This is Sara Bareilles who, with a fine orchestra and backup singers, delivers a nice rendition of "When You Wish Upon a Star." I've always had a strange fondness for this song — strange because I really don't believe in its message. Wishing upon a star is harmless, I suppose, but if you want your dreams to come true, you're going to have to do a lot more than wish, especially because Fate is not always kind and often does not step in and see you through.
Still, it's a great song. Like almost everyone else, I liked it best when the cricket sang it but this is pretty good too…
I'm not looking at the news much these days but every time I do, I see articles about how the prosecutors prosecuting Donald Trump want him to shut up and I see "legal scholars" (the quotes denote that some of them are dubious in their expertise) saying that every time Trump opens his mouth, he confesses to something and hands them evidence to use against him. What is wrong with this picture?
Earlier today, I started writing but did not finish or post an item about how all this stuff about how the 14th amendment could get Trump disqualified from many ballots. I'm thinking that the wording of it seems too vague or arguable to me to achieve what many are hoping it will achieve. I'm still not convinced he'll be the Republican nominee but if he is, he'll be on all or most state ballots.
But I'm not going to finish or post what I started writing. A little while ago, I watched a new video by Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone. It's members-only at the moment but it should be on YouTube (and on this site) later this evening or tomorrow. He basically says the same thing but says it better with more backing in laws and precedents. So I'm going to let an attorney speak for me…which is something Mr. Trump oughta try.
This image seems to be ricocheting around Ye Olde Internet and several folks, knowing of my dislike for candy corn, have sent it to me. It's a sign for MJ's Steel City Sports Bar & Grill, which Google tells me is located on Cliff Mine Road in Coraopolis, Pennsylvania. Next time I'm in that area which I've never been to and can't imagine why I would ever have reason to visit, I'll have to drop in and try their Chicken Parm Hoagie.
Actually, I have stopped belittling candy corn since my sweet tooth went away, which mysteriously happened a year or so after my 2006 Gastric Bypass Surgery. I am still repulsed at the remembered taste of candy corn but now I also feel that way about Hershey Bars, M&Ms, Butterfingers, Reese's Pieces, Raisinets, Snickers, Milky Ways, chocolate-covered anything, etc. So it seems unfair to pick on candy corn. Cole slaw is, of course, quite another matter.
Once I post this post on this blog, there will be 31,182 posts on this blog. 238 of those are "encore" reruns so as you are reading this, there are 30,944 unique posts on this blog. There's also an additional 174 pages of other articles and essays. I cite these numbers partly to inform anyone who might be curious about this kind of thing but mainly to make those of you who haven't clicked on the banner below think you really oughta…
When a longtime politician reaches the stage of life when he or she knows they're never going to run for public office again, some of them become very honest and outspoken. Mitt Romney seems to be in that stage these days. There was never a moment when I wanted to see him become President of the United States but if in 2012, he'd talked like he does now instead of how he talked then, I'd have been less afraid of him winning.
Actor-musician-comedian (he did just about everything) Greg Lewis passed away this morning — peacefully, I'm told — after a long stay in post-hospital convalescence. If you're old enough to remember some of the great variety acts of the past, you may remember the world-famous Jerry Murads Harmonicats and The Harmonica Rascals starring Little Johnny Puleo. They appeared on every variety program back when there were variety programs including The Ed Sullivan Show, The Hollywood Palace, The Merv Griffin Show and The Mike Douglas Show. Greg was a part of both groups starting with the former at the age of 15.
Later, he was an actor, mostly of the comic kind, on shows like The Bob Newhart Show, Love Boat, Night Court, Everybody Loves Raymond and How I Met Your Mother and he always seemed to be busy. One of his big accomplishments late in life was an autobiographical one-man show called Some Greeks Are Not in the Restaurant Business which brought him great acclaim.
I have no idea what he died from or precisely how old he was. I just know that he was a fellow member of the group Yarmy's Army, that he was in show biz all his life, that he did a zillion different things in that biz and that he was a very nice, funny man.
P.S. ADDED SOMETIME LATER: Greg's daughter Anastasia informs me Greg was 88 years old, having been born on April 21, 1935 and the cause of death was heart failure.
Forty years ago, I spent about six days (cumulative) of my life writing the pilot script and small-b bible for a Saturday morning cartoon series called Dungeons & Dragons. In my line of work, you sometimes spend a lot of time working on things that, once they reach an audience, are consumed and quickly forgotten. Even some things that are considered successful for a while can fade from memory with the passage of years.
Ah, but every so often, you get involved in something that people remember and treasure and keep talking about. I feel like I have now spent more than six days (cumulative) being interviewed about this series. It went on CBS on September 17, 1983 and lasted three seasons. Do not believe those who claim it was driven from the airwaves by pressure groups who saw satanic subtext in the series.
It went off for the same reason most shows go off: Because the ratings were declining and — rightly or wrongly — the brass at the network didn't think it would have enough viewers to sustain another season. Yes, there were protests about its content but not many and CBS, at least in those days, was pretty good about ignoring such outcries if — and this is always a Big If — the viewers seem to want whatever is being outcried about.
It was a good show because of good writers, good producers, good artists, good voice talent, good everything…and I was mostly a spectator to all that goodness, having opted not to stick with it. Still, thanks to the gent who was my agent at the time, my name was seen for a micro-second in the credits each week so I get more kudos than I probably earned.
An aside to anyone who doesn't know this: If you're in the creative and collaborative arts and your career has any kind of length or breadth to it, you will often get less credit than you deserve for things. You will occasionally get zero credit. And every rare once-in-a-while, you will get more than you merit. From your point-of-view, it may feel like the universe is doing a big Make Good on you, overcrediting you here to compensate for the undercrediting you got elsewhere.
But you shouldn't expect others to see it that way. Someone else who worked on Dungeons & Dragons once took me out to lunch basically to tell me how much he resented my onscreen credit. Like me, he didn't work on every episode but he felt he deserved most of the recognition for the show's success. He said — and this is verbatim — "I should have had your credit" and didn't laugh when I replied, "You should have had my agent."
Quite recently, I sat for the video podcast below with a fine interviewer and a major fan of the series, Heath Holland. It's almost an hour and we talked about some other things but it's mostly about Dungeons & Dragons…
Hi. I awoke this morning to a flurry of e-mails from folks saying they were getting 404 errors when they tried to access this site. A 404 error, for those of you who don't know, is kind of The Internet's way of saying, "You have reached a dead end." Not all of you were getting that but some.
In the early days of this blog when that happened, all I could do was get on the phone to my hosting company, listen to "hold" music for what seemed like forever and then, if and when I reached a human being, report it. They'd usually have it fixed before the day was out. I got tired of that so I ditched my first hosting company (even though they were giving me space for free) and moved to one that charged money…though not a lot.
You get what you pay for so I finally moved to a somewhat expensive hosting firm and that's why this blog has been up 99.6% (or something like that) of the time. It's also why when I logged into their support site this morning, I found a notice that they're aware of the problem, they've already instituted a fix and it'll just take a little while for it to spread all across the world-wide web so no one gets that 404 error. If you can read this, it's reached you. This kind of service is why I'm now occasionally asking for money here.
You'd be amazed at the spam you get when you operate a blog like this. A lot of companies assume newsfromme is a big company with numerous staffers who must be paid each week and who sometimes take vacations. In the last few weeks, I've had several offers to be my payroll company, one inquiry from a travel agency that wants to help me book my crew for a week in The Bahamas, a sales pitch from a major office supply firm and a whole buncha other things I don't need.
That's a disadvantage of being a one-person operation like this. The biggest advantage is that over the 273 months since I started this blog, I've been named Employee of the Month two-hundred and seventy-three times. I think I'm way overdue for a raise and if you agree…
I just came across a bunch of polls in which Americans were asked if they think Donald Trump [or Hunter Biden and/or his father] is guilty of…and then the pollster named some sort of crime. As you might imagine, the results varied wildly depending on the party affiliation of the person being asked…and nothing else.
Seems to me they could get the exact same results by asking "Would it make you wildly happy if Donald Trump [or Hunter Biden and/or his father] was convicted of a crime…any crime?" It reminds me of all those people at Trump rallies chanting "Lock her up! Lock her up!" about Hillary Clinton. They didn't know what crime she'd allegedly committed. They didn't care. They just wanted her locked up.
Thanks to all of you who have donated so far to our little telethon here. It keeps the blog running and it makes me feel it's worth doing; not that I didn't feel that before but more is always nice.
Back in this post, I linked you to a video that purported to be of Los Angeles in 1953. Then in this post, I cited a reader of this site who pointed out that the copyright on the video said it was 1945. My buddy Stu Shostak thinks that despite the copyright date, 1953 is more likely correct. Here — I'll let him tell you why he thinks that…
If you look closely at all the cars, there are more from the late 40s/early 50s than there are from prior. Also, the film mentions NBC and CBS Television, neither of which existed in 1945. Neither started with any great presence until at least 1947 or 1948.
Stu may be right…I dunno. Can anyone who knows cars tell me if there are any automobiles from the fifties in the video? That would settle it, sort of.
I used to be real good at identifying the makes, models and years of cars. One could speed by me doing sixty and I could instantly tell you all that but the skill, which came from nowhere went back there just as mysteriously as it had arrived. And when I say "used to be," I mean around when I was twelve. Most of my permanent teeth came in and my ability to recognizing cars went away. I'm sure you see the connection.
Lastly: I keep reading articles in which learned men and women theorize as what Donald Trump's plan is for dealing with all his indictments and lawsuits. It seems to not have dawned on any of these learned folks that he may not have one.
Let me be among the 1,492 who are correcting you on an understandable error you made in your Bye Bye Birdie column. The 1963 movie was not Miss Ann-Margret's debut. She'd already scored major appearances in Pocketful of Miracles (1961) and State Fair (1962).
As much as Birdie was re-tooled to emphasize her, it does seem like it was her debut. Keep up the great work. I do enjoy your columns!!
You're right about everything, Jeff, except that it wasn't 1,492. More like 1,480. But thanks for the correction and you also reminded me that I've never told my Ann-Margret story on this blog. Three in the morning isn't a good time for me to be trying to write it out so I'll get to it in the next week or so, "or so" meaning (of course) before Christmas of this or some other year. Thanks to all of you.
Posted on Saturday, September 16, 2023 at 12:00 AM
…of our annual telethon and if I'd thought to do this over the Labor Day Weekend, I could do this imitating Jerry Lewis and bring out Max Alexander and Norm Crosby and I could have started the whole thing off with this musical number…
But I didn't think of that then so all I can do is tell you that if you like this blog and wish to help fund its very existence on the web…
