Monthly Archives: February 2010

These will probably only be of interest to those of you who live in or around Los Angeles…

• Anyone want to see Dreamgirls? Live? A snazzy (I hear) production of the show is playing downtown at the Ahmanson Theater from February 23 through April 4. I have season-type tix for March 23 and I don't want to use them. I know most people love this show but I don't. I would like to sell my tickets at face value to someone who does love the show. My seats are good — second row of the balcony near the center — and if March 23 doesn't work for you, I can probably exchange them for equally-fine seats on another date if it's late in the run. Drop me an e-mail if interested.
• Driving to WonderCon in San Francisco? It's April 2-4 as you know and it's a great con and I'm looking for someone who's motoring north from L.A. for it who might have room in their car for a couple of boxes of books. This is not for me. It's for Stan and Hunter Freberg, who are guests and who are flying there. I figure a couple of legends shouldn't have to haul boxes on and off American Airlines so I'd like to find someone who's driving there to transport their wares up and maybe back. I'd also like to find them a couple of trustworthy helpers to assist them at the con, watching their table and such. Again, drop me an e-mail if any of these volunteers might be you.
• I have found — well, actually, Carolyn found — a truly wonderful bread. It's Bavarian Sour Rye Bread…kind of a cross between rye and sourdough. It's made by the Old Town Baking Company and it's sold at various farmer's markets across the Southern California area. Here's a list of where the company vends its goodies. I am also a fan of Big Mista's, a barbecue concern that I found and which sells cooked meats at local farmer's markets. Here's a list of where and when they can be patronized. Note that both the great bread and the great ribs can be procured via one-stop-shopping at the farmer's market in El Segundo on Thursdays. This is the only reason I could ever imagine anyone wanting to go to El Segundo…but it's a good reason.

I had a scare Saturday evening. I was in my favorite CVS Pharmacy and I thought I oughta pick up a few more Reach Access Flossers. I only have about two dozen in my home and you can never have enough Reach Access Flossers around. It is, as we noted here, The Greatest Scientific Breakthrough Of Our Time.

That's a fact. Don't tell me that honor belongs to the Internal Combustion Engine. First of all, that's not our time. Secondly, even if it was, it doesn't hold a candle to the Reach Access Flosser. Let's say you're eating ribs and you get a piece of rib wedged between your two back molars. You think an Internal Combustion Engine will get it out for you? Not bloodly likely.

Anyway, I went to pick up a few more and couldn't find them. Up and down the oral care aisle I went, finding brushes and Water-Piks and toothpaste and tongue scrapers. How, I asked aloud, could they possibly have tongue scrapers and not Reach Access Flossers? Finding none, I body-slammed a passing CVS employee and asked if perhaps they'd moved their Reach Access Flossers to a special Reach Access Flosser section of the store. To my horror, he said, "I don't think they make them anymore!"

Chilled to the marrow, I raced home to my beloved Internet. The Johnson & Johnson Company just couldn't have stopped making them, I knew…but if they had, I was prepared to surf the 'net all night and buy up every last Reach Access Flosser I could find anywhere. I'd even take (and sterilize) used ones if I had to. What I found though was that my favorite Scientific Breakthrough is still manufactured. For some reason though, the CVS chain no longer carries them.

This scares me a bit. There are 7000 CVS Pharmacies in this country and at this moment, they're building 7000 more…and then 7000 more. They won't stop until there's one on every block, plus I think they're starting to open them inside Walgreens outlets and Duane Reade stores. It can't be good for the sales and therefore the ongoing existence of Reach Access Flossers that CVS no longer stocks them. But for the moment, I think I'm safe.

In the meantime: I am happy to report that once again, March will be Creamy Tomato Soup month at your local Souplantation or Sweet Tomatoes restaurant. This is my favorite soup and so you know where I'll be eating that month. And then after I've downed a few bowls of Creamy Tomato Soup, I will floss thoroughly with my Reach Access Flosser. It takes so little to please me.

I know it's not an issue that is foremost in folks' minds these days but we still have a Death Penalty in this country — one that is enforced intermittently in some locales and not others. I've been on all sides of this issue at various times and have watched as the discussion has segued from one concern to another. Once, it was about the simple morality of the State having the right to take a life. Then for a time, it was about whether having a Death Penalty was a deterrent to crime and if so, how much. Lately, it's come around to whether we're doing it right — i.e., are we only executing guilty people and if we aren't sure, isn't that a reason to not execute anyone? This last concern is helpful for some of us because if you answer "Yes," then you don't have to wrestle with the much more complex topic of whether the government should be killing people at all.

Michael Traynor is president emeritus of the American Law Institute, a group which pretty much wrote the blueprint for this nation's Death Penalty structure. I didn't hear it about then but last fall, the group reversed itself and withdrew support for its old recommendations. It now thinks the Death Penalty is unfair and unfixable. I'm still conflicted on whether if we could do it with a reasonable degree of certainty, we should be executing those who commit capital crimes. But the fact that even these people think we can't is one more reason not to.

Over on his blog, Neil Gaiman writes a long and solid response to a question of how one can defend some of the more vile comic books, especially those that might be labelled as kiddy porn. I agree with all Neil says.

The New York Times has an editorial up about Republican health care proposals. It's called "Small Ideas Won't Fix It," which kinda says it all right there. But it also itemizes some of the other G.O.P. ideas which I didn't mention a few items ago here, including capping malpractice awards and letting folks open tax-free health savings accounts. None of this is going to help lower class folks who simply can't afford health insurance these days.

Tonight on Turner Classic Movies, they're showing Casablanca. I thought I'd mention it in case you want to tune in and look for Jack Benny.

One thing I don't think some people get in this whole debate about Health Care Reform is that there are consequences, apparently dire ones, to not fixing the system. The G.O.P. plan, such as it is, seems to be to smack down trial lawyers and protect the insurance and drug companies with tort reform…and a few Repubs want to enrich the insurance companies by allowing them to sell across state lines. That's darn near the whole proposal and those two things wouldn't do much to stem rising costs. Check out this article about the problems that the Republicans don't seem to want to solve.

A nice profile of Craig Ferguson. I find myself enjoying Ferguson's show more than any of the others…though I could do with about eight less fart jokes per hour. I also cannot get out of my head something I once heard a producer friend of mine say: "There's something wrong with a talk show host who isn't satisfied to enjoy all the advantages of controlling the show and owning the audience…he also has to make sure his chair is higher than the one his guests sit in."

Back when Jack Paar was hosting what we now call The Tonight Show, he was forever getting into feuds and on-air controversies. The biggest — the one that actually caused him to walk off the show in protest — came when he told a mildly scatological joke one night about a "W.C." The abbreviation has fallen out of common usage and wasn't even all that current in 1960 when the incident occurred…but it stood for Water Closet, which was then another way of saying "toilet." NBC decided to edit the joke out of the taped telecast and did. Here, in case you want to hear it, is audio of the joke as Paar delivered it that night…

Paar was upset that they cut the joke without consulting him. Mostly, he was upset that it got around that NBC had cut a "dirty joke" and that someone thought he told something truly raunchy and filth-laden. Paar felt that the press was always looking for excuses to attack him — never mind that he often attacked the press — and that the deletion would provide fodder for this attackers. He convinced the network that they'd been wrong to cut the W.C. joke but couldn't convince them to let him play it so America could hear for themselves how mild the joke was. They refused and he gave an on-air resignation. Here's audio of that broadcast…

Shortly after delivering the above, Paar exited and his announcer Hugh Downs hosted the rest of the program. It was a major story that was on the front page of every newspaper in the country the next morning. Here's Page One of the L.A. Times with a report that was continued onto this page.

As an aside: Note that the newspaper article does not say Jack Paar walked off The Tonight Show. It says he quit The Jack Paar Show. When Paar signed aboard in 1957, the word "Tonight" was still part of the show's title, though the form changed from time to time. For an extended period, it was Tonight Starring Jack Paar. By 1960 and the W.C. incident, it was just The Jack Paar Show. When he announced his final departure in 1962, they began to ease the word "Tonight" back into the name, though a lot of newspapers never picked up on that. Most TV listings just listed the name of the regular host as the name of the program.

Getting back to his first walk-off: Maybe it's just me but as I look at this whole story, I'm not sure who behaved worse — the network or Paar. They were wrong to excise the joke but he was wrong, I think, not to just come on the air and say, "It wasn't as bad as you think and the network guys were lunkheads." Paar was right that he was often getting attacked. He was wrong to think he was always an injured innocent in those attacks. The man was enormously thin-skinned for a guy who did what he did for a living.

Anyway, he disappeared for a while and finally went back to the show on March 29, 1960, having been gone since February 11. The show had guest hosts and reruns in his absence…and of course, when he returned, he got a massive tune-in. He later denied it was all a publicity stunt but it does raise the question: Why quit the way he did — on the air, a few minutes into one night's show — if all he wanted was out? I've always had the feeling that while it might not have been a calculated publicity stunt, there was some sort of neurotic need for attention that drove the whole episode.

Here's a video clip from an interview Paar gave on shipboard (!) in the early nineties. It takes a while to get started but you might enjoy hearing his summary of the incident, plus they show footage of his return to the program. I think it's significant that in the thirty years Johnny Carson did that show after Paar, Johnny had plenty of arguments with NBC, mostly over money but occasionally over control of the program…but he never found the need to walk off in the middle of a taping.

Gerald Posner has long been one of those investigative reporters whose work I enjoyed and followed. He authored a book on the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Case Closed, that made what I thought was a near-airtight case that Lee Harvey Oswald did it and acted alone. (No, it was not airtight but you have to consider that in the context that the books that argue for conspiracies all, without exception, leak at every corner.) I don't trust any journalist 100% but I've found Posner to be as trustworthy as I'm ever likely to find.

It is therefore distressing to see the man enmeshed and shamed by a mini-scandal. Others noted that several sentences in recent Internet articles by Posner were lifted from articles by others. The particular material was factual stuff — the accuracy of Posner's reports was not compromised — but he had not gone to the trouble of rephrasing those lines, putting them into his own words. This is not excusable but it's also not robbing liquor stores at gunpoint.

Posner apologized on his blog, accepted full responsibility, promised to not let it happen again. He was suspended from his position with The Daily Beast, an online magazine, and then resigned. This all seems appropriate, if not a bit excessive, but it's not enough for some of Posner's colleagues/peers. A number of them (like this one) are demanding more mea culpa…or something. And there seems to be a thought out there that suggesting the punishment does not fit the crime is to argue there was no crime.

Posner's sin — and I'm not saying it wasn't a sin — was in crossing that easy line from getting info from others and getting their phrasing. If you write on the web and do research on the web, there's much to be learned from this episode. I could articulate it better but I think I'll just wait until someone else does and copy whatever they say.