Monthly Archives: July 2007

Frank Luntz on what it will take for a Republican to win the White House in 2008. He judiciously omits the topic that few will speak in public: What will happen if there's another big terrorist attack before Election Day. Under normal circumstances, that would further lower the public's faith in Bush and those who've supported him…but who knows? We can only hope we don't find out.

As some of you may recall, since my surgery, a small but significant concern for me has been what to drink. I've never liked coffee or tea or iced tea. I neither like nor trust artificial sweeteners. I need to avoid things that are as heavy in sugar content as most fruit juices. And I have to avoid carbonation.

What does this leave? Not a whole heckuva lot. I drink a lot of tomato juice and I also mix a watery lemonade using Country Time Lemonade mix and bottled lemon juice, and a watery orange drink using a Knudsen sports drink called Orange Recharge which they sell at some (not all) Whole Foods Markets. Those three things and water are about it. I drink an awful lot of water.

More for the change of pace than any other reason, I often vary the water with the flavoring of either True Lemon, True Lime or True Orange — especially the last of these, which is a fairly new product that is just appearing in a few marketplaces. Each is a crystallized citrus powder that contains all natural ingredients and no sugar or calories. They're especially handy to have along in restaurants where the H2O may be of dubious taste and a wedge of real fruit may not be easily obtainable. In some cases, I'm almost ashamed to admit, I like these better than the squeezings of the genuine article.

You can read all about 'em over at the True Lemon website and you can also arrange for them to send you some free samples. I do not own stock in this company. I just like their products.

This is another long one…about seventeen minutes if you watch all three parts. Amazingly, it ran for that entire length (actually, a bit longer) without commercial interruption on NBC in 1967 on The Dean Martin Show. It's Don Rickles insulting a celebrity audience.

At the time, Rickles was well known in Hollywood society and in Las Vegas. He'd done guest shots on sitcoms and a few appearances with Mr. Carson but had yet to really break through on television. Dean's producer-director, Greg Garrison, decided this was because Don had not been seen in his natural surroundings — a night club — doing what he did best.

So Garrison decided to give the insult comic a huge showcase on the show…and apparently he had the idea that it might lead to some sort of Don Rickles TV series that The Greg Garrison Company could produce. He arranged for an all-star audience to show up at NBC one evening and they had Rickles come out and do more than an hour in a club setting. Then they hacked it down to this.

There were probably very few ad-libs during that taping, at least in the edited segment that made it onto the air. Rickles knew in advance who'd be there and where they'd be sitting, and many of the lines he uttered were lines he'd used before on these very people. At the end, Bob Hope makes a "surprise" appearance just so Don can hit him with a great comment…and it's the same comment Rickles had made at a couple of earlier performances when he discovered Hope in the audience.

You'll notice that throughout the piece, the camera is usually on a celeb just as Rickles starts talking about them…or even a few seconds before, meaning that Don was not up there being totally spontaneous. Someone was cueing him to begin addressing Dom DeLuise, to begin on MacDonald Carey, etc. I suspect they even did multiple takes of a fair amount of this. Like most of what Garrison did with Dean, it's allegedly spontaneous material that's been chopped up in the editing room and trimmed to the point of losing the sensation of spontaneity.

Still, the exposure did a lot for the career of Rickles. The following year, he had his own series on ABC — a rather embarrassing flop which did not involve Greg Garrison. The program was originally supposed to be a game show, with Don functioning a la Groucho in a game show format, belittling contestants and then giving them a chance to win a few bucks.

Close to the last minute, the decision was made to abandon that idea and instead do a free-form half-hour variety show…but they still had the game show budget, much of the game show staff and no real concept for the new program. After its swift cancellation, and in later years as other shows starring Rickles came and went, Garrison told everyone that he alone had been able to make Rickles "work" on TV and pointed to the '67 appearance. I'm not sure there was ever a series in what Rickles did on The Dean Martin Show but it sure is nice to have that "record" of what he did when he was in his prime. Here it is…

I rarely agree with Conservative commentator Peggy Noonan and even though she's come around to the view that Bush ain't very good at what he does, I'm not about to start now. In this column, she theorizes that George W. makes some people uneasy because he's so upbeat and cheery. Here's an excerpt…

As I watched the news conference, it occurred to me that one of the things that might leave people feeling somewhat disoriented is the president's seemingly effortless high spirits. He's in a good mood. There was the usual teasing, the partly aggressive, partly joshing humor, the certitude. He doesn't seem to be suffering, which is jarring. Presidents in great enterprises that are going badly suffer: Lincoln, LBJ with his head in his hands. Why doesn't Mr. Bush? Every major domestic initiative of his second term has been ill thought through and ended in failure. His Iraq leadership has failed. His standing is lower than any previous president's since polling began. He's in a good mood. Discuss.

Okay, Peggy, I will. I think you've got it exactly backwards. I think Bush is making people uneasy because his "good mood" seems so forced and driven by panic, and because the guy is stammering and relying on hysterical premises that few now accept, like the idea that the people we're fighting in Iraq are the same people who attacked us on 9/11. I don't think Americans even know anymore who we're fighting in Iraq other than it's now "Al Qeada," an ill-defined group that depending on which report one believes this week, is either stronger than it was back then or weaker or growing or on the ropes. So we don't know who the hell we're fighting there and we're wondering if the current administration does.

The supporters Bush has lost needed to hear an articulate explanation of what precise objectives will constitute Victory and allow us to say we won and bring the troops home. Instead, they've been getting catch phrases about fighting "them" there so we don't have to fight "them" here, uttered by a guy doing at least a darn good impression of an alcoholic who's sneaking quick beers now and then.

Does anyone think what we're seeing lately from Bush is "effortless high spirits?" He looks more and more to me like a poker player who thought he had a royal flush, bet everything he had and then peeked again and saw that what he'd thought was the Ace of Spades is actually a Four of Clubs. It isn't Bush's good mood that unnerves people. It's all that flop sweat they're smelling.

In case you haven't heard, the four-day memberships for Comic-Con International are sold out. They still have individual days, as well as a "three-day" pass that gives you Wednesday evening and all day Thursday, Friday and Sunday. That's not as horrendous a situation as it might seem because I know a few people who opt to skip the Saturday mobs and sight-see that day. In any case, I would suggest that if you're going to the con you either register in advance or don't go.

For what it's worth — and this far in advance, it isn't worth much — the weather folks are predicting sunny skies, highs in the low seventies and lows in the mid-sixties.

In one of those periodic revelations that seems to occur in order to juice up the monologues of Leno and Letterman, Senator David Vitter has been revealed as a patron of prostitutes. Obviously, there's a certain entertainment value in the embarrassment of the rich and powerful, especially when they've been so sanctimonious in scolding others for lesser offenses…but there's also something sad about it. In this case, I think the sadness has to do with Vitter viewing his actions as excusable (or at least forgivable) in a way he would never allow with regard to someone else, especially a political opponent.

I was going to write a longer piece about this but I stumbled across a comment on the weblog of Matthew Yglesias. He articulates my feelings here better than I could.

Down near U.S.C. in Los Angeles, there's a car dealership known as Felix Chevrolet, although they also sell other makes there. Its lineage dates back to 1922 when an entrepreneur named Winslow Felix opened a car lot in downtown Los Angeles. Mr. Felix was a friend of Pat Sullivan, the entrepreneur whose studio made the Felix the Cat cartoons…and there are many stories about how he granted what was apparently permanent permission to use the cat as the dealership's mascot. One tale has Sullivan getting a free car out of the deal. Others have him getting new cars at dealer cost or less for the rest of his life. Sullivan lived in New York for most of this period so I'm not sure how that would have worked.

In any case, Winslow Felix had the name in perpetuity and the proprietors of Felix have received not one car or dime for over a half-century. A new Felix neon sign went up in 1958 when the dealership moved to its present location at Figueroa and Jefferson Boulevard…and it became something of a local landmark.

The business has gone through many hands and that area has changed a lot. There are developers who want it to change further. The current owners of Felix Chevrolet have no plans to close the place or even take down the sign…but the rumblings are there. So lately, folks who are out to preserve L.A. heritage have been rallying to protect Felix from any future threats to his survival. As this article in the L.A. Times notes, the city's Cultural Heritage Commission has just voted to declare it a historic-cultural monument.

That's not the final word but it's a defeat for Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa…like he needs more bad news these days.

I love Felix and I love Los Angeles history…but I'm not sure this one's worth a fight. It's a nice looking sign but historic? Cultural? I don't know about this one.

Here's an unsold pilot that Paul Winchell did in the sixties for a kids' game show called Quick on the Draw. I've seen it listed as 1962, 1963 and 1964, and beyond that, your guess is as good as mine.

I think Paul did about nine hundred pilots for kids' game shows and one or two of them — like Runaround in 1972 — even sold. You can kind of tell why Quick on the Draw didn't make it. The contestants don't even look like they want to be there and the only good moments come from Winchell doing his old bits with Jerry Mahoney. The show was directed by Gilbert Cates, who directed about half of all TV shows done in the sixties.

One interesting thing (to me) about this is the part where Paul, as he occasionally did, is supplying the voice while someone else is operating Jerry. A lot of it seems to be ad-lib and whoever's working Jerry is darn good to keep up…but as a devout Winchell fan, I could always tell when someone else was at the controls. Paul had a certain way of shaking a dummy's head when it was "talking" to add a little extra animation to the figure and also to distract from the fact that the lip sync could never be too precise. His assistants learned it too but no one did it quite like Winch.

The two parts of this run a little over 22 minutes and the second cuts off before the show ends. I doubt you'll make it all the way through but you might enjoy the Paul/Jerry opening chat, which was one of Paul's oft-performed routines. That cuff link gag was the close to the first joke I ever learned. If you do want to watch both parts, I've made up a little YouTube playlist so you can go right from one to the other.

Here's a little hunk of it…

The Defense Department put U.S. troops in Iraq at risk by awarding contracts for badly needed armored vehicles to companies that failed to deliver them on time, according to a review by the Pentagon's inspector general. The June 27 report, obtained Wednesday by The Associated Press, examined 15 contracts worth $2.2 billion awarded since 2000 to Force Protection Inc. and Armor Holdings Inc.

The contracts were issued without the normal competition for government work because the military determined these companies were the only ones capable of supplying the vehicles fast enough to meet the demands of deployed troops. Yet the inspector general's report concluded otherwise.

Overall, Force Protection of Ladson, S.C., received 11 contracts from the Army and Marine Corps worth $417 million for a variety of vehicles, including its Buffalo and Cougar mine-resistant trucks. Force Protection failed to meet all delivery schedules, according to the report, and acquisition officials knew there were other manufacturers that might have supplied some of the vehicles in a more timely fashion. The report does not provide the names of those possible alternative sources.

You can read the whole story here. If you can stand it.

If you ever have the inexplicable urge to install software manufactured by the Symantec Corporation, resist. Instead, just take the computer out back and lob it into the pool. The result will be pretty much the same and you'll save time.

For techie-type reasons that have nothing to do with me, this website (and my e-mail) will be down tomorrow (Friday) night for a period of up to five hours. Try not to get too upset about it.

So how are we doing for meeting those benchmarks that are supposed to measure progress in Iraq? Not so good, sez Fred Kaplan.

Roger Ailes is now the head honcho at Fox News Network. In 1970, he was a Republican media consultant…which was pretty much the same job. Back then, he authored an interesting memo about Nixon's TV manner and they have it over at The Smoking Gun.

Here's the end of the Marx Brothers movie, The Big Store, with Charles Lane doing what he did so well and so often: Playing a mean old authority figure…

The Richard M. Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, California is undergoing a makeover. They're taking out the lies.