Recommended Reading

Fred Kaplan (Yeah, him again) writes about what's happening with our military and how a lot of good soldiers don't want to stay in it for very long.

Follow-Up

A reader named D. Radboud, who I assume is not of my country, sends the following in response to this post

To add some information on the website you linked to in your post, HEMA is an almost 100 year old department store in the Netherlands. I would compare it to Marks & Spencer in the UK. I can't think of a US equivalent just now. This is the kind of place where people buy their household basics, as the site illustrates I guess. The kind of place can buy their own unfashionable underwear and socks without being embarrassed, so to say.

The place is also famous for some specific foodstuffs, in particular its smoked sausage. One story I heard from a Dutch artist, working for the Dutch edition of Mad, was that when Bill Gaines would come over to the Netherlands to discuss business, he would take a special cab ride every day from his hotel to the nearest HEMA to get a hold of one of the sausages. No, these are not health food by a mile.

Which almost goes without saying because Bill Gaines's idea of "health food" was to put organic lettuce on his bacon cheeseburger. Thanks, D. Sounds like Target or K-Mart or Walmart or one of those U.S. chains.

Just Before Bed

I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour, either. Well, yes, I do…finishing a writing assignment. Oddly enough, my partner Sergio Aragonés is also up. He just e-mailed me the last page of a story we're doing together. When you work with someone long enough, you sometimes find yourself oddly synchronized.

A little more than a hundred of you have voted so far in our little poll. Mitt Romney was way ahead after about fifty votes and now John McCain's pulled into the lead. I realized I neglected to put Alan Keyes in there and it's too late to add him. So I think I'll just look at the total votes for Duncan Hunter and divide by three.

Good night, Internet! See you in the morning. The cleaning lady will be here in five hours.

Go See It!

I'm going to send you a website that may take a minute or so to load…and I'll warn you it may be noisy.

I'm not entirely sure what it sells because it's in another language. Looks like some sort of e-commerce site to me. In any case, it's one of those "you gotta see it" websites. My buddy Daniel Will-Harris sent me to it and now I'm sending you. You'll send other people.

Here's the link. You've been warned.

Another Poll!

Let's see what kind of pundit prognosticators visit this site. The following poll has nothing to do with who you'd like to see get the G.O.P. nomination either because you think he'd make the best Chief Exec or because you think he'd be the easiest to defeat. Put preference out of your mind, imagine you have serious money riding on this…and vote for the name of the guy you think is most likely to get the nomination.

This poll will be up for one week and then I'll ask the same question about the Democratic field. I'm just curious what the readers of this site will say. If I had to wager, I think I'd have to go eenie-meenie-minie-mo between about four of these choices.

poll02

Today's Video Link

Here's another of those mysteries of life that few people will care about but I happen to be among the few…

In the fifties, when the Time for Beany puppet show debuted, its cast mainly consisted of Daws Butler and Stan Freberg, two great cartoon voice actors. Daws provided the voice of Beany. Stan was Cecil. After several years of this, they left and the show's producer-owner Bob Clampett replaced them with other actors. Beany was done by either Jim MacGeorge or Walker Edmiston (they switched off) and Cecil was done by Irv Shoemaker.

In the sixties, several years after the puppet version had gone off, Beany & Cecil came back in a new animated version that Clampett produced under a deal with Mattel Toys. For this show, MacGeorge provided the voice of Beany and Shoemaker spoke for Cecil. Butler and Freberg were in no way involved. In fact, they and Clampett weren't even on speaking terms.

As part of the show's commerce, Mattel put out dozens of Beany & Cecil playthings, many of which were in the toy company's "chatty" line. These were dolls that talked when you pulled a little ring. Today's clip is for a commercial for Beany and Cecil dolls that talked. But here's what's odd. The voices of both dolls were not recorded by MacGeorge and Shoemaker who were concurrently doing the voices on the cartoon show. The voices of both dolls were recorded by Daws Butler. You can even note how Beany sounds like his Elroy Jetson voice. For Cecil, he approximated the voice that his old partner Stan had done for the puppet show.

Why did Daws do this? There's the mystery and it was one of those things I wondered about when I was a lad. I was able to recognize voice actors and I couldn't figure out why they hired Daws. He certainly wasn't cheaper than the other guys would have been. He surely wasn't picked by Clampett.

When I met Daws, I asked him and he said, "I have no idea. They called me to do it so I went out and did it." I also asked Bob Clampett. Bob was a pretty sharp guy but on this one, he just looked baffled and said, "You know, someone told me that was Daws on those and I never knew how that happened." Both men have since passed away and I don't know of anyone else I could ask…so I guess that's it. Just one of those puzzlements with which we all must live. Here's the commercial…

VIDEO MISSING

Going, Going…

Bidding on eBay for Gary Coleman's pants (as explained here) is currently over $200,000. As you may recall, back when people were offering $700,000 to $1,500,000, eBay declared all those as "bogus bids" and deleted them. Apparently though, an offer of $200,000+ for a pair of sweatpants signed by an out of work child star does not warrant skepticism.

The auction closes in a day and a half. So you still have time to top that offer.

This Just In

Here's everything you need to know about the Republican presidential race:

Mike Huckabee won the Iowa caucuses which made him the front runner…

…until John McCain won the New Hampshire primary, which made him the front runner…

…until Mitt Romney won the Michigan primary today, which makes him the front runner. At least until the next primary.

Rudy Giuliani hasn't won a primary yet but the news apparently isn't all bad for him tonight because John McCain didn't win. On Larry King Live, Ari Fleischer — who used to do this kind of spinning in the service of George W. Bush — said, "This is what Rudy needed." Apparently, what Rudy needed was to finish with 3% behind even Ron Paul and Fred Thompson. To be fair, he did beat "Uncommitted" by a point.

Waiting for the DGA…

I hereby officially predict that a deal between the AMPTP and the Directors Guild will be announced tomorrow. On what do I base this? Simple: I have an extremely busy day tomorrow. I don't have time to deal with a DGA deal tomorrow — all the pieces I'll have to write, all the discussions I'll have to have — which is why there will be one. That's about as sound a basis for a prediction as anything right now.

Actually, I have heard nothing from anyone in a position to know how close to a deal they might be so just sit tight. Either they'll make a deal this week or they won't. I'm going to be very busy next week too, so it could happen then.

Debatable Topics

Glenn Greenwald has an interesting piece up on "judicial activism" in the court decision to not compel MSNBC to include Dennis Kucinich in this evening's Democratic debate. Basically, Kucinich sued on a "breach of contract" basis and the matter seems to have been settled — he was not included — based on the merits of that specific principle. But a lot of people who wanted him in the debates — either because he's their guy or they think he'd wound the other Democratic candidates or maybe because they just like short people — are charging "judicial activism." That is, as Greenwald notes, something a lot of folks charge any time a court decision does not yield their preferred outcome. I think he's right. The law does not always give us the results we'd like to see and it isn't always (or even often, I suspect) because judges are trying to engineer the results they'd like to see.

I caught a little of that debate, by the way. Tim Russert seemed to be trying hard to get the candidates to bash one another and they refused to do much of that…and even gave Russert a bit of hard time for trying to start trouble. At least in the portion I saw, it didn't seem like any candidate "won." The victory seemed to be for those who want to see the leading Democratic contenders stop firing at one another and to link arms to get one of their own elected. Apart from that, it wasn't of huge interest. In hindsight, the best argument for including Kucinich was that he might have gotten some squabbles going and livened things up. Of course, they could have done that by bringing in Gallagher to smash a watermelon.

Vox Populi

Never mind all these polls about who's going to be President of the United States. Let's look at the really important one, the one that tells what you folks thought of the movie, Skidoo. Here are the final totals…

poll03

As you can see, almost half (47%) of those who voted did not watch the thing. A hair under 27% of you enjoyed the experience with 4.3% of you calling it a "fine motion picture." A slightly larger amount called it "one of the worst movies I've ever seen" and everyone else was kind of bewildered, which is where I came down on the issue. This poll has a margin of error of ±100% because the movie did, as well.

Since I wronged some of you by encouraging the viewing of this film, I'll suggest some good ones to watch on Turner Classic Movies. Tonight, they're running What's Up, Tiger Lily?, which was the very funny movie for which a team of clever actors redubbed a sixties Japanese spy flick with funny dialogue. Woody Allen was the front man but I hear the voice and wit of my pal (and a frequent patron of this blog), Frank Buxton.

Early Thursday morning, they're running the rarely-seen Taxi!, which was one of Jimmy Cagney's first movies. It's quite melodramatic but Cagney is, of course, electric in the lead. Matter of fact, they're running a number of rare Cagney movies that morning and more later this month.

Lastly, if you like Danny Kaye, you can view or record The Secret Life of Walter Mitty on Friday evening and The Court Jester early Saturday morning. Some or all of these should make up for causing you to watch Skidoo.

Briefly Noted…

Millions of you are writing this morn to point out to me that there's a copyright date on the To Tell the Truth clip with William Gaines. It says 1970. There's also a plug in there for the 1971 Chevy Impala. So apparently Bill was not "telling the truth" when he said that Dick DeBartolo had been writing for Mad for seven years. This should serve as yet another reminder that you can never trust anything a publisher tells you.

Recommended Reading

My chum Robert Elisberg, whom I owe ribs, discusses the endgame in the battle 'twixt the WGA and the AMPTP.

Today's Video Link

From an unknown year: William M. Gaines, publisher of Mad Magazine, appears on To Tell the Truth. My thanks to Kliph Nesteroff for telling me about this.

My only guess as to the year is that at the end, mention is made of Dick DeBartolo, who worked on To Tell the Truth and also wrote for Mad. Gaines says that Dick has been in the magazine for seven years without missing an issue. DeBartolo first appeared in Mad in issue #103, which was dated June, 1966…so if Bill's being accurate, this episode would have been around 1973. (DeBartolo has kept that streak going, by the way. He has now been in Mad every issue since then for a total of 399 consecutive issues over 42 years.)

Dick, by the way, sent me a note I ran here some time ago about this segment on To Tell the Truth. Here it is.

And here's the clip. You may notice that the audio is a little out of sync. So was Bill Gaines.

VIDEO MISSING

The Latest

The rumor that seems to be making the rounds is that the AMPTP and the DGA have already hammered out the main points of a deal and that they're just cleaning up language and addressing some minor points that need to be addressed. This may not be so but it's what people are saying and it at least feels likely. As I said the other day, it's always been unlikely that the DGA wouldn't be able to arrive at a deal. How good a one? And is it something that would work as well for writers and actors as it does for directors? That remains to be seen.

It may be seen quite soon. I suspect the AMPTP has something they think they can prove here; that this whole catastrophic strike wouldn't have happened if the WGA had just behaved like the DGA. I don't believe that for a minute. I think the studios thought they could steamroll over one union at a time starting with us and now that they know they can't, they're looking to make a deal and get their business back but to blame organized labor for their own refusal to negotiate. In any case, it's in their best interest to get a DGA deal done as quickly as possible, preferably while Nikki Finke is on vacation.