Monthly Archives: July 2006

For years, one of the best-kept secrets in Las Vegas was a guy named Bob Anderson — a singing impressionist who played all the hotels with uncanny carbons of Dean, Frank, Sammy and (the part I liked best) several performers who no one else does. I mean, how often do you hear someone mimic Mel Tormé? Or The Righteous Brothers? Or Otis Redding? He had an amazing act full of such folks…and he still has that act, though he now does it more commonly in Branson, Missouri. Since I never get to Branson, it's my loss.

Our link today is to a little promotional film for Mr. Anderson. It runs a bit over eight minutes and it doesn't get into the impressions until the mid-point…and with all due respect to whoever assembled this, I think he's better than some of the examples here. But still, as you'll see, he's pretty darn good. Maybe one of these days, someone in Vegas will have the brains to lay a big, long-term contract on the guy and I can go see him again when I travel there. In the meantime, this will have to suffice…

Jonathan Alter on why Bush's veto of the embryonic stem cell research bill was not only politically foolish but wrong from a pro-life viewpoint.

We know plenty about the movies of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy but very little about their wildly-successful tours of Europe. Crowds turned out in Elvis/Beatles numbers and the performances they gave were packed.

Some of this is covered very well in a half-hour radio special on BBC4 by film historian Glenn Mitchell, who managed to find many "lost" recordings of Stan and Ollie. You can hear it for the next few days at this link. Don't delay.

Clips from my Comic-Con panels — all of them unauthorized and most of them very much out-of-sync — are turning up on YouTube. But I thought it was worth linking to this one. It runs a minute and a half and it's from Sunday's Cartoon Voice Panel. Bob Bergen is the current voice of Porky Pig and many of the Warner Brothers characters. I asked him about one experience he had doing the voice of Luke Skywalker for a Star Wars radio program.

I asked yesterday about what was omitted via a bad edit during Keith Olbermann's Tonight Show appearance the other night. My spies tell me it was an explanation of Bill O'Reilly's defense of Nazi killers during World War II…essentially the same story told on the page to which I linked.

Why was it cut? That, they can't tell me. Maybe for time.

I guess I should mention that it's official: The Dungeons and Dragons cartoon show, which I worked on back in my misspent youth, is coming to DVD shortly. On or about November 7, it's coming out from the Ink and Paint company — a "complete" set which will include all 27 episodes plus a "making of" documentary and a number of special features. I'll put up an Amazon link as soon as that's possible.

David Segal on what Woody Allen's up to these days.

Here's a perfect example of why we love Stephen Colbert…

I've received (actual count:) 569 e-mails since I left for the San Diego Con. I've answered about fifty of them. I won't get to them all but if yours warrants reply and you haven't received one yet, that's why. I also have a looming deadline to contend with…and it's kinda warm. Plus, my dishwasher is broken. You can't expect me to answer e-mail when my dishwasher is broken.

Our daily Video Links will resume in a day or two.

Last night, Jay Leno had Keith Olbermann on his show. The main topic was Olbermann's ongoing feud with Bill O'Reilly.

At one point, Olbermann mentioned how O'Reilly keeps "defending" some Nazi killers from World War II (this page explains what that's all about). Then suddenly there was a bad edit and Leno was asking him if he'd ever met O'Reilly.

Wonder what was cut out there.

What with doing ninety-seven panels, I didn't have a lot of opportunity in San Diego to take photos. But you kinda have to make the time to snap a giant figure of Batman made completely out of Lego blocks.

Back in February, I broke the sad news that The Old Spaghetti Factory in Hollywood was soon to be demolished. Here's a flashback to that item. My pal Corey Klemow writes…

Went to eat at Spaghetti Factory tonight and asked the server when they were closing. She said they were going to close at the end of this month, but they struck a deal that will allow them to remain open for two more years. More opportunities for garlic butter and for spumoni, yay!

And more opportunities for me to get up there for one more meal. I don't eat spaghetti these days but it might be back on my menu within two years. Nice of them to keep the place open for me.

I posted a message the other day about Global Warming here, figuring that — given past response to any current events comment here — I'd receive a few hundred agreements and arguments. Perhaps because much of this blog's readership was standing in lines at the San Diego Convention Center, I received a grand total of one message. It's from Roger Taylor and here it is, along with my response…

In response to your comment about the high temperatures we've been having, are you going to tell me that if we have some record cold days we will be plunging into an ice age? This planet is always changing and also always "fixing itself." Let's not forget how Greenland got its name (hint: it wasn't because humans were making it warm).

Money spent on preventing "Global Warming" would be much better spent elsewhere: feeding hungry people, disease research, security from people who want to murder and maim as many people as possible under the guise of their "religion"…

The premise of the Global Warming theory is that what is happening is making our weather more extreme — more droughts, more floods, wetter storms, bigger snowstorms, etc. So record cold days would be more evidence that Global Warming is occurring, not less. ("Global Warming" is probably an unfortunate popular name for what should be called something like "Extreme Climate Change." The popular name allows people to dismiss a perfectly valid theory, overwhelmingly supported in the scientific community, every time it snows.)

Yes, the planet is always changing and repairing itself. If Global Warming is occurring, it will doubtlessly correct itself, perhaps in a few thousand years. The threat is not that the planet will be irreparably damaged but that an awful lot of people will suffer and die before the correction takes place.

In other words, Roger: I think you're completely misrepresenting the theory you're arguing against.

And you seem to have missed my point, which I'll restate here because repeating myself is ever so much easier than thinking of new things to post on this blog. It's that I hope people like you are right. I hope Global Warming is a myth. I hope that before I die, we can all have a good laugh about it and file it away with Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster and Bill O'Reilly's integrity. But if someone comes up with evidence of a possible problem that might cause millions of people to die, you don't wait until the case is airtight. We invaded Iraq because Saddam's pending nuclear arsenal seemed probable (or at least possible) and we couldn't take the chance. There's way too much evidence of the kind of thing Mr. Gore is talking about to not take action as if it's definite. The potential loss if all those scientists are right is just too great.

Okay now, I have something really important to post about so I'm going to go on to the next item…

I never met Jack Warden. I have no neat anecdotes about Jack Warden. But I did want to say that I never saw him not be wonderful in whatever he did…especially And Justice For All… and his dual role in Used Cars. The latter had the greatest dying scene in the history of movies. I hope his real exit wasn't as tumultuous.

Amtrak ran a bit late but the train was way more comfy than flying…and given how long in advance airlines want you to check in now, not that much longer. Hey, how about driving? Nope, no way, forget about it. The older I get, the less I like to drive anywhere and especially long trips. So the train was jes' fine for us.

What to say? I liked the Hyatt a lot more than Heidi MacDonald but she's basically right about everything else. The big story was, of course, the teeming mass of humanity (I'm being a bit loose with the language here) that descended — or in some cases, tried to descend — on the convention center. A tip for next year's con: Register in advance or don't go.

And by the way: I'm not sure that there isn't some convention rule against this but if there isn't, I'm going to throw out a free idea by which someone could make themselves a ton o' money: Sell bottles of water cheaper than the convention center vendors. Your basic 16.9 ounce bottle of Crystal Geyser drinking H2O (those little bottles that all say they're filled by someone named "CG Roxane") sell for about 25 cents each at the market near me and they're even cheaper at Costco. Those are retail prices but even if you paid that, you could sell them for $1.25 each and make a tidy profit, even after paying for your table and a couple of tubs of ice. The concessions at the convention center were getting $2.50 for a bottle of water…and it was even worse than that.

You get in line, wait five or ten minutes and finally, when you reach the front, you say, "Two bottles of water, please." And you figure they're going to hand you, for your five dollars, two of the 16.9 ounce bottles they have on display. Logical, right?

Only they don't do that. They hand you two twelve ounce bottles of Dasani…which, first of all, isn't as good a drinking water (purified as opposed to natural spring). And secondly, instead of getting 16.9 ounces for your $2.50, you're getting twelve ounces. For two and a half bucks, they can't give you the slightly larger size which costs them maybe two cents more? Plus, of course, it's sort of misleading advertising…and you'll usually go along with it because you're thirsty and tired and you need to be somewhere for a panel and you don't really want to spend another ten minutes in line to see if the next vendor over has larger bottles. (Based on my unscientific survey, they did not.) In a hall where one could find plenty of rip-offs, this was the rip-offiest.

Hmm…I think I just complained about that for more paragraphs than it's worth. But that's sometimes the kind of guy I am.

I'll write more after I unpack.