I'm not much into following sports but I've finally found one that interests me. Matter of fact, now that I've lost all that weight, I may start training for it. Here's a link to a video of my new favorite athletic endeavor.
And after you watch the video, you can read more about it.
One of the best comic blogs on the web is Dial B for Blog, run by the pseudonymous "Robby Reed." Oh, wait. I probably need to explain the reference here. In the sixties, DC had a comic book called House of Mystery and it featured for a time, a strip called "Dial H for Hero" about a kid named Robby Reed who had a magic device that looked like an old-fashioned telephone dial. Every time he dialed H-E-R-O on it, he was magically transformed into a different super-hero, almost all of which were new and never seen again after the one appearance. The comic was written by Dave Wood and drawn by Jim Mooney.
(Quick aside because if I don't put it here, I'll forget to mention it: Congrats to Jim Mooney, one of the great gentlemen of our business, on his recent and successful cataract surgery. I am told he's regained the use of an eye that hasn't worked so well for many years…and isn't that a wonderful thing to hear? He's probably drawing better than ever now, and he was already pretty darned good.)
Where was I? Oh, yes: Robby Reed. Well, the Robby Reed who runs Dial B for Blog isn't the same guy. I figured this out because the Robby Reed in the comic book was a fictional character. I'm not sure who the Identity Thief is who runs the blog but today, he's posted the first in a ten-part (10!) series on Ira Schnapp, one of the most important figures in the history of comic books.
Who, you may have just muttered aloud, was Ira Schnapp? Well, go read Part One of Ten (10!) and maybe you'll begin to get the idea. This is a long overdue bit of research and, as the saying goes, it about time.
Just watched Mr. Conservative: Goldwater on Goldwater, an HBO documentary about the late senator from Arizona and 1964 presidential candidate. I enjoyed it a lot and would recommend it…in fact, here's a link to a page that tells all about it, including when it airs again.
However, I had the faint sense of maybe (just maybe) witnessing some after-the-fact whitewashing of a man's life; of Barry Goldwater being repackaged for posterity as the somewhat non-partisan elder statesman he became, not as the darling of the extreme right that he was in '64. I suspect, just based on a distant observer's perspective, he would have approved of such refurbishment…and to its credit, the film does give us a good glimpse of the 1964 model Goldwater.
Still, one overwhelming message of the film is that ol' Barry was such an honest, outspoken maverick that even his old enemies loved and respected him. That may be true to some extent — the on-camera interviews praising him are full of Democrats and Liberals — but it's the later Goldwater they loved. They liked the guy who was no longer a force of any note in the Republican party and who said things like "Nixon was no damned good" and that gays should be allowed to serve in the military. They liked him because when he said such things, he couldn't be dismissed by the right as some wacko Liberal. He was, after all, Mr. Conservative, the one-time pin-up boy of the John Birch Society and defender of Joe McCarthy.
In fact, the main theme of the film — apart from the one about Barry being such a swell, candid guy — is that he was Mr. Conservative and those who now represent that movement are not. (This is also the main thesis of the new John W. Dean book, Conservatives Without Conscience, that I just finished. The book, Dean says, started out as a collaboration with Goldwater.) The documentary even offers us testimony from present-day right-wingers like George Will to wish that Conservatism was more like it was in Goldwater's day…though I doubt Will would sign on to every view that Barry voices in the old footage.
My recollections of Goldwater in '64 — and remember, I was twelve at the time — is that he was the poster boy for those who wanted to slow down the advance of Civil Rights (like, to the point of moving backwards) and those who wanted the U.S. to find an excuse to drop serious nuclear explosives on those dirty commies in Russia…or maybe not even to wait for a reason. Those might not have been his views. In fact, they probably were not, but he sure did little to distance himself from that mindset and whatever votes it could bring him.
I also recall thinking his campaign was just plain feeble. There's a skill to running for office…a skill that has nothing to do with whether the candidate is any good or not. It has to do with fund-raising and advertising and presenting the product (the candidate) in a saleable context. Lyndon B. Johnson and his operation were just better at it than the folks marketing Goldwater, especially when L.B.J. was armed with a powerful weapon: A martyred president whose legacy he could claim to be trying to carry forth. (You can hear and read Goldwater's '64 acceptance speech here. It's somewhat less radical now than it was at the time.)
I don't know whether this country would have been better off if it had elected Barry Goldwater that year…probably not if he'd governed as per some of the campaign speeches he made. Once it was clear he'd never get another shot at the presidency, and maybe once it was apparent that Arizona voters would keep him in the Senate as long as he wished to serve, the man changed. He became the iconoclastic, beholden-to-no-one gadfly that the documentary makes him out to be. I wish they'd obtained footage of an appearance he made on The Tonight Show shortly before his death in 1998. Jay Leno was the host then and Goldwater had that wonderful attitude of "I don't care what people think…I'm going to say what I believe." It was a wonderful chat as he bashed Nixon and Jerry Falwell and anyone who opposed gay rights, then turned right around with equally strong words against several prominent Democrats and their efforts. I think that guy might have made a much better president than Johnson.
Alas, I can't think of a single politician today who ever became half as famous and who would absent himself from partisanship that way and just say and do what he thought was right. Which is why I'd like to believe the Barry Goldwater they sell us in Mr. Conservative was the real Barry Goldwater.
There's a family-submitted obit for Berny Wolf up at the L.A. Times. Animation historians might want to check it out for more details on his long and varied career.
Gary Hart says the October Surprise is a U.S. assault on Iran which will be sold as necessary to prevent the mass development of nuclear weapons…but it's actually Step One in a neo-con plan for "regime change" over there.
It seems to me that in the last few elections, there were advance rumors of an October Surprise. Then the October Surprise turned out to be that there was no October Surprise. Anyway, I'm linking to Hart's piece not because I think he's right but because I'm hoping he's wrong.
My longtime pal (of close to 40 years) Bruce Reznick found something wonderful on the web. He sent it to me so I can share it with all of you.
Emerson College is assembling a library of oral histories of comedy. Bill Dana (yes, Jose Jiminez) and Project Manager Jenni Matz have interviewed more than fifty important comedians and comedy writers on videotape and a sampling of this material is available online. You can read the transcripts of interviews with Dana, Louis Nye, Don Knotts, Larry Gelbart, Tom Poston, Bill Persky, Ed Begley Jr., Jay Sandrich, Phyllis Diller, Dick Gregory and Jan Murray. There are also video excerpts of some of the conversations. Here's the link you want. Enjoy…and don't thank me. Thank Bruce.
Take the time to read this article in The New York Times that says that…well, here. This excerpt will give you a pretty good idea of what it says…
A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.
The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, according to several officials in Washington involved in preparing the assessment or who have read the final document.
The intelligence estimate, completed in April, is the first formal appraisal of global terrorism by United States intelligence agencies since the Iraq war began, and represents a consensus view of the 16 disparate spy services inside government. Titled "Trends in Global Terrorism: Implications for the United States," it asserts that Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.
Yow. If this is an accurate characterization of that report, then the people we trust to know this kind of thing believe the Bush administration has made the problem worse, not better. And sadly, it's probably true since the report issued last week by the House Intelligence Committee said pretty much the same thing but with only a tad less pessimism. It's hard to fathom why there are still people in this country who back George W. Bush because they think he's made us safer. But there are such people. Five or six of them will now write to me and accuse me of "Bush-hating."
I have to go and work on a script. When I next find time to post, I'll try and make it something about comics or old movies or something more important than this War in Iraq stuff.
Andrew Sullivan on how the Bush administration defines torture.
Y'know, I keep reading how military men say that torture doesn't work; that it simultaneously leads to us (in this case) getting information that is questionable at best while also ratcheting up the chance that others will torture our soldiers…and still, the U.S. apparently engages in it and Bush manuevers to keep some form of it going. Has anyone credible yet come forward to argue that, oh no, we get great, accurate information from torture and it doesn't place our troops in any greater physical jeopardy? I don't mean that to be as lopsided a question as it probably seems but I couldn't think of how else to phrase it.
I sense there are some people out there who simply like the idea of us torturing "the enemy" or even anyone who kinda looks like or might be part of "the enemy." These are the same people who are happy when they hear a car bomb went off in downtown Baghdad killing 80 people because they figure the odds are that there were probably a few terrorists or future terrorists in that eighty. Leave those people aside. Is there a sane case to be made for practices that fit a reasonable definition of torture? Has any genuine military authority come forth to make that case? Or is the only controversy here what constitutes "torture?"
Their site may be a little busy this morning but Crooks and Liars has posted the first 20 minutes or so of Bill Clinton's interview on Fox News Sunday. I suspect that people who never liked Clinton will enjoy it because they'll see him as rattled and defensive while those who like him will say he did a great job of standing up to the Fox News machine. Some in both camps may enjoy seeing a United States president who can speak without a script and manage to get both a subject and a verb into most of his sentences.
I feel a little (only a little) sorry for the interviewer, Chris Wallace, in all this. I think Clinton is right that Wallace and his Fox News cohorts have done a lot to advance Republican Talking Points of at least dubious accuracy, and haven't put tough questions to the Bush administration in the areas under discussion. But I think he's wrong that he was baited-and-switched with the understanding that the interview would be mainly about his Global Initiative project. The discussion wound up being so much about Osama because Clinton took it that way. Actually, I suspect both men were delighted with how the whole interview turned out. Even though Wallace got spanked a little, he got a newsworthy, highly-promotable piece of tape out of it…and probably a lot of gold stars from his employer. And Clinton got his view out and got a lot of attention.
And you'll probably like it because no matter how you feel about Clinton, there's something in there for you. Give it a look if the link isn't too slow because everyone else is watching it.
Thanks to a more conscious public and some sane legislation here and there, some aspects of the environment are becoming a tad more free of pollution and degradation. This is not the case with the tap water in my neighborhood. For at least five years, it's been undrinkable and now it's slowly becoming unshowerable.
Every so often, I run into someone with a mad on for environmentalists…someone who thinks they spread bogus warnings about disasters that are never going to happen and try to inconvenience people or businesses with preventing them. That's certainly so in some cases but not always. The many folks who warned us we were polluting our water supply were 100% dead-on right and the folks who insulted and mocked them were utterly wrong. We're all paying the price for not heeding that warning. There's now a $22 billion industry in this country selling bottled water…and that number doesn't even factor in what's being spent on filtration systems and Brita pitchers. I'm amazed people aren't more upset about this. But then I'm also amazed they don't do much more about high gas prices than pay them and grumble about it.
I resisted bottled water as long as I could…but when the liquid coming out of my faucets began to taste like I imagine kerosene tastes, it was time to go to the bottles.
Like most of you, I've tried just about every major brand. Happily, the one that tasted best to me was one of the cheapest — Crystal Geyser Alpine Spring Water. The only negative about it, apart from the fact that I have to pay for bottled water at all, is that the largest size it comes in is the one gallon container. You can't buy or have them deliver a big five gallon jug like I need to put on my water cooler. For that, I have Sparketts delivered and it's okay…but most of the time, I swill Crystal Geyser out of half-liter bottles. Cheapest place I've found to buy them is Smart and Final when they run their occasional "buy two cases, get one free" sale. In addition to any health benefits I derive from the water, I get exercise lifting those 36 bottle cartons into and out of my car.
My Crystal Geyser water comes from a spring somewhere on or about Olancha Peak, which is in the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California. Other parts of the country get Crystal Geyser H2O that comes from other sources so I'm curious as to what it tastes like. Later this year, I'll be doing some travelling and I'm going to make a point of sampling, for example, the Crystal Geyser water from Benton, Tennessee where there's a protected source adjacent to the Cherokee National Forest, which is surrounded by the historic Blue Ridge Mountains. (In case you can't tell, I'm doing some cutting 'n' pasting from the Crystal Geyser website.)
I like the Crystal Geyser product but I'm sorry I have to pay and lug around plastic bottles to have drinkable water. When people tell me now that we're doing things that are making our air unbreathable, I think I'm going to take them more seriously. I'd hate to have to carry tanks around like I'm scuba diving everywhere I go. I have a feeling even that won't make some people think the environmentalists are ever right but we need to do something.
Hey, whadda ya say we watch a cartoon? The Private Snafu shorts were made between 1943 and 1945, mainly to be shown to our fighting men overseas. Some were a bit educational and some were intended to drill some message into the soldiers' heads…but all were intended to be primarily entertaining. To that end, the War Department allowed the filmmakers to be a little more adult in their humor. Bob Clampett, one of the directors who worked on them, said that they became a repository for many of the jokes they dared not put into the cartoons they were making to be shown in American movie theaters.
Frank Capra had the original idea for the series and Theodor "Dr. Seuss" Geisel was their main writer. There is some dispute as to how much of Geisel's work made it to the screen and how much was supplemented by gag writers at the Leon Schlesinger cartoon studio, aka Warner Brothers. Schlesinger got the contract — which was originally expected to go to Disney — by underbidding Walt, then he turned the project over to his staff of directors: Clampett, Chuck Jones, Friz Freleng and Frank Tashlin. Mel Blanc supplied the voice of the hapless Private Snafu, who sounded very much like Bugs Bunny.
This one is entitled Booby Traps and it was directed by Clampett and released in January of 1944. The narrator you'll hear is a man named Robert C. Bruce, who usually narrated travelogues for a living, and who was used by the Schlesinger/WB studio whenever they did a travelogue parody, which was often for a while there. The cartoon will teach you a lesson that we all learned well from later Warner Brothers cartoons; that you should never, ever play "Those Endearing Young Charms" because the last note of the first line is always hooked up to explosives. That joke certainly did not come from Dr. Seuss.
Several Internet message boards have erupted today with debates on whether Osama bin Laden is alive or dead. I think he's alive but disguised as Tony Clifton.
The Writers Guild has posted a press release about the rally/picketing of last Wednesday. It'll tell you a few things I didn't cover in my reports, either here or here. There's also a link (WARNING: PDF File!!!) to the text of the speeches that were given that day. They were pretty good speeches, especially the one by Phil Robinson. Take a look if you're interested.
Donny Osmond has joined the New York cast of Beauty and the Beast, which is now entering its 700th year on Broadway. He's playing Gaston, and I imagine he's pretty good in the role…though not enough to make me go see him. But he'll sell some tickets to someone, which is what it's all about. I thought it was a pretty good show the three times I saw it…which were all, of course, sans Donny.
In the meantime, a rumor is circulating that The Producers will soon close…and the reported grosses would seem to bear that out. For the week ending September 17, the show played at 54.5% capacity, which was the lowest of all the Broadway houses. By contrast, Mamma Mia — which has been around almost as long — is filling 96.7% of its seats. I'm guessing The Producers is moving the bulk of its tickets via the TKTS half-price booth so its grosses are even worse than they might appear. This is a far cry from not-so-long-ago when Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick were in the show and people were paying hundreds of dollars over face value for tix.
But I find it hard to believe that The Producers will just give up without a fight. It's been quite some time since they had anyone in the cast with any sort of "name" beyond West 44th Street. I would think that before they closed the thing, they'd try bringing in a Jason Alexander or a John Goodman or any of a few dozen other stars who might make it into an event again. That's the idea behind Donny Osmond in Beauty and the Beast, after all. The only reason I can think of why the producers of The Producers might not try some stunt booking is because there's a huge deal in place to open the show soon at the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas. That production still doesn't have an announced cast or opening date. Perhaps they'll try to make it happen by using performers from New York…but that seems unlikely to me.
In the meantime, the Disney-backed stage musical of Mary Poppins, which is doing so well in London, will open in New York on October 14. I don't know anyone who saw it who didn't dislike it, in part because it strayed so much (and so fruitlessly) from the film. Over at the show's official website, you can watch a video preview that I guess is made up of scenes from the U.K. production. It seems calculated to look like they just brought the movie to life…so either the show has changed or they're engaging in some misleading advertising. Look on the left menu for the link to the video.
And while you're over there, you might want to visit the Beauty and the Beast website and see a peppy 30 second video ad for that show. Without Donny.
Earlier this year, I got semi-hooked on the NBC game show, Deal or No Deal. My interest went up and down but I generally enjoyed the show and managed to TiVo and watch every episode. I was struck by how its simple premise created such interesting scenarios, by the expert hosting of Howie Mandel and by the skill with which the producers made the thing work.
And — oh, yeah — there were also those 26 beautiful models. They mattered.
Yesterday was the close of Deal or No Deal's season premiere week. It aired multiple times with the top prize cranked up incrementally to six million clams. They gave away a lot of money on these shows and there were some genuine moments of tension…and once again, I found my interest coming and going…but mostly going. I think some of it's the repetition and some of it's the time-wasting moments. Early in each game, you have the contestant struggling with an offer in the low-to-mid five figures…and we all know they aren't going to take it. You can pretty safely fast-forward from the first Banker Offer to around the fourth or fifth without missing anything except some agony that is either bogus or needless.
I also find my interest impaired by my having attended a taping of the show, as reported here. Reading back over that post, I think I was too nice about how long they kept us there, how uncomfortable it all was, etc. The experience probably made me even more conscious of how "pasted together" (edited) the show is and I find myself looking at allegedly spontaneous moments, noticing edits and wondering, "Gee, wonder what actually happened there."
I still have the TiVo set to record each edition and for the time being, I'll still be watching. But unless something new starts happening, I think the ol' "skip ahead" button will be getting a good workout.
Lastly, a question: My understanding is that the offers from "The Banker" are calculated via a formula. The silhouetted gent you see on screen actually does nothing. Instead, as each case is opened and its amount is revealed, that number is entered into a computer program. When it comes time for a Banker Offer, one of the producers consults a screen which gives him a limited range and he can decide on any amount within those parameters. What he decides is relayed to Mr. Mandel on the phone and that's how the offers arise. My question is whether anyone has figured out the formula. There are a number of computer games that let you play Deal or No Deal on your computer or Gameboy or PlayStation3 or Waring Blender or whatever you have. Has anyone formulated a program that lets you calculate banker offers the same way the producers have them calculated? Just wondering.
Speaking of money, it's been a while since I posted one of these…
