Monthly Archives: November 2013

Eons ago, I helped launch a popular Saturday morning cartoon series called Dungeons & Dragons. Its 27 episodes have been released twice on DVD. The first set featured just the episodes as they were presented initially on CBS. The second set had all sorts of special features but on some of the 27 episodes, the music was altered, presumably to save someone money. I don't particularly recommend one set over the other…but if you're interested, Amazon is closing out the first version for $5.00 a set.

There was once a TV show called Celebrity Billiards and it starred a gent named Rudolf Wanderone Jr. who was then famous as "Minnesota Fats." Mr. Wanderone was a professional pool player with no actual connection to Minnesota. He was, in fact, billed as "New York Fats" for much of his career.

Novelist Walter Tevis created the character "Minnesota Fats" for his novels, The Hustler and The Color of Money, both of which became successful motion pictures. When the first book came out, Wanderone claimed the character was based on him and proclaimed that he'd sue Tevis into oblivion. He apparently never sued; just claimed they'd settled out of court, a claim Tevis denied. After the hit movie of The Hustler, wherein Jackie Gleason played the portly billiards whiz from Minnesota, Wanderone took to billing himself as "Minnesota Fats" and had a pretty good career as a result. He had lots of colorful anecdotes about playing pool with Al Capone and Charlie Chaplin and who knows? Maybe one or two of them were even true.

I don't know from billiards but I recall Wanderone getting occasional slams from tournament-winning players saying he wasn't deserving of the hype; that he really was a hustler but not because he was that skilled with a cue. He hit all the talk shows, usually telling grandiose tales of winning huge bets, and he'd demonstrate trick shots.

No one seems to know for sure when his syndicated TV show, Celebrity Billiards, went on or off. Googling will tell you it debuted in 1965, 1968, 1970 or other years. My sense is that it was a series that was done on such a low budget that they could sell it to stations for next-to-nothing — the kind of show stations kept on the shelf in case they had to fill a hole at 3 AM or if a baseball game got rained-out. The producers probably shot a dozen episodes in a day and once in a while, they even managed to snag a guest who didn't trivialize the label of "celebrity."

Here's a quick sampler with Groucho Marx and Milton Berle. I'll betcha Groucho lost but since he didn't care, was very funny doing it. And it wouldn't surprise me if Uncle Miltie cared a lot, played to win — and wasn't very funny doing it…

I said earlier here, "In all honesty, I must admit one more reason you won't find me in a Walmart: They're not convenient to where I live or most of the places I go. But even if there was one across the street, I think I'd still drive the 6.71 miles to my nearest Costco."

The nearest Costco to me is, indeed, 6.71 miles away.  But I just checked and the nearest Walmart is 5.03 miles from me.  So Walmart is more convenient to me but I still prefer Costco.

Also, I realized I've been spelling it wrong.  It's not Wal-Mart.  It's Walmart.  I just did a search-'n'-replace and corrected it throughout the site.

• Supreme Court rules abortion is legal but it's okay to make it impossible for anyone to get one.

The surviving members of Monty Python are reassembling for a stage show. I think those guys are great and I'd like to see them make all the money they can and I'd like more fans to be able to say, "I saw them live." But there's been something a little sad for me the last eighty times I saw Cleese and Palin do the Parrot Sketch. And it'll be sad to see them perform with someone missing.

Here's why I will never go in a Walmart. And I frankly don't get why people who are horrified at the concept of Public Assistance and Food Stamps aren't outraged that Walmart can get away with paying so little that we (i.e., taxpayers) have to subsidize their employees.

Here's one of the reasons I shop at Costco…

Less than a week after Costco CEO Craig Jelinek spoke out in favor of raising the minimum wage, the big-box retailer's earnings showed that paying workers a living wage doesn't always hurt business.

Costco reported a profit of $537 million last quarter, up from $394 million during the same period last year, according to the Wall Street Journal. The healthy earnings report comes just six days after Jelinik urged lawmakers to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour.

"At Costco, we know that paying employees good wages makes good sense for business," Jelinik said in a statement last week. "Instead of minimizing wages, we know it's a lot more profitable in the long term to minimize employee turnover and maximize employee productivity, commitment and loyalty. We support efforts to increase the federal minimum wage."

I also just plain like the Costcos better than the Walmarts I've been to: Better products, better atmosphere, employees who don't act like they hate their lives, etc.

In all honesty, I must admit one more reason you won't find me in a Walmart: They're not convenient to where I live or most of the places I go. But even if there was one across the street, I think I'd still drive the 6.71 miles to my nearest Costco.

I tell people I'm Jewish but the truth is this: My mother was Catholic. My father was Jewish. That makes me, technically, Nothing. When they wed, my mother dropped most of her identity as a Catholic and never regretted it. My father was kind of a minimalist Jew. He went to shul on the High Holy Days but few other times. He did not formally belong to any synagogue. He did not hesitate to eat ham or bacon. He spoke about thirty words of Yiddish…but then so did my mother, having picked it up around him and other Evaniers. My mother's brisket and latkes could hold their own against any cooked by a pure, certified-as-Kosher Jewish Mother.

Another truth is this: Religion was not very important in our house. We had one prying neighbor lady who was always asking me questions about my family. Did we dutifully pray before every meal? No prayers were ever uttered in the our home. Did we routinely read The Bible? Nope. My mother had her childhood Bible, more as a keepsake than a reference, but it was almost never opened. Which holidays did we celebrate? Any holiday where you got gifts and/or ate a lot of food.

It all worked fine for us but it bugged the heck out of that lady and certain other onlookers. As I've mentioned here, my parents' mixed marriage was at first frowned-on by friends and relatives on all sides. The rise in acceptance in interracial marriages and now gay marriages shows the world moving in one direction: It doesn't matter who consenting adults marry as long as they're happy. Today, a Jew marrying a Catholic would scarcely elevate any eyebrows. When my parents wed though, it was like — as my father once put it — a penguin was marrying a gopher. (In the penguin-gopher analogy, I never figured out which was the Jew and which was the Catholic. If I had to guess, I'd guess the penguin was the Catholic because it looked more like a nun.)

After a short while, both sides of the family came to accept that Bernie and Dorothy were married and they had this great kid…and that, by God, was that. But there were some lingering resentments and feelings. My immediate family was more Jewish than not and my father's side occasionally asked, ahem, why I wasn't in Hebrew school? Or why I wasn't working towards Bar Mitzvah? The truth was that given the emotions that had surrounded their marriage, my parents didn't want to open old wounds — a wise move but not one that my Aunt Dot and Uncle Aaron could fully endorse.

Aunt Dot (for those of you not taking notes on these articles) was my father's sister. Uncle Aaron was her husband. They were slightly more devout Jews than my father and they feared for my soul or the family lineage or I don't know what they feared for. I think maybe my alienation from a world that expects everyone to have a neat, understandable religious label. "The boy should be something," I heard Aunt Dot say to my father once when they didn't know I could hear. "At least, expose him to it."

They campaigned intermittently and not without results. My father finally agreed and then my mother agreed with my father: Mark would be enrolled in a Sunday-only Hebrew school. I was not there to work towards a Bar Mitzvah; not unless I suddenly was seized by the passion to be a full-fledged Jew and insisted. But I should at least learn what it was all about and make up my own mind. There would also be some move made to expose me to Catholicism so I'd understand that side. Uncle Aaron consulted his rabbi and got a recommendation for a Hebrew school not far from my home.

Immediate Problem: The school had two classes, each of which was held from 10 AM to 2 PM on Sunday morning. One class was for kids aged 7-9. The other was for 10-12. Into which class should 10-year-old Mark go? I was a newcomer to these teachings so obviously, I should go in the Beginner class, right? But that might be embarrassing because I'd be in with the "little kids."

A lot of my classmates at weekday school were in the Advanced class so obviously, I should be in the Advanced class, right? But that might be awkward since in the Advanced class, it was presumed you already knew all the stuff you learned in the Beginner class and I hadn't taken the Beginner class.

There was so much discussion about this topic that they even asked me what I thought. I thought I should not be in Hebrew School at all but if I had to be, I should start in the Advanced class. I figured it would get me out of this ordeal sooner. It was decided that I'd go into the Advanced class and that I'd make a special effort to read certain books that might bring me up to speed.

It was horrible. The Advanced class was taught by a young, angry Israeli man named Avik who took an instant dislike to me and my lack of Jewish purity. I kind of thought of him as an anti-semi-semite. He was fierce and militant about his faith, and quite intolerant of those who did not share his ferocity and militancy. After my first day there, he went to the lady who ran the school and told her I should not be in his class. She responded, "You think he should be in the Beginner class?" and Avik replied, "I think he should not be in this school at all." Well, we agreed on that but not much else.

The principal lady told him he was stuck with me so for the next month or three, he did what he could to make my learning unpleasant. However fast I tried to bone up on what I'd missed, it wasn't fast enough for Avik. The man was filled with rage on a wide variety of subjects and as for his sanity…well, let's just say he was a few Jews short of a minyan. In class, in front of my friends, he'd pepper me with questions he knew damn well I couldn't answer.

At first, I tried responding with a joke but that only made him madder. At times when he began yelling at me, I would just get up and walk out of the classroom. The facility we were in was a nursery school during the week so I'd go out and sit on the edge of the sandbox. I'd just sit there and wait 'til class was over and my father came to take me home. I tried to tell him about The Problem With Avik but he just kept telling me to work a little harder.

"In this world, you've got to learn to get along with people."  That was my father's oft-given advice…and good advice it was.  But what do you do about people who angrily refuse to be gotten along with?

It got really bad in the portion of class where Avik taught us Yiddish and Hebrew. I happen to have an utter inability to learn any foreign language.  You could teach a giraffe to speak Russian before you could teach me.  Go ahead.  Try it.  See how you fare.

In regular school at different times, I studied Spanish, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and I think one or two others. The reason I kept changing is that via intense, short-term memorization I was able to get through the tests in each class, after which my mind immediately jettisoned all I'd memorized. So I'd get through Beginning Spanish and then when I passed that and moved on to the next level of Spanish, I wouldn't remember two words of Beginning Spanish…so I'd switch to Beginning French and start all over. I was rotten at all of them and that included Yiddish and Hebrew.  Especially Yiddish and Hebrew.

Avik would ask me a question in Yiddish (or Hebrew; I could never tell the difference) and when I couldn't answer him, he'd ask it again, only louder. And then louder and louder. One time as he hit around the fifth level, I said to him, "You seem to be misunderstanding the problem. I can hear you just fine. I just don't know what any of those words mean." He screamed at me and ten seconds later, I was outside sitting on the edge of the sandbox.

There were actually a few decent weeks there because Avik was away — in Israel, of course — and his substitute was a decent guy who didn't loathe me because I did not fit his definition of a good, young Jewish boy. Whatever I did learn well enough to remember, I learned during those weeks. But then Avik returned and it was back to the sandbox for me.

Finally one day, things reached the meltdown level. We were supposed to bring in money to donate to a fund to plant trees in Israel and my parents had given me two dollars for that. I had it in my wallet along with three dollars of my own — three dollars I'd earmarked for the purchase of comic books and my other (brief) passion of the time, Topps baseball cards. Avik came around with an envelope and when I pulled the cash out of my wallet, I pulled out all five dollars, put two in the envelope and started to put the other three back in my wallet. Avik suddenly grabbed my hand with the three bucks. "You are holding out," he said. "Your parents gave you five dollars to donate and you are trying to keep three for yourself." He then snatched the three dollars away from me and jammed it into the envelope.

I told him he was wrong, that my parents had only given me two for the donation, and pointed out how almost everyone else was only giving two. He called me a liar. I told him to go call my parents and they'd verify they'd only given me two dollars for the cause. He said something like, "I don't have to call your parents. I know your kind, passing yourself off as a Jew. You are not a Jew! You will never be a Jew!" Then he said something about how my father could not possibly be a Jew either. If he was, I would have been in the synagogue with him every week and I would have entered Hebrew School when I was younger and would now be two years from being Bar Mitzvahed.

There was more, including nasty words about my mother who had gone no further as a convert to Judaism than learning how to cook a great brisket, but I'd had enough. I charged from the classroom…and this time, I didn't stop at the sandbox. I barged into the office of the principal lady, told her what had happened and that Avik was insane and also that he'd stolen three dollars from me. The woman phoned my parents, verified that I had indeed been given two dollars to donate, and she suggested they come over immediately so this incident could be properly discussed. Then she led me back to the classroom and in front of all the other students, told Avik to give me back my three dollars and apologize.

Avik protested that I was lying. She said, "I spoke to his father. Mark is telling the truth." Avik started screaming what I think were actually curse words in Yiddish or Hebrew. Whatever they were, they were directed at me and my father and even at the school for allowing me in. Then he threw the envelope with the money down, stormed out of the classroom, got into his car and went elsewhere. My classmates cheered me because I'd won. I even got my three dollars back.

The administrators of the school called a hasty meeting to discuss what to do. They weren't certain if Avik had quit but just in case he hadn't, he was fired and I received an official apology from the school, not just for the $3.00 brouhaha but also for the way he'd treated me in general. They urged me to please, please stay in the class and learn with Avik's replacement but by this point, my parents had arrived — at the school and also at the realization that putting me into it was a serious parenting error. My folks left it up to me to stay or leave…and I gave it careful consideration. I thought it over for almost a sixteenth of a second.

That was the end of me and Hebrew School…an experience I never missed. But it was not the end of the story of me and Avik.

Three months later, I was with my mother at a very large Kaiser Health Clinic where she was going for some medical matter. We had an hour to wait so I told her I was going to take a walk around the building. A few corridors later, I happened to notice a man glaring at me and realized it was Avik. He started walking briskly towards me and yelling something, not necessarily in English.

I turned and ran a bit, looked back, saw him still striding purposefully towards me and I ran some more. I finally found a Security Officer and told him a strange man was coming after me. Avik saw me pointing him out to the Security Officer and he turned and fled. And that was the end of the story of me and Avik.

It was also the end of my Jewish indoctrination. Soon after, I received my glimpses into Catholicism. That didn't turn out much better except that I convinced everyone in even less time it was not for me. I'll tell you about that in the next installment in this series.  Or maybe the one after.

Cookie Monster — in one of his greatest roles…

• Mayor Rob Ford stripped of most powers. Ah, but he still has the power to make us all go, "HE SAID WHAT!!!?"

From this blog on August 1, 2013…

Why do I have the premonition that before long, we're going to read another news story about George Zimmerman firing his gun at someone?

From today's news…

George Zimmerman, whose battles with the law have captivated the nation for almost two years, was arrested again Monday in Florida on charges of domestic violence, including pointing a weapon at his girlfriend.

He's already been arrested once for this but it turned out that initial reports of a gun being involved were erroneous.  This time, they seem more certain.  You watch.  This guy's going to shoot at someone.  He may even wind up in the cell next to O.J. Simpson.

Two daughters of Dick Cheney — Mary (who's gay) and Liz (who's running for office) — are having a public squabble over the latter's condemnation of Gay Marriage. When I read about what she said and then what she said and then what she said about what she said, all I can do is imagine a conversation in private…

MARY: I don't understand you, Liz. You wished me well in my relationship. You said you loved me. You were so happy for me. I'm really mad at you for the position you're taking.

LIZ: And I'm really mad at you, Mary. Don't you understand that I have to say this crap to get elected in this state?

In the past here, I've plugged the hell out of Big Daddy, a local band that I've been following for quite some time. Here's the premise: They take songs (usually but not always current ones) that do not sound anything like fifties music and they rearrange them to sound like fifties music. Amazingly, a lot of them sound better that way, in part because the four guys who are Big Daddy — Marty, Bob, Donny and Tom — are real good musicians. They all sing. They all play multiple instruments. And they have a couple of secret weapons: They know plenty of fine guest musicians who can assist them in capturing just the right sound…and Bob — aka "Lightnin' Bob" — is a real fine audio engineer. If you want to listen to some of what they've done, there's an audio sampler on this page. If you prowl about on that site, you'll find even more goodies.

Yesterday, I attended the release party for their new CD, their first in many years. It's called Smashing Songs of Stage and Screen and on it, you hear them fifties-ize tunes like "Over the Rainbow," "Don't Cry For Me, Argentina" and "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious." The way they do the last of these sounds like Johnny Cash teaming up with Alvin and the Chipmunks. The CD was made possible by a successful Kickstarter campaign…and it was kickstarted by a lot of readers of this blog, thank you. Anyway, it's really good and I will soon be posting an Amazon link so you can order it.

I couldn't stay for the whole party due to these things called deadlines. But I stayed long enough to pick up my donor swag and to see how happy everyone there was that Big Daddy is recording again. To those of you who pledged their Kickstarter: Thanks. You did a good thing and when you get your copies, you will feel quite rewarded.

Paul Waldman on why all this talk about Obamacare being doomed is ridiculous. Right now, the horrors are the spotty, sometimes-arguable cases of it costing people some money. Starting January 1, repeal of it would be inarguably costing a lot of people their lives.

More Johnny…and a pretty good one. It's from 11/26/86 with guests George Carlin and a gent named Barney Odom who had a tree-climbing dog. Johnny's monologue is from the period when he started getting more political and this one is from the depths of Iran-Contra. Remember the good old days when presidential scandals were really about something and the opposition party wasn't too hysterical about them?

Dick Cavett tells about a friend of his who had a problem with drink. Thanks to Bruce Reznick for the referral to this.

As I'm sure I've mentioned here — and as some people refuse to believe — I've never had a drink of alcohol in my life; not unless you count one dose of NyQuil® many decades ago. Never smoked anything, either. I do not fault or look down on those who do these things unless they cause discomfort or harm to others.

When I said that once in a group, someone said, "So you don't mind if friends of yours cause discomfort or harm to themselves?" I replied, "I don't think that's possible. If you cause discomfort or harm to yourself, you probably cause it to others at the same time. You certainly would make your friends and family feel terrible that they didn't do more to stop you from what you did to yourself, even if helping you wasn't humanly possible."

I never really ever had an interest in trying a sip of anything alcoholic. Back in my teen years, my friends who were drinking seemed to be craving a sensation that, as described, held out no appeal to me. It always reminded me of other folks who were trying to get me on roller coasters by saying things like, "Oh, you'll love it! It'll make you feel like your entire stomach is being passed through your nose" or other descriptives that prompted the reaction, "You know…I think I could live my entire life happily without experiencing that." Also, drinking always seemed a bit too adult for a guy like me who is fighting adulthood to this day. If you've ever seen my house, you know: So far, I'm winning.

Anyway, those were my initial reasons for not drinking. Later, when a close loved one was killed by a drunk driver — who actually thought "I wasn't responsible…I was drunk at the time" was a logical alibi — and I witnessed other acts of self- and loved-one destruction, I had more reason to not start. I know folks who enjoy it and who apparently enhance their lives with it and that's fine. Good for them. But like Mr. Cavett says in his article, I don't understand the ones who ruin lives (their own, others') with it.