Monthly Archives: February 2009

I won't be posting this 'til I get home but right now, it's 11 AM and I'm in Room 302 on the 11th floor of the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center in picturesque Downtown Los Angeles. That's right: Mark has jury duty.

The summons said I had to be here at 7:45 AM which for a night person like I am sounds like greater punishment than is likely to be handed out in any courtroom in this building today. Fortunately, I discovered that if one takes an online orientation course, one can report a little later. Last night, I watched the videos and answered questions…and as my reward, I got to be here at 9:30. So I drove down in a light rain, parked where they tell you to park and hiked several blocks to this imposing structure. The route between the lot and here is quite long and by some distortion of science that otherwise exists only in M.C. Escher prints, it's uphill in both directions.

I am here under the assumption that I will not get on a jury…not that I will try not to, but it's hereditary. My father had jury duty many times. Never got on. My mother was once an extra playing a juror on L.A. Law…and remind me to tell you that story some day. She had an interesting encounter with Jimmy Smits. But the folks who pick real jurors wouldn't cast her. The last time I had jury duty, I sat there all day talking comics with one of my best friends, Scott Shaw!, who by coincidence had jury duty the same day I did. I didn't even get called to go off to a courtroom and be considered for an actual jury.

I got here on time…and don't think that's easy. The hard part was fighting my way onto an elevator amidst a horde of people who didn't seem to understand that when a car full of people arrives, you have to wait until they get off before you can get on. I finally boarded a car thanks to a lawyer (I guess he was a lawyer) who was directing traffic while he negotiated a plea bargain for some client on his cell phone.

One disadvantage of reporting late was that all the good seats in the jury waiting room were taken before I arrived. This included the dozen-or-so seats where I could have had a little table on which to use the laptop I hauled here along with me. Some were occupied by folks who had not brought laptops or work to do and who didn't seem to notice (or maybe care) that some of us had. I was about to go over to one and propose a seat swap but before I could, someone else with a laptop did and got rebuffed. And rather rudely at that. So I had to wait until a number of folks were called away to courtrooms before I could pounce on my present workspace.

The way this works is that we sit here and every so often, they call out names picked at random and those folks report to other locales in the building where they will be interrogated on their suitability and availability to serve for the particular trial. If they don't get selected, they come back here and their names are put back in the pool. The first such pick was for a trial which we could refuse because it will last an estimated ninety days.

When the lady who calls the names said that, there was a loud "Whoa" from the room and it sounded like everyone would be declining. But a surprising, perhaps encouraging number of folks said yes, they'd be willing to serve on a jury that lasted that long. These people have either a stirring sense of civic duty or an employer who pays full wages when you're on a jury. I have neither so I'd have declined if they'd called my name which, of course, they didn't. Two more groups of prospective jurors have since been called and my name was not among those the lady mispronounced.

So what do I do instead? Well, now that I have a little desk space, I can sit here and work and write stuff for the blog. It's 11:16.

For reasons I shall explain when I return, I may be gone from this weblog for a day or two. Nothing serious. In fact, it may turn out to be kind of funny. Anyway, I'll be back soon and I'll try to get (reasonably) caught up on e-mail when I do.

Congrats to my pal Larry DiTillio, who received the Morgan Cox Award last evening at the Writers Guild's gala award ceremony. The Morgan Cox Award is given for tireless, vital volunteer work for the guild and I can't think of anyone who's done more of that than Larry. Whoever made this choice knew what they were doing.

From now on, every time a stranger around me is doing something really stupid and annoying, I'm going to immediately shake their hand. This way, I can be sure it's not Howie Mandel.

An awful lot of folks who read this blog apparently also speak French. I got a lot of messages like this one from Jean-Daniel Brèque…

In the short Cannes 1972 feature you posted today, Hitch says, more or less:

"Hello, this is Alfred Hitchcock speaking from aboard the good ship, Michelangelo. I think this ship is a good place for a suicide, for there is a pool without water.

"I'm looking at the Palais du Festival. I think I see a woman without clothes. No, it's a man without clothes. I think.

"Hello, I see you have a tie. In my movies, even the women have a tie. But they wear it like this (mimes strangling)."

Thanks to all who wrote. Since you all said he said more or less the same thing, I guess you're all right. For all I knew, he could have been selling Amway products.

As we mentioned back here, most people pick too-easy passwords for the many places on Ye Olde Internet where they need one. It seems to me that this will often be the case when you're trying to come up with one that you can remember. Yes, it's possible to think of one that would be hard for a person (or of greater threat, a computer program) to guess…but you should also use different passwords on every or nearly every site.

All of that made me decide I should, first of all, forget about trying to remember passwords. I just now use a different one for every place I need one and I don't try to keep them all in my mind. I keep them in Roboform, which is a fine program that stores your passwords, credit card info and other data. They have a pay version and a free version…and frankly, the free one isn't much good except for testing it out on your system and, if you like it, upgrading to the one that costs cash. But even then, it's only thirty bucks.

I've directed my Roboform to store all its sensitive data on a flash drive I keep plugged into a USB port. I can take it out of the computer and carry it with me…and when I do, my passwords and such aren't even on my computer. If you do this, it might be a good idea to back the flash drive up to something else…which I do.

So what about the passwords? I just use gibberish. You can generate your own like this: gfuir9u or vrfe5ori or cf984Nfd but it's easier to use GRC's Ultra High Security Password Generator. It's free and you can add it to your browser toolbar so you can access it immediately whenever you need a new password. If a site requires one of 8-12 letters, I just zip over to the U.H.S.P.G. and copy 8-12 letters off whatever they've generated for me. Couldn't be easier…or as I like to think of it, couldn't be 1jokwdT!

Above is a photo of the DeMille Barn, so called because Cecil B. DeMille shot The Squaw Man in it in 1913 and many other films followed. It was not then located where it is now. It was at Selma and Vine and later, to preserve such an important relic of Hollywood history, it was moved to several different pieces of real estate and it also changed owners a few times. In 1983, a group called Hollywood Heritage acquired the place and stuck it in its current whereabouts, which is on Highland Avenue in a lot where people park to go to the Hollywood Bowl. Inside, Hollywood Heritage operates a small museum that you can read about on their website.

This afternoon, I went up there to speak at "An Afternoon of Remembrance," which is an annual event put on by the animation community. The Animation Guild, ASIFA and Women in Animation all stage this ceremony, which is kind of like a gang memorial service for everyone in the cartoon biz who died the previous year. A little tribute speech is delivered about each person and some speakers talk about more than one person. I was there to memorialize Greg Burson, Steve Gerber and Harvey Korman.

I was fortunate they were all friends whose last names began with letters in the first half of the alphabet. The ceremony goes (mostly) in alphabetical order, starting today with John Ahern, and there were 54 names to get through. The speeches are supposed to last no more than three minutes each but…well, I got there at 1:15 for the milling and refreshments. Eulogizing commenced a little after 2:00 and I departed at 4:15, which was how long it took to get to the late Mr. Korman. If I'd stayed to speak about Dave Stevens, I might literally still be there. Fortunately, Bill Stout came in to handle that.

Korman was #26 on the list. There was a 15-minute intermission just before we did him so figure 13 speeches per hour. To get through 54 people could take more than four hours. But since most in the audience are there to speak and since many leave after they're done speaking, the crowd thins out. The place was half empty by the time I had to go. I doubt there were many there to hear the tributes to the fallen whose surnames begin with "W," which makes me feel bad for their friends and any family members who might have attended.

To my friends in the animation community, I want to say: Let's stop doing this. I absolutely appreciate the respect for the deceased and their contributions to cartoon-making but there's got to be a better idea. Most of us show up because we feel obligated. I would have felt terrible if there'd been no one who knew them well who could speak for Burson or Gerber. I did feel bad about having to leave when I did and not hear L-Z but (a) I had other responsibilities and (b) I couldn't sit for four hours and listen to people talk about how great I was, let alone about other people. Let's think of another way to honor these folks…please?

A couple of folks who read the previous posting have written to ask me what a rape case has to do with the Death Penalty since, after all, they usually don't sentence someone to die for the crime of rape.

I thought it was obvious but just in case others are wondering: A court system that could send an innocent man to prison for 25 years for rape or any other crime is a court system that could send an innocent man to the gas chamber. The Innocence Project, which is not the only group doing this kind of thing, has notched 232 post-conviction DNA exonerations in the United States since they began doing this in 1989. That includes seventeen who had served time on Death Row.

No one expects a Zero Defect System in our courts but I think a lot of folks have their heads in the sand over how often judges and juries put the wrong person behind bars. At the very least, there needs to be more willingness by officials to investigate and admit error. Jerry Johnson was telling people for years that he, not Timothy Cole, had committed the rape for which Cole was convicted. That's the kind of thing that can be fixed.

I've just been reading a number of news stories on an amazing DNA "innocence" case down in Texas. And with this one, you kind of have to read a number of them because no one report seems to have all the maddening details in full. Here's one and here's one and here's one and now I'll try to summarize the whole ugly tale for you…

In the mid-eighties, a sicko who some called "The Tech Rapist" was terrorizing young women at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas. It was assumed he'd been caught and his career ended when a young man named Timothy Cole was convicted of the 1985 rape of a 20-year-old woman. The woman identified him from a police lineup but Cole maintained his innocence, pointing out (among other things) that the victim described her assailant as a heavy smoker. Cole had terrible asthma and didn't/couldn't smoke.

In court, Cole's lawyer tried to suggest that another man, a fellow named Jerry Johnson, was the actual guilty party. The victim's i.d. was too compelling, however, and Cole was convicted and sentenced to 25 years in prison. He was offered one of those plea bargain deals where he could get probation if he confessed but he refused, insisting he was not going to say he'd raped someone when he hadn't.

In 1995, Johnson began confessing to the rape. In fact, he repeatedly told authorities he'd done it but no one paid any attention to him even though he had a history of similar crimes. Indeed, DNA testing would later prove that he, not Cole, was the rapist…proof that came too late to help Timothy Cole. In 1999, Cole died in prison from heart problems related to his asthma. Last Friday, a judge said, "I find to a 100 percent moral, factual and reasonable certainty that Timothy Cole did not sexually assault [the student]" and he ordered Cole's name cleared. It's a nice gesture but a little tardy, don't you think?

How many things went wrong in this case and how often do they go wrong, individually or collectively, in others? The victim identifying the wrong man is the least of it. There's no way to prevent that from happening but then we have the situation where Cole was basically told, "If you admit you did it, you'll get out of prison and if you insist you didn't, you'll stay there for a long time." That's a horrible choice for him and a horrible choice for society. But I guess it does make the prosecutors' lives easier when someone confesses. So the accused have to be given some incentive to do that whether they're guilty or not.

A lie would have gotten him out but standing by the truth put and kept Timothy Cole in prison. Then along comes a convicted sex offender…one who had also been a suspect in the case so it's not like he was some stranger who was nowhere near the scene of the crime. He says, "Cole didn't do it…I did" and the authorities ignore him. Could that have had anything to do with the fact that it's embarrassing to admit you put an innocent man in prison? That it's easier to pretend that other confession couldn't be legit and to hope it will just go away? One might even suspect that when you have a serial rapist around, there's great pressure on law enforcement to make an arrest…so maybe they were a wee bit hasty to pin it all on Cole and once they had, they couldn't go back.

My friend Roger and I sometimes debate the Death Penalty, which I'm largely against because I think our judicial system is too inefficient to be trusted with that power. Roger's attitude is that even if the wrong guy is occasionally convicted and executed, that's no great injustice because the kind of person who winds up wrongly on Death Row is the kind of person who's probably guilty of something else heinous, anyway. Still, of this case, I don't think even he'd say, "Well, how do we know Timothy Cole didn't rape someone else?" He'll more likely say, "No system is ever going to be perfect. This kind of thing is going to happen once in a while." I suspect "once in a while" occurs a lot more often than any of us might like to think.

There's been much chatter, at least in my e-mailbox, about the status and fate of MAD Magazine. There's also been discussion over on the weblog of Mike Snider, one of that publication's wittier contributors.

I call to your attention this posting in which Mike graphs and discusses its circulation slide. Notice the descent did not begin with the popularity of the Internet. It probably has more to do with a general and growing disinterest in this country in the basic concept of buying magazines of any kind.

I also call to your attention this posting in which Mike responds to the news that MAD will be trimmed back to quarterly status. I think he's wrong, by the way, that it will soon cease publication completely. My feeling is its overlords will always keep some publication on the newsstands called MAD, even if it doesn't bear a great resemblance to the MAD we know and love.

And I especially call your attention, assuming you have any left, to this posting which is about Frank Jacobs, who I still think is the funniest poet and lyricist of our day.

Meanwhile, MAD artist Tom Richmond is reporting over on his site about recent reports of financial woes within Time-Warner that are probably not unrelated to what's going on with the magazine. As he also notes, some MAD fans have been fantasizing that some wealthy guy will swoop in, purchase MAD from Time-Warner and keep the publication going in the grand tradition. I'd say there's about a 0% chance of the corporation ever selling off so famous a brand name for any amount of money. Conceivably, they might allow an outsider to license the right to publish the magazine called MAD so they don't have to…but that would suppose there's someone out there who loves the thing enough to lose millions of dollars a year just to see it continue. Maybe they can apply for a federal bailout…

Today marks fifteen years since the great comic book creator Jack Kirby passed away, a recognition that saddens me for all the obvious reasons. One, perhaps not so obvious, is that if he was still with us, he'd be even more famous and honored and rewarded than he was in his lifetime. It's only in the last decade or so that the works of folks like Jack and Stan Lee and Steve Ditko have been recognized as important (and lucrative) contributions to mainstream popular culture. Lee, I'm happy to see, is being showered with tributes and deals. Ditko is still with us but for his own reasons, chooses to avoid most of that. Kirby would have reveled in it.

I have written so much about Jack over the years that I'd be repeating myself to discuss his influence on so many of us. So I thought I'd just share the above photo with you. It was taken in Jack's studio in 1970 by my then-partner Steve Sherman…and yes, that's me in the Red Skull mask. There is or was (I think they're still in business) a company called Don Post Studios founded by a gent named, oddly enough, Don Post. If you ever need a great-looking rubber mask of a monster or other odd creature, look for the Don Post label.

Anyway, we took one of Mr. Post's plain, vanilla skull masks and a can of red spray paint and — voila! — we had a mask of Captain America's arch-enemy. Jack loved it and acted like we'd somehow figured out how to invent nuclear fission or something. It always felt good to get Jack's approval and an awful lot of people are still trying for it, one way or another…