Monthly Archives: June 2007

I was reading a column by Jonah Goldberg about Dick Cheney and the following chunk leaped out at me. I've seen others say things like this, both about Cheney and also about George W. Bush…

Why do I like Dick Cheney? Because at a time when everybody talks a big game about how they don't like people-pleasing politicians who live by the polls, Cheney is pretty much the only guy out there who walks the walk. He truly doesn't care what people think about him. I love that.

Forget for just this paragraph that we're discussing Cheney or Bush. Why is this such a great thing to say about anybody? I mean, the homeless guy down on Fairfax who's always pissing in the gutter doesn't care what people think about him. I have a hunch that when Tim McVeigh decided it would be a dandy idea to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, he didn't care a whole lot what most people thought about him. Just being popular doesn't mean you're doing the right thing in life but it sure doesn't mean the opposite. It is theoretically possible — is it not? — that a politician could please people and go up in the polls because he was doing the right things.

Actually, I don't believe any politician doesn't pay attention to the polls. Not one. Most of them are running for office again and even when — like Bush and Cheney — they aren't, they have to deal with people who are if they're going to get anything accomplished. Bush seems pretty unhappy that the Immigration Bill he backed went down to defeat. Some of that had to do with his own low standing in the polls and some of it had to do with various members of Congress who are up for re-election and looking at their numbers. When I hear people say of a politico, "He doesn't follow polls," I don't believe it. I believe that's being mistaken for someone's conscious decision that it's better for them and their immediate goals to cater to a minority or fringe viewpoint. Or sometimes, they've just dug themselves so far into a hole in one direction that they don't know how to dig their way out. That's not particularly admirable, either.

I could understand liking a guy who's down in the polls if you're part of that minority position and you think he's getting you what you want. For some reason, Goldberg is a fan of Cheney's despite the fact that he thinks the Great White Hunter is "ultimately counterproductive." So I guess I'm stumped here. What is there to like?

According to the Gallup Poll…

Public approval of the job Congress is doing has dipped to its lowest level of 2006, and is now the worst Gallup has recorded since the closing days of the Democratic majority in the U.S. House of Representatives in 1994. The current approval rating for Congress is a near-record low according to Gallup survey trending.

Meanwhile, from the Associated Press…

Despite low approval ratings and hard feelings from last year's elections, Democrats and Republicans in the House are reaching out for an approximately $4,400 pay raise that would increase their salaries to almost $170,000.

From the 1964 TV show, Hootenanny, here's Rolf Harris doing a medley of his hit…

I have removed the link from the previous item and I instead direct you to the same article on the site where it originally appeared: That of PC World, which is a fine operation with exquisite taste in websites. So go there instead to read about "100 Blogs We Love." And my thanks to Harry McCracken and anyone else over there who was responsible for sending a little love our way.

The Washington Post picks "100 Blogs We Love," one of which is this one. It's the first thing that paper's gotten right since Nixon resigned.

Al Langer passed away on Sunday. Langer's Delicatessen is situated in a crummy part of Los Angeles, down near MacArthur Park. It's so crummy that Langer's closes at 4 PM every afternoon probably because even the Langer family doesn't want to hang around there after dark. But during the day, people flock to Langer's because, they say, it serves the greatest pastrami in the world. That's what they say in the L.A. Times obit for Mr. Langer, though I recall a few pieces in which the Times restaurant critics suggested that other local delis did as good or better in the pastrami department.

I'm not a pastrami kind of guy. When I've been to Langer's, I've ordered the corned beef, which was quite wonderful even though it always caused my dining companion, whoever it was, to act like I'd gone to Lawry's and not ordered the Prime Rib or gone to Peter Luger's Steak House and not asked for steak or gone to any restaurant that was famous for one thing and ordered another. Still, I had to admire Langer's for building a reputation that would cause people to go to that terrible, inconvenient location.

Mr. Langer, by the way, lived to the age of 94. Sol Forman, who owned Peter Luger's in Brooklyn, died at the age of 98 and the two men who founded the Lawry's Prime Rib empire lived similarly long lives. Maybe eating cow flesh isn't as bad for you as some say.

Wanna be a game show contestant? You won't win a million dollars but then again, you'll be able to do it via telephone from the comfort of your own home. Shokus Internet Radio, which we plug the heck outta on this site, has an audio game show called Anyone Can Play, hosted by Larry Anderson, who hosted The Big Spin, the revival of Truth or Consequences and other shows. Anyone Can Play needs contestants for some upcoming tape dates. You need to be good at trivia and it might help if you listened to the show, which you can do Monday through Saturday at 3 PM Pacific Time.

It's sponsored by Endless Games, makers of great board and DVD games like The Price is Right, Password and The Match Game and you'll never guess what the prizes are. That's right: Great board and DVD games like The Price is Right, Password and The Match Game. You can read the rules and apply over on this page. And you can listen to Shokus Internet Radio by going to this page and selecting an audio browser. Don't miss out on this golden opportunity. Remember…this is how Vanna White got started. Sort of.

Also, that last link will come in handy if you want to listen to any of the fine programming on Shokus. All this week from 10 PM to Midnight (Pacific) they're rerunning the most recent episode of Stu's Show that featured Yours Truly and my fellow animation writer/historian, Earl Kress…with a special guest appearance by Batfink. There are also shows there worth your attention that don't have me on them. The TV Soundtrack Show, which is on at 2 PM Pacific on most days, should be of special interest to the kind of person who'd come to this site. Your affable host Stuart Shostak digs up some wonderfully obscure gems to share with his listeners…stuff that never made it to those "TV Themes" CDs that we all own. End of plug.

In 1962 and 1963, Jackie Gleason hosted a variety show called The American Scene Magazine, which was basically the same as every Jackie Gleason variety show — same characters, same running bits, same catch phrases. The main change from Gleason's earlier shows was that Art Carney was not a regular and that Frank Fontaine was, usually playing his mentally-challenged character, Crazy Guggenheim. This is a Joe the Bartender sketch…and they all went pretty much like this one, except that later on, they'd end by have Crazy sing a serious song…and Fontaine would inexplicably drop the idiot voice and character to do so.

This sketch is kinda funny because they get to talking about the movie, The Hustler, in which Gleason had recently appeared. And get a load of the great reading that one of the "Glea Girls" (Jackie's coterie of lovely models) gives the opening. Do we think this woman was hired for her ability to deliver a line? And awaaay we go…

I know zip about Harry Potter. Haven't read the books, haven't seen the movies. So I didn't pay a whole lot of attention to Keith Olbermann's segment tonight offering his theory as to how the series will end. Since then however, five different people have written me to say that it's a terrific, logical guess. If you'd like to hear this terrific, logical guess, you can view the segment here. And keep in mind that all terrific, logical guesses as to how The Sopranos would end were wrong.

Time Magazine is devoting its new issue to remembering John F. Kennedy. Since they apparently didn't need a couple of pages for late-breaking Paris Hilton news, they stuck in a brief debate about whether there was a conspiracy in the death of their cover boy. Given the gravity of the topic, it's an appallingly brief exchange but the "no" argument, penned by Vince Bugliosi, makes some pretty solid points. The "yes" argument, which is by David Talbot, is quite weak, putting its focus not on whether there was a conspiracy but on whether Bobby Kennedy believed there was one. Which is not the same thing.

Thanks to Michael Kelley for letting me know about this.

Or it will be soon.

I access the Internet via a Road Runner cable connection. For reasons too boring to go into, I also needed a dial-up connection so I had a subscription for $9.95 per month with a company called AllVantage that offered this…with a real nice online webmail interface and pretty good service. Recently though, AllVantage got out of this business and announced that effective July 19, they would cease offering dial-up Internet access and such, and that all our accounts would be transferred over to PeoplePC, another firm that offers much the same thing at much the same price.

Actually, PeoplePC offers a much less sophisticated webmail interface. In fact, GMail, which is free, offers a better one so the only reason I would need PeoplePC is for the dial-up connection, which I also don't need because the Road Runner people now have those available — also for free — to their cable subscribers. Which is why I don't need PeoplePC at all and decided to cancel it before they billed me. The AllVantage people not only gave them my account but also my credit card info as well, which is either a violation of some law or should be.

The trouble is that as with many such services, cancelling your account involves calling a Cancellation Department. You can't just opt out online because they want you to speak with someone whose job is to talk you out of leaving. (AllVantage does online cancellations. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to talk to a human being who works for that company, assuming there even are any.)

So I just spent an aggravating half-hour on the phone, trying to cancel a PeoplePC account I never signed up for in the first place. I always feel bad when I get annoyed with these employees who have their little script they've been ordered to follow. The lady on the phone seemed nice enough…but she was either not smart enough to realize that she couldn't keep me, or perhaps she just wasn't allowed to make that determination. She kept asking me why I wanted to cancel and what possible reasons I could have for being anything less than thrilled with PeoplePC and didn't I want to keep my account intact and give it a few more months before I did something as drastic as cancelling this account I never wanted in the first place?

I told her I didn't need a dial-up account at all. I told her I never wanted PeoplePC at all. I told her that my attempts to make telephone connection with people there had been uniformly inefficient and resulted in excrutiating hold times. I told her I didn't like their webmail interface and that it didn't serve my purposes. Somehow, she was not empowered to just write me off and close out my account then and there. She still had to put me through more questions and urge me to give them a chance to prove themselves. I kept flashing on all these guys on Fox News Channel telling us that The Surge will work if we just give it more time. And more time and more time and more time…

I think (note the boldface) I finally convinced her to close out my business with them. She gave me a 17-digit "cancellation confirmation number," which of course raises the question of why that number requires seventeen digits. Are that many people cancelling? You can write out the entire population of the planet in ten digits. Why do they need more number combinations than that?

I hope this will be my last message here about PeoplePC. And a warning to you all.

Here's a commercial for Twinkles, "the only cereal in the storybook package." Twinkles was an elephant and when you bought his cereal, which was kind of like sugary Cheerios in star shapes, there was a little storybook affixed to the back of the box. The idea was that you could read the Twinkles story while you ate the cereal. I recall neither being very nourishing. A batch of Twinkles adventures were also produced for television on the lowest-possible budgets…spots that split the difference between being cartoons and being commercials. This is one of them.

The narrator of the Twinkles spot is George S. Irving, an actor who was in most of the later Total Television cartoon shows, like Underdog. At last report, Mr. Irving was still actively performing in musical theater in and around the New York area. There's also a commercial in there with a fireman who sounds to me like either Arnold Stang with a cold, or someone doing an okay impression of Arnold Stang. I'm thinking the latter. (And speaking of Arnold Stang, check out this weblog post for a nice profile of that fine comic actor. In the next week or so, I'll try to get time to write up my one Arnold Stang anecdote and post it here.) Anyway, here's Twinkles…

And if you liked that, here's another one. This one's in color…

My friends Anthony Tollin and Will Murray recently made an amazing and important discovery about a piece of comic book history. As we all know, Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, in a story entitled "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." It was signed by Bob Kane and much of it may even have been drawn by him. It was written, sans credit, by Bill Finger, who later acknowledged a lot of inspiration from the pulp magazine character, The Shadow. As it turns out, "inspiration" was putting it mildly.

Anthony and Will are both experts on The Shadow and are involved in the production of new facsimile editions of that pulp and also Doc Savage, which Tony is publishing. Based on some leads from Will, Tony managed to locate a Shadow story that was clearly the template for that first Batman story, even to the point of it being about a "chemical syndicate." Here's the first part of a two-part interview with Anthony all about it.

If my mail is any indication, an abnormally high percentage of folks who read this site are TiVo owners. If you are one such critter, I have a recommendation you should keep handy. If your TiVo breaks…or if you want to upgrade it to a larger harddisk…or if you just need new accessories, check out the folks at WeaKnees. I don't understand the name either, but they upgrade TiVos and they fix them and their site is full of tips and tricks.

You will be especially beholden to them if you have the HR10-250 DirecTV model and it stops working. This page will tell you what to do about that. Generally speaking, if these people can't fix your TiVo, it can't be fixed. They upgraded one of my many TiVos and it's worked flawlessly since then.