Monthly Archives: July 2013

I mentioned recently that I was starting to kinda think Paula Deen was getting a raw deal. This brought a lot of e-mails from folks urging me to read this article that proved she wasn't or that article that proved she was. I'm afraid I can't generate the interest to click, read and formulate a firm view in this matter. I also can't bring myself to read enough about the George Zimmerman trial to have a suggestion of what should or will happen.

My sense of the latter when it occurred was that Trayvon Martin was this innocent kid and Zimmerman was this trigger-happy vigilante who was too eager to presume a black guy was up to no good and to force a physical confrontation. I'm not sure how much of that I got from the facts and how much came from reading online defenses of Zimmerman by folks who clearly had some racial distrust and maybe fantasies of being confronted on the street some day by dark-skinned hoodlums and blowing them away. Maybe that's not valid but I just don't have the energy to read all about this one and align my emotions with one side.

I find that lately, my distrust of most news reporting makes me wonder how much we really know about these matters. Back when I was way too interested in O.J. Simpson trials, I read a lot of articles and books that would have left me with false info 'n' impressions had I not read a lot more. My sense of the Zimmerman trial is that I couldn't or shouldn't read one or two articles about it and formulate a viewpoint; that I need to read a lot and compare and contrast and mull for my view to have much validity. And I don't think I want to commit that much time or interest.

Not that it's unimportant. It's probably a very important trial whose outcome will matter a lot to this country. But it is unimportant that I, as one individual, have a strongly-held opinion about it. I'm not on the jury.

As I read news on the web and watch CNN or MSNBC or Fox, I see people who are constantly urging me, directly or indirectly, to take sides on every matter. Some of them desperately want me to take their side but they all want me to care about every single thing they report on. And I can't. I just can't.

Longtime readers of this blog are sick of me plugging my pal Frank Ferrante, who tours in his stunning re-creation of You-Know-Who called An Evening With Groucho. It's Frank and his highly-talented, long-suffering pianist Jim Furmston on a stage for close to two hours…and by the time Frank sings "Lydia the Tattooed Lady," you will long since have forgotten that you're not seeing the one, the only Groucho miraculously back among the living. The guy is really that good.

When he played in Southern California recently, I promoted it and told you it was the last time you'd be able to see him in these parts for a year or more. Well, I lied. Or more accurately, plans changed. Frank will be doing one performance the evening of Saturday, July 27 at the Pasadena Playhouse, which should be an ideal venue for his show. I dunno if I'll be able to make it but if you can, you should. Details and tickets are to be found on this page. Highly, as always, recommended.

Folks around here are upset (and understandably so) about an incident that occurred the other day down in Hawthorne, which is about ten miles south of where I live. A man named Leon Rosby was walking his pet Rottweiler and he happened upon a crime scene. He put the dog in his car. Police officers ordered Rosby to turn down a loud radio he was playing and when he didn't comply, they handcuffed him. Rosby had some history with the cops and one recognized him and considered him a "troublemaker."

When they started to lead away his master, the dog leaped out of the car and began barking and snarling at the officers. One of them then drew his gun, fired several times and killed the dog…

…and a neighbor recorded the whole thing on video. (I'm not going to link to it. It's not hard to find if you have some desire to view it and I'm kinda sorry I did.)

All the newscasts I saw said something like, "This was the worst thing you could ever see." Personally, I can think of worse things…like, say, if police had killed a human being instead of a dog. They do that too, you know. But killing that dog was still pretty awful. You have to wonder: Wasn't there something else they could have done there? I'm also wondering if the officer would have been as quick to do that if he'd realized it was all being caught on video.

I have to own up to a slight prejudice here. I've had some bad encounters with dog owners who were utterly blind to the fact that their dogs aren't well-behaved children who never do anything wrong. It's bad enough when those well-behaved children crap on your lawn but several times in my life, I've been attacked or injured by dogs — once, enough to require professional medical treatment — by dogs who should have been kept on a tighter literal or figurative leash by their owners. And in every case, I blame the owners. My first reaction is to blame the owners.

The most recent time was two or three years ago. Earl Kress and I were over at Farmers Market, just walking somewhere. From out of nowhere, a dog — and it may have been a Rottweiler — ran up and for no visible reason, biting at random, sank his teeth into my arm. I had on a heavy jacket and he didn't break the skin but it was still rather startling and disturbing. Moments later, a woman appeared to grab his leash and I heard a lot of "He never does this kind of thing" and "He's a good boy" and the one I really liked…"He didn't mean it." I wanted to say to her, "How do you know? Maybe he loves the Spirit comic book and doesn't like what Sergio and I are doing on it!"

I wasn't hurt but there were bare-armed, bare-legged children all around and if the pooch had gone for one of them instead of me, something pretty horrible would have happened. What annoyed me most about the incident was the woman's attitude that she was in no way responsible for what her dog did, no matter where she took him.

Getting back to Hawthorne: Killing that dog was just terrible. Rosby should have put the window of the car up far enough that the dog could breathe but couldn't get out…but that's not a capital offense, punishable by executing the Rottweiler. Hawthorne Police are said to be "investigating" and I expect that they'll wind up pointing to something in a manual that says what that officer did was utterly according to procedure. At worst, he may have decided a bit prematurely that the dog was dangerous but he had to be trusted to make that call.

I wouldn't expect anything more to come of it except Rosby suing the police and worsening of the already-bad relationship the force there has with the citizens of Hawthorne. Oh, and I'd imagine the officers down there are being told, "If you need to draw your gun or rough someone up, make sure there's no one around who has a video camera and a YouTube account!"

This is an amalgam of two clips I posted earlier — the video of the opening number at this year's Tony Awards, plus the video of director Glenn Weiss in the booth, calling shots at a mad pace. Most TV directors go through their entire careers without ever doing something like this on live television with but one chance to get it right. I think Mr. Weiss did an astounding job. Everyone who worked on that number did.

Watching the two videos in sync, you may get an idea of what a TV director did in the old days…and does now in fewer and fewer instances. Very few shows are live these days and when they aren't, it seems to make sense in most instances to just record the feeds from all the cameras and then select the shots later when they can take their time and try many different combinations. Weiss obviously had all his shots carefully planned during the number and he had his script marked to indicate to cut to Camera 4 on this word, Camera 7 on that word, etc.

But when they hit the end of the song, the cameras are deployed to get certain shots of the stage and audience during the applause — which I think went on a lot longer than they'd expected — and that's when Weiss starts ad-libbing, looking at what his cameraguys are giving him and making split-second decisions. I'll bet he wishes he'd cut back to Neil instead of to that audience shot of Megan Hilty so he could have gotten Mr. Harris's line — "Well, that's our budget" — completely on-screen but other than that, I don't see a single misstep in the whole thing…

Twenty famous lines from movies that most people misquote. And Oliver Hardy usually said, "Well, here's another nice mess you've gotten me into," not "Well, here's another fine mess you've gotten me into!"

Someone named Derek Langille has compiled an interesting Flickr page (actually, at the moment, two pages with more probably on the way) showing double-page spreads that Jack Kirby did for comics over the years. They all seem to date from 1970 and it's worth noting that a large percentage of these were done during a period when some in the industry were saying that Jack was washed up and didn't care; that he was just hacking the work out for a paycheck.

That was never true of Kirby. He was capable of doing work that wasn't up to his standard but he wasn't capable of not trying. That was one of the things I learned from the man and have tried to apply to what I do. I realized early-on that it wasn't possible to equal Jack's brilliant imagination and skill but it was humanly possible to work just as hard as he did.

Anyway, there they are…featuring the inking of Mike Royer, D. Bruce Berry, Vince Colletta, Frank Giacoia and one or two others…but mostly Royer. I'd say more about them but they really speak for themselves. What amazing artwork.

It is my belief that 100% of people who claim to have psychic or similar abilities are frauds. They are occasionally frauds who believe their own steer manure but they are still frauds.

You know those houses in cheap neighborhoods with the illuminated sign out front that says PSYCHIC and then has a phone number? Kyle Swenson describes some of the scams that get run out of houses like those.