Paul Harris has posted the audio of a long interview he did with Ed McMahon back in 2000. Paul's a great interviewer and Ed, perhaps by virtue of putting in all those years on Johnny's couch, was a great interviewee.

There's a joke about a sky diver whose chute doesn't open and a horrified crowd watches him plunging towards certain death…and then at the last second, a fluke gust of wind blows him into a haystack and he lands without a scratch on him. The onlookers all run up to the guy and one says, "My God…you're the luckiest man in the world!"

And the man replies, "No, [name of very wealthy celebrity who doesn't seem to have ever done much of anything] is the luckiest man in the world!"

These days when that joke's told, the inserted name is probably Simon Cowell or Keanu Reeves (is he still famous?) or someone like that. For a long time, whenever I heard the joke, it was Alan Thicke. But when I first heard it, the name in there was Ed McMahon.

It's unfair, of course. All those people do or did very popular things…but they had that sense of having gotten it all by chance, by being in the right place at the right time. Ed McMahon wasn't much different from dozens of professional announcers when he got the job working with Johnny Carson on a game show. He didn't do anything that others couldn't. Still, he fit right in and provided Carson with an anchor and someone to play off. At times, Ed's main function was as a kind of lifeguard. No matter how silly or bizarre things got, Johnny could go to him in moments of crisis and there was someone rock-steady to help him pull himself out of a hole. When Carson got The Tonight Show, he took Ed along as kind of security blanket.

A week or two ago here, I quoted former Tonight Show head writer Hank Bradford about the value of McMahon. Hank is aghast that while all of Johnny's successors — guys who now host that kind of show — cite Carson as the role model and the guy who did everything right, they all think they don't need an Ed. Carson never thought that. There was a period in Tonight Show history when McMahon's extracurricular activities, like selling Budweiser or hosting Star Search, caused him to not be there some nights for sidekick duty. Johnny finally sat him down and said that was not acceptable.

Ed was no dummy. He knew that everything he had, he had by the grace of Carson. His schedule was quickly adjusted, even though it probably cost him some serious money, so that he was always there when Johnny was there.

Before each show, he gave great warm-up. It was the same each night, almost word for word, but it worked. He delivered his employer a hot audience and then stood by, ready to be called upon if Johnny got into trouble or if Don Rickles needed someone to call a fat drunk. He learned Carson's timing and certain looks Johnny might give him that would cue his participation. One night when Mr. Carson said, "I'll never forget when I learned there was no Santa Claus…I was just devastated," Ed knew enough to jump in and ask, "How old were you?" so Johnny could immediately say, "Thirty-seven."

In person, Ed was a little bossy, a little phony, a little eager to prove he was more than Johnny's stooge. He occasionally tried acting or nightclub performing…never to any lasting success. He did a lot better as a pitchman or a host, but those were just ancillary perks of the Carson gig. Without it, he was just another announcer. In a way, it was perfect casting to have him doing those commercials where he'd go around, presenting contest entrants with checks that made them wealthy. It was one lottery winner passing the luck on to another.

This evening, Carolyn and I went to dinner at what previously was one of our favorite restaurants. We like the menu. We like the furnishings and the mood and the comfort…and we used to like the food.

About eighteen months ago there, I got a pretty sorry plate of fish 'n' chips. I'd had it there before and enjoyed it but that night, I got bad fish and bad chips. Okay, that happens even in the best of places from time to time. I didn't hold it against the restaurant.

A few months later, we gave 'em another try. This time, I wound up with bad prime rib and bad mashed potatoes…quite a surprise since mashed potatoes are pretty difficult to ruin, and prime rib is one of the signature dishes of this establishment. On the way out, I told Carolyn, "Get a good look at the decor…it'll be a long time before I bring you back here."

This evening, I guess I was in a forgiving mood…plus, I had a certificate for $25 off. So we gave it what turned out to be its last chance and I tried the fish 'n' chips again. The chips were bland and the fish had that taste that makes something in your tummy say, "Stop sending crap like that down here!" I ate one of four pieces and not only didn't like them but started feeling queasy. My stomach has always been pretty sensitive to faulty cuisine and since I had its size reduced, it's become even more apt to go rogue on me.

The waiter took a largely-uneaten plate away and I had him instead bring me a plain baked potato…which turned out to also not be very good. How do you ruin a baked potato? In this case, I suspect, by cooking it hours ago and leaving it in some kind of warmer for way too long. Carolyn found her entree (sea bass) edible but not wonderful, and when she bravely sampled what I had in front of me, she concurred that all was not right.

The manager came over — a well-dressed man who, Carolyn said, reeked of cigarettes. I didn't smell that but things were a little blurry for me at that moment and she was closer to him than I was. He was polite and asked that we give his business another try in the future…but he seemed pretty certain that the food could not possibly be at fault. He had tasted an untouched piece from my plate, he said, and it was fine. As further proof, he noted that they get a delivery of fish every morning. Not being at my best just then, I didn't think to ask, "Is it within the realm of possibility that your supplier brought you a piece of bad fish? Or that it hasn't been properly refrigerated since this morning?" But given his manner, I'm sure he would have said, "No, that is not humanly possible." And of course, no one else has complained about anything this evening or lately.

Bottom line: I was apparently wrong that the fish tasted awful and was making me ill.

Well, that was it for one of my favorite restaurants. Had the man said, "Well, of course it's possible something went wrong in the kitchen…we'll make sure it never happens again," he might have given me a reason to think things would be different on a future visit. As it is, if I give 'em yet another try and dislike my meal, I'll feel like the biggest ninny in this hemisphere…so we'll go elsewhere. There are plenty of elsewheres out there.

I had three thoughts after we left. One was to wonder why he thought I was complaining if the meal was fine. Did he think, "This clown just doesn't know what good food tastes like"? Did he think I was trying some sort of scam to get a free dinner? I was there with that coupon, after all. It meant I was a longtime customer — so obviously, I've properly appreciated their cooking there at some point. I was also not paying much for the meal anyway.

The second thought was this: The place wasn't very crowded. When Carolyn phoned for a reservation, she was told, "You don't need one…we're practically empty." They were, and maybe that explains why the food didn't taste fresh. When the joint is full, there are probably freshly-baked potatoes coming out of the oven every few minutes. When they're only serving one or two taters an hour, I'm guessing they bake a whole batch at once and then the spuds sit around for a while and get a microwave blast just before serving.

Which brings us with Thought #3: As we all know, retailers everywhere are hurting these days. In April, the National Restaurant Association reported falling sales for the eleventh consecutive month. I'm thinking that maybe if your dining establishment is losing patrons because it's declining in quality, you might not realize that…because you'd think it was just the bad economy.

I just stumbled across this and it's kinda funny. You all know Billy Mays, the guy who sells Oxi-Clean and Kaboom and…well, he can sell just about anything. Obama oughta hire the guy to sell his health plan.

Anyway, someone went out and registered www.billymays.net and another domain bearing that name and this person is hoping to get Mr. Mays to buy them from him at a profit. Click on the link and see how he's trying to entice his buyer.

I won't be there to see it but the Goodman Theater in Chicago will be mounting a new production of Animal Crackers in September. Apart from Cocoanuts, I can't think of another play where you have to get folks to impersonate exactly the actors who originated the roles on Broadway. When you do My Fair Lady, you might cast a Higgins who reminds people of Rex Harrison…but you don't get a guy and make him up to look like Rex Harrison and have him slavishly imitate Rex Harrison's voice. When you do Animal Crackers or Cocoanuts, however, you need to find folks who can replicate Groucho, Harpo and Chico…and if you want to be really faithful, Zeppo as well. (That's the hard part. There aren't a lot of good Zeppo Marx impersonators working these days…)

I dunno if the Goodman Theater company is doing what's customary in this kind of revival, which is to stick to the original text — probably a lot closer than the Marx Brothers ever did — but to interpolate other, more popular songs by the same composer(s). Other Irving Berlin tunes have a way of sneaking into revivals of Cocoanuts while hit tunes that Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby wrote for other shows often turn up in new productions of Animal Crackers.

I'm not familiar with any of the actors who've been cast but you can see their names, photos and brief bios over in this section of the Goodman Theater website. The most controversial choice presumably will be that Harpo's role will be played by a woman. In most productions of Animal Crackers, Harpo did a lot of chasing ladies around stage. It should make for an interesting subtext.

Thanks to "Shiai" for reminding me that I wanted to write about this. If anyone reading this attends, I expect a full report.

Statistician-analyst Nate Silver looks at the polls regarding health care and concludes the following…

The bottom line is that the health care debate is not really being played out in the court of public opinion. If it were, Congress would pass a robust plan with a public option that was funded by raising taxes on cigarettes, booze, and people making over $250,000, and we'd live happily ever after (or not). Rather, this is a behind-the-scenes fight at the committee level, where certain senators who have ample financial incentives to please the insurance industry have a disproportionate amount of control over the process.

I'm generally not one to carp about special interest money — seeing politics through that lens is often an overly reductive formulation that serves as a catch-all excuse any time Congress does something you don't like. But on something like the public option, which has broad public support and which would probably reduce — not increase — the long-run bill to the taxpayers, it is just about the only way to explain what's going on in Washington.

I'm quoting this because I agree with it. I don't always agree with everything I quote but I agree with this.

Fans of Spinal Tap will want to scurry to this BBC Radio link and hear this interview with the band and preview of their new CD. [Caution: May start playing immediately.]

According to this new poll in The New York Times, 72% of Americans favor the idea of a "public option" for health care. The question even wins (50% to 39%) among Republicans. A majority is even willing to pay some unspecified amount of higher taxes to ensure that all Americans have health care.

Of special interest is that "85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt, [while] 77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care." I take all this to mean that most of us are rather happy with our doctors…and rather unhappy that certain friends and relatives don't have what we have.

So what we have here is a situation where a substantial majority of Americans believe something is important…and a lot of senators and congresspeople are resisting because they're in bed with lobbyists and the medical industry. It would be nice if the public dialogue on all this were framed a bit more in those terms.

Noticing what today is, it occurs to me that while I often mention my mother here, I don't write a lot about my father. I guess that's because she's still (happily) here and he (unhappily) passed away in 1991.

A lot of people say "My father is/was the nicest man in the world" but mine really was. In all the years we were together, he lost his temper at me about six times…and in two of those instances, he later realized he was in the wrong and he came to me to apologize. I'd go to friends' homes to play and I'd literally hear more yelling between parents and children in one afternoon than I endured in my entire childhood. My friends' fathers were mostly the kind who would never, ever humble themselves to apologize to their kids. They thought it was a sign of weakness. In Bernie Evanier, it meant nothing but strength.

We hear a lot about dysfunctional families…so much so that I sometimes feel like I came from one of the last functional ones. There was almost no drinking. There was absolutely no hitting. There was, as I said, minimal shouting. At times, my father fretted he wasn't doing his job as a parent because I never got in trouble: Nothing to scold me about, no reason to administer spankings to try and put me on the right path. I was already there…in large part because of the example he set. He was also very, very encouraging without ever trying to force me into any career of his choosing.

My father didn't like at all what he had to do for a living, which was to work for the Internal Revenue. Didn't like it one bit. Because of that, he encouraged me to find and pursue something I wanted to do — anything so long as I could get up each morning and look forward to my job. There are times when I don't like what I have to write or who I'm writing it for…but I've only had this one profession and I've never yearned to do anything else. I have my father to thank for that.

He was a very compassionate man. Like most Depression-era kids, he was enormously frugal with regard to his own needs but generous to others. His forced occupation didn't yield much of a paycheck but there was nothing my mother or I ever required or ever really wanted that we didn't get. When in my late teen years I started making decent bucks, I tried to use some of them to give my folks a little luxury. This usually made both uncomfortable at first but especially my father. "I don't want you spending your money on me" was a phrase I heard constantly. A couple times, I had to fib to him, understating what something cost to get him to accept it or permit him to enjoy it.

He didn't hate very many or very much. Richard Nixon is the only subject that comes to mind, and some of that was personal because as an Internal Revenue officer, my father saw firsthand what the White House was doing while Nixon was in it. They wanted, my father said, to consciously and deliberately nail the poorer taxpayers for every cent possible while letting rich people — especially rich people who'd donated to the Nixon campaign — get away without paying what the law expected. Picking on the little, helpless guy…that was the kind of thing that got my father mad. If you didn't do that, he liked you. Which meant he liked most people.

He loved the Dodgers and the Lakers and was half-convinced that they couldn't win a televised game without him yelling at the screen. He loved my mother's cooking (and everything else she did) and the family cat and a great joke and…well, darn near everything except his job, Nixon and the kinds of things that any decent person abhors like prejudice and cruelty. He loved his friends, his family and all parts of his life that did not involve tax collection.

I lost him in '91 with only the normal regrets. After a parent passes, you often hear the child say, "Oh, if only we'd done this" or "If only we'd talked about that." I had none of those "if only"s. We got along great. There were no lingering, unresolved issues. He left this world, content that I could and would see that my mother always had everything she required. In a sense, I think he willed himself to go then…not that he didn't love life and want to stick around. Trouble was, if he'd left that hospital, he would have needed nurses and constant care and someone to help him dress. Perhaps worst of all, he wouldn't have been able to drive, which was something he loved — chauffeuring friends and family around. It wasn't that he liked cars. He just liked doing things for people.

I was so sorry to see him go but so glad he didn't have to live his last years like that. A close neighbor had and that was my father's worst nightmare: To be a crippling burden to his loved ones. Since I was an only child, he only left a couple of loved ones — essentially just my mother and me — but we miss him…and not just on Father's Day. We miss him every day. Father's Day is just a good excuse to say it in front of everyone and it feels so good to write this that I don't know why I had to wait for a holiday to do it.

I just went over to Salon and found a news item, the headline and first paragraph of which are reproduced below…

Obama and daughters snack on frozen custard
By CHRISTINE SIMMONS Associated Press Writer

Jun 20th, 2009 | ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The first family was in the mood for something sweet — something like vanilla custard, fudge and sprinkles. On a muggy Saturday just before Father's Day, President Barack Obama took Sasha, 8, and Malia, 10, to The Dairy Godmother, a frozen custard shop just outside Washington.

…and then it goes on to tell you that the president had a vanilla custard with hot fudge and toasted almonds in a cup and that Sasha ordered a brownie sundae treat with vanilla custard, hot fudge and chocolate sprinkles. And so on. That's really all this news story is about.

Below it, I found the following…

Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes.

Nice to know that on a day when car bombs and rioting are killing people in Iraq and Iran, the president taking his daughters for custard can still qualify as breaking news. If they spilled any, CNN would probably cut in with a bulletin.

Here's another article on that Supreme Court decision that says convicted criminals do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction. It still sounds screwy to me. I can understand that the High Court might decide this is a matter for the states to decide…but should an innocent person be sitting in prison because he's in a state that hasn't gotten around to upgrading its laws to deal with the new technology of DNA testing? Seems to me human rights and decency oughta trump that little obstacle.

Of course, I come to this situation with a long-held (and ever-growing) belief that our court system ain't as good as we'd like to believe and that innocent folks are convicted all the time. I felt that way even before DNA testing began exonerating convicts left and right. I also feel that most (not all) authorities go out of their way not to let convicted folks prove their innocence. It's too embarrassing, plus you can get sued. Better to leave the wrongly-convicted behind bars, even though that means that the real criminal gets away with it.

That really is The Perfect Crime, after all. Not only do they never pin it on you but they convict someone else…so they stop investigating and try real hard not to let him prove he didn't do it. Next time I kill someone, that's how I'm aiming to set things up.

I understand that in the case the S.C.O.T.U.S. decided, the guilty party had previously waived DNA testing, and that he'd also made confessions he has since recanted. He may well be as guilty as a body could be and is just grasping at the flimsiest of straws, looking for a way out of the slammer. But DNA testing doesn't take long and isn't expensive (the convict has even offered to pay the costs) and it has a way of settling things, once and for all. It would have taken a lot less of the government's time and money to test the DNA, rather than let this thing linger on through appeals. Moreover, doesn't the state have a compelling interest in proving they got the right guy? Even if it turns out he's guilty?