fun but not a lot.

I was rather indifferent to fireworks until New Year's Eve of 1997 when I stood among thousands of people on the Las Vegas Strip and watched the most incredible display of pyrotechnics you could imagine. I wrote about it here but you don't need to click. Just understand that it was mind-boggling and magnificent and overwhelming and that for the grand finale, they blew up an entire casino. That's right: An entire casino. The display ran six or seven minutes of relentless and beautiful explosions…and at the end, the Hacienda Hotel was imploded as fireworks erupted all over its structure and in practically every window. It was one of those "wow" moments you never forget.

And I suppose it's jaded me forever on the subject of fireworks. Since then, I've seen huge displays at Disneyland, the Hollywood Bowl and a few other places. Everyone around me is enthralled as as they ooh and ahh and remark on the sheer beauty of it all, I just smile gamely and say, "Yeah…it's nice. But I don't see them blowing up an entire hotel!"

Split Decision

There's a new effort by some to split California into two separate states. I do not believe this will ever happen.

Why don't I believe this? It has nothing to do with whether or not it would be a beneficial idea for Northern California to be one state and Southern California to be another. The reasons have something to do with infrastructure and zoning and not making the revenues from one area pay for the needs of another. I don't know from that stuff. What I know is this joke…

There's a proposal to divide California into two states, Upper California and Lower California. That's a bad idea for those of us down here. How would you like to live in Low-Cal?

Wanna know where I heard that joke? In 1965 when I went to watch a taping of The Red Skelton Show, Red told that joke. That's how long they've been talking about this. If there were any logical reason to do it, it would have happened by now.

More on The MAD Show…

I am informed that the run at the York Theater in New York is not three performances. It's five performances in three days.

And many folks have reminded me that Stephen Sondheim did not, as I stated, exactly write a song for The Mad Show. He wrote the lyrics to a tune supplied by his friend, Mary Rodgers. In fact, Douglas McEwan mentions this in an e-mail he sent me. Here — I'll let you read it so you can see for yourself…

I saw The Mad Show when it came to L.A. I was, I believe, 17 at the time, seated in the front row. The first time I ever saw Jo Anne Worley was when the curtain came up and the cast, singing the opening number, came out into the house, and Jo Anne plopped herself down on my lap and began singing as loud as she could, which was Ethel Merman loud (may still be). Six months later, Jo Anne came and saw me perform in Little Mary Sunshine. It was a nice turnaround. Though I made my entrance from the audience in that show, I managed to refrain from sitting in Jo Anne's lap.

Loved the show. Still have the cast CD (Replacing my long-lost cast vinyl record). Along with Sondheim, some of the sings are by Mary Rodgers, daughter of Richard Rodgers, and co-writer of the songs for Once Upon a Mattress. Nice to see I'm not the only person left who remembers it.

Jo Anne Worley, who I seem to see at every theater-related event I attend in Los Angeles, has had an amazing career. She was at one point — some people may not know this — Carol Channing's understudy for Hello, Dolly. The story goes that when she was hired, Ms. Channing took her aside and said, "I'm sure you're very talented but you're never going on." And she never did. Channing never missed a performance.

Extremely Off-Broadway

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The Mad Show was an off-Broadway revue based on guess-what-magazine that opened in New York on January 9, 1966, racking up a pretty impressive 871 performances. It later came back for a brief run not because of audience demand but because (reportedly) MAD publisher William Gaines had a bet with a friend as to how well it would do if he did bring it back. Mr. Gaines did that kind of thing. The show was written by MAD writers Larry Siegel and Stan Hart with music by a couple of folks, one of whom (he contributed one song) was Stephen Sondheim hiding behind a fake name.

Revues tend to get remembered because of the talent that came out of them. In addition to Mr. Sondheim, there was the show's on-stage piano player…a gent named Joe Raposo who was murdered every night during the performance but still somehow went on to write some of the most memorable tunes for Sesame Street and The Muppets. And on stage you also had Linda Lavin, Jo Anne Worley, Paul Sand, Richard Libertini and MacIntyre Dixon. Ms. Worley was later in the L.A. company with Alan Sues, not long before both turned up on the somewhat-similar Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In.

It's rarely revived but it's being revived for three performances — July 29, 30 and 31 — at the York Theater in New York. The only person I know who's in the cast is my supremely-talented friend Christine Pedi, who's also heard daily on the Broadway channel for SiriusXM Radio, but she's reason enough to go if you're in the area. I, alas, will not be in the area so please attend so I can live vicariously through you. Details and tix here.

19 Days Until Comic-Con…

Hard to believe it's less than three weeks away. Everyone I know who's attending is, first of all, asking "Didn't we go to the last one, like, two months ago?" And secondly, they're looking forward to it. I sure am. For those of you wondering, the programming schedule will be up soon and on it, you'll find thirteen events either hosted or co-hosted by Yours Truly. They include the annual Jack Kirby Tribute Panel and one in memory of the late Gene Colan. There's Quick Draw! (Saturday morn at 11:45) and two of our gala Cartoon Voices panels (Saturday at 1 PM, Sunday at 11:30 AM), plus a longer-than-last-year panel Sunday afternoon about how to break into the field of cartoon voicing. Marv Wolfman and I are co-moderating spotlights on Paul Levitz and Roy Thomas and there are a number of other fun events.

Early warning: There will be no Golden Age Panel this year. I kinda doubt there will ever be one again. To those who complain about this, I have a simple reply: "Fine. You find me 4-6 people who will be at the convention and who worked in comics before around 1960." If there are such folks, I don't know about their presence at the con. At the moment, I'm only aware of two…and two is not a panel, especially since one of them (Jerry Robinson) will be the subject of his own spotlight interview on the schedule. (The other, before anyone asks, is Ramona Fradon.)

The annual Golden Age Panel used to be a treat. In fact, the thing that was once wrong with it was that it had too many Golden Agers on it. Someone had the idea that the Golden Age Panel should include everyone at the con who'd worked in comics during that glorious era so they just put everyone on it. The first of those panels I was asked to host had, I think, about eighteen panelists…and since two of them were Julius Schwartz and Gil Kane, sixteen great writers or artists didn't get much chance to say anything.

One of the things I learned early about running panels on any topic is that you have to keep the number down. Six is a good number. Five is okay. You can get along just fine with four if a couple are decent talkers. Seven is pushing it.

If you get up around seven or above, you don't just lose the audience. You lose the panelists, especially if they don't have an awful lot in common with one another. They go so long between opportunities to speak that even they don't pay attention…and if the bodies on the stage aren't paying attention, the audience sure won't. So the year after I got stuck with that 18 (or so) member gang bang, I told the programming folks that I'd take over the panel on an annual basis and even program it if they'd let me whittle it down to a manageable roster. This was done and there was much happiness, even from potential panelists who thus were excluded some years.

The one exception? Julie Schwartz. He kvetched something awful whenever we had a Golden Age Panel without him on it. He'd sit in the front row and participate unofficially to the point where I'd just give up and invite him up onto the dais. One year when he couldn't attend the convention due to a problem with his legs, he called me several times in the weeks before the con to ask why he couldn't appear on the panel via phone from New York. Today, I'd take him up on it.

But that was then, this is now. A bittersweet aspect of those panels flowed from the fact that the average panelist was in (approximately) his or her late seventies. We had a few panelists in their nineties. Each year when I went to assemble the Golden Age Panel, I'd note that someone on the previous year's dais had passed and several others were no longer well enough to fly out…or interested. There are more Golden Age writers and artists alive than you might think but very few who journey far to conventions.

When the talent pool began to get shallow a few years ago, we quietly changed the event to the Golden and Silver Age Panel so as to incorporate folks who'd worked in comics in the sixties. For your information, I define a Silver Age creator as anyone who was in comics before me. That's a joke but it coincides approximately with how others would define it. I started in 1970 and most would say the Silver Age ended between 1968 and 1970. Alas, I decided that extending the cut-off into the Silver Age would still not yield a decent panel this year so I made the decision not to have one. Before a certain person I know starts blaming the convention, let me make clear that this was my recommendation. The con actually cleared room on the schedule for a Golden Age Panel and we're instead using the time 'n' space for the Gene Colan Tribute. That same day though, we will have a panel of comic creators who broke in during the seventies.

I'll be telling you more about the programming — my hunk of it, anyway — in the weeks to come and I'll let you know when the full schedule is online. I highly recommend taking the time to browse it and make a list of panels and presentations you might like to see. Several will be scheduled opposite each other…but you won't be able to get into everything anyway. Last year I mentioned that there were some folks who'd taken to just following me around. I thought they were avid fans who'd discovered that was a great way to see the best program items at the convention. Now I'm starting to wonder if they aren't just Homeland Security agents who think I'm up to something.

This Just In…

Well, this is interesting. The rape case against French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn is collapsing, in large part (assuming stories like this are true) because the victim has severe credibility problems. From the outset, it looked the lawyers for Mr. Strauss-Kahn were going to argue that and it's looking like they found what they were hoping to find.

So the question is becoming: Will Strauss-Kahn walk (or get a light punishment) because he really and truly did not rape the lady in question? Or will he walk (or get a light punishment) because no court will or would believe enough of what she says to find the accused guilty? All I know is that whatever happens, what Ben Stein wrote right after the incident is still really, really stupid.

A Couple Things…

I said here the other day that the Marina Hotel in Las Vegas was torn down to make way for the MGM Grand. A few correspondents have politely accused me of being a bit loose with history (or just plain being wrong) so here's a clarification: The MGM Grand was erected on the site of the old Marina Hotel. Where the MGM is now situated is where the Marina used to be. But the builders of the new inhabitant of that real estate only tore down portions of the Marina and they left some of it standing and incorporated those parts into the MGM Grand.

There. Happy now?

A more serious error may be this: I said this year's Labor Day Telethon for Muscular Dystrophy would be on Labor Day. I'm told it's actually on September 4, which is the day before Labor Day — in most cities from 6 PM until Midnight. Does that mean it's live to the East Coast and tape-delayed everywhere else? If so, that would mean that the big total at the end would not reflect results from most of the country seeing up to half of the telethon, wouldn't it? We need to look into this.

I'm also told this year's hosts have been selected: Jann Carl, Alison Sweeney, Nancy O'Dell and Simon Lithgoe. These are probably all fine, devoted personalities but if the producers want to turn around their loss of audience share and key stations, they need to conscript a superstar or two. Perhaps they're planning to do that in 2012 when the host(s) wouldn't seem so blatantly a replacement for Jerry.

Lastly: A couple of folks wrote me that they thought I was misrepresenting the case against Gay Marriage to make it seem more feeble than it is. No, I was writing about the case people make to me in e-mail, which is pretty damn feeble. So was the courtroom defense of California's Proposition 8, about which I believe I wrote (I can't find it at the moment) that I could have made a better case than that…and I'm a guy who thinks it's moronic and bigoted to not allow consenting adults of any stripe to wed.

Some folks have the unfortunate tendency to believe that any stupid thing said on behalf of their cause is valid and brilliant and inarguable. It's a sad part of our public discourse, this rush to deny everything the "other" side says and embrace everyone on your side as a fellow soldier. If deep in my soul I thought Same-Sex Wedlock was wrong, I'd hope I'd be embarrassed, if not by that then certainly by some of the people out there saying that. Few of the elected officials who oppose Gay Marriage even strike me as caring that much about it. They all seem more interested in how the issue can be manipulated to rouse a certain segment of the population to vote for and donate to candidates who'll reduce taxes on the wealthy. And they seem to be in a panic that the issue is of decreasing effectiveness to accomplish that.

Okay, that's all for now. Gotta go to work.

Road Rage

Comic-Con International is 22 days away so some of you are thinking about how you're going to get there. If you're driving down via the 5 Freeway or the 405 (which links up with the 5), there are two things that might conceivably cause you some problem.

On July 16 and 17, the 405 is going to be closed down around the Sepulveda Pass so that a bridge can be demolished. This is going to be an utter mess that will snarl traffic and inconvenience many, many people. I'm not saying it doesn't need to be done; just that L.A. transit is going to be impossible for a while there. Now granted, this is the weekend before the con we're talking about but a lot of folks are fretting that the situation won't be back to normal for a while after. In any case, if you're driving anywhere near the 405 during the work period or soon after, you need to know what they're doing and where (this site will tell you) and stay up to date on what's closed and when.

If you're driving down the 5 on Wednesday, July 20, which is the date of Preview Night for the con, know this: It's the opening day of racing at Del Mar Race Track, which is located along the 5 about 20 miles North of San Diego. Opening day always draws a huge crowd as does the first weekend, which is that Saturday. I have gotten stuck in opening day traffic there. It ain't a lot of fun and there aren't really any good alternate routes as far as I can tell.

Anyway, the gates at Del Mar open at 11:30 AM, First Post is at 2 PM and at 3:00 on opening day, they're having a parade of hats with a big cash prize for the most interesting one.

Neil Gaiman News

Our pal Neil Gaiman is at this moment flying from Seattle to Los Angeles — no thanks to Delta Airlines, which cancelled his original flight — to tape tonight's Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson. He goes from there to the Saban Theater just outside Beverly Hills for a lecture/reading. I was going to hike over to at least one of these (I'm close enough to walk to either) to annoy him but I'm trapped in Deadline Hell and will be fortunate if I can find time to belch before dawn. But like you, I can at least watch (more likely, TiVo) his appearance with CraigyFerg. The other guest is Paris Hilton and I'd be fascinated to know what, if anything, she and Neil say to one another backstage. Perhaps an exchange of grooming tips?