Monthly Archives: September 2010

Regarding Christine O'Donnell, who's running for the Senate in Delaware: I think it's kinda unfair to keep dredging up these clips from talk show appearances she made years ago as proof she's a looney. Then again, can anyone cite me one instance in recent years when anyone who opposed a candidate has had mud on that candidate and not flung it? If the most honorable person running for public office — whoever that is — had that kind of thing on their opponent, do you think the clip would not be up on YouTube? And yes, I know that speaking of the most honorable person running for public office is a little like discussing which of the Three Stooges had the highest intellect. (It was probably Joe Besser, the only one who quit…)

Not only are the clips of Ms. O'Donnell old but they're from shows where you had to be a little outrageous to get face time. If she'd advanced an intelligent, well-reasoned approach to issues like safe sex and birth control, she would never have gotten on some of those programs in the first place. She was, like so many folks who get on those programs, a bit of a freakish anomaly — in her case, a real cute woman who had all these weird ideas about sex. Conservatives love that because it puts an adorable face on their agenda. Liberals love it because it puts a naïve face on the Conservative agenda. Producers of both stripes love it because she's attractive and it's a way to get sex talk on their shows and not get criticized for it. Win/win/win.

So when she distances herself from the "witchcraft" clip, I say let it go. Voters in Minnesota didn't hold Jesse Ventura's wrestling past or Al Franken's worst Saturday Night Live bits against them. Dredging up Sarah Palin's beauty contest days or showing that clip of her in an exorcism…to me, that's almost like her opponents saying, "We can't make a good argument against the current person so we want you to vote against who she used to be." If they had footage of Ms. O'Donnell killing a man to watch him die or giving neck rubs to Bin Laden, that would be different. But this is like Ken Starr, under the cover of an "investigation," publishing every possible detail he could dig up about the size and shape of Bill Clinton's genitalia and where he put it. It's just trying to embarrass a political foe instead of dealing fairly with them.

And it's all so unnecessary in Christine O'Donnell's case because there's plenty of current, relevant reasons why she should not be allowed anywhere near public office. The woman lives in a fantasy world where the planet isn't getting warmer, the poor don't exist and you can talk horny 16-year-old kids out of having sex. You don't have to dig into the vaults to portray her as a looney. Just get her to do three interviews with anyone who'll challenge her more than Sean Hannity…or point out that if she won't do that, it's because she's incapable of answering a real question.

I just watched some of this morning's subcommittee hearing — the one in which Stephen Colbert testified. I had to watch it on the C-SPAN website because it was telecast on C-SPAN 3. For some unknown reason, even though DirecTV (my satellite provider) carries C-SPAN 1 and C-SPAN 2 and every 10-watt channel that will sell you the Magic Bullet or lead you in prayer, they don't carry C-SPAN 3. I believe it would be free to them but they don't carry it.

The hearing ran 2 hours and 10 minutes and I've embedded below a player will run the whole thing, though you can zip ahead to when Mr. Colbert first spoke, which was about 56 minutes into the proceedings. He gave the opening statement embedded in the previous item here, then did follow-up questions and such intermittently thereafter…

Other sites will show you excerpts of just Colbert but if you're as intrigued as I was about just what he was doing there or what he was accomplishing — or even what he might have thought he was accomplishing — you kinda have to see a large chunk of the non-Colbert parts of the hearing. Then you can see how he does and does not fit in there. At times, he seems to not know why he's there or to be embarrassed he can't offer more substantive information. And at times, the various committee members seem divided among being amused or annoyed by his presence. He did make one good point at the end, which is that there's a glaring contradiction with how we treat illegal, undocumented workers. We ask them to come pick our tomatoes, then we ask them to get the hell out of our country. Those are my words, not his. The problem has always been that "we" (as defined by the loudest voices) want the benefits of having them here but not the responsibilities or costs…and no one is willing to address the matter on that basis.

I suppose that Colbert did some good in that he got some attention for an issue that many wish to demagogue but few wish to actually fix. But I don't see that he did anything that would get us closer to fixing it. Then again, probably nothing that happens these days before a Congressional subcommittee is going to get us any closer.

A few weeks ago, I found myself driving from Indianapolis, Indiana to Muncie, Indiana in a car the Hertz people rented me. Did I say "car?" "Moving van" would be more like it. It was way more vehicle than I wanted or like to drive but it was the only thing they had available that had a GPS in it. I have unerring directional capabilities on my home turf but when I'm a stranger in a strange land, I can't find my way from the toilet in my hotel room to the sink. The Hertz folks put me in it for the price they'd quoted for a mid-sized sedan so I took it for the duration of my stay in Indiana. I figured that if I had some extra time, I could pay for the trip by moving some pianos.

En route to Muncie, I lunched at a B.D.'s Mongolian Barbecue — a favored chain they have back there but not out here — and while chowing down thought, "Gee, I oughta stop off somewhere and buy a new suitcase." Southwest Airlines had rendered my old one unrollable and it was fracturing up one side. I consulted the Yellow Pages app of my iPhone and found a nearby store that from its name seemed like it might have what I wanted. It didn't. Neither did another luggage shop. Both had plenty of bags but not the kind I had in mind.

As I got back into my oversized rental, its excessive bulk made me think of Costco and I realized I'd seen the perfect suitcase a few months earlier at a Costco in Los Angeles. I consulted the app again and it turned out there was a Costco less than two miles from where I was at that moment. This struck me then as unremarkable. After all, there must be Costcos all over Indiana, right? Not right. I later learned that there are only two in the entire state. I just happened to be near one of them…the one in Castleton, Indiana. Minutes later, I was pulling into its parking lot.

It looked just like the ones in Southern California which, in turn, all look like each other. I've been to five different Costcos around here. They vary a bit in whether they have certain add-ons like a tire store or a gas station but they pretty much all look the same on the outside. Within, they look pretty much the same as well, though some are mirror-imaged. As you face the rear of the warehouse, sometimes the groceries are on this side and the tools and appliance-type stuff is on that side.

Sometimes, it's the other way around. It's one of those left brain/right brain things. One of the nice aspects of Costcos, comforting in a way, is their conformity. First time I walked into the one in Burbank, I knew right where everything was. It was in the exact same place as in the Costco I've been known to frequent in Marina Del Rey.

At first glance, the Costco in Castleton was laid out just like both of them and like the one in Los Feliz and the one in Inglewood…but as I moved through it, I noticed subtle and then some not-so-subtle differences. Not everything was in its proper place. The computer software, which should have been over here, was over there. The display of batteries, where you can buy one package containing enough AAAs to power everything you will ever own that takes that size, was not where it was supposed to be, either.

I do not generally have any trace of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but I seem to get it at Costco. I found myself wanting to grab employees and tell them, "No, no! The contour pillows go at the end of the aisle!" If everything or even most items had been in different spots, I could have coped easily…but you know how it is when just one venetian blind slat is twisted and you just have to correct it? It was like that for me at the Indiana Costco. 95% of its layout seemed correct but I couldn't stop wishing the 5% would conform.

Remembering the purpose of my visit, I took myself to the aisle where the luggage was supposed to be. It wasn't there, which I found doubly unsettling. Never mind that my needs were not being met…it was just plain wrong. There should have been luggage there, not just for me but for everyone.

I wandered the entire store to see where they'd recklessly put it and couldn't find suitcases anywhere. I was just thinking that maybe they didn't carry them when a friendly Costco employee, spotting bewilderment on my brow, asked if she could help me locate anything. We were near the spot where I could point and say, making clear I didn't think this was her fault, "Why aren't there suitcases in that aisle there? There are supposed to be suitcases there."

With a forced smile, she pointed halfway across the warehouse and said, "Luggage is right there, sir. Next to the down comforters." And indeed it was…maddeningly in the wrong place. Believe me, it was not comforting to find it near the comforters. I got back some of my bearings though when I happily discovered they did at least have exactly the suitcase I'd coveted in Los Angeles. Costco had not let me down and I have to tell you, it was a good, reassuring feeling.

Once I had my attention off the baggage crisis, I could browse the store with wider eyes. I free-sampled some new kind of potato chip that I enjoyed…and would later learn is not available, at least not yet, at the Inglewood Costco. I watched the guy preparing the hot rotisserie chickens for purchase and I was consoled to see it was the exact same guy who prepares them for purchase in any Southern California Costco.  Costco acquires everything in bulk, including that guy.

Only one other thing unnerved me. I kept spotting items I needed back home and would momentarily forget it was stupid to purchase them there. Like, I noticed the crates of Friskies I buy, two or three at a time in L.A. to feed my backyard kitty committee. For a half-second, I thought, "Hey, this would be a good time to…" before realizing I didn't really want to pack sixty pounds of canned cat food into my new suitcase and haul it back to California.

So it felt a bit odd to be checking out of a Costco with but one item. Everyone else had a cart that looked like the carts I usually push through checkout, loaded down with enough paper towels to blot up the entire B.P. oil slick. I didn't even have a cart…just one suitcase which rolled quite nicely, by the way. A friendly crew member saw me waiting behind a dozen such carts and suggested I avail myself of the self-service checkout counter. I've never seen one of those in any Costco out here but I steeled myself for something else different and did as he advised.

As I was swiping my credit card — and wondering as I always do why we use that confusing verb for that action — yet another cheery Costco crew member approached to inquire, "Did you find everything you wanted, sir?" I told him yes but added, "I'm from Los Angeles and out there, our Costcos are laid out a little differently." He smiled even more and said, "Well, we do things a little different here in Indiana." Indeed, they do…and I'm not saying any of it's wrong. In fact, in time I could even get used to the crates of yardsticks being next to the nine-packs of Kirkland-brand paprika. But it would take a lot of time.

Earlier today on Facebook, my friend Scott Shaw! posted a quote from me that is semi-famous among comic book professionals. He gave it as "Never fall in love with characters you don't own." I remember it as "Never get possessive about characters you don't own," which I think gets fractionally closer to the core of what I was advising.

What prompted it was that I had friends who'd, for example, get the job of writing Superman…and being passionate writers, they'd pour their hearts and guts into the work and they'd be very proud of the results. All well and good…but they'd be largely unprepared for the emotional wrench that would occur one day when they discovered they weren't parents. They were just baby-sitting.

One day, someone else would be writing Superman, either concurrently or instead of them…and the new guy would be having the Man of Steel do different things, having Lois Lane act in a different way, having Jimmy Olsen say different things. It was often jarring. In one way, it reminded me of an incident I often relate from my days hanging around the Comedy Store, feeding jokes to up-'n'-coming standups. There was a comic there — not a very good one — whose act largely consisted of material right off of Woody Allen's third album. Mr. Allen did three comedy albums. The first two were brilliant and widely-circulated. The third was a tad less brilliant but still very funny…and the record had received so little circulation that you could steal jokes right off it and not get caught. Which is what this kid did. Each night, he'd take the stage and wow the audience with Woody's lines.

So one evening, he arrives at the club and a buddy rushes up to him outside and tells him, "There's a new kid who's on right now…and he's doing your act!" He checks and sure enough, the new kid is up there doing material from The Third Woody Allen Album (that's what it was called)…and probably doing it better. The new kid comes off stage to huge applause and wanders outside, where he is immediately slammed into a wall and threatened by the first guy. The first guy yells, "Don't let me ever catch you doing my Woody Allen material again!"

That attitude reminds me of the way some writers I know acted when they discovered that someone else was writing Spider-Man or Batman or Star Trek after them. They were almost shocked to discover it wasn't theirs. One time I was at a big Christmas party that DC Comics held for its local freelancers at the Beverly Hills Hotel. A very nice party it was and everyone who might have showed up for it showed up for it. Even Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster were present and so was Jack Kirby. At one point in the evening, a fellow who'd written a few Superman stories (not very many, as I recall) engaged Mr. Siegel in a loud conversation in which he tried to compare what he'd done with the character with what Jerry and Joe, its creators, had done. He kept saying things like, "My Superman can leap over the moon, whereas your Superman could only leap over tall buildings" or "My Superman has deeper motivations than your Superman." The sheer arrogance of it annoyed those of us who had to overhear it but we said nothing. It took Jack Kirby, who had often found himself in the same position as Jerry, to speak up. He leaned over to the young Superman scribe and said, "You don't have a Superman." Then he pointed to Jerry and said, "He has a Superman!"

I think it was shortly after the party that I wrote in some article what Scott was trying to quote. It was not intended as advice on how not to make a fool of yourself before your peers and betters. It was because when I was writing Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo, I kept having to remind myself that I didn't own Bugs Bunny and Scooby Doo. They were not my characters. I could take great pride in what I did with them. I could expend as much fervor and creativity as I can put into something wholly original and copyrighted in my name. But what I couldn't do was to "own" the series in any true sense and it was better for my equilibrium to not forget that.

A friend of mine did forget it. He was a die-hard fan of an ongoing property — one not much less famous than the biggies mentioned above. For years, he dreamed of getting the chance to write the comic book…and one day, he did. An editor, knowing of his mania, made his wish come true. My friend really put his heart into the task and he wrote issues that were highly-praised and popular. Part of that may have been because like a lot of us, he put a little of himself into his work. He identified in a way with the lead character and infused it with some of his personality — not enough to jarringly change that established character but it gave him a new depth and dimension. (I kinda did the same thing when I was writing Daffy Duck. All of a sudden, Daffy Duck hated cole slaw.)

At the time, my friend was smitten with a lady named Karen. This was in his real life…but his real life was serving as subtext for the comic book so he introduced a new character into the comic, a lady with whom the lead character could be similarly smitten. The parallels were subtle and perhaps evident only to him but when he wrote about the established comic book character and the new female, he was kinda/sorta writing about himself and Karen. In his head, the new character certainly talked like Karen…and he was amused that when the artist designed that new character, she even looked a little like Karen. The artist had never seen Karen, nor did he know my friend had based the new character on Karen. But there she was on the pages.

All went well until, as inevitably happens with characters you don't own, someone else takes them over. My friend was off the comic and someone else was on. At a convention, he ran into his successor and through gritted teeth, wished him well. The new writer thanked him and began describing some of the things he had in store for the book. All of them sounded horribly, horribly wrong to my friend and he had the cold sensation that his era was being quickly expunged and that none of it would linger. He asked about the character based on Karen and the replacement guy said, "Oh, I have big plans for her. She's going to break off with him because she's never loved him. You see, I've decided she's always been a Lesbian and then she's going to get into this cult thing and get brutally murdered and the hero's going to have to go out and avenge her death and…"

My friend just stood there, feeling like Michael Dukakis being asked on national TV how he'd feel about his wife being raped and murdered.

He went on to write other comic books of characters he didn't own and they were pretty good comics. But he was a little more careful thereafter about injecting portions of his own life and emotions into them.

A new show debuts on CBS tonight called $#*! My Dad Says. I haven't seen anything of it other than a few promos and they haven't moved me to ask my TiVo to record it. This is probably a good thing because there's no way on a TiVo to do a search for "$#*!" or even for a dollar sign. In fact, TiVo can't even put all those punctuation marks into the name so on TiVo, the program is called $..! My Dad Says. If you really want to find it, go through Browse by Channel or Browse by Time. (If you use Browse by Time, remember it doesn't start at 8:30 like the ads say. It starts at 8:31. They do this just to screw with us.)

The show is historic for a few reasons. One is that it's the first series ever inspired by a Twitter feed. Another is that it's the first new series that William Shatner has had all week. And it's also the first network TV show to suggest the use of the word "shit" in its title. Penn & Teller's Showtime series, of course, has that word in its title but that's on cable.

Getting back to shows not starting or ending on the half-hour: If you look on your TiVo, it will tell you that the 11 PM telecast of The Daily Show is 33 minutes long…but The Colbert Report, which follows it, starts at 11:30 then runs for 30 minutes, followed by some other show which starts at Midnight. That mysterious 33 minute episode of The Daily Show is repeated three more times in the following 24 hours only in those airings, it's 30 minutes even though nothing is cut. Again, they just want to screw with us.

Late tonight, Turner Classic Movies is running What's Up, Tiger Lily?, the 1966 effort in which Woody Allen and friend-of-this-blog Frank Buxton turned a Japanese spy film into a very funny dubbed-into-English feature. You don't get to see this one often so you might want to set your DVR or VCR or even stay up late. It starts at 3:15 AM in most time zones but check to see when it starts on your set.

It's preceded by This is Spinal Tap!, which is also a very funny and innovative movie…but I'm guessing you already own that one on DVD. If you've somehow never seen it, tune in. It has a lot more jokes in it than the one about going to eleven.

Lawrence Wright writes the best piece I've seen about the flap about the "Ground Zero Mosque" and about the sudden rush of fear or hatred (or one morphing into the other) against Islam.

I see a lot of people on my cable news channels who are against Health Care Reform, including one G.O.P. Congressman who insists that Republicans should not allow the passage of any legislation about anything that does not includes a clause that totally repeals what the Democrats passed in this area. Some of these folks strike me as just interested in the power play…i.e., we're going to show that we can muster the force to neutralize anything Barack Obama does. They seem to have an utter disconnect to the problem that H.C.R. was intended to fix. It's been a long time since I'm seen any of them even pretend to have an alternate proposal…and they're drowning out those who might have legit concerns about how H.C.R. will operate and its costs. It's kinda like, "Obama's major achievement? Well, we have to undo that, whatever it is!"

The other day, I lost my leading "Prominent Republican for whom I still have some respect" when Mike Huckabee, for God-knows-what reason, came out against health insurance that covers pre-existing conditions. During the main debate on Health Care, Florida Democratic Congressman Alan Grayson infuriated many Republicans by suggesting that their proposals for Health Care could be summed up in the following phrase: "Don't get sick, and if you do get sick, die quickly." That was an unfair summary of most G.O.P. talking points but I'm not sure it doesn't describe Huckabee's position. Nor would "You have a life-threatening condition and no insurance? Well, that's most unfortunate." That Huckabee would take this stand is kinda baffling when you note that even some of the loudest opponents of Health Care Reform like the part about covering folks with pre-existing conditions. I'd hate to think Huckabee just thought he could inch his way back to front runner status in his party by outcrazying the crazies.

This new website is full of non-partisan info on the state of Health Care Reform in this country. It says that at the moment — it could change by lunchtime — the country is pretty evenly split on whether the Health Care Reform that was passed is a good thing or a bad thing. That certainly is not the split I see represented on cable news, not even on the allegedly Liberal MSNBC. (I will believe, by the way, that MSNBC is the left-wing equivalent of Fox when Fox hands three hours of airtime a day over to a host who is as Liberal as Joe Scarborough is Conservative.) In any case, I'd be curious to see some polling on whether those who want to see "Obamacare" overturned would be happy to revert to the old system for the forseeable future or if they're assuming that there's some better plan in the offing. Because I don't think there is. I think there's just the old setup but with much higher rates.