Monthly Archives: May 2007

I've written here about two felines which are among the menagerie I feed at my back door. We call them (left to right in the above pic) The Stranger Cat and The Stranger Stranger Cat. The Stranger Cat comes up and howls for food and demands to be petted. The Stranger Stranger Cat hides or hangs back, waiting for the food dish to be filled and no humans to be present, then creeps up and partakes…although there was one evening The Stranger Stranger Cat was uncommonly friendly and did come up to me while I was serving and he (she?) even tolerated a little petting. That only happened the one time.

This photo was taken at night, which is the only time both come around together. During daylight, The Stranger Cat is sometimes seen. The Stranger Stranger Cat only shows up after dark. There's also a grey cat that's been turning up lately. The other night, I walked into the kitchen, looked out on the back porch and saw the three pussycats all standing around the supper dish, not eating, just slowly hissing at each other. Finally, The Stranger Cat and The Stranger Stranger Cat outhissed him and the grey one fled. You just don't want to mess with Stranger Cats.

When the Beany & Cecil cartoons debuted on TV in 1962, they brought with them a flood of Beany & Cecil toys from Mattel. I had quite a few of them including the one advertised in this commercial…the Official Beany Copter! Some of them — like the Beany & Cecil game that came with a talking Cecil puppet — were pretty good. But the one advertised in today's video offering, the Official Beany Copter, was good for about five minutes of fun.

It was a cap which, since it was formed out of hard plastic, didn't stay on your head at all unless it was an exact fit, which it usually wasn't. You put one of the propellers on the top, then spun it around to "wind" it. Then when you pulled the string, the copter blade was released and it sailed a good eight feet, whereupon the fun was over. I think I fired mine about three times for myself and once for each of maybe four friends…and that was it. Time to go pull out a different toy.

But take a look at this commercial. Those kids are enjoying themselves a lot more than any real kids ever enjoyed their Beany Copters. It wouldn't surprise me if every child actor in this spot became a successful, honored professional in the craft of acting. They sure showed talent to pretend they liked the thing.

The House Armed Services Committee is now run by Democrats. They took the shears to the administration's billion defense budget of $504 billion and wound up with a defense budget of…$504 billion! Fred Kaplan tells how they managed that.

A happy (I think) correction: Irwin Hasen did not have a pacemaker implanted. He's in the hospital, he's being treated for a stroke and I'm told he's responding well. But without a pacemaker in him.

If I may, I'd like to make Three Unrelated Points. That is, they're unrelated to each other. They may be related to something…

1. Obviously, I am grossly disappointed in John McCain. Do not however assume that because I haven't expressed as much that I have any particular fondness for any other candidate. So far, I don't like anyone very much and am really tired of e-mails from people who assume that because I don't like their guy that I must think the candidate they like least is flawless. I've gotten this so often that I actually went back and did a search on my own blog to make sure I hadn't, in a moment of madness, written something like, "I think Hillary Clinton can solve every problem the world has in twenty minutes and bake a cherry pie at the same time." I hadn't…and for good reason.
2. Recently in a market, I spotted and purchased Tyson Frozen Flat Iron Steaks and attempted to cook one at home. I did this because I had forgotten a prevailing rule of my life: Never assume that food named after an inanimate object won't resemble that inanimate object in taste and texture. I formulated this rule the first time I ate in a Straw Hat Pizza Parlor.
3. Like you, I get a lot of Spam for pornography and sex sites. Actually, I manage to trap about 99% of it before it reaches me but I do get that 1% and about once a month, I take a quick peek in the filter folder to make sure it didn't gobble up something I would have wanted. I know that the Porn Spammers intentionally spell words wrong because they think it'll get their messages past some Spam Monitors…but I prefer to think that these guys are just so illiterate that they can't spell their own body parts correctly.

This has been the latest edition of Three Unrelated Points. Tune in one of these days for another exciting installment of Three Unrelated Points.

Here's a clip from the Garfield and Friends series that needs a bit of explanation. If you ever saw the show when it was on CBS, you may recall that we had episodes of Garfield and we had episodes of a cartoon that was called, in this country, U.S. Acres. In other countries, it was called Orson's Farm. These cartoons ran 6-7 minutes in length. We also had little short cartoon gags that were called "quickies" that ran an average of thirty seconds each. In an hour-long episode of Garfield and Friends, we had four of the longer Garfield cartoons, two of the longer U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm cartoons and some Garfield quickies and some U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickies. (We also, for a time, had a segment called "Screaming With Binky" but never mind that now.)

One week, I wrote a Garfield cartoon called The Attack of the Mutant Guppies, which was all about giant, radioactive guppies that lived in the sewers. The cartoon ended with the monsters apparently being swept out to sea. This was then followed by a U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickie in which…well, here. See for yourself. Here are the last few seconds of the Garfield episode, followed by the U.S. Acres/Orson's Farm quickie…

See? The Garfield cartoon is continued, sort of, into the Orson's Farm quickie. I thought that was kind of funny. If it was though, it was only funny when that Orson's Farm quickie immediately followed that Garfield cartoon. You have no idea how hard it was to keep them together. The folks editing the shows kept calling to say, "Hey, the show's running a little long. Can we move that U.S. Acres quickie to another show?" And I kept telling them no, they couldn't. I think when the hour was first delivered to the network, they had the quickie before the Garfield cartoon and someone at CBS figured out the problem and made them go back and change it. When the show went into syndication, a number of elements had to be juggled around or trimmed to fit the syndication format and that quickie disappeared. So when the "Guppies" cartoon airs now, it airs without its punch line.

Along the way, I got a lot of people mad at me there because I'd made things too complicated. We also had a complaint from someone over at the studio that made The Muppet Babies because we'd mentioned their show. I still don't know why that bothered them.

Here's how the Griffith Park Fire looked from downtown. Via time lapse video.

We reported here that the Mann National Theater in Westwood was closing down…and it did. Now, we're reporting that the theater is about to reopen, though not as a Mann. The chain's lease on the building has expired and the National will begin showing films again as a private concern. No word on whether the owners expect to keep it going on that basis or if they're just looking to generate some cash while looking for a buyer for the land.

I don't imagine he has Internet access in the hospital but who knows? They just stuck a pacemaker into the legendary comic artist — the guy who gave us the Dondi newspaper strip and some great Golden Age comic book feature, Wildcat. Maybe they embedded a Broadband connection in the guy while they were at it and he can log in on himself and read this.

So, just in case: Get healthy, Irwin. Of all the people we've met in comics and interviewed at conventions, you're one of our favorites. Here's the partial text of one convention conversation with you. We need you around so we can do more of these.

[CORRECTION: Irwin did not receive a pacemaker. He's being treated for a stroke but did not receive a pacemaker.]

Fred Kaplan, who's been ahead of everyone else on telling us what would happen in Iraq, has some (slightly) hopeful thoughts. Basically, he thinks, what the Democratic Congress is now doing may pressure Iraq into getting its act together.

Maybe because I saw the smoke live when it began and/or because my friend Carolyn lives near it but I've been following the Griffith Park Fire with extra interest. Or perhaps, come to think of it, it's because of that great day Carolyn and I recently spent up there at the L.A. Zoo, feeding the hippos. Whatever, when I awoke this morning, my first thought was to rush to the TV and see how containment is doing and to make sure the zoo is not in harm's way. At this moment, the fire is 40% contained and the zoo is fine. It's also not threatening the newly-refurbished Observatory, despite what the above photo would suggest.

I got this info from Good Day L.A., the morning show on Fox Channel 11, which is following the fire as, it would seem, their "B" story today. They have reporters on the scene and they cut to them occasionally…but considerably more air time is going to the latest updates on American Idol, a show that has yet to snag my interest…and don't think I'm not happy about that.

Last night after the 11:00 news shows were over, I watched some live coverage of the fire on RawNews, an HD-digital channel that the local NBC station offers. It features unstructured footage and live broadcasts and last night, what it had on was the raw feed that some of the station's mobile units were sending back to the station…fascinating, informative stuff. But this morning, for some reason, they're just showing video of the newsroom crew sitting around, discussing what they're covering today…and their website suggests they're about to start airing a camera feed from the Phil Spector trial. One of these days, some local station will turn one of its extra HD channels into All News, All the Time, and we'll all be glued to it when something like the Griffith Park Fire occurs. For now, we have to take it where we can get it.

You won't make it through all ten minutes of today's clip but see how far you get. This is a ten minute art lesson from Jon Gnagy, a man who alternately motivated and disheartened countless aspiring artists of the fifties. Mr. Gnagy was a pioneer of early television, doing his first broadcasts in 1946. (A Gnagy art lesson was reportedly the first thing transmitted when the big antenna atop the Empire State Building in New York was installed.) Throughout the fifties, he had a series of syndicated TV shows called, variously, You Are An Artist or Jon Gnagy's Learn to Draw.

By any name, what he offered was a fifteen minute program in which he'd do a drawing in about ten minutes and you at home would be expected to draw right along with him and wind up with the same thing. This was not humanly possible. An accomplished professional trying to keep up with Gnagy and replicate his actions would have failed…so you can imagine how well I did when I was nine. He'd be adding the finishing touches, like the smoke curling out of the chimney…and I'd still be sketching in the foundation line of the log cabin. So there were two possible reactions at home: You could think, "If I practice enough, someday I'll be able to do what he can do." Or you could think, "Boy, I really don't have a talent for this" and you could forget all about becoming an artist.

My response was closer to the second than the first, though I kept at it for a time. I even got my parents to buy me one of the Jon Gnagy art kits that were sold during the commercials. It turned out to be a box containing a pad of cheap drawing paper and an array of charcoal sticks that broke the first time they came into contact with the cheap drawing paper. More frustration. More feelings that maybe I should forget all about drawing. A lot of acclaimed artists (including Andy Warhol) would later cite Gnagy's TV instruction as important and inspirational, and I'm sure it was to some. I'm just wondering how many people gave it up because of the guy.

I used to have an ongoing, friendly debate with a gentleman named Burne Hogarth. Burne was an acclaimed illustrator, comic strip artist and art teacher. I'd see him at conventions or since he lived near me, run into often him at the drugstore, and we always somehow got back into it. I was (and still am) of the opinion that even hopeless amateurs should be encouraged to draw…or at least, not discouraged. What they produce might not be worthy of hanging in a gallery but it can be fun and perhaps theraputic. You don't have to be Dennis Rodman to go out and shoot some baskets and you don't have to be Picasso (or even Burne Hogarth) to sit down and paint a painting. Burne's side of the argument was that someone who doesn't know how to fly a plane shouldn't be allowed a seat in the cockpit, and that we shouldn't dignify what an amateur draws by calling it drawing. Or something like that. I'm probably making his position sound less reasonable than it was but that's easy to do when you have a weblog and the other guy is dead.

Anyway, we spoke of Gnagy. Hogarth knew him and respected the man's attempts to educate the masses. When I said I thought Mr. Gnagy had soured a lot of souls on The Joys of Drawing, Burne's attitude was, "Good." If Burne were around today, I think I'd take this video over to his house and see if he could draw what Gnagy could draw in ten minutes with the bad charcoal.

Here then is Jon Gnagy on his show teaching us how to draw a grist mill. I not only don't know how he did this, I don't even know what a grist mill is. I also was never able to keep up with The Galloping Gourmet and make a beef bourguignon as fast as he could…

I was looking at local news websites for information on the Griffith Park fire…which is still raging and still awful. Over on the page for KABC Channel 7, I found the following, which I guess is the result of some online poll…

Online polls usually strike me as silly and rigged and indicative of absolutely nothing. But for some reason, I think this is an accurate, inarguable reflection of public sentiment. Except that the "Yes" vote is probably about 3.5 percentage points too high.

One thing we like to do here at newsfromme.com is to plug our friends' business endeavors. I have this friend named Bob Logan, who's a filmmaker, writer, director, all those things. He's directed some successful comedies like Meatballs 4 and Repossessed and he's working now on a movie that will bring the old F Troop TV show to, as they say, The Silver Screen. I was especially impressed with a movie he did a few years ago called Up Your Alley, which was a comedy about homeless folks. You wouldn't think that would be a fertile topic for humor but it was. A few years later, Mel Brooks — working with about a million times the budget — made Life Stinks, also a comedy about the homeless, and I liked Bob's film a lot better.

In fact, Bob's film was a triumph of making a professional-looking movie for almost no money. I don't recall what he spent but it was probably about what Mr. Brooks spent on donuts for his film. To share his expertise with the world — and, let's be honest, make a few bucks — Bob is now conducting classes in how to do what he did on Up Your Alley and other film endeavors. He calls it The One Day $99 Film School and I'll bet the folks who take it learn an awful lot in that one day. End of plug.

Last Friday, we blogged on here about a story in Newsday on the current state of long-running comic strips. The article set some sort of world record for errors per square inch. In almost all cases, the folks they identified as currently writing and drawing certain strips are not only not working on them, in some cases because they're dead.

As you may recall, I phoned the reporter that day and told him what he'd done. It's taken until this morning for Newsday to acknowledge any errors. Here is what they ran, in toto…

The current artist for the comic strip "Blondie" is John Marshall. Craig Boldman and Henry Scarpelli are the artists now for "Archie," and "Mary Worth" is drawn by Joe Giella and written by Karen Moy. June Brigman is the current artist of "Brenda Starr," working with writer Mary Schmich. For "The Phantom," Paul Ryan is the current artist and Tony DePaul is the current writer. The credits were given incorrectly in an Act Two story Saturday.

Actually, no. The credits were given incorrectly in a story that ran on Thursday, not Saturday. And the above list doesn't address all the mistakes in the piece. Nothing in it, for example, amends the erroneous statement that Alex Raymond once assisted on the Blondie strip. Moreover, the original piece says that Dan DeCarlo, Bill Ziegler, John Saunders and Stan Drake are all producing certain features when, in fact, those gentlemen are all deceased. Saying that someone else is doing those jobs would leave a reader with the impression that all four of those gents are still around and just aren't doing those jobs at present.

An incomplete correction, of course, only matters if someone reads both the original article and the correction, which is unlikely unless it's through my links. Newsday puts theirs in a "corrections" section that few readers probably ever see. I had trouble finding it on the website and I was looking for it specifically because I already knew the article was flawed and had complained. I have no idea where the correction is in the printed paper, if it's even in the printed paper. But I'll bet you it isn't prominent.

Many newspapers, when they correct an article that's available online, will post the correction on the same page. Newsday doesn't. At this moment, if you go to the page with the original piece on it, it's just as wrong as it ever was. There are some comments that readers have posted but the link is hard to spot, and those criticisms are only there because outsiders took the time to post them. Newsday hasn't corrected that page.

This may all sound trivial but ever since I got involved in comic books and strips, I've watched a steady stream of newspaper and magazine articles that just plain got things wrong. It's mind-boggling to me how many mistakes there are in such pieces. A few, I can understand. I've made some doozies in my own writing but the volume in some articles is staggering, especially given the easy availability of on-the-record sources. Even worse, of course, is when there is little or no willingness in some news organizations to issue corrections and it's all done a lot to shake my faith in journalism of all kinds and topics.

The guy who wrote that Newsday essay was not a moist-behind-the-ears intern. He is, amazingly, an editor and staff writer at the paper who is on the verge of retirement after forty years there…but he didn't take the ten seconds to Google "Blondie" and find out who currently does the strip. Is the person writing about Iraq for that paper adhering to the same standard?