Monthly Archives: May 2007

Firefox is a free browser for the PC and many who've tried it like it better than Internet Explorer. I have both on my computer and use both but I have to say I use I.E. more often. Firefox is fine and — mostly because of specific plug-ins I've plugged-in — it does some things Internet Explorer doesn't. I think it's a close competition and that many of the folks out there who insist Firefox is way superior are just trying to stick it to Microsoft.

Like I said, Firefox is free. So I was astounded to learn that it generates $55 million a year or so for its makers. How is such a thing possible? Read here and find out.

People keep asking me when there will be more Groo. I'm not sure if they're asking because they want to race to their local comic shop then or steer clear but whatever their motives, they ask. For a long time, I haven't had a real answer for them because my collaborator, Sergio Aragonés was busy with whatever he does to earn a living (I have no idea) and I was swamped with whatever it is I do (likewise). But now I have something to tell the folks who ask.

There will be more Groo on August 1. That's the release date for The Groo 25th Anniversary Special, the cover of which looks something like the above. Here's what the official solicitation says about this thing…

Celebrate twenty-five years of the world's stupidest barbarian doing stupid and barbaric things! After a brief hiatus, the Champion of Cheese Dip is back to battle the menace of "The Plague," an all-new story by the same guys responsible for all the Groo stories for the last quarter-century, Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier. Also, thrill to The Groo Alphabet, a primer of that hero's friends and foes (mostly foes), followed by a special illustrated text story by Sergio and Mark on how this comic came to be and why it just won't go away. Plus other silly features.

So there you are. More Groo. Not only that but the following month, Dark Horse Comics — the same folks bringing you the special — will release the first issue of Groo: Hell on Earth, a four-issue mini-series. And we're also starting up the reprint paperbacks again but I don't want to mention that now and scare you into thinking you may get too much Groo. But you will. Let that be a lesson to you all about being careful what you ask for. It just might be Groo.

Last week, eleven House Republicans went to the White House and, as the New York Times put it, told "…the president that conditions needed to improve markedly by fall or more Republicans would desert him on the war." I don't think that little news item has gotten quite enough attention. As I noted back in this post…

What we had then, I think, was a Republican party that realized that Nixon was going down — in popularity if not in an impeachment trial — and they threw him overboard to save their own necks. Barry Goldwater, Hugh Scott and I forget who the third one was — three prominent G.O.P. leaders — essentially went to the White House and told Nixon that he would not have solid Republican backing if it came to an impeachment vote and trial. Goldwater even said he was prepared to vote to convict on at least one count. That was when Nixon knew the time had come to have Pat start packing.

That was what it took then. The third messenger, by the way, was House Minority Leader John Rhodes. Hugh Scott was then the Senate Minority Leader and Barry Goldwater was, of course, kind of the Father Figure of the G.O.P. at the time.

The lesson to be learned was this: Nixon could have coped with Democratic opposition. No matter how serious the charges against him, he could always have dismissed them as partisan attacks. No matter how low his popularity went with the nation — and lately, he's about a point ahead of rectal itch — he could always keep his base by telling them it was just a Democratic smear and fear campaign. That won't work against a sizeable Republican opposition.

The thing to remember is that it isn't just eleven Republican Congressfolks. It's eleven warning him there are a lot more ready to hop off the bus. Presumably, some of those are from districts where it might be politically dangerous to oppose Bush now…but they're willing to do so before Election Day rather than lose.

Bush says he doesn't want Democrats dictating timetables to him for ending the war. Sounds to me like Republicans are doing just that.

Two weeks ago at the L.A. Times Festival of Books, I attended a panel called "The Age of Spin" on which Frank Luntz, Joe Conason, David Goodman and Michael Isikoff discussed the current political situation with John Powers acting as moderator. It wasn't the most interesting thing I've ever seen but if you want to take it in, it's on C-Span 2 later today — at 8 PM Eastern time, 5 PM Pacific time, and please remember that C-Span schedules sometimes change for no visible reason. (It's also supposed to run early tomorrow morning.) My report on the panel, written after getting home from it, is here.

Cartoonist Roz Chast is interviewed by Steve Martin.

You might not but I found this rather interesting. Tim Harford writes of how the Coca-Cola company (a somewhat successful enterprise, wouldn't you say?) went sixty years without raising its prices.

Dick DeBartolo has been writing for MAD Magazine since Roosevelt was president…the first Roosevelt. Here, he takes us on a tour of the offices of that esteemed publication in New York…

Okay, that was Part One. Here's Part Two. Warning: It isn't any more exciting than Part One.

The first time I visited the Mad offices was when they were at 485 Madison Avenue. (They're now on Broadway, in the building across the street from where Mr. Letterman does his show.) The first offices I saw were crummier and more cluttered, and therefore more interesting. They also had Bill Gaines in them, which made them even more interesting. That day in 1970, I met him, Al Feldstein, John Putnam, Nick Meglin, Leonard Brenner, Jerry DeFuccio and one freelance artist — Angelo Torres.

That office was decorated much like the current one — with cover paintings on the walls and MAD merchandise around and such — but there were also jokes…like a pair of fake feet hanging out of a ceiling air vent. Bill's office had the famous life-size head of King Kong (sculpted by Sergio Aragonés) peeking in the window. Someone explained to me that for a long time, the MAD offices looked like ordinary offices with nothing silly or colorful around. As the magazine got more popular in the sixties, fans were trekking up there and asking for tours and such. Gaines saw the disappointment in their faces that the MAD office wasn't a wacky place so he adjusted the decor a bit. But just a bit.

Here I am practicing what I preach. Earlier today, complaining about newspapers that don't make decent corrections, I said, "Go ahead. Find me the online 'corrections' section for The Washington Times. Reader Loren Collins did. It's on this page.

Nice to know they have one. I'm pretty sure they didn't a year or two ago…and they're sure keeping it a secret now. I couldn't find anything on their front page that leads to it, nor does it show up on their site map. So I think my point is still valid. Corrections are either not done at all or not done in a way that would cause most people who read the original piece to see the correction.

One last thing. I was amused by this one on the Washington Times corrections page…

Due to an editing error, The Washington Times yesterday incorrectly recounted the biblical story of Abraham disowning one of his sons. The son whom Abraham disowned was Ishmael.

I don't know why that struck me funny but it did.

I know I keep harping on this matter of people misspelling the names of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. I apologize for that. It's just that it strikes me as the simplest kind of error. I mean, there are a number of areas of dispute in comic book history. You'd think we could all, at least, get the inarguable stuff right.

But what just dawned on me about eight seconds ago was that the Internet has become a kind of sloppy fact-checker. In faulting that Newsday reporter, I said that if he'd just taken the few moments to Google "Blondie," he could have found out who was currently doing the strip, instead of the names he gave. That's true…if (boldface "if") he'd had the presence of mind to know what he was reading. The official Blondie website or the King Features Syndicate site are as close to authoritative as you could get. But there's also faulty info on the Internet. Lots of it.

Case in point. If someone wanted to check the spelling on Siegel and Shuster, Googling will only get them so far. If you go search for Siegel AND Schuster AND Superman, you get (at this moment) around 25,600 hits. I'm sure some of the people who got it wrong did that kind of search and interpreted that result as verification. So they print Joe's name as Schuster and now the next guy who "fact-checks" that way will find there are, like, 25,601 hits. In fact, I probably just added to the pile with this posting.

Over on the Playboy website, there's a little chat with Stan Lee. Much of the talk about comics is fairly standard (and once again, someone can't spell the names of both Siegel and Shuster correctly) but you might be interested in Stan's comments about the War in Iraq. He's for an immediate withdrawal.

Kurt Bodden, who was also there last night at the W.C. Fields celebration, reminds me that there were a couple of brief mentions of alcohol in the panel discussion. I guess I was just amazed there was so little discussion of the man's drinking. Many years ago, as I recounted here, I got to meet and chat with Carlotta Monti, who was Fields's companion or mistress or whatever you want to call her. Obviously, she knew him better than most people and she spoke of his imbibing as akin to his breathing, and couldn't talk about him at all without mentioning it constantly.

Something I'm always wary of is the tendency to extrapolate a full portrait of someone based on a very brief contact with the person. I know a guy who'll tell you Phil Spector is (present-tense) a great and stable human being because that's how he was during their one fifteen minute encounter twenty-some-odd years ago. There are people I worked with and I got one impression of them the first week or two of our association…and a quite different one after a few more weeks or months.

I don't think it's always as easy to say what kind of person someone was…and certainly not via selected anecdotes. On top of that, as Leonard Maltin noted last night and has emphasized elsewhere, a lot of published histories are just plain wrong. People who should know what someone was like have been known to write fiction about them. At times, people even lie or get things horribly awry in autobiographies. A few years ago, a writer I knew quit a job co-writing the autobiography of a Famous Hollywood Figure because the F.H.F. kept insisting on his versions of certain events that were clearly disproven by surviving documentation, up to and including the time and place of his birth. You couldn't even believe what the Famous Hollywood Figure said about himself, let alone what casual acquaintances had to say.

Those of us who never met an important, compelling legend like W.C. Fields have to rely on the researchers and the memories of the dwindling number of folks who knew him. Some of what they say is certainly true and some probably isn't and to sort it all out is probably a better juggling act than even Fields himself ever performed. Which doesn't mean we shouldn't try. We should just recognize that it ain't as easy as we'd like it to be.

Today's clip runs fifteen minutes and probably needs a mild warning of "adult content" for nudity and subject matter. So those of you who are physically or emotionally under eighteen, you're hereby forbidden to click the link…and I just know you won't.

In the early days of cable/pay TV, there was a short-lived but very wonderful series called Likely Stories that gave innovative filmmakers the chance to produce funny films on what sure seemed to be sufficient budgets. I'm not sure how many episodes aired on TV but they were later edited into four, little-seen volumes for home video. Among the famous folks who wrote and/or directed were Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Harry Shearer, Danny DeVito and David Jablin. Mr. Jablin seems to have been the main driving force behind the whole project…and whatever he did, he did well. The batting average of the films was pretty darn high but they didn't get the attention they deserved. I don't know if it was because cable was still getting its act together or because audiences rarely take to anthology formats…probably both.

Here's one of the segments — a bogus instructional film called "School, Girls and You," that was produced in or around 1983. Among the actors you'll recognize in it are Paul Reubens and Patrick Macnee, and I thought the whole thing was pretty funny. I'm not certain but I believe the film was directed by David Wechter.

This is, let's hope, our last post about that Newsday story on comic strips that was woefully filled with outdated and incorrect information. The online version of the story was posted to the Newsday website on Thursday, May 3. Here is a link to that article which is, as of this moment, uncorrected. A few determined readers posted corrections in a section that's hard to spot and which I doubt many people read.

The gentleman who authored the article — a longtime Newsday editor and writer who's about to retire after forty years there, certainly didn't read the corrections. Or at least, he hadn't as of the following day when I phoned and told him there were problems with the article. He was quite surprised to hear there was anything wrong with the piece which, he said, he researched in a "comic encyclopedia" in the Newsday library. I directed him to this posting on my weblog here where I itemized most (not all) of the mistakes.

On Saturday, the article ran — errors and all — as a major cover story in a Newsday magazine section. I'm going to guess that this section was already printed or irrevocably "off to press" at the time I phoned the reporter the day before, and that he was powerless to change it.

The following Tuesday morning, May 8, this paragraph appeared in the online Newsday "corrections" section. As I explained here, I thought this was quite insufficient, starting with the fact that few people who read the article would ever see those corrections. I further noted that the original article was still online and still uncorrected.

As you can see, it still is. However, some time last week, another version of the same article popped up on the Newsday site with corrections inserted. Here it is. As with the paragraph in the "corrections" section, we still have the error of saying that Alex Raymond took over the Blondie strip after Chic Young died. I mentioned that in my posting but apparently if the reporter looked at what I wrote to get the other facts, he missed that one or simply decided not to correct it. There is also nothing to contradict the impression that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ziegler, Allen Saunders and Stan Drake are still alive.

There were a few other things wrong with the original article but I've already spent too much time on this. I only spent any because I wanted to make this point. This is not unique and it's not a rare exception and it's not even the work of an intern with no experience. This is the way too many news sources in this country are. They get it all wrong and then grudgingly do a minimalist, almost covert correction if someone applies a little pressure and/or shame. Some papers these days don't even do that much. (Go ahead. Find me the online "corrections" section for The Washington Times.)

True, there's nothing earth-shattering about citing two dead guys as the current makers of Mary Worth…but this is pretty much the same level of accuracy that The New York Times managed for its coverage of the Whitewater scandal and its early reporting on the Iraq invasion. They did a partial mea culpa on the latter but the record in "The Newspaper of Record" is still scratched.

Lately, a lot of "real journalists" have been decrying bloggers because, among other insults, bloggers don't fact-check and aren't answerable to anyone. That's all true. There's at least as much nonsense and erroneous info in the blogs, probably more. But there's a lot less excuse.

I'm back from a nice evening at the Motion Picture Academy and a program all about W.C. Fields. The Academy has been hosting what I hear is an extraordinary exhibit of Fields artifacts and memorabilia, most of which was donated by the late comedian's family. I haven't seen it yet and if I'm going to, I'm gonna have to hustle. Sunday is the final day to view it.

Last night, the auditorium was about 60% packed for an entry in a series they call The Jack Oakie Celebration of Comedy in Film, which spotlights great funny folks. Leonard Maltin hosted the program which consisted of a series of Fields trailers, a clip from his 1927 silent film Running Wild, a panel discussion with folks who'd either worked with Fields or studied him, and a Fields feature film. The members of the panel were Jane Withers (who appeared briefly with W.C. in It's a Gift), Delmar Watson (who had a small role in You Can't Cheat an Honest Man), Jean Rouverol Butler (who played Fields's daughter in It's a Gift), Hal Kanter (who wrote briefly for some of Fields's radio appearances), film historian Joe Adamson and Fields's grandson, Ronald Fields.

The overriding theme of the discussion was that W.C. was a much nicer human being — especially towards children — than some histories have made him out to be. Three people on the panel worked with him when they were much younger…although Watson admitted he had almost no contact with the man. All reported good experiences with the man, which was nice to hear, though hardly definitive. Interestingly, in a half hour discussion of what kind of person W.C. Fields was, there was no mention whatsoever of alcohol.

The feature shown was The Old-Fashioned Way, a film Fields made in 1934 and — I think — one of his weaker efforts. In it, he plays The Great McGonigle, the con-artist head of a theatrical troupe that likes to skip out of town without paying its boarding house fees. The storyline doesn't make a whole lot of sense but it was still a joy to watch Fields go through his paces and, near the end, to do his juggling act as a semi-grand finale. I had a fine time but I came away wishing they'd run It's a Gift or The Bank Dick or You Can't Cheat An Honest Man instead. One of the folks involved in planning the program told me they'd selected The Old-Fashioned Way because it isn't seen as often as the others. That's true…but you almost never get to see any W.C. Fields movie these days on a big screen with a large, responsive audience. Back in the late sixties/early seventies, there were such screenings around town and I enjoyed them very much. Tonight made me really miss those opportunities.

Once again, we present Three Unrelated Points. For those of you who aren't aware of what this means, it means these are Three Unrelated Points…

1. The other day, flipping the dial in search of news on the now-thankfully-contained Griffith Park Fire, I happened to find myself watching a little of Montel, the show hosted by Montel Williams. His guest — and I gather he has her on often — was a lady named Sylvia Browne who seems to make a very fine living as a "psychic," telling people…apparently anything. She can tell what messages your dead relatives have for you. She can tell you how they died. She can tell you how your career is going to go in five years. She can answer any question and she can do it instantly, without pausing to feign concentration or a trance or anything. It takes less time to get a report on the current thoughts of your dead uncle via Sylvia then it would take to phone a living relative and find out what he's doing. I'm a pretty hard skeptic on subjects like communicating with the dead or predicting the future this way…but I do understand how some people can believe. What I don't understand is how even the most fervent believer in psychic powers could be so mind-numbingly stupid as to think Ms. Browne has any.
2. Years ago, I made the mistake of buying a Pelouze scale that weighs my outgoing letters and packages and tells me to the penny how much postage to put on them. It's great but every time the rates go up, as they will on Monday, I'm supposed to purchase a new chip from the Pelouze people to upgrade my scale. The new chip is $45 plus postage and handling, which I think is more than the scale cost in the first place. In the past, I've shelled out the new fee almost without thinking. But as my use of e-mail increases, my use of paper mail slides in the other direction…and most of what I do mail is in the category of bills that don't require weighing. So I'm going to wise up this time and not order the new chip. If and when I do have an outgoing piece o' mail that might be over the minimum, I'll put it on the scale, note the weight and look the correct postage amount up here. Either that or I'll phone Sylvia Browne and ask her how many stamps to put on it.
3. Why is it that if you go to Google, type in "search engine" and click "I'm Feeling Lucky," it doesn't take you back to Google?

You've been reading the latest edition of Three Unrelated Points. Tune in some time between now and the end of time for another thrilling installment of Three Unrelated Points.