- Newt's changed his mind about going to the Moon. He's decided it's too dark at night so he wants to build a colony on the Sun. #
- Newt wants to build a permanent U.S. base on the Moon. Hey, it's not like we don't have money to spend on playing Spaceman. #
- Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want to raise taxes on the super-rich. Shame on them for waging class warfare against themselves. #
Monthly Archives: January 2012
Robert Hegyes, R.I.P.
Sad to hear of the death (by heart attack at age 60) of Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter. My partner Dennis Palumbo and I put in a season as Story Editors on that series and also wrote a Love Boat episode in which Bobby was, by his own admission, grossly miscast. In a way, he was miscast as Epstein, too. The role as envisioned was that of a big, doesn't-know-his-own-strength dumb guy but when Bobby auditioned for one of the other roles (Barbarino, I imagine), the producers liked him so much that they changed Epstein to make him more like Hegyes. It proved to be a wise move. Audiences loved him.
I have no bad stories about Bobby Hegyes. I don't think I'd tell them just now if I did but honestly, I have none. He was very dedicated to the work and very adept at dealing with the last minute script rewrites we threw at the cast. There was much tension around that series and grand feuds and arguments. None of that involved Bobby.
I ran into him a few times after I left the show, including one time outside a theater where I'd just seen him play Chico Marx to Gabe Kaplan's Groucho. He was a darn good Chico there…and to some extent on Kotter, as well. I do recall him telling me that he was less interested in acting than he was in writing and directing, and I was glad to see he got to do a lot behind the camera, as well as in front. He was good in both places and a very nice guy, as well.
Today's Political Comment
Opponents of Gay Marriage often whip out the following argument: "If we say it's all right for two men to marry then why not three men? Or two men and one woman? Or fifteen people?" That always strikes me as one of those "we can't make a good case so let's make a stupid one" arguments.
Most "slippery slope" arguments are like that. My neighbor has a dog. I don't like dogs but I can't argue for a dog ban based on that so I try slippery-sloping it: "If we let anyone who wants a dog have one then what's to stop my neighbor from having a rabid coyote? Or fifty disease-carrying pumas that will kill our children?" Back when there was a debate in this country about lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, all some opponents could come up with was "If we lower the age to 18 then why not to 17? Then 16-year-olds will demand the vote, then 15 and before you know it, we'll have three-year-olds voting! Then embryos!"
There are, I will concede, some legit arguments of this nature…cases where doing X is likely to lead to Y. But most of the time, the principle is that if you can't gin up a reality-based thesis, you invent one based on something that's not apt to follow.
Jay Michaelson discusses the one where they leap from Same-Sex Wedlock to polygamy…or as he calls it, polyamory. He thinks we don't know enough about multiple-partner relationships to say if they're at all in the same category as same-sex ones. I think it doesn't matter much until such time as there's a real outcry to consider legalizing group marriages.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and thirty-two in a series…
Feed Me
I am informed by a couple of folks that the RSS feed for this site is not working properly, at least not in Google Reader. I would ask my tech-savvy webmaster to get right on this except that my webmaster is me and I ain't so tech-savvy about RSS feeds and syndication and other stuff like that. I've fiddled with a few of them over the years before deciding that it was more organic and proper to just go to each site I like individually and read them on their premises.
Before I start trying to educate myself enough to fix this problem, I thought I'd ask: Is there anyone reading this who knows RSS and knows WordPress and can advise me what to do? For that matter, is there some other kind of syndication feed I should be offering here?
Today's Video Link
Jim Henson's first TV show was a five minute show called Sam and Friends that aired twice daily on WRC-TV, which was the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. The series lasted from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961 so he did a lot of them but only a handful of episodes have survived. One that has is this one that we present in its almost-entirety…
As in many episodes, the big feature is the puppets "lip-syncing" to a record — in this case, Stan Freberg's 1953 spoof of "C'est Si Bon." The Henson character doing the lead vocal was named Moldy Hay and the two back-up singers were called Hank and Frank. Don't ask me which one is Hank and which one is Frank, and stay tuned after the song for a word about Esskay Franks…
Con-Struction
The San Diego City Council has approved a $500 million buck expansion of the convention center. As this article notes, a significant concern is to keep the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego and not have it wander elsewhere after the current contract expires in 2015. The piece notes that Anaheim and Las Vegas are "beckoning" for the convention.
My understanding is that Vegas has done very little beckoning. Anaheim and Los Angeles have beckoned, as have some cities a bit farther off. Personally, I think Vegas and L.A. are ill-suited to host the event. We may find out on in March how suited Anaheim would be to it. The WonderCon in March is being held at the Anaheim Convention Center…and WonderCon is operated by the staff of Comic-Con International. (In case you missed early explanations, WonderCon is usually in San Francisco but this year, the Moscone Center up there is undergoing extensive renovations and could not offer WonderCon acceptable dates and facilities.)
I doubt that Comic-Con will move out of San Diego; not unless the city planners down there do something really, really stupid to drive it away. This expansion still has to be approved by a number of parties but assuming it goes through, it'll probably lock Comic-Con in for another 4-5 year pact. Fine with me. It's a great city and I like the idea that when we're there, we own it.
My Tweets for 2012-01-26
- At Whole Foods Market again. Fabio isn't here this time but there are 9 men who look just like him. And 5 women. #
- Newt didn't resign his speakership due to ethics violations. He quit to spend more time leaving his family. #
- Americans would earn more if they weren't all wasting time calculating how long it takes Mitt Romney to earn their annual income. #
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and thirty-one in a series…
Still More About Dick Tufeld
Obituary for Dick Tufeld. I still think people pay too much attention to his role voicing the robot on Lost in Space. That's fine but I'm more impressed by the thousands and thousands of TV and radio announcing jobs this man had.
Here's a link to another one. This is from the 1978 CBS Anniversary Special. They did a gathering of every CBS star they could round up and that's Dick Tufeld you hear introducing them as they enter. This was from a period when Dick was pretty much The Voice of CBS, doing about 80% of all their promos. Around the same time, he was also The Voice of Disney, doing most of the trailers for Disney movies until the job passed to Marc Elliot.
(For extra points: See if you can figure out how many stars in the CBS clip weren't actually there when they did the big walk-on and were taped at another time and edited in. I'll start you off with Bill Cosby and The Smothers Brothers. There are several others.)
Harvey
Cartoonist Drew Friedman writes of his encounters with (and admiration for) the late Harvey Kurtzman. Kurtzman was one of those guys whose talents and visions exceeded that which comic books could accommodate at the time he was around but he made do. You look at his body of work and there are two possible reactions. One is how good just about all of it was…or you can think, "Oh, if only there'd been a more perfect showcase for what he could do." That he never quite found a place where he could be as good as he could be — and be paid commensurate with that — is one of the many sad songs of the form.
Anyway, read what Drew has to say about him…and read anything Kurtzman did. None of it is without interest and some of it is almost as good as he was.
Today's Video Link
My buddy Doug Molitor explains the differences between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney…
Recommended Reading
What happens to the men and women we send off to war? Read this.
My Tweets for 2012-01-25
- I seem to be the only person in America not delivering a rebuttal to the State of the Union address tonight.
- Obama should come out tonight and say, "The State of our Union is good…if you're really, really rich. I mean, if you're Romney rich."
- My pal Roger thinks Mitt's wealth proves he can be entrusted with the U.S. economy. By that logic, so could Larry Flynt.
- Newt demanded an open marriage. After seeing their options, I think Republicans are going to start demanding an open convention.
Best Tweet of the Day
