The folks who make Guinness used the Sammy Davis version of "The Rhythm of Life" to create a great commercial that has nothing to do with drinking Guinness — unless you buy into the concept that their product can turn back the hands of time. Not being a drinker, I wouldn't know…
As I'm sure you noticed, a few days ago House Republicans held a quick, secret vote amongst themselves and decided to try and ram through without debate, a bill that would seriously weaken the policing of their own ethics. Some said it was like bank robbers voting to get rid of guards and security cameras, and to make it illegal for tellers to testify as to who pointed the gun at them. There was a public outcry against the bill — gee, I wonder why — and they reversed course and dropped the bill…for now. Some or all of it will probably return.
The website Talking Points Memo has been trying with limited success to find out which members of Congress voted for this idea in the first place. Some refuse to say, which probably means they were all in favor of no one being in a position to prosecute them if they accepted bribes, sought reimbursement for what they'd spent on hookers and cocaine, or molested small children and/or animals. It's probably not fair to presume that those who voted for this bill or wouldn't say that they opposed it are engaged in at least one of those activities. But I might anyway.
I thought it might be interesting to repost this item which ran here on June 30, 2003. I'll save you doing the math. That was 13 years, 6 months, 4 days ago. In it, as you can see, I note that people are always calling for Constitutional Amendments…and then nothing happens. They say we absolutely must have it and then they do nothing or almost nothing about it.
I would guess that in the 13 years, 6 months, 4 days since I posted this, there have been many thousands of calls for Constitutional Amendments that someone feels are desperately, vitally necessary…and not a one of them has moved an inch towards being voted upon, let alone adopted.
Dr. Frist, by the way, left the Senate in 2007. Though he had been one of the most powerful Republicans in Congress, he said that as a doctor, he would have voted in favor of the Affordable Care Act. One can only speculate what his support for it might have meant had he still been in the G.O.P. leadership. Anyway, here's what I wrote back then…
Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist wants a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage. Has anyone ever calculated the follow-through rate when prominent politicos call for a Constitutional amendment? I doubt it…but I'm guessing it's well under a thousandth of a percent.
Quick: When was the last time a move to amend the Constitution went the distance and actually occurred? Answer: 1992. And that was a provision with no opposition whatsoever — a technicality about Congressional paychecks.
Before that, the last amendment that actually was passed was to lower the voting age to 18, back in 1971. I recall very little opposition to that one. And before that, it was another uncontested, no-opposition change about presidential succession in 1967.
It's been close to 40 years in this country since we've passed a Constitutional amendment that had more than token opposition. But every week, when some Supreme Court decision or act of Congress doesn't go their way, someone's on Meet the Press, saying we need and will pass a Constitutional amendment undoing that loss.
I doubt even Dr. Frist thinks we'll ever see an amendment like he describes. He just thinks it's good politics to say that. It makes his supporters think the battle is not over and that if they keep throwing campaign contributions and efforts at Frist and his party, something will happen. But since that amendment is never going anywhere, it won't do much to energize the opposition.
Reader-of-this-blog Andy Mansell just sent me four questions…
I just received my inscribed copy of Why and When the Dick Van Dyke Show was Born by Carl Reiner. For my inscription, I chose "Shut up, Mel!" I'm dying to know what you requested.
Since I already have Carl's other books autographed by him, I asked to have this one signed by Alan Brady. Mr. Brady signed it in big letters and farther down the title page, Carl signed it as well. For some odd reason, they have similar handwriting.
Can you (or have you already) list the quintessential Laurel and Hardy films for a newbie?
I think their three best features are Sons of the Desert, Our Relations and Way Out West. There are dozens of must-see sound shorts but I would suggest The Music Box, Towed in a Hole, Come Clean, The Laurel-Hardy Murder Case, Be Big!, Our Wife, Me and My Pal, One Good Turn, Busy Bodies and Scram! Silent comedies would be Big Business, Double Whoopee, Do Detectives Think? and From Soup to Nuts. But just about every film they made for Hal Roach has wonderful moments and even the non-Roach ones do. The non-Roach ones just have less of them.
Which version of "Up the Ladder to the Roof" is your fave? I gotta go with Bette Midler's voice-cracking version.
I really like the one from the Broadway show Everyday Rapture. But to me the interesting thing is how the many renditions are different or similar to each other.
I just watched I Know that Voice and enjoyed it but there should have been a bit more of you and a lot more Daws Butler and anything about Don Messick. Is there a retrospective about these two giants you'd recommend?
A gentleman named Arnold Kunert did a good documentary on Daws called Daws Butler, Voice Magician. You can probably find it on YouTube. I'm afraid there's been very little about Don Messick, although he is interviewed in the film about Daws.
I was just as happy for there not to be much of me in I Know That Voice because I'm never comfy in front of cameras and also because there were many voice actors who were not interviewed for that film and others who were but got little or no screen time. It's too vast a topic for any one film. You could do five hours just on Daws and the folks of his era without even getting into the hundreds of fine vocal talents of later decades.
But really, all voice actors — even Mel — have been under-celebrated. It's one of the reasons I started doing panels of those folks at Comic-Con back in the days when there were almost no voice actors in the programming unless I put them there. They all deserve a lot more attention even if some of them got into the field because they wanted to be actors but didn't want a lot of attention.
Thanks for the questions, Andy.
Our pal Jim Cummings provides the voices for many cartoon characters, mostly for Disney. Here he is doing what he does so well…
Antenna TV has started airing reruns of The Joey Bishop Show, the sitcom in which Mr. Bishop starred from 1961 until 1965. The show had a checkered run during its four seasons but there was a period in there when it was pretty good. I was never fond of Joey as a comedian but even I like some of them.
The series started life as an episode of The Danny Thomas Show (aka Make Room for Daddy) on CBS. Several shows, like The Andy Griffith Show and The Bill Dana Show, began that way with their pilots disguised as episodes of Danny's series. In the disguised pilot, Bishop played Joey Mason, a Hollywood public relations man. CBS passed on the show and it wound up on NBC, changed quite a bit from what was intended in the pilot. For one thing, Bishop's character was now named Joey Barnes.
The show struggled through its first season and was almost canceled…but NBC decided to give it another chance on the condition that it undergo major surgery. And so Joey Barnes the Hollywood P.R. man became the host of a late night talk show and he got a new wife (played by the stunning Abby Dalton) and supporting cast that included Guy Marks, Mary Treen and Joe Besser. This version was pretty good and there was a third season on NBC, then NBC dropped it and it did a fourth season back on CBS. It was canceled in 1965 and two years later, life imitated art and Bishop became the host of a late night talk show for real…on ABC.
There are some odd things about the show. They loaded it down with guest stars and as I recall, the best episodes were the ones not built around a guest star. The first and last seasons were in black-and-white and the second and third were in color. An awful lot of the writers and non-regular actors on it also turned up on The Dick Van Dyke Show, which was filmed on the same lot. And some of the problems that the writers had with Joey off-stage turned up on the Van Dyke program as problems Rob, Buddy and Sally had with Alan Brady.
There was also one "lost" episode. Comedian Vaughn Meader, who was then famous for his impersonation of John F. Kennedy, filmed an episode full of J.F.K. jokes a week or so before Kennedy was murdered. It never aired. I doubt Antenna TV has it but I'll be watching to see if it turns up. It would be about a third of the way through Season 3.
Antenna TV has started airing with the second season, which was when the show started to get good. They have two episodes on each morning Monday through Friday and two episodes each evening on the weekends — so that's fourteen a week. There were 123 in all. Frankly, I don't think I can take that much Joey Bishop but we all might enjoy an occasional dose.
Michelle Nicastro was a wonderful singer-actress who was part of the Los Angeles musical comedy scene. She left us at way too early an age. Here she is singing the hell out of a great song from the under-noticed musical, Smile…
Everyone cares about current outrages but not many of us care about old ones. I care a lot about this one…
Some pretty solid new evidence has emerged that while the 1968 Presidential Election was in full swing, then-President Johnson was on the verge of brokering a deal that might have ended the Vietnam War then and there. But since that might have helped Hubert Humphrey win the presidency, his rival Richard Nixon sabotaged that deal.
If that's true, that's one of the worst things a human being — and certainly a person who won the presidency — ever did.
It's Treason with a capital-T — real treason, not using the word the way we do now in politics as a charge any time any political opponent does anything you don't like. People found guilty of a lot less have been stood up against a wall and shot by a firing squad…and they got off easy.
Now, I understand that it's sometimes difficult to summon up emotions about long-ago deeds and long-dead people…but we do. The Holocaust still matters to some people. So does the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a few others. This one strikes me as something that's deserving of more than a shrug and a head-shake. But that's probably about all it will get from many Americans who are more upset about Steve Martin tweeting that he thought Carrie Fisher was beautiful.
Republicans have been vowing to destroy Obamacare and replace it with, in the words of the incoming Oval Office Occupant, "something terrific." But after years and years of vowing to come up with a better system, they still have no idea what that something will be. As Jonathan Chait notes, anything that would be as good as Obamacare (let alone better) would do all the same things that they find so loathsome about Obamacare…except that Obama wouldn't get the credit for it.
This would almost be funny except for the possibility of so many people suffering and dying in the transition process to whatever we wind up with. It'll probably be something called Trumpcare, which will be Obamacare with a coat of cheap gold paint and massive increases in the deficit.
You know the movie Red River? That's right: The 1948 western starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, directed by Howard Hawks. Well, if you know the film, you might also know there was a controversy about its ending and there still is. There are two versions and you could make a good case that either is the "correct" one. My buddy Michael Schlesinger recently wrote a good essay for the Library of Congress about all this and you can read and/or download a PDF of that article here.
Here's another approach to the song from Sweet Charity, "The Rhythm of Life." This one sings the original lyrics — or at least they sing some of them. Part of the performance is in another language…Welsh, I think. It was jazzed up for what I believe is a British TV show that's like The Voice but it's choirs instead of individual singers…
I started to write a post here about what might be in store for us this year from the new order of the government but it got too speculative and depressing so I hit the delete key. Why sour a perfectly good new year before you have to?
Then again, I am not one of those folks who think that we start each year with a clean slate and the chance to build something new. To the extent you can do that at all, you can start just as readily on September 23 or July 9 or October 14 or any day. So far this morning, the most constructive thing I've done is to write in "2017" on the first dozen or so checks in my checkbook. At least I won't get that wrong for a while.
I think we sometimes get too hung up on this "new year" concept. A long time ago, I shared an office with a writer who smoked incessantly. It was as bad an addiction as you've ever seen and he knew he had to quit…so he kept saying, "I'll quit January 1." He was saying this in March. It was an excuse for not quitting March 13 which, as I pointed out to him, was a perfectly acceptable date to quit smoking also. He said, "No, it's easier to quit the first of the year" as he lit up another.
Apparently, last night on a live TV broadcast, there were tech problems that screwed up Mariah Carey's performance. Some people this morning are way too happy about seeing a star embarrassed.
A couple of folks have written to suggest I write about Tyrus Wong. Mr. Wong was an artist of Chinese heritage who at one point in a rough (but long) life worked for Walt Disney and there had a lot to do with the beauty and success of Bambi. It's an extraordinary story but I know nothing about him that isn't properly covered in obits like this one. So I direct you there.
I have a very busy week ahead. I hope the long post yesterday will make up for the short posts that may fill this site for the next few days. And I thank all the folks who made year-end (or year-starting) donations to this blog. Since I switched to a new hosting company, I think we've been "down" a grand total of about ten minutes as opposed to much longer intervals at the first two hosting companies where I had this thing parked. The new company is quite expensive so donations (or using our Amazon links) are most appreciated. See you later.