Category Archives: Uncategorized

You see the guy on the left in the above photo? Never mind the clown on the right. That's me. But the guy on the left is Chuck McCann, one of the funniest and most creative humans in this hemisphere. For those of you who remember Chuck's legendary kids' show on local New York television in the sixties, no more need be said. The rest of you came to know him from his movie roles, his hundreds of TV appearance, his commercials, his cartoons, his…oh, heck. If you told me that Chuck had donned a tu-tu and danced the Swan with the Joffrey, I'd hesitate to dismiss it as unlikely. The guy's done everything…and judging from the fan worship I witnessed this year at Comic-Con, most people know that.

But what they might not know is that today's his birthday. So…much affection and a big, candle-studded cake to one of my favorite people.

It's also the birthday of another one of my favorite people, cartoonist supreme Scott Shaw! But we have a one-birthday-post-a-day rule here. So sorry, Scott. Maybe next year.

Recently here, I mentioned that if you wanted a region-free DVD player, Walmart has a model — the Durabrand — that'll play just about anything and which sells for peanuts. I don't have one of these but a number of my friends have bought 'em and liked 'em.

And now they may have to send them back. Here's the notice of a product recall due to a fire hazard.

Our pal Jim Brochu is playing Zero Mostel in our nation's capitol. The Washington Times likes him.

The warring factions in the current Writers Guild election seem to have buried all hatchets, done a big group-hug and decided that it was all a silly misunderstanding that shouldn't get in the way of Guild Solidarity. Good for them, good for us. I am back then to voting for Elias Davis, though I must say that it wouldn't bother me if his opponent, John Wells, was victorious. And since I've now filled out my ballot, that's it as far as I'm concerned.

Speaking of Jerry Lewis — as I was in the wee small hours of the morning — his annual Labor Day Telethon is this weekend. As usual, it'll be different lengths in different cities. I'll be receiving two separate feeds on my little DirecTV satellite dish. KCAL, the Los Angeles affiliate, is running it from 6 PM Sunday night through 5 PM on Monday for a total of 23 hours. WGN in Chicago is running it from 8 PM Sunday night (L.A. time) 'til 9:30 AM when they stop for a baseball game. They resume with Jerry whenever the game ends, which TiVo says will be 12:30 PM and then it runs 'til 5 PM. Assuming the game is three hours, that's 18 hours. The San Francisco station, which I can't get on my satellite, is only running eight hours.

The P.R. handouts seem to have stopped describing the telethon as being any particular length. Last year, they said it was 21 and a half hours but KCAL ran a 23 hour version and WGN aired 18. Since large chunks of the overnight programming are reruns from earlier in the telethon, it can be almost any length, and I have no idea how many hours they actually do.

Announced as performers are Dolly Parton, Reba McEntire, Tony Orlando, Charo, Wynonna, Train, Bo Bice, Terry Fator, George Wallace, Lee Greenwood, Three Dog Night and many more. Betcha Dolly, Reba and maybe a few others aren't there on stage but instead pre-taped special numbers as part of concerts they were doing somewhere. There will be a tribute to Ed McMahon which will be repeated several times during the show.

A friend of mine tells me that this year, Jerry doesn't want any men on the stage with him; that all his co-hosts will be women like Nancy O'Dell and Jann Carl. But all the publicity still mentions Tom Bergeron as a co-host so I don't know what that means.

I'll tune in. I'll send some money. But I'll probably find myself waxing nostalgic for the day when it was a much bigger show with much bigger guests.

Okay, we finally have an answer to the riddle. Back here, we noted that Infinity Entertainment was bringing out a DVD of The Jerry Lewis Show and we wondered which of several Jerry Lewis Shows this was…or even if it wasn't a typo for The Jerry Lee Lewis Show. A couple of websites had it under both names.

The Amazon listing still doesn't tell you anything but your know-all spies here at newsfromme have gotten word. It is indeed the 1967 NBC variety show that Jerry Lewis (not Jerry Lee) did. The DVD features 10 hours and 40 minutes of the show, which I guess is something like the first thirteen weeks, sans commercials. Featured among the guest stars are The Osmond Brothers, Flip Wilson, Don Rickles, Joey Heatherton, Janet Leigh, Shirley Jones, Audrey Meadows, Lynn Redgrave, Barbara Feldon, Nanette Fabray, Imogene Coca, Ben Gazzara, Richard Kiley, Laurence Harvey, Harold Sakata and Nancy Sinatra. Personally, I've always loved the comedy stylings of Harold Sakata, to say nothing of his way with a song and dance.

I recall that series as being somewhat fun, though every week Jer felt obligated to engage in at least one sketch where he tried to wring every possible giggle out of a pretty unfunny and antiquated racial stereotype. I'm going to order the set and see how it all holds up today. Jerry seems to be holding up so maybe that series will, as well. Click on the Amazon link above to join me in this experiment or you can wait and see if I take one for the team.

My pal Gordon Bressack has written 'n' directed a new play that's currently running in Los Angeles at the Hudson Backstage Theater. It's called "Fuggedaboudit" and swamped as I am these days, I haven't had the chance to get out to see it. But many folks I know have had the time and they tell me it's very funny…so I'm going to try to make the time and maybe I'll even do it this coming weekend. September 4, 5 and 6, if you order tix online and enter the code word DONOR, 25% will go to OneLegacy.org, a charity that raises dough to help folks who need organ transplants. Gordon was recently one such person so the cause is near and dear to his new liver.

Gmail was down for a while today. The official explanation is over here but we know the truth. The entirety of Google (including GMail) operates off one old HP N3330 notebook computer with a 5GB harddisk and only 64 MB of RAM. It runs Windows 98 and the guy who has it at his apartment sometimes forgets to plug it in so the battery runs out and all of Google goes down. You'd think with all the money that company is making, they're upgrade at least to one of those cheap reconditioned Dell systems they sell at Best Buy…but no. Damn foolish if you ask me.

If you have a spare $12.9 million, you can buy the house where Groucho Marx lived for the last few decades of his life. But if you do, read the contract carefully and check out the sanity clause.

This morning's headline: "Improving weather gives exhausted crews hope." Well, that's something.

Okay, I'm going to bed. The current headline over at the L.A. Times site says, "Blaze consumes 105,000 acres, no end in sight." When I get up, I want there to be something there about an end in sight…maybe an estimate of containment for this awful thing.

I'll meet you back here in the morning and we'll see if that's happening…

Recently here, I said I was voting for Elias Davis for president of the Writers Guild of America, West. I still may be. But there's a new eruption in the battle between the two factions in the current election — his and the one supporting John Wells for the presidency. It's all gotten angrier and nastier with each side accusing the other of bald, premeditated lying. That's above and beyond each side blaming the other for the fact that our current contract isn't better than it is.

(I think, by the way, it's not a bad contract, especially when you consider the opposition we had to face down to get it. But one of the many things that soured me on WGA politics is that no matter what we achieve — and we achieve a lot — there are always members willing, even eager to piss on the efforts of others and say, "That's not nearly good enough.")

The current spat is an ugly squabble, especially because most of it's being played out in Nikki Finke's online column. If this battle has to occur at all, it should be waged within the Guild, not out in public where things become harder to settle. It also means anonymous and unverified commenters hop in to pour petroleum on the conflagration. It's always clear to me in such donnybrooks that while some who post are what they say they are, a lot are not…and some of them are the same person under a variety of pseudonyms. This does not help.

My ballot arrived today and is presently unmarked. It may just stay that way or I may still mark it for Elias, as he's always struck me as a good man and all the reasons I had for favoring him are all still valid. This is not a retraction of my endorsement…more like me saying, "Hmm…I may want to think this over a bit more." Or I may not. Having been caught up in many Guild brouhahas that I thought were destructive to everyone involved, it doesn't take a lot to cause me to wash my hands of the whole schmear, mutter something about a pox on all their houses and turn my back on WGA politics. I've done it before and I can do it again.

So I have to decide if I still want to vote for Elias Davis…but first, I think I have to decide if I want to spend more than five more minutes of my life thinking about Writers Guild politics.

Earlier today, I linked to a video of four guys singing barbershop quartet in Star Trek costumes. I've just replaced that link with one to a longer, better clip of the same fellows. If you watched it this morning, watch it again.

One other key point to keep in mind in this Disney-Marvel deal…

A lot of fans are wondering what this means about publishing plans…will the Marvel Masterworks reprint series continue? Will Marvel add a new Sub-Mariner comic? Will Aunt May either die or get resurrected? (I'm not sure if she's currently dead or not but if she isn't, she will be, and if she is, she'll come back.) Well, this deal is not about any of this. Take a look at the opening line in the L.A. Times coverage, and it's pretty much the same in all the reporting everywhere…

The estimated $4-billion deal would give Disney access to a library of more than 5,000 characters and help it strengthen its appeal to the young male audience. Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's CEO, will work directly with Disney to build and integrate Marvel's properties.

This isn't about publishing. Disney didn't say, "Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!" They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them. But Disney's interest here is in two closely-related areas. One is to be able to market all these great characters and the history that rounds them out and makes many of them beloved. And the other reason is to make sure nobody else gets 'em.

The best news for the comic book division of Marvel in all this is how unlikely it is that anyone at Disney will care much what they do as long as the department shows a profit. If it generates new properties that can be turned into movies and video games and iPhone applications, so much the better. But the future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn't mattered for a long time.

The big news today, at least for me, is that the hills are still alive…and not, sadly, with the Sound of Music. They're alive in fire and it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better. I awoke this morn to headlines that said the "Station fire" (that's what they're calling the big one) doubled in size overnight to 85,000 acres.

I'm not personally threatened. I'm a good fifteen miles away from it and the inferno would have to burn through most of Hollywood to get to me. I don't think anyone I know is in its path, either. Still, it's just scary and sad. Every so often, the wind is such that I can see huge, ugly clouds of smoke to the north. It's hard not to think of those clouds as someone's life, perhaps literally, going up in flames.

It makes me angrier when I think of how, for example, various energy companies stole billions from this state in the last decade. I know there's no guarantee that that money, if it hadn't been looted the way it was, would have gone to help battle the fires and rebuild. But I'll bet you we could be doing more than we are or will.

That's really all I wanted to say. I need to get back to work, need to put it out of my mind for a while. I probably also need to stop checking the L.A. Times website and even looking out my window to the north. Sometimes, the way I stop thinking about things is to write about them here.