Monthly Archives: April 2010

Roger Ebert on the controversy around textbooks in Texas skewing toward right-wing views. At a time when books can be desktop-published and printed-on-demand, I'm not entirely sure why other states have to use the exact same editions that are used in Texas. Ebert's right that more states should refuse to let Texas become the de facto editor of all textbooks.

Speaking of Dick Van Dyke! The MGM Limited Collectors Edition project puts out DVDs of movies that (someone there thinks) won't command the kind of audience necessary for a full-out, fancy release. As I understand it, these are simple releases where they don't do much, if any, restoration on the prints and there are no special features. They're about to do one of those for Cold Turkey, a 1971 comedy starring Mr. Van Dyke, Bob Newhart and an awful lot of folks who later turned up on Norman Lear sitcoms. Mr. Lear wrote and directed.

It's a fun film, mostly because of the casting. Bob and Ray are in it. (Don't miss the link to that article I posted earlier about Bob.) Vincent Gardenia and Barnard Hughes are in it. There's a funny old lady who says naughty words whose voice was dubbed by June Foray. The one thing I don't like about it is that the ending makes a silly premise sillier but it's still worth watching and now you'll be able to watch it on your own DVD player. Here's a link to pre-order a copy…and while you're there, it's an easy link to check out some of the other offerings in this line. And remember: Big clocks are never wrong.

Obits in the New York Times for Peter Gowland and Dick Giordano. They're both good but the piece on Dick is illustrated online with two covers — a Wonder Woman he inked over Mike Sekowsky and a Green Lantern penciled by Neal Adams that someone obviously thinks Dick inked. I think they may be wrong about that. In any case, in the course of his lifetime, Dick must have drawn more than 500 covers by himself. It would have been nice if they'd featured a couple of them instead.