Someone named Marv Wolfman who claims to have been a friend of mine for 38 years sends the following…

You and I have trudged to the Souplantation a number of times but never during Classic Creamy Tomato soup month, and that kinda soup's my favorite. So after today's column where Wayne told his soup story, I did a Google search on the nearest Souplantation (they closed down the one near me in Woodland Hills) made my way to Godforsaken Northridge or wherever it is, and had dinner. Well, the very best creamy tomato soup I ever had was at an incredibly good (and expensive) restaurant sitting on a magnificent lake in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, the sun just setting out the window looking over the lake and I can tell you that soup was to die for. This wasn't as good, but it was close. Real close. Real, real, real close. As is the restaurant, comparatively to Alabama at least, and much, much cheaper. I had two bowls. You were right again, pal-o-mine.

I'm not sure I know this Wolfman guy but if he likes the Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation, he sounds like my kind of person. At the very least, he gives me the chance to remind you all that there isn't much of March left and that my favorite soup won't be at Souplantation (or its twin, the Sweet Tomatoes chain) for much longer.

(Also: Can anyone identify the restaurant in Alabama that this person visited?)

I've been corresponding with Wayne DeWald since around the time Richard Nixon was president. He just sent me this message. (That is to say Wayne sent it…not Nixon.)

After 39+ years it's not easy for me to impress the good Mrs. DeWald, but yesterday a flyer arrived in the mail announcing the opening of a Sweet Tomatoes restaurant just up the street — the first in this area. I quickly made the connection to your rapturous posts about the Creamy Tomato Soup and insisted we had to eat there soon. Tonight we visited Sweet Tomatoes and as luck would have, it still being March, Creamy Tomato Soup was indeed available — and delicious. My wife had two bowls which she thoroughly enjoyed. She was impressed — perhaps stunned is the better word — by my amazing culinary expertise. Thanks, Mark!

Many of you have written to say that the most valuable service this weblog has performed in the ninety-some-odd years of its existence has been to tout you onto the creamy tomato soup being served during the month of March at Souplanation and Sweet Tomatoes restaurants. There are over 100 of these establishments in fifteen states and if there's one near you, you might want to hurry there in the next few days. The Creamy Tomato Soup will probably disappear from most of them, some time this weekend. (At least at the one near me, they use a loose definition of when one month ends and the next begins. The March soups could be gone as soon as Sunday or as late as Tuesday. Whatever, you don't have long.)

But do us all a favor. If you like this soup even a tenth as much as I do, call the Souplantation/Sweet Tomatoes customer service line and tell them. Here's the number. There's also a way to send e-mail comments there but it's been my experience that companies pay more attention to phoned-in suggestions. Tell them you'd like to see the Creamy Tomato Soup become a regular selection there…or at least something we can have there more often than one month a year. I'm going to get a few "to go" orders and freeze them to eat in April but that's not good enough.

Stan Lee has a MySpace page. And it's really him.

Just had lunch with one of the three most talented people on this planet, Chuck McCann, and I'm taking him down to USC later this afternoon to speak to my students. (I teach Comedy Writing down there on Wednesdays. So if you see a future generation of comedy writers who can only do "mulch" jokes, you'll know the reason.) Chuck is an actor and a writer and a filmmaker and a voiceover genius and if I ever need to have someone do a liver transplant on me, I'm betting he can handle that, too.

Each year, he organizes the Brown Paper Pete Film Festival featuring short movies that are made in a helluva hurry. They give you six weeks and a topic and then they see what you come up with. This coming Sunday at the Fine Arts Theater in Beverly Hills at 1 PM, they'll be unspooling this year's entries, which are in some way about cars. If you're anywhere in the area, go and I'll bet you enjoy yourself tremendously.

In the meantime, if you click on this link, you can watch a film that Chuck made for some past festival…or something.

In January of '05, a man named Juan Manuel Alvarez did what has to rank right up there with the crappiest things any human being has ever done to other human beings. After what were reported as several failed attempts to take his own life, Alvarez parked his Jeep Grand Cherokee on some railroad tracks in Glendale, apparently figuring that the Metrolink train that ran along those tracks would destroy it and him. He also, just to add to his certain demise, doused the Jeep in gasoline.

At the last minute, it is said, he got cold feet…or something. Whatever his motives, he fled the Jeep and so escaped death or even injury when the train collided with it. Alas, others were not so fortunate. Eleven people died and close to 200 more were injured, some of them quite seriously. Alvarez was taken into custody and now, more than three years after the horrible incident, he's about to go on trial, charged with 11 counts of murder, one count of arson and a number of other offenses for which prosecutors are seeking the Death Penalty. Jury selection began today and in this article, it says the trial is expected to last through June…

…to which I say, "Huh?"

Through June? Three months? Why should this trial take more than twenty minutes?

I'm not suggesting they should just throw the book at the guy, schedule the electric chair and adjourn to Chili's for the Smokehouse Bacon Burger lunch special. Everyone is entitled to a Fair Trial and Due Process. I'm just wondering what they have to talk about that's going to take that long.

It is not in dispute that he parked the Jeep on the tracks, intending to have the train hit it. There seems to be some disagreement as to whether he really was suicidal and ever intended to be in the vehicle at the moment of impact but, in the immortal words of Dick Cheney…so? Motive and mindset are obviously important in some cases but do they really matter a lot in this one?

The lawyers for Alvaraz are apparently not going to argue that he was framed and that a mysterious one-armed man actually parked the Jeep on the tracks and made it look like Alvaraz did it. Their primary defense will be that, okay, you're right…because of what he did, a train was wrecked and people died or were maimed. But he didn't mean to. He thought the train would just hit the SUV, destroy it and him, and then continue its merry way along the track. It will be further claimed that the train striking the Jeep did not cause all those deaths; that they were the result of a chain reaction of events — this hitting that which hit that, etc. — which could not have been anticipated. It will further be asserted that Alvarez was emotionally distraught and not in full possession of his faculties…

…to which I still say, "Huh?"

Apparently, the three months (and they're saying it could be longer) will be to determine if Alvaraz was really trying to kill himself, and there will be witnesses for both sides discussing what he was like as a child and to what extent he'd ever displayed suicidal tendencies. So what we'll have here is the Prosecution arguing he should die because he didn't want to kill himself…and the Defense saying he shouldn't get the Death Penalty because he did want to kill himself.

This is silly. Either way, this man should not be free to walk the streets…maybe not for the rest of his life but certainly not for a long time. I don't see that it matters a lot whether he spends all eternity in prison or if he's executed…and I don't mean just that the difference doesn't matter to society. I mean, it doesn't even seem to matter to him. A lot of my general opposition to the Death Penalty is because I don't believe it's sagely enforced. I think it's applied to a horrifying number of people who are either innocent or just plain did not receive fair trials and might be. That doesn't apply in this case.

This whole story is a great argument for some sort of government-sanctioned program for Assisted Suicide. I think you have a moral right to end your own life…and if things are going so poorly that you're thinking of parking your SUV on the Metrolink tracks, we oughta help you do it in a neater manner. I've written here in the past about a friend of mine who ended his botched-up existence by leaping from the top floor of the tallest hotel in Manhattan. I don't know if his life could have been put back together with professional help but it sure could have been ended in a less destructive (for others) way. He did great damage to total strangers who were there that day and witnessed that horror, to say nothing of what the spectacle did to his friends and family.

Unmentioned in any recent article I've seen on Alvarez is a follow-up on something that was reported at the time of the tragedy. There was some question as to whether the injured and the families of the deceased had any financial recourse. The train company has insurance but the train company did not seem to have been at fault in any way…and Alvarez didn't have the funds to buy a bottle of Bactine, let alone pay for any of the destruction he caused. At last report, some of those injured were trying to recoup on huge hospital bills by suing the train company for not doing a better job of anticipating this kind of thing.

All of this — the deaths, the destruction, the injuries, the medical bills, the millions of dollars in legal fees from the trials, all of it — might have been averted if there was a place this Alvarez guy could have gone and gotten help, either to end his life or to help him save it. There are counselling services out there but they don't offer the option that Alvarez allegedly (if we believe his lawyers) felt he needed. I don't know if he did or he didn't…but if he was determined enough to do what he did, wouldn't it have been better if someone could have shown him a more efficient way to go about it?

Every so often, the software that maintains this site hiccups and something that I post once shows up twice or thrice on the page you read. Last night, I posted the previous message once and it somehow wound up on here four times. I deleted three of them but have to note the irony of four copies of a posting about It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

David Owen explains why we should get rid of the penny.

This is from Lars van Roosendaal…

I just read about your article "Spots Before My Eyes" on Animated News. As soon as I saw it was about a 101 Dalmatians song, I immediately remembered a song from the LP I had as a kid. Since I lived in The Netherlands, of course it was in Dutch, but the end is like: "…en honderd en een van die hongerige mondjes en honderd en een van die kwispelende kontjes, dat zijn dalmatiner hondjes!" (…and one hundred and one of those hungry little mouths and one hundred and one of those wagging little dog ends, those are Dalmatian doggies)

I was curious what you had to write about it and was surprised to learn this song is not in the movie. I can't remember seeing the movie, but I just adored my record, especially this song. It is so catchy I too can remember it after so many years. Although you wrote your record dates from 1960, and the song wasn't in the movie itself, my record is from the early eighties, me being born in 1977. I find it funny the song was used for a children's record in The Netherlands, translated and stayed on the LP even twenty years after it was skipped from the original movie. Unfortunately, I don't have the Dutch record here in Vienna, Austria…

Well, now you've done it. I'm going to be going around for weeks humming "…en honderd en een van die hongerige mondjes en honderd en een van die kwispelende kontjes, dat zijn dalmatiner hondjes!" to myself. Thanks a lot.

Now that I've learned how to embed audio links in this page, I'm going to share a few goodies, starting with the repost of something I put up here a long time ago, before most of you began visiting this blog. This is the demo tape of the late, great voiceover god, Paul Frees.

All voiceover actors have at least one demo and some have several — one for animation, one for narration, one for trailers, etc. Mr. Frees had a "one size fits all" demo. Actually, he had a couple different ones but they all had a wide variety of what he did, and of the three or four I have, this one's the best.

It's five minutes. Note to anyone who's considering a career in voiceover work: You would be a fool to make your demo five minutes. No one who can ever possibly give you work is going to listen to it and many of them will think less of you because you don't know that. You are not Paul Frees.

Actually, given his rep, his demo probably wasn't used primarily to get him work. It was probably more like a catalogue so that people who were already thinking of hiring him could get a fix on which Paul Frees voice they wanted. Even then, if Mr. Frees were around now and looking for work, this demo would be two minutes. The business has changed since his day and now agents and casting directors figure that if they don't hear something wonderful in about the first minute, there's no point in listening any longer. That's probably valid.

I once asked a top voice agent, "If this demo came to you from an unknown, how far into it would you get before you decided you wanted to take this person on as a client?" He said, "Halfway through the first voice on it." That's even discounting the most impressive thing about it, which is that about 80% of these are from real jobs Frees had, some of which were quite successful and loved. So was he, and I think you can hear why…