Monthly Archives: October 2015

Hey, let's go to Greg's Kitchen and watch as he makes everyone's favorite — a warm fish milk shake…

Three weeks ago today, I was on an operating table getting my knee replaced.

A couple of people have written to ask me what this thing costs. Answer: Beats me. So far, the hospital has rung up a bill of $167,804.48 and there's still quite way to go. Insurance has already paid for or agreed to pay for all but about $2,000.00 of that. I suspect both numbers will climb…and of course, the final "total cost" will not be what an uninsured person would actually have to pay. Then again, an uninsured person might not have been able to have it done or could have been wiped out by the actual pricetag.

How am I doing? Much better than I thought I'd be doing after three weeks. I have largely stopped my pain medications. My foot hurts a bit. My thigh doesn't hurt so much as it's numb here and there. My knee hurts for a while when I get up after sleeping or sitting for too long but that goes away and thereafter, the only pains occur when I move it too much in certain ways that I can usually avoid. I'm guessing that in two weeks, all of this will be minor and in two weeks after that, it'll be forgotten. Just when I'll start driving again, I'm not sure.

People keep asking me, "Are you glad you did it?" as if I had a real choice. Yeah, I'm glad I did it before the old knee got a lot worse. The surgery was inevitable and better now than then. Thanks to all of you who sent well wishes for the well wishes.

Kevin Drum has a good piece up about the problem the Republican party faces: No matter what they stand for, it pisses off some portion of their base they can ill afford to lose.

I received a few e-mails like this one from my buddy, Nat Gertler…

Your response to Thomas's question of "Hillary is beating him by 20 points. Do you really think he has a chance at the nomination?" could've had a much
simpler answer:

CBS news poll, October 2007: Clinton is leading Obama by 28 points. In retrospect, we can safely say that yes, Obama had a chance.

Yeah, and I sure didn't say Sanders didn't have a chance. I don't know. My main "prediction" through all of this has been that with so much time to go before the election, a lot of things will happen that will alter the dynamic and change the game. As many have noted, we aren't yet even into the year when the voting will take place. Today, we don't know if Joe Biden will be a candidate by the end of this week. If he is, that's going to make a lot of today's "conventional wisdom" obsolete.

I admit to a certain skepticism that enough of America will vote for a guy who cops to being a "Socialist." The "Democratic" part won't matter to a lot of them. Then again, there was a time not so long ago when I thought it would be another decade or two before enough of this country was ready to vote for a president who wasn't a white male. I think we're in that frequent political situation where it's too early to make a lot of predictions but that's not stopping anyone.

Jonathan Chait explains why Marco Rubio's ideas about energy and the environment are ridiculous. What I've heard out of Rubio on every issue pretty much comes down to the premise that reinstalling every policy of the George W. Bush administration is a flood of fresh, new ideas.

This kind of thing bothers me more than it probably should. Every evening, Monday through Thursday, I have my TiVo set to record The Daily Show, The Nightly Show and @Midnight on Comedy Central. Looking at tomorrow night, the TiVo schedule is as follows…

• The Daily Show starts at 11 PM and runs 34 minutes
• The Nightly Show starts at 11:31 PM and runs 32 minutes
• @Midnight starts at 12:01 AM and runs 30 minutes

Obviously, there's some strange overlaps going on there. But then an hour later, they rerun all three episodes. This time…

• The Daily Show starts at 1:33 AM and runs 32 minutes
• The Nightly Show starts at 2:05 AM and runs 30 minutes
• @Midnight starts at 2:35 and runs 30 minutes

I'll do a more careful measure tomorrow night but it sounds to me like they're sticking 2 minutes of extra commercials into the first runs of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show…but then the next day, they rerun both shows a few more times and both of them are 32 minutes. I guess they put two extra minutes of ads into Mr. Wilmore's program then.

But that still doesn't explain how between 11 PM and 12:01 AM, they manage to run 66 minutes of programming.

I'm going to conduct a thorough investigation and get back to you on this. If anyone's already done this, drop me a note and save me the time and effort.

The Today Show debuted on NBC on January 14, 1952 with its first host, Dave Garroway. The week before, The Bob & Ray Show — starring Bob Elliott and Ray Goulding — closed with this little sketch/crossplug and a surprise appearance by Mr. Garroway himself…

From someone named Thomas, a few minutes ago…

Regarding your tweet about Bernie Sanders not getting enough press coverage, why should he? Hillary is beating him by 20 points. Do you really think he has a chance at the nomination?

I dunno. It's a long way to go until that gets decided. Sanders stands a decent chance of winning some early primaries and that never hurts anyone's chances. And we can all imagine things that could happen between now and the Democratic Convention that could be real game-changers.

But, hey, all the Republican leaders are saying, as Mitt Romney did this morning, that Donald Trump ain't gonna be the nominee and the press coverage is practically The Donald Trump Comedy Hour. No one thinks Ben Carson has a shot at it even though some polls have him in the lead for the Republican nomination. Jeb! Bush is at 8-10% and running out of loot and he's getting more face time than Sanders. (Okay, admittedly most of Bush's coverage suggests how his candidacy is collapsing. Then again, most of the time when Sanders is mentioned, it's in stories about how he can't win.)

This morning, Larry David's impression of Bernie Sanders on Saturday Night Live seems to be more newsworthy than anything the real Bernie said the last few days.

Like I said, I don't know if Sanders has a real chance to be the nominee. At some point, it has to become an issue that he's not even a member of the party he wants to have nominate him. But I don't think that's what press coverage is about or should be about. I also don't think the Sanders candidacy is only about whether or not he gets to sit behind the big desk in the Oval Office. It's very much about trying to take the Democratic Party more to the left and to shine a spotlight on certain issues which many politicians would prefer to avoid. In that sense, I think he's succeeding. That merits more attention than he's received.

• Wish the press did as much coverage of Bernie Sanders running for president as they do of Joe Biden not running for president.

Two of my areas of interest — comic books and Broadway — came together in 1973 when Charlton Press issued one of the oddest comic books ever. In connection with the release of the motion picture version of 1776, they brought out an adaptation that was…uh, interesting. Western Publishing used to do this kind of thing for their Dell and Gold Key lines but by '73, they'd stop doing that kind of thing. Almost every comic book company had.

I have no inside info on how it came about but I have a pretty fair guess. My guess is that someone at Columbia Pictures remembered when they used to arrange that kind of merchandising with Western or Dell and approached them about it and were turned-down. I'd further guess they went to DC and Marvel and maybe other places before hooking up with Charlton, a firm which didn't say no to much. Charlton occasionally produced some fine comics but they paid poorly and had lousy printing and my sense is that almost every company that made a licensing deal with them was unhappy with the end-product.

At about this time, Hanna-Barbera was doing a lot of comics with Charlton and when the contract ended, they yanked it away and set up a new operation which I worked for. One of the guys I worked for had largely gotten his job because the guy before him had been fired for many bad deals, one of which had been the license to Charlton. I would be surprised if whoever made the deal for the 1776 comic was any happier with how things turned out.

The comic was written by Joe Gill. The Guinness Book of World Records recognizes Paul S. Newman as the most prolific writer of comic books ever. I liked Paul and he sure wrote a lot of them but I always suspected he was in there because he got the bright idea to submit himself for the title. I can think of several other guys who might qualify, one of whom is Joe Gill. Charlton paid so poorly that in order to make a living, Gill had to churn out scripts around three times as rapidly as the guys working for DC or Marvel. Enough of it was good that you have to wonder what he could have done writing at a more human pace.

His adaptation of 1776 was not among his better efforts…nor could it have been, trying to cram a 141-minute movie into 31 pages of comics. (141 was the original release length. Some home video versions run longer.) The songs, of course, were absent but some of the lyrics were retooled as dialogue. Large chunks of the plot were eliminated…

…and, oh yes: Gill cut out all that stuff about slavery.

I assume he was ordered to do that and oddly enough, it may have been a good cut for reasons of space. I doubt he had the room to treat that topic with any sensitivity. (Or maybe Gill looked at his working arrangements with Charlton and just found the whole topic personally distasteful.) In his abridgement, the primary obstacle to getting the Declaration of Independence approved and signed was merely that various delegates were squabbling about various points, most of them largely unnamed. Most of the romantic tensions between John and Abigail Adams, as well as the romance of Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Jefferson, were also trimmed way down.

The artwork was done by Tony Tallarico, who did a lot of work over the years for the lower-paying companies. As with Gill, I suspect he had a lot of talent that didn't show through the low, low rates he was paid. He did a decent job drawing William Daniels in the lead role and seems to have not been given sufficient photo reference on anyone else. It had to have been one of his tougher assignments since all it was really was 31 pages of guys in colonial garb arguing with each other.

Charlton's costs were so low that they probably made a few bucks off the comic, especially if (as there may have been) some sort of promotional deal where copies were given away in some areas to promote the movie. That was done with many of the film adaptations that Western or Dell did.

Anyway, that's about all there is to say about this comic. I am by no means suggesting you seek out a copy of it because it's not good in a bad way or bad in a good way. Given the assignment of adapting a musical about slavery without the music or slavery, I doubt anyone could have done much better. It's just one of the oddest comics I ever came across. And you may have some idea of how many comic books I've seen in my day…

This is an entry to Mark Evanier's list of the twenty top voice actors in American animated cartoons between 1928 and 1968. For more on this list, read this. To see all the listings posted to date, click here.

Most Famous Role: Donald Duck of course.

Other Notable Roles: Huey, Dewey, Louie and (briefly) Daisy Duck, plus he does bit roles in many Disney features, usually making sounds for inarticulate animal characters.  Once in a while, he even did a line or two as Mickey for something.

What He Did Besides Cartoon Voices: He started out in show biz doing impressions, mostly of animals and touring schools to entertain.  Later, Disney equipped him with the above Donald puppet and sent him out to make personal appearances as a goodwill ambassador for the studio.

Why He's On This List: Has there ever been a voice that more people tried to imitate than the quackery of Clarence "Ducky" Nash?  And Donald was such a great character, in large part because of Nash's acting skills.

Fun Fact: As Mr. Nash grew older, he found that doing the duck voice inflamed his throat so he cut back on personal appearances.  But he also never wanted to disappoint anyone so if you met him, he would always do Donald saying hello to you and saying your name.  He's probably the only major voice actor who ever built a career on one role.

Each year, the holiday shopping season kicks off in the Hollywood area with the Hollywood Christmas Parade, which this year is November 29. I wonder if there'll be any outcry from the Fox News types because the parade organizers have selected two atheists as their Grand Marshals.

A conversation with one of America's greatest filmmakers, Tex Avery. I briefly shared an office with Tex when he worked at Hanna-Barbera and he was a lot funnier talking about his cartoons in private than he was in a public interview setting. Still, it's great to see him again…

Matt Taibbi didn't like Hillary Clinton's answers Tuesday night about controlling "too big to fail" financial institutions and preventing another Wall Street crisis.

Speaking of Tuesday night: People keep writing me to see if I agree with them that Bernie Sanders really won the debate. I thought Sanders and Clinton both did well and I've never really been comfy with the idea that that kind of debate is "won." It certainly isn't in the sense that a baseball game or a chess match is won. Baseball games and chess matches have rules and point systems and there's a firm definition of what constitutes winning. Like in baseball, it involves counting the number of players on each team who make it around the bases and get to home plate.

In a debate, it's all subjective, which is why more than one side can claim victory…and usually does. To the extent there is scoring, it can probably be found in the post-debate polling, not about who most people thought won but the polls that show how the candidates now stand. If one gained support and the other lost support, the gainer probably won, regardless of what the boosters for each might argue.

Back from a visit to the surgeon who installed my new right knee. (That's an actual x-ray of it above. Sad to say, that's now the cutest part of me.)

As you may recall, I saw him on Tuesday and my knee was healing much better than could be expected but my lower leg had swollen up somewhat due to drainage from the knee. To solve this, he slapped a thing on my lower leg called a gel cast which acts like a super-powerful compression stocking. I had to limit my computer time and stay in bed…though as you've seen here the last few days, I didn't limit it by much.

Today, he removed the gel cast and we were both very happy with the job it's done. The leg's still a bit swollen but it's nothing that can't be handled by a regular compression stocking…which is what I'm wearing now.

Still limping a bit and I don't have the strength or flexibility that I'm supposed to have but a week or two of physical therapy should change that. I've already cut back on my pain meds and given up the walker. It may be a few more weeks before I trust myself driving and I'm still going to refrain from anything strenuous…still going to confine myself mostly to quarters. But I sure didn't expect to be doing this well this soon after the surgery.