Category Archives: Uncategorized

Number one in a series.

This Robert Novak column is interesting, not so much because of what it says but because he's saying it. A lot of Republicans are probably mulling over when they're going to distance themselves from George W. Bush and over which issues. The new Medicare prescription plan, which almost no one is willing to defend, is a good starting point. Novak is the kind of columnist who pretty much just takes dictation from some powerful Republican with a story to plant. Wonder who dictated this one.

Edward Jay Epstein on why Blockbuster Video is not long for this world.

Sometimes, your brain goes North and your typing fingers head South. I just got a couple of messages from folks asking me to tell more about the Boondocks pilot I worked on. I thought to myself, "That's odd. I never worked on a Boondocks pilot." Then I realized what I'd done. In the piece I wrote about Lou Rawls, I meant to type the name of Jump Start, which is another fine newspaper strip. Some years back, I voice-directed little five-minute animated pilots for a number of strips and Lou Rawls was in the one we did of Jump Start. Only I didn't type Jump Start. For some reason, I typed Boondocks. Very dumb of me.

Every so often — not as often as I'd like, of course — I allow myself an In-n-Out Burger. In case you live outside the few states where one can get such a thing, In-n-Out Burger is a chain of fast food burger shrines that does a small menu but does it right. It's hamburgers, fries, soft drinks, milk shakes, milk, coffee and nothing else. No turkey burgers, no chicken sandwiches or nuggets, no salads…you can't even get hot tea at an In-n-Out. What you can get is a hamburger done right. The beef is never frozen, the potatoes for the fries are cut fresh on the premises (you can watch them do this) and everything is done with more expertise than you see in a place that hires minimum-wage teens to crank out pre-fab food. There's something almost inspirational to see that it's possible to build a business without anything artificial and still make a real profit.

One reason for the quality control is that In-n-Out does not franchise — every one is company-owned, company-operated — and they do not expand too fast. So it's unnerving to hear that there is strife and open warfare within the family that owns this fine chain and that it may lead to serious expansion. According to this article in the L.A. Times (which may make you register), a power struggle is in progress and those never end well. The folks who will probably win it sooner or later want to bring in new management that will grow the chain and maximize income…something the old management has never done since the first stand was opened in 1948.

Is this beginning of the end for In-n-Out Burger? Probably not. Fatburger went from a couple of outlets to many without seriously compromising their product. Of course, I do recall that a brief attempt some years ago to expand my once-favorite local burger joint, Cassell's, into a chain was a disaster. All the new ones they opened closed rapidly because as was quite evident to all of those who flocked to them, they'd abandoned the basic principles and standards that had made the first one work. Today, only that first, original outlet of Cassell's remains…with new ownership and reduced quality. So I'm just the tiniest bit worried.

Johnny Depp as Sweeney Todd? I hate to prejudge a movie, especially long before it's even made. But gee, that sounds wrong to me.

That's right: Two for the price of one! Not only is today the 80th birthday of Soupy Sales but Larry Storch is 83 years old today…or maybe tomorrow. Depending on which source you consult, the star of TV's F Troop was born either January 8 or 9. There's no doubt though that he's one of the funniest comic actors to ever work in television…and did you know he also did a lot of cartoon voice work in the sixties? He was on Tennessee Tuxedo and The Groovie Goolies and a whole batch of other shows. I even brought him in once to do some voices on Garfield and Friends, partly because I thought he'd be great (he was) and partly because I just wanted to meet him and tell him how terrific I always thought he was in everything.

Legend has it that Storch's big break came when he got a role on a radio show starring Frank Morgan, who was best known for playing The Wizard of Oz in The Wizard of Oz. Morgan, the story goes, lost his reading glasses during a rehearsal — or in some accounts, just before going on the air live. Storch, who was a fine mimic, came to the rescue and not only did his own role but also read Morgan's lines in a perfect imitation. (That was his Frank Morgan impression you heard when he voiced Professor Phineas Whoopee on Tennessee Tuxedo.) He went on to a grand career on stage, in clubs, on TV and in the movies. He's still performing, mostly in theater…so happy returns of the day, Larry Storch. Either today or tomorrow.

Frank Rich on the whole Wiretaps Without Warrants matter. And for what it's worth, I think Rich misses the point on one matter. He writes…

If fictional terrorists concocted by Hollywood can figure out that the National Security Agency is listening to their every call, guess what? Real-life terrorists know this, too. So when a hyperventilating President Bush rants that the exposure of his warrant-free wiretapping in a newspaper is shameful and puts "our citizens at risk" by revealing our espionage playbook, you have to wonder what he is really trying to hide. Our enemies, as America has learned the hard way, are not morons. Even if Al Qaeda hasn't seen "Sleeper Cell" because it refuses to spring for pay cable, it has surely assumed from the get-go that the White House would ignore legal restraints on eavesdropping, just as it has on detainee jurisprudence and torture.

It isn't that the terrorists on whom our nation eavesdrops would assume the White House would ignore legal restraints. It's that it doesn't matter. The warrants that the administration should be getting under the NSA act are secret warrants. The terrorists couldn't possibly know or care if procedure is followed or not.

Eighty years ago today, a baby was born in North Carolina who was destined to become a TV superstar…and also to get hit in the face with tens of thousands of shaving cream pies. Kids today have no one on television — absolutely no one — they could possibly feel as close to as my friends and I did to Soupy Sales during the years he lit up Los Angeles television. And kids who were the proper age when he worked in Detroit and New York feel the same way, I know. It wasn't just that he did one of those all-too-rare shows that though ostensibly for children held just as much delight for grown-ups. And it wasn't just that he did it without writers or much of a budget or even (much of the time) more than one person in his supporting cast. Soupy was just plain the most fun person to watch on TV when I was eight. He was also, for my classmates and me, a huge influence. We never talked to big dogs or wiseguy salesmen who hurled meringue our way but we did repeat his jokes and even, in our everyday speech, made feeble attempts to repeat his timing. Soupy "connected" with us like no one else I've ever seen on the screen.

Some time back, I wrote this article about him which was reprinted (with my permission, natch) in his autobiography. Beyond that, there isn't much I can say except to wish Soupy a happy 80th. I hear he's bouncing back from some health problems, which is great news. Here's hoping he has a great big cake today and that nobody throws it at him.

The lovely Carolyn Kelly and I are back from the debut performance of Scott Shaw!'s Oddball Comics presentation at the Acme Comedy Theater in Hollywood. First of all, here are the details on how you can attend. Secondly, attend. If you are anywhere near Los Angeles, get thee to the Acme next Saturday night or a Saturday night not long after. For at least the next few weeks, Scott will be doing his show Saturday night at ten there and those who show up will have a very good time. I laughed a lot and so did everyone around me as Scott displayed bizarre comic book covers from his bizarre collection and delivered incisive, clever commentary. Four stars, two thumbs up, three cheers and tiger for me. End of plug.

On December 28, the Rasmussen Poll announced that it had recently surveyed Americans and determined that…

Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people living in the United States. A Rasmussen Reports survey found that just 23% disagree.

Today, results were released of an AP-Ipsos poll that said…

A majority of Americans want the Bush administration to get court approval before eavesdropping on people inside the United States, even if those calls might involve suspected terrorists, an AP-Ipsos poll shows. 56 percent of respondents…said the government should be required to first get a court warrant to eavesdrop on the overseas calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens when those communications are believed to be tied to terrorism.

Now, let's assume for the moment that both these polls are correct — a small assumption with the AP one, a larger one with Rasmussen but still, in both cases, an assumption. These two polls are not mutually exclusive. If I believe the Bush administration should be allowed to snoop on the phone calls of terrorist suspects but should do so only with warrants and judicial oversight, I'd be with the majority in both polls. The thing is: Neither poll reflects the actual situation. Neither is really asking about the law as it currently stands.

The NSA law allows the administration to eavesdrop on just about anybody it wants. They're supposed to get a warrant before they do it but if they feel time is of the essence, they can do it immediately and then they have 72 hours to secure the warrant afterwards. Some people don't seem to know about this last part. A lot of Bush defenders are arguing for his position as if complying with the law as written means that they have to go to a judge beforehand and therefore can't act swiftly. Not so. They just have to let this secret court that was set up to keep an eye on wiretaps know what they're doing.

The controversy is not about whether if Osama bin Laden phones you, the government should be listening in. It's about whether the Bush administration can overlook a law that was set up to govern how wiretaps would be done, and can conduct them without any oversight, either before or after the fact. How come nobody's polling on how we feel about that?

Glenn Greenwald refutes the argument that it harmed National Security for the New York Times to reveal that our government spies on phone calls without obtaining warrants. I think he's right. They didn't aid terrorists in any way. All they did was to point out that the Bush administration may be violating the law.

Robert Faires writes to ask about the Peanuts reprints that are currently being made available to newspapers…

Sometime in the last week or two, Peanuts jumped way back in time. I don't really recall what time frame the strips were in before the jump — early to mid-seventies, I'd guess — but now they look to be late fifties/early sixties, and considerably earlier than the period of strips when they started the "classic" repeats around the time of Schulz's illness and passing. It's not that I mind at all, since I actually like the era these strips are from better than the seventies and later, when the characters and humor took a turn that didn't work as well for me, but it struck me as a curious move, one that kind of came out of nowhere, and I wondered if you had any reaction to it.

Well, the first thing that needs to be explained here is that United Feature Syndicate offers two different groups of vintage strips to its subscribing newspapers. One set is from the nineties (though it hasn't always proceeded in sequence) and the other started with 1974 strips and then jumped back to 1973 strips and then to 1972 and so on. The idea here as I understand it is that some papers wanted the older strips and were willing to deal with the fact that they have different proportions than most modern-day strips. Some weren't and so they run strips from after Mr. Schulz adjusted his dimensions to match everyone else's.

Anyway, the older package was in the middle of a 1969 storyline about Charlie Brown, Linus and Snoopy going to a sports banquet to meet the round-headed kid's hero, Joe Shlabotnik. On January 1, they suddenly abandoned that story and hopped from 1969 to 1959. (Today's strip is from January 10, 1959.) My reaction? I think it would be neater if they'd started in the late fifties and worked forward but it's all wonderful stuff. As we'll probably all discover after Fantagraphics has more of its wonderful Peanuts archive books out, it's quite arguable when the strip "got good." A lot of it depends on how you take to the gradual humanization of Snoopy and the focus on his fantasies. Some thought that was when the strip stopped being about children…and of course, others thought it was never about children. Personally, I thought Schulz began to hit repetitive patches in the seventies so that was never the ideal place to start. In a sense, I thought the last ten or twelve years of strips were better than the ten or twelve years that preceded them but they're all worthy of another look.

I dunno who to thank for this nice plug over at the Scoop website. But thank you, whoever wrote it. The whole site is a pretty good read and one we recommend. Even when they don't talk about me.

Sorry to hear the news that the title of the record album at right — Lou Rawls Live — is no longer applicable. If you never got to hear the man perform in person, you missed out on a wonderful experience. Talk about having a voice that you play like a fine musical instrument.

I met Lou a few times but only one anecdote comes to mind this morning. About ten years ago, I directed him in a short voiceover job. It was a never-aired animation pilot based on the comic strip, The Boondocks Jump Start, [Correction] and he was playing one of the main roles. He was very good and after we thought he'd left, one of the engineers said, "It must be hell to have every woman who hears you sing want to sleep with you." Lou, who'd overheard the comment out in the hallway, leaned back in, flashed a big grin and said, "Man, I wish it worked like that." Having seen him once in Vegas, I have a feeling it almost did.