Monthly Archives: May 2012

Number two hundred and forty-three in a series…

12 Celebrities And Their Stunt Doubles Because People Seem To Enjoy This Sort Of Thing.

Bruce Bartlett explains why Mitt Romney is sounding more and more like he wants America to think of him as the fiscal heir to Bill Clinton.

I took this in a mall food court the other day.  It was in front of a Wetzel's Pretzels…

Michael Kinsley visits China.

Here's a video of Imogene Lynn, a popular big band singer back in the days of big bands and big band singers. She's here with Ray McKinley and his Orchestra but she sang with a lot of them, most notable Artie Shaw and his band. At some point in her career Ms. Lynn stopped singing as herself for the most part and began singing for others. She sang for most of the Riding Hoods who popped up in Tex Avery's MGM cartoons of the forties. She also dubbed a lot of leading ladies in movie musicals who couldn't sing…Leslie Parrish in Li'l Abner, for instance. Here she is singing for herself…

Two readers of this site have reported a glitch where they read the posts on the first page and then when they get to the bottom and click "Older Posts," it takes them back a week. This is not a problem I can fix, especially since it doesn't happen on any of my three computers or my iPad or my iPhone. It may be a bug in WordPress, the software that drives this site. If it is, they'll probably get around to fixing it but there's nothing I can do.

Here's a tip if you're having that problem. You can read posts here by the page or by the post. To go into one-post-to-a-screen-mode, just click on the Subject of any post and you'll go to that post and only that post with links at the bottom so you can read forward or backward. That should avoid the jumping problem and sooner or later, it will go away for you. Sorry.

Number two hundred and forty-two in a series…

So just when my pal Ken Levine and I are making lunch plans, he starts blogging about his favorite hamburgers…and two of his favorites (Five Guys and Cassell's) turn out to be two of my favorites. Matter of fact, I agree with all his evaluations except…

What he says about the Apple Pan in L.A. serving a wonderful burger was true, say, twenty years ago but it wasn't quite as true my last few visits there. Not that it isn't still a place worth visiting. I suspect the folks who started the Johnny Rocket's chain went there many times to figure out how to configure their restaurants…which, by the way, are also pretty good.

I've passed on Umami Burger and Father's Office. Father's Office has this policy (a gimmick, it sounds like) that they will allow no substitutions or alterations in how they serve their burgers. You have it their way. I have oodles of food allergies and I believe every one of their hamburgers as served contains something that could kill me dead on the spot. Friends have told me the servers get real snotty with you if you even mention changing anything…so I'm not particularly eager to see if they'd make an exception for me. Every Umami Burger listed on that establishment's menu is the same way. The ingredients list on each reads to me like it says "grilled onions, gruyere cheese and cyanide." I'm told they will consider alterations but not without a lot of attitude.

There's a great way to deal with the problem Ken notes of the lethal chili on a Tommy's Burger. You have them leave the chili off. It's a much better burger without it. This is also true at Carney's and also probably at every other place in the world.

The best burger Ken says he ever had in New York was in the Parker-Meridian hotel. I've never been there but the best burger I ever had in New York (Brooklyn, to be completely accurate) was at Peter Luger's Steak House. Served only on their lunch menu and well worth the shlep.

Lastly, I'll second what Ken says about Cassell's down in Koreatown — and it too is only available for lunch as Cassell's closes at 4 PM each day. Something I learned during my few years of investment in a restaurant — a famous hamburger place not as good as the places Ken and I both now like, I sheepishly admit — was about one key element. The superior places aren't superior just because of the meat they buy or how they prepare it or what they put on it, though all of that is essential.

The thing that kicks a good place up into the strata of all-time faves is that one person on the premises who scurries around making sure everything is right. It's the guy who grabs up the phone at least three times a week, calls a supplier and yells, "Murray, what the hell are you doing to me with these crappy potatoes your guy delivered?" If he's really good, he builds up a relationship with Murray of trust or fear or both such that Murray doesn't dare send him the crappy potatoes in the first place.

The old Cassell's, back before Mr. Cassell sold it off to a Korean family then died, was the kind of restaurant you'd drag friends to. It was visually unimpressive and inconveniently located with no place to park, plus you usually had to wait in a line that snaked outside to the curb. The rest of your party would look at you like, "Why did you bring me here?" But it was worth it because they'd taste their hamburgers, "get it" and respect the heck outta you for knowing about such a great place.  And of course they'd be pondering, "Hmm…who can I bring here?"

The current Cassell's still serves a great burger — one I like with a minimum of toppings. But it's not special the way it used to be and really all that's changed is that they don't have that guy. They don't have Alvin Cassell running around, personally tasting the lemonade, making sure his customers were all happy and then phoning Murray to holler about substandard spuds. And in restaurants — in anything in life, really — you need to have that guy around.

Congrats to Tom Richmond, caricaturist extraordinaire, for taking home a Reuben Award this evening at the National Cartoonist Society shindig in Las Vegas! It's not easy to draw TV and movie parodies of MAD magazine where the bar was set by the likes of Drucker and Davis. You gotta be damn good and obviously, Tom is. I couldn't be there for the ceremony but I'll bet this award made a lot of people happy, including but not limited to Tom.

By the way: I used to say that my partner Sergio Aragonés is the only cartoonist in the world who draws himself looking uglier than he actually is. I think Tom also qualifies in that area and I can't come up with a third.

I happen to like Vice-President Joe Biden. Yes, he occasionally makes verbal gaffes — though at least half the time when I see one reported, it doesn't seem to be as big a deal as folks are making it out to be. And even if they were all foot-in-mouth moments, he averages about one every two weeks, whereas George W. Bush said something dumber in just about every speech. (I'm not sure, by the way, that Obama's recent evolution to support Gay Marriage was hurried up because Biden had said something he shouldn't have said. Seems to me it was a deliberate way of paving the way for the big announcement.)

The other day, Biden gave a moving address to an audience of folks who'd lost loved ones in military service. I don't recall ever seeing someone with a rank as high as the Vice-President ever speaking so clearly from the heart and so extemporaneously. It's about the price of war but it's also about coping with any kind of death in the family. Here it is and it runs twenty minutes…

And if you'd like to see the entire program — which includes remarks by others and runs 45 minutes — here's a link to watch it on the C-Span website. It's quite a thing to view at any time but especially on Memorial Day Weekend.

Thomas Friedman presents an interesting view of Barack Obama…as a man who is very good at being President of the United States and not so good at making people aware of his accomplishments in that job. And I'll quote one paragraph that I think is especially true…

"Obamacare is socialized medicine," says the Republican Party. No, no — excuse me — socialized medicine is what we have now! People without insurance can go to an emergency ward or throw themselves on the mercy of a doctor, and the cost of all this uncompensated care is shared by all those who have insurance, raising your rates and mine. That is socialized medicine and that is what Obamacare ends. Yet Obama — the champion of private insurance for all — has allowed himself to be painted as a health care socialist.

I think I said this in a blog post before and if I didn't, I meant to. The day this country passed a law that said that people who can't pay would be treated for free in an emergency room was the day we got Socialized Medicine. And I think it was a good and necessary thing, though not as good as a real program. Better would have been a plan that enabled those folks to go to doctors before their conditions got so grave that they had to go to an emergency room. What they get there is much more expensive and nowhere near as efficient as preventative care or early detection.

That law, in case you're interested, was the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, passed in 1986 by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, then signed into law by Ronald Reagan. That made it possible for someone to get free medical care which someone else would pay for. How is that not "Socialized Medicine?"

Number two hundred and forty-one in a series…