Monthly Archives: November 2008

A newspaper in Omaha, Nebraska has awarded a rogue electoral vote to Barack Obama, bringing his total to 365. Still to be decided is where Missouri's 11 electoral votes will land. McCain is reportedly in the lead there but it's not definite…so Obama's final total will be 365 or 376. This brings us back to our little contest to guess the number.

No one guessed 365 but as explained here, a lot of people — starting with Richard Bensam, guessed 364. We also had one person, Ellen Bischoff, guess 366. Richard's guess came in before Ellen's so if 365 is the final tally, I'll declare Richard the winner, Ellen the runner-up and the next ten folks who picked 364 as Honorable Mentions.

One and only one person guessed 376: Jim Ellwanger.

Before I forget, I want to again plug the website of Bob Claster, who was one of those who picked 364. Bob is a writer and historian of comedy, and also of other things. He once hosted a very fine radio show called Bob Claster's Funny Stuff on which he interviewed many of the giants in the mirth business and he's been nice enough to put a number of these broadcasts online for your pleasure and edification. Among those he interviewed were John Cleese, Stan Freberg, Douglas Adams, Peter Cook, Quentin Crisp and Tom Lehrer. If you go to his page, you'll find an interview with someone you think is or was a genius in the world of comedy…probably several someones.

Several websites are reporting that Forrest J Ackerman, sci-fi legend and founding editor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, has passed away. As far as I know, this is NOT true. It is true that Forry is 91 and ailing. It's also true that friends of his have circulated e-mails saying this would be a good time to write or visit Forry to say the kind of things you want to say to someone before they depart. But the news now circulating that he has died is apparently premature…and if Forry has heard about it, I'll bet he's having a chuckle.

In 1932 and 1933, Groucho and Chico Marx starred in an NBC radio series called Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel, which we assume was a very funny show. We have to assume this because not many recordings of this program have survived. The series was written by two close Marx associates, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin, sometimes with the participation of George Oppenheimer and Tom McKnight. So it had that going for it and of course, it's Groucho and Chico. How could that not be worth listening to? (Though audiences of the time found sufficient reason to prefer Ed Wynn, who was on opposite the Marxes' show. Which is why it only lasted one season.)

Like I said, most of the shows are lost but fortunately, copies of all but one of the scripts still exist. In the early nineties, BBC Radio hired Groucho and Chico impersonators and a full cast and crew to replicate the old series. The thirties' material was freely adapted, in some cases with two or more of the original scripts combined to make new episodes. Material from the Marx Brothers movies also found its way into the BBC versions. In one, their Groucho sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" which the real one sang in the 1939 movie At the Circus. The tune probably hadn't even been written when Flywheel, Shyster and Flywheel was originally airing.

Despite the tampering — or maybe even because of it — the BBC shows are pretty darn entertaining. Wanna hear one or more? BBC Radio 7 is presently rerunning them, which means they also turn up on that network's website. If you go to this page, you can listen to the first episode…though only for the next week or so, at which time I expect it will be replaced by the second episode and so on. Various sources disagree on how many the BBC did but 18 seems like a good number. One hopes they'll keep this run going 'til they've replayed them all. Enjoy. And thank Mike Rea for letting me know about these.

Every election, there always seems to be some big race decided by eleven votes…just to remind us that sometimes, whether or not we take the time to cast a ballot can make a difference. This time, it seems to be the Senate race in Minnesota. As of last night, Norm Coleman led Al Franken by 477 votes. Today, heretofore uncounted ballots have been added in and the difference is now 337. There will be more counted and this is all before they commence the recount that is mandatory in that state when an election is this close.

I also should have mentioned that while the polls were generally accurate, most of 'em were way off with all the races in Alaska. Polls predicted that the career of convicted felon Ted Stevens would be going down a series of tubes…and Stevens seemed to be hastening his loss the other night when he went around announcing that he hadn't been convicted of anything. It made him seem not only crooked but delusional, as well. Polls had him losing by 7-10% and at the moment — with some amount of ballots still outstanding — he has a slight lead. The pollsters were off with other Alaskan contests as well. There's no reason (yet) to suspect tampering but you have to wonder: Why Alaska and nowhere else?

Hey, remember the other day when I told you how MAD printed an issue that came out right after the 1960 election with congrats to JFK on one cover and to Nixon on the other? Well, in 2000, an interior page also had to be done in two versions but for a different situation. The acclaimed drawer-of-faces Tom Richmond, who produced the two versions, tells us all about it.

I see a lot of pundits and bloggers today telling us what's going to happen with the 2012 presidential race. This is all good to know.

Could someone point me to some of the predictions made just after Election Day in 2004 that said that in four years, this nation just might elect a black guy and Joe Biden in a landslide?

Some news sources are now calling North Carolina for Obama so that would put him at 364 electoral votes. Missouri's 11 are yet to be awarded but look like they're going to McCain. It's odd. Once Obama hit my prediction of 349, I found myself almost rooting for him not to get any more. It is, after all, more important that I be right, as opposed to my chosen candidate to lead the country getting a bigger mandate.

I'm not following all the G.O.P. finger-pointing a lot but as I understand it, it works like this: We have a second or third hand report of some unidentified person claiming that Sarah Palin said a lot of silly things in strategy meetings and prep sessions…like this would be a shocking revelation, given what she said in public. From this new gossip, we're apparently supposed to conclude that she's more responsible for the loss than the guy who thought she'd be the best possible vice-president. I don't have a very high opinion of Governor Palin but at least she wasn't dumb enough to do this…

A lot of folks out there are trying to score how well the pollsters did in calling the election. The scoring seems useless to me since it's usually a matter of matching a pollster's last prediction to the final score. If you were an inept pollster, you could just make wild forecasts with no basis in reality for months. Then, just so long as you got close the day before voting, your reputation wouldn't be tarnished, at least by the kind of measures now being applied.

What I get in hindsight is, first of all, no one poll is without its big misses, and some of them try to have all bases covered with multiple surveys that may differ. To the extent there's something to be learned there, you have to look at a consensus over some period of time, especially the rolling average. If your world rocks each time Zogby says your guy is up or Rasmussen says your guy is down, you're letting yourself be jolted by near-meaningless noise. This year, and maybe it's this way every year, daily fluctuations and outliers gave us a very inaccurate view of what was going on with the electorate but the long-term averages of all the major pollsters were probably close to reality. Which, of course, we'll all forget next time as we hang on each day's polling headlines.

Obama is currently at 349 electoral votes with North Carolina (15 votes) and Missouri (11) still to be allocated. So he'll wind up with either 349, 360, 364 or 375.

If he winds up with 349, I win…and so do about eight people who guessed the same thing I did but since they were just copying me, no credit.

If he winds up with 360…well, that was one of those numbers that struck me as possible but which no one guessed. The closest was Mark Jarek with 359.

If he winds up with 364, which is looking likely…we had about fifty of those. The first one received was Richard Bensam and I'll also mention the next ten: Michael Kilgore, Kris Mandt, Cory Strode, Corey de Danann, Tony Thomas, Roger Green, Bill O'Brien, Michael Hagan, Bob Claster and Anand Kandaswamy.

And if Obama gets 375…well, the first one in with that number was Michael Hagan but he changed his guess to 364 and as per our rules, his last guess counts. So the next person to guess 375 was Chuck Sigars, whose guess was received about two minutes before I got one from Charles Christopherson that also guessed 375. Ten others guessed 375, not counting one other who guessed that then changed to a lower number.

For what it's worth, over a hundred of you guessed 311 and almost as many guessed 338. Leaving aside joke guesses like 3 and 538, the lowest number guessed was 150 and the highest was 487.

Forty-eight people (out of about 1300 guesses) had Obama below 270. Ten or so wrote that they were hopeful he wouldn't win. Six said they wanted him to win but expected massive vote stealing and fraud. The rest were without comment.

I'll be back to crown our winner when we know for sure.

One last comment and then I have to get back to work-type stuff. We all have our personal causes which we'd like to think were advanced by the election results. One of mine is that sleazy campaigning and the demonization of the opposition shouldn't work and we should celebrate when it doesn't. I'm not well enough versed in North Carolina politics to know why Kay Hagan was able to unseat Elizabeth Dole but I'd sure like to think that Dole commercial — the one where a Hagan impersonator shouted, "There is no God!" — had a lot to do with it. It would be nice to think Obama's win had a lot to do with people simply not buying the idea that he was this secret Socialist or Communist who was out to take Joe the Plumber's great wealth and redistribute it to the poor.

For reasons I may write about in the next day or three, I doubt that Sarah Palin has much future in elected office and will instead opt to become the Oprah Winfrey of the Fox News crowd…and maybe even on Fox News. But whether she runs again or not, some friend's going to have to caution her about making divisive, arrogant comments about how the people who support her are the "real Americans," as she did in Guilford County, North Carolina. The "real Americans" of Guilford County gave 58.75% of their vote last night to Obama-Biden and only 40.44% to McCain-Palin.