I cribbed this from Atrios, who is one of the leading left-wing bloggers. It's a paragraph from an honest-to-God news item…
Bush told his senior aides Tuesday that he "didn't want to see any stories" quoting unnamed administration officials in the media anymore, and that if he did, there would be consequences, said a senior administration official who asked that his name not be used.
Wouldn't it be embarrassing to be the guy who got fired for leaking that one?
Clark J. Holloway has some great web pages about comic strips. Here's a terrific history of Bringing Up Father (aka "Maggie and Jiggs"). And here's another one devoted to Alley Oop.
Someone just sent me a transcript of the 1978 Playboy magazine interview with David Frost. This was conducted just after Frost had conducted his historic interviews of Richard M. Nixon. To Playboy, he told the following anecdote which I've always thought was indicative of something quite amazing (I'm not sure what) about our thirty-seventh president…
Small talk, of course, is never easy with Nixon. For instance, one day, Nixon — wanting to be one of the boys — turned to me as we strolled in to start taping and said, "Did you do any fornicating this weekend?" And I just could not believe he'd said that. Quite apart from the fact that lovers use the word fornicating about as regularly as newsmen say, "Well, we've managed to trivialize matters again tonight, Henry." I mean, I just couldn't believe it. One almost had to warm to the sheer clumsiness of it all. It really did fascinate me that Nixon could have gotten through 30 years of politics, of attending countless fund raisers and such, and still be so bad at small talk.
One thing that's interesting about it is that as the transcripts of the infamous White House tapes show, Nixon was not at all reticent about using the more common "f" word around his buddies and underlings. Leaving aside the question of why he would even inquire about David Frost's sexual exploits, you have to wonder why the choice of the word, "fornicating?" Was it because Frost was British? Did he talk to Margaret Thatcher that way?
I haven't mentioned Spinsanity lately so here's a mention of the most rational political site on the web. The folks there debunk and fact-check articles and speeches by prominent politicos and commentators from all corners of the political spectrum. They just posted a bunch of articles that catch Michael Moore, Bill O'Reilly and William Safire distorting the truth, as well as various people who've recently attacked Wesley Clark and John Ashcroft with bogus data. I wish there were more websites that could recognize bullshit from other than their political opponents.
Cartoonist Fred Hembeck posts a fond remembrance of the work of the late Pete Morisi.
In 1974, the National Lampoon folks published one of their crowning achievements: A mythical 1964 high school yearbook owned by student Larry Kroger. The yearbook was written by Doug Kenney and Michael O'Donoghue, and its art direction and photos were as funny as its text. The book went through several printings and was obviously much-treasured by those who purchased it. Copies rarely turn up on eBay or in used book shops, so it was about time the current National Lampoon proprietors (whoever they are, this week) reprinted the thing. Here's the link to order a copy of the new edition which is in hardcover and which contains a new foreword by P.J. O'Rourke and a "Where Are They Now?" feature which presumably notes that Larry Kroger went on to college where he pledged National Lampoon's Animal House.
I say "presumably" because I haven't seen a copy of the reissue, though I've ordered one. I'm told the printing is not ideal and that the whole thing is on one paperstock, whereas the original printing involved several in order to better simulate a real yearbook and various inserts. But since you're not about to find an original for $14 or anything near that, this should be well worth having.
By the way: I just realized that the movie, National Lampoon's Animal House, was set in 1962 but Larry Kroger's high school yearbook is from 1964. So maybe it's a different Larry Kroger.
Here's a piece about Triumph the Insult Comic Dog from the Conan O'Brien show. But really, it's about Robert Smigel who works the puppet and does a lot of other funny things.
Buzz Dixon is a fine writer and one of my favorite people, even though he and I rarely mark our ballots the same way. He writes the following about the matter of Mr. Limbaugh and his pill-popping…
There's actually a 4th position out there, but one that isn't getting a lot of airplay/bloggage. This is not because this POV is being deliberately blocked so much as the people holding it have a wait-and-see attitude. These are the supporters of Rush Limbaugh who are very troubled by the hypocrisy of his words vs. his deeds re his drug use. We're waiting to see what he has to say when he gets out of treatment. Anything less that an open admission he was a hypocrite when he advocated strict punishment of drug abusers is not going to fly with this group. Acknowledgement of hypocrisy would have to be followed by sincere steps to insure his listeners it will not happen again.
He is, roughly speaking, in the same place Jimmy Swaggart was when he was caught peeking at prostitutes' privates a decade or so ago. It is possible for him to regain much (but not all) of the lost trust through contrition and genuine reform of his habits. However, if he fails that trust again as Swaggart did then he will lose all mainstream credibility and have only hard core easy-to-dismiss followers. I don't want that to happen. I want the man to rebuild as much of his credibility as he can, but if he is not honest enough with his audience to acknowledge he was a hypocrite then he will lose all credibility with most of them.
You may be right, Buzz, but I'm doubtful. I haven't listened to Rush in years but when I did, it struck me that his main appeal involved reassuring conservative listeners that the world was just the way they wanted to believe it was. When the news was bad for Democrats, he spun it so it was worse. When the news was bad for Republicans, he spun it so it was bad for Democrats. When a caller veered close to facts that called his interpretation into question, he cut them off and gave himself the last word to explain why they were not only wrong but why anyone who suggested whatever the caller was trying to say was ignorant and could be ignored. Rush is a smart guy and at times, tremendously entertaining. But I think his act is all about playing to an audience that likes to see things through the filter he provides and they'll be eager to believe whatever he has to say.
My guess is he'll emerge from rehab proclaiming not only that he's clean but that that proves that anyone with a drug dependency can lick it in thirty days if they really want to accept personal responsibility. He'll portray his problem as medicinal and argue that since he didn't start taking the drugs for recreational use, it's completely different from the addictions that crack whores and other users bring on themselves. He'll hint that he was "set up" for the bust, congratulate himself on licking his problem, and thereafter urge that people show compassion for those who have his particular, non-intentional kind of addiction. Since he's white and wealthy and powerful, he will pay a token fine and receive some sort of suspended sentence or probation…or less. And the vast majority of his listeners will buy every word of it and admire him all the more for his courageous stance.
You could be right. But if you're waiting for the guy to say, "I've been a hypocrite," I think you'll be waiting for a long time.
Most of the commentaries I've seen about Rush Limbaugh and his druggie dilemma struck me as either…
I think I'm with the subset of the second group…the ones who really mean it. And the most interesting comments I've read so far on the whole situation are these by Bill Maher. Who knows a thing or two about drug use.
There's a lot of neat stuff amidst the pop-up ads at IGN Filmforce. I enjoyed reading this just-posted interview with Penn Jillette. And while I was over there, I also enjoyed this older interview with Stephen Colbert of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart. Both were conducted by Ken Plume, who is a darn good interrogator of interesting people.
Full details are now available on The Complete Peanuts, the reprint series we told you about here. If you go to this message board page, you can read all about this forthcoming series and begin computing how much it's going to set you back. This is a terrific project, especially because so many of the early Peanuts strips have never been reprinted in any form. I personally think Charles Schulz hit his stride in the mid-sixties but from what I've seen of the first 10-15 years, we're in for a real treat. It was never anything less than a great strip, not even when Schulz was fiddling with his characters, randomly changing their ages and attitudes and finding his unique voice. Clear a bookshelf now.
In the National Post, Jeet Heer offers an overview of the careers of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby.
There are a couple of things in it that seem to me like errors. Stan Lee's real name is Stanley Lieber, not Leiber. (The article also misspells the name of Jordan Raphael, whose book is being reviewed in the process.) I'd take issue with the claim that Kirby changed his name because he was "slightly ashamed of his immigrant roots" or that he was ever reticent to talk about his war experiences. Most of Jack's friends would say that he never concealed his heritage and that you couldn't shut him up with the World War II stories. Joe Simon was not his "childhood chum." They met less than two years before doing Captain America, who was created before Stan Lee began working at Timely Comics, not after as is implied.
But otherwise, the article makes some good points and gives a good assessment of the importance of the two men. I think the analogy of Lee and Kirby as the "Lennon and McCartney of comics" only goes so far but fortunately, Heer doesn't take it too far. Take a look.
As others have noted, The Hallmark Channel is now running episodes of M*A*S*H uncut. Each night starting at 10 PM (7 PM for those of us on the West Coast with satellite dishes), four shows are run and in order to accommodate the usual cable channel number of commercials, the shows run longer than a half hour. The first starts at 10:00, the second at 10:36, the third at 11:12 and the fourth at 11:48.
Interestingly, though TiVo and most of the online guides seem to know about this, the Hallmark Channel's website seems utterly unaware. It presently has the shows starting at 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 and 11:30…and then the show after starts at 12:30, which is also wrong. Actually, the show following starts at 12:25 and runs for two hours and four minutes, ending so that the show after that (usually a Rifleman rerun) which is listed as starting at 2:30 starts at 2:29.
To further confuse people, the same four M*A*S*H episodes are run twice a day and in the earlier airing, they are cut. Tomorrow at Noon, you can tune in and see "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (that's the one about a cold snap making everyone in camp miserable) in a half-hour slot, which means that they'll cut four and a half minutes to accommodate more commercials. Then later that evening, you can tune in and see "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in a 36-minute slot with nothing cut.
You wonder where all this is heading. Is this a test to see if uncut episodes will draw a larger audience? If the response shows that people really like the shows without the trims, will Hallmark or some cable channel experiment with reducing the number of commercials (and charging more for the ones they do run) and putting the shows in half-hour slots? Or might we be heading towards a day when they'll run everything uncut and let shows start and end whenever they start and end?
In the meantime, Game Show Network is going the other way with this. They used to run three old black-and-white game shows early in the A.M., uncut but each in a 40 minute slot. Starting next week, those two hours will be filled with four shows, so there will presumably be some cutting. I don't know what the thinking is behind this but if it's because the ratings on those shows have been going down, I think I know the reason. Both the I've Got A Secret and What's My Line? shows have gotten a bit stale from being rerun over and over, and the few commercials, which repeat ad nauseam during the two-hour block, have long since passed the saturation level. During them, I'm now tempted to grab up the phone, call the 800 number and offer to buy a dozen of those damn dog grooming brushes if they will just limit the commercial to two runs per night. And I don't even have a dog.
Here's a link to an obit for Pete Morisi in the newspaper, The Staten Island Advance.
Pete Morisi, known to fans of Charlton comics as "P.A.M.," died yesterday at Staten Island University Hospital. So far, we've heard nothing about a cause of death but I'll tell you what I can about his life and times. Peter A. Morisi was born in the Park Slope area of Brooklyn in 1928 and grew up there, dreaming of being either a policeman or a comic book artist. He opted for the latter and wound up studying, like about half the comic artists of his generation, at the School of Industrial Arts in New York. He occasionally assisted on newspaper strips (Dickie Dare, The Saint and the Dan Barry Flash Gordon) but devoted most of his career to comic books and another, unrelated occupation, which we'll get to. His first comic book work appears to have been for Fox Comics in 1948, where he sold a few stories before being drafted into the Army.
While stationed in Colorado, he wrote a number of scripts for that company's romance and crime comics, and even managed to draw a few stories, including a short-lived strip called "Lionus the Cruel." Upon his return to New York in 1950, he worked for Quality Comics, Timely (now Marvel), Harvey, Lev Gleason, Fiction House and several other companies. In 1953, he wrote and drew a detective strip called "Johnny Dynamite" for Comic Media. It failed to click with readers but attracted a strong following among professionals and the admiration of his fellow artists.
Morisi's early work in comics showed a lot of Alex Raymond influence but one day, he made a sharp turn. Reportedly, an editor told him to try and draw more like George Tuska, who was then the "star" artist in the field of crime comics. Morisi liked Tuska's work and saw that others were emulating the man, but felt it was wrong to simply appropriate someone else's style. So, the story goes, he phoned up Tuska, asked if he could imitate his approach and offered to pay a small royalty for the privilege. Tuska was so amazed that anyone had asked that he gave Morisi permission to draw like him and waived the fee. Thereafter, some of Morisi's work was so close to Tuska's in style that when they worked for the same firm, the editor got them confused.
In the mid-fifties, there was a recession in the comic book field and publishers began closing. Morisi saw where it was all headed and decided he needed another line of work. Fulfilling his other childhood dream, he studied for and joined the New York Police Department in 1956. He put in twenty years on the force, most of it spent working in Brooklyn and lower Manhattan. But he didn't stop working for comics. He just stopped signing his work…or he'd sign it "P.A.M.," so that the N.Y.P.D. wouldn't know of his moonlighting. Except for one brief job for Classics Illustrated and a few jobs for DC in the early seventies, all of his comic book work was done for Charlton, primarily on westerns. These included Billy the Kid, Gunmaster, Wyatt Earp and Kid Montana. Though Charlton paid rock-bottom wages, the company was willing to allow him to work without deadlines. He'd write and draw his own stories (or accept a script which he would only draw) at his own pace in whatever time he had away from the police beat. Whenever he got one done, they'd accept it and pay him. It worked out well for both sides and Morisi was one of their more talented contributors.
His most memorable work, however, came during a brief period in the sixties when editor Dick Giordano attempted to launch an "action hero" line and asked Morisi to come up with one. Morisi created Peter Cannon, Thunderbolt — an uncommonly thoughtful super-hero comic which delved into Eastern philosophies and martial arts at a time when such areas were relatively new to American media. The first issue appeared in January of 1966 and made a huge hit with fans. Unfortunately, Morisi was unable to produce material on the kind of deadline necessary for a recurring feature. Others had to fill-in for him and after only eight issues, he had to abandon his creation and return to non-series stories, mostly for westerns or ghost comics such as The Many Ghosts of Dr. Graves. He did not attempt another regular strip until 1975 as he neared retirement from the N.Y.P.D. Then, he created, wrote and drew Vengeance Squad, which dealt with a crew of private detectives who used fisticuffs and high-tech means (though rarely firearms) to solve crimes and catch criminals that stymied the police. The book only lasted six issues — and Charlton didn't last much longer. Had readers known the comic was the work of a cop with twenty years on the force, it might have meant more.
Morisi retired from police work in 1976 but did very little in comics after that. His wife of 53 years passed away last May so he is survived by three sons (Steven, Russ and Val), a brother, a sister and five grandchildren. Services are Thursday at the Richmond Funeral Home in Grant City.
I never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Morisi in person but we spoke several times on the phone. He was a modest man who cared deeply about a select group of artist friends. He was always calling to check on them and see if he could assist with advice or work referrals, or even to loan them money. One time we spoke, I asked him if during all his years as a cop, he ever had to arrest anyone he knew from the comic book business. He chuckled and replied, "No…but I can think of a few guys who should have been doing hard time."