Monthly Archives: December 2012

I would like to slightly amend my previous pessimism that we're ever going the change gun laws in this country. I said there that the only thing I could imagine that might spur some action would be the emergence of some brave, charismatic leader to champion Gun Control…and by the way, I don't think that person could be Barack Obama or anyone thought of as a liberal partisan. It would have to be someone who could "win" without it being a "win" for the Democrats.

But it occurs to me there's a more likely (sadly) scenario that could get a Gun Control bill passed: More shootings.

Let's say the tragedy in Newtown now has 75% of the country thinking something needs to be done. That's probably high but let's say it's that. A week after all the funerals, it'll be 65% and a month later, 55%. 55% ain't gonna do it. It would take a steadier stream to the point where people were genuinely worried that sooner or later, someone would go crazy with an AK-47 in their vicinity.

Even then — here comes more pessimism — what law would they pass? It would be a token effort…something about more background checks and about how you can't buy a clip that holds 100 rounds of ammo. You'd have to buy two fifties. New York Mayor Bloomberg is in favor of Gun Control. He's the guy who thought he was making a dent in the problem of people drinking too much Pepsi by making them buy two Mediums instead of one Large.

Right now, the folks calling for Gun Control strike me as being not unlike the folks yelling to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Okay, so show us the proposal. Draw up a rough summary of what you would do, get some experts to sign off on it and put it online as a PDF for much of the country to read and rally behind. That would be a starting point for a real change as opposed to something cosmetic. But I don't even expect that to happen. Not even if we have one Newtown a month.

A few minutes with Carl Reiner on a 1967 episode of The Merv Griffin Show. The lady is Genevieve, a French singer and actress who did very little singing or acting, at least in this country. Jack Paar found her charming in a ditsy way and would have her on often, usually to make fun of her English and her unawareness of certain American customs. When Paar left the airwaves, Merv inherited her and she was frequently in his guest chair. This was back when people went on talk shows when they weren't plugging anything.

We get confused here once in a while. A week or so ago, I posted Tales of My Mother #8 here. This morning, I opened up the folder in which I keep drafts of postings I'm working on, saw it there and forgot I'd already posted it. So I did a bit of a rewrite and expanded it somewhat, then posted it here. Informed of this by many of you, I've gone back and deleted the earlier version. The ninth installment will follow soon…for the first time.

My mother was a very intelligent woman and until about the last six weeks of her life, she was in possession of darn near all her mental faculties. As I've mentioned here, I spent much of the last decade hearing many of her many doctors hint or even state that she wouldn't be around much longer. She outlived all those predictions and even outlived one of those doctors.

In the last few months, two things made me realize they were the last few months. One was her primary care physician Dr. Wasserman changing his tone. He never said "Your mother's going to die soon" but he didn't have to. To be a good doctor, you obviously have to know a lot about how the human body works and what kind of pill or procedure fixes this or that. You also have to know how to talk to patients and their loved ones; how not to exaggerate or underplay what you know with reasonable certainty. I once asked my own doctor if in Medical School, he had to attend classes called "Breaking Bad News." He said yes, sort of. They weren't called that and there weren't enough of them…but it was a skill he had to learn just as sure as he had to learn how to stop bleeding or cure migraines or write illegible prescriptions.

Dr. Wasserman is real good at speaking between the lines. What he said and what he didn't say made me realize that the end was near for my mother.

The other indicator was that she was starting to get confused about things that had never confused her before. What day of the week it was. Names of people she'd known for years. I had long since taken over all her finances and bill-paying but about two months before she passed, she wanted to sign a certain check herself. And when she couldn't figure out where to sign, that was a bad indicator.

Before that, I used to tell friends, "She's a smart lady but when she gets sick, she gets stupid." That was why she needed me around. When she was well, she was fine at running her life and getting things done. She might need me or one of her endless stream of caregivers to drive her somewhere and then push her about in a wheelchair but she always knew where she was going and what to do when she got there. It was mainly her eyesight, not any mental deterioration, that prompted me to assume checkbook duties. When alert, she could take care of herself…and did.

She insisted on living alone after my father died. Other arrangements were proposed and rejected. Throughout four decades of married life, she'd lived by his timetable — and for a long part of that, mine. She got up when it was time to get him off to work and/or me off to school. She ate when we ate…and between his food preferences and my food allergies, it was usually a matter of eating what we would/could eat. When there was but one TV in our house, it was usually set to what he or I wanted to watch. Later, when I got a set for my room, the one in the living room was sometimes tuned to what he wanted to watch but not always.

Shortly after we lost him, I sat her down and told her I wanted her to be self-indulgent; to make wishes that I could make come true. She no longer had to cater at least in part to his needs and since I was living elsewhere, mine were of near-zero concern. It was time, I told her, to reorient her thinking to what she wanted and only what she wanted. She said, "Let me think about this for a few days." A few days later, she told me, "I've decided I want to live on my own schedule. I want to eat when I want to eat, sleep when I want to sleep, watch what I want to watch. Would that be okay with you?"

It was, of course, okay with me. How could that not be okay with anyone? So to the extent her eyesight, limited ability to walk and a few doctor's orders would permit, that was how she lived…and in the same house, with my old room converted to a den where she could smoke and watch TV at any hour.

She couldn't get out of things like having to go to the hospital at a certain time for a doctor's appointment but to the extent she could, she eschewed all demands to do anything when she didn't want. It was understood that when we had a date for me to take her out to dinner, she might just call me at the last minute and say, "I don't feel like it tonight."

For years, she'd loved Cirque du Soleil and I took her to see it whenever one of its traveling companies ventured near. One time, I called her and mentioned that a new Cirque show would be in Santa Monica in a few months and I was going to order tickets. "Don't get one for me," she said — to my great surprise. I was expecting joyous anticipation and when I didn't get it, I asked how come…

"Because the night your tickets are for, I might not feel like going. If you buy me a ticket, then I have to go." She still loved Cirque but she loved even more having no demands on her time.

That was why she recoiled in horror whenever I mentioned the dread words, "assisted living." She accepted the need to have a caregiver around a few hours a day, though she resented having to get up at a specified hour to let one in. She hated the idea of having one on the premises full-time and would often send one home early. The idea of relocating to an Assisted Living Home was even more dreaded. "I'll die before I let that happen," she'll said…and I knew she would. It was bad enough that she had to spend as much time as she did in the hospital with all those strangers around telling her when and what to eat.

Those who observe the time stamps on these postings note that I keep odd hours. In her final decade, my mother's were odder. She was as likely to be up watching TV at 4 AM as at 4 PM. She ate meals so irregularly that she couldn't classify them as breakfast, lunch or dinner. They were just meals.

I arranged with two nearby restaurants to deliver to her and to charge everything — the meal, the delivery fee, the tip — to my credit card. She just had to call one and say, "I'd like chicken tonight" (or shrimp or beef or…) and within the half-hour, a man would bring a freshly-prepared, low-sodium dinner to her door. The problem with this system? She might not feel like waiting the half-hour. Or she might not get the craving 'til after 10 PM when both restaurants closed. So she'd pop a Stouffer's frozen entree into the microwave and that would be dinner…or maybe breakfast.

MSNBC used to air three hours of Don Imus from 3 AM to 6 AM on this coast. Who would be up watching at that hour? Often, my mother. She didn't like Mr. Imus but she liked the lively discussions on his program and enjoyed, she said, when his guests often put him properly in his place. In 2007, he got himself fired because of one particular remark that many took as racially-offensive. My mother was disappointed to lose her middle-o'-the-night entertainment and a bit bewildered. As far as she was concerned, this was like firing Don Rickles for calling someone a hockey puck. Imus, she felt, said something stupid and insensitive about as often as he threw to commercial. Why did that offensive remark doom him when the eighteen the day before hadn't? Or the 143 the previous week?

She never warmed to his replacement, Joe Scarborough. She thought he was just as miserable a human being as Imus but Imus at least didn't pretend to be anything else. Imus also didn't talk so much about the boring minutiae of Congress and he gave his guests a fair shot at telling him he was full of crap. She found her way to other 3 AM programming (often QVC or some other channel via which she squandered my inheritance) and when I later told her Imus was back on another channel, it was like, "I'm over that." In my ongoing monitoring of my mother's mental state, I thought that was a good sign.

How can you tell when it's getting close to Christmas? When Evanier posts this…

There are 87,482 new articles on the Internet today about what to do about the utter availability of guns in this country. The smartest one I've come across is this one by Joshua Holland.

The article might give hope to some that there's a way to pass sane Gun Control legislation that would even be backed by a majority of firearms owners. I don't think so. When you come across a stat like one Mr. Holland cites about how Americans favor banning 100-round magazines by a margin of 63-34, you might think such a law is possible. I don't for two reasons. One is that the 34 are louder and more adamant than the 63 and our elected leaders are just plain more afraid of the smaller group. Before most representatives would support such a law, they'd have to see some recurring evidence that you can get turned out of office for not supporting something like this. The 34% are fierce enough on Gun Control issues that they will expend the funds and energy to defeat their political foes. The 63% are not.

And I also suspect it's not really as lopsided as that; that some in the 63% are in favor of the other guy not being able to buy such ammo and that they assume they'll find some way to get theirs and outgun him. I also think that the 63-34 margin exists in a world where the 63 assumes it's never really going to happen and that if it ever came down to an actual vote, a lot of them would be persuaded by the argument that, you know, this is just opening the door for all those people in the government you don't trust to confiscate and ban all your ammunition.

I would love to be proven wrong about this but on the topic of Gun Control, I think anything short of total pessimism is overly optimistic. Still, read Holland's article. The only thing I could imagine that might turn all that sanity into passable legislation is if someone prominent — as famous and charismatic a gun owner as Charlton Heston — emerged as a spokesperson for responsible gun owners. There are plenty of wise, sane pistol-packers out there but they have no rallying point, no leader, no spokesmale. That's what it would take and even that would only cut my cynicism about this by about a third.

I like Howie Mandel and I like game shows. I liked Deal or No Deal up to a point, that point being when it started to feel repetitive and manipulative. It also began to feel like a good half-hour entertainment padded out to an hour.

He has a new show on — a limited-run series that for me started at that point. That it also looks and feels very much like Deal or No Deal (minus the prize models) adds to the feeling of déjà vu. Mandel spends an awful lot of Take It All telling us how exciting it is and how much more exciting it'll be after the next commercial break…so don't go away now. If it really was that exciting, he wouldn't have to keep telling us that.

Take It All is based on an old party game sometimes called White Elephant, sometimes called Greed, sometimes called something else. The first round has five contestants and one gets eliminated per round until the last round is two folks going head-to-head. In the first-through-penultimate rounds, the first contestant picks a colored icon from the "Dream Screen." That gives them a fabulous prize and they find out what it is but not what it's worth. The second contestant then has the option of taking that prize away from them or picking an unknown quantity from the Dream Screen. The third contestant can take one of the previously-selected prizes or an unknown from the Dream Screen, etc. If someone wants to take your prize away, you can lock it (once per show) and keep it or you can take one of the other contestants' prizes or you can go pick from the Dream Screen.

After everyone has a prize, the person who picked first can take someone else's prize, presuming they don't lock it. Then prices are revealed (in an agonizingly slow and teasing manner by Mr. Mandel) and whoever has wound up with the least-expensive prize is eliminated and goes home with bupkis. Nothing. Zero. Not even a case of Turtle Wax. The others move on to the next round.

In the last round, the two survivors go head-to-head. Each has three huge prizes plus an unknown (to all, including them) quantity of cash which could be as high as $250,000. In a moment, they will be asked to secretly lock in one of two selections: Keep Mine or Take It All. It's like Rock/Paper/Scissors in that neither knows what the other has chosen until both are revealed simultaneously. Then…

• If both pick "Keep Mine," then each contestant goes home with his or her three big prizes plus their cash amount.
• If both pick "Take It All," they both go home with nothing: No prizes, no cash, no Turtle Wax.
• If one picks "Keep Mine" and the other picks "Take It All" then the "Take It All" person takes it all: He or she gets their prizes, their opponent's prizes and both cash amounts. That has happened a few times this week.

So what's wrong with this? Well, for starters, up until the last round, it's all high in guesswork, low in strategy. For another, there's the same problem that Million Dollar Drop had. On that show, contestants started with a million dollars and then the whole game was about how much of that they wouldn't lose. Most players lost everything in a game that didn't feel entirely fair. On Take It All, you meet five interesting players and then watch as they amass huge prizes…and then three, four or all five of them lose everything. So it becomes more a game about losing than about winning.

On Deal or No Deal, it was possible to go home with almost nothing but almost everyone had several opportunities to take a nice piece o' change and quit. They kept getting banker's offers, sometimes in the six figures, and they had to decide to grab the cash…or go on and see if the offers would go up. That's an interesting dilemma for a person to be in, one some of us can identify with. We all go through life facing issues where we have to decide when to play it safe and when to gamble. Very little in Take It All reminds me of any game I play in my day-to-day existence.

The closest they come is in that endgame. There's a moment there which I'm guessing the producers feel is the real "gold." The two finalists talk and try to convince each other with some plea that goes roughly like this: "It would mean so much to me and my family if I could just go home with what I've won so far. I'm going to pick 'Keep Mine' and if you do too, we can both go home happy. So please, please…trust me and pick 'Keep Mine.'" This may be sincere but is probably not. Before and after the exchange, Mandel reminds us that under the rules of the game, it's okay to lie.

Thursday night, one woman feigned crying, said she was going to select "Keep Mine" and begged her opponent to trust her and do the same. She did that but her opponent didn't. He pushed "Take It All" and took all her prizes and cash away. Friday night, another woman made a similarly impassioned plea: She would pick "Keep Mine," she said…and if he did likewise and they both won their prizes and loot, she would donate the cash amount to his favorite charity. He trusted her. She picked "Take It All" and wiped him out.

In both cases, someone won around a half-million bucks by lying and convincing someone to trust them…then kinda screwing them over. I suppose that does parallel a situation some of us encounter in the world but I don't really want to watch lying and betrayal succeed. That's pretty much what it takes to win big.

So far, Take It All isn't doing badly in the ratings. NBC is. Their prime-time schedule usually finishes in fourth place for the night. But they have to put something on and Take It All is getting better numbers than many programs which certainly cost more to produce…so after its little tryout week is up, the network may well decide to order more. I suspect folks will tire of it even faster than they've tired of all these prime-time game shows before long but it might be around for a while. So if you're good at getting people to trust you and then knifing them in the back, you might want to apply.

David Frum on the notion that "This is not the day to talk about Gun Control." I think he's right that something should be done but I don't believe anything will be done.

Our Pal Christine Pedi is back — and more Liza than ever…

Another mass shooting. Sometimes, I think we should put $100 in a jackpot fund every day there isn't one and then we all guess when the next will occur and whoever's closest gets the money.

And we all know the drill. One part of the country will say — and is probably already saying — let's talk about Gun Control! Another part will say that in respect of these tragic, senseless deaths, now is not the time to discuss such things. The latter group, of course, thinks it's never time to discuss such things. But there will be a lot of arguing and nothing will change.

Here's Ezra Klein with some interesting stats and facts that also won't change anything.  In fact, they won't even be believed by anyone who needs to change their mind in order for there to be change.

Back in this posting here, Garrie Burr inquired about the origin of a catch-phrase that turns up on old episodes of The Jack Benny Program (on radio) and in several Warner Brothers cartoons. It's "That's what the man said, that's what he said, that's what the man said." I was stumped so I asked if anyone out there could help Garrie (and me) out.

Quite a few folks (too many to list) thought it came from this exchange in the Humphrey Bogart movie, The Big Sleep…

Floyd Norman mentions The Big Sleep then adds: "However, I think it goes back a bit further. Way back when I was a kid, my parents often took me to "colored movies," and black comics were always using the line, "Dat's what the man said, dat's what he said, he said it!" I found this line so funny I often used it in stuff I was writing. I used the line recently in a cartoon I was scripting. I dunno. It always made me laugh."

Several folks including Philip Grecian wrote that it was a catch-phrase of Eddie "Rochester" Anderson on the Benny program…and he certainly said it there a number of times. The question is whether he was referencing some earlier source.

Dick Halsey writes, "This Google Books link has a reference on page 83 to the quote in the subject. It was given as a catch phrase for the black maid character Beulah on the Fibber McGee and Molly Show.

Richard Pontius says, "Fanny Brice/Baby Snooks leaps to mind with that quote but I can't find any reference and can't say I recall hearing her say that, so the synapses may be misfiring."

Carl Pietrantonio writes, "It sounds awfully like a recurrent phrase used in Aaron Copland's Abraham Lincoln, performed over the years and voiced by different celebrities including Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck, among others. I've no idea if that is actually where it comes from and do not have a recording at hand right now, but got to thinking and maybe that's part of it. It was briefly vaguely popular so who knows."

And there were a few other votes that struck me as even wilder guesses. You can all decide for yourselves but I suspect its origin is forever lost in the antiquity of the black equivalent of on-stage burlesque comics. It just sounds to me like the kind of thing that would have come from there. If anyone has some solid evidence, let me know.

Fred Kaplan talks about the withdrawal of Susan Rice for the post of Secretary of State. I dunno if she was the best-possible candidate but don't you get the feeling that the opposition wasn't about her qualifications or Benghazi; that it was about some Republicans' need to prove they can still beat Obama at something?

If I were Barack Obama, I think what I'd do is nominate my second choice for each position and let Republicans tear that person apart. Then once that nomination was dead and they had their "win," my first choice would sail right through.

There are a lot of articles online that ask the musical question, "Just what it is the Republicans want Barack Obama to cut before they'll agree to make a deal on taxes and the debt limit?" The best one seems to be this one by Ezra Klein.

For what little it may be worth, here's my answer to the question. I think that candidly stated, the G.O.P. demand to Obama would go something like this…

We demand that you slash Social Security and Medicare and that you do it in such a way that most folks will blame you, not us, and we can then use it as a campaign issue against Democrats!

Or something like that. I also think it's not going to happen.