I'd appreciate it if you'd post your thoughts (or anything you've seen online) about how consumers should address the recent payment card troubles at Target. I usually shop there a few times a month – including within the Black Friday through mid-December timeframe when the hack happened.
Since hearing about this, I've checked my online banking website daily for any unusual activity. None yet, but some of the news reports say it could be weeks or months before the stolen card information might actually be used. I'd rather not call my bank and get a new card if there's no need to. The phone lines to Target are apparently jammed and it's not clear if they know or if they would even tell a consumer if their card information was affected. So, all that's left is a waiting game, with daily worry if or when the other shoe will drop and cause financial headaches.
You're always pretty savvy when it comes to dealing with large organizations when things go wrong, so I await your wisdom on this situation.
Well, if what I'd had ripped-off was a debit card, I'd cancel it immediately. Beyond that, I'm not sure you're at any greater risk than you are all the time with credit cards. Two nights ago, you ate at a restaurant and for a few minutes, your Visa card was away from you and several restaurant employees could easily have copied down all the info on it. They can wait a few months, then post just as many unauthorized charges to your card as the folks who obtained that info by hacking Target.
Matter of fact, I'd be more worried about info stolen on a small scale. The busboy at the restaurant who passed your info on to his brother-in-law only stole 20 or 30 numbers that way all week and might well try to use all of them at local businesses. The Target hackers stole 40 million numbers and the majority will probably never get used that way…or will be used from all over the world. Even the stupidest credit card company in the world will smell large rodents if you live in San Diego and usually purchase gas and groceries locally…and suddenly, your card is being used to charge purchases of rifle ammo in Reykjavík, Iceland.
What I'm getting at is that I think you should always monitor your credit cards as if your numbers are in unauthorized hands…because probably, somewhere, they are. And with regard to the Target situation, read this.
I don't know why in the age of Smartphones, credit cards don't work more like this…
You charge a purchase in a store to your credit card.
When the store phones or "internets" in to check on the card, the credit card company dispatches a text message to your Smartphone.
You receive the message and it asks you to confirm your purchase of $828.43 at Whips 'R Us.
You type in a little 4-digit code to confirm it and the purchase goes through.
Now obviously, not everyone has a Smartphone or would want the occasional hassle…but if my company offered me a card that worked like that, I'd get one. I would think it would be especially good for online purchases. There must be a reason they haven't tried this.
A lot of you chipped in to help Bob Kahan raise enough cash to not get evicted from the apartment where he and his cats have resided for many years. Bob reports today that he went to court and the funds raised did the trick. The eviction notice will be vacated as soon as the checks clear. Yay! Now, we just hope the fellow can find a job.
This kind of thing makes me happy. You know what doesn't make me happy? The people you see on and in the news who have that Scrooge-like self-hatred that bubbles out as contempt for the needy. You know: Anyone who doesn't have a job is a lazy bum who leeches off the public. The homeless should just starve to death and disappear. Sick people can just go to emergency rooms and don't bother me with them. Oh — and you know, slavery wasn't so bad…
The rhetoric is sometimes frighteningly identical to ol' Ebenezer and his wish that the poor die off and decrease the surplus population. You'd think that the folks who think like that would at least have the sense to conceal their a-holishness, especially around this time of year but no. I guess the Tea Party has made them feel liberated enough to boast of their selfishness. Some of them have even developed convoluted explanations of how their worldview is utterly consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ. He didn't care about the poor and sick at all except…well, all the time.
I often think about this one quote from Kurt Vonnegut. Someone asked him to explain the meaning of life and replied…
Well, I have a son who writes very well. He just wrote one book; it's called The Eden Express. It's my son Mark, who is a pediatrician and who went crazy and recovered to graduate from Harvard Medical School. But anyway, he says, and I've quoted him in a couple of my books, "We're here to help each other get through this thing, whatever it is."
So…what's going to happen with the National Security Agency and its snooping, especially in light of that judicial decision that its surveillance operation is "probably" not Constitutional? Fred Kaplan has some thoughts.
Joe Conason writes about the War on Christmas. If Ebenezer Scrooge was alive and had yet to meet those three ghosts, he'd be busy cutting food stamps and unemployment benefits.
Shelly Goldstein e-mailed me with a horrible story that hasn't hit the U.S. news outlets much yet. This evening in London's West End, the balcony of the Apollo Theater collapsed during a performance. At least 65 people were injured. Just awful.
Matt Taibbi on the latest attempt by Sarah Palin to…uh, gee, I'm not entirely sure why she says such inane things. I guess she's making a good living spinning reality to fit the beliefs of her base. I think you've got to give the woman credit for realizing she had no future in running for elected office but could prosper mightily via stuff like this. And she learned well from Rush to never, ever put yourself in a position where you have to defend your positions against someone who'll in any way challenge them.
The New York Times has an obituary up for Al Goldstein, who at one time was the most outspoken defender/purveyor of pornography in this country….and quite a celebrity in New York. A friend of mine once remarked that there was no aspect of sex or person so attractive that Al Goldstein couldn't make it, he or she repulsive. Every time I came across him on some talk show, I was reminded of the joke where someone asked Woody Allen if sex was dirty and he answered, "Only if you're doing it right."
I admit to a certain admiration for Mr. Goldstein's outspoken rants. You know the song lyric about how freedom's just another word for nothing more to lose? Al Goldstein used to demonstrate that a person can say remarkable (sometimes, even true) things when they don't have a shred of dignity or self-image left to protect. One night on Tom Snyder's old show that followed Carson, Goldstein unleashed a hysterical diatribe against government interference with private sex lives that, bleeps aside, was like the Gettysburg Address of getting Uncle Sam out of the bedrooms of consenting adults.
But that's not why I bring him up here. I love New York Times corrections. Very few newspapers make them at all and the ones that do usually do only the real significant ones. Here's one they ran on the Goldstein obit that could only appear in The New York Times…
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of a movie Mr. Goldstein starred in. It is "Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Are Screwed," not "Al Goldstein & Ron Jeremy Get Screwed."
This is the time of the year when lots of people link to my Mel Tormé Christmas story. Its location on this site has moved so here's the new address for it.
I haven't checked lately to see if it's still so but it used to be the most-read page on this site owing to the tremendous number of links it gets each year. But it was also the most stolen thing. People often just copy it onto their sites and sometimes (not always) they credit me. Sometimes, they also do odd excerpting, including omitting the punchline.
I even had people take it and run it on their sites as if it had happened to them. I was especially amused by the rabid right-winger who copied it onto his site as if it was his account of his own experience. When I wrote to call him on it, I got a couple of crazed e-mails, full of words spelled in odd ways, that said basically it was a good story and he wanted to share it with his readers but he didn't want them coming to my site and reading my America-hating Commie views and since I was a Commie, I should have no objection to "sharing the wealth" and letting people take what was rightfully mine. Love that Christmas spirit.
The best part of the story for me, by the way, is that one of Mel Tormé's children wrote me a few years ago and said that Dad had told them about the incident and felt very touched and pleased by it. So I'm glad I helped make it happen.
This is the annual "TCM Remembers" video from Turner Classic Movies. It's subject to further additions as movie people die before the end of this year. In fact, I think they've already revised it at least once…
David Weigel reports on how Fox News is breathlessly reporting "Non-citizens caught voting in 2012 presidential election in key swing state" of Ohio.
After every election, we seem to hear the losing side screaming, "Fix!" At a party a few months ago, I got into a brief, pointless debate with a Republican who didn't believe his side ever lost an election fair and square. It was always dead people and busloads of illegal aliens who threw the contest to the Democrat. The Fox News story seems calculated to feed that belief, trying as it does to not call attention to this fact: We're talking about 17 votes in a state that Obama won by 166,272.
They might also have reminded readers that Obama beat Romney by 126 electoral votes…so he would have won without the 18 electoral votes of this "key swing state." In fact, Obama could have lost Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida and California (!) and still won. He got more electoral votes than the number Dick Morris insisted would constitute a Romney Landslide.
In truth, charges of rigged elections have a way of collapsing for lack of evidence. Democrats complained that George W. Bush stole the vote in Florida in 2000…but at least there was some actual evidence of that, mostly in the form of qualified voters who were not allowed to cast ballots. My guess is that if there is Massive Voter Fraud in this country, as we keep hearing, it's in denying ballots to people who should get them but who, for geographic and/or racial reasons, seem likely to vote against the party that controls the determination of voter eligibility. That's how you rig an election, people.
Beyond that, as Weigel points out, there are all sorts of anomalies with the vote count that no one cares much about. These are all the incidents of sloppy, inaccurate tabulation and handling of the ballots. You would never for a minute entrust your savings to a bank that handled money as recklessly as we handle ballots in this country. But no one cares about those problems because, I guess, what good is an inaccurate vote total if you can't control it to go your way?
Posted on Wednesday, December 18, 2013 at 12:11 PM
The Hollywood Park racetrack — which is not and never was anywhere near Hollywood — will be closing forever shortly before Christmas. They'll tear it down and build condos and retail stores and other things on which people can lose money. It was a pretty old, shabby place in Inglewood that I gather will not be too missed. Horse Racing ain't what it used to be and Santa Anita Racetrack, which is still up and running 'em, is only about 30 miles away.
Hollywood Park was opened in 1938 by a bevy of stars and movie studio execs. Jack L. Warner was the first chairman and then Mervyn LeRoy took over and presided for the next 45 years. Al Jolson and Raoul Walsh were on the original board of directors and shareholders included Joan Blondell, Ronald Colman, Walt Disney, Bing Crosby, Sam Goldwyn, Darryl Zanuck, George Jessel, Ralph Bellamy, Hal Wallis, Anatole Litvak, Hunt Stromberg, Wallace Beery and Irene Dunne. I don't think a lot of movie people have frequented the place since most of those folks passed away.
One who frequented the track for a long time was Joe Frisco, a now forgotten stuttering comedian who was cast in a lot of movies because he was funny in front of the camera and even funnier off-camera. Denizens of Show Business loved having Frisco around for the anecdotes that resulted. He was always broke and always complaining in a hilarious (albeit, stammered) manner. One time at Hollywood Park, Bing Crosby was holding court with friends in a private box and Frisco wandered by and borrowed $100 which Bing figured he'd never see again.
Joe Frisco
A few races later, someone told Bing that Frisco had bet on a big longshot that had come in and had made a fortune. Mostly for amusement, Crosby told his pals, "I'm going to see if I can get my hundred back." He went into the clubhouse and found Frisco, who could never hold onto money long, buying drinks for everyone. He tapped his debtor on the shoulder and said, "Hey, what about the hundred, pal?" Nonchalantly, Mr. Frisco pulled out a C-note, waved it in Crosby's direction and said, "N-n-n-not so f-f-fast, B-B-Bing. F-first, give us a ch-ch-ch-chorus of 'W-W-W-White Christmas!'"
I have been to Hollywood Park, most recently when I was twelve. My Uncle Nathan never married and seemed more interested in horse racing than in women. And isn't that a premise for an entire Alan King monologue? Depending on the season, you'd find my uncle on the weekends at either Hollywood Park, Santa Anita, or down south at Del Mar.
One Saturday, he took me with him to Hollywood Park. On our way in, we passed through a mob of vendors selling mimeographed tip sheets. My uncle purchased certain ones he believed to be of help and also bought a copy of that day's special Hollywood Park edition of a local newspaper that existed then, the Herald-Examiner. Inside, it was the regular Herald-Examiner for that date but wrapped around it was a special four-page section containing horse tips and articles for that day's races.
Once inside, we hunkered down in two seats with no one near us and he studied all this paperwork, made notes, did math, etc. I think we'd missed the first two races but he placed a $20 wager — not a small amount of money then or for a guy with his income — on a certain horse running in the third. He told me to pick a horse, any horse, and he'd place a two-dollar bet on it for me.
Well, what did I know from horse racing? The only horse in the whole world I really liked was Quick Draw McGraw and he wasn't running. But I scanned all the papers Uncle Nathan had accrued and decided arbitrarily to go with the tips of one particular columnist in the Herald-Examiner. But I didn't tell Uncle Nathan that's what I was doing. I made like I'd invented some sort of system and that I'd studied all the stats before making my selection.
He placed the bet on my behalf…and you can guess how it went. My horse won. His horse lost.
The next race went exactly the same way. I pretended, like some handicapper savant, I had a formula for picking a horse…but really all I was doing was following the advice of this one guy in the Herald-Examiner. My uncle bet two bucks on that horse for me and another twenty bucks on the horse he'd figured would win. And of course, I won and he lost.
The fifth race went the same way and so did the sixth. My uncle, the expert horse player, was losing. The kid who'd never been to a racetrack before was winning…but really, the guy in the Herald-Examiner was winning. Still, despite the fact that I was making nothing but money, I couldn't conceal from Uncle Nathan that I found the whole experience utterly boring. The races themselves were kind of interesting but the periods between them each seemed to go on for hours. There was nothing to do but study for the next race, place bets and eat hot dogs. I had enough hot dogs that day to last me well into the Nixon Administration. If I'd cut myself, I would have bled French's Mustard.
Uncle Nathan decided we'd leave after the seventh race and by then, he couldn't resist discarding decades of horse-betting experience and putting it all on one of his nephew's (so far) infallible hunches. His own methods told him to pick Horse "A." I, consulting my source, picked Horse "B." He put nothing on "A" and a big bet — I think it was a hundred dollars — on Horse "B." The odds were such that if "B" won, Uncle Nathan would leave well ahead for the day.
And of course, you can guess how this one went. "A" finished first. "B" should be crossing the finish line right about now.
I felt bad for him and on the way out, I told him how I'd picked all those winners. He was a good sport about it. He'd lost about $250 total — that was probably close to a week's pay for him then — and I'd made about $40…or as I figured things in those days, 333 comic books off the rack or 960 at the second-hand bookstore. He did say to me, "Maybe I ought to pay more attention to that guy in the Herald-Examiner." After the following week's sojourn to Hollywood Park, he told me he'd consulted that pony-picker and had more than won back all he'd lost on our outing.
Maybe that's true. Who knows? It sounds like the kind of thing you'd say to your nephew to make him feel good…and Uncle Nathan would do anything to make me feel good. He had trouble showing affection so he did it via gifts. My father (his brother) and my mother told me how proud he was of my career but he never really said a word of it to me.
When he died in 1994, he was residing in a small apartment about eight blocks from my house. He lived alone, as he lived his entire adulthood, and one of the few friends he had, who also lived in the building, found him dead on his bathroom floor. He was 82.
It fell to me to be in charge of Uncle Nathan's funeral and his affairs and belongings…and my mother and I, together, cleaned out that apartment. We found a whole shelf full of comic books I'd written — I'm not sure where he got them — and tattered news clippings that mentioned my name, mostly in connection with TV work. We found a letter he'd written to an acquaintance in another state that had been returned to him because the acquaintance had just passed away. It was all about how his nephews Mark and David were doing so well as professional writers. My Cousin David was the son of another of Nathan's brothers and there were copies of his books next to my comics.
We also found a ton of horse racing forms and tip sheets and little toys that would randomly pick a "sure winner" for you. It all prompted me to tell my mother the story of that day at Hollywood Park. Uncle Nathan had asked me to keep the story of our wagering "our little secret" and at the time, I did. My mother laughed when she heard it then said, "Now I understand why he asked us every week for years after that, 'Do you think Mark would like to go to the races with me again?'" Maybe he liked being around me but maybe some of it was that I'd picked four winners out of five that day.
