Republicans have often hammered Democrats — especially Democrats running for office — for not using the term, "War on Terror." But as Fred Kaplan notes, the intra-cult memorandums of Osama bin Laden show that bin Laden loved it when Republicans called it that because he thought it was a great recruiting tool for his side.
By the way: I'm home.
Number two hundred and twenty-four in a series…
I'm blogging, largely because I can, from a Delta Airline flight. I don't know how high up we are but the GoGo Wi-Fi doesn't work below 10,000 feet so we're at least there. Remind me never to fly on a Friday afternoon. The Minneapolis airport was like the stateroom scene in A Night at the Opera. In fact, I think I even saw Chico there. He tried to sell me a tip on a horse and I told him, "No, no…that's your next movie!"
I'll tell you about the trip later. Right now, things are kinda cramped. There are six midgets on this flight but the guy sitting next to me makes me look like #7. But hey, let's see if I can at least post a photo of Stan and Ollie from up here…
Michael Kinsley thinks Mitt Romney made a big, cowardly mistake to demote a trusted spokesperson just because the more rabid right-wingers didn't like that the guy they're stuck voting for had an openly-gay press representative. Apparently, the guy would have been more trustworthy if he'd lied and pretended to be straight. I'm not sure it's cowardice. It may just be the kind of thing you have to do these days if you want certain Republicans to vote for you.
Here's a video of a live performance by Big Daddy — live somewhere in Orange County, it says. They took the hit by Foreigner, "I Want to Know What Love Is" and they rearranged and mashed it up with "La Bamba" by Ritchie Valens — and look at what they got…
I seem to have confused a few of you about the Cast of Cat Characters in my backyard. The Stranger Cat, as we know too well, just went and died of old age. "But what," several correspondents have written to ask, "became of the Stranger Stranger Cat?" Allow me to elucidate…
The Stranger Cat was the first of the current crop to arrive on the rear porch in quest of chow. We named him The Stranger Cat because…well, he was a cat and he was a stranger. That's about as clever as we get around here. If I'd known he was going to be around so long and become such a non-stranger, I'd have given him a real name. That is, once I'd decided the animal's gender, which I had not bothered to do.
So he or she was coming around to dine, not once a day or twice but thrice or more often. "That Stranger Cat sure eats a lot," Carolyn and I said to each other. The Stranger Cat also seemed to be a bit schizo: Friendly and pettable one visit; stand-offish the next.
One night, Carolyn was working at the kitchen sink and I wandered over to the patio doors, looked out at the feline-feeding area and said, "Carolyn, I think I've figured out why The Stranger Cat eats so much. Come look." She wandered over to see what I was looking at: Two Stranger Cats. They weren't exactly twins but were easy to confuse. It was like it is with Kardashians: Once you know what to look for, you can tell them apart. We dubbed the new arrival, the one who didn't like being touched, The Stranger Stranger Cat.
I finally decided that The Stranger Cat was a male that someone had trapped, fixed and returned to the feral life. I decided that The Stranger Stranger Cat was a female to whom the same had happened. And I theorized that before the first of these fixings had taken place, The Stranger Cat had fathered The Stranger Stranger Cat. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.
Soon after, a huge silver feline also began coming about, asking — nay, demanding — more food than the combined consumption of both Stranger Cats plus the state of Nevada. I named him Max because…well, you know: Why not Max? Max and The Stranger Stranger Cat became quite an item so she seemed to need a real name and she became Sylvia because…well, you know: Why not Sylvia? But The Stranger Cat remained The Stranger Cat even as the handle became more ironic. He was a stranger the way Curly Howard was curly or a big guy named Tiny is tiny.
Somewhere in all this, a kitten began coming around. We called her The Kitten until she got pregnant. She was the one you may recall that I went to great lengths to trap, take in for a kitty abortion and neutering, and then released into the wild. At the vet, I had to give her a name better than The Kitten so she became Lydia, named for someone that Frank Ferrante likes to sing about.
So that's how my Fantastic Four were assembled and named and they've protected their backyard turf against most others for years. For a brief time before she was Lydia, Lydia was bringing a friend over for dinner now and then but Max set her straight about that. Max, who prefers to eat someone else's food out of their dish even when there's food in his, doesn't want anyone else around. He barely even tolerates Lydia getting anything to eat. It is sometimes necessary to place her food up high. She can and will climb but Max can't or won't.
But Max would rarely shove The Stranger Cat aside and take his food. As hoggish as Max is, he understood and dignity and seniority of The Stranger Cat, except maybe when there was tuna in the bowls. We all respected The Stranger Cat and we all miss him.
Here, as promised, is a much better obit than mine for Buzz Potamkin.
Number two hundred and twenty-three in a series…
You know what I'd like to see? I'd like to see a gallery of photos from 1950 of popular cartoonists — including Milton Caniff, Alfred Andriola, Ernie Bushmiller, Bill Holman and Otto Soglow — drawing on women in bathing suits. And I'd like to thank Craig Miller for sending me a link that makes it possible for me (and you) to see such a thing.
On the old version of this blog, each item had a little obvious permalink that you could copy and use to link to the item in question or send the link to someone else. We still have that even if it isn't as obvious. It's incorporated into the subject line. See up above where it says "A Much-Asked Question?" That's the link to this item.
Here's another selection from Big Daddy, the group that took current hits (current at the time they were active) and mashed 'em up with fifties tunes. This is a music video they did of the song "The Land Down Under" when it was big on the charts. Only they didn't do it the way it sounded when it was on the charts…
Scott Marinoff, who sends me lots of great links I pass on to you people, sends me to this chart which enables one to convert "cat years" to human ones. If it's right, the Stranger Cat may have been pushing 96. Not bad for a guy who slept outdoors and ate Friskies Mariner's Choice.
Steven Brower wrote a great piece on comic book artists working in advertising. (One quibble: Sheldon Moldoff had many impressive credits but he was not, as Mr. Brower, says a co-creator of Hawkman. Shelly didn't even work on the first Hawkman story, which was written by Gardner Fox and drawn by Dennis Neville. Moldoff took over drawing it after a few issues.)
Animation producer Buzz Potamkin died recently (I heard April 28) following a long battle with cancer. Buzz was like the Johnny Appleseed of animation companies, running, founding or co-founding many over the years including Perpetual Motion, Southern Star Productions, Visionary Media and Buzzco. His tenures with each outfit were highlighted by innovative, acclaimed production, much of it in the area of advertising but plenty in the category of TV series and specials. As one example, he received credit and praise for a lot of the splashy animation that the cable channel MTV employed in advertising and imaging when it debuted.
Though I worked with Buzz and considered him a good friend, I'm not up to itemizing all his credits. I'll have to leave that formidable task to someone else and just write about the work we did together in the eighties. We met when I wrote a prime-time animated special that one of Buzz's companies in New York (I was never sure which one) animated for CBS. Shortly thereafter, Buzz relocated to Hollywood for a time and you might be interested in the story of how that happened. I guess this is okay to tell now.
Hanna-Barbera was doing shows for CBS in the eighties and at one point, they delivered a string of notably substandard shows, well below the level that was expected of them. Angry CBS execs told H-B, "We're not buying any more shows from you!" H-B execs understandably panicked at the thought of losing about a third of their marketplace. They begged, pleaded, cajoled and promised to do much, much better next time if CBS would grant them a next time. In particular, they pledged to not send any more CBS shows to a particular lousy subcontracting firm overseas.
CBS gave them one more chance and bought another show from Hanna-Barbera. For reasons which were never clear (I heard a half-dozen explanations) H-B sent that show to the particular lousy subcontracting firm overseas.
When the first episodes were delivered, CBS exploded. They said that not only would they never buy another series from Hanna-Barbera, they weren't even going to accept or pay for that one that was currently in production.
Again, there was much panicking and grief in the executive offices on Hanna-Barbera. There was more pleading, more cajoling and a lot more promising. When it all settled down, CBS agreed to continue with that series if (big, expensive IF) H-B would pour megabucks into producing the show and if they would hire an animation producer CBS trusted to spend all that money, spend it wisely and deliver a quality show. That producer was Buzz Potamkin.
He moved to L.A., set up an operation, finished that series and produced several others, mainly for H-B but some also on his own and a few in co-production with CBS. Probably the best one he did was The Berenstain Bears, which was on from 1985 to 1987, winning much critical praise and several award nominations. He was later involved in several of the more popular shows developed for Cartoon Network including Johnny Bravo, 2 Stupid Dogs and Dexter's Laboratory.
Someone else will have to list all the other shows he did. I just wanted to tell that story because it speaks of the Buzz Potamkin I knew, who was a man of utter integrity both in handling money and in handling the creative reins of a show. I wish we had more like him and am sorry to lose the one we had.
Longtime readers of this blog are well aware that I feed feral cats in my backyard. There have been a lot of them over the years and though I feed them often, there are times when they're crowding my feet and howling because I can't get the cans open fast enough, and I practically turn into the Soup Nazi yelling, "No Mixed Grill for you!"
The last few years, there have been four around — Lydia, Sylvia, Max and The Stranger Cat. And if I haven't posted anything about them in a while, it's because they've pretty much stuck to their usual routines of eating and sleeping, or sometimes sleeping and eating. The eldest of these (and the father, I suspect, of Sylvia) was The Stranger Cat and as you've seen in my headline, he has left us.
I don't know how old he was but I've been feeding him for at least ten years and he was not a kitten when we met. I told the vet I took him to on Monday that I thought he might be 15. "At least that," she said, adding that he might be as old as 20. Feral cats don't live that long in urban environs. In rural, yes. But for a cat to make 20 in the city with cars is like you or me hitting 105.
I took him to the vet because he got very old in the last week or so, the way a human who's 90 but looks 70 might have a little stroke and suddenly, overnight, look 90. Two weeks ago, I watched him chase a squirrel not for food but for the sport. But this past weekend, he was limping and sleeping all day and not eating…and the vet basically charged me $80 to tell me he was very old. She could run tests, she said, but all that would do is tell us what was wrong…and what was wrong would not be treatable.
I wasn't there for his departure. I'm in Muncie, Indiana tending to the needs of another cat. But Carolyn is at my house and she stayed up with him most of the night, making sure he had water and trying to get him to eat. When he refused freshly-prepared chicken livers, she knew the end was near, and when she finally went to bed, she knew he wouldn't be alive in the morning. When I left for the airport yesterday morning, I said goodbye to him feeling much the same way.
He was an enormously good cat who never caused me any trouble. He didn't even cause much by dying since he did it the day my gardener comes. I phoned Francisco and he said he'd be over shortly and he'd take the body away in a dignified manner. The last time one of these cats died, I had to stuff it in a Banker's Box and leave it out at the curb for several days before the sanitation people came by to pick it up.
Carolyn tells me the other cats look sad. So does she. So do I. Odd how these strays show up at your back porch one day and become part of your life.