Monthly Archives: February 2007

A few weeks ago, I bought one of these. It's the Cruzer Crossfire, made by SanDisk…a little USB connecting flash drive that with the cap on is a bit smaller than the standard-size Pez refill pack. It holds 4.0 GB of whatever you want to put on it. Cute, huh? Well, it would be if it worked.

It did for a time. I copied all my vital files onto it and used it to update them between my three computers. Then a few days ago, the thing stopped working. I plug it into a USB port and nothing happens. I've tried it on eight USB ports on three computers and none of them recognize its existence.

So I called SanDisk…and I'll say this for them. They have people on duty at Tech Support even on Sunday and I wasn't even on "hold" for very long. But really, all the guy there could tell me was that once in while, there's a defective one and they'll replace it if I send it back, or I can do what may be faster, which is to take it back to the place of purchase.

Which brings me to my problem. I put all my vital files on it — credit card data, bank accounts, passwords, pictures of various comic book industry figures naked…do I really want to send this to a total stranger at some distant company? I mean, they say they'll just destroy it and ship me another but do I want to trust this? Maybe it will work on some computer. Maybe it'll work on the computer of that kid at the Returns Desk at Costco.

Hmm. Something to think about…

We hereby inaugurate a new, recurring feature on this weblog. It's called "What Do You Want To Bet?" Here's our first "What Do You Want To Bet?"

Fidel Castro's niece says her uncle is in "stupendous" health. What do you want to bet he's dead before the month is out?

The Extinct Attractions Club is a group that is interested (maybe "obsessed" would be a better word) with documenting the history of theme park attractions, especially at Disneyland. They have a whole line of DVDs they've produced with rare footage of the Magic Kingdom and interviews with the folks who built or otherwise contributed to the things you could once do for a "E" ticket.

Here's a little preview of their overview of the Haunted Mansion. In it, you'll get to see some footage of the late Thurl Ravenscroft, the man with the greatest singing voice that ever existed on the planet. You know him best as Tony the Tiger but he can be heard all over Disneyland, and we're glad the Extinct Attractions folks interviewed him so extensively.

This is just to remind you all that tomorrow (Tuesday) is National Pancake Day. If you go to an IHOP (those places we used to call The International House of Pancakes) between 7 AM and 10 PM, they'll give you a free short stack of buttermilk pancakes. All the details are over on this page but really, that's all you need to know. Go to one. Ask for free pancakes. Eat free pancakes. Go home. Simple as that.

Another pioneer of the earliest days of comics has died. It's legendary artist Bob Oksner and the cause of death, earlier this evening, was pneumonia. Born October 14, 1916 in Paterson, New Jersey, he originally embarked on a legal career at New York University. It was while he was editing the campus humor magazine that he met many cartoonists and began flexing his muscles in that area. Before long, he'd changed majors and enrolled also at the Art Students League. He received an M.A. at Columbia University, then taught art and history in high school until he broke into comics. His earliest work was in either 1939 or 1940 for Funnies, Inc., which was an art service that supplied comic book material to a number of publishers, including Timely (now Marvel) Comics. Timely liked to hire artists away from Funnies, Inc. and by '42, Oksner was working directly for the publisher on strips including The Destroyer and Marvel Boy, while also occasionally drawing for other houses. In 1945, he began drawing a syndicated newspaper strip, Miss Cairo Jones, that lasted until 1947.

Sheldon Mayer, an editor at DC, had been a fan of Miss Cairo Jones and he invited Oksner to work for DC…an association that kept Bob occupied for the rest of his career. He started on The Black Canary and other strips featuring pretty ladies and soon segued to humor features, especially ones based on licensed properties. Oksner drew The Adventures of Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis until that team split up, whereupon his assignment became The Adventures of Jerry Lewis. He also drew Sgt. Bilko, Doberman, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, Pat Boone, The Adventures of Bob Hope and non-licensed humor titles like Leave it to Binky, Miss Beverly Hills, A Date With Judy and Stanley and His Monster. One of his more memorable stints was as artist/co-creator of the short-lived The Angel and the Ape in the late sixties. He received the National Cartoonists Society Award in its Comic Book Division for 1960 and 1961 won the Shazam Award in 1970 for Best Pencil Artist (Humor Division).

When DC didn't have humor work for him, he did romance tales for Girl's Love Stories and other such comics. Later, when they weren't publishing either, Oksner worked on Wonder Woman, Supergirl, Lois Lane and other adventure-type strips, especially those featuring heroines. He did a long tour of duty as Curt Swan's inker on Superman and drew a number of Superman stories on his own and illustrated many classic covers.

Over the years, Oksner occasionally returned to syndicated comic strips. From 1952 to 1955, he drew a strip based on the I Love Lucy TV show and from 1967 to '68, there was Soozie, a very well-drawn strip about a very well-built young lady. His longest run in syndication began in '69 when he began collaborating with his long-time friend, Irwin Hasen, on the scripts for Hasen's strip, Dondi. Oksner did the plots and Hasen wrote the dialogue. This lasted until 1986 when the strip ended.

That was a year or two after Oksner had retired completely from drawing…and I don't mean just from drawing for DC. He gave away his drawing table and art supplies, and when fans contacted him to inquire about commissions, his reply was, "Sorry…I don't have anything to draw on." A few years later, he weakened enough to do a few sketches but when I interviewed him at the 2002 Comic-Con International, he said he was quite content to have put drawing behind him. (The above photo of him was taken at that convention. Thanks to Jackie Estrada for supplying it.)

That convention was the only opportunity I ever had to meet Mr. Oksner and spend time with him, even though we'd both worked briefly on a mid-seventies comic book adaptation of the TV show, Welcome Back, Kotter. He was a charming gentleman who was amazed and delighted to discover he had so many fans. It seemed like every thirty seconds for all four days, someone was coming up to him to say how much they'd always admired his art. Especially the way he drew the ladies.

An issue of Alter Ego devoted to Oksner's work is just about to go to press.

Let's catch up with what folks are writing to me. This one's from Starmaxx and it's in response to that post I put up about replacing human cashiers at parking lots with machines…

I can tell you that these machines came into vogue at the parking lots that service the Washington, D.C. metro-rail (similar to the subway) in the last few years after management found out that the "manned" parking lot attendants were stealing lots of money. Apparently, it went into the millions and had gone on for years. Why an audit never caught this still remains a mystery, but that just goes to show you how the D.C. local government is run!

I had a horrible experience when I attended the 2006 baseball opening day for the Washington Nationals and decided to take mass transit. Went into the metro parking lot, but could not find any parking spaces after looking for 30 minutes. Tried to get out, but you needed the "fare card" to use in the automated machine — but you could only buy the card inside the Metro complex (which meant you had to find a parking space and take a 5 minute walk). What a quandary. Finally, a friendly attendent showed me an empty space. What lunacy — but I now always have a spare card in my glove compartment.

I can understand wanting to eliminate theft but it seems to me it would be quite easy and cheap to have a TV camera monitoring the exit cashiers and counting how many people exited and paid. I don't understand how it's cost efficient to have machines collecting parking fees, especially when you need to have human beings around to jump in when the machines fail or when "the system" doesn't work for some customer. My old pal Pat O'Neill, who does not live in Southern California, writes…

Wait a minute here — you have to pay to park at a shopping mall in Los Angeles? The fact that you're spending money in the stores isn't sufficient revenue? Do any of the stores offer to validate?

f I drove to a mall and found out they wanted me to pay for the "privilege" of leaving my car in the lot while I went in and spent money, I'd quickly find some other place to spend my money!

Don't think that hasn't occurred to some of us. But yes, there are malls out here that don't validate…where you can go in and spend thousands of dollars but you still have to come up with a buck to get out. The Beverly Center and the Beverly Connection, which are across the street from one another, both do that…and I'm guessing they haven't suffered a noticeable loss of consumers or they wouldn't do that.

Both once had free parking if you were there two hours or less. The Beverly Center started charging a buck minimum a few years ago and now the Beverly Connection, which is just reopening after a major renovation, is going that way. It'll be interesting to see if they stick with it. The revamped mall is not yet fully open — some stores aren't finished — so they aren't expecting a lot of business yet. Once they get to the point where they do, they may find that parking fee keeping people away.

Also, the other day, I posted a link to a video and wondered if that was Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters singing. I got some interesting responses, like this one from Fred G. Vigeant…

Most definitely Glenn on the Raid commercial. While the song was made popular by the Kingston Trio as the "M.T.A.", the tune is from a song known as "The Wreck of the Old '97," which every folk group, including the Weavers and Leadbelly sang. It may be interesting to you as well, that the Limeliters were formed as a "song try out group" for the Kingston Trio. Lou Gottlieb, who was singing with the Gateway Singers at the time, wrote a couple of songs that were part of the K.T. repertoire. Somebody (it may have been Lou or possible Frank Werber, the Kingston's manager) got the idea that another group could be formed that could "try out" new songs in front of an audience to see they would work. Thus, the Limeliters were formed (named after the club in Aspen, I believe, where they started out) and soon had their own following and recording contract.

A couple of folks thought it wasn't Yarbrough but they were just guessing. Here's another expert opinion from Michael J. Hayde…

First of all, that's definitely Glenn Yarbrough. Nobody could duplicate that voice. Second, I suspect the banjo player is fellow Limeliter Alex Hassilev.

As to why Yarbrough (and possibly Hassilev) did the commercial probably has a lot to do with timing. The Kingston Trio's "M.T.A." was released in the spring of 1959, and peaked on the charts around July. Coincidentally, that's the month the Limeliters were formed. Yarbrough and Hassilev had been working as singles and occasionally as a duo at a club in Aspen called the Limelite. They were joined by Lou Gottlieb, who'd been working as an arranger for…The Kingston Trio. Originally, Gottlieb thought the three of them could record demos for the K.T., but it was clear that the potential for something greater was present.

In any event, that Raid commercial probably was one of many projects the group members took on before, during or after their first (not-so-successful) album on the Elektra label came out in 1960, but prior to their signing to RCA Victor, which put them into the big time. I should add that no folk group did more TV commercials than the Limeliters; it was they who introduced the "Things go better with Coke" jingle, and how I'd love to see that turn up on your website someday.

We aim to please. Here are the Limeliters — who I always liked a lot better than the Kingston Trio, by the way — performing that lovely jingle with Mr. Yarbrough in fine voice as the lead singer. And because no detail's too trivial for me to not point it out, I think the short delivery guy in this commercial is the fine character actor, Bill McCutcheon. Thanks to everyone for all the mail.

A man named Douglas Feith seems to have been designated as Official Scapegoat for all the bad intelligence work that got us into the war in Iraq over, at best, erroneous assumptions.

I do not mean to suggest Mr. Feith is blameless. Indeed, the fact that he's now making the rounds, denying he ever said all the things he said does not speak well for his integrity. But he may be drawing a disproportionate share of criticism that should rightly be dispersed over a wider pantheon of folks who screwed up royally.

In any case, he has achieved something amazing. How badly does a Bush administration official have to dissemble before Fox News calls him a liar?

Step right up. I have your Sunday Video Link right here, friends. It's another clip from The Dinah Shore Chevy Show, in this case from October 4, 1959. Dinah and Groucho Marx perform "Peasie Weasie," which was one of those weird old songs that only Groucho seemed to ever sing.

It dates back to a touring vaudeville act that he and his brothers began doing around 1910. They actually had two acts then. One was called "Fun in Hi Skule" and the other was "Mr. Green's Reception." As I understand it, they did "Fun in Hi Skule" for a while and then developed the second act, which was kind of a sequel with the same silly characters. In some theaters, they did one of the two acts and in some, they did both and "Peasie Weasie" was usually the finale in one act or both. Here's Groucho and Dinah taking a crack at it…

I keep alluding here to the upcoming labor nastiness in Hollywood which may include either a monumental strike by the Writers Guild and/or the Screen Actors guild, or one or both of those unions getting its teeth kicked in, or both. There are some other possibilities but I'm not expecting any that involve everyone linking arms, singing happy songs around the campfire and life as we know it continuing unchanged.

This website has a very simple explanation of how the process works, at least from the WGA perspective. I disagree with the suggestion that my Guild "lost" the 1988 strike. In fact, I think one of the problems we've gotten into is this tendency to view a labor negotiation like a Jai Alai game where one side must emerge as undisputed winner and the other as loser. If you can get away from that mindset — and sadly, some folks like the bloodshed and don't want to — it's possible to arrive at a deal that works for both. It's also possible to wind up "winning" a strike the way some wars are "won" — i.e., fewer of your people got killed. So you still lose when you win. I believe the future of labor negotations, at least in Hollywood, involves moving away from the win/lose attitude and getting to the "works for both sides" mentality. I'm not sure though that the folks with whom we bargain are there yet.

Anyway, like I said, I don't think we lost the '88 strike. I don't think we won, either. I think we were forced into a situation where being on strike for five months was the less damaging of two bad options…and there were only two. When we get closer to when the '07 strike might commence, I'll try to write more about what I think happened in '88. But in the meantime, read that piece to which I'm linking. It's a good primer on the situation.

Yet another chapter in the long-running Winnie the Pooh legal battle. The Disney folks lost the latest round.

The late composer Meredith Willson wrote "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Christmas" and all the songs in The Music Man and The Unsinkable Molly Brown — tunes like "76 Trombones" and "Til There Was You" and "I Ain't Down Yet." But for some, his most memorable tune was one that was drilled into them in their school gym classes in the early sixties.

In 1961, President John F. Kennedy launched something called The President's Council on Physical Fitness and asked Willson to compose an exercise-oriented theme song. Willson responded with "Chicken Fat," a record sung by Robert Preston and distributed by the zillions to physical education classes across the country. In some schools, it was played every day and when students from that era hear it, they reflexively drop and begin cranking out push-ups.

Our link today is to a clip of the song as performed on The Dinah Shore Show on October 6, 1961. Dinah and Nanette Fabray give it their all, along with Dinah's dancers and brief appearance by Al Hirt and George Montgomery. It's an odd presentation of an odd song, and for the full effect, you might want to do a couple of sit-ups as you watch. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for recommending this one.

So exactly what was so wrong with having cashiers at the exits in parking lots? It's getting so every mall I go to these days has a little recording on the way in that tells you that there are no cashiers at the exits and that if you have to pay, you have to pay at some machine before you return to your car. This is annoying enough in lots where you don't always have to pay — say, at the Westfield in Century City where the first two hours are free. But yesterday, I was at the new Beverly Connection on La Cienega and it's at least a dollar to get out, no matter what you bought or how short a time you stayed there. So if I go there, I have to deal with their silly vending-type devices.

I don't get how this can save them a lot of money. It's not like those people in the booths were drawing down CEO salaries, after all. By eliminating those employees, the lot incurs the cost of the equipment and the ongoing upkeep on it all. And in every lot I've visited that has gone to this system, there seem to be dozens of employees hovering around, making sure the machines work and teaching people how to use them and dealing with the inevitable confusions and system failures. Wouldn't it be easier/cheaper to put back the booths and stick those people in them?

At the Beverly Connection, before you return to your auto, you stop off at a kiosk and put in a dollar to get your exit ticket validated. A little voice informs you that you have twenty minutes to use the exit ticket.

Question: What happens if on my way to my car, I suddenly think of something else I'd like to go buy? Or what happens if I run into a friend and we get to talking or if I can't find my vehicle and it's twenty-one minutes before I get to the exit? Or if I lose my ticket? Or if, as happened to me twice in parking lots before Christmas, I drive around the lot for ten minutes, fail to find an empty space and decide to leave? I can think of a dozen other problematic scenarios, none of which occur if there's a human being I can talk to and pay on the way out.

Yesterday also, I was in a manned parking lot where the first hour was free. I was driving for the exit at 58 minutes after my entry time…but there was a traffic jam at the gate and I had to sit there for four or five minutes while the lady in the booth argued with some driver. When I finally got up to her, it was more than an hour after I'd entered but she waved me on through because she knew it wasn't my fault. A machine can't do that.

Like I said, I don't get how this can result in huge savings. I can see how it generates ill will and maybe a desire to not visit that parking lot if you can help it. But can this really be worth the potential ill will involved?

Dropped by the Hollywood Collectors Show this afternoon out in Burbank at what was once a Hilton and is now a Marriott. That's how it is sometimes in life. One day you're a Hilton and the next day, you're a Marriott. The next time I go there, I fully expect it to be the world's largest Motel Six.

Those of you who know about these events can skip this paragraph. Four or so times a year, a gent named Ray Courts stages these events, usually in Burbank but occasionally in other climates. There are dealers selling photos and movie posters and other show biz memorabilia but the big attraction is this: The room is full of stars of all kinds — TV stars, movie stars, silent screen stars, child stars, music stars…even some current working stars. They're all available to sell you an autographed photo or book and most are willing to just talk, especially after you've purchased an autographed photo or book. The purchase is not, with most, mandatory. I actually didn't spend a cent out there but had some nice conversations, regardless.

Two of them were with folks who've recently been featured in video links on this site — Bill "Jose Jiminez" Dana and William Schallert. Nothing all that interesting to report on either front, though I must say that Mr. Schallert seemed amazed at how many people were stopping by his table to buy a photo and tell him how much they've always liked seeing him on TV. It's also funny that back in the sixties, he played Admiral Hargrade, the ancient C.O.N.T.R.O.L. agent on Get Smart under heavy make-up…and now, forty-some-odd years later, he still looks younger than he did then. He was selling a still from that show and everyone was remarking about this.

Among the other celebs there, some of whom I had the chance to talk with, were Edie Adams, Gogi Grant, Adam West, Burt Ward, Julie Newmar, Paul "Pee Wee Herman" Reubens, Kristy McNichol, David L. Lander, Katey Sagal, David Faustino, Mariette Hartley and many others. And while they weren't guests, my pal Earl Kress (who went with me) and I enjoyed running into Chuck McCann, Wally Wingert and Gary Owens, and lunching with the latter. (By the way: Earl, over on his website, has a good post up about that Bill Dana/Hanna-Barbera cartoon I keep babbling about here.)

The Hollywood Collectors Show concludes tomorrow (Saturday) and most of the same guests will be there. It's $15 to get in and they nick you another seven for parking. That is, if you can find a space. You might have to wait around until the whole complex turns into a Holiday Inn Express or something.

Here's another Raid commercial. I don't think Tex Avery directed this one. I'm including it mostly because the parody of the song, "M.T.A.", is so bizarre.

I think the one word the mouse yells — "Raid!" — is Mel Blanc — probably lifted from the track for another Raid commercial — but you can't always be certain with one word. I'm more intrigued by who the singer is. Is that Glenn Yarbrough of the Limeliters? Or is it someone doing a great Glenn Yarbrough impression? And "M.T.A." was a hit for the Kingston Trio. I think the Limeliters performed it occasionally and may even have recorded it…but why have Yarbrough (or someone imitating him) perform a commercial parodying a rival group's hit?

I don't expect answers to any of this. I just think it's strange…or at least, strange enough to be Today's Video Link. You might as well click. It's only forty seconds.

The best source of information on Vegas — and one of the few that isn't under the thumb of advertising from the businesses they're ostensibly reviewing — is Anthony Curtis's Las Vegas Advisor. Formerly only a monthly paper newsletter, it's now also an Internet site where some features are available only by subscription but others are open to all.

One free feature is the daily Question of the Day, where Curtis and his staff answer some query about Vegas. Ordinarily, each question can only be read for free until displaced by the next day's question…but for the next few days, the Las Vegas Advisor Q.O.T.D. Archives are open to all. If you're interested in the city and how it works, hurry over there and read up. No one knows more about that place. Also, here's a link to today's question.