It's worrisome to learn, as this article explains, that your iPhone has been tracking and recording your movements since June. Hey, never mind you. It's really worrisome that my iPhone has been tracking me since June. It's logged a trip to the Comic-Con in San Diego, a visit to Indiana, two excursions to San Francisco, 17 trips to Souplantation for Creamy Tomato Soup, 935 trips to a Ralphs Market to buy cat food and sometimes food for me, etc.
Since I haven't been anywhere I shouldn't have been, I'm not worried about sizzling revelations. I do think though it's a real bad precedent for a product to do this without telling us and without including a little "off" switch. Let's see what the Apple folks do in that direction.
Why is this post different from all the other posts I've posted? This one was sent from my new iPad. If you can read this, I've just figured out how to blog from my new iPad. If you can't read this, never mind.
Speaker of the House John Boehner keeps saying the country is broke. But there's always money to use when it comes to trying to deny basic civil rights to gays.
Speaking of Laurel and Hardy, as we often do here: Richard Bann, who knows more about their movies than I could ever hope to know, has penned a long and informative article about film preservation and how the films of Stan and Ollie have been handled over the years. It's sad and horrifying how many great films no longer exist because someone needed shelf space or didn't want to spend a few bucks on restoration.
Down in the dumps today, bubbie? Well, here's a happy little tune…and if it sounds familiar, it's because it's out of a music library and you've heard it many times in commercials and cartoons. But it's a great way to cheer up and I've embedded it in a little audio player below…
Republicans say we don't have a revenue problem in this country…we have a spending problem. David Weigel says we have both and that you're not serious about tackling either unless you're willing to deal with both.
If you're in Southern California and would like to see Dick Van Dyke in person, you have three upcoming opportunities that I know of. There will probably be many, here and in other towns, since he's going to be out promoting his new autobiography, My Lucky Life In and Out of Show Business: A Memoir. The book comes out May 3 and you can advance order it here.
He'll be signing copies on Tuesday, May 10 at the big Barnes and Noble in The Grove here in Los Angeles at the Farmers Market. (For those of you in New York, he'll be at the Union Square Barnes and Noble on Wednesday, May 4. I assume we'll see him on many of the New York-based talk shows that week, as well. By the way, the Barnes and Noble in The Grove will have Albert Brooks there on May 17 signing his new novel.)
Even better is what happens the evening of May 31 in Beverly Hills. I have written here before about a fine group called Writers Bloc which stages events where one celebrity interviews another, then the one who has a new book out signs copies for those who wish to purchase one. They did that Dick Cavett-Mel Brooks evening I wrote about. On May 31, they have Carl Reiner interviewing Dick Van Dyke. How can that not be wonderful? If you want to attend, get a reservation now because it's not a big theater and it'll sell out before long.
(And here's another by-the-way: On May 12, the very same Mr. Reiner is interviewing Betty White at another Writers Bloc evening.)
Mr. Van Dyke will also be performing July 29 and 30 at the Hollywood Bowl along with Michael Feinstein in an evening called "Michael Feinstein and the Singing Stars of Television." And he told some of us on Sunday evening that he expected to restart his one-man show at the Geffen Playhouse. You may recall that it closed after one night due to an injury to its one man.
All in all, it looks like a good couple of months for Dick Van Dyke fans in the Southland. I may see you at a couple of these events.
This blog has gone too long without any Laurel and Hardy on it…and I suppose I should have clarified that Dick Van Dyke is my favorite contemporary performer. Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy were my favorite all-time performers…and probably Dick Van Dyke's, as well.
This is a clip from Los Calaveras, which is one of the films they made in a foreign language — in this case, Spanish — for the foreign market. Before it was technically feasible to dub or subtitle American movies, this was how they were exported overseas. Stan and Ollie actually filmed several of their films in English, then went back and did the dialogue scenes again in Spanish, German and/or French.
For the foreign versions, some new actors were brought in who were fluent in the language in question. Stan and Oliver spoke naught but English so a translator-coach would write their dialogue out on a blackboard just outside of camera range and The Boys would read the equivalent of phonetic cue cards. Apparently, the awkwardness of their speech was endearing to many audiences in other lands. In this clip, you can see Hardy especially glancing over to where the words are. You also see a brief appearance by Charlie Hall, a British actor who turned up in a lot of made-in-English Laurel and Hardy comedies and who probably had to learn his few words in a tongue he didn't speak.
Los Calaveras was, by the way, a short feature made for Spanish-speaking audiences by linking together two shorts made for America — Be Big and Laughing Gravy — along with some newly-written scenes that connected the two. The scenes below were all a part of the Be Big section…
Dave Gilson explains how wealthy folks get away without paying much (sometimes, anything) in taxes. Back when my father worked for the Internal Revenue Service, it was a lot simpler. You just became a donor to the campaign of Richard Nixon. Then you lied and cheated outrageously on your taxes, doing things like claiming the entire population of Paraguay as dependents or overlooking 90% of your income. Then if you got caught, you called certain Nixon associates and they'd arrange for the I.R.S. to settle your case for a few cents on the dollar. The first time I ever paid taxes — a few hundred dollars — my father mentioned the names of three or four very rich Nixon buddies he'd been assigned as cases…cases which had suddenly been yanked out of his hands and either dropped or settled for peanuts. And he said, "Last year, those guys collectively made about ten million and you're paying more taxes than all of them put together."
The author of this blog and his favorite performer — both a bit out of focus due to cell phone photography.
As I related here, I went to see a filming of The Dick Van Dyke Show when I was twelve. I cannot count the ways in which that evening changed my life, all of them for the better. I'd always wanted to be a writer. I have no memory of a time when I didn't want to be a writer. But it was at that filming that I realized I wanted to be a TV writer, not necessarily to the exclusion of other venues.
I also wanted to be — well, I'm not sure if I wanted to be Dick Van Dyke or Rob Petrie or even if it was possible to make much of a distinction. I know I didn't want to be a performer so I guess I wanted to be Rob. He only had to perform at parties and he got to sleep with Laura. I mentioned something in the above-linked article but a moment like the one I'm about to describe deserves more attention. It was the moment when Mary Tyler Moore walked onto the set and passed about six feet in front of me.
She was 28 years old and if I thought she looked great on my TV at home — which I did — I was unprepared for the sight of her live and in color. If Satan had appeared and said, "You can have one year of hugging this woman and staring at her all day but then I will have your soul and you will rot in the bowels of Hell for all eternity," he would have had a deal. On the spot, no questions asked. I wasn't even thinking of sleeping with her, not even in the Petries' twin beds. I just wanted to be around her and I admired/envied Dick/Rob because he was. (Sixteen years later, I actually met Ms. Moore and in a move worthy of Rob Petrie at his Petriest, I started things off by stepping on her left foot — the same one Rob broke in the episode about how he and Laura met.)
So I wanted to be Dick and/or Rob because that's the kind of guy who got to be around women like that…but there were other reasons. Dick/Rob was cool. He was funny. People liked being around him. He was friends with one of my other favorite performers, Stan Laurel, and did a darned good impression of the guy. He could sing. He could dance. He could deliver a joke. On the set of The Dick Van Dyke Show that evening, there was a delay for technical reasons. It was the flashback episode where Rob and Laura bought their house and Mr. Van Dyke was holding a business card that the actor playing the realtor had just handed him. Instantly, to keep the audience amused, Van Dyke began doing sleight of hand, back-palming the card to make it disappear and appear and disappear and appear.
And I sat there and thought, "Boy, he can do anything." Where I guess I leaned more towards wanting to be Dick was because Rob was a klutz — the kind of guy who'd step on the foot of a woman he'd always wanted to meet — whereas Dick was just so darned good at everything he did.
That's about how he's always been. When people make fun of his English accent in Mary Poppins, I think they do so because that's like the only thing they can nail him on. And they still usually admit that he was wonderful in that movie, along with all the rest, even the crummy ones. I haven't liked everything he's been in but I've always liked him.
Which I guess is all I really wanted to say here. There's no real point to this whole mini-essay except to say how much I've always liked Dick Van Dyke. If you've gotten that idea by now, I guess we can move on.
People keep asking me, "What's up with Groo? When are we going to see more Groo? What's with this 'Groo vs. Conan' thing we've heard about? What are you doing here? Why don't you go away? What's the deal with your hair?" Those kinds of questions.
I can't answer any of them but this article will tell you what's up with the Groo-related ones.
