Monthly Archives: September 2013

I need to stop thinking about Syria and I'm determined not to have a firm opinion about it. If I did, it would probably run along the lines of these pieces by Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan. But I don't.

It is possible, maybe even probable that this blog will be down for a few hours later tomorrow evening. Maintenance work and such. Don't let it panic you.

A lot of people — and I've been guilty of this myself at times — formulate their political views by looking at the folks they distrust and despise and then advocating the opposite. They're against whatever Obama is for or they're against whatever Dick Cheney is for or they're against whatever Bill Clinton is for or they're against whatever Rush Limbaugh is for…and so on.

Boy, this Syria thing is making it difficult for them.

I keep forgetting to watch Kevin Pollak's Chat Show, a weekly videocast that consists of Kevin Pollak sitting at a table and talking with a very interesting person who's in or around the comedy business. It keeps slipping my mind but when I do watch, I always enjoy it and think, "Hey, I oughta watch this more often." Here's a long, recent conversation with Dick Van Dyke. I sometimes skip over Mr. Pollak's intro chat with his staff but you might enjoy every minute of it…

The arguing we're now seeing about Syria in this country does little to move me off my belief that no one in Washington knows what we should do there; at best, they know the public position they should take to improve their own chances in the next U.S. election. I don't know what we should do and I'm very glad that I don't have to have an opinion. My default when the issue of going to war comes up is: "No, we shouldn't." I think history has shown that that would have been the best course of action on most occasions when we did. So I think I'll stick with that even if it does put me on the same side as those who wanted to go to war in Iraq and were dead-wrong in every single one of their predictions and even their facts.

If you find the whole matter confusing — and clearly, many in Congress who'll be voting on it are clueless — here's an article by Max Fisher that gives the simplest possible explanation of why there's all this chaos in Syria and how there's really nothing we can do to make it better. Warning: The simplest possible explanation isn't all that simple. And that may be a large part of the problem right there.

• My view on Syria is the opposite of John McCain's. Will somebody please let me know what it is today?

• Listening to Donald Rumsfeld's advice on Syria is like…well, like listening to Donald Rumsfeld's advice on Iraq.

Well, I got my CBS-owned stations back on my Time-Warner Cable and my TiVo finally realized they were back. I re-took my Season Pass for Craig Ferguson but apart from his show and the occasional Letterman, I don't find myself watching much on CBS at all.

While I was at it, I told my TiVo to grab the first week of Arsenio Hall's new late night show which debuts next Monday. He's already achieved something miraculous in not only coming back from the dead but getting a pretty good lineup of station clearances. A year or so ago if you'd asked the experts, most of them would have told you that Arsenio was old news; that stations wouldn't fall in place for a guy with an outta-date track record. It's been nineteen years since his last talk show went off the air.

But here he comes with close to 95% of the nation sold. I have no idea how well he'll do or how he'll impact the Jay/Dave/Jimmy race. He may not matter one bit to it. A theory is floating around show biz that he won't matter if he succeeds but that he will if he fails. At some point soon, Mr. Leno will be a free agent to begin entertaining offers for a new late night show. Since we have no access to his contract, we don't know for sure when that would be…but his contract reportedly binds him to NBC through next September and it's not unusual for deals to allow the performer to negotiate with others beginning six months before a pact's expiration.

The success of The Arsenio Hall Show might convince the industry that a new late night talk show not from one of the three oldest networks is viable. Then again, Arsenio would be sitting in a lot of time slots that wouldn't be available to a new Jay show. On the other hand, the failure of The Arsenio Hall Show might convince the industry that the market is glutted with talk shows and there's no room for another. Then again, depending on when the show failed, all those time slots might be available at the time someone was trying to sell a new show with Leno…who does, after all, have a current, impressive track record. Just another thing to think about.

What I find interesting is that absolutely no one is talking about a talk show that would be much different from what's already on. Arsenio's advance publicity is not promising anything different. They seem to even be promising the same show that was successful for a time back when it was on against (and taking audience away from) Johnny Carson. His first week guest list seems to be the same folks you see on all the shows: Lisa Kudrow, Magic Johnson, Penn & Teller, etc. He's even having on George Lopez, who for my money was the worst talk show host in history.

Arsenio, by contrast, was a pretty good one. But with interest in that kind of show trending downward, you'd think someone would be offering up a show in that time slot that didn't look like all the rest. Yeah, you'd think that, wouldn't you?

Dougie McCoy never quite "made it" as a professional cartoonist, at least to the extent that his enthusiasm and passion seemed to warrant. He actually drew pretty well and his work was very popular in small press publications and on local projects in and around Nebraska. Sadly, he was trapped in that sad Twilight Zone of talent: Too good to give it up and not quite good enough to get the kind of work he wanted to do. So he continued to support himself working at a fast food restaurant — I think he was even the manager there — and he drew in his spare time. Correct that: He drew and he drew and he drew and he drew…

He was a lovely and funny man and he drew lovely and funny people along with lovely and funny animals, all very much alive and colorful. He'd save up to go to cons and diligently show his most recent work, of which there was always plenty, to cartoonists he admired like Sergio Aragonés, Scott Shaw! and Stan Sakai. He even went so far as to ask me for advice.

I don't do many critiques. You squander time on too many kids who don't want to listen and/or learn…whose attitude is along the lines of "Yeah, yeah, just tell me what I need to do to get hired." Dougie wasn't like that at all. He listened to everything, strained to understand it, and you could tell that he was going to race home and do his darnedest to apply what he'd learned. I remember sitting with him for an hour at one con in Kansas a few years back, examining his latest efforts, telling him what I thought he'd done right and wrong. There was plenty of right — enough that I figured he wasn't too far from getting steady work in his chosen profession. Sad to say, he hadn't quite made it there when he died over this past weekend at the age of 50.

Doug came out to the Comic-Con in 2009 and something happened there which Mr. Shaw! just mentioned on Facebook and said was possibly the high-point of Dougie's life, at least as far as cartooning was concerned. It happened at Quick Draw!, that event I host where we get three of the swiftest cartoonists up to sketch rapidly and rise to challenges in front of an audience. That year, I tried a new stunt which involved bringing three more cartoonists up for a few minutes. I'd arranged for the second three to be there in the audience — Bobby London, Stan Sakai…and there was a third but that person was a no-show.

I needed another cartoonist in a hurry and I saw Dougie sitting in the front row and thought, "He'd do fine." Unlike the other two, he hadn't expected to be called to the stage. He was just one of about 3,000 people we had in that room as spectators. I walked up to him, turned off my microphone for a moment and asked him if he had the courage to get up there and draw alongside Scott, Sergio and Floyd Norman. It wouldn't have surprised me if he'd said no but he didn't. He gulped and said, "Yes," pronouncing that word in about five syllables. That did take guts and as you'll see in the video below, he did fine, easily holding his own alongside five top pros who were up there with him.

After the event, there was milling and much signing of autographs. I was scribbling my name on program books, comics, I.O.U.s and confessions of sex crimes when Dougie politely made his way up to say thanks for his inclusion in the game. He muttered something about how he hoped he hadn't embarrassed himself since he wasn't in the same league as the others. I told him, "Nobody thought that. Up there, you were just one of six good cartoonists."

Just then, as if to prove my point, something happened…something small but it's a moment I'll never forget and I'd bet my house Dougie never did, either. There was yet another kid standing there with a program book and a pen, and Dougie assumed he wanted my signature. He stepped back and waved the kid towards me…but the kid turned to Dougie and said the most wonderful thing…

He said, "No, I don't want his autograph. I want yours."

I'm sure Doug had been asked for his autograph before. He was a very visible celeb among the comic fan community in Omaha, always participating in charity sketch events and jam sessions and doing drawings for anyone who asked. But this was the first time he was ever asked for his autograph as part of an event where he was one of those guys he'd always wanted to be. He not only signed for the young man, he did him a helluva cute little drawing. And that wasn't easy for Dougie because he was actually crying with joy as he did it. Why the hell does a guy like that have to die before he realizes his full potential?

Here's that segment from the Quick Draw! at the 2009 Comic-Con International. It's Dougie McCoy, who's spent way too long on a little farm team, finally getting an "at bat" in the majors…

• Okay, so the CBS-owned channels are back on my TV that has Time-Warner Cable. Now, will somebody please tell my TiVo?

• Just got CBS-owned stations back on my Time Warner cable feed. Did they have to bring back Dr. Phil?

Let's look at a minute of the cutest creature on this planet, the newly-born panda. This is the as-yet unnamed offspring of Yuan Yuan, who lives at the Taipei Zoo. I have to figure out how to (a) get one of these and (b) keep it this size. Maybe if I had it PermaPlaqued…

Kevin Drum says pretty much the same thing I was trying to say about Syria but, of course, says it better. I might be able to wrap my mind around the "to bomb or not to bomb" question if it was actually about what will best for American interests and sheer morality. But that's not the debate we're starting to have in this country. It's largely in the hands of people who are trying to calculate what action will be the best for their (unrelated to Syria) political objectives.

Hendrik Hertzberg describes a new problem for Barack Obama. Like the man didn't have enough to think about already.

There's a great Yiddish word that, like many Yiddish words, is spelled all different ways in English: Ganef, Gonif, Goniff, Gonnif, etc. It denotes a person who is thief and a crook and you can spell it however you like. Me, I usually opt for gonif. This is the story of Harry the Gonif.

There is much that I can't tell you about Harry the Gonif. I can't tell you what his last name was because though I heard it many times, we always referred to him as Harry the Gonif. I can't tell you who first hung that term on him. I can't even tell you how my father knew him…but my father was friends with Harry the Gonif. Harry would come over for an evening now and then. Sometimes, my father would go to lunch with him or take us all out for dinner with Harry the Gonif.

Most often, we'd drop by his place of business where Harry sold TV picture tubes. Discount TV picture tubes. This, obviously, was back when TV sets had picture tubes…around the mid-sixties. If your TV set needed a new one, it could easily run you $80 or $100…and that was just for the part itself. Installation could drive the price far beyond that.

But there was an alternative. Buried in the sports section of the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, there was a little ad that advertised brand-new TV picture tubes for $19.95…and then in the kind of microscopic typeface I like to call Flyspeck Bodoni, it said, "…and up."

That was Harry's ad. He had a deal with a manufacturer in Hong Kong or Korea or some country where workers could be paid cents per hour. They made picture tubes and shipped them over and he sold them in the Los Angeles area. There were, I gather, other gonifs in other cities selling them to folks in their jurisdictions.

They made picture tubes in all shapes and sizes, and they made them in two levels of quality. If you came in to get your $19.95 picture tube, Harry would usually sell you one…but acting like he was your sudden buddy, he'd let you in on a secret. The models he had for $34.95 were much, much better and because of their longer, warranty-covered lifespan, much more cost-effective.

Or sometimes, if you looked desperate to get your TV working again before the Dodgers game that evening, he'd just tell you he was out of the $19.95 tubes that would fit your set and it would be two weeks before he could get more in. Then when you were in sufficient panic, he'd tell you, "Gee…I think I might just have one tube in the right size but it would be our $34.95 model." About two-thirds of those who went to Harry for the $19.95 tube went home with the $34.95 one.

He wasn't lying about one thing, by the way. The $34.95 models were indeed better than the $19.95 models. The $19.95 ones were, I gather, picture tubes in the same sense that a Snickers bar is dinner. But all you need to know about either is this: When our living room TV died, my father called Harry and told him. Harry immediately sent over one of his men to install a brand-new picture tube — and it was not one of his. He had his guy stop off at some warehouse and pickup an RCA model, for which we paid his cost plus an installation fee.

Harry may have been a gonif but he wasn't the kind of gonif who'd stick a friend with his crummy product.

Of course, $34.95 only got you the picture tube. If you wanted one of Harry's men to come to your house and install it…well, that's where they made back some of the profit they weren't making by selling picture tubes so cheaply.

Or you could take it home yourself with a little printed sheet Harry provided — instructions on how to do-it-yourself. And then when you'd done-it-yourself and it didn't work, you could pay to have Harry's guy come over and make it work…and that could really run into money. (Also, if one of his crew came to your house, they'd gladly haul away your old picture tube and "dispose of it safely." Usually, that meant they'd recycle it and make even more bucks off you.)

Up above, I said there were many things I couldn't tell you about Harry the Gonif. The big one was why my father was friends with this person. I think it was just that my father was such a nice man, he couldn't bring himself to cut an acquaintance loose…and with his tendency to see the best in everyone, he did have some nuggets of respect for Harry, AKA "The Gonif."

Harry had built a successful business. He seemed to treat his employees well. And some people couldn't afford a $90 picture tube so a $19.95 one, inferior though it might have been — or even if they were baited-and-switched up to 35 bucks — was still a good thing. If your TV was busted and you called a repairman out of the Yellow Pages, you could get swindled a lot worse than anything Harry would do to you.

One day, Harry took my father to lunch and let him in on a secret. Harry was preparing to triple the size of his operation. The more picture tubes he ordered from Sweatshop City, wherever it was, the less each one cost him. If he could get his sales up 300%, he'd up his profit more than 500%. I am not remembering the numbers precisely but I'm in, as they say, the ball park.

All it would take was a bigger building, more employees and more advertising…which of course meant more working capital. He was going to buy billboards all over L.A. and get a full page amidst all the other gonifs in the phone book. He'd even paid good money to secure a new phone number that spelled out something like NEW-TUBE. I thought it was a shame that none of the many common spellings of "gonif" had seven letters.

To do all this, he was taking in investors. He had one share left of his new, expanded business and my father could buy in for $3000.

My father had $3000 in the bank but he didn't have much more than that. He heard Harry out, examined some papers Harry gave him about the investment and what he'd get for his money…and asked for a few days to think it over. Then he went home and involved my mother and me in his thought process.

He had little doubt that Harry would make his expanded company profitable. Whatever else you could say about the guy, he knew how to run that kind of business. He also believed Harry was offering him this opportunity out of naught but friendship. Given the firm's past track record, it wouldn't have been that difficult to find a stranger willing and perhaps eager to put in the three grand. Harry really liked my father and liked the idea of making him a bit wealthier.

But even if an investment looks like a "sure thing" — and this wasn't quite that — it's not easy to part with most of the money you have in your bank account. My father, as I've mentioned here, was a great worrier. The second the money was invested, he'd be worried: What if Harry's expansion plan did crash and burn? And what if we, the Evaniers, had some sudden, impossible-to-predict emergency that needed those bucks?

There was also a wee bit of conscience involved. Harry broke no laws. His $19.95 picture tubes weren't first-rate but what do you expect for $19.95? You could certainly make the case that he was doing his poorer customers a favor. You could also make the case that there's something a bit sleazy about making money the way he did.

Against all that, my father (and we) had to weigh the fact that this seemed like a pretty good investment. My father, you may recall, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. There are some lines of work where you can get rich if, say, you work for a company that thrives and prospers and they promote you. It doesn't work that way at the I.R.S. My father's income was pretty much locked down for the rest of his life, pension and all. Even if they'd bumped him up to a better job in the department, he would only have made about 5% more. If he was ever going to make a lot more money, he was going to have to take a gamble in something like this. He asked us if we thought he should do it.

My mother voted, basically, "No but if you really want to gamble on this, I'll support you but I'd rather you didn't." She had no idea if it was a good investment or not. She just didn't want to put up with my father worrying night and day about his money…as she knew he would. When my father asked me how I voted, I voted, "I vote that I should not have a vote." I kinda liked the idea of the gamble but something felt wrong about it…something upon which I could not quite put my little finger. Also, I didn't want to feel responsible if he did it and it failed or didn't do it and regretted it…so I said, "It's your money and your decision."

I was sure he'd decide against it but the next day, he surprised us both by saying he was going to do it. He called Harry and said yes. "Great," Harry the G said. "Bring me a check for $3,000 as soon as you can." My father said he'd be right over with it and then he sat down with his checkbook. I thought I noticed a slight tremble in his hand as he made it out. Then he stuffed it into an envelope and asked me, "Want to take a ride?" I said sure.

On the way to Harry's, my father told me, "I'll feel a lot better about this if I know you approve of it. I know you said it's my money but it's really not. My money is our money. It's the money we all live on."

I was impressed that he'd put it that way and that he really wanted my opinion. A lot of fathers wouldn't care what their 14-year-old son said. I'm guessing that's what I was at the time. We were still some distance from Harry's so I said, "Give me two minutes to think about it."

He gave me the two minutes and I tried to figure out what it was about this whole matter that bothered me. Finally I said, "I don't know much about business…but isn't there a rule somewhere that says you never trust your money to anyone whose nickname is The Gonif?"

My father thought for a second. Then he pulled over to the curb and stopped the car. Then he brought out the envelope with the check in it and tore it up. Then he started the car up again and turned a corner so he could head home instead of to Harry's. When he got home, he called Harry and told him he'd thought it over and had changed his mind.

"You're making a big mistake, Bernie," Harry told him.

"Maybe so," he said. "And I appreciate you giving me the opportunity but I don't want to risk my family's security this way."

Harry said the same thing again a few more times — "You're making a big mistake, Bernie" — and then they said goodbye.

Now, this story could end one of two ways. I could tell you that Harry's expansion plans were a disaster; that the whole enterprise collapsed and all the investors lost everything and my father was always grateful that I'd brought him to his senses. Or I could tell you that Harry's new, super-sized TV tube business venture thrived and grew such that even a $3000 investment would have yielded a significant return. That version would end with my father wishing 'til his dying day that he'd gone through with it.

But the truth is that I don't know how Harry made out and my father never knew, either…because my father never spoke to Harry again. He never called Harry and Harry never called him. The only clue I have to the progress of Harry's business is that his ads in the Los Angeles Herald Examiner got larger, then they got smaller, then they stopped appearing. Some years later, so did the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. I don't think Harry not advertising in it was the reason but with gonifs, you never know.

Once when I was visiting my father during one of his occasional hospitalizations, I was groping for something to talk about, just to make conversation. Outta the blue, I asked him, "Hey, whatever happened to Harry the Gonif?" He thought for a second and said, "I don't know…and I don't care."

Then he looked at me and said, "Right after I turned down investing in his company, I got to thinking, 'Why is this man my friend?' I didn't enjoy his company. I didn't learn anything from him. I didn't find him particularly interesting. When he called up and said, 'Let's have lunch,' I always thought, 'Oh, Christ! Him again.' It was like a chore. I had to have lunch with Harry." He paused and added, "You know, it's important to have friends in this world but you don't have to make room in your life for every person you meet."

That was one of the wisest, sharpest things I learned from my father. Right after he said that, I took a good, hard look through my address book and realized I had a couple of Harry the Gonifs in there. They were people upon whom I wished no ill will…but I just couldn't explain why I wasted any large chunks of my life on them. Not when there were so many people I liked in this world.

Being polite is fine. You can and should be polite to everyone. I just had to learn not to let these people drag me out to dinner or wrangle invitations to drop by when I literally had nothing in common with them and no interest in anything they had to say. The time I spent with them was time I didn't spend with real friends.

So that was one big thing I learned from him. I was going to add that another was "Never trust your money to anyone whose nickname is The Gonif" but I think he learned that one from me. Either way, it's good advice, too.