Monthly Archives: December 2011

Let's all thank Greg Ehrbar for telling me where we can also listen to a pretty good 30 minute interview of Mr. John Cleese. And this is the real John Cleese…not one of those Basil Fawlty imitators who looks only vaguely like him.

Some of you have noticed and pointed out to me that this site has slipped out of the purview of Google and can no longer be found there. There is a reason for this.

Shortly before Thanksgiving, someone hacked into my file server and secretly implanted another website within my own. This is known as "cloaking." Deep within the bowels of my software, there was a hidden directory full of software that ran a site selling pills to aid men in achieving erections. It was linked somehow to a server in India which, in turn, could have been linked to a server anywhere else in the time-space continuum. Anyway, I cleaned it all out…or thought I had. It turned out I missed a piece or three of it which I just now expunged.

In the meantime, the Googlebot Spiders — and wouldn't that be a peachy name for a minor league baseball team? — had come across the boner pill ads and they took my sites out of their indices. I am now trying to get them to put me back. We'll see how long this takes. Until I am reaccepted, this site will not be found in its usual Google results.

As it happens, I had already decided to do a revamp on this blog around or about the first of the year. I will be changing to another software and doing a whole redesign in the process. All the old messages will still be available though they may be offline for a few weeks…and there may be a day or two while I'm configuring the new software that we'll be closed for street repairs. Don't be surprised at what you see here for a while.

Master author-animator J.J. Sedelmaier bids a fond farewell to telephones with wires on them. They'll get the one on my desk when Charlton Heston pries it from my cold, dead fingers.

Number eighty-four in a series…

Rick Santorum is living proof of the old adage that Life imitates Google.

Good night, Internet. Don't let anything exciting happen on you while I'm asleep.

Here's a darn good article by Todd Leopold about the heritage of MAD magazine. Not much in there about the current publication, which I think is quite funny and worthy of purchase. Leopold writes mostly about Al Jaffee and the illustrators who've survived from his generation. But check it out and click on the links, some of which will take you to good articles that expand on what Leopold writes. And especially check out the gallery of Tom Richmond caricatures of himself and his fellow artists.

Herman Cain is apparently still denying he had a 13-year sexual affair with that lady in Georgia, even though no one who wasn't gung ho to see him in the White House believes the denial. One Cain supporter friend I have is online blaming it on the media, which apparently also was responsible for all those stupid things Cain said in speeches and interviews. I have no great respect for most reporters these days but I don't think candidates who lecture people about "personal responsibility" should turn around and argue that it's someone else's fault when foolish remarks come out of their mouths.

There are many obvious reasons why Cain is still denying it. I doubt one of them is that he's afraid of criminal prosecution even though adultery is technically illegal in Georgia, where some of the alleged adulterizing took place. This article includes a map that shows where it is and where it isn't. You may also be interested in the wish lists of some of our current politicians and candidates for office. They're all folks who will tell you they want government to get out of our lives…but they do want it to tell you who you can have sex with and to dictate what the two of you are allowed to do.

In the past here, I've posted raves and Amazon links for the two collections of Stephen Sondheim's lyrics — Finishing the Hat and Look, I Made a Hat. Upon reflection, I would like to back off somewhat on my enthusiasm not for Mr. Sondheim's brilliance but for the presentation of it in these books. Initially I think, my delight at the idea of the project overwhelmed my common sense. I'm deciding that I like the contents of the books but don't much like the books themselves.

There is, of course, a problem with any book of lyrics. Lyrics are written to fit with the music. Remove the music and you force the lyrics to stand alone…something they were never meant to do. Sondheim himself has referred to this problem on many occasions. Often, he has noted that when Oscar Hammerstein wrote, "O, what a beautiful morning / O, what a beautiful day," he wrote something that appeared trite and hackneyed on the page…but once it was married to Mr. Rodgers' melody, it became a soaring, effective lyric. It could not be evaluated or appreciated without the tune affixed to it. And here, we have Sondheim's life's work offered up without the tunes affixed…and in the case of most of the cut tunes, unavailable even to those of us with every darned CD of his work.

Sondheim is fond of saying, "Content dictates form" but I don't think the content has dictated the right form here. It should have led to a smaller page format somewhat less than the 8" by 11" size chosen. Since lyrics are read as a series of short lines, the wide page meant a multi-column layout that I find distracting and confusing, especially due to the indents and offsets to differentiate lyrics from Sondheim's annotative interjections and also from the stage directions included. The quantity of content — the sheer number of lyrics — did not, alas, dictate a respectable font size. We got one that is legible, yes, especially to those of us with 20/20 vision…but there is a reason no hardcover novel is ever set in so tiny a typeface. It's not comfortable to the eye and in a sense, it diminishes the importance of the material it conveys.

The publisher would, I'm sure, argue that there was so much to be covered and that it was impractical to expand to three or four volumes…or more if they'd made the pages smaller. That is probably so but it doesn't make this presentation of the material any easier to read. There is a format that would have, however.

These books cry out to be released on Kindle and similar devices. They would allow the lyrics to be read in one column with the type size adjustable for the reader's comfort and with Sondheim's annotations presented in a differentiating font. Better still, this whole thing should be in some format for tablet computers that would allow the lyrics to be linked to recordings of the songs…so you could read the words, then at your option, click and hear the song performed. It would not have to be the original cast recordings; just performances that the author felt served his work well. I sure I'm not the only person who is referencing back and forth between the book and their CDs…or in the case of shows I know well, supplying the tunes as I read, mentally singing along where possible. It would be so much nicer to be able to click and hear Bernadette Peters and musicians instead of my rotten, non-professional voice a capella.

Since there is no e-reader format available, I wonder if that's because someone is working on it for future release. I hope they are and I hope it'll have the melodies somehow attached. That is the form that I think the content dictates.

One other gripe and I hate when publishers do this. It is now possible to order the two books in a boxed set…an option that was kept (or kept quiet) from us die-hard fans until after we'd bought the two volumes, sans box. We could reasonably have been expected to do this as soon as they were available…and now we could reasonably be expected to wish we'd waited. And maybe, it was unreasonably expected, some of us will be thinking of buying these books again to get the box. That's a premeditated strategy with DVD sets these days: Wait 'til a month or two after most of the orders are in on the last one and then offer the version the loyalest fans will want.

That said, the boxed set will make a peachy Christmas gift item for some. I may order it for myself and then give the books without the box away as gifts. I just wish they'd told us a few weeks earlier that a box would be available. (Before someone asks: No slipcase of any kind is planned for the Pogo series with which I am involved.)

Anyway, everything I said about the importance of Sondheim's words being collected like this still stands. I just wish the format served those words better. And I wish that when I ordered the second book on Amazon months ago, there'd been a little box that said, "Hey, we're bringing out a boxed set two weeks after this one. Wouldn't you rather order it?" Because I would have, especially if like those volumes of the O.E.D., they'd included a magnifying glass.

Apparently, absolutely nothing happened in the world while I was asleep. Good.