Monthly Archives: February 2013

Something about the latest Firefox update is incompatible with something in the latest WordPress update. WordPress is the software that makes the pages that comprise this website.

When you come to this page, Firefox is supposed to check to see if things have changed since the last time you came here. If not, it displays the version of this page you downloaded on that last visit. If something has changed — say, if I've posted a new item — then it downloads the new version and displaces the previous version. For some reason, it's not doing this for everyone and a few friends report they aren't seeing any messages I posted since about last Thursday. If they reload the page a few times though or flush their caches, all is right with the world.

A slightly less severe version of the problem has to do with the videos I embed. I have all of them in their proper places but — again, in a few cases — they turn up in the wrong windows. This is again a problem of your computer "remembering" stuff it's supposed to forget. Try refreshing the page a few times and see if that doesn't solve matters. If it doesn't, try this: Pick out a post with the wrong video displayed. Click on its subject line and you'll be taken to the individual page for that item. It should have the proper video in place. If it doesn't, one refresh oughta make things right. Then read forward or backwards a little and all should be right with the world. I assume the next release of either WordPress or Firefox will come about soon and will correct this.

If you ever have this problem with a browser other than Firefox, pretty much the same solutions apply. There is absolutely nothing I can do on my end…and you're probably having the same problem with other sites but if they don't update as often as I do, it may not be as noticeable.

After Stan Laurel died in February of '65, a man named Gene Lester proposed to CBS that there be a big, prime-time special honoring Mr. Laurel and also Mr. Hardy. Lester was an acclaimed photo-journalist, a friend of Stan's and a devout fan of The Boys, and what he had in mind was an hour or two of clips and "talking head" tributes telling the story of the World's Greatest Comedy Team. As the star of a then-current CBS series and a friend of Laurel's, Dick Van Dyke was the obvious host.

The notion was accepted and an hour-long special aired on November 23 of that year and apart from Van Dyke hosting, it in no way resembled Lester's concept. He'd been shoved aside and it had been transformed into a jumble of a variety special with many stars including Lucille Ball, Phil Silvers, Tina Louise, Bob Newhart, Louis Nye, Audrey Meadows…and somehow, they even got Cesar "he's always available" Romero to appear on it. A few of those folks even had a slight connection to Laurel and Hardy. Most did not and the material they performed had little to do with the honoree. The show aired in Red Skelton's Tuesday night time slot and was taped on the stage Red used with most of his crew involved.

Here's poor video of the show in two parts. The most interesting thing in it — and there isn't a lot of him in here — is Mr. Keaton, making what was probably his last appearance. Keaton died a little more than two months after this special aired…and it wouldn't surprise me if he'd asked that no such "salute" be done for him. Fans of Laurel and Hardy seem pretty unanimous in disliking this tribute and many mentioned that a different salute — one assembled and hosted by Chuck McCann for local New York television — did the topic justice and was pretty much what Gene Lester had in mind. I wish I could show you that one but here's the one CBS ran…

Vince's Pizza was located on Westwood Boulevard about three blocks north of Santa Monica Boulevard. That's a generic image above, not a photo of an actual Vince's Pizza. I doubt any memorabilia exists of the place and as you'll see, I don't know much about it. It was the place my family got pizza in the sixties and it was pretty good pie. They had a drive-thru window but I don't recall my father ever actually driving-thru.

Vince's went away some time in the early seventies, replaced by a drive-thru dry cleaner. Two things did it in. One was a sudden boom in pizza places. Once upon a time, there were so few of them that people actually went to Piece O' Pizza, which served very poor pizza. For those who knew what pizza could/should be, Vince's was a godsend. It was the only place to get a quick, good take-out pizza for miles around…and then, one day when there were others, it wasn't. But there was another, obvious reason for Vince's success when it was a bustling business establishment.

Located right nearby — at the intersection of Santa Monica and Westwood Boulevards — there were three (at times, four) huge liquor stores. It was like the Liquor Store Capital of the World on those corners…and people sometimes wondered why they were all congregated there. After all, it's not like one liquor store sells entirely different liquor than another liquor store. Why so many competitors all bunched together?

The answer is that once upon a time, there was a law that prohibited the sale of beer, wine or spirits within a certain distance of the U.C.L.A. campus and therefore the student housing. The intersection of Westwood and Santa Monica was just outside that distance.

Most nights but especially Saturday, those three or four stores were packed with students. If there had been ten stores there, they all would have done good business. And what did all those students do after they'd picked up beer and booze and were headed back to the frat house? They drove through Vince's and picked up a pile of pizzas!

My parents learned not to brave Vince's on a Saturday or even a Friday night. Other evenings, if you went early enough, were fine. But one Saturday night I recall, we phoned in to order a pizza that we'd come pick up and the lady on the phone basically told us not to bother. "We're running at least an hour behind," she said. "Our ovens can only cook so many pizzas at one time." We took her advice and went in the other direction for Chinese.

The law forbidding alcohol from being sold closer to campus was repealed and, of course, other pizza places opened — including, shrewdly, one at the corner of Santa Monica and Westwood — so Vince's lost most of its advantages. All it had to offer was great pizza and there were a lot of places you could get one of those in the area. And maybe, now that I think of it, it wasn't so great. It was just greater than the pizza at Piece O' Pizza, which wasn't hard to be. My mother could achieve it with a Chef Boyardee mix.

Our friend Jerry Beck (aka The World's Foremost Animation Authority) has reopened his old blog, Cartoon Research. Resume going there to read important articles on the world of cartoons…like this one by another friend of ours, Keith Scott, on the true history of the character Foghorn Leghorn. A lot of folks think Foghorn was just a rip-off of the Senator Claghorn character on Fred Allen's radio show. Eventually, he was…but not at first.

Anyway, it's good to see Jerry's still blogging away. If you're interested in animation, his is a must-visit site.

Joan Walsh writes about the reaction to Seth MacFarlane's Oscar hosting. One good point she makes is that MacFarlane probably did pretty much what the Academy expected of him…and with material that was approved and rehearsed and put on the official Academy TelePrompters. There's a tendency to think of the host of one of those things as the sole perpetrator of whatever he or she perpetrates. Not so…ever.

Ms. Walsh notes that there once was a time when we had a continuity of Oscar hosts; when you could expect that next year would be the same guy as this year. The change to what we have now has probably led most of them to go into it there with the sense that it's their one and only chance to host the Academy Awards so they'd better promote themselves all they can while they can. My notion of an ideal host is a guy who'd keep things moving and would keep the focus on the awards and their winners…but everyone would probably then view him as not making much of a contribution. That's why a lot of potential hosts wouldn't use Bob Hope or Johnny Carson as their role model. They'd use Ricky Gervais. I doubt Mr. MacFarlane is too troubled by the suggestion that he was too outrageous and offensive for Establishment Hollywood.

The premise behind picking him was apparently to attract young male viewers and I wonder how much impact the host can ever have about something like that. The star of the show last night, for instance, was never going to be its host. It was always going to be Argo and Lincoln and Anne Hathaway and the salute to James Bond and such. If you tune in for the host, you're going to be disappointed because most of the show is about the award for Outstanding Production Design and the host becomes largely irrelevant. Maybe what the Academy needs to do is to just get someone who can do a sharp, not-about-themselves monologue and then get out of the way. It also wouldn't hurt to have someone whose presence would lend an air of importance to the proceedings but I'm not sure who that might be in today's Hollywood. Maybe the Geico Lizard.

The Great Hotel Room Lottery for Comic-Con 2013 is tomorrow. Before then, you should go to this page, read up on how it works and decide on some hotels wherein you might wish to lay your sleepy head.

They have more rooms than ever available this year. This probably means they'll all sell out in twenty minutes instead of fifteen…but if you get shut out, don't despair. More will become available later. Each year, I get angry/weepy calls and e-mails from friends who didn't get a room and who somehow think there's a reason to complain to me. I can do nothing to help you, people. A few weeks later, almost 100% of these folks manage somehow to secure a place to stay and all is well. Happy hunting!

Conan O'Brien and Andy Richter visit Google. This was recorded between the time O'Brien left The Tonight Show and before he started his series on TBS…

Through the miracle that is TiVo, I watched the Academy Awards in about a third of its 3.5 hour running time so it wouldn't be fair for me to review it in full. I caught most of Seth MacFarlane's spots and thought he did fine when he wasn't talking about himself and not-so-well when he was. When you get your chance to host the Academy Awards, try to remember that the most important thing about the ceremony is not that you're hosting it.

Once we got past the sketch about what a bad, offensive host MacFarlane was, things seemed to go well enough. It felt like a few too many musical numbers but that's not a huge complaint. As I say every year, I think people are way too harsh on these telecasts. Folks say it's too long but it's not supposed to be a short show. There are lots of awards to give out and lots of commercials to show. People also complain about the winners as if there was something the producers of the Oscars could do to change them.

Really, they're just the Academy Awards. Unless you're up for one or working on the broadcast, they shouldn't matter much to you. And if they seem too long, get a TiVo.

I continue to battle with Time-Warner Cable on the matter of my mother's cable TV service. A day or two after she passed away in early October, I phoned up to have it turned off. Within another day or two, her cable feed ceased but the billing did not. They continued to debit her credit card for a month or two until I noticed and called up and said…well, pretty much what you'd expect me to say. In response, I was told I did not have the power to cancel her cable TV service. I had the power to cancel her other utilities. I had the power to cancel her bank accounts and move all her assets into mine. I even had the power to sell her house, which I think we're doing this weekend. But turn off her HBO? Nope. I would have to fax or bring in a copy of her Death Certificate, they said.

I said I had not yet received her Death Certificate. They said they would have to keep billing her until I got it and brought it in but they once they had proof, they would terminate service and refund whatever had been paid since her passing. I pointed out they had already terminated service; that we were being billed for a service we no longer received. They told me no, the cable was still active. Since there's no longer a TV in that home, it wouldn't be easy for me to go back and check but at the time I took the TV out, the cable was not functioning like a good cable should.

I canceled her credit card (something I had to do anyway) so they could no longer bill her phantom cable service to it. They began sending her larger and larger bills with attached threats, the main threat being that they would turn off her cable TV and there would be a substantial penalty for later reinstating it. Still, I need to get this cleared up. When I finally obtained Death Certificates, I carried a copy over to a Time-Warner office where I got a lot of blank stares and employees wondering why I was handing them something like that. I explained and a nice-but-bewildered lady behind the counter went off to ask a supervisor to supervise her handling of this crazy person who had for some reason brought in information about his dead mother. The supervisor came over, looked at the account info on a computer, then asked me if I was there to make a payment.

I told her no, I wasn't. She warned me that I was in danger of having my cable TV turned off. I told her it wasn't mine and they'd already done that, then I explained all about the Death Certificate. She said no, service was still on at that address…and her evidence of that seemed to be that I was still receiving bills for it. Finally, she called someone somewhere and discovered I knew what I was talking about — admittedly a rarity in my life but oddly undeniable in this case. They accepted the paper and said they'd forward it to the appropriate department which could cancel the billing and issue a refund.

Apparently, they did forward it to that person but when I got another bill yesterday and called up about it, I was told that that person was on vacation and would act on it shortly. Being "on vacation" is not an excuse for you not paying your bill but it is an excuse for them not issuing a refund.

Somehow, I doubt this will be cleared up soon. I've decided it's not at all about shutting off my mother's cable service. I've decided it's a plot by the Time-Warner Corporation to get even with me for conning DC Comics into publishing Fanboy.

I always liked the theme song to the Road Runner cartoon show. Here it is in Korean…

As I've probably made clear here, I think we have a real Health Care Crisis in this country — one that's bankrupting some people, killing others and even bankrupting and killing a certain number. If one armed man was doing a hundred-thousandth as much damage, we'd have every cop for miles around working overtime to stop him and bring him in. But we let the Health Care problem continue, at most applying small band-aids like "Obamacare." What I like best about Obamacare is that it does something, as opposed to every single one of the alternatives proposed which have all been to do nothing but pretend it's something. I also like that Obamacare opens the door to doing more.

Recently, a journalist I like named Steven Brill authored a 26,000 word article for Time that deals with the simple question of why everything costs so much when you go to a hospital. You may have seen him the other night on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. If you didn't, watch the extended interview that was posted online. If you did see him, watch it also because so much more of interest is said in this version.

Here's a link to the entire article. It's long and I'm not suggesting you not read it. I will suggest you not read it until you have the time and stomach to be outraged about the situation. But I will quickly summarize it for you…

Hospitals charge so much because they and their suppliers want to make as much as possible and they know you have no choice but to come up with the money.

That's pretty much it. If you're brought in with a broken leg and it would cost them $500 to set it, they could charge you $500 or they could make a 100% profit and charge you a thousand. So they weigh the pros and cons of each alternative and then they decide to charge you $12,000 because they know you're stuck. It is also significant in Brill's piece to note how little of these windfall profits go to the actual doctors and nurses who treat patients. Most of it goes to super-well-compensated executives, drug companies or suppliers of medical equipment.

As I said, it'll make you mad. This is not about Free Enterprise and The Free Market. There can be no Free Market when you're carried in on a stretcher and the folks treating you can do whatever they feel proper to do to you and then hand you an inflated bill for it. For a market to be free, both buyer and seller have to have the power to opt out. No, this is all about gouging the ill and injured.

An hour with Stephen Colbert, recorded at Google when he was pushing his latest book…