Monthly Archives: December 2005

Took this one last night. Three, maybe four young raccoons were out back scarfing down cat food and this one paused to get a drink out of my pool. Fortunately for him, I keep it full of Evian.

Here's a longer obit on Bud Blake, creator of the newspaper strip, Tiger. It's in the New Jersey Star-Ledger and you may have to answer a few questions to get to it.

I wonder if King Features — or any of the older syndicates — would consider setting up a subscription website with full runs of their older, out-of-print strips. There are sites where you can log in and read current strips and occasionally a classic or three…but those only give you a day at a time. There's something like 38 years worth of Tiger and even more of some other strips. No one will ever put out books of all that material so why not a website? Or CD-Roms? I prefer reading such material on paper but since no one's going to issue The Complete Tiger, why not give us the chance to buy it in digital format?

This is for those of you who live in or around Los Angeles. After a brief hiatus, the live theatrical production of What's My Line? resumes this Wednesday evening at the Acme Comedy Theater in Hollywood. It's hosted by J. Keith van Straaten, who is very good at game show hosting, and each episode features four celebrity panelists, three contestants with odd occupations, a Mystery Guest and a live commercial or two, plus live music by Adam Chester. They'll be doing it every Wednesday evening through March but since it's different every week, you can go every week. For more info, enter this website and sign in, please.

The Acme will also be the site of another show we're going to recommend in one of our next few postings here. Stay tuned.

An interesting year-end wrap-up from Andrew Sullivan.

Well, we seem to have found a possible side effect of our game, There's No Such Website! Earlier this morn, I put up links to four real websites and one bogus one. Enough of you apparently clicked on the link to one of the real sites that it exceeded its daily allowance of bandwidth and is now shut down for a bit. I assume it will be back at some point and if its proprietors read this, my apologies. I hadn't reckoned with the awesome power of news from me links.

Remember: When you play the game, the fake website link is the one that takes you to one of my pages that tells you you've found the phony entry. If you wind up on a page that tells you the site in question is unavailable, that does not mean it's the fake website. In fact, it means the opposite.

I'm a day or two late in noting the passing of Julian "Bud" Blake, who wrote and drew the newspaper strip Tiger for close to 40 years. Tiger was one of those "stealth" strips that was widely respected but often overlooked. Blake won the Reuben award three times, which is a lot, but I can't recall ever hearing anyone say Tiger was their favorite strip or even mentioning it when they rattled off a list of the greats. On the other hand, I also can't recall ever hearing anyone say they didn't like it. On the rare occasions it was brought up in a group of cartoonists, the unanimous opinion would be, "Oh, yeah. He's great. Is he still doing that?" I have to admit that I never followed it on any regular basis even though when I did see it, it always impressed me as well done.

Here's a link to one of the many obits currently on the web. There seems to be some confusion as to whether Blake was still producing Tiger at the time of his death or if it had been handed over to assistants or what. My understanding — correct me if I'm wrong, somebody — is that Blake retired two years ago at the age of 85 and that while it was reported then that other hands would begin writing and drawing the feature, that never happened. Instead, it quietly went reprint…and since the strip was timeless and Blake's style had changed so little over the years, few noticed. Most of its 100 or so remaining client papers are overseas and King Features will continue to offer it to them in reprints.

A nice year-end column by Paul Krugman. This is another one of those articles that's behind the subscription wall at the New York Times. Some of us paid $50 a year to be able to read such pieces but they're quoted so freely on other websites that we needn't have bothered.

By now, you should know how this works but just in case you suffer from short-term memory loss, we'll review: Below are links and descriptions pertaining to five alleged websites. Four of these are unlikely but real websites on the Internet. One is not. One is a disgraceful sham of a fraud of a hoax invented by the crackerjack team of filthy liars we employ here at newsfrom me. (We hired them away from The Washington Times.) Study all five. Try to figure out which is the phony. Click to find out. Do not pass "Go," do not collect $200, do not forsake me, oh my darling…

• Joogle – A special search engine just for Jews. Actually, you don't have to be Jewish to use it. But it helps.
• Afterlife Telegrams – Want to write to someone who's no longer among the living? For only $5 a word, you can send them a telegram.
• Animal X – The Society for Animal X is a group trying to right a terrible wrong. There's no animal with a name that starts with "X," thereby creating a nasty void in alphabet books. So they're going to find one.
• The Amish Homepage – A place for the Amish to gather on the Internet, complete with Amish links, Amish e-mail and even a few recipes.
• Juan Meatball – Follow Jorge Martinez (AKA "Juan Meatball") in his inexplicable mission to eat at least one meatball in each of the 556 Olive Garden restaurants in the U.S. and Canada.

And that's how we play There's No Such Website! Thanks to Richard Gersh, Rephah Berg and Barry Toffoli for suggesting real sites that don't sound like real sites.

A half-hour spotlight on master monologist Shelley Berman. This is another one of those links that you have to get to right away because it won't be there long.

The esteemed cartoonist Sergio Aragonés phones to say he read the website this morning and that I'm right about how someone should reprint Conchy…but the strip that really cries out for collection is Jack Kent's King Aroo. Sergio is correct.

King Aroo ran from 1950 to 1965 without ever setting the world on fire or getting in that many papers. I really know it only from its one paperback collection, which was published in '52, but if it was that good all the time, it was very good. The strip dealt with a sometimes-befuddled, sometimes-whimsical monarch who ruled over the justly-named land of Myopia…and beyond that, it's tough to describe. You kind of have to see it…and I hope that some day soon, we'll all be able to.

This falls into the category of "Books I'd Like To See Someone Do." I'd like to see someone do a big book that collected the entirety of Conchy, a short-lived but wonderful newspaper strip by a man named James Childress, about whom I know relatively little. I know that Mr. Childress was a newspaper illustrator who came up with a cute little feature about a bunch of people who live on a beach somewhere. It was initially self-syndicated, beginning in 1970, and attracted enough interest that one of the major syndicates took it on. Apparently, that was not a happy association. The strip at times could get serious and philsophical, and the story we heard at the time — I can't swear how true it is — is that the syndicate felt those episodes were costing it potential clients and Childress kept refusing their requests to tone that down. In any case, he finally persuaded them to let him return to distributing it himself. In 1977, for reasons that no one seems to quite understand, Childress took his own life and that, of course, was the end of Conchy.

There were three or four paperback collections, one of which Childress published himself, but an awful lot of Conchy remains unreprinted. And it would be nice if some scholar could collect all that is known about the cartoonist and perhaps interview those who knew him and are still around. This tribute website, assembled by one of his friends, gives us a brief taste. (Click on the photo to enter.)

There are actually plenty of other newspaper strips that never attained the longevity and stature of a Peanuts or even Calvin & Hobbes that are just too good to be allowed to slide into obscurity. Most of the majors are being or will be well-preserved and presented. Let's not neglect the ones that didn't reach that status but deserved to.

PC World Magazine has selected what it considers The 50 Greatest Gadgets of the Past 50 Years. Like all such lists, this one is highly arguable. They put the Sony Walkman at number one and I guess that's as good a pick as any. I am reminded of a lecture I once heard by Akio Morita, who was the co-founder of Sony and maybe the smartest person whose words I ever heard in person. He explained at some length how every conceivable marketing survey and expert had told him that people — Americans, especially — would never buy a tape recorder that didn't record and that the Walkman would be a sure-fire flop. He said something like, "A record player doesn't record and this is better than a record player" and he ignored the experts. Which is one of the reasons he died with more money than all of us, put together, will ever see.

Anyway, enjoy the list. I don't quite understand why a transistor radio that came on the market in 1954 is among the greatest gadgets of the past 50 years. I also don't get why they didn't include my favorite, the Reach Access Flosser unless it's because it doesn't take batteries.

That's my pal Jerry Beck, the fine animation producer and historian, and this is a plug for his new book, which you see in the other picture. It's called The Animated Movie Guide and it's a must-have for anyone interested in animation. Jerry and a crew of experts list every animated feature ever released in the United States — there are more than 300 of them — and give data, voice and crew information, storylines and wizened reviews, some of which I even agree with. You'll be especially interested in the real obscure ones, which are well-covered…in some cases for the first time ever in print. Here's an Amazon link along with our highest recommendation. And on your way to order, stop in at Cartoon Brew, the fine animation weblog Jerry maintains with Amid Amidi.

I got hit with a computer virus last night…nothing Norton Anti-Virus and I couldn't handle but it took about three hours to make sure I'd gotten rid of every last trace of it. So I'm even farther behind on e-mail than I was before, and I was already pretty far behind. Forgive me, all ye whose messages languish in my "To Be Answered" folder. Someday, they may get out of there.