I mentioned in a posting a few weeks ago that when I was over on the Disney lot, I was strangely touched to see a "We love you John" banner added to a big billboard for John Ritter's show. Alan Light calls my attention to a website that put up a photo of that billboard. I don't know why I thought this was so appropriate but I did…and do.
An editor at the Los Angeles Times defends his paper's coverage of the claims that Arnold S. groped a lot of ladies against their will.
Jay Leno is still getting a little heat for his role in the Schwarzenegger campaign. I wonder if folks realize how long those two guys have known each other. Somewhere in some tape vault, there's a copy of an old ABC Wide World of Entertainment taped at the Playboy mansion around 1975. It would have been one of Leno's first-ever TV appearances, done back when he had a huge "afro" haircut and was wearing a leisure suit. The main feature of the show, of course, was Playboy models strutting around in bikinis but they stuck in a muscleman in a tiny Speedo who wandered about and spoke with such a thick accent you couldn't understand him. Guess who. I seem to recall a little sketch where Jay was hitting on a lady and Arnold wandered by, flexed a few deltoids and took her away from him.
One advantage Arnold had by running in such a short campaign was that there wasn't time to track down all the embarrassing footage of him that's around, and Equal Time rules restricted the amount that could be aired. I'm not suggesting it would have impacted the vote but there are a lot of things he's probably glad haven't resurfaced. One other one that comes to mind is a time he was on The Tonight Show with guest host McLean Stevenson. This was back when the main feature of a Schwarzenegger appearance was that he would take off his shirt, and often his pants as well, to display his physique. Mr. Stevenson, who was actually a terrific host the first few times he sat in for Johnny, showed uncommon self-esteem or courage or something. After a brief interview, they sent Arnold backstage to strip down to his skivvies, and McLean announced, "Okay, first I'll show you what a normal, healthy male body is supposed to look like," and McLean took off his shirt. Then they brought Arnold out for a pose-off, with McLean imitating whatever the future governor did and…well, it was very funny. I remember at the time thinking that Stevenson had made the bodybuilder look pretty ridiculous but the spot worked because he [McLean] made himself look even more ridiculous.
And of course, there's the movie where Arnold (billed as "Arnold Strong" and dubbed) played the alter-ego of mousey Arnold Stang. And plenty of other stuff. I suspect we'll be seeing a good deal of this material in the months to come.
Getting back to Jay: I don't think his monologues have been slanted and even if they were, so what? The guy's entitled to his politics, which are not as easily categorizable as most folks probably make them out to be. Some folks would really like to see the late night comedians use their shows as bully pulpits to advance certain positions. A few weeks ago when Conan O'Brien was making the rounds to promote his anniversary special, he did an interview on Buchanan and Press, and all Pat Buchanan could ask him about was using his show to influence voters. O'Brien's answer, and I presume Leno's would have been much the same, was that he was doing an entertainment program; that he did the jokes he thought were funny and couldn't afford to reject good material in order to advance a personal agenda or candidate. I think what some folks don't get is that pushing your political views is not always Job One for a lot of people. It was all that mattered to Buchanan but to someone in Leno's or O'Brien's position, it's probably a very low priority…if it even matters at all. I'm sure it's more important to Leno that his show maintain its ratings, which to some extent means being a venue where any "hot" celebrity will feel welcome. When asked to appear at Arnold's victory party, I suspect Leno's only concern was not whether it would be perceived as a political endorsement but whether it would compromise the Tonight Show's ability to book other high-profile guests. Answer: Of course not.
I do think the press gave Arnold a free ride but I don't think Jay Leno should be faulted for that. Jay's show is not where candidates are supposed to be ruthlessly interrogated and held up to public scrutiny. Let's ask the folks who at least claim to be real newspeople why they don't do more of that…to all candidates and not just the one.
Want to see what a hundred thousand dollar bill looks like? Well, either pick Jerry Seinfeld's pocket or visit this webpage.
Back in 2001, both Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were saying that Iraq did not have "weapons of mass destruction" and was not a threat to the United States. This page has online video footage of them saying this. Looks like they were right the first time.
The widow of the late William Steig tells us about her late husband.
Why, after years of mocking Siegfried and Roy, is the tall, verbal half of Penn and Teller giving press interviews on Roy's behalf? Over on his website, Penn explains.
So I post the link to the John Dean article, get in the car, drive over to a nearby drugstore and who do I see shopping there when I walk in? John Dean. I should have linked to something by Halle Berry.
Actually, I always kind of admired John Dean and I wish there'd been a graceful way to tell him that. But he didn't look approachable, and I figured, "Hey, on my weblog I just linked to a piece you wrote" was among the geekier things you could say to a stranger.
John Dean explains what laws may have been broken in the Valerie Plame scandal.
Here's another example of the shortcomings of campaign coverage in this country. It is now being reported — and this apparently didn't take any vast amount of digging to uncover — that as governor, Arnold S. may not be able to rescind the increase in the car tax. Why are we hearing about this now?
Schwarzenegger got a lot of votes from Californians because they were mad about the increase and because he promised to do away with it. Instead of asking him about frisking unwilling ladies, wouldn't it have been nice if journalists had asked him, "Are you certain you can deliver on this campaign promise to lower auto registration fees?" Perhaps he can. Still, the promise went by without anyone wondering if it really was as simple as he made it out to be.
For that matter, no one ever really went into the possibility that Gray Davis was not as wholly to blame for the increase as angry voters made him out to be. In one of those "town hall" interviews, Davis gave a complex, hard-to-follow explanation of how he inherited from his predecessor a budget/law situation that made such increases almost mandatory. I don't know if that's completely true, but this new story suggests that it may not have been completely false, either.
Davis deserves some blame for not explaining this more prominently and in a clearer fashion. But it would have been nice if a non-partisan reporter or two had looked into the matter before the vote, if only so we weren't getting all our alleged facts from candidates and their associates. There will now be some sort of public debate as to whether the governor can roll back what Arnold promised to roll back. And whether it turns out that he can or can't, I think this debate should have started before the election. But I guess it was more important to talk about the grabbing of breasts.
Here's another opinion on what happened with Roy Horn and the tiger. Other animal experts are now saying that the tiger was trying to kill his handler and that it wasn't all an accident involving an otherwise benevolent animal trying to "help" Roy.
I'm not sure how much the difference matters or if both views aren't just a matter of humans pretending they know what's going on in an animal's mind. Seems to me the danger presented by a tiger like that is the same no matter what was on the critter's mind. It can hurt someone trying to help them just as it can trying to hurt them.
I have just made a small wager with someone that within the next week, Donald Rumsfeld will be changing jobs.
I've usually had good luck with online services that give you driving directions from one place to another. Tonight, I used Switchboard to tell me how to get to Vroman's Bookstore in Pasadena and it told me to go get on the 101 Freeway. As I neared the 101, I consulted the printout to tell me which way to go and the paper said to take the 101 East.
"Well, that'll be a fun ride," I thought. The 101 goes North and South.
But I somehow found my way to the shop wherein my friend Alan Brennert was signing his new novel (click here for details on the book and future signings). It was a nice turnout, and I got to chat with an old friend of mine, Richard Kyle, who was among the founding fathers of comic book fandom. Some say he coined the phrase "graphic story" to denote the format we all know and love, and I can believe that. A lot of things Richard wrote in 1967 about the future of comics have come to pass, and others will happen in our lifetimes. Anyway, it was great to see Richard and I thought I'd mention that here, since folks occasionally write to ask me if he's still around.
You couldn't help but feel sad for Siegfried last night on Larry King Live. You also felt that he was only giving interviews because he or his advisers felt that, for their past work not to be besmirched (and for the future of any acts that use big cats, including theirs), they had to start getting people to view what happened to Roy as a rare, flukish accident. They need to convince folks — and I'm not saying this isn't the case — that the animals aren't that dangerous, that what happened to Roy could not possibly have been prevented and is unlikely to ever happen again.
In this article, Vegas mogul Steve Wynn offers a more detailed explanation of what happened, including the notion that the tiger was distracted by the ringside presence of a lady with a large hair-do.
This is not the same thing but I am reminded of one time I did a TV show where one of the guests was a fine magician named Mark Kalin who, in the course of his performance, made a live tiger appear. Before the taping, the director went up to the pages (the staffers who seat the audience) and told them to make sure that none of the women sitting near the stage were having their periods at the moment. "The cats smell the blood," he told them. "It drives them crazy." I've heard this is — you'll excuse the expression — an old wives' tale, and I'm not sure if the director believed it or if he just thought it would be funny to stick the pages with this silly job. But pages do what they're told and a couple of them diligently went out and started interrogating female audience members about their menstrual cycles — a chore made even more awkward because the tiger was going to be a surprise so they couldn't explain why they wanted to know. I actually overheard two male pages discussing whether certain ladies were young or old enough that it wasn't necessary to ask them, and it reminded me how utterly clueless most males are about things like that.
I also remember that in the trick, throughout two dress rehearsals and two tapings, the tiger never failed to urinate about thirty seconds after it appeared. One of Kalin's assistants was positioned such that he could not avoid being rained upon. After the third or fourth time this happened, I actually heard the guy mutter out loud, "What? And give up show business?"