Category Archives: Uncategorized

Ah, yes. Something else on which you can spend your hard-earned dinero instead of buying medicine for your ailing mother. The folks at Dark Horse Comics are coming out with another line of cute li'l figurines of classic characters and just to make the others look more important, they're including Groo the Wanderer in the set. You can order it next month. You can receive it when it comes out in February. You can stare at it from then on, expressing shock and amazement at the stunning likeness of everyone's favorite mentally-deficient barbarian. Here's where you can learn about the whole line and pre-order.

I don't know how many of you recall the McMartin Pre-School Scandal. Briefly: In 1984, it was charged that hundreds of children were molested at a pre-school in Manhattan Beach. The school's owners and employees were arrested, tried repeatedly and eventually released…by which time their lives were pretty well destroyed. Parents were outraged that no convictions were ever achieved since at some point, the evidence appeared overwhelming and the McMartin staff was pretty well convicted in the press. As the case unfolded, however, it became apparent that investigators had pressured the children to confirm tales of highly dubious accuracy. Kids, for instance, told tales of being taken down to the basement of the pre-school and forced to play "naked games"…but the school building had no basement. It also became apparent that some of the reporters covering the story were sensationalizing and misrepresenting matters and that at least one of the parents levelling accusations was, herself, mentally unstable. (If it all sounds like a TV movie, it was. It was made into a largely-accurate HBO film called Indictment – The McMartin Trial, starring James Woods.)

Today in the Los Angeles Times, one of the kids who said then that he'd been molested writes a long, amazing apology for going along with phony accusations. His name is Kyle Zirpolo and I'm not sure if he deserves praise for coming forward or scorn for not doing so years ago. Either way, it's one of those stories that's worth keeping in mind when someone looks guilty beyond any reasonable doubt. In this case, a lot of people and law enforcement officials were wrong and, worse, incapable of backing off on their crusades even after they should have realized they were wrong. It's not rare that this happens but it is rare that it becomes so obvious…and that anyone apologizes.

Garry Trudeau has a good track record for predicting what's going to happen in the world and incorporating it into his Doonesbury strip. Every so often though, his Magic 8-Ball fails him. Next week, he had a whole continuity about the Harriet Miers nomination. Now that she's withdrawn her name, those strips won't appear in the newspapers…but they are on his website.

Lewis "Scooter" Libby indicted on five counts. Finally.

Michael Kinsley explains Act One of the "Plamegate" affair.

Okay, I'm going to bed. All the usual sources are telling me that tomorrow's the day we get at least one high-level indictment. I have the dread feeling I'll wake up in the morning, turn on CNN and someone will be saying, "We have Breaking News that there is no Breaking News."

By the way: In addition to seeing someone indicted, I also want to see someone "frog-marched." Just so I can find out what the hell that is. Sweet dreams!

Someone has been indicted! Someone has been indicted! Okay, so it's a coin dealer in Ohio…but it's someone.

Time to carve your jack-o-lantern online.

See? No indictments this morning. There will never be any indictments of anyone. Indictments are so over.

In other non-news: George W. Bush has "reluctantly accepted" Harriet Miers' decision to withdraw as a Supreme Court nominee. Just as last night, I "reluctantly accepted" delivery of that Chinese Food I ordered.

First of all, I have nothing to do with these interviews I told you about. If they won't play on your computer, don't come running to me.

I've watched a few of them. The ones that have a good, well-informed interviewer are terrific but in some cases, the interviewer simply doesn't know enough about his subject. This leads to the interviewee being asked a lot of things he's answered many times before or things which are already on the public record. If you put a Carl Reiner mask on me, I think I could have answered about 80% of the questions Mr. Reiner is asked in his little oral history.

A tip for all interviewers: Don't ask your subject what he thinks of each of his friends and co-workers unless you have reason to believe the subject either has a great anecdote about a certain person or that they didn't like them. I can't take interviews that go like this…

INTERVIEWER: So, what was it like to work with Bette Davis?

INTERVIEWEE: Oh, she was so wonderful. What a professional. She was always on time and she always had a great big smile for everyone.

That kind of thing is boring and informs no one. Actors are supposed to be professional and to be on time. So don't even ask that kind of thing unless you suspect it might go like this…

INTERVIEWER: So, what was it like to work with Bette Davis?

INTERVIEWEE: A monster. One time, the stage manager went to get her and he found her shooting crystal meth in her dressing room. She kneed him in the groin and stuck a shiv in his thorax. The cops came and took her away and they had to bring in some drag queen to impersonate her for the rest of the picture.

You see? That's the kind of thing people want to hear…or at least something of more substance than, "Oh, he was great to work with." People in show business say that about everyone, including the people it wasn't great to work with.

Okay, enough for tonight. I'm going to bed. I'm not expecting any indictments tomorrow morning when I wake up. I'm becoming convinced it's like Waiting for Godot except less coherent. The Special Prosecutor is going to empanel another grand jury and then another and another, and for the rest of our lives, we'll be hearing that indicts are imminent. It will go well past the year 2100, by which time we'll have Bushes who aren't even born yet in the White House and the White Sox might (might!) win the World Series again. Good night.

Political cartoonist Mike Luckovich does an amazing piece of work. Make sure you click on the PDF link to see it enlarged.

I am about to cost some of you a helluva lot of time. I mean like many, many hours of your life.

For some years now, the Archive of American Television has been videotaping oral histories of important people in the field of TV. They've logged thousands of hours of these interviews and now they're making them available on the Internet, over on the Google Video site. Hundreds are already posted with more to come. Wanna watch several hours of Joe Barbera being interrogated by Leonard Maltin? It's there. What's more, the interviews seem to be raw, unedited footage with false starts, delays, technical errors and everything included for those of you who like that kind of thing.

This page tells about the project but the best way to find these interviews and watch 'em seems to be to go to the Google Video page and do this search. Most of the interviews seem to be in several parts and in some cases, they seem to have not posted all the parts yet. For example, right now they have Part 5 and Part 6 of their Dick Van Dyke interview up but not the earlier pieces. More uploads, as I mentioned, are promised.

Here, just to get you started, are a couple of more direct links…

• Carl Reiner (eight parts)
• Sid Caesar (six parts)
• Buffalo Bob Smith (six parts)
• Dick Clark (three parts)
• Joe Barbera (seven parts, one of which doesn't seem to be up yet)
• James Garner (six parts)
• Florence Henderson (ten parts!!!)

Before you emotionally commit to any of this, remember that some of these interviews run more than four hours and there's a load of dull, repetitive material in them…but there's also a ton of show biz history so go exploring. I've just barely started my browsing so I'm not certain what's in some of them.

Here's an example of the kind of thing our public discourse could do without…

A majority would vote for a Democrat over President Bush if an election were held this year, according to a CNN/USA Today/Gallup Poll released Tuesday. In the latest poll, 55 percent of the respondents said that they would vote for the Democratic candidate if Bush were again running for the presidency this year. Thirty-nine percent of those interviewed said they would vote for Bush in the hypothetical election.

Great! All the Democrats have to do is figure out how to get a presidential election held this year. They also have to make sure they run an unnamed candidate because the minute they select someone, that person is no longer "the Democratic candidate." Instead, that person becomes Hillary or Al Gore or Howard Dean or someone else with a history and a paper trail and traits that the opposition can attack.

Really, I'm no fan of George W. Bush. I think he's been a terrible president. But a poll such as this one is full of "if"s as to be way below worthless. Perhaps the pollsters could try telling us something that relates in some way to reality. They could at least indict someone.

The Allan Sherman collection, My Son, the Box, is much cheaper over at Barnes & Noble. At the moment, it's $111.98 if you're not a member of their book club, $100.78 if you are…and that's with free shipping. (It costs $25 a year to belong to their book club so this might be a good time to join.) Here's a link to the page.

This site (i.e., the one you're reading at the moment) is not a member of the Barnes & Noble affiliate club, meaning we don't get a commission (like we do with Amazon orders) if you go there via our site and buy stuff. We could have set this up for Barnes & Noble too but the last time we looked, their affiliate links involved putting a little tracking cookie on your system that we decided qualified as spyware. We object to that…ergo, no affiliate links to Barnes & Noble. If you are grateful that we don't allow that kind of thing on this site — and that we may save you up to thirty bucks on this purchase — feel free to show your appreciation with a PayPal tip.

Lost in the celebration today of the 35th anniversary of Doonesbury is the fact that 35 years ago, another strip started. Momma was the second newspaper strip of Mell Lazarus, who had previously done Miss Peach…and continued to do it, along with Momma, until 2002.

(Quick Aside: I'd love it if someone would reprint large quantities of Miss Peach. The strip never ran in any Los Angeles newspaper…or at least, no L.A. paper that came into my home. In 1961, I glommed onto a paperback collection of it when the Scholastic Book Club did one of its classroom book-hustlings, and it was hilarious…one of the dozen-or-so newspaper strips that ever made me laugh out loud. But for a long time, that was about all I saw of Miss Peach. I think I have all the subsequent collections and I've still only seen about 1% of all the ones Mell did. I'm sure there must be plenty of others as funny as the ones in those books.)

Mell forgives me that I never liked Momma quite as much as Miss Peach since I seem to be pretty much alone in this viewpoint. Maybe it's because my own mother was and is so unlike Sonja Hobbes, for which I will be ever grateful. But I have always enjoyed Momma. A few years ago, I wrote a short animated sequence of the strip — June Foray did Momma's voice — that was done for a TV project that never aired. Before I did it, I sat down with a pile of Momma strips, figuring I'd read a few weeks' worth just to get a feel for the characters. I got hooked and spent hours reading the whole stack, which was about five years worth. Good stuff. I'm not surprised it's been around as long as it has.

While you're waiting for your Allan Sherman CD set, you probably have nothing else to listen to. So I'll mention that over at Comic Geek Speak, they have a new podcast episode up…an interview with Yours Truly all about comics and the folks I've met who write and draw them. The whole show runs a little over 90 minutes but it's not all me.