The Washington Post, once so despised by Richard Nixon, has morphed into a (somewhat) right-wing newspaper. It's also becoming damn sloppy with facts. Yesterday, trying to argue that President Obama was undeserving of the Nobel Peace Prize, they offered an alternative. It should have gone, they insisted, to the late Neda Agha-Soltan, who died a publicized, defiant death during the Iranian uprising. You could certainly make the case for her to have gotten the award instead…except for the fact that, as James Fallows notes, the Nobel Prize rules prohibit posthumous honors. Why is an editorial about the Nobel Prize being written by someone who didn't do the five minutes of research necessary to find that out?
Recommended Reading
Frank Rich reminds us — and boy, do we need to keep this in mind — that in matters relating to Afghanistan and Iraq and where we should deploy our military — John McCain has been wrong an amazing 100% of the time. So have a lot of Republicans, neo-con or otherwise, but McCain is in permanent residence on the Sunday talk shows where he does a good job of sounding reasonable and moderate and prudent as he tells us how best to get our troops killed and to make things worse overseas.
Sunday Morning
My initial reaction to Barack Obama's Nobel Prize was probably a lot like yours: "Uh, isn't this a little premature?" And I do think on some level, it was bestowed because the Nobel committee wasn't allowed to give out a negative award to the Bush administration for achieving the precise opposite of what this award was intended to honor.
But as I read all the different op-eds and viewpoints, I'm drifting to the view of folks like Joan Walsh and Juan Cole who think it makes sense. I also don't think it's a huge deal if the Nobel Prize is given to the undeserving. The world didn't end when Kissinger got one and that was like giving a humanitarian award to Hannibal Lector. The Nobel Prize is just the opinion of a bunch of people whose names we don't know and whose actions we don't care about the other 364 days of the year.
Today's Video Link
Last week, Turner Classic Movies ran (and I TiVoed) There's a Girl in My Soup, a 1970 movie starring Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn. It was one of those "romantic comedies" where two people who seem like they don't belong together meet and eventually fall in love, then fight, then fall in love some more, etc. The only unique thing about this one was that…
…they don't wind up together at the end. I saw it when it first came out and all I could remember was that Peter Sellers played an arrogant putz, that Goldie Hawn walked around naked for about four seconds, and that the opening titles were kinda bouncy and cute. I couldn't even remember if, apart from the four seconds and the titles, I even liked it.
So I watched it again last night. I liked the four seconds, the titles and not much else. Here's everything I liked except for the four seconds…
P.S.
A couple of e-mails this morn remind me that I never mentioned here that Kirby: King of Comics also received an Eisner Award in San Diego in the category, "Best Comics-Related Book." But I was present at that convention and made the awkward, overlong acceptance speech there.
Thanks…
My book Kirby: King of Comics won two Harvey Awards last evening in a ceremony held at the Baltimore Comic-Con. One was in the category, "Best biographical, historical or journalistic presentation." The other was the "Special Award for Excellence in Presentation." Had I been present, I would have made two awkward, overlong acceptance speeches, much like the one I made in San Diego, thanking the family and many friends of Jack Kirby, Charlie Kochman and his fine crew at Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Neil Gaiman and all the folks who voted. And I would have added that it's pretty damn easy to put together a good-looking book of Jack Kirby art.
This Just In…
Police in San Diego have so far been unable to apprehend a serial bank robber. He's described as a man in his seventies who sometimes has an oxygen tank strapped to his back.
Alvin!!!
Steve Worth, over at the ASIFA Animation Archives, has posted a nice history of Alvin and the Chipmunks. He makes it sound like their maker, Ross Bagdasarian, started his recording career with "The Witch Doctor," then came up with the Chipmunks and never did anything else for records, which isn't so. But apart from that, it's a nice little summary of an impressive career, and there's some splendid artwork from The Alvin Show. I keep hearing that a complete DVD set of that fine series is coming out but it has yet to materialize. Someone oughta speed that process up the way David Seville sped up his voice.
Today's Video Link
Several people have written to ask me what I know about this. Answer: Very little. In 1967, the Hanna-Barbera studio produced an unsold (and apparently, unaired) pilot called The World — Color It Happy. It was to be a kind of anthology show mixing live-action and animation segments…and they brought in some formidable talent, starting with Hal David and Burt Bacharach to write the theme song, and Jack Jones to sing it.
Woody Allen was also involved, contributing a spy spoof. In this video clip, which just shows the opening and end credits, you'll see him listed, plus he also gets a writer credit along with veteran animation writers Michael Maltese and Charlie Shows. Makes me wonder if this is the source of an urban legend I used to hear around the halls of Hanna-Barbera when I worked there years later. The story was that Woody Allen had been hired to write an episode of The Flintstones and had handed in an unusable script that was essentially a Honeymooners episode set in the stone age. Among the things wrong with it was that it presumed the limited-animation Barney Rubble was capable of an extended pantomime scene a la Art Carney, and that it was all set in one room for the entire half hour. This never happened and Joe Barbera even told me it had never happened…but a lot of people believed it.
Hanna and Barbera themselves were to be the hosts in animated form. They were caricatured in a Jetsons-like opening (I think those are Iwao Takamoto designs) but they didn't do their own voices. Hanna's is done by Bill Idelson, who was famous for playing in the Vic and Sade radio show, and later in the role of Herman on TV for The Dick Van Dyke Show. Barbera's is done by veteran announcer Art Gilmore, who also did the rest of the voiceover on this opening. Also in the cast was actress Laraine Day, who just happened to be married to the show's producer, Michael Grilikhes. You can read the rest of the credits for yourselves.
The show did not sell, for which I heard (second-hand, so take this for what it's worth) that Barbera blamed "too many chefs," both in his studio and at the network. That was the reason Joe gave for most projects that failed, which doesn't mean it wasn't applicable. The whole thing was instigated by execs at Taft Broadcasting, which was the conglomerate that bought the Hanna-Barbera studio in '67. They reportedly were eager to turn their new purchase into the Disney studio and decided to start by imitating Disney's popular Sunday night show on NBC, which at the time was named Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color. Not only did the H-B version have a name that sounded similar but it also employed Paul Frees as a voice guy. Frees was heard often on the Disney series in many roles, including its occasional host, Ludwig Von Drake.
And that's about all I know about it. Take a look at this brief excerpt. It seems so lacking in focus that it doesn't surprise me it didn't sell…
Recommended Reading
Joe Conason is probably my favorite political-type commentator and reporter. During the Clinton scandals, he was one of the few voices out there pointing out how things like Whitewater and Filegate were ginned-up scandals based on nothing, just to smear Bill and Hillary and to make some of the scandal-mongers very wealthy. Ken Starr did everything in his power to sculpt those allegations (and Travelgate and the death of Vince Foster) into something indictable and couldn't. They finally found something to "get" Clinton with but it was something pretty petty, contrived and none of anyone's business.
The notion that Bill 'n' Hillary had committed crimes in Whitewater had about as much solid evidence behind it as the charge that Barack Obama was born in Kenya. That it went a lot farther — special prosecutor, talk of impeachment and/or imprisonment for that — had a lot to do with the so-called Liberal Media leaping on the allegations and giving them credibility. In the above-linked piece, Conason reminds us of how that happened…and suggests that those who were so wrong about the Clintons need to answer for their bad reporting. And since some of them are still in a position to do the same thing with Obama — and since his enemies are determined to treat every breath he takes as an impeachable offense — we need to make sure it doesn't happen again.
Nobel Effort
So Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize for…what? The beer summit between that cop and the guy he hassled? I dunno. I'd probably say the prez deserves it just for not being George W. Bush and for putting at least a temporary end to so many (but alas, not all) of the destructive international policies we had for eight years. But really, I don't know why anyone has taken the Nobel Peace Prize seriously since they gave one to Henry Kissinger.
Friday Morning
Happy birthday to the most Liberal cartoonist I know…Mike Peters, creator of Mother Goose & Grimm. And happy birthday to the most Conservative cartoonist I know…Russell Myers, creator of Broom Hilda. We've scheduled cake for 6 PM and the steel cage death match for 7. The weapon of choice will be India Ink at ten paces.
A Phishy Message
You may have received this. It's one of those "phishing" e-mails that tries to look official and to get you to disclose personal data that they can use to hijack your accounts. This one, which came to me the other day, struck me as setting some high achievement in presuming that there are computer users out there who are brain-dead stupid. Take a quick read…
Dear WEBMAIL ONLINE Owner,
This message is from the WEBMAIL TEAM users messaging center to all WEBMAIL ONLINE TEAM account owners. We are currently upgrading our web/data base and carrying out maintenances of all our e-mail accounts in order to reduce the rate of spam/scam mails. We are also deleting all unused WEBMAIL ONLINE TEAM account to create more space for new accounts.
To prevent your account from being closed unnecessarily, you will have to update us with the following informations below in order to know that it's a present used account and to also facilitate maintenance operation.
CONFIRM YOUR EMAIL IDENTITY BELOW
1.Full Email Address:________ 2.Password:________ 3.Country:_______4.Age:________5.Date of birth:______6.First name/Last name:____7.Security Question/Answer:______Warning: Account owner that refuses to update his or her account within Seven days of receiving this warning will lose his or her account permanently.
Thank you for using WEBMAIL ONLINE TEAM.
Best Regard,
WEBMAIL ONLINE TEAM®.
Seriously: Are there people out there who'll fall for this? They'd have to start by not knowing the name of the service via which they get their e-mail, which is almost certainly not named Webmail Online. They'd have to overlook the typos and stilted grammar which suggest that this was not written by someone who speaks English as their primary language. They'd have to miss the fact that the sender is telling you that there's something wrong with your e-mail but needs you to supply your e-mail address. And of course, the premise here is that your e-mail account hasn't been used lately so you have to give them your password and security info to prove to the company that hosts that account that you still use it.
Oh, yeah…and a bit of Googling reveals that the return address is not someone at this Webmail Online company. It's the e-mail of a professor at the University of Dhaka in Bangla Desh. If you replied, you'd think your message was going to him but it would actually go to another address.
As a reminder: Not all phishing schemes are this obvious. Don't expect they'll all scream "fraud" as blatantly as this one does.
Honoring Shel
The man at right in the above photo is Warren Beatty in the title role of the movie, Dick Tracy. The man at left is Shel Dorf, who is usually referred to as the founder of the annual event now known as Comic-Con International. And he was, though nods should go to several other folks who helped invent that wonderful gathering. I met Shel in early 1970, months before the first convention, when it was not more than a dream he spoke of with great enthusiasm. We became instant friends and apart from a year there when a silly squabble drove us apart, we remained friends. Shel loved comics and it's easy to be friends with someone like that.
Alas, my friend is not well. For months now, he's been in a hospital in San Diego with a pretty long list of ailments including kidney failure and intermittent heart attacks. I don't like to write someone off while their heart is still beating but his condition is pretty bad. I visited him a few months ago and he was unable to speak or recognize me. The nurse on duty said he occasionally has better days.
Several of the folks who worked with Shel to start the convention have set up a website to honor his achivements. There's not a lot yet on the Shel Dorf Tribute website but there will be more, including a piece I'm preparing. But take a peek at what Mike Towry, Richard Alf and Barry Alfonso have to say so far. Those three guys were there at the beginning and they know the magnitude of Shel's contribution.
Today's Video Link
And here's a video that someone showed us while we were at the Garfield offices. It started off to be a pitch to adopt this cat named Pinky and it turned into a fight for survival…