Monthly Archives: September 2012

Several folks have written to explain to me about the mysterious phone calls I mentioned here. This message from Jeff Beton sounds like the correct answer…

What you're experiencing reminds me of a job I had a few years ago. I worked in a call center briefly where we would call people at random around the country and ask them questions which were calculated to identify what kinds of goods or services they might be apt to buy. Then our company would sell those leads to other companies. So we'd find out you weren't happy with your car insurance and then we'd sell your number to a company that would call you and try to sell you car insurance.

The problem with working on something like this is that a lot of phones weren't answered by human beings so if we just called different numbers, we'd be spending a lot of time listening to phones ring or getting voice mail and it would waste our time. So someone came up with a device that wastes your time instead. It was programmed with a list of numbers to call. There were millions of them. It would call ten or twelve of the numbers at the same time and search for live people for me to talk to. When it found one, it would route that call to me and I would talk to that person and try to get them to take our survey. If other calls in that batch were answered by humans, it would simply hang up on them and note that number as a likely prospect to call back later.

What you're experiencing is probably a company that's making 20 robo-calls at once. The first call that connects to a live human is routed to the survey taker. The rest get hang-ups. You're getting the hang-ups.

That sounds like it, especially my brief connect yesterday to someone who sounded unprepared to be talking to me. Okay: Unless someone comes up with a better explanation, I'm buying this one. Thanks to Jeff and all the folks who sent in answers, many of which were quite similar.

A beautiful bit of card manipulation by magician Shawn Farquhar…

I figure someone who reads this site can probably explain it…

About twice a day, sometimes more often, I receive a mystery call on my cellphone, always from the same number. The area code is 866, which is a toll-free area code. The first three digits of the number are 869. Googling the entire number tells me thousands of people are having the same experience with this number. It rings. You answer it. There's no one there. And two seconds later, it disconnects.

There has been one exception. Today, I answered it. I said "Hello" and I heard a man's voice. He seemed a bit startled, like he hadn't expected anyone to answer. Then…

HIM: I'm sorry. I seem to have dialed the wrong number.

ME: You seem to dial this wrong number several times every day.

Then I heard him start talking to someone else and the line went dead. Five minutes later, the number called me again with no human attached.

Googling tells me it's some sort of marketing survey company but no one explains what they're surveying or how. So far, all they seem to know is that when they dial my number, I answer. Do they really need to test this premise twenty times a week?

What am I missing here? How is it of any benefit to them to place those calls to me? Someone here will know.

That's a photo of William M. Gaines, who became justly famous as the publisher of MAD magazine. But MAD was still probably just a promising comic book back when this picture was taken. Gaines was then the publisher of the EC line of comics which included Tales from the Crypt, Shock SuspenStories and other horror and crime titles. They sold well but Gaines was condemned as a seller of filth that would corrupt children. There were articles and books and TV discussions about perhaps banning the kind of things Gaines did…and in April and June of 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held public hearings in New York to determine what, if anything, Congress should do about "those awful books."

The hearings were led by Senator Estes Kefauver (D-Tenn) and historians suggest that Senator Kefauver was quite certain that the public exposure would pave the way for him to secure the nomination of his party to run for president in 1956. There was a time when it looked like this would happen. He won many early primaries that year but eventually, Adlai Stevenson won more. In a move which no candidate has tried since and no candidate ever will, Stevenson decided to let the delegates to that year's Democratic Convention select a running mate for him and they chose Kefauver. The ticket lost to Eisenhower and Nixon in a landslide.

Kefauver lined up a slate of witnesses that would prove, he expected, that comic books were harmful and that they had to be banned, lest they contaminate the children of America. He also sought to prove — and he was somewhat right about this part — that it was a dirty business with organized crime very much involved in the distribution end of things.

A friend of Gaines urged him to ask to testify and defend his business. I hope I never have a friend who gives me advice that rotten. Gaines gave poor answers and allowed his inquisitors to hammer him. He later blamed his poor performance on a diet drug he was taking that left him loopy when he needed to be sharp. He did more harm than good to his cause and also painted a large bullseye on his tochis, making himself as much a poster boy as Alfred E. Neuman. When most of the other publishers rallied together to announce they'd "cleaned up" their industry, it became imperative to oust Bill Gaines from it. Lucky for him, he had MAD to fall back on.

The archives of New York radio station WNYC are online and they've got some audio from the hearings. This link will take you to a page where you can hear around two and a half hours of it. First up is Dr. Frederic Wertham, author of many a book and article about how crime and horror comics were corrupting an entire generation. Then comes Gaines with an insufficient rebuttal, which is not to suggest a sufficient one was possible in that setting.

Gaines is followed by a trio: Newspaper comic strip artists Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly and Joe Musial who are basically there to explain that what the Senate is investigating has nothing to do with them. The audio of this is especially frustrating since one cannot see the demonstration of how comics are drawn, nor understand why the Senators needed to see this.

This link will take you to a page which has just the Wertham and Gaines testimony. If you go there, beware of the text which has some factual errors, like referring to the EC comic book Panic as Prank, and stating that Gaines turned MAD from a comic book into a magazine to "…escape the new strictures imposed on comics." Actually, he made the change to keep his first editor, Harvey Kurtzman, from leaving.

And this page will play you some of the other testimony in the hearings. I haven't waded through it yet but it doesn't seem to be of great interest.

Nice to know that even back then, our Senate had the capacity to waste time and money doing nothing to fix trivial problems which they didn't understand in the first place.

Daniel Larison writes the same article that a lot of folks are writing about Mitt Romney's unclassy (and unpresidential) statement about the Libyan rioting.

I get the feeling that many years ago, some focus group study told Romney that one thing voters like — and this may just have been the kind of voters he thought he could harvest — is a candidate who refuses to apologize for anything. There are a lot of people in this world who confuse never admitting you're wrong with always being right and some see it as indicative of strength of character. You and I both know that it shows the opposite but we're smarter than a lot of people.

So Romney titled his book No Apology and he's gone around accusing his opponents of apologizing as if that alone is wrong, regardless of what you're apologizing for. And this time, he got it so wrong that he should, of course, apologize…but can't. George W. Bush, the man who couldn't name a single mistake in eight years of a presidency where a lot of things didn't happen the way he wanted, had much the same shortcoming.

By the way: I apologize for saying I'm smarter than a lot of people.

Johnny Carson gets a visit from Groucho Marx. This is from around 1966, give or take a year and is most interesting because of what Groucho is wearing…

Wanna know happened today in Libya? Fred Kaplan explains it all for you.

Actually, I think I slightly disagree with Fred on one point…and it's a domestic point, not one about foreign policy. He wrote…

Imagine if Romney had called President Obama, asked how he could be of assistance in this time of crisis, offered to appear at his side at a press conference to demonstrate that, when American lives are at risk, politics stop at the water's edge—and then had his staff put out the word that he'd done these things, which would have made him look noble and might have made Obama look like the petty one if he'd waved away these offers.

He thinks that would have helped Romney. It would have with some voters and if that was Fred's point, I agree. But I think it would have sunk him with the Obama-Hating part of his base — not to be confused with the voters who merely feel Romney would do a better job. But there are those who hate every single thing about Obama and believe every single negative thing about him…and Romney can't win without those people. They don't want to see Romney link arms with the president. They want to see him trash the guy every possible way even if it means making up phony "facts" to do so.

This is a must-click. The world's first color motion pictures have been found by the National Media Museum, 110 years after they were shot. Thanks to Greg Berg for letting me know about this.

When the Garfield comic strip started in 1978, it was about a fellow named Jon Arbuckle who owned a cat named Garfield. Jon has a roommate named Lyman who had his own pet, a frisky little pup named Odie. But after a few years, the strip's creator Jim Davis decided Lyman was extra baggage or unnecessary or something. Lyman disappeared and Odie became, by default, Jon's other pet.

Every so often since, Lyman pops up in the background of a Sunday page…or there's one Garfield video game where you prowl through a haunted house and at one point, you may find Lyman chained-up in the basement. Die-hard Garfield followers (there are a lot of 'em) have been known to speculate on the whereabouts of Jon's one-time roomie and they even write their own amateur stories about what became of him.

Well, I like Garfield so I wrote my own amateur story about what happened to Lyman…and since I'm also one of the producers of The Garfield Show, it airs this Friday. It's an extra-long episode that fills two half-hours of the series and they air one after the other on The Cartoon Network. In most time zones, the first half hour airs at 10 AM and the second follows at 10:30.  If you miss it, Cartoon Network will be running these two half-hours again.  And again and again and again and again and again.  But for reasons I won't pretend I can understand, they won't always be running them back-to-back like this.

The voice cast consists of Frank Welker as Garfield, Gregg Berger as Odie, Wally Wingert as Jon, Julie Payne as Liz, Laura Summer as Minerva and Drusilla (or maybe Drusilla and Minerva), Stan Freberg as Dr. Whipple, Fred Tatasciore as Dirk Dinkum, Misty Lee as Angie, all of those people in other supporting roles —

— and in the role of Lyman…well, some of you may recall my frequent plugging of my pal Frank Ferrante, who tours America with an uncanny show in which he plays Julius "Groucho" Marx. I decided Frank might make a good Lyman. So Lyman he is. He was quite good in the role even if you don't take into consideration that it was his first real cartoon voice job.

I don't plug a lot of what I do on this site but I'm plugging this. Hope you catch it and like it — in that order.

From the 1979 Tony Awards telecast: Robert Klein and Lucie Arnaz perform the title song from They're Playing Our Song, which ran a long, long time on Broadway. I saw the show in out-of-town tryouts and enjoyed it, largely on the strength of Mr. Klein's performance. I didn't think the book by Neil Simon was up to his then-current standards, sorta liked the music by Marvin Hamlisch and thought the lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager were far from Broadway-worthy…but audiences didn't flee. Matter of fact, despite a lack of Tonys and a few very bad reviews, the show did pretty good, notching over a thousand performances. This number is about as good as the show got…

Here in a nutshell is the Romney-Ryan plan for the economy: They're going to ruthlessly slash government spending. They won't touch Defense. In fact, they'll spend more on Defense. They won't cut Medicare. There are one or two other sacred areas they won't touch.

But they'll cut hundreds of billions in other places.

Where? They won't tell you. If they did, it would be used against them during the campaign. That's another way of saying that even a lot of their supporters wouldn't vote for them if they knew.

But if elected, they'll start slashing. One suspects it won't be the wealthy or those who have a powerful lobbying presence in Washington who will suffer. Here's Thomas B. Edsall on the non-specifics of their plan.

I remember thinking this commercial seemed kinda creepy back in the sixties…but it really feels wrong now. I think that's Hal Smith announcing.