My pals who form the musical group Big Daddy have been busy doing what they usually do: Taking recent hit songs and rearranging them so they sound like records from the fifties. If you're in the Los Angeles area, you might like to catch them performing live at Boulevard Music in Culver City on June 30. Here's where you go to get tickets.
In the meantime, here's what they did to "Uptown Funk" by Bruno Mars. They're right. It would have been a much better song if it had been recorded by the Statler Brothers…
In a few hours, Donald Trump will announce what, if anything, he's going to do about the deal that blocks Iran from going nuclear for the time being. I wouldn't presume to guess what that announcement might be except that he will, of course, insist he's making the absolute right decision and that the world will be a lot safer because of him and we should all praise him for that.
This piece by Alex Ward explains why Trump hates the existing Iran deal. I'm sure everything Mr. Ward says is true but two other reasons occur to me, one being that Trump's campaign for the presidency was largely based on the premise that every single thing the Obama administration had done was wrong and stupid and terrible and in bad need of reversal. Much of what Trump has done in office seem to me to flow from a need to change what he condemned on the campaign trail even though he has no better plan or idea to put in place. Obamacare, he said time and again, was a disaster that had to go and he'd replace it with something better and cheaper that would cover more people…and so far, we haven't heard even the bare bones of a plan.
The second reason is closely related. In my career as a professional writer, I have often been courted by agents who wanted me to leave my guy and make them my guy. The pushiest ones were the ones I was least likely to consider and one of the things the pushiest ones all did was to tell me that I was robbed blind on every single deal my previous agents had made for me. It was like if you sold your old Honda Accord for $2000 — or about what comparable cars always went for — and I said, "My God! You got taken to the cleaners! If you'd let me sell it for you, I would have gotten you Fifty Thousand Dollars for that car!!!!" (To convey the hysteria in some of those pitches, I probably should have typed that in ALL CAPS and BOLDFACED ITALICS.)
Your sleaziest agents always seem to say that. No deal is any good if they didn't make it. Some of them even seem to believe their own bull or take it as some kind of personal incentive to promise you the moon plus several planets and then set themselves the goal of achieving it. They often do great damage to their clients because they're not satisfied to make you a good deal. They need, for their reputations and/or egos, to make you the best friggin' deal in the history of mankind. Nothing less will satisfy them, never mind satisfying you. Trump, who continually tells us that he's the greatest negotiator and deal-maker who ever lived, reminds me way too much of that kind of agent.
Hey, I tried one of these. Just Crack An Egg is a new idea from the folks at Ore-Ida who specialize in frozen potatoes and it comes in four variations: Denver Scramble, All American Scramble, Rustic Scramble and Ultimate Scramble. With each, you can whip up a quick omelet in your microwave just by adding one fresh egg.
I'm one of those rare freaks who isn't wild about cheese in my omelets — a preference that seems to always horrify restaurant waiters or the person at a breakfast buffet who mans the omelet station. They always look at me like I asked them to leave out the egg. Also, for allergic reasons, I don't want peppers of any sort in anything I eat. All four variations of Just Crack an Egg, like 95% of all breakfast sandwiches available in the U.S.A. contain cheese and all but the All American Scramble contain peppers. So I went with that one and decided to make it "as is," including the cheese.
You open the cup and in it, you find three little packets — one each of cheese, bacon and potatoes. You take them out. You crack your egg into the cup. You open the three packets and empty them in. You stir the uncooked omelet. You put it in your microwave for forty seconds. You stir what's in the cup then put it back in for another thirty seconds and it's done…or at least it's supposed to be. My microwave runs hot but my omelet-in-a-cup still seemed to need another fifteen seconds…but fine.
Any good? Yeah, I guess. The end product was what you'd expect: A microwaved scrambled egg with that stuff in it. But I decided I still don't want cheese in my omelet and the potatoes really didn't bring anything to the taste or texture. So what I may do in the future is crumble some cooked bacon into my own cup, crack my egg and save two and a half bucks.
This reminds me of the problem I have with all these new prepared meal services that are advertised on half the web pages I visit — services like Home Chef and Hello Fresh and Prepped and all the others who offer to deliver ready-to-heat (or sometimes, ready-to-cook) entrees to your door. Due to their relentless promotions (and my food allergies, which are many), I often feel like there's an industry out with the sole purpose of feeding me food that will kill me. Almost every carefully-selected-by-their-gourmet-chefs dinner contains something I'm allergic to and often, some component which I could eat but just plain don't like. At least with Just Crack An Egg, I could leave out the little packet of red and green peppers.
Wikipedia, which is never wrong about anything except most things, tells me that "up to 15 million Americans have food allergies, including 5.9 million children under age 18." That sounds right to me and gives me comfort that I am not alone in this world. When I get some time, I think I'll write a few more posts here on this topic. I need to explain better to certain friends of mine why I'm not being anti-social when I don't want to go with you to an Indian restaurant and why you should never-ever-ever buy me something to eat without my advance consent.
And as for Just Crack An Egg, I guess this is a good review of a product I will probably never buy again. The best part of it for me was the separate packets.
For some time now, most of us have been amazed that Donald Trump could say one thing on Monday, the opposite on Tuesday…and then on Wednesday, Sarah Huckabee Sanders would be out there suggesting that any charge of a contradiction was indicative of a biased, dishonest media. Now we have that latest in a will-be-getting-longer list of lawyers contradicting everything he said a few days ago regarding the James Comey and Stormy Daniels matters.
I am speaking, natch, of Rudy Giuliani, a man who — yes, I know it's hard to believe — once stood for a certain amount of integrity. Now, he'll do anything for Trump except, apparently, get his story straight. In the last few days, it's changed more times than most parents have changed diapers. He puts out one set of facts and then, if it doesn't work, don't worry — because he's got another. And then another and another.
William Saletan, Matt Yglesias and Ben Mathis-Lilley all express their bewilderment at the sloppy lawyering going on here. It sounds to me like Donald and Rudy worked it out without consulting experts…then Rudy went out and began spreading that version…
…and then when all these legal scholars weigh in and say "Giuliani has gotten Trump into more trouble than before," Rudy and Donald get on the phone and one of them says, "Okay. Let's come up with something else."
I realize a lot of Trump backers really don't care about this stuff…or who he cheated with or what he lies about or how he personally profits, just as long as a liberal does not move into his seat of power. But they've got to be worried that all this is making that world-destroying change more likely. And they've got to know that this will never end; that we'll be hearing things that Trump will try to brush away as "Fake News" every remaining day of his presidency and for years after. And now, this…
Any time you're on the Internet and you see a sentence that begins with the words "Nobody can deny that…" there's a 75% chance you will disagree with what follows. Nobody can deny that this is so.
Alton Brown shows you the safe way to slice a mango. I don't eat mangoes but if I did, I bet I could follow Mr. Brown's instructions to the letter and still injure myself. You're probably better at this than I am. In any case, viewer discretion is advised…
As readers of this blog know, I had this wonderful friend named Carolyn in my life for around twenty years. The first ten were mostly joyous, though there were times when we seemed to mutually agree the relationship was over and I, at least, went off to be with someone else. Then we'd be back together. Then we wouldn't be. The last ten were as joyous as a relationship can be when one party is battling cancer and the other — me, in this case — tries to be as supportive as humanly possible while becoming increasingly certain the battle is not winnable.
For most of the last five, that battle was darn near a 24/7 struggle for Carolyn. As a close observer and participant, I vacillated — sometimes in the same burst of thought — between admiration for her tenacity and sadness because I knew how it would end.
The beginning of that end came one evening in April of 2016 when she was having a serious problem breathing. I took her via ambulance into an emergency room where we got her immediate short-term relief via some sort of respirator but had to wait close to six hours for a doctor who knew more about what else should be done for her.
During that period, she went to sleep — or maybe they induced it, I'm not sure — and I plunged into my iPad. If you're ever going to have to spend a lot of your life in waiting rooms and medical offices, get yourself an iPad or something comparable. I can't always get a decent Wi-Fi signal but I always have plenty of books to read via the Kindle app and games to play. I got to be so good at Sudoku that I should probably give up writing and spend my time trying to hustle suckers into playing it against me for money.
And if I do remain a writer…well, sometimes, I can write something on my iPad while waiting or even post on my blog so I don't resent waiting time so much. On more than a few occasions, I was able to use it to find a phone number or some other necessary information that would help Carolyn. I was really glad I had it and I still make a point to always have it fully-charged and to keep a portable charger fully-charged, as well.
For no visible reason the other day, I got to thinking of how technology had made her last years better. I don't mean the medical technology, which obviously helped a lot. I mean things like my iPad and her cell phone and the Amazon Echo I got her for the room she lived in for the last year-or-so in an Assisted Living facility. I expect that Amazon or some company will soon bring out one of those designed for hospital rooms or nursing homes. It will play music on voice command or summon help or phone people or whatever a confined-to-bed person needs. Carolyn's kept her company when I couldn't and it would have been difficult for her to tune in a radio.
One day when I was at the Assisted Living place, Carolyn and I heard faint cries of "Help, help!" We ran to investigate and found that two doors down from her room, a very sweet but frail elderly woman had fallen. Her room had pull-cords — one by the bed, one in the bathroom — that she could use to summon aid but she'd fallen nowhere near either.
I had learned helping my mother when she fell that in this situation, you shouldn't try to help someone to their feet. They'll probably be too wobbly and shaken for that. Instead, you place a chair — preferably a good, solid one — behind them and get them up and into that, which is what Carolyn and I did. I'm sure within minutes, someone from the nursing staff would have happened by, heard the lady's cries and done what we did, but we can all imagine a scenario when that might not have been in time. An Echo-like device that was continuously monitoring the room could have brought help almost immediately.
And yet another thing that helped was that we have services like GrubHub and DoorDash and other folks who deliver meals from restaurants. Carolyn found the food at the Assisted Living place far from delicious and also far from what she thought she should be eating. We got her a mini-refrigerator for her room and either I or my assistant John would bring her meals. When one of us couldn't get over there, Carolyn would call and tell me what she wanted and I'd order it online for her either from my home computer or my iPhone or iPad.
A nice thing about those services is that you pay (and even tip) via credit card so the recipient doesn't have to hassle with cash or cards or gratuities or anything. I could specify that her order should be delivered to the front desk of the nursing home.
But before I placed it, I'd phone whoever was at the front desk and tell them, "I'm ordering Thai food for Carolyn. Would you be on the alert for it and get it to her when it arrives? And by the way, would you like some egg rolls or pad thai? I'll pay for it." The desk folks almost always declined but they all appreciated the offer and would make sure Carolyn got her dinner.
There were other ways that being online helped — ordering prescription refills, making medical appointments, just being reachable — but I'll close with one story, not about technology helping Carolyn but about it helping my mother, who passed away in October of 2012…
My mother loved cats. She had several in her home over the years but when the last one died, she decided it would be the last one. She had too many physical problems and spent too much of her life in the hospital to take proper care of another feline. It was something she missed dearly.
As you may know, I feed feral cats in my backyard and I currently have two clients. Lydia, who's been around for more than a decade, is almost always out there. Sylvia has been coming around for almost as long to join her most evenings for dinner. For years, I had one we called The Stranger Cat who was adorable and friendly and who loved to be petted. The Stranger Cat almost never left my yard. When the gardener or the pool guy came around, The S.C. would grudgingly trudge over to a neighbor's yard and wait impatiently until they were gone. Then once they were outta there, he'd immediately return to his chosen place to lie in the sun that day and give me stares that said, "Why are you letting those people into my yard?"
Sometimes when I took my mother in for doctor appointments, we'd stop at my house on the way back to hers. Physical limitations prevented her from coming into my house — it would have been too rough on her — but I'd pull into the garage and she'd stay in the car while I went and got the Stranger Cat. She would pet him and hold him on her lap for a few minutes and it would cheer her greatly because he was so affectionate as long as you weren't a gardener or pool guy.
When the Stranger Cat died in May of 2012, I didn't tell my mother because…well, why? She didn't need any more sadness in her life. Occasionally, she'd ask me how he was doing and I'd lie and say he was fine. By this point, she was unlikely to ever be well enough to be taken to my garage to pet him.
A month before she left us, she was in a nursing home in Torrance and I was spending time with her one evening. She asked me about the Stranger Cat and I said he was doing well and he missed her and I'd take her by soon to see him, even though I knew that wouldn't happen. This was the biggest lie I ever told my mother and the only time I got away with it. She said she'd love to see him and I did what I could. I showed her a few photos I had of him on my iPad.
A bit later, I was out in the hall talking to Carolyn, who was at my house with her friend Annie. She mentioned that she'd just fed Lydia and Sylvia, and I had a sudden, fiendish idea. Sylvia looks very much like the Stranger Cat and is almost surely a younger relative of his…
The Stranger Cat and Sylvia. I could tell them apart in person but not in this photo.
Carolyn's cell phone was an old flip-phone that she loved and refused to upgrade. It would not work for my scheme but fortunately, Annie had a more modern phone and was willing to help. We set up a Facetime call between Annie's phone in my yard and my iPad which I was holding in my mother's room. Annie had her phone trained on Sylvia but we didn't tell my mother it was Sylvia. I told her she was watching the Stranger Cat live from my home.
Even if her eyes had been good, I don't think she could have seen the difference. By then, they were so bad, I could probably have had Annie aim her camera at Carolyn or even Sergio and my mother would not have known she was not looking at a live video of the Stranger Cat dining. It made her very happy so it made me very happy and Carolyn, as well. I had the sense even Sylvia liked it, though perhaps not as much as the Mixed Grill she was eating.
As any decent scholar of film history knows, after Shemp Howard died from a heart attack, four Three Stooges comedies were filmed with a stand-in pretending to be him. He has been referred to as Fake Shemp and it's obvious Donald Trump stole the whole concept of Fake News from this. Thanks to modern-day technology, we were able to create Fake Stranger Cat…and for a very good cause.
This may be the only post here today. At the very least, it will be the only post until I finish up a script that is, of course, not as important as blogging for you, dear readers, but it's one of those bits of writing that will pay me money. Wouldst that I could write for you and only you.
Before I go do what I must, let's pause to wonder: What must the conversations be like these days between Bill and Hillary Clinton. I'll bet Bill says a lot of sentences that start with "My God, if there was even the slightest rumor that I'd cheated on you with a porn star and paid her hush money…" And Hillary says things like, "Jeez! That man calls me Lyin' Hillary?" What I'd kinda like to see happen is for Paula Jones to turn up and claim that Trump sexually harassed her. Then we could watch all the Trump supporters turn backflips to explain why in his case, it's different.
The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has voted to expel Bill Cosby and also, since they can't explain why they're kicking him out when they didn't kick out Roman Polanski, Roman Polanski. I have an e-mail from someone asking me why they also haven't expelled Woody Allen and I think that's, first of all, because Woody Allen has never been formally charged with a crime, let alone convicted of anything. Secondly, a lot of us (and I'm among the "us") think the case against him is very weak. I haven't had the time yet to write that long post (might be posts, plural) explaining why we feel that way.
And lastly, it might have something to do with the fact that Mr. Allen is not and has never been a member of the Academy. It's kinda hard to toss someone out of an organization to which they've never belonged.
Lastly for now: It's been announced that Conan O'Brien's show on TBS will be trimmed to a half-hour. I've never quite understood why it was cost-efficient for them as an hour since its ratings have never been spectacular, nor has it spawned a whole turnaround of that channel's image and audience as was once hoped. But cutting it to thirty minutes will presumably make it more expensive than half of an hour show and make it less dominant and noticeable on their schedule. Unless they pair it with another half-hour show that will attract a helluva tune-in, it sounds like the prelude to cutting it altogether.
At the same time though, it's been announced that Conan's old NBC shows will become highly available on the web. I like that. I thought that was a terrific program for about its first ten years. If they'd equaled that standard on the current show, they'd probably be making it ninety minutes.
And now if you'll excuse me, I have to go to work.
I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour either but since I am, I might as well write about some topics…like the seeming mess that Rudy Giuliani made last night on Hannity when he began rearranging Donald Trump's legal affairs. I'm thinking his new spins and "facts" will make more sense once we know what Michael Cohen is telling prosecutors or what evidence came out of that raid of his office.
Has Cohen completely flipped? Is he now unloading dirt on Trump to Mueller and Giuliani's trying to get out ahead of some of the revelations? I'm still not sure what the story is now. Trump didn't know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an affair that never happened but he did repay the money to Cohen but he didn't know what it was for? And he fired James Comey because he felt the American public needed to know their president — the one who won't release his tax forms like every other president or tolerate his private businesses being investigated — isn't a crook?
The moment that really made me blink came when Hannity brought up Cohen's assertion that in paying the hush bucks, he acted without Trump's knowledge and Giuliani said that the president "didn't know about the specifics of it, as far as I know." Does anyone think Rudy went on TV and went out of his way to reveal the reimbursement without knowing what his client, Donald J. Trump, did or didn't know about $130,000 of that client's money going to pay off a porn star? "As far as I know" is a phrase you toss into a sentence when you know there's a good chance that statement will be proven false.
Ah, we live in interesting times. And it's going to be like this every single remaining day that Donald Trump is in office and for many years after.
Various organizations are now recalling and undoing honors for Bill Cosby. Yale pulled his honorary degree. The TV Academy has removed him from its Hall of Fame. Any day now, Jell-O will be denying that he ever sold Pudding Pops for them and NBC will be retaping The Cosby Show with Christopher Plummer in the lead.
A small part of me (about the size of my spleen) feels sorry for the guy. I can't help but feel some sadness for anyone who has screwed up their life that badly, especially a guy who was capable of so much good. How difficult would it have been to think, "As much as I'd like to drug this woman and rape her, I should just be content with all the women who want to have sex with me because I'm rich and famous"?
I keep thinking of the stories one hears occasionally about really, really rich people who go into a store and shoplift candy bars or other small items just because it thrills them to know they can get away with that. It's not enough to have fabulous wealth. They also have to feel that the laws that govern the average person don't apply to them.
I'm sticking with my belief that we'll never really know what motivated Bill Cosby to do what he did and I'm not assuming he even understands it. But it had to be something like that…some feeling that he had to prove to himself that he was powerful enough that he could do the most repulsive, illegal things he had even the tiniest urge to do. If you think you were surprised that he was a rapist, imagine how shocked he must still be that he wasn't allowed to be one without penalty
I'm lately getting tired of folks who think if I ask, "How have you been lately?" or even "How are you?" what I'm really saying is "Tell me every single thing in your life that hasn't gone the way you wanted it to for the last five or ten years." Even if I really like you, there's a limit to how much I want to hear every negative you can think of.
And if you want my input on some matter…well, that's fine but remember who you're asking. Like most folks, I have a fair amount of expertise in a few areas and darn near none in most areas. My advice on how to write a comic book script might conceivably have some merit if only because I've done a lot of that. Hearing how I do it might lead you to figuring out how you can do it, even if the path involves doing the exact opposite. But the other day someone asked me about how to swap out the carburetor in a late-model Honda for a new one, which is like asking a poodle how to file for a tax extension.
A writer I often quote, Alan Jay Lerner, once said, "There are people in the world who are brilliant at playing the saxophone and nothing else," meaning that skill in one area does not denote skill in any other. And I can't even play the saxophone. Or explain why I'm up at this hour.
You know what today is? That's right: It's Unicorn Wednesday. Every Wednesday from now on is Unicorn Wednesday, the day our friend-enchantress Misty Lee performs a magic trick with sorcery, sophistication and sass over at the Official Unicorn Wednesday website. Go take a look if you don't believe me.
Back here, I raved about the recent documentary on the great (now, late) entertainer, Rose Marie. We loved Rose as a performer and those of us who knew her loved her as a person. One of those who knew her, Shelly Goldstein, was interviewed for the Decades channel about the lady. Decades, which I don't get on my cable service, is now running that documentary, which is called Wait For Your Laugh. If you get Decades, watch it. If you don't get Decades, it's turning up other places so catch it via one of them.
America's best roaster (in the comic tradition) Jeff Ross weighs in on the controversy over Michelle Wolf's speech at the White House Correspondents' Dinner. I might quibble with his insistence that the event is a roast. It's an entertainment that might take the form of a roast but doesn't have to. Craig Ferguson didn't really "roast" and I doubt Ross would look at whatever it was Rich Little did in 2007 and say, "Yeah, that's the same kind of thing I do."
But when you invite Michelle Wolf to perform, what you get is exactly what she did. It would be like hiring Frank Ferrante to perform and being outraged when he did Groucho…which, come to think of it, would be a pretty good idea.
I still think the whole premise of the dinner is a bad one but Ross is right. There is something very wonderful and American about a comedian doing jokes about the President of the United States to his face. Then again, I disagree that Trump would be the same kind of Good Sport he was on those Comedy Central roasts. On those, Trump was just delighted to be seen as important enough to be the topic for an hour of television. He's way past that now. Now, he's too important to let anyone even jest about the crookedness of his tie, let alone his entire administration.
