Monthly Archives: September 2014

Today is Sergio's birthday. Happy Birthday, Sergio. I was thinking of getting you this as a gift.

It's a rare copy of our favorite book, The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra. This, the most sought-after printing of the classic work was published in 1880 with illustrations by Ricardo Balaca and magnificent hand binding in the finest leather. The opening bid on it is $4,800. It might go even higher than that but I figured nothing is too good for my best (male) friend. So I decided to buy it for you at any price…

…but then I changed my mind. I figured you'd probably just draw tiny cartoons in the margins.

I have friends who are bothered by the growing (and, even they admit, irreversible) acceptance of Gay Marriage. I suggest that they read some of the courtroom arguments that have been made to try and stop it…and the judicial decisions that have overturned laws against it. The arguments against it have been surprisingly feeble. When California's Proposition 8 was being argued before the court that ultimately ruled against it, the lawyer defending 8 did such a bad job, I'm surprised he didn't get accused of throwing the case.

This week, the 7th circuit struck down gay marriage bans in Indiana and Wisconsin. The three judge panel was unanimous and the opinion was written by Judge Richard Posner. I happen to have read a few of Judge Posner's past opinions and many articles by him and I haven't been impressed. I don't know from all the legal justifications for this or that but when he offered opinions based on sheer logic, I usually thought his logic was faulty…even when it got him to the conclusion that I favored.

Judge Posner was expected to rule against Same-Sex Wedlock. In oral arguments he largely devastated the attorney defending the anti-gay legislation. Slate put some excerpts from this debate online. If you listen to only one, listen to the one entitled "Brief It." The first voice you hear is Posner's.

And then you might want to read his opinion. It's a pretty forceful argument for allowing Gay Marriage. I'd be curious to see what kind of rebuttal someone could possibly make to it.

How long would they keep me on hold if they didn't know my time was valuable?

"All customer service agents are busy. Please hold for the next available agent."

Monet Sabel performs one of Mr. Sondheim's less well-known tunes with the Charlie Rosen Big Band…

• NBC announces new format for Meet the Press: No host…just John McCain each week announcing a new country we have to bomb.

Excerpts from a message I received about Joan Rivers…

I've always wondered how different her career might've been had she turned down Fox's offer for her own talk show in the 80s, had she stayed Johnny Carson's permanent guest host. Might Johnny have retired earlier and Joan would've eventually become the star of The Tonight Show?

My understanding is that the reason Joan grabbed the offer from Fox was that she'd come to realize she didn't have much of a future on The Tonight Show. Ms. Rivers had lost Johnny's seal of approval. Ratings on the nights she filled in for him were down but someone on her behalf was leaking cherry-picked numbers to the press that made it sound like she had more viewers than Johnny. (A rumor made the rounds that execs at Fox had been fooled by those releases and that's why they made their offer to her. I don't think I believe that.)

Johnny, I heard, was not happy with how Joan was doing his show, getting some guests upset with things she said or asked, and refusing to limit the amount of time she spent plugging her other enterprises. Given that and descending ratings, I don't think she was destined to remain as guest host for long. And I can't imagine that getting the permanent job — or impacting when Johnny decided to pack it in — were at all in the cards.

I should probably skip this one but if I do, followers of this site will infer all sorts of reasons I don't write about the passing of Joan Rivers. If she'd had a different style of humor, I probably wouldn't write anything about her because it will come off negative…but Ms. Rivers never spared anyone's feelings.

Groping for nice things to say about her, I'll say that, first of all, no one ever worked harder. She started in stand-up at a time when a woman had to hustle and fight to get on stage and to overcome all manner of presumptions that a female just shouldn't be doing that. So good for her for getting past all that crap to become a successful, in-demand performer. She also had to get past the belief that if a woman did for some reason insist on doing comedy, there was really only one appropriate topic for her. Like Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields, she had to get on stage and insult her own appearance and sexuality. And get past that, she did.

I will also say that many people loved her and respected her and are saddened by her passing. In fact, many people I respect a lot are saddened and I don't discount that. The fact that I stopped finding her funny about half-past her time in Johnny Carson's guest chair doesn't mean she didn't succeed admirably in her occupation.

As she got older and angrier, it made me more and more uncomfortable to see her on television. I just wrote three more paragraphs explaining why and thought, "No, this is not the time for that." So I deleted it all, including the part where I called her the Westboro Baptist Church of comedy. I'll just close by saying that I followed her career as long as I could and I admire how long it lasted and what she went through to get there. She was a very important and accomplished performer and she was really, really good at being Joan Rivers and I hope that when I go, no one writes an obit about me with as many mixed feelings as this one.

Stephen Sondheim and Bernadette Peters. Doesn't get much better than this…

When you have a moment, read this article by Dahlia Lithwick about Henry Lee McCollum and Leon Brown. They're two mentally challenged adults who as teenagers in the early eighties were convicted of the rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl. McCollum especially has been cited again and again as a poster boy — as example of someone so loathesome that we need to have the death penalty so animals like him can be put to sleep forever. Justice Antonin Scalia often mentions him in that capacity…

…and now it turns out that McCollum and his friend Leon are almost certainly innocent. This is not to say that those who long ago made up their minds of the two gents' guilt will ever admit this. Also, Lithwick notes…

It never fails to astonish me that the same conservatives who argue that every last aspect of big government is irreparably broken and corrupt inevitably see a capital punishment system that is perfect and just. If you genuinely believe that the state can't even fix a pothole without self-dealing and corruption, how is it possible to imagine that police departments and prosecutors' offices are beyond suspicion, even though they are subject to immeasurable political pressure to wrap up cases, even when the evidence is shaky and ill-gotten, and even as there are other avenues that have gone unexplored?

Yeah. I really don't see how anyone can look at the justice system and have utter confidence in its conclusions. And I don't see how anyone can believe the government should be putting people to death because they might be guilty. Whether they should be doing this with people who are inarguably guilty is another topic of discussion.

I wrote this to post yesterday but because of the tech problems we've been having here, I didn't post it when I thought I did. Yesterday was the birthday of one of my favorite people, Chuck McCann.

Actually, Chuck was one of my favorite performers before I ever met him…and I'm sure I'd have liked him even more if I'd grown up in New York when he had his legendary kids' show. But I knew him as a performer from so many movies and TV programs and cartoon shows…and then when be became pals, I started to realize he was the epicenter of the Entertainment Industry. People think I know everyone. Ha! Chuck's the guy who knows everyone. He's worked with them all and done just about everything.

He's an enormously funny, clever man with a heart large enough to have its own zip code. Here's wishing him many more birthdays. I promise to not be a day late on the next one.

We've been having a little trouble with computer issues here…issues that took this site offline for about 90 minutes. This kind of thing will stop soon.

I've received a few messages about the seat-reclining issue. They range from utter agreement to one guy who said basically, "I pay for a reclining seat and I'm going to recline my seat and I don't give a crap about whoever's sitting behind me and if he even dares ask me not to recline my reclining seat, I'll probably punch his lights out." Remind me never to sit behind that person.

I am reminded of a flight I was on a few years ago. We were running way late and just before we were to land in Memphis, a flight attendant got on the P.A. system and explained to everyone that we had aboard a delegation of Italian educators who were touring America as part of a cultural program. They were seated in the back of the plane and when we landed, they'd have about six minutes to make a connecting flight on another airline that would take them to New York where they were to be honored at some sort of United Nations event.

"Could we please ask everyone when we land to remain in their seats for a few moments and allow our guests from Italy to exit the craft first?" There was general head-nodding and agreement throughout the cabin.

We landed, the seat belt light went off — and suddenly, a family of three leaped up and clogged the aisle as they struggled into jackets and took their own sweet time about getting luggage down from the overhead compartments. The folks from Italy were unable to pass.

The flight attendant scurried up to the family of three and asked, "Are you rushing to make a connecting flight?" The father said no. The flight attendant reminded him about the Italian educators. The man loudly announced, "I don't give a shit" and continued not giving a shit as he purposely slowed down his actions. I almost said something but figured an argument in the aisle wouldn't help get the Italian folks to their flight.

Finally, having made whatever point they thought they were making, the family of three cleared out and the Italian visitors sprinted for Gate Whatever. I never heard if they made it.

You encounter people like those aisle-cloggers from time to time…angry people who are always looking for a way to assert their right to not care about anybody else but themselves. You have to remind yourself that most human beings are not like that.

Leonard Maltin is bidding farewell to his wonderful Leonard Maltin's Movie Guide. The 2015 edition, which goes on sale this week, is supposed to be the last. I have a feeling it won't be but he doesn't seem to feel that way so we'll go with his view of it. I do understand though that in the age of computers, it's a lot easier to look things up online than to page through a 73,000 page paperback. Here, Leonard has some remarks about the end of what has been a 45 year labor o' love for him, his spouse and his crew.

We should weep not so much for the end of that book in book form as for the end of what Leonard calls "curated information," which refers to someone actually doing the legwork to confirm facts before releasing them to the public. Every single human being who has a page at the Internet Movie Database can tell you more than a dozen things that are missing or just plain wrong on their page. I have witnessed first-hand (and occasionally aided) Leonard's mania to get things right.

I received a paperback copy free last week but have paid for the Kindle edition because I think it will be handy to have in that format…and frequently consulted.

(P.S. If you're in the Los Angeles area, Leonard is signing printed copies this Saturday at 5 PM up at Book Soup on Sunset. If you see his wife Alice there, get her to sign your copy, too. She's really the brains of that operation.)

The two guys who wrote "New York, New York" perform "New York, New York." Ladies and gentlemen — John Kander and Fred Ebb…

The other day, my buddy Paul Harris wrote about seat-reclining problems on airplanes. The airlines are squeezing more and more seats into their planes now and it's becoming a problem for us tall people when the seat in front of ours reclines. Actually, I've always had a problem with this and I'm only 6'3". I have no idea how people taller than that cope.

For whatever it's worth, I never recline my seat intentionally. I sometimes hit the button by accident but I've never found it makes me any more comfortable. Because of that, I'm in agreement with Paul's suggestion that this capability be eliminated.

And maybe we'll get our wish. As this news story notes, there's been an increasing number of fights on planes because of seat-reclining. They sometimes even lead to flights having to make emergency stops due to brawlers. Something's gotta change.