Monthly Archives: August 2010

I have no idea what's going on with Iran and Israel…and it worries me that certain folks in Washington don't seem to have any idea, either. An article by Jeffrey Goldberg has a lot of folks discussing what could result and how difficult it may be to prevent the bad scenarios. Among those talking are Fred Kaplan, James Fallows, Robert D. Kaplan and Glenn Greenwald. If you can figure it all out, you're a better man or woman than I am. Even if you can't, you probably are.

As you surely recall, I feed about an ark's worth of animals in my backyard including four feral cats. One of the felines we named "The Stranger Cat" for reasons that escape me at the moment. They certainly aren't applicable these days as he's one of the friendliest creatures you could ever hope to meet. He's old and near-deaf but he wants everyone to pet him and he spends at least half of every day napping in one of about twelve spots in my yard. One of these lately has been my back step, near where I put out food for the entire menagerie.

Yesterday, I tossed out some peanuts for the squirrels and bluebirds. Each descended on the buffet and began carrying off nuts to eat or hide. One squirrel in particular was torn between grabbing peanuts and snacking dry cat food out of a bowl I try to keep filled. Then along came The Stranger Cat.

Oblivious to the squirrel and the bluebirds, The Stranger Cat plopped himself down on the step such that his foot was about one inch from the last peanut. The squirrel came back from secreting or downing a peanut and found this challenge: He wanted that remaining goober but he was afraid of the cat.

It was a groundless fear. I know The Stranger Cat and there's no more chance of me sprinting across the yard in pursuit of a squirrel than there is of him doing it. Nevertheless, I watched (and took photos) for about five minutes as the squirrel approached, an eighth of an inch at a time. Every time The Stranger Cat twitched or scratched in his sleep, the squirrel leaped back a foot or two but finally, he got that nut. You can see the second before he grabbed it in the above photo.

So now the last peanut was gone and Mr. Squirrel was still hungry, I guess. Once he'd disposed of it, he snuck back onto the step and made his way to the bowl of dry cat food. With one eye on The Stranger Cat, he nervously wolfed down one nugget after another of Friskies Seafood Sensations…

Every time T.S.C. made a move in his sleep, the squirrel head for the hills, then crept back when he realized it was safe. In the above pic, The Stranger Cat is awake and looking at me as if to ask, "What's he so jumpy about?" Then back to sleep he went while squirrel went right on stuffing himself…and someone came to my door so I had to stop taking pictures. I thought it was a nice moment that oughta be shared.

The Pew Research Center did a poll to find out how informed people were about recent news developments. What they found was that Americans have a lot of faulty or missing info in this area…but interestingly, there wasn't much difference between Democrats, Republicans and Independents. They were about equally wrong and right.

Back in this post, we discussed (and linked to videos of) You're in the Picture, the disastrous 1961 game show hosted by Jackie Gleason. I mentioned there that among the many things that went wrong with its first (only) telecast was that one of the panelists, Keenan Wynn, had to be replaced just before airtime and comedian Pat Harrington Jr stepped in.

About a dozen people wrote me to say I had it wrong; that it was Johnny Carson that Harrington stepped in to replace on the first (only) telecast. The way most of them told it, Carson attended a rehearsal session, realized the show was going to stink and took a hike. Naturally, I was intrigued and also concerned I'd dispensed erroneous history here.

Last evening, I was at a meeting of this group I belong to called Yarmy's Army — a club of folks in and around the comedy profession, mostly older. (I'm one of the younger members.) Pat Harrington Jr was there so I grabbed the opportunity to ask him about it. He said he never heard anything about Mr. Carson doing the show.

As far as he knew, he stepped in when Keenan Wynn either couldn't or wouldn't do it. Pat never heard a reason. His father, a rather prominent actor, was friends with Gleason and that had something to do with Pat, who was well-known from his appearances with Steve Allen and elsewhere, being called in shortly before the live broadcast. And that's about all he remembered of the show except that nobody liked it and he only did the one episode.

Speaking of J. Carson: The website www.johnnycarson.com has just been redesigned to promote two enterprises using the vast (but not as vast as it should be) library of old Carson Tonight Shows. One is that they've digitized the entire library and cross-indexed it for guests and words that are spoken…and now if one is a potential customer for this service, which you probably are not, one can search the whole thing online and view clips for licensing. I have a feeling they'll eventually open it to anyone who pays a fee just for the online access but right now, you have to be someone who's likely to want to pay to use a clip in some proper venue.

The other venture is that they're launching another DVD club — I think they tried this before — where you can subscribe to receive Carson DVDs every so often. In this case, it's every six weeks, you'll get two new ones in the King of Late Night series. The first one's ten bucks plus shipping and handling. Thereafter, they're twenty each plus shipping and handling. How much is shipping and handling? I dunno. You seem to have to actually give them your credit card info and place an order and then they'll tell you. But the offer's even more mysterious than that. I think (but am not sure) these are full episodes, sans commercials. I also think (but am not sure) there's more than one episode on each DVD but if the website says how many, I can't find it.

This is rather distressing for us Carson fans. A lot of us would love to have those old shows but to receive them, we're basically being asked to make a significant financial commitment of some inexact amount to receive an unspecified quantity of Tonight Show episodes…and we don't even know which ones, either. I'm sorry. I love Johnny but I'm not comfortable ordering anything on that basis and I suspect most folks are like me and the company won't get enough orders to warrant continuing the series. If anyone does sign up, would you please drop me a line and let me know what you get and how much it costs you?

Fred Kaplan on what's up with attempts to trim the budget over at the Pentagon. Remember a few years ago when trying to not spend as much money as possible on anything related to Defense was a sign that you didn't believe in protecting America and secretly wanted the Commies to come in and conquer us all? My, how the deficit changes things…

There are quite a few websites out there these days that have taken to posting entire scanned comic books, many of which are under copyright and trademark. In another post one of these days, I'm going to write not so much about the legality — others can speak more authoritatively to that topic — but of the lack of respect it sometimes shows for the efforts of the creators they're trying to honor. (I will though say that some folks out there seem to think that "fair use" just means you didn't make any money off it. If you wrote a novel and I printed up bootleg copies of it and gave them away on street corners, I wouldn't make any money off it but your copyright would still have been egregiously violated.)

What I will say for now is this: A lot of what's being posted these days is material originally published by Western Publishing Company as either a Dell or Gold Key comic. That probably means it didn't have credits when it was published. I have decided to give up my entire career, resign from all my jobs, and just spend my life correcting erroneous artist identifications.

I read (but now cannot find for linking purposes) some of the transcripts of the Proposition 8 trial a few months ago. What struck me, and I think I mentioned this here before, is how empty and lame the arguments were against gay marriage. I'm surprised those who are unhappy with the outcome of that trial aren't suggesting that their lawyer took a bribe and threw the match. A better case could have been made…

…but not a much better one because for the most part, the case against same-sex Weddings has always been a pretty flimsy one. I've read and heard a lot of them and they always seems to come down to…

• …a couple of passages in The Bible condemn homosexuality. (Yeah, well maybe they do…but The Bible is full of passages which condemn things that are legal, including some routinely practiced by those who swear allegiance to the book. Anyone for shrimp cocktail? We don't pass laws in this country because The Bible says something is wrong. It's perfectly legal, for example, to not believe in God, to have other gods before Him, etc.)
• …children are better off being raised by a mixed couple. (That's arguable but even if it's true, no one seems to be suggesting we ban all those divorces which leave kids in the custody of single parents. It's also an argument against gay adoption, not gay marriage.)
• …and gay sex is unnatural and yucchy. (Again, even if true, no basis for law. I might get behind this one if we all agree to ban some things I think are unnatural and yucchy, like getting tattoos, eating cole slaw and watching Glenn Beck. I could make a long list of legal things that repulse me more than the notion that two people who love each other have made a commitment to spend the rest of their lives together. Latent homophobia, as practiced by some who oppose gay marriage, is one of them.)

The main reason Gay Marriage is gaining increasing acceptance is that more and more, people are coming to realize that the case against it is pretty hollow. The one argued before Judge Walker sure was, especially when the attorney for Proposition 8 veered inexplicably into talking about the value of procreation to society. Apparently, no one told him that regardless of how laws are written, procreation is pretty much off the menu for gay couples and therefore irrelevant. No wonder he lost.

Recently in the New York Times, Conservative columnist Ross Douthat largely abandoned the old arguments from his side as baseless. He then comes up with an artfully-worded new one that is summarized in this paragraph…\

The point of this ideal is not that other relationships have no value, or that only nuclear families can rear children successfully. Rather, it's that lifelong heterosexual monogamy at its best can offer something distinctive and remarkable — a microcosm of civilization, and an organic connection between human generations — that makes it worthy of distinctive recognition and support.

I could maybe buy a small part of that if Douthat acknowledged that an amazing percentage of the leaders against gay marriage are not exactly poster boys for heterosexual monogamy. But for the most part, it's double talk. We don't make laws in this country that enforce "lifelong heterosexual monogamy." Divorce is legal…and pretty common. Homosexuality is legal. Cheating on your spouse is legal…and pretty common. We don't even require that married couples have kids at all, which I guess is that "organic connection" he's talking about.

And as I read it, he's managed to miss…or maybe just not want to see the core of Judge Walker's decision. Douthat wants the legal system to endorse his view that Hetero Marriage is somehow superior to gay marriage. Judge Walker's decision was not that it is or it isn't; just that it isn't the business of the state to make such a judgment. That oughta be the Conservative position, telling the government to keep its judgmental opinions to itself…but anything relating to sex seems to make The Nanny State acceptable to some and political considerations impact others. As I wrote in a Tweet the other day, it's very confusing: My governor, who's a Republican, is in favor of gay marriage. My president, who's a Democrat, is not.

Or maybe it's not so confusing. Obama doesn't need the added grief he must think he'd get from an outright endorsement of it, and Arnold is going back to making movies and would probably like there be someone on the crew who'll style his hair.

A lot of you remember Sheila Kuehl from her acting career. Under the name Sheila James, she played Zelda Gilroy on the old sitcom, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis. She later got into politics and served in the California State Assembly and California State Senate until term limits ended that. She's currently doing consulting work and writing essays like this one in which she gives her view of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's not a flattering view and is quite at odds with the one being structured in the press.

Kliph Nesteroff has a darn good interview up with cartoonist Drew Friedman. It's mostly about a favored topic: Old Jewish Comedians.

A follow-up to yesterday's post about the Great Costco Chicken Crisis. A number of folks wrote me to say that the real villains in the piece were the two guys who came in and cleaned Costco out of rotisserie chickens. Well, okay…but the lady who was angry wasn't mad at them…and the two fellows may not have realized how long it would take Costco to replenish the display. Also of course, it's quite possible that Costco could run out of chickens if everyone in the store at the moment had suddenly decided they wanted to take home a hen and had each gone over to buy but one.

Problems do happen. Stores do run out of things. You can't expect a zero defect system in any business…and when things do go wrong, you can't expect employees to do the impossible. I also don't think you should expect them to stand there and be screamed at. The lady's anger was misdirected and way outta scale with the offense. Some people think that if they're wronged, even a little, they're therefore justified in being rude to everyone within sight. I worked (briefly) with a guy like that once. Someone — anyone — would make some tiny mistake and this guy would Hulk-Out, screaming in every direction…and you could tell that the sadistic side of him was delighted that the mistake had been made. It gave him the chance to unleash his inner a-hole.

And the other point was that this woman at Costco was screaming at a poor store employee who couldn't scream back. After he'd done all he could do — politely apologize for not being able to hand her a cooked chicken — she kept yelling at him, calling him names, etc. Some people love abusing service personnel because no matter how nasty you are to them, they have to take it and can't tell you to shut the hell up and get the hell out. You itching to fight with someone? Then fight fair. Fight with someone who can fight back. Once in a while, you see an employee do that and I suspect it doesn't happen enough. If I ran a business that served the public, I think I'd empower my staff to stand up to this kind of thing more than most do. There's too often this sense that every customer is sacred and we don't dare lose a one of them. They're not "always right," you know and that lady the other day made the Costco experience pretty unpleasant for a lot of other shoppers. (So, obviously, did the men who made off with all the chickens but they weren't creating a scene or unleashing their ugly sides in others' faces.)

I've long since written more about this whole incident that it deserves and in truth, it was even funny in a way and some in Costco at that moment may even have enjoyed the floor show. There was another employee handing out free samples of seafood spread on crackers next to it all so the entertainment even came with snacks. Shopping at Costco is always interesting. There seems to be something about the way they sell in bulk that makes some customers respond to everything in excess.