If you're tracking how many delegates each G.O.P. contender has won, you might want to read this piece by Dave Weigel. In it, he explains why no one really knows for sure…and may not for some time.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
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- Newt Gingrich finishes third in Louisiana, talks about how he will win the nomination and plan his moon colony. #TheJokeIsJustTooEasy #
- Geraldo Rivera tells black men how to dress so they don't get shot. #TheJokeIsJustTooEasy #
- Dick Cheney gets a heart transplant. #TheJokeIsJustTooEasy #
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and eighty-seven in a series…
Today's Video Link
Here's a short clip, date unknown, of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. Johnny does a great, Carsonesque "take" when he notices that Tommy Newsom is filling in as bandleader for Doc Severinsen. He says he was unaware Doc was off…but then he segues into prepared material (which he, of course, approved) that makes fun of Tommy. Kinda makes you think he did know Doc was off, doesn't it?
For a long time on Johnny's show, the line of succession worked like this: Ed McMahon was, of course, the announcer. Doc was Musical Director. Tommy was a band member and Doc's assistant, and he also supervised most of the band's arrangements. If Doc had the night off, Tommy would lead the band. If Ed had the night off, Doc would rotate over to serve as announcer and Tommy would lead the band. There was also a third-position band member named Shelly Cohen who occasionally led the band if Doc and Tommy were out at the same time…and there was at least one night when Ed and Doc were away so Tommy served as announcer and Shelley led the band.
One day, Johnny decided to change this. Ed was often off doing Star Search or those sweepstakes commercials or hosting corporate events for Budweiser or other extra-curricular activities so he was frequently absent when Johnny hosted. He was finally told he had to rearrange things and always be there for Mr. Carson. Ed, who knew darn well why he had a career, immediately complied.
Doc was apparently told the same thing and he also began canceling outside gigs with a band he had called Xebron. At the same time, Johnny decided to stop featuring Tommy Newsom on the show, either as a bandleader or as he'd occasionally been used, as a sketch player. Tommy was relegated back to his musician function and thereafter, he only led the band if Doc had to be away due to some personal emergency. I'm not sure there was one for the rest of Johnny's run. Ed still did some outside jobs but only when Leno hosted and on those nights, Doc would serve as bandleader and announcer.
As a devout Carson fan/expert, I was always curious about what triggered the new policy…why suddenly, Johnny decided his crew had to show up for work. And was there some incident that soured him on Mr. Newsom to the point where he didn't even want him fronting the band on Leno nights? Years later, I asked a few folks who'd worked then at The Tonight Show, including Fred DeCordova, and got a lot of shrugs and comments like "That's how Johnny operated." He would suddenly decide something had to be changed and he'd change it.
The end to Ed's and Doc's nights off was probably just because Johnny felt he should have his "A" Team around. Perhaps Tommy's exile had something to do with Johnny's fears that his audience was skewing too old. I can't imagine that he decided Tommy wasn't a good foil to bounce jokes off of. Take a look at this clip…
Recommended Reading
Steve Lopez offers up a true story that explains why we need Health Care Reform in this country. In case you have trouble with the pay wall over at the L.A. Times site, I'll summarize: An 11-year-old girl had a tummy ache. On the advice of her doctor, her father took her to an emergency room. There turned out to be nothing really wrong with her but the father, who could ill afford it, got a bill for $5000.
I absolutely believe that. In fact, based on the three times in the last three years I've taken others to emergency rooms, I'm surprised it was only five grand. In one case, it topped $18,000 for not that much more treatment.
As then-candidate Barack Obama noted in the video clip I posted two and a half hours ago (before I came across Lopez's article), folks who can't afford health insurance these days have two options when they get sick. They fall into the Medicaid pool, which means we pay for their medical care…or they go to an emergency room which means that when we go to one, we pay for their medical care. In this case, the little girl's father could afford insurance. He just couldn't afford insurance that didn't have a $5000 deductible.
With the Supreme Court opening the question of the mandate in the Affordable Care Act, we're about to hear a lot more about "Obamacare" and how it's socialized medicine in that it forces people to pay for the medical bills of others. We already have socialized medicine in this country in the sense that we've decided not to let human beings die in the street because they can't afford a doctor. If that's what the opponents of Obamacare want, I wish they'd just say it. If it's not what they want (and I doubt it is), they need to come up with a better, more efficient way for society to take care of those who are broke and sick.
Game Theory
I watched the HBO movie Game Change last night. Oh. My. God.
I guess there are two ways to approach an effort like this — as a movie and as an alleged reflection of reality. As a movie, I found it quite well-made and entertaining. I usually don't find myself absorbed into performances where someone imitates a known person. When an actor plays Elvis, I sit there noting all the ways and moments when he doesn't look like Elvis, doesn't sound like Elvis, doesn't move like Elvis, etc. That's kind of how it was for me in this with Ed Harris playing John McCain but largely remaining Ed Harris.
But Julianne Moore as Sarah Palin? Bought every second of it. And of course I had no problem with Woody Harrelson and all the other folks playing "handlers" who had to deal with their frustrations and horror of what their Frankenstein Monster was becoming and how she was sinking the ticket. The moment Sarah Paulson (playing campaign advisor Nicole Wallace) admits she couldn't vote for the lady she tried to get elected is one of the most powerful statements I've seen about American politics.
So good job as a movie. And praise for screenwriter Danny Strong and director Jay Roach.
As a record of what really happened? I dunno. Ms. Wallace said in an interview, "Game Change is not a movie about Sarah Palin. And it's definitely not about staffers like me. It's a film about the vast, murky gray area in which the majority of politics takes place." No, I think it's about Palin and about staffers like her…about what Palin really was, as opposed to the image that her coaches tried and only sometimes succeeded in establishing for her. Many of those staffers, Wallace included, are now saying the film is a striking mirror of reality and I can understand why someone would say that. It's another way of proclaiming, "Hey, don't blame us for losing that election. Look at what we had to work with!" And of course, we can all understand why Ms. Palin and those who support her would insist it's lies, fiction, a false narrative, etc.
A project like this kind of demands that the viewer have some opinion as to how accurate it is. Here's mine and you have to remember that I think Semi-Governor Palin was unqualified, not because of her limited experience but just because of who she was and how ill-informed she has always been. I further believe that her mission in life is not the dangerous political agenda she spouts but the personal glory and financial gain of Sarah Palin, and that she's found that firing up her base is a great way to further that agenda. So she fires them up with nonsense, distortions, outright fibs and playing the victim card every time someone disagrees with her or she doesn't get what she wants. And she avoids any situation where a journalist might ask her a question with an intent other than to let her deliver a prepared answer.
So you could say I have a low opinion of the lady. And despite that, as I watched Game Change, I kind of felt sorry for her.
I know I shouldn't. As she goes around this country telling people that Barack Obama is a Socialist who's destroying America, I don't even think she doesn't deserve a lot of the insults hurled at her. People in glass houses, after all. But still, the depiction of her bothered me. I'd really like to think it's exaggerated; that no one that clueless could have gotten that close to such a high office.
Then again, during the campaign the real John McCain struck me as pretty confused and disingenuous (much more so than the way he's played by Harris in the film) and he got even closer to the presidency. The film felt to me like its makers, aware they'd be slammed for the way they depicted Palin, decided they might look fairer if they made McCain look heroic and wise. During that election, one of the reasons Senator McCain did not win was that he did not look heroic or wise. Here's a clip of one of many moments when he did not…
The John McCain we see there is everything Game Change makes Sarah Palin out to be. He's attacking an alleged aspect of the Obama health care proposal…but he obviously didn't read it or listen to anyone who did. Perhaps someone heard a talking point on Fox News and didn't bother to check the actual plan to see how Obama might answer McCain. The first thing I learned in debate class was that you never ask your opponent a question unless you have a good idea how he'll respond. What the hell happened here?
Game Change makes Palin out to be foolish and arrogant at times for refusing to study for public appearances. Why are they faulting her when McCain's out there making mistakes like this, throwing an accusation at Obama that Obama could so easily hit out of the park? And of course, Obama was sharp enough to mention that he'd explained this at a previous debate, thereby making the point that McCain wasn't paying attention or his memory was going…or something.
I don't accept the implied premise of Game Change that the Palin half of the McCain-Palin combo sank the ticket by coming across addled; not when the guy on top was making people wonder if he was just plain too old or confused to be Chief Exec. In the movie, Ed Harris comes across as strong and principled and in total grasp of the situation…and he has that leading man quality that makes you feel like he's ready to go be an astronaut. Can you recall McCain ever coming off like that during the campaign? Watch that debate clip again. Palin didn't do well in her one-on-one with Biden but McCain did more damage in his debates, if only because his mattered more.
So I feel bad for her that she's getting blamed for the loss. Even if she really is/was the uninformed narcissist that the HBO movie makes her out to be, she doesn't deserve all or even most of the blame for McCain losing. I'd say George W. Bush and Dick Cheney probably deserve more…and McCain certainly does. Bush and Cheney did what they did to this country — and McCain's the one who didn't really try to tell America that if they elected him, there'd be any kind of real Game Change.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and eighty-six in a series…
Recommended Reading
Bruce Bartlett analyzes the new Republican budget and finds it lacking in detail and reality.
The Lodging Lottery
Hotel reservations for this year's Comic-Con International will open on Thursday, March 29 at 9 AM Pacific Time. You can get a sneak peek at what hotels will be available over on this page. Good luck.
Today's Video Link
This is from The Rachel Maddow Show and it runs almost 15 minutes. It's a pretty damning segment on Mitt Romney's tendency to say a lot of things which are untrue and/or in direct conflict with what he said not long before. I offer it here not because I think it'll change anyone's mind but because you might enjoy a preview of the upcoming election…assuming Romney heads up the G.O.P. ticket. Heck, it'll also be the theme of the remaining attempts to deny him that honor.
The thing I find most interesting here is that Romney is only now starting to get the image of a truth mangler. Prior to this, he's been a flip-flopper, which is not quite the same thing. I mean, if a guy previously held a view contrary to yours and now he agrees with you, you can kind of think, "Well, at least he's seen the light." At some point though, folks start to perceive a total disconnect between what a candidate says and reality. Not that I think it'll cost him the nomination but I think Romney's there…and boy, do I wish I owned stock in Etch-a-Sketch because we're going to be hearing a lot about that product, aka The Original iPad.
From the E-Mailbag…
L. Johnson (probably not Lyndon) writes to ask…
In the R.C. Harvey article you linked to, it said that Johnny Hart's syndicate said "In 2001, Hart was inducted into the Guinness World Records as 'the most syndicated living cartoonist' because the combined circulation of his strips hit 2,600, allegedly more than any other." What can you tell us about this?
Well, it's an improvement from when they once claimed that if you added the circulation of B.C. to the circulation of The Wizard of Id, it made Hart the most widely-read author in the world. I'm not sure that even by their rationale, the actual numbers proved that. At one point when Hart was claiming his two strips taken together topped any other cartoonist's one strip, the syndicate that then had Peanuts and Garfield was saying that wasn't so; that each of those strips individually beat his combined total. I think most of the industry presumed Hart's claim was faulty just in its math.
And the "most read" part was surely baseless. Just because I received a newspaper that carried his two strips doesn't mean I read them. When I used to get home delivery of newspapers (yes, people once did that), there were lots of sections I never opened. So that claim was kinda like saying your TV show is the "most watched" because it's available on a channel that goes into the most homes.
Also, when you hear that a newspaper strip is in X papers, the arithmetic is a bit phony. They count the daily strips and the Sunday strips separately. If you do a newspaper strip that runs seven days a week in The Picayune Post-Dispatch, most people would say you were in one newspaper. You would say you were in two. In Johnny Hart's case, if the Post-Dispatch carried both his strips every day, he would say he was in four newspapers. The claim that he's in "2,600 newspapers" has to be understood in that context. To the extent it's suggesting a lot of readers, it's counting some people four times.
The raw number of papers is also not an indicator of circulation since many of those papers are very small. If my strip was in 300 newspapers that paid the minimum fee for it and yours was just in the L.A. Times and nowhere else, yours would be more successful in every meaningful way. You would make more money and there would be more copies of your strip printed and available each day than mine. My claim that I was in 300 times as many newspapers as you would be rather misleading. Not that I wouldn't say it.
Hart's two strips were very successful though and they continue to be. Since his passing, they've been continued by a little group that includes some members of his family. When I see them, I always think they're well-drawn and funny — in many cases, funnier than what Mr. Hart was doing with them his last decade or so.
Fran Matera, R.I.P.
Fran Matera, who spent a lifetime in comic books and newspaper strips, has died at the age of 87. The cause is given as prostate cancer.
Matera grew up in Stratford, Connecticut and was still in high school when he sent a fan letter and samples to cartoonist Alfred Andriola, best known for the newspaper strip, Kerry Drake. Andriola liked the young man's drawings and gave him work as an assistant and referrals to comic book publishers. Apart from a stint in the Marines, Matera made his living thereafter in comics, mainly in strips, often as a ghost or assistant. Among the many strips he worked on over the years were, in addition to Kerry Drake, Dickie Dare, Little Annie Rooney, Mr. Holiday, Nero Wolfe, Rex Morgan MD, Judge Parker, Apartment 3-G, The Legend of Bruce Lee and a long run (credited) on Steve Roper and Mike Nomad. For comic books, he maintained a steady presence in Treasure Chest from 1959 until 1971 with his feature, Chuck White, and was known to pop up occasionally at Marvel, Charlton or some other publisher when the newspaper strip work was slow. His art style was heavily Caniff at its core but from all those years of ghosting different strips, he knew how to skew it for any occasion.
My only contact with Mr. Matera was over the phone. I don't recall how we "met" but he called occasionally in the late seventies in search of a writer for some strip project he hoped to launch. As newspaper strips with continuity (as opposed to a gag-a-day) declined, the secret to continued employment for a guy like him seemed to be volume, volume, volume. He was usually doing one strip and trying to sell another…because doing just one didn't pay all the bills. When we spoke, it was because he had an opportunity to take over an established strip that from its fame, you'd think would have been successful and lucrative for its current handler but no. Getting the gig was a matter of submitting samples plus the lowest bid, and he told me the lowest bid was more important than the samples. When he told me how low we were talking, I was amazed. I wasn't interested in writing that particular strip at any price but I sure liked Fran on the phone, and I liked his determination to work as hard as he had to in order to make a living in the field he loved.
Tom Spurgeon has a good career overview on Matera at The Comics Reporter and Matera's local newspaper also offers a good obit. Everyone seems to have the same view of the man: Dedicated professional who did an awful lot of fine work.
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Book Reports
Spent a laugh-filled evening last evening at Celebrity Autobiography, a show that pops up around the country from time to time, though not often enough. I explained about these last time I attended one but for those who don't remember: Celebrity Autobiography is where a bunch of celebrities come out and read excerpts from autobiographies from other celebrities. The texts are real and unaltered except, at times, via emphasis and performance. But for example, Fred Willard read a few pages of Don't Hassle the Hoff, the autobiography of David Hasselhoff. It was quite funny. So were all the other readings by (at this outing) Fred, Lainie Kazan, Laraine Newman, Rita Wilson, Rob Reiner, Florence Henderson, Weird Al Yankovic, Illeana Douglas and the show's founders, Eugene Pack and Dayle Rayfel.
The audience howled at, for instance, Ms. Kazan reading chunks of Ethel Merman's memoirs while Ms. Henderson read from Snooki's. Since we were in a theater downtown at the Grammy Museum, the emphasis was on music. Rob Reiner read from two different books by rappers. Dayle Rayfel read from the autobiography of Diana Ross — who, we were told — was performing right next door to where we were. There was also a reading of the poetry of Suzanne Somers, a medley of diet tips from the stars, a lot of naughty quotes from Madonna's book, Sex, and many other delights. I especially enjoyed a rerun from the first time I saw one of these shows: The story of Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Eddie Fisher, Richard Burton and a few of Liz's other hubbies, drawn from the autobiographies of most of those folks.
There's no real schedule as to when these shows pop up except that they seem to do one a month at the Triad Theater in New York. The next one there is April 9 and the readers will include Brooke Shields, Mario Cantone, Darrell Hammond, Gina Gershon, Jackie Hoffman, Steve Schirripa, Eugene Pack, Dayle Reyfel, Jennifer Tilly and Alan Zweibel. If you can't make that and you want to see one of these — and believe me, you do — you'll have to keep an eye on their website for the next opportunity. I sure enjoyed myself.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and eighty-five in a series…
