Monthly Archives: October 2008

As you may recall, my kitchen was annihilated last year by a burst water line. When I began the process of getting it rebuilt, I had no idea I was embarking on my life's work.

The current task is to find a new light fixture to install on the wall over my new kitchen sink. This should not be difficult. Millions of homes have kitchen sinks. Most have lights over them. There must be a big market for them. Why, oh why, can I not find one?

I tried looking online, clicking my way through a dozen or so sites which offer hundreds of light fixtures. I'm looking for something that would use two standard, non-Halogen bulbs and can fit in a space about a foot wide. I don't want something frilly or ornate and I don't want something with such dense globes that only half the light ever makes it out into the room. You would think this would be simple. Yeah, you would, wouldn't you? I found a few maybes on the websites of lighting companies but nothing that I was so sure of that I was willing to buy it without seeing it in person.

This afternoon, I had to go out to the Warner Brothers lot to be interviewed for little behind-the-scenes videos that will appear on two upcoming DVDs of cartoon shows. One is of the 1979 Saturday morning Plastic Man series, which I worked on for one season. The other is of the 1985 syndicated Jetsons revival, which I worked on for about an hour.

I'm not kidding…about an hour. I was summoned to a meeting where a short-term Hanna-Barbera exec who didn't seem to have ever watched the original show began talking about "modernizing" it. I asked why he thought it necessary to "modernize" a show that was set in the future. While he was trying to come up with an answer, I added that I thought the '62 version was pretty darn good and in no need of improvement. There are certain projects in one's life where if you're lucky, you get a sense very early on of "This is not the project for me" and you can get out while the getting is good. The ensuing discussion convinced me this was just such a project and I was back in my car and heading home before you could say "His boy, Elroy."

Anyway, whilst out in Burbank, I took the opportunity to visit a huge lighting fixture shop out there. Nothing on display matched my needs but a pushy salesman who looked way too much like Morey Amsterdam told me he could get me any fixture made in the world. "Just pick it out," he said as he motioned towards a wall of bookcases that contained about as many catalogs as I have of comic books. I thought of challenging Morey to give me a joke about two camels and a sailor, but instead asked if he could point me to the catalog that might contain what I wanted. He shrugged and said, "Any of them…just flip through 'til you see the one."

I flipped for about fifteen minutes before my eyes glazed over and I could look no more. "Tell you what," Mr. Amsterdam said. "You on the Internet? Browse around websites, find what you want, then print it out and bring it in. I can match anything you can find and get it for you." I told him I'd tried the Internet and come up empty. (By now I was growing weary so I didn't bother telling him that if I could find it on the Internet, I could just order it on the Internet. I also didn't ask him if he had a brother who'd been working at Hanna-Barbera in '85 but I was tempted…)

Before I hit the road, I ducked into the lighting store's men's room and — wouldn't you know it? — there, over the sink was pretty much the kind of fixture I was seeking. I went back to Morey and said, "I can show you what I want but you'll have to come into the bathroom with me." If someone said that to me, I wouldn't follow them in there but he did.

He studied the fixture for about six hours and then told me, "I'm not sure where to get those." I'm beginning to get the feeling that by the time my kitchen is finished, those reruns of The Jetsons will look like they're set in the past.

As you know too well, this weblog shamelessly pimps for the Creamy Tomato Soup that is occasionally available at the chain of restaurants known variously as Souplanation or Sweet Tomatoes. This is perhaps our greatest public service as proven by the kind of e-mails it invariably yields. Here's typical testimony…in this case, from Corey Klemow, a devout reader of this blog…

I have a deeply ingrained prejudice against tomato soup. Sometime when I was very, very young, I decided I hated tomato soup; probably had a lousy batch of Campbell's or something. I have studiously avoided tomato soup all my life (with one exception too convoluted to go into here). So it was a big deal for me to try tomato soup of any sort. Even a highly recommended creamy variety. Goddamn, that was some friggin' good soup. Extreme thanks for the extreme recommendation. (Ever tried dipping the foccacia bread in it? Mmmmmmm.)

There you have it: Independent verification. And I will remind you that this soup will disappear from those eateries some time this weekend (call first to check) and will probably not be available for months. They usually have it in March but, as the lady at the Customer Service line keeps telling me, the menus are not set this far in advance. They do this to toy with my emotions.

Also of note: As so many of you informed me, this past week on the TV show, The Big Bang Theory, one of the characters made a special mention of the Creamy Tomato Soup at Souplantation. It was a nice bit of timing from my point of view. This is the first week since the end of March that my favorite soup has been available there…and this is the week it got mentioned on The Big Bang Theory. Not only that but the show aired the first night I was able to get over there and shotgun a couple of bowls. I wondered here if the mention could have anything to do with my relentless hectoring of you all to go out and slurp some of this soup.

Turns out the answer is yes…and I feel dumb for not realizing this. So startled was I that I plumb forgot my pal Lee Aronsohn is one of the Executive Producers of The Big Bang Theory. Lee, who reads this here blog, informs me he wrote that line. I shoulda known…

Recently, I linked to this article by Jeffrey Goldberg which charged general ineptness on the part of the TSA department at the airport that is allegedly screening passengers for signs of terrorism. If you read it, you might be interested in this response from the agency. It's not all that convincing to me.

This is not exactly a recommendation since I've only seen a few minutes of it…but Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on your point of view), Turner Classic Movies is running The World's Greatest Sinner. This is one of those movies that film buffs often discuss even though few of them have seen it. It was made in 1962 but never really released. No matter how few people tune in to see it on TCM, their number will probably be greater than all the people who've seen it to date.

The film was a vanity production, written and directed by Timothy Carey, who popped up in a number of films by Stanley Kubrick or John Cassavettes. He stars, as well, playing an insurance man who quits his job and becomes a Rockabilly star and a cult leader. The legendary Paul Frees was the narrator and the music was done by Frank Zappa, who later called it "the worst movie ever made" and urged his fans not to seek out copies.

Is it all that awful? I dunno. I've seen about five minutes of it in clips over the years and while nothing in those clips was inconsistent with that description, you hate to label a movie that way without actually seeing all or most of it. Is it so awful it's funny? Same answer. But its trailer did include this blurb: "The most CONDEMNED and PRAISED American movie of its time!"

That's quite a claim for a movie that wasn't released and which very few people ever heard of. In fact, it's enough to make me want to see the thing. So I've set my TiVo. Whether I'll watch the film it records remains to be seen.

I was interviewed this afternoon for an hour on Inkstuds, a comic book talk radio show hosted by Robin McConnell and heard on CITR radio in Vancouver, Canada. The topic? Jack Kirby, of course. You can hear it over on this page if you're not sick of hearing me talk about Jack Kirby.

Veteran stage actor George S. Irving will be honored on December 8 with the 17th Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.

As this piece notes, Mr. Irving made his Broadway debut in the chorus of Oklahoma! and won a Tony Award for his performance in Irene, along with appearing in dozens of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Two's Company, Can-Can, Bells Are Ringing, Call Me Mister, An Evening With Richard Nixon and…, I Remember Mama, The Pirates of Penzance and Me and My Girl. But I hope someone will mention at the ceremony that he's worked extensively as a cartoon voice actor, including his stint as a cast member of the show, Underdog.

Tom Fagan is dead at the age of 76, and I probably need to explain to most of you who he was. Tom was a longtime resident of Rutland, Vermont and he was the mover and shaker most responsible for that city's famous annual Halloween parades. As he explained in this interview last year, he'd always loved Halloween and he had a vision for what the town's parade could be and set about to make it happen.

A lot of it involved filling the streets with comic book characters. Fagan promoted the idea in comic books and to comic book companies…and by the early seventies, the parade was awash with superheroes and villains. Writers and artists from the industry journeyed to Rutland to participate in the festivities, often in costume, and art began to imitate life: Many comic book stories were done that were set in Rutland involving DC and Marvel heroes actually attending. The illo above is from an issue of Batman in which the Caped Crusader went there…and the guy you see him talking to is Tom Fagan.

I never got to attend one of Tom's public parties but I always heard great things about them. We corresponded briefly in the seventies and you could tell from the way he wrote about the events that he was very proud of what he'd created. Here's a link to an obit in the local paper there.

So we have this proposition on the ballot in California. A decision of the State Supreme Court made gay marriage legal and now we have Proposition 8, which would make it illegal.

Naturally, there are commercials all over the place…and to see some of them, you'd never know the issue at hand has anything to with gays or marriage. Some of the "no" spots speak of equal protection under the law without discussing what exactly is being protected. Some of the "yes" ones speak of "tolerance" but their notion of tolerance is respect for the rights of those who choose to oppose gay marriage. Some of both could make you wonder how many voters will really know what they're voting on…or whether a "yes" vote means "yes" or "no" to gay marriage.

(The "yes" votes I've seen seem to be getting a bit more honest. For a while, they made it sound like the point of Proposition 8 was to stop sex education from being taught in schools, protect the tax-free status of churches and limit the power of "activist judges." Nothing in the actual Proposition 8 mentions any of that.)

A few months ago, polls showed 8 going down to a solid defeat. That's when a lot of us who see nothing wrong with same-sex wedlock (and everything wrong with barring it) thought the game was over and we could bite our nails over the presidential race, instead. That'll teach us to get cocky. Current polls suggest it's neck-and-neck and that the vote, like some whose relationships it would impact, can go either way.

This is quite disappointing and not just because it might lose. It's disappointing because it means the vote will probably be close…and that means the losing side will just try again in the next election. We'll be fighting this battle again…and again and again. Perhaps that was inevitable but some of us had hope. Then again, I still think gay marriage is inevitable and that it will some day seem ridiculous that it was ever an issue. Maybe if we get out the vote, we can make that day happen sooner…and minimize the injustice until it does.

Various politicians are rushing to condemn John McCain's unsolicited robocalls about Barack Obama's "relationship" with William Ayers. I would like to take this opportunity to condemn all unsolicited robocalls about anything. This includes the ones that want to tip me to great pay-per-view events on DirecTV and the ones that invite me to try out a free membership at my local Family Fitness Center. We're not getting political-type calls here in California but if I do, I will condemn them, no matter who they're from or what they're about.

I actually question whether they're effective in any way. They seem to me like a great way to piss people off, interrupting their lives or dinners or other, more important calls to listen to some unwanted sales pitch. There also seems to be a high potential of robocalls reaching the wrong person…someone in the home who couldn't buy the product if they wanted to.

I suppose the companies that set up such things have statistics that prove robocalls are of some value in moving a product or public opinion, however illogical that seems to me. Nevertheless, even if they make sense for the sponsor, I think they're a slimy, annoying way to do business and I think less of any enterprise that employs them.

Obviously, they should be outlawed and the people who do them should be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole and, more important, no access to a telephone. Failing that, they should be required to include their home phone numbers in any robocalls so we can ring them up at our leisure and tell them exactly what he think of such tactics. 4 AM sounds like as good a time as any to me.

The nice folks at Google will be glad to not only tell you but to show you.