Monthly Archives: June 2009

Fans of Spinal Tap will want to scurry to this BBC Radio link and hear this interview with the band and preview of their new CD. [Caution: May start playing immediately.]

According to this new poll in The New York Times, 72% of Americans favor the idea of a "public option" for health care. The question even wins (50% to 39%) among Republicans. A majority is even willing to pay some unspecified amount of higher taxes to ensure that all Americans have health care.

Of special interest is that "85 percent of respondents said the health care system needed to be fundamentally changed or completely rebuilt, [while] 77 percent said they were very or somewhat satisfied with the quality of their own care." I take all this to mean that most of us are rather happy with our doctors…and rather unhappy that certain friends and relatives don't have what we have.

So what we have here is a situation where a substantial majority of Americans believe something is important…and a lot of senators and congresspeople are resisting because they're in bed with lobbyists and the medical industry. It would be nice if the public dialogue on all this were framed a bit more in those terms.

Noticing what today is, it occurs to me that while I often mention my mother here, I don't write a lot about my father. I guess that's because she's still (happily) here and he (unhappily) passed away in 1991.

A lot of people say "My father is/was the nicest man in the world" but mine really was. In all the years we were together, he lost his temper at me about six times…and in two of those instances, he later realized he was in the wrong and he came to me to apologize. I'd go to friends' homes to play and I'd literally hear more yelling between parents and children in one afternoon than I endured in my entire childhood. My friends' fathers were mostly the kind who would never, ever humble themselves to apologize to their kids. They thought it was a sign of weakness. In Bernie Evanier, it meant nothing but strength.

We hear a lot about dysfunctional families…so much so that I sometimes feel like I came from one of the last functional ones. There was almost no drinking. There was absolutely no hitting. There was, as I said, minimal shouting. At times, my father fretted he wasn't doing his job as a parent because I never got in trouble: Nothing to scold me about, no reason to administer spankings to try and put me on the right path. I was already there…in large part because of the example he set. He was also very, very encouraging without ever trying to force me into any career of his choosing.

My father didn't like at all what he had to do for a living, which was to work for the Internal Revenue. Didn't like it one bit. Because of that, he encouraged me to find and pursue something I wanted to do — anything so long as I could get up each morning and look forward to my job. There are times when I don't like what I have to write or who I'm writing it for…but I've only had this one profession and I've never yearned to do anything else. I have my father to thank for that.

He was a very compassionate man. Like most Depression-era kids, he was enormously frugal with regard to his own needs but generous to others. His forced occupation didn't yield much of a paycheck but there was nothing my mother or I ever required or ever really wanted that we didn't get. When in my late teen years I started making decent bucks, I tried to use some of them to give my folks a little luxury. This usually made both uncomfortable at first but especially my father. "I don't want you spending your money on me" was a phrase I heard constantly. A couple times, I had to fib to him, understating what something cost to get him to accept it or permit him to enjoy it.

He didn't hate very many or very much. Richard Nixon is the only subject that comes to mind, and some of that was personal because as an Internal Revenue officer, my father saw firsthand what the White House was doing while Nixon was in it. They wanted, my father said, to consciously and deliberately nail the poorer taxpayers for every cent possible while letting rich people — especially rich people who'd donated to the Nixon campaign — get away without paying what the law expected. Picking on the little, helpless guy…that was the kind of thing that got my father mad. If you didn't do that, he liked you. Which meant he liked most people.

He loved the Dodgers and the Lakers and was half-convinced that they couldn't win a televised game without him yelling at the screen. He loved my mother's cooking (and everything else she did) and the family cat and a great joke and…well, darn near everything except his job, Nixon and the kinds of things that any decent person abhors like prejudice and cruelty. He loved his friends, his family and all parts of his life that did not involve tax collection.

I lost him in '91 with only the normal regrets. After a parent passes, you often hear the child say, "Oh, if only we'd done this" or "If only we'd talked about that." I had none of those "if only"s. We got along great. There were no lingering, unresolved issues. He left this world, content that I could and would see that my mother always had everything she required. In a sense, I think he willed himself to go then…not that he didn't love life and want to stick around. Trouble was, if he'd left that hospital, he would have needed nurses and constant care and someone to help him dress. Perhaps worst of all, he wouldn't have been able to drive, which was something he loved — chauffeuring friends and family around. It wasn't that he liked cars. He just liked doing things for people.

I was so sorry to see him go but so glad he didn't have to live his last years like that. A close neighbor had and that was my father's worst nightmare: To be a crippling burden to his loved ones. Since I was an only child, he only left a couple of loved ones — essentially just my mother and me — but we miss him…and not just on Father's Day. We miss him every day. Father's Day is just a good excuse to say it in front of everyone and it feels so good to write this that I don't know why I had to wait for a holiday to do it.

I just went over to Salon and found a news item, the headline and first paragraph of which are reproduced below…

Obama and daughters snack on frozen custard
By CHRISTINE SIMMONS Associated Press Writer

Jun 20th, 2009 | ALEXANDRIA, Va. — The first family was in the mood for something sweet — something like vanilla custard, fudge and sprinkles. On a muggy Saturday just before Father's Day, President Barack Obama took Sasha, 8, and Malia, 10, to The Dairy Godmother, a frozen custard shop just outside Washington.

…and then it goes on to tell you that the president had a vanilla custard with hot fudge and toasted almonds in a cup and that Sasha ordered a brownie sundae treat with vanilla custard, hot fudge and chocolate sprinkles. And so on. That's really all this news story is about.

Below it, I found the following…

Salon provides breaking news articles from the Associated Press as a service to its readers, but does not edit the AP articles it publishes.

Nice to know that on a day when car bombs and rioting are killing people in Iraq and Iran, the president taking his daughters for custard can still qualify as breaking news. If they spilled any, CNN would probably cut in with a bulletin.

Here's another article on that Supreme Court decision that says convicted criminals do not have a constitutional right to DNA testing after their conviction. It still sounds screwy to me. I can understand that the High Court might decide this is a matter for the states to decide…but should an innocent person be sitting in prison because he's in a state that hasn't gotten around to upgrading its laws to deal with the new technology of DNA testing? Seems to me human rights and decency oughta trump that little obstacle.

Of course, I come to this situation with a long-held (and ever-growing) belief that our court system ain't as good as we'd like to believe and that innocent folks are convicted all the time. I felt that way even before DNA testing began exonerating convicts left and right. I also feel that most (not all) authorities go out of their way not to let convicted folks prove their innocence. It's too embarrassing, plus you can get sued. Better to leave the wrongly-convicted behind bars, even though that means that the real criminal gets away with it.

That really is The Perfect Crime, after all. Not only do they never pin it on you but they convict someone else…so they stop investigating and try real hard not to let him prove he didn't do it. Next time I kill someone, that's how I'm aiming to set things up.

I understand that in the case the S.C.O.T.U.S. decided, the guilty party had previously waived DNA testing, and that he'd also made confessions he has since recanted. He may well be as guilty as a body could be and is just grasping at the flimsiest of straws, looking for a way out of the slammer. But DNA testing doesn't take long and isn't expensive (the convict has even offered to pay the costs) and it has a way of settling things, once and for all. It would have taken a lot less of the government's time and money to test the DNA, rather than let this thing linger on through appeals. Moreover, doesn't the state have a compelling interest in proving they got the right guy? Even if it turns out he's guilty?

Bob Elisberg sent me to this article about how airlines are all inventing new fees (for things like checking our baggage or giving you an exit-row seat) in order to generate more revenue. Welcome to another reason to curse the airlines. Among the many annoying things about this is that when you go online to compare fares and books your tickets, you can't get an accurate fix on what a flight will really cost. If one airline is cheaper but is charging for checked luggage and for seat belts and air, it might not really be cheaper.

You know, I knock Southwest a lot, mostly because they have this quaint idea that my suitcase needn't arrive at the same airport and time as me. But they're doing better than most carriers these days because they don't make you feel gouged at every turn. The price you pay is the price you pay. They also do a better job than most of going where I want to go at the time I want to go. Maybe I oughta start seeing if I can do carry-ons.

The Writers Guild of America, East is doing something intriguing. On Monday, June 22, they're presenting an evening of readings. What are people reading? Excerpts from new, as-yet-unfilmed screenplays.

One of them is a script called Dick Cavett Ruined My Life, which was authored by Craig Shemin. Craig described it as "…a comedy about a regular guy and how he continuously has his life wrecked (albeit inadvertently) by talk show host Dick Cavett." These readings are all cast with professional actors and they had to find someone appropriate to play the role of Dick Cavett. They got — you guessed it — Dick Cavett.

Here are the details. If I were closer to New York, I'd probably go.

That's a pretty old photo of my best friend (male division), Sergio Aragonés. I took it at the third (I think) Comic-Con, which was in 1972 — the first of many at the El Cortez Hotel. They didn't call it Comic-Con International back then. It went through a couple of names to which no one ever paid any attention. We all just called it the San Diego Comic-Con. I think the '72 one was formally called San Diego's West Coast Comic Convention.

But this item isn't about the convention. It's about Sergio. Sergio now lives in Ojai, California where he seems to know everyone. In a long overdue move, the Ojai Valley Museum will host a big exhibit of his artwork August 7 through October 4. He will also be hosting a couple of seminars there during the weeks of the exhibition. Details can be obtained at this here website. I'd make some snide, derogatory remark but this is actually a great honor for a great talent and even I can't find anything negative to say about it. Congrats, amigo.

If you grew up in Southern California in the sixties, you're going to thank me for this. Because since then, you've had a song running through your head…over and over, haunting you, pounding on you from within. It got into your brain during that decade because you innocently turned on a radio one day and heard it. And heard it. And heard it. And heard it some more. You couldn't go four minutes without hearing it because it was on every channel, mocking you and refusing to be denied.

Even when you didn't have your radio on, you often heard it because someone else had a radio on and it was always on their radio. At some point, there probably didn't even have to be a radio within earshot for you to hear it. It was a part of you. If a doctor had put a stethoscope on your chest, he would have heard it.

I am speaking, of course, of the Sav-On Drug Store jingle.

They may have had it in other cities, too…but they sure had it in Southern California. There were times when even though I didn't need anything at a Sav-On Drug Store, I went to a Sav-On Drug Store. Just because I had to. Other people had dogs barking in their heads. I had the Sav-On Drug Store jingle.

As jingles go, it wasn't one of the better ones. Whoever wrote it thought "parade" rhymes with "save." It didn't then, it doesn't now, it never will. The pounding kettle drum sound was addictive, though. Another local jingle writer named Stan Worth admitted to being inspired by it when he wrote the theme for the George of the Jungle TV show.

I don't know when they stopped using it on the radio…some time in the seventies, I guess. I just know I continued to hear it somewhere in my soul for years after…until finally, one melancholy morning, it just went away. I was amazed to discover that I missed it.

Just the other day, after all these years, I heard it out of my computer speakers. Someone sent me an old air check of a KFWB broadcast from 1962 and there it was in all its primal glory. I think this was the only version Sav-On ever recorded of it. I just had to edit a clip and put it up here for all of you, just so you could experience that memorable melody one more time.

Sav-On drug stores are still around but slowly going away. The two I used to go to are both now CVS Pharmacies and I suppose they're just as good if you need a bottle of Maalox or a bag of Baked Ruffles (the good kind, the kind with cheddar cheese and sour cream flavoring) or a pack of 9 volt batteries. But they don't have a jingle this good — and they never will…

Not every time but with increasing (and frightening) occurrence, the Supreme Court of this great land of ours does something so mind-numbingly unfair that I can't believe it. On a 5-4 vote (of course), they recently ruled that if you're convicted of a crime and there's DNA evidence that could prove conclusively if you did it, you do not necessarily have a right to have that evidence. The cause of justice is somehow better served if you just remain behind bars, insisting you didn't do it. Apparently, our courts are already too crowded to bother with a little thing like imprisoning the right person.

I read about the decision on this webpage and I thought, "This can't be all there is to it. There must be a more logical case to be made for this decision." But I've looked at about a dozen other articles and I sure can't find one. If you've got one, pass it along.

Last night on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had a long talk with Mike Huckabee about abortion. It was so long that they cut it to confetti for airing, and I don't suggest you waste your time watching it in that version. But they have the whole chat up on their website in three parts. This link will take you to the first part and I think the others will follow in sequence.

I kinda wish Mr. Stewart would do a separate show on the weekends where he'd just engage in these kinds of conversations for longer stretches. At a time when so much of what passes for debate/discussion out there is just W.W.E.-style wrestling matches dressed up with "issues," it's nice to see two human beings talk without trying to smack the other down. I tend to agree with Stewart in most areas, and his stance on abortion ain't far from mine, especially in its lack of certainty…but he always lets his guests talk and doesn't do those moronic O'Reilly tricks of cutting them off and trying to manuever them into sound bites that will be damning when later taken out of context.

There were a number of points in the conversation where I think Stewart dropped the ol' ball, as it were. One was letting Huckabee largely dodge the question of whether he would or could support abandoning the silly (to me) notion that abstinence education is effective, and whether he'd favor increased access to information and condoms and such. Another was when Huckabee claimed that he knows of no one in the so-called "Pro Life" movement who would favor allowing a mother to die to save a fetus. Every poll says that somewhere around 10-15% of Americans believe abortion should be forbidden in all cases. What else could that response mean?

But watch for yourself. I don't know where this issue is headed — "nowhere" would be my best guess — but if there is any progress, it'll come from more discussions like this one. And less of the O'Reilly kind.

Stan Freberg called yesterday and asked me to join him and his wife Hunter for a public interview that Penn & Teller did last night. I was too busy to go but when Freberg invites you, you say yes. So I said yes…and it was worth the time I couldn't spare just to be sitting next to Stan when Penn introduced him in the audience, telling all what a huge, wonderful influence the work of Freberg had been on the world and on Penn & Teller, in particular.

(In the preceding paragraph, I initially typed their names as "Penn and Teller," then remembered that last night's host-interviewer, Eddie Gorodetsky, reminded the audience that their names are only correctly spelled with an ampersand. I learned long ago to listen to Eddie.)

Nice crowd. Penn & Teller spoke about their work — and yes, Teller spoke, though not as much as Penn. Penn Jillette is a fascinating man, who speaks on a wide array of subjects, usually with great passion and individuality. About a third of the time, I think he's full of that stuff they named their Showtime series after but I always find it thought-provoking to hear the guy. I think the show is full of it about a third of the time…but that's not a bad average for television programming that seeks to "say something." And I usually come away having learned something, even if it's only because I figured out for myself why they were wrong.

Eddie asked them a lot about their partnership and about their approach to magic. Penn did a long ramble about how though they've done a lot of tricks that caused physical discomfort and potential injury, they've never put themselves or anyone who works for them at risk of death, and how few prominent magicians these days can make that claim.

He and Teller also talked about times they were injured, and Teller told — I hadn't heard this before — that the first time they did their water tank trick, it was on Saturday Night Live, and because they hadn't had sufficient time to prepare and test the trick, Teller came close to drowning on air. (That's the trick where he's locked underwater and not allowed to breathe again until Penn successfully finds a chosen card…and then Penn botches the trick up so Teller has to remain submerged long past the time he can hold his breath. Teller seemingly dies…and he came close that night because the hidden breathing apparatus malfunctioned and he really was locked in the tank.)

They spoke of their Showtime series, Bullshit, which in its new season (starts next week) will tackle topics including orgasms, organic foods and the end of the world. And they talked about other projects they have in the works and it was all very interesting. But the best part was when Penn introduced Freberg and everyone in the place applauded.