Monthly Archives: October 2010

The latest on the war in Afghanistan from, of course, Fred Kaplan. And I think it's amazing how little most Americans care about this. Even Americans who have jobs.

Thank Jeff Abraham for sending me a link to this great interview with Buck Henry. Someone could do a great documentary or TV show just by pointing a camera at Buck Henry and having him tell anecdotes for 90 minutes. He's a fascinating man who's worked on a lot of projects, good and bad, and as you'll see if you read the interview, he seems to know which were which.

Here's a weird one. A year or three ago when GMail was launched, I signed up for a GMail account with my name…and it occurred to me that it might be handy to have a whole bunch of GMail accounts under a mess of names. They were free and I thought I might route my spam to one of them and use another to filter certain messages and reroute them. When I go on all these weird political message boards, I sometimes have to sign up in order to read things and rather than leave my own e-mail address, thereby bringing on waves of penis enlargement ads, I could sign up with one of my GMail addresses. So I got a whole bunch of them and for most, I used the name of obscure comedians and character actors. For instance, one of my favorite film comics was a gent named Charley Chase…so I signed up for charleychase at gmail.com. (I am not typing the name with the "@" sign because that makes it vulnerable to bots and spiders that comb websites looking for e-mail addresses to add to spam mailing lists.)

And then I never got around to using that address for anything. I went a year or three without logging into it and I certainly never sent any e-mail its way, nor did I do anything that would cause anyone else to send e-mail to it. The other day, I logged in and found it was full of messages that had accumulated there over the last few years…messages that sat there, unread and unanswered.

I thought at first it was all spam but on closer examination, very few of them were. They were mostly real messages, some of which described how much the sender had so enjoyed having sex with the addressee. A number were flight itineraries for a woman whose name I did not recognize. There were about a dozen messages from 1-800-flowers.com discussing its repeated and failed attempts to deliver a basket of posies to Charley Chase. I kept wondering, "Why did these people send these messages to this address?" And then I came across one that was the planned shooting schedule for a movie called Party of Feet 2 and asking the recipient to fax or e-mail her "latest test" and that's when I figured it out.

There is a very popular actress who appears in sex films under the name Charley Chase. For some time now, fans and business associates have been writing to her at that address, thinking it's hers. I'm guessing she probably has a GMail account that is that name plus a number or something else…and they've been accidentally leaving off the number or something else. Anyway, I've been getting a lot of her mail and I've been trying to decide what to do about this.

My first thought was to find some way to contact the lady and turn the email address over to her, mail and all. My second thought was not to. After all, she usurped the name of one of my favorite comedians and made it impossible to Google images of him without seeing a lot of photos that would make Larry Flynt blush. But then my third thought was to go back to my first thought. When she started out, she may not have known there was ever a rather popular actor named Charley Chase…and if she does by now, it's too late for her to change her nom de porn. So, no sexual suggestion intended, I'd like to give it to her.

I'm sending messages to her Facebook account and her Twitter account and directing her to this message of explanation. Charley, if you're reading this, I do not want anything from you except to make sure that I'm turning over the account to the lady who actually performs under the name of Charley Chase. That is the only way you have to satisfy me to get it.

John McCain has occasionally been mentioned on this blog…and some of you have heard the deep sigh of disappointment that accompanies his name. I have rarely agreed with McCain's politics but there was a time when I thought he was a man of great character. And by that I mean someone who understands and works for the greater good even at personal expense or, in politics, possibly alienating his immediate base of support. Late in life, Barry Goldwater — whose name kinda defined Conservatism in this country for a long time — horrified many of his fans by coming out for gay rights and denouncing what he called a pernicious bigotry, on that issue and others, within the Republican party. Some who'd previously canonized the man and hung on his every word could not deal with this. I remember a Goldwater hagiographer going on the old CNN Crossfire and trying to spin it as senility and assuring us that the real Barry Goldwater still opposed gays in the military, gays everywhere, no matter what that sad old man who looked like The Real Barry said.

Goldwater, of course, had little to lose then by speaking his mind. He wasn't running for anything. But I got this idea in my head at some point that his fellow Arizonan, Senator McCain, was the kind of man who would put principle over votes…who would "reach across the aisle" and back a Democratic initiative if he thought it was the right thing to do. Where did I get such an idea? Well, once upon a time, he did do that kind of thing but also there were a number of articles that helped shape my image of the man. The most significant probably ran in The New Republic and dealt with McCain's relationship with a man named David Ifshin. It's a powerful piece and there's one line in it that made a big impression on me and has stayed in my mind to this day and changed my outlook a little. It's the line about how forgiveness is ultimately less self-destructive than the bitter desire for vengeance.

I just found a link to the piece, which was written by Michael Lewis. If you put the current and recent McCain out of your mind and read it, I'll bet you find yourself admiring the man…and also keep in mind that it appeared in a magazine that was quite Liberal. During the same period, I often read The National Review and I never saw them run anything that so flattered a public figure who was at all left of center. In fact, they didn't even run anything that was this flattering about McCain.

Did McCain change or was the author of this piece somewhat duped? Certainly the former (remember when there was talk of him switching parties?) and probably the latter to some extent. But at least I'm not the only one who had to turn loose of that John McCain. I came across this piece by wizened old Joe Klein in Time and saw that he made much the same journey. And Klein's piece also reminded me that the Obama campaign could easily have turned Ifshin into McCain's William Ayers (scandalous past) or Reverend Wright (America-hating)…but didn't. That's a small bit of integrity on their part but it's not enough to offset the cynicism that has built within me about all politicians. It's kind of reached the point where the ones I like and admire, I regard as just the ones either (a) haven't gotten around to selling out their principles, perhaps because they haven't gotten the right price, (b) never really had them and have managed to fool me or (c) have long since sold 'em out in some way and I just don't know about it yet. And in the last decade or so, no one in public life has let me down more than David Ifshin's dear friend, John McCain.

Want a rattlesnake mug like the one Craig Ferguson drinks out of on his show? Here you go.

Regarding my recent post here about meeting Dick Van Dyke in an elevator, Curt Alliaume sent me this excerpt from the book Saturday Night Live by Hill and Weingrad. It's about SNL writer Alan Zweibel…

A year after he left Saturday Night, Zweibel ran into Van Dyke in an elevator in Hollywood. He introduced himself, explaining how he'd achieved success on Saturday Night, married a beautiful and vivacious brunet (Robin Blankman, a former production assistant from the show), and was in the process of shopping for a home in the suburbs, quite possibly in New Rochelle. "And I just want to thank you," Zweibel said, "because my dream came true and you embodied it."

Van Dyke smiled and put his arm around Zweibel's shoulder. "That's very sweet of you to say this to me," he said, "but let me warn you, Alan. This is a word of caution. After five years, The Dick Van Dyke Show was canceled, and I became an alcoholic." Zweibel spent the rest of the elevator ride pounding the door and moaning "No! No! No!" while Van Dyke tried to comfort him.

The Van Dyke show wasn't so much cancelled as it was ended by Van Dyke's choice…and from all reports, his alcoholism was bad during the series. But I absolutely believe the core of this story. There can easily be an unseen dark and down side in a success like either series. I sometimes think there should be a little release you should have to sign that says something like, "Yes, I want to be a very rich and famous TV star and I understand the problems that can create in my life and head…"

Just back from Souplantantion where I had two bowls of their Classic Creamy Tomato Soup. On the way out, I found a $20 bill on the ground. This proves that eating Classic Creamy Tomato Soup can benefit you in many ways.

I don't usually link to articles in the Weekly Standard because, well, I usually find them to not go much deeper than "Republicans good, Democrats bad." It's among the many sites on the web — Liberal or Conservative — that have lost my visitations due to incessant demonizing of the opposition.

But I was impressed with this piece by Andrew Ferguson, which is a review of a new Obama-bashing book by Dinesh D'Souza. I have not read the book but I did endure the article D'Souza wrote for Forbes which made the same silly case that Obama is an "anticolonialist" (definition subject to change from paragraph to paragraph) because his father (the one he hardly knew) was an anticolonialist. Ferguson's view of the theory matches mine but with better supporting examples since, for one thing, he actually read the book. But more interesting to me is Mr. Ferguson's view of how the right-wing, of which he is a proud member, is making up all sorts of silly, hysterical charges against Obama when there's a much simpler version of the man right in front of their faces. It's sad that inventing crap about your opponent works so well these days. It's certainly lucrative.