Monthly Archives: April 2013

If you don't understand this commercial, it's only because you never saw a cartoon show called Wacky Races…

Matthew Yglesias thinks we should stop complaining about air travel. Most of his arguments are right as far as they go but he doesn't address my two big gripes about the airlines. One is the incredible expense and hassle you incur when you need to cancel or change a flight. The other is how when you have a problem, there are very few employees to talk to and most of them don't know anything. I'd agree that when things work, they work pretty well…but they don't always work.

A British company called Tesco is giving up and closing (or if they're lucky, selling) 200 Fresh & Easy markets they'd opened in California, Nevada and Arizona. The premise of these stores, in case you never went to one, was to offer a kind of friendly atmosphere in which you could buy a mix of familiar brands and products specific to Fresh & Easy. It was kind of like a combination of Trader Joe's, Whole Foods and Ralphs…and the first time I set foot in one, I wanted to like it. My big problem was that they just plain didn't stock a lot of the items I wanted. There's nothing "Easy" about a market when after you shop there, you have to then go to another market to get what you need. The "Fresh" part seemed to be true but again, they had a pretty sparse selection of produce. Also, the self-service checkout lanes were confusing and almost every single time I used one, it malfunctioned and I had to wait until a member of the too-small staff came over and put things right.

I'll give them this: The stores were clean and there was a friendly atmosphere in the ones I visited. I also liked their meat selections and if I still ate desserts, I would have loved the on-premises bakery at the Fresh & Easy out in Burbank. I just couldn't find most of what I wanted in them and it looks like I wasn't alone in that.

10 Words You Mispronounce That Make People Think You're an Idiot.

Today on Racial Sensitivity Theater, we have a scene from the 1940 Charlie Chan movie, Murder Over New York: The police round up every Hindu in town…plus one Stooge…

Looks like even the watery, wouldn't-do-much Gun Control bill is withering away for lack of votes. We are, of course, not surprised. Maybe they'll try another one that will do even less to control guns and maybe it'll do so little that the N.R.A. types will think, "Ah, let's back this one so people will think something was accomplished and will give up trying." But I don't even expect that.

Nothing that will actually do anything is going to pass. Not now. Not after the next deranged shooter or the one after or the one after. Even if 90% of the country wanted it, our lawmakers would still be more scared of the 10% working to unseat them than they would be of angry voters among the 90%. Name me the Senator or Representative who ever lost his or her seat because they voted against Gun Control.

As readers of this here blog know, my mother passed away last October at the age of 90. Friends keep asking me if I'm all right, if I'm consumed with sorrow, etc. Easy answer: I'm fine with it. Honest. I miss her…but I missed so many things about her while she was alive. For the last decade or so, I missed her being able to walk more than a few steps at a time and even those required a walker. I missed being able to take her to places she loved. I missed her being able to read or cook or do any of a dozen other things that once brought her pleasure. The last six months, I really missed her not being in the hospital and not being deeply depressed about her condition. If you miss a person that much when they're still alive, it's hard to miss them more after they die.

There are so many obits on this site that I get the occasional e-mail from someone asking for tips on how to cope with grief. I'm only an expert on what works for me…and what works for me is this: Just getting on with things, resuming normal activities and not feeling I have to make myself physically or emotionally ill to prove I cared about the departed. After all, you're going to get there eventually. Why not just go there now?

Given her physical ailments and constant hospitalizations, it's not like my mother's death was a surprise…or that there wasn't an aspect of relief about it. She was only months (and not many months) from being totally blind and requiring 24/7 care. She wanted very much to go before those things happened and I'm sure that for the most part, she was glad she did. So I could take comfort in the timing, plus I had all those things to do: Papers to file, calls to make, her house to take care of. This past weekend, I think I checked the last thing off that list.

As I mentioned here earlier — here, for instance, and later here — I decided to sell her house, the house I grew up in. The process was pretty simple. I determined who the top realtors were in that area…the ones who really knew the neighborhood and were selling homes there. I selected five and interviewed each (plus one couple who crashed the interviews) and made my selection. I do not think I would have gone terribly wrong with any of the five but that's a hunch. I know I didn't go wrong with the guy I chose.

His name is Chad Lund. If you ever want to buy or sell a home near where I grew up, here's his website.

I've written here in the past of the beauty I find in anyone who does what they do about as well as it can be done. Usually, I'm talking about great jugglers or great dancers or great comic book inkers…but hey, why not great realtors? Chad told me what he would do and it was all within the range of Possible. As a person who likes reality in his financial dealings, I appreciated that he did not promise to get me an unreachable price. I also appreciated the attention. He sells houses at about the same pace I knock off blog posts but always had the time 'n' patience to explain everything to me and to answer what must have been some very naïve, repetitive questions.

It would have been easy to dog it once he had the listing. The house was going to sell no matter what he did…and it's not like he needed to impress me with his efficiency so I'd let him sell other homes I grew up in. I just had the one. Still, I was impressed with how "in control" he was of the process and how even after selling as many dwellings as he's sold, he's not bored with it all and sloughing off the details. He got back to me in a flash every time I called and everything worked out pretty much the way he said it would.

Can't ask for better than that.

A very nice family purchased the place. I'm going to go over there later this week with some old photos I have and explain to them all the history they can stand. They've invited me to come back any time if I want to see what they've done with it…and I may change my mind but I don't think I do.

It stopped being my house — or even my mother's house — around 6 PM, last Saturday. Legally, it stopped belonging to anyone named Evanier the previous Wednesday when escrow closed but I still had things to get out, mostly for friends. Carolyn got my mother's dresser and a desk (the kind they call a "secretary") in the living room. My assistant Darcie got the dresser from the back bedroom… the dresser my mother bought to put in there after I moved out of that room with all my comic books. My mother's (and my) former cleaning lady Dora got her refrigerator. My former assistant Tracy got the old paintings in the garage and a wonderful old egg beater. My mother's friend Karen who lives next door and kept an eye on her got an area rug and her cat cookie jar. My friend John the architect, who helped her often, got her old O'Keefe & Merritt stove.

While John was picking up the stove, he met the new owners and I think they're going to hire him to design some new rooms, including perhaps a second story they hope to add. I like that, just as I know my mother would like that Carolyn had her dresser, Dora had her refrigerator, etc. Nothing big went to people she didn't know and a few pieces of her house, like that great urn she had out in the front patio, are now parts of my house.

I hired two men and a big truck on Saturday to deliver many of those items to their recipients and once they were all distributed, I felt like a large chapter of my life was over. And the last dangling matter undangled itself yesterday when I received a check from Time-Warner Cable. It took months to persuade them to cancel her cable TV account and months more to get them to refund fees they'd charged her after she had passed. It was actually easier to get her two banks to acknowledge her death and do what had to be done than it was to get Time-Warner to stop billing her for HBO.

Not long after she died, a well-meaning friend offered me some advice. Noting that I was not consumed by grief, she predicted I would be once the paperwork was done and I'd checked off the last item on my "Things to Do Because My Mother Died" list. She said, "Now, all that stuff is busy work and it redirects your mind from your loss. When it's all done, there'll come a moment when it'll hit you." Well, it's all done and no such moment arrived. Instead, there was a sense of relief that I was finished with that…and a sense of gratitude to my mother for setting it up as neatly as she did. A lady at one of her banks looked over the paperwork my mother had left and said, "I've never seen anyone prepare so neatly and make it so easy for the person in your position."

That was how it worked with us. She took care of me for the first part of my life and then the responsibilities reversed and I took care of her for the last part of hers. Then after she died, we kind of took care of each other.

The folks at Snopes debunk some of the misinformation being dispensed about the Boston Marathon Bombing.

Bob Elisberg (whose blog I hope you're visiting on a regular basis) sent me this link to a production number from the 1986 Emmy Awards. It's a mess of TV stars singing snatches of — or merely walking on to — their shows' theme songs. I think it's all prerecorded and lip-sync'd so I dunno what went wrong with Carol Burnett's audio at the end. But remember when TV shows had memorable theme songs and they could do something like this?

For a few decades now, the oft-brilliant Harry Shearer has produced a weekly pro bono radio program called Le Show. It's one of those things I listen to from time to time and enjoy enough to think, "Hey, I should make a point of catching this every week." And then I get too busy to do that. The last few years, I've downloaded it in podcast form and every so often, find time to run another one through my ears. Downloading helps a little but I must admit I have a folder full of as-yet unheard ones. It is a great series, though.

When I did listen on one of those things called a "radio," I listened on KCRW, a public station out here in Santa Monica, which was Harry's flagship station. The "was" is because yesterday, they told him they're dropping the show, effective immediately. I doubt that will cost him any audience since anyone smart enough to appreciate the show is smart enough to snag it off the Internet…and it will continue in other cities. Still, he's looking for a new Los Angeles outlet and I'll let you know if he finds one. In the meantime, you can hear each installment here.

In his announcement, Harry muses about having a nightly show before, I assume, an even larger audience. I dunno why the MSNBC folks or some others I could name haven't snatched him up for just such a mission. Maybe he's just too smart for the room.

So…a nonpartisan, independent panel has reviewed interrogation and detention programs in the years after 9/11 and concluded that "it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture" and that the nation's highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it. Moreover, they say the use of torture has "no justification" and that it "damaged the standing of our nation, reduced our capacity to convey moral censure when necessary and potentially increased the danger to U.S. military personnel taken captive." They found there was "no firm or persuasive evidence" that such interrogation yielded info that could not have been obtained by other means and that much of what was extracted via such means was "unreliable."

It's pretty damning but there will be no prosecution of those who did it. Instead, we'll have a lot of people saying, "Yeah, well, but if there's even a remote chance it would prevent a Boston Marathon-style bombing in my neighborhood, we have to do more of it."

Like everyone else in this country (except, we can hope by now, a few official-type investigating officers), I don't know who was responsible for yesterday's ghastly bombing in Boston. And like less than half the people in this country, it seems, I know I don't know. It's distressing how many folks seem to have decided it absolutely, positively, proven-beyond-all-doubt has to be…well, whoever they're most afraid of. How many acts of terrorism now have been initially blamed on certain foreign villains and then later it turned to be some home-grown psychopath?

A little while ago, a so-called Terrorism Expert was on CNN saying the kinds of things that self-proclaimed experts say when they don't know anything and feel they have to say something. He's sure it was a group like Al Qeada. Why? Because there were two bombs and a "lone nut" (his term) couldn't have managed two bombs. Ergo, it had to be a whole group.

I'm not sure why one person couldn't plant two bombs. Wasn't the 1996 Olympic Park Bombing committed by one guy who'd been going around planting multiple explosive charges? Why is it so impossible for a guy who could make one and plant one bomb to make and plant two?

Years ago when I was immersed in Kennedy Assassination Conspiracy talk, I found this interesting. There was a theory that Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone, had killed John F. Kennedy. There were elaborate theories that involved hundreds, even thousands of people who got together, killed J.F.K. and then managed to keep the secret within their very large circle. But I never saw anyone with a theory that two or three people had killed Kennedy. It was always one guy or a whole mob.

It seemed to me that most of those who held out for the whole mob had worked backwards to get there; that they'd started with the assumption that The Crime of the Century had to be about something way bigger than any motive a gnat like Oswald could have had. So then the narratives diverged: Was it a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was a patsy? Or a Big Conspiracy in which Oswald was utterly uninvolved? There were dozens if not hundreds of theories within those two categories. But there were no theories involving Small Conspiracies.

I have no real point to make here…just my observation that folks are too quick to make the leap from Lone Nut to Big Conspiracy. Right now, we shouldn't be jumping to either because we don't know. And some of us even know that.