Category Archives: Uncategorized

Several folks have sent links that work for them to view the videos I mentioned on the C-Span website. Unfortunately, these links seem to only work for specific browsers…and not even all the time. C-Span has their video clips on an "RTSP" protocol (Real Time Streaming Protocol) which is almost a guarantee that visitors will have trouble, plus they link to some of them in a pop-up window that doesn't want to pop up, at least in any of my browsers. I can download the files but not watch them online…which I find is happening with more and more websites that get fancy with pop-ups and JavaScript and other bells 'n' whistles.

In the meantime, a few of my correspondents have argued that the chat Bush had with those soldiers was not exactly "scripted." No, in a literal sense it wasn't — though when deputy assistant defense secretary Allison Barber rehearsed the troops beforehand, that was a word she used. My complaints were not that everything was controlled to the point where everyone knew in advance what everyone was supposed to say. You kinda expect that to happen with any president and especially with this one. It's that it was done so poorly and almost in a manner so as to insult our intelligence. We know George Bush (or, again, any president) can have his aides pick out ten or twelve soldiers who are on his side and will stay "on-message" and say just what the administration wants to represent as the truth. But doing it the way they did and doing it so ineptly deserves a certain amount of ridicule. Bush hammering away at a home for Katrina victims the other day on The Today Show was another phony stunt. I dunno…I have this idea that anyone else could have driven those nails as well or better, and Bush could have used the hour or two in some way that would have helped those people more. I kind of expect him, as the most powerful man in the world, to do something my handyman couldn't do.

I keep thinking about something Jon Stewart said on a recent Daily Show, which is that this president refuses to answer questions from adults as if they are adults. The answer to everything lately seems to be, "Shut up…I know what I'm doing." That's hard to believe when they don't even know how to stage a simple media event involving a satellite link.

ASIFA is the international animated film society and its various branches do great things to honor and preserve good animation and even some of the less-good variety. The Hollywood wing is presently establishing an archive that deserves your attention if not your support. Stephen Worth is the main mover-and-shaker behind this most worthwhile endeavor and he's started a weblog to tell us all how it's going.

For some reason, the C-Span website won't let me link directly to video files but there are two over there that are worth a look-see. If you fish around there, you might find them.

One is George W. Bush's 15 minute live chat this morning with a number of our soldiers in Iraq. If Bush doesn't get rid of whoever organized this thing then it's official: It's impossible to screw up so badly in this White House as to get fired. The White House Chef could probably burn down the kitchen and not endanger his job, pension or Medal of Freedom.

The whole idea of the teleconference was wrongheaded from the start. Bush is terrible in ad-lib, chatty situations and no matter how tightly one scripts and rehearses a live, overseas remote, there are going to be moments that require a little quick thinking and improvisation. There were more than usual in this one due to technical screw-ups. I once did a TV show with a host who wasn't the swiftest in such situations and it wasn't a big deal to have cue cards poised to cover all contingencies. (First rule of Live TV: When things go obviously wrong, you admit it and don't insult the audience's intelligence by pretending it's how you meant for things to go.)

This "media event" was carefully rehearsed and loosely-scripted and someone — maybe the same someone who erred by suggesting the format in the first place — compounded the disaster. They allowed the media to see and tape the rehearsals where the troops were told what would be discussed in seeming spontaneity. I would love to hear the explanation of why they allowed this to be seen. It made Bush look like a marionette who walks in and does what his own handlers don't trust him to do without careful preparation. We all know that much of what we see on television that's represented as unplanned is meticulously prearranged. Most producers, however, know enough not to show the world just how prearranged.

How awful was it all? I felt sorry for George W. Bush. That's how awful it all was.

The other video worth a look is the press briefing that Scott McClellan engaged in later, denying to reporters who'd see the rehearsal that the event was rehearsed. I don't know why anyone with an ounce of self-respect would ever want to be a presidential press secretary. At some point in every administration, your boss is caught picking his nose, there's videotape of him picking his nose, and you're sent out to deny that he picked his nose and to suggest that there's something seriously wrong with a reporter who thinks so. For the last few years, the White House Press Corps has taken polite dictation and asked questions that don't even measure up to the softball standard. Wiffleball is more like it…or Nerf. I dunno if they're just lazy or if, as I suspect, there's some fear there of feeding the rage of those who scream "Liberal Media" every time there's something on the news they don't like. But every so often lately, there's been some Scott McClellan tap-dance that is so far from provable reality that even the guy from Fox News has to go, "Come on."

It's fascinating to watch McClellan at work. The only problem with the Harriet Miers nomination is not, as some of us thought, that a lot of prominent Conservative voices think she's not qualified or demonstrably committed to their worldview. It's that the press is refusing to talk about her experience and qualifications. Come on.

So here's the premise: Any time the news is bad for George W. Bush, federal officials up the Terror Alert Level and say they have evidence of "credible threats." This is intended to distract us and to perhaps scare a certain kind of person into being more loyal to the White House occupant.

Do you buy that premise? I don't know that I do, but I also don't believe it's inconceivable. In my lifetime, I've never seen a presidency that I was sure wouldn't do something like that, and the timing of recent alerts is making it more difficult to disbelieve about this presidency. I'm especially conflicted because I just watched a strong case made for the premise by Keith Olbermann this afternoon on his Countdown show on MSNBC. He didn't convince me completely but…well, he went through a list of ten instances where something occurred that the White House probably wanted off the front pages and then, by apparent coincidence, terror alerts (which were not followed by terror attacks) bumped the bad news over to Page A-17 where nobody sees it.

You can see Olbermann's presentation at this site. It's a bit over 13 minutes so don't click 'til you're comfy. And you can read a weblog posting that he made about it here. Unfortunately, I can't find a link to the interview that Olbermann did immediately after on the program. He talked with Homeland Security Undersecretary Asa Hutchinson and it was a very refreshing and rare instance of a TV news/commentary host giving airtime to an opposition viewpoint and discussing matters with him like a gentleman. I think I respected Olbermann's view a bit more because he allowed Hutchinson to deny it and didn't try to shout him down or put him on the defensive.

If you're as unsure about this as I am, you might want to watch and/or read Mr. Olbermann's editorial. We link…you decide.

I promised a week or two ago to post more about "official" comic book fan clubs but then I got distracted by a bevy of great comic actors dying on us. There will be several more posts beyond this one about the Merry Marvel Marching Society, which Marvel Comics threw at us around the close of 1964. For a buck, you got a membership card (seen here), a button, a welcome letter, some stickers, a button, a memo pad and — best of all — the "Voices of Marvel" plastic record in which Stan Lee and most of those then creating Marvel Comics welcomed you to the club. I'll write about the rest of the kit later but that record was and still is wonderful. One of the first times I interviewed Jack Kirby, I asked him about it…

ME: That record seems so weird. Was it recorded in the office like it sounds?

KIRBY: No, it was in a recording studio. We rehearsed in the office. Stan treated it like he was producing the Academy Awards. He had this script he'd written. He'd written it and rewritten it and rewritten it and as we were recording it, he kept rewriting it. We all went into the office, more people than there was room for. When you weren't rehearsing your part, you had to go out in the hall and wait. No work was done that day on comics. It was all about the record. We rehearsed all morning. We were supposed to go to lunch and then over to the recording studio, which was over on 55th Street or 56th. I forget where it was. But when lunchtime came, Stan said, "No, no, we're not ready," so most of us skipped lunch and stayed there to rehearse more. Then we took cabs over to the recording studio and we were supposed to be in and out in an hour or two but we were there well into the evening. I don't know how many takes we did.

ME: On the record, Steve Ditko isn't heard. They say he slipped out the window. I assume he just refused to be part of it.

KIRBY: Steve was much smarter than we were about those things.

ME: Have you listened to the record lately?

KIRBY: No, and if you try and play it for me, you'll be out the window with Ditko.

It was quite a relic of that era in comics. In 1967, they put out a "new, improved" Merry Marvel Marching Society kit with a different pin and a different membership card and other different items…and a different record. This one, alas, didn't feature more Abbott/Costello banter betwixt Lee and Kirby. It just had the theme songs — opening and closing — from the Marvel Super Heroes TV cartoon show that had recently debuted.

As you may have guessed by now, we're going to let you hear both of these classic recordings. Marvelite Maximus Doug Pratt has transferred them to MP3s and he says it's okay if I post links for you all. You can hear the "Voices of Marvel" recording by clicking here…

And you can hear the second record (entitled "Scream Along With Marvel") by clicking here…

We all hate "spyware" on our computers, spyware being those annoying files you probably accumulate as you surf the web and download porn your e-mail and such. I assume we all use at least one program periodically to scan our computer for spyware and eliminate it.

Well, there's SPYWARE!!! and then there's spyware. A "key-logger" program that installs itself secretly in the computer's memory and records everything we type and which then transmits this data to an outside party is quite a bit different from a cookie that tracks some little thing you did online. I'm no expert but it appears to me that the competition between spyware-eliminating programs has caused some to define "spyware" down to a useless level, flagging cookies that are sent to us for some harmless purpose. They seem to want to be able to say, "Our program caught X pieces of spyware that the others didn't." That may not be because the program in question is better…just that it has broader (perhaps, too broad) criteria as to what constitutes spyware.

Example: Every morning when I get up, Giant Spyware has swept my system and it usually catches three or four cookies, all of which are probably harmless but I eliminate them anyway. Giant was acquired by the Microsoft company — as we all will be, sooner or later — and is now being rebranded as their spyware software. It's not necessarily the best. It's just the one I use.

First thing this A.M., I ran the free version of Ad-Aware, as I do every week or so. Ad-Aware is the granddaddy of spyware snaggers and it caught eleven pieces of what it believes to be spyware on my computer. In other words, Ad-Aware flagged as spyware eleven cookies that Giant felt were harmless. (And we're only talking about cookies here. A key-logger or some other kind of malicious program is another matter.)

After I ran Ad-Aware, I immediately ran the free version of A-Squared, which tracks spyware and "malware." It marked nine cookies, including one from comedycentral.com, one from comicbookresources.com, one from mediamatters.org and one from mediaputfile.com. You may have some of these on your system right this minute. That last one is the site that has the Smurfs video I linked to in the previous message. Giant and Ad-Aware think these cookies are fine. A-squared thinks they're spyware.

I'm suspicious of the A-Squared findings because all of the cookies it fingered are together in my Cookies directory in two groupings by alphabetical order. That is, when I look at a listing of all my cookies in alphabetical order, I see five of them together in one sequence of the listing and the other four together in another section. I think I'd like to get a fourth opinion here so I'm going to leave all the cookies that A-Squared wanted to delete and I'm going to run Spybot – Search and Destroy. I'll be back to you next paragraph with the results.

Okay, Spybot wasn't alarmed at any of the cookies that A-Squared didn't like but it did catch three that were overlooked or deemed benevolent by Giant, Ad-Aware and A-Squared. What can we learn from this?

That the word "spyware" can cover a multitude of intrusions, some so miniscule that they shouldn't worry us. Still, I wish I could set some sort of "level" of protection and tell my chosen spyware sweeper that I don't care about the ones that all the other spyware detectors thought were so unintrusive as to not be a problem. This review over in PC World tested all the leading spyware-nukers and says that the most instances of spyware were caught by Webroot Spy Sweeper. I'm not sure that's what I want.

Yesterday, I linked to this video of a French newscast on the "Smurfs get bombed" commercial. Today brings this message from Charles-Emmanuel Ouellette…

About the Smurf newscast and bombing, well, I'm French Canadian and happen to understand French (and speak and write English a bit awkwardly, sorry). I thought that you may be interested in a little English synopsis of the whole thing.

The newscaster at the start warns the audience that the new UNICEF campaign uses strong images that can be considered shocking and warns the audience about what follows. The off-screen News Lady then narrates the Smurfs sequence, saying it starts with images of joy that summarize young age, and then all hell breaks loose. It then jumps to the text on the blue background, saying: Don't let the children's universe be destroyed by war (well, that's how I put it in English, but I'm sure you can make it sound better). In all, since it's against war and for children's right, even if the Smurfs' little blue butt get kicked hard in this, I understand that Peyo's family agreed.

I'm pretty sure a lot of people who worked on Smurfs product just liked it at the first degree. Still, it's interesting that it's more than just cute character bashing (they're an awful lot of this on the net) and it delivers a message.

I don't know…"Don't let the children's universe be destroyed by war" sounds like a pretty good way to put it to me. It's sad that anyone felt they needed to make a commercial to "sell" that idea to people but I suppose the point is fund-raising. I'd be curious to know if the ad succeeds in that respect. Thanks for the translation.

I usually don't like it when you go to a website and they have an "intro" page with music and Flash animation. Makes me immediately go diving for wherever you click to "skip intro." For some reason, however, I enjoyed the noisy intro page on the website of In-n-Out Burger.

If you live where there are no In-n-Out Burgers (i.e., anywhere but California, Arizona and Nevada), that's pretty much what it looks like at one. They have great fast food burgers, fresh fries, sodas and creamy milk shakes…and nothing else.

Like you, I have no clue as to what kind of indictments, if any, may emerge from the Valerie Plame/CIA investigation. But it sure looks like someone "in the know" is going around and leaking to pundits and reporters — or to people who will pass it on to pundits and reporters — that Someone Big is about to be formally accused. Which, given how good this inquiry has been about not leaking or tipping its hand, makes me suspect that this is not going to happen.

From Jay Leno's monologue tonight…

As you know, there is terrible flooding in New Hampshire and it's been declared a disaster area. To give you an idea how white New Hampshire is…FEMA got there in a minute and a half.

Yesterday, the right-wing news service, Newsmax, issued a "news story." I can't provide a direct link to it but if you hurry, you might still see it in the Google cache. Here's just the first part…

Bono, U2 in Fund-Raiser for Senator Rick Santorum

On Sunday, October 16, a truly unique political event will take place. Teaming up with the legendary rock group U2 for a one-night only appearance will be Sen. Rick Santorum (R-Penn.). The thousand-dollar-a-seat concert has been put together by Sean and Ana Wolfington and will take place at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia in support of Santorums re-election, reports NewsMax's James Hirsen.

U2 front man Bono is no stranger to Washington, D.C. He has come often to the nation's capital to network with politicians on behalf of his many causes…[snip]

Not long after the story was released, the following appeared on the newswires…

STATEMENT BY JAMIE DRUMMOND, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR OF DATA (debt AIDS trade Africa), THE AFRICA ADVOCACY GROUP CO-FOUNDED BY BONO:

It is not uncommon for politicians, from both parties, to organize events at all kinds of music concerts and other entertainment events. If any political fundraising events take place at a U2 concert, it is without the involvement or knowledge of Data, U2 or Bono. U2 concerts are categorically not fundraisers for any politician – they are rock concerts for U2 fans.

Shortly after, the original story was amended on the Newsmax site without comment. The beginning of the story now reads…

Fundraiser for Senator Rick Santorum at U2 Concert

On Sunday, October 16, a unique political event will take place. At a concert of the legendary rock group U2, Senator Rick Santorum will hold a fund-raising event for one night only. The thousand-dollar-a-seat fund-raiser has been put together by Sean and Ana Wolfington, and it will take place at the Wachovia Center in Philadelphia in support of Santorum's reelection.

U2 front man Bono is no stranger to Washington, D.C. He has come often to the nation's capital to network with politicians on behalf of his many causes…[snip]

In other words, the first story tried to suggest that Bono and U2 were throwing a fund-raising concert expressly for Rick Santorum and were, by implication, endorsing his re-election bid. The amended story more accurately says that a group supporting Santorum hopes to raise some cash for him by selling tickets to a U2 concert that was always going to occur.

That's quite a difference but it could, I suppose, be an innocent mistake. On the other hand, it's worth pointing out that in the past, whenever a news story favorable to Liberals or Democrats could in any way, shape or form be interpreted as inaccurate, Newsmax has always taken the position that someone deliberately lied.

The Bush administration is hiring.

As we surmised, the video of the Village of the Smurfs being bombed is actually a little more fully-animated than the clip to which I linked earlier. Here's a link to another newscast that includes the actual footage. [Thanks to Joel Wright for sending me there.]

And I have received three e-mails from people who wrote the old Hanna-Barbera Smurfs show telling me how they had longed to do that scene.

Radio Guy Paul Harris writes to answer a question that I posed here the other day: Does George Carlin still have Dennis Blair opening for him when he performs in Vegas? According to Paul (who by the way, is heard weekday afternoons on KMOX in St. Louis)…

Just back from a long weekend in Vegas (which I'll blog about in a day or two when I find the time), but with a moment free, here's an answer to a question you posed: Yes, Dennis Blair is opening for George Carlin in his current Stardust run — he even gets billing on the sign out front.

That's nice to hear, and not just that Blair (who's very funny) is still gainfully employed. It's nice to hear that Carlin allows him billing, which some headliners might not do. One of the things that helped kill off opening acts was that in the seventies and eighties, a lot of stars decided it was beneath them to share the marquee. It had to just be their name out there, as large as possible.

This is a rotten thing to do to a fellow performer and also to the audience. The folks paying megabucks for seats have a right to know what they're going to get for their money and to get the best possible show. They don't get that with a surprise opening act. They sit there all primed for the headliner and suddenly, a voice says, "Would you welcome…" and the opening guy becomes this unexpected obstacle between them and what they paid to see. It's kind of like you're all poised and ready to eat Porterhouse steak and just when you think you're about to be served, they say, "Whoa! First, you have to eat this salad you didn't ask for." If he's billed, he's part of the show. If not, not. A comedian friend of mine who opened for several superstars at Caesars Palace told me once that he got half the laughs when he was unbilled. Same routine…half the laughs because he had suddenly become an intrusion. That's annoying, above and beyond the obvious insult.

If you get to Vegas and Carlin's there, go see him. His act has gotten angrier but he's still the best stand-up working today, maybe the best one ever. And Dennis Blair is more than worthy of sharing that stage with him.

Michael Kinsley makes some good points about Supreme Court nominations and how ridiculous it is for a nominee to profess not to have any opinions on the big issues.