Several e-mails asked (or lectured) me about my use of the word "lyrist" to denote the person who writes the lyrics for a Broadway show. I have always subscribed to the theory that anything you can find in any real dictionary is fair game. More recently, I have come to believe that the Microsoft Encarta World English Dictionary on my computer is the definitive authority when I don't feel like getting up to consult actual books. Anyway, Encarta says it's either "lyricist" or "lyrist" so one can use either.

Since "lyrist" can also apply to a person who plays the lyre, I would ordinarily decide to use the unambiguous "lyricist." However, my favorite person who had that occupation, Alan Jay Lerner, used to always insist that "lyrist" was the proper word for what he did. So after I read that, I began to use that word.

Interestingly the Encarta dictionary actually has "Alan Jay Lerner" as a listing and he is described thusly: "U.S. playwright and lyricist. He collaborated with Frederick Loewe on several musicals including My Fair Lady (1956) and Camelot (1960)." There's also a listing for Loewe.

Real good interview with Carl Reiner over at Harris Online. It's a little more than a half hour but well worth your RealPlaying.

Mr. Reiner is out making the rounds, promoting his autobiography, My Anecdotal Life. You can purchase a copy from Amazon by clicking on that name. I haven't read it yet but I find it hard to believe it won't be a joy.

I spent an hour or so this afternoon fiddling with the design of this page, changing the main type font and making it adjustable for your browser, and doing other little alterations. If you logged in here during that time, you may have seen some odd layouts. It wasn't your screen. It was just me not being quite finished. I think I am quite finished now. If anyone has any serious issues with readability, please let me know.

Peter Stone, the Tony Award-winning librettist who wrote the books of the Broadway musicals Titanic, Sugar, My One and Only, The Will Rogers Follies and 1776 (and a few others) passed away April 26 at a hospital in Manhattan.

There's a saying in the theater that there can be no great "book" writers in a musical; that the songs and dances are of such paramount importance that the person who writes the story and the spoken dialogue must continually subordinate his craft to that of the lyrist and composer. The songs carry the peak emotional moments, not the stuff in-between.

With all his shows, but especially with 1776, Stone sure proved that adage wrong. Here's an obit.

Here's a link to an article over at BBC News about Joe Barbera's letter to the City Council to try and save his old studio building. And here's a clarification by me: It's incomplete and maybe misleading to say that Hanna-Barbera was sold to Warner Brothers in 1996. That, coupled with the almost-true statement that Bill Hanna worked every day up until his death, makes it sound like Bill and Joe kept the place going on their own until '96. The history is that they sold out to a company called Taft Broadcasting in 1966, though they continued to run most aspects of the firm. Taft was acquired and reorganized as Great American Broadcasting in 1989 and that company was acquired by Ted Turner in 1992. What happened in '96 was that Turner merged his company into Time-Warner. So all that time, you have H-B (and therefore the building at issue) being handed around from company to company with no one saying, "Hey, we have to preserve the place where Wacky Races was produced!"

It's also misleading to say, as the above-linked article does, that the City Council wants to tear the place down and put up apartment buildings. I don't think the city owns the property, nor does the council make that kind of decision. More likely, the building is owned by some private company which is going curiously unmentioned in these reports. That company is considering several development proposals for its investment, some of which would raze the old H-B building, so Barbera and others are asking the City Council to step in and designate it as some sort of historical marker and/or configure the zoning of the land to encourage a plan that would maintain the building. Perhaps city funds will need to be coughed up to compensate the present owner for what it would lose by not replacing the birthplace of Peter Potamus with condos.

Not that my support matters one iota but I think, before I got behind any such move, I'd want to know who owns the property and what kind of taxpayer dollars might be spent to keep this building intact. And someone ought to ask the question of why, if it's so important to the history of the Hollywood cartoon, Time-Warner (which owns so many of them) isn't footing the bill to put a museum or something in there.

Thanks to "Destiny" (master of this weblog) for the link.

Good profile of Bernadette Peters.

Frank Rich in The New York Times. Worth a click.

Jim Hanley writes…

By the way, when you say, "But saying that anti-war folks want to see soldiers killed is just plain misrepresenting a political opposition," you are correct in most instances. There is, however, a minority of the far-left anti-war movement that does things like marching under banners that say, "We Support Our Troops When They Shoot Their Officers." I have been dismayed that the anti-war version of the Big Tent doesn't make any attempt to distance themselves from such.

You're right. As I always say on rare occasions, every political movement has its idiot element. (And I sometimes add that if you can't see the idiot element in your movement, you're it.)

I have seen some of the responsible anti-war leaders try to distance themselves from such clucks, but not enough. In any case, I do think that trying to characterize the anti-war movement by the wackos is just what I said: A misrepresentation of the political opposition. I also feel this way when the gun control folks try to pretend everyone who owns one is a super-paranoid militia member, when those who oppose women's rights try to paint every feminist as a dyke, or any of a dozen other extreme caricatures we could all name. Maybe there ought to be a slogan that goes something like, "When you have to define the other side by its looniest participants, it's because you're afraid to debate honestly with their rational ones." Preferably, something a bit wittier…

An Associated Press story says that Joe Barbera has written a letter to the L.A. City Council urging them to preserve his old studio at 3400 Cahuenga. That's about all there is to the story, which you can read here if you like.

But if you do go read it, you'll see one error. It says that building is "where Tom & Jerry, The Jetsons and Yogi Bear…were first sketched." This is not true. The Tom & Jerry cartoons were done, starting in 1940, on the MGM lot in Culver City. Yogi Bear's first cartoons were done in the first Hanna-Barbera studio, which was on La Brea near Sunset, in 1959. The building on Cahuenga was first opened in 1962, even as the first — and for a long time, only — season of The Jetsons was being completed. (Most of that show was done on La Brea.)

Thanks to Charles Apple for calling my attention to the story.

Here's a link to an article by columnist Leonard Pitts who says pretty much the same thing I did.

From "ArizonaTeach" comes this…

Please explain to me the difference:

"I don't support the war but I support the troops."

"I don't support homosexuality but I support homosexual people."

If you're claiming that Santorum is "winking to his supporters" then you're calling any anti-war people anti-Americans who want our troops dead.

And that's not a slippery slope.

Okay, here's my explanation, but let's note that the second quote above is not exactly what Senator Santorum said. What he said was that he was fine with the notion of people being homosexuals as long as they didn't commit homosexual acts. That's pretty much an internal contradiction. It's like someone saying, "There's nothing wrong with disco music as long as no one actually plays it." Homosexuals are, pretty much by definition, people who commit homosexual acts. So the distinction Santorum was attempting to draw was a bit disingenuous. It is possible in a spiritual sense to condemn what you believe to be a sin yet still love the sinner, and perhaps that was what he meant. But he was talking about enacting or not enacting laws, and laws are based on prohibiting behavior.

Now then. The distinction between the two statements you laid on me goes to the definition of the word, "support." This whole notion of "supporting the troops" goes back, at least in my experience, to the Vietnam protests. I assume it has existed with earlier wars, but that's where a lot of us first heard it. Then, we heard an ever-increasing number of folks who felt that that war was either unjustified or that it was being so mismanaged that we should cut our losses and bring our soldiers home before any more of them got killed or maimed. Somehow, the rejoinder to that sentiment became, "You aren't supporting our troops." This was one of those instances — way too common in our society from all angles — where one side of an issue deals with opposition by misrepresenting it into something more noxious and inarguable. It's like when Jerry Falwell voices a political viewpoint, wraps it in Biblical references, and claims that to be against his viewpoint is to oppose God.

There are a lot of folks out there — and I am not among them — who believed and perhaps still believe that the whole Iraq invasion was an utter mistake, and perhaps one with unstated, business-related motives. That is a criticism of White House and Pentagon decisions, not of the fighting men and women. One can certainly have nothing but positive feelings towards the troops themselves yet still feel that the higher-level decisions that sent them off to fight are wrong. So you can "support" the fighting men and women without supporting the war. But I don't know how one supports homosexuals in any real way while saying they shouldn't be allowed to commit homosexual acts.

I think Santorum is advocating an unreasonable governmental control of folks' sex lives and implying he wants to work towards something even more restrictive. Once you start denying any right to privacy in the bedroom, you're looking to become more intrusive in policing sexual activity. But saying that anti-war folks want to see soldiers killed is just plain misrepresenting a political opposition.

This thing is puzzling. MSNBC has this clip online of Matt Lauer interviewing Tim Robbins the other morning. It's a fairly innocuous interview, at least for Robbins, and it ends rather normally. It's also short enough (about two minutes) to make one suspect that there was more said, either before or after — but maybe not.

Just thought I'd mention that after several days, I'm extremely happy with the software I set up to run this weblog. It's called Movable Type and it's free, though they ask for donations and charge a modest fee if you want them to install it on your server. On the old news from me page at POVonline, I hand-formatted things, so to do an entry meant a certain amount of time fiddling with software and HTML codes and uploading.

With Movable Type, any time a thought hits me, I can just open a window, enter text like this, click and — ZAP! — it's up on the website. If while surfing the web I come across something I want to recommend to you, I right-click, select the MT option and it not only opens a window for me to type in but pastes in the link for me, as well. I don't have to worry about archiving, either. Movable Type handles all that. The downsides were that since I didn't want to use any of their standard templates for my page format, I had to design a page, then figure out how to make Movable Type create that page. This meant learning a little something about XHTML, the new web format, but it was worth it. Hope you agree.

David Bachman writes…

Strictly speaking, voters who elected Senator Santorum aren't the only ones (as you stated) who have the right to remove him from the U.S. Senate. The Senate itself, as provided in Article I, Section 5 of the Constitution of the United States, "may…, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member." I believe this was done last year, in the lower House, to The Honorable James Traficant (I love the irony inherent in some formalities, don't you?). I'm sure your general meaning was that voters in states other than Pennsylvania have no voice in Senator Santorum's future as a Senator, and I haven't an argument with that. Still, I hope that you'll be as interested in knowing this bit of Constitutional trivia as I am in sharing it.

You're right, of course. But of course, the "honorable" Mr. Traficant was on his way to prison for a crime when he was booted out of the House. Santorum has been charged with no crime — though if he goes the route of many public moralists, he'll be caught in some men's room molesting the towel dispenser before the year is out.

I guess calls for someone's resignation usually strike me as grandstanding and kind of arrogant: "Yes, you've been duly elected to this position by the voters in your state (or district or whatever) but you've offended me so I demand you quit." Often, it's obvious that the person making the demand really doesn't want the offending party to quit. Democrats were calling for Trent Lott's abdication at the same time they were hoping he'd stay right where he was, driving minority voters from the G.O.P.

Hey, how about that statement of support from our semi-elected president? Ari Fleischer said, "The president believes the senator is an inclusive man." I think that means Santorum even wants people he considers immoral criminals to be a part of the Republican party. And I liked a comment that I spotted on a couple of websites. For all the right-wing's condemnation of the morals of men like Ted Kennedy and Barney Frank, neither one of them ever did an interview and brought up the topic of men humping dogs.