Monthly Archives: August 2009

Dick Cavett brings us the video of a second interview he did with Richard Burton. In it, Burton addresses all sorts of interesting questions but none so interesting as asking what the hell I'm doing posting links at this hour?

I don't take nearly enough photos at comic book conventions. I always get home and wish I'd taken more. Fortunately, there are folks like Bruce Guthrie who take oodles of them and he trains his camera mainly on the people particpating in programming, not at the odd people who think they look good in a Princess Leia outfit.

Bruce has a whole online gallery where you can see pics he's snapped at conventions and also at places like the La Brea Tar Pits where, for some reason, I wasn't hosting any panels. If you want to view just his pictures from this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego, try this link. If you were on one of my panels this year, you're probably in here.

Steven Pearlstein says that Republicans aren't even trying to make an honest case against the plans for Health Care Reform. They're just flat-out lying about what's being proposed.

Maybe Democrats should try lying right back: "Did you know that insurance companies have the right to put you into internment camps and make you eat foods you don't like? And they can force your daughters into prostitution and perform forcible sex changes on your sons to make them into daughters? We need this bill to outlaw those insidious practices!"

It might work. Claiming that Obama wants to kill your grandparents seems to be working with someone out there.

In the meantime, Sarah Palin says that Obama might have euthanized her son, Trig. This must mean it's an even-numbered week. Next week, she'll be out there complaining that her foes are dragging her kids into political matters.

Every hotel in Las Vegas has at least one swimming pool and some have several. For a number of years now, some hotels have designated one of their pools as "European-style," which is a classier way of saying that women are allowed to bare their boobies. As far as I know, this is not the case with every pool or beach in Europe or even a majority of them, but I guess the term sounds more sophisticated than "topless."

I've never been to one of these, but I gather their appeal is as follows. Women like them because they feel freer and also because of tanning benefits. Men like them because the women don't have tops on. And some of each like them because it means there'll be no children in or around the pool, probably no old people, and possibly a general sexual ambiance. Some of the ads suggest (nudge nudge, grin grin, wink wink) such pools might be a good place to meet members of the opposite gender, making them well worth some hefty admission prices. Men, of course, pay more than ladies since the ladies are the show.

In Vegas, they like control and artifice. I could cite many examples but my favorite, and I think it's still there, is at the Flamingo. Out back, they have a little garden with live birds, including flamingos, and there are babbling brooks. To ensure that the brooks babble properly, there are hidden speakers that output the recorded sound of rushing water. Someone actually decided that just having a nice little stream of H2O there wasn't enough; that they could actually improve on a river.

In a town that does that kind of thing, it's easy to presume all sorts of attempts to control and better reality. So the rumor's been around for some time that attractive women are being hired and paid to hang out at some of those "European-style" pools, the better to get males to pay the steep entrance fee. A friend of mine who works at a hotel that has such a pool told me what he'd heard; that business there was falling off because few of the women who were sunning themselves, sans tops, were the kind of ladies that men want to see that way. So they hired some wanna-be showgirls (I guess) to just sit around all day and sun themselves. Nice work if you can get it.

Then, of course, someone took it to the next step. This is Vegas, after all, where the next step is always the next step. The Rio made a deal with Sapphire, a local "gentleman's club" (euphemism for "strip joint"). to have some of its employees drape their European-style pool…to in effect make the pool an extension of the club. This lasted several months…up until last week when several of those employees were busted on prostitution charges and the pool was closed.

Hotel execs are reportedly shaking their heads, wondering how such a thing could happen and I can understand that. I mean, you have men who come to Vegas with lotsa money to spend on having a good time. You have strippers lounging around them with their tops off. You have alcohol being served and daytime temperatures reaching into the hundreds. How on God's Green Earth could that combination possibly lead to prostitution? Who could have imagined it?

(And surprise, surprise: When newspapers printed the mug shots of the ladies who'd been arrested, none of them looked even remotely like the woman in the above photo, which the Rio used to promote the "Sapphire Ultra Hot Brazillian Style Adult Pool.")

So you're thinking what I'm thinking…about the scene in Casablanca where Captain Renault says he's shocked…shocked that gambling is going on. Me, I'm shocked that prostitution is still illegal in Las Vegas County. At a time when business is way, way down and more hotels are in trouble (the Riviera is reportedly not long for this world), they're probably considering it. Mayor Oscar Goodman has long been in favor of legal, regulated brothels but, of course, he has no power. The big hotels have the power in that town and they've got to be talking, discussing when the time might be right. It's the only attraction they could offer that you can't get at the new casinos all over the country.

And for those of you who love spotting little continuity errors in movies, Buzz Dixon notes how Ray Walston's shirt buttons and unbuttons itself in the clip I posted earlier. Must be the beginning of Mr. Walston's Martian powers…or maybe the work of the devil.

I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I usually plug what's coming up on Stu's Show, my pal Stu Shostak's program on my pal Stu Shostak's radio station. I got busy and wasn't able to tell you about yesterday's show, which featured two of my favorite folks, Charlie Brill and Mitzi McCall.

Charlie and Mitzi are famously remembered as the comedy team that had to hold the stage before an audience full of screaming Beatles fans on the night the singing moptops made their historic debut on The Ed Sullivan Show. But more than that, they've been popular entertainers for close to fifty years, working not just as a comedy team but individually and collectively as actors, writers, voiceover artists, game show panelists and radio personalities.

They met around '59 in a comedy workshop class that Jerry Lewis was running. They went on to work with everyone in their field. You think I've got a lot of show biz anecdotes? Hang around Charlie and Mitzi for an evening. Whenever I have, I always laugh myself sick and learn even more about all they've done.

It was a great show today. They were joined by their pal, actor Jack Riley, and they told wonderful tales…so I'm sorry I didn't promote it here. Fortunately for you though, the show reruns all week — at 7 PM Eastern, 4 PM Pacific time…and you can figure out the time for your part of the world from that. Tune in and listen, which you can do by going to the website of Shokus Internet Radio and clicking on the player there. You have six more chances to do this.

I have once again accepted an invite to show my face (and perhaps throw caution to the wind and host some panels) at the Mid-Ohio-Con in Columbus, Ohio. This year, it's October 3 and 4 and the guest list already includes Mike Grell, P. Craig Russell, Bernie Wrightson, Gary Friedrich, Tony Isabella, Fred Hembeck, Herb Trimpe, Marv Wolfman and a whole mess o' other fine folks. There's a reason why I go back to this convention year after year and it isn't just because (a) they ask me, (b) there's a great Mongolian Barbecue a few blocks away or even (c) that Tony Isabella is just so darned irresistible.

No, I like it because it's a great, friendly convention. Those of you who moan that the Comic-Con International should be smaller and more about comics should seek out gatherings like Mid-Ohio-Con. I always have a good time there.

I kinda feel sorry for sane, intelligent Republicans these days. There are such people…lots of 'em. And they must be cringing and writhing to see their party represented by tea-baggers, birthers, deathers, Joe the Plumber and Sarah Palin, and folks whose idea of democracy is that you mass at town hall meetings and just try to shout everyone else down, screaming that Obama was born in Kenya. My Conservative pal Roger visibly winces at the suggestions that Rush Limbaugh is "the" face of the G.O.P. because Roger thinks that Limbaugh cares only about getting people to listen to him, not about winning elections.

But these folks are only part of the problem. Another part is Republican politicians who are deathly afraid of them. I think most Senators and Congressfolks on that side of the aisle know well that the idiots are idiots. Trouble is, they're useful idiots. They vote. They donate money. They work for candidates. And as much as they hate Democrats, they're even more rabid against Republicans they think are weak on their pet issues…or worse, turncoats. So if you're a G.O.P. guy in office and you want to stay in office, you have to kind of wink at them and say non-confrontational things about how they have some valid points and are raising questions that must be addressed.

There was a period in my life (a brief one, thankfully) when I found myself around a lot of folks who were convinced of all sorts of major conspiracies in the Kennedy assassination, including a few that were but one notch closer to reality than a scenario in which JFK was offed by a band of Venusians. I went in, thinking that what these people craved was an answer they could believe in, but soon discovered that that was the last thing they wanted. There were such researchers and skeptics around but they were pretty much trampled into oblivion by a mob that could and would never be satisfied by any solution.

Most of them didn't even have one theory about who killed Kennedy. Some had a dozen mutually-exclusive theories (i.e., if #1 was true, numbers 2 through 12 could not have happened) and they got hysterical if you tried to take any one of those theories away from them. Every conceivable explanation was possible except, of course, that maybe the 35th President of the United States was killed by one lone nut with a rifle. One did not dare consider that possibility in their midst. That didn't get them anywhere.

In the same sense, the birthers really don't want definitive proof that Obama was born in Hawaii. That's of no use to their purpose, which is to pretend the nation didn't really elect a black Democrat who's kinda Liberal. In this article, Joe Conason reminds us how a lot of the same folks tried much the same thing with Bill Clinton, trying to de-legitimize his presidency by ginning up scandals that later evaporated for lack of any evidence. As long as Obama is in office, we're going to be hearing this nonsense. Get used to it.

The wonderful Heidi MacDonald of Publishers Weekly has posted her long report on this year's Comic-Con. I agree with darn near everything Heidi ever says about anything but I have to address something about one thing she said in this piece…

It's quite disheartening and demoralizing to look at all the major media coverage of the con and not see a single comics-only project or personality (unless you count Stan Lee) getting coverage.

Yeah, it is. And equally disheartening is to see Heidi MacDonald, whom I adore, write her major overview report on the con without mentioning Jerry Robinson or Russ Heath or Nick Cuti or Doug Moench or most of the comics-only guests or events. In earlier coverage, she mentioned a couple because they were onstage at the Eisner Awards but I think that was about it.

The place was crawling with comic book folks, past and present, and there was plenty of interest in them. They just get ignored in the fan press because, I guess, it's more interesting to cover Robert Downey Jr than it is to cover anyone who ever drew Iron Man. I got Stan Freberg, who is kind of a legend in animation, down to the convention and he was mobbed and we turned away hundreds of folks at the Freberg panel…but that's received nary a sentence in the convention coverage. We had a Golden Age Panel that has gone largely uncovered. I did a panel with comic creators from the seventies that has been noted on one website so far, and a particularly historic panel — the first-ever reunion of the three main "Bob Kane" ghost artists on Batman — that I've yet to see mentioned anywhere online…

…but I sure see a lot of people complaining there's not enough emphasis on comics.

There's plenty of comics content at that event. It's there and if you decided to only attend programming that was wholly about funnybooks, you could do that and easily fill four days…and I don't just mean with my panels. One of the many things I love about Comic-Con International is that they don't just schedule and support the programs and guests who are likely to pack Hall H. They spend money to bring Lew Sayre Schwartz and Jack Katz to the convention.

That's not going to change so I have no complaints in that area. Those folks are getting plenty of attention from the convention. They're just not getting much from reporters, even those who lament that Comic-Con puts too much emphasis on movies and "hot" non-comic concerns.

One actually came up to me on Sunday and started bitching about all the focus on the movies and the Hollywood celebs and such. Now, my attitude about the Comic-Con (oft-stated) is that the con is really a dozen or more cons rolled into one. There's an anime con in that building, an animation art con, a small press con, a Golden Age comics con, a gaming con, etc. Some of them don't interest me in the slightest so I sidestep those aisles and find the con I want to attend. I always seem to be able to find it. Unless you're dying to attend a sparsely-attended gathering, the one you seek is in there somewhere. Don't let all those other conventions annoy you or distract you.

But this guy was upset that so much of the Comic-Con wasn't about comics and he felt, I guess, that I'd concur and would rush off to do something about it…maybe throw Robert Downey Jr out of the hall or something. Instead, I told him about that great panel we did on the Golden Age of Batman with Jerry Robinson, Sheldon Moldoff and Lew Schwartz. If you're interested in the history of comics, it doesn't get any more historical than that. I then said to this fellow who was complaining about the con not being about that kind of thing, "I didn't see you there."

And so help me, he replied, "I couldn't be there. I had to get in line to see the 24 panel with Kiefer Sutherland."