Monthly Archives: August 2003

One of the best political-type websites I've found (and certainly the sanest) is Spinsanity. On it, three very smart gents take apart various news items, speeches and commentaries that fudge or distort the facts. They're very fair about this, going after Democrats as well as Republicans, and Conservatives as well as Liberals, and doing it in a fine, well-researched and non-inflammatory manner. I've been recommending this site for a long time and will continue to do so. So you might as well visit there.

This evening, I was honored to break bread (pasta, actually) with one of its editors, Ben Fritz, whom I met via e-mail exchanges. We talked about politics and the Internet and comic books and how dumb Fox News looks for suing Al Franken and all sorts of things. He's a bright guy and I wanted to use the occasion to plug Spinsanity again and also to direct you to another website in which he is involved. Dateline Hollywood showcases Ben's sillier side. There, he and partner Gil Cunha bring you the latest in phony Show Biz Gossip. Phony Show Biz Gossip is just the same as Real Show Biz Gossip except that it's more accurate. Or as a writer for one of the tabloids once told me, "I believe 70% of everything I read about Hollywood, including the stuff I make up out of nowhere."

Here's E. J. Dionne with one of those political commentaries that I think is right on the money.

One of the things we have to remember is that when a politician (any politician on any side) says, "This is an outrage," he or she generally only means, "This is an outrage when the other side does it, not when we do it."

When folks like Bill Bennett complain that America has lost its moral compass, and that they no longer express indignation over things that warrant it, I always think: That's because people like you have turned moral indignation into something that's only to be used to slam political opponents.

This website, the reliability of which is unknown to me, is claiming that a deal has been reached for Pete Rose to return cautiously to the world of baseball, including possible entry into the Hall of Fame. A spokesperson for Major League Baseball denies the report but the website is standing by its story.

So one of two things will happen here. Either Rose will shortly be reinstated, whereupon the spokesperson for Major League Baseball will be shown to be a fibber. Or Rose won't be reinstated, in which case we'll know the reliability of that website. There's also a third possibility, I suppose: They decided to reinstate Rose but since the report leaked, they'll go back and change their minds. But that seems unlikely.

Maybe there's a fourth possibility. Maybe they're decided to reinstate Rose but they're denying it so that Pete has a chance to get some bets down on his reinstatement before it's announced.

Or a fifth: They have no intention of reinstating him but Rose has planted the rumor so he can get some bets down that he won't be reinstated.

Can a guy be ruled ineligible for the Hall of Fame for betting on whether he'll be ruled eligible for the Hall of Fame?

Another obit.

Here's a good article on Tom Kenny, the voice of SpongeBob SquarePants and many other creatures and things.

According to this story in the Marin Independent Journal, we may not get to vote for Father Guido…

A third candidate, Don Novello of San Anselmo, a comedian known for his portrayal of the character Father Guido Sarducci on NBC's Saturday Night Live, filed the paperwork but failed to get enough valid signatures to qualify, according to county officials. Novello, 60, said he does not consider himself out of the race yet.

"I can't tell you how disappointed I am," he said. "I paid the money, I turned in the signatures, I'm not going to consider it official yet. I'm still in it." Novello, running on a campaign against excessive spending, challenged others in the race to match him "zero for zero" by refusing special interest money and campaign contributions.

My friend, comic book dealer Barry Short, also seems to have disappeared from the latest drafts of the candidate lists. What is democracy coming to when I'll only be able to choose from 195 candidates?

Yes, the "Don Novello" who appears to have qualified for the California gubernatorial ballot is the same Don Novello who portrayed (and may still portray, for all I know) the eminent Father Guido Sarducci. For those of you who can't place the name, Father Sarducci was the gossip columnist and rock critic for the Vatican newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, and occasional Assistant Managing Editor of the Vatican Inquirer. Novello wrote on and off for Saturday Night Live for years (he is often credited with the "cheeseburger, cheeseburger" sketches, among others) and sometimes appeared on the show, or on other programs as Sarducci.

In yet another identity, he was Laszlo Toth, author of a brilliant book entitled The Lazlo Letters, which actually defies description but I'll try: Novello made up a character named Lazlo Toth, named after Laszlo Toth (note the different spelling), the latter being the man who took a hammer to Michelangelo's Pieta. What Novello's Toth wrote was almost as destructive. He penned very strange letters to an array of prominent individuals, received an amazing array of replies, and then published both in The Lazlo Letters, which was subtitled, "The Amazing, Real-Life, Actual Correspondence of Lazlo Toth, American." Could all three of these men, rolled into one, be the next governor of California? Probably not…but the actual result won't be any less bizarre.

For months now, Gary Owens has been telling me about his role in this. It's an animated show about the fabled star for whom Rob Petrie, Sally Rogers and Buddy Sorrell wrote on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Maybe Dick didn't get a comic book out of the deal but Carl got a cartoon show.

(I noticed this link on Jerry Beck's fine Cartoon Research site. Credit where it's due.)

Here's an article in The Washington Post entitled, "Depiction of Threat Outgrew Supporting Evidence." Despite its rep from Watergate days, the Post has been very reticent to suggest the White House wasn't being entirely candid with the American people. This and a few other pieces suggest that is changing.

Most PBS stations are running a nice little special this week. It's called Broadway's Lost Treasures and it features musical numbers from great Broadway shows as they were performed on the Tony Award broadcasts. You get Robert Preston doing "Trouble" and Zero Mostel singing "If I Were a Rich Man" and Jerry Orbach and the original cast of 42nd Street belting out "Lullaby of Broadway." Can't do much better than that. The broadcast I just watched was, like so much on PBS, a marathon pledge break interrupted by snatches of program.

But it was enjoyable and since they were offering copies on VHS or DVD (with five more numbers), perhaps I'll pick one up. If I have to, I might even rejoin my local PBS station which I supported for years with a subscription but finally abandoned. I think it was the hourly mailings urging me to resubscribe that finally made me feel my money was not being used to support quality programming; it was being used to send me ads.

Frank Rich on all the sudden interest in gay lifestyles, including the possibility of wedlock.

If I read the schedule correctly (never more than a 50% probability), the episodes of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart that run during the day on Monday are both last week's outing with guest Tracey Ullman. The Daily Show airs three times a day on Comedy Central. The last of these (at 7:30 or 10:30 PM depending on your time zone) is that day's new episode. The episodes that air earlier in the day are reruns, usually of the previous installment.

The reason I mention this is that I found Ms. Ullman to be fall-down funny in this appearance. Can't recall the last time I laughed so much at a "chat spot" on any talk show. You also get to see her underwear but even without that, it would be worth catching. If and when they put a clip up on the Comedy Central website, I'll post a link to it. In the meantime, if you watch, TiVo or tape either of the during-the-day broadcasts on Monday, you should get it.

And here's a link to the obit for Bill Woolfolk that ran in the New York Times. Did I mention that Mr. Woolfolk struck me as a very nice, very dedicated man? At the Comic-Con in San Diego last year, he was very proud that people remembered and loved his work, and we had a wonderful conversation about The Defenders, the TV show he wrote in the sixties.

(One error in the obit: Sy Reit was the co-creator of Casper, not the creator. Joe Oriolo should also have been credited.)

As discussed here some time ago, there are plans afoot to tear down the old Hanna-Barbera building on Cahuenga Boulevard and replace it with one of those shopping malls that Southern California can't have enough of. Hey, yesterday I actually drove five blocks without passing a Victoria's Secret.

Over at Animation Blast, Amid Amidi expresses his ambivalence on whether the structure should be preserved for its historical and/or architectural value. As I mentioned, I feel much the same way. I worked in that building for years and I love the early H-B cartoons. But the early H-B cartoons weren't made in that building, and it seems to me that if it's worth preserving, it should have been worth not selling it to the current owners.

Nevertheless, I just added my signature to this online petition that urges the preservation of the place. (At the moment, my name is ten above that of "A. Sphincter Sayswhat.") I'm not sure I want to see public funds used for the purpose but the petition doesn't call for that. Perhaps if there's enough light on the matter, someone will come up with a creative way to preserve the birthplace of Jabberjaw.

Thanks to Bob Bergen — a nice Jewish boy who grew up to be Porky Pig — for e-mailing me the link. Here's a link to Bob's website. He's one of the best voice guys in the business and if you're interested in that field, the advice he has posted over there will be very valuable.

You've all seen them: "Non-scientific" polls that ask you to vote if you love the president or hate his policies or want to see gay marriage in Iraq or some other hot-button issue. They're non-scientific because anyone can vote and if they take the time to figure out how to delete cookies and/or mask their IP addresses, they can vote hundreds of times, even thousands. I often log into activist political sites and see everyone being urged to go vote in one and sway the vote their way.

The sites that set up such polls love them. They know they're utterly meaningless but they bring a lot of people to the site, if only to vote a few dozen times. They brag to advertisers about how many "hits" their site receives. I suspect some sites set up a poll for something like, "Should people be put to death for eating cheese?" and then they have folks log into the Cheese Lovers' chat rooms and post messages urging everyone to run over there and vote.

In any case, no one thinks they reflect any real sense of the public. In fact, on a given day, the same question can be asked in a dozen different online polls and "yes" will win by 90% at one site while "no" wins by 90% at another. Everyone knows they're a massive fraud.

So why is it that when I log onto a site that has one, I can't resist voting in it? And I feel a little better if the results show that my view is leading?