Monthly Archives: March 2006

I've wondered here in the past if anyone ever falls for those e-mail scams that tell you you can share in someone's inheritance of a huge amount of money. Apparently, someone does.

John Dickerson on that newly-noticed video that shows George W. Bush being briefed before Katrina hit and not appearing to grasp what it all meant. So far, I haven't seen much of a counterspin on this one.

I love magicians and I especially love magicians who invent brand new tricks and do things on stage that no one else has ever done. You don't catch Sylvester the Jester doing the linking rings or the cups-and-balls…or if he did, he'd put his own, animation-inspired twist on those hoary illusions. Sylvester bills himself as "The Human Cartoon" and replicates on stage, many effects you'd find in a good Tex Avery short. In the course of one show, he is electrocuted, decapitated, stretched and squashed, and even has a few holes blown in him. It's all very original and very well-done and very funny.

You can find out where to see him at his website but for much of March, I can tell you where to see him: In a late show, Friday and Saturday nights, at Theatre West in Hollywood. Located appropriately near the old Hanna-Barbera studio, the Jester will be destroying himself on stage for your amusement, and I intend to get up there and see this happen. If you love magic or cartoons, you'll enjoy what he does…and I'm guessing one or the other applies to everyone who visits this site.

Jack Wild is the kid who, at age fifteen, played the Artful Dodger in the movie of Oliver and stole, not only people's purses but the movie, as well. Shortly after that, he became the human star of the popular Saturday morning series, H.R. Pufnstuf. After that, he has a brief moment of glory as a pop star and after that…

Well, "after that" was not kind to Jack Wild. He had problems with alcohol and tobacco and life in general. Sid and Marty Krofft, who'd produced H.R. Pufnstuf, became like surrogate uncles to Jack. When I worked for them, he'd occasionally visit the office or turn up at a party and I always enjoyed talking to Jack. A lot of folks felt sorry for him but I never got that he felt sorry for himself…not even the last time I ran into him. It was about three years ago and most of his voice was gone due to cancer of the mouth, one of the nastier things that can happen to a human being. Jack had a little card he'd show to people to explain why he couldn't talk and we had an odd, sad conversation with him responding mostly in mime and little grunts. He was proud that in spite of everything, he was still doing occasional acting jobs.

Jack died on Wednesday. He was 53. Here's a link to an obit.

Lennie Weinrib, who was the voice of H.R. Pufnstuf, just phoned me from Chile, where he now lives. He said, "Tell the world that Jack Wild was the nicest, most talented kid I ever met in all my years in show business, and that we're all just devastated at the news." I can't put it any better than that.

Back on KCAL, someone just said, "This started out as a routine traffic stop as part of an investigation of a stolen vehicle. The woman didn't want to go to jail." So to try and stay out of prison, she stole a police SUV and drove it around for 75 minutes. Good way to avoid a stolen car rap.

KCAL's news coverage has ended and they've returned to regular programming, which is people arguing in the TV courtroom of Judge Mathis. A woman is claiming her ex-boyfriend kept refusing to get a job and wasn't paying back money he owed her and had promised to pay. The ex-boyfriend is claiming that because of her drunken misbehavior, he was also driven to drink so it was her fault he was unable to find work. For some reason, these people thought it would be a good idea to go on television, air their private dispute, argue over which of them was the bigger drunk and let Judge Mathis settle it. This makes about as much sense as stealing the police SUV.

And how far are we from the day when they'll arrest someone like the lady who was driving around Palmdale and Lancaster, then bring her directly into a TV courtroom? Having just watched the arrest, we'll be able to then watch the trial. Judge Mathis can sentence her and then later in the day, Judge Judy can rule on her appeal. By evening, we could have the prisoner on Fear Factor for possible execution. Or just let Simon Cowell insult their grooming.

It might work. Couldn't be a greater miscarriage of justice than the O.J. trial.

Actually, she's been mainly in Lancaster the last fifteen minutes or so. On Fox, they're monitoring (but not letting us hear) some conversations the woman is having on the police radio with authorities. They're discussing (a) whether she's faking her emotional distress, (b) whether if she is, she's doing it to try and establish some sort of defense for when she winds up in court and (c) whether she's just enjoying the attention of all the helicopters overhead and news coverage.

This just in: She's stopped, police have stormed the vehicle and they have her down on the ground and under arrest. And now they're leading her away to another police car. Hope she doesn't steal this one, too.

I'm switching channels and watching the pursuit on different stations. Someone on Fox News just said that this vehicle would have probably have had a full gas tank at the beginning of the shift, but of course we don't know when that was. I'll report back if there's any more useful information like that.

More than seventy minutes ago, the woman stole a police vehicle and she's been driving in circles and running stop signs and red lights ever since, often weaving over to the wrong side of a road. A newsperson just said, "We have unconfirmed reports the woman is extremely agitated." You think?

I'm watching a police chase on TV at the moment. A woman has stolen a police SUV — they say it's a Ford Expedition — and has been driving around and around mostly the same streets in Lancaster and Palmdale for more than an hour. The newsfolks on KCAL Channel 9 are locked into that awkward position of having to say the same things over and over…and they really don't know all that much to begin with. At the moment, we're kind of on Tire Watch, wondering how long it'll be before a shredding left rear tire renders the vehicle undriveable. Stay tuned.

I have no idea what I'm doing up at this hour, either. But while I'm here, I might as well post something about bogus e-mails that pretend to be from PayPal or your bank or some other business institution. I get about twenty a week that tell me there's some problem with my account at Chase Manhattan Bank and, of course, I've never had a nickel in Chase Manhattan.

If things like this are causing you any confusion or problem, here's an idea you might want to consider: Dedicated e-mail addresses. A lot of people think they can only have one or only manage one. Actually, you can many different ones and if you bank, let's say, at Bank of America, you could have an e-mail address that's only for your correspondence with Bank of America. Once you've set it up, you can just assume all e-mails that purport to be from Bank of America but arrive at other e-mail addresses are phony.

I have a separate e-mail address for each of about two dozen companies with which I do real business. That doesn't sound as difficult to manage as it might because they're all set to forward to one master "business" e-mail account so when I download messages, I download them all at once. It's simple then to have the program I use to manage e-mail (Mozilla Thunderbird, which is free and wonderful) filter the incoming e-mail on that account and sort the messages into separate folders — the ones from my bank into one folder, the ones from the Gas Company into another and so on.

How can you get so many different e-mail addresses? Well, I control several domains and each domain gives you unlimited e-mail addresses @ that domain. You could achieve the same thing with several of the free e-mail services online. G-Mail, for instance, will let you sign up for as many accounts as you like and you can set each account to forward to another. If you're on AOL, I believe they still give you a number of screen names on each account.

Multiple e-mail addresses can be very handy for weeding out unwanted e-mail or separating the e-mail you really care about from the stuff you sort-of care about. I have a couple of accounts that I use when I have to sign up for something on a website — "junk mail" addresses, you might call them. If you have everything coming to one e-mail address, it swells the mailbox you care about and when you download your important e-mail, you have to download all those ads and newsletters with it. Most of my "robotic" e-mail — mass mailings from companies I've ordered from, for example — goes to one special address which I download once or twice a week. This separates them from my main e-mail account which receives messages several times a day.

Multiple e-mails and e-mail forwarding are easy to set up with most programs. Just something you might want to consider.

I just received a phony e-mail that claimed to be from PayPal. The subject line was, "Protect yourself from phony e-mails that claim to be from PayPal."

There are polls out saying Bush and Cheney are hitting unprecedented lows in personal (and policy) unpopularity, and that a solid majority of troops in Iraq think the U.S. should start packing to leave. I never believe any one poll but I suspect these are at least showing the direction in which opinion is moving. With Bush sticking to his guns on this Dubai Ports deal despite overwhelming public opposition…and with Cheney handling that shooting incident the way he did…it ain't hard to believe both men could have dropped a few points in the last week.

What I find amazing is that the American public is coming to these conclusions with very little help from the Democrats. There are a few Dems like John Kerry out there attacking the administration but not too well and without much notice. Frankly, I think Kerry's wasting his breath. This country never listens to anyone who lost an election; not until many years after, and then only when the person seems to have a good shot at becoming a winner again. Much of the U.S. didn't listen to Kerry before he lost and we don't even listen to someone like Al Gore who got more votes than the guy who allegedly beat him. With the occasional exception of Howard Dean, who doesn't get a lot of air time, I don't see any prominent Democrat out there making even a semi-effective case against the war and Bush policies. And yet, the country is getting there without them.

Reminds me of a joke I wrote after the 1972 election…one of the first I ever had performed on television by a professional comedian. It was, "Every time the Republicans do something wrong, I blame George McGovern. Because if Nixon had run unopposed, he would have lost." Bush is operating with pretty feeble opposition…and he's losing.

Two more of those "Personal Best" Monty Python specials run tonight on most PBS channels. I'm told by folks who study such things that some of the programs have some minor bleeps and the fuzzing of brief nudity, even though the exact same footage has run unexpurgated on PBS many times in the past. We have apparently reached the stage, post-Janet Jackson Super Bowl appearance, where a lot of broadcasters are terrified of fines. In the case of PBS, there are folks in the Bush administration who just plain don't like the institution and may be looking for an excuse to administer a few slaps.

The episodes featuring Michael Palin, Terry Jones and Terry Gilliam reportedly are identical to what's on the DVD versions of the shows. The others have small changes except that there's a big alteration in the Eric Idle show where the entire musical number, "Sit On My Face," has been replaced by "The Philosopher's Song."

As mentioned earlier, PBS will soon rebroadcast all the original episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, from which most of this material was drawn. One wonders if they will be uncut and if so, why these compilations had to be laundered.

As noted here, cartoonist Aaron McGruder is taking a six month hiatus from producing his newspaper strip, Boondocks. During that period, newspapers will either run reruns or some other strip entirely.

Back when Garry Trudeau started this practice, taking some time off from Doonesbury, a number of older cartoonists criticized him. The criticisms were along the lines of "These kids today are so lazy." And it is true that in the "old days," a guy with a syndicated strip could only take a vacation by getting ahead on his work, and that most strips then required somewhat more drawing on a daily basis and a lot more on Sunday. Strips now are smaller and simpler, and a top creator of one current comic strip once estimated to me that, even putting in as much detail as he dared, there was still less drawing in a whole week's worth of his strips (7 days) than George McManus used to put into just the Bringing Up Father Sunday page.

I'm not sure why McGruder needs six months off, especially if it's true that he no longer draws the strip himself. Comic strips don't take that long to write. But let's say he does need to get away for a bit. Only a writer or artist truly knows the way in which his work fatigues him and what is necessary for recovery. Still, if I were the editor of a newspaper that has been buying Boondocks for years, I think I'd be annoyed. Boondocks is at its best when it's topical so reruns are really going to feel like a cheat. And if I bring in another strip to take its place for six months, am I not risking that my readers will forget about Boondocks and not welcome it back? Or want to see that replacement strip displaced? Reader loyalty to the comic strip page has already gotten pretty fragile in some cases and this won't help.

I wonder if the syndicates would consider offering some strips as time-shares. Maybe a strip doesn't have to run seven days a week. Couldn't it run Sunday through Friday, and then give the Saturday slot to some new feature? Perhaps the answer to shrinking newspaper space is to double-up. Instead of two cartoonists straining to produce seven strips per week and burning themselves out, maybe they could share one space — one strip on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; the other on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and then they take turns doing a Sunday page. Some strips might profit creatively from such a schedule.

Maybe it isn't that much of a problem. Most cartoonists don't take sabbaticals. Then again, most of them don't have a loyal-enough audience that they dare.

I'm a big fan of a chain of restaurants called Souplantation in some states and Sweet Tomatoes in others. I have no idea why the two names, or if there's any palpable difference. They all seem to be places where you can load a plate with salad, select from an array of soups, have some pasta, grab some muffins or foccacia bread and finish your meal off with something from the dessert bar. I wish there was a bit more animal-style protein to be had on the premises but apart from that, they're great places to dine. I've probably been in at least a dozen different ones in Southern California and the food and mood are always to my liking.

The only negative I have about going to Souplantation is that most of their soups are not as wonderful as you might expect from a place with that name. This will not be the case during the month of March. In March, most of their restaurants are featuring among their selections, a Creamy Tomato Soup which — unless they've gone and changed the recipe on me — is heavenly. It's kind of like Campbell's done right…and Campbell's Cream of Tomato soup is pretty decent to begin with. The last time Souplantation had Creamy Tomato in their soup rotation, I bombarded Souplantation H.Q. with demands that they bring it back. I'm reticent to take full credit but I'd like to think you can have it this month, at least in part, because of me.

By the way: At least in the Souplantations in Los Angeles, you can get 10% off if you show the cashier a membership card in the American Automobile Association (i.e., "The Triple A"). They don't advertise this much, and I admit it's not as good as free pancakes. But hey, 10% off is 10% off.