Monthly Archives: October 2015

Listening to a recording tell me how glad they are I called and how someone will be with me shortly.

That's right. Rub it in.

So the Rehab Center arranged for Apria Home Healthcare to deliver a walker to me to use at home. Having had experience with Apria when they were furnishing medical equipment for my mother, I told the folks at the Rehab Center (a) they never delivered on time and (b) to call them about anything is to spend much of your life on hold. In light of that, the Rehab Center loaned me one of their walkers to use until the one from Apria showed up.

Sure enough, Apria didn't deliver yesterday. Someone there left a message on my voicemail early this morn to phone them to arrange a delivery time. I called them back, explained what I needed, gave them my credit card for the co-pay and a lady said, "Please hold while I verify your delivery information." I have now been on hold for 37 minutes. It would only take 40 for me to crawl on my hands and knees over to CVS to buy a goddamn walker.

James Corden, Rachel Bloom and Nathan Lane offer up some Inappropriate Musicals. Mr. Lane's head has been shaved for his upcoming role as attorney F. Lee Bailey in an upcoming episode of American Crime on FX called "The People Vs. O.J. Simpson." That strikes me as real odd casting but, hey, maybe they added in some show tunes. It's not like it would lower the dignity of that trial.

I love Rachel Bloom and the fact that she now has her own TV series. She started pretty much promoting herself on the web via self-produced and self-financed music videos, one of which was the controversial, "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury." If you've never seen it and can handle a bit of naughty, you can view it here. Ray was among the many who loved it.

At the 2012 Comic-Con International in San Diego, there was a big Ray Bradbury Tribute event to note his passing. Rachel had volunteered to perform the number but someone (this was before I became involved) had told her it was too "adult" for a Comic-Con event. No problem, said she. She wrote a set of clean alternate lyrics that I believe turned the tune into "Touch Me, Ray Bradbury" and she showed up in her schoolgirl costume from the video to perform it. She would be singing live to a recorded musical track.

I was co-hosting with Ray's friend/biographer Sam Weller and on one of my trips out on stage to introduce a speaker, I noticed something about the audience: There were no kids there. Not a one. No one under the age of 18 or maybe even 30. When I went backstage, I went over to Rachel who was waiting to go on and asked her if she'd rather sing the raunchy lyrics. She said, "I'm not sure I can remember them but I'll give it a try."

So when it came time to introduce her, I went out and polled the audience. I told them they had a choice: They could hear the laundered version or, in the spirit of Fahrenheit 451, Rachel could perform the unexpurgated version. We did a show of hands and not one person present wanted the cleaned-up lyrics…so out she went to perform the song as written.

There's an online report on the memorial that says she was the one who asked the audience which version they wanted to hear. Nope. I did that and I want credit for it because I could hear Ray giving his wholehearted approval.

Rachel is a tremendous talent who will go far. Here she is the other night with James Corden and Nathan Lane…

Fred Kaplan on how what's happening in Syria reminds him of how World War I started. I don't know what's going to happen over there but we won't like it.

Not long ago, I mentioned a "secret project" here. Here's what it was. Monday the 28th at an ungodly early hour, I traded in my old right knee for a brand-new knee. I got a fairly good one I think and for a rather good price: 99 cents at — where else? — the 99 Cents Only Store on Wilshire. I wanted to get my knee at Costco until I found out that they make you buy a dozen.

First question people ask: Did it hurt? Answer: Yes, of course. It hurt like hell. As of today, it only hurts like heck and only when I put weight on it or twist it in an odd way. I trust I will look back on this decision and feel that the result is less total agony than I'd have experienced if I'd kept the old one much longer.

Actually, keeping the old one indefinitely was not a real option. It just plain wore out and it was time for it to go. Would that all things in this world that have outlived their uselessness could be replaced so thoroughly. (Have you watched Meet the Press lately?)

Please understand before I go any further that I am not recommending this surgery to anyone or not not recommending it to anyone; just describing my experiences. Would I do it again? Alas, I may have to as my left knee has been giving me trouble, too — and why not? It's just as old and I got it from the same place. I probably could have delayed the right knee for six months but because it was so intermittently efficient, I stopped driving about three weeks ago. And as I'm sure everyone can understand, I wanted to try and get it replaced and healed before the left knee became an issue.

What did I learn from the experience? Well, one thing is that many narcotics may have zero effect on my body at least for pain management. As you may know and even care, I have taken precious few drugs in my life…and I'm including alcohol and tobacco in that list. Never tried most others either but I'm kinda unsurprised that the ones they tried on me at the hospital didn't all do for me what they do for most folks.

As I've mentioned here, I have a lot of Food Allergies. One thing you learn when you have a lot of them is that bodies are different. This is not something that dawns on most people who either have none or have only had minor bad experiences with one or two foods. They're always saying to folks like me, "Oh, you should eat artichokes! They're so healthy for you!" And some of us think to ourselves, "Healthy for you maybe, poison to me!" You'd be amazed at the number of folks who don't believe that anyone can't eat the things they love. (Sometimes, they'll even say, "What if we melted cheese on the artichoke?")

So since walnuts do not have the same effect on my body as they do on most bodies, I see no reason to assume that any given drug will. Invulnerability to drugs is apparently not a hereditary trait. My mother used to consume Vicodin like those great Molasses Chips bars that come in assortments of See's Candy. The time I took my one and only Vicodin, which was in connection with some minor surgery, I got violently seasick on dry land.

I had my surgery on Monday. After, there was much pain, especially if I did anything foolish like moving my leg or exhaling. They gave me Norco. It had no effect. They gave me a higher dosage of Norco. Still no effect. Then they tried Dilaudid. That did have an effect: It made me nauseous and dizzy. The leg remained indifferent and ablaze.

The Dilaudid experiment was in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Once it had failed, doctors were unreachable and my nurse wasn't authorized to give me anything else so I suffered until about 7:30 AM when my surgeon made his rounds to see how I was doing. When he found out, he ordered up a new nerve block for my leg, like the nerve block they'd used along with other anesthetics during the surgery. For reasons they explained but which I'm not sure I can replicate here, the second block wouldn't take so we plunged back into trying other drugs.

Morphine didn't work on me. Percoset didn't work on me. Oxycontin didn't do a thing for my pain but it did make me very, very stupid for most of one night. Finally, I understand this Rush Limbaugh thing.

A few others failed and then on Thursday morning, they called in a Pain Management specialist. A young Korean woman suggested a muscle relaxant called Robaxin which, working in tandem with more conventional pain-killers, suddenly did the trick. By Thursday evening, I could move without sounding like Sam Kinison with his dick stuck in his zipper. Friday morning, I even took a few steps with a walker.

Friday evening, I was moved to a Rehabilitation Center, a move I initially feared. I dealt with several for my mother when she was in her final years and even the best one I found wasn't wonderful. The worst one reminded me of one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the survivors of the nuclear holocaust wonder aloud if those who'd perished weren't the lucky ones. But folks at the hospital assured me I was going to one of the better places and they were right, though I turned out to be allergic to every single thing on their menu except Cheerios.

That amazingly was not a problem since some combo of after-effects of the surgery and/or my pain meds completely nuked my appetite. My friend Carolyn and my cleaning lady Dora brought me the few meals I felt like eating. (The chow in the hospital was, amazingly, not bad. I wasn't hungry there either but what I did consume could have been served at a Denny's or Bob Evans'.)

That was one difference between the hospital and the Rehabilitation Center. Another was that in the hospital, I had a private room and didn't have to listen to a lot of old people screaming all night. I don't mean that to be insensitive but that's an accurate description. I shared a room with two gents far more elderly than I and across the hall from us was a woman I never saw but heard aplenty. From her voice, I imagined her looking just like Shelley Winters and she was always hollering to have her door left open, her door left closed, her food tray brought, her food tray taken away, her medication given, etc. Mainly though, the demands were toilet-related.

So it's 4 AM and we're all listening to this woman announce in graphic terms what she'll do to the bed and herself if someone doesn't come and help her. No wonder I had no appetite. Meanwhile, one of my roommates kept yelling in pain while the other was nice about 23 hours and 55 minutes out of each day. The other five, he'd spend in nightmare-delusion land, yelling at the nurses here that they had broken into his home and they should leave immediately because he was calling the police.

And still, it wasn't that bad. The staff was friendly and efficient. The place was clean and well-equipped. The Physical Therapists knew what they were doing. I did not have a terrible time.

Please do not write me that you or a loved one had a terrible time in a nursing facility. I know that's the norm, especially after what I experienced having to yank my mother out of several. I just thought you'd all appreciate hearing that it isn't always that way.

Since the wonderful Korean Pain Specialist solved the riddle of what would manage my hurting, my knee has gotten a bit better each day. I came home this afternoon and finished/uploaded this post which I mostly drafted at the Rehab Center. The four days at the hospital, I managed this blog, posting pre-written items and writing some new ones on my iPad and iPhone. At the Rehab Center, I had the space (and ability to get outta bed) so I could set up the laptop. Now I'm home and I expect to be back to normal walking and driving in two weeks, maybe sooner.

I did not mention this before now except to a few good friends, or keep a real-time blog of the experience because I knew I'd get e-mails with anecdotal tales of folks whose knee replacements went horribly, horribly wrong. For some reason, some people think they're being helpful when they do that while others do it out of a heightened sense of Nasty. Even after my Gastric Bypass Surgery in 2006 which was utterly successful, one of my fellow comic book writers couldn't resist coming up to me at Comic-Con and telling me, "You know, most people who have that operation are okay for a time but then they suddenly die." He was not kidding. He just wanted to piss on someone else's self-improvement.

That's everything I can think of to tell you right now but others, I'm sure, will occur to me. It was briefly awful but all in all, less awful than I expected. Once I'm well enough to get down on one knee, I'll start working up a dynamite Jolson impression to go with my Durante.

Before there was YouTube, there was Public Access TV. Here from a 1979 public access broadcast is a half-hour with Mel Blanc. Mel tells the story of how he invented Porky Pig's voice by deciding that a pig's grunts were not unlike a stutter. That's not true. Porky was created as a stuttering pig and originally voiced by a stuttering comedian until Mel was called in to replicate what the previous guy had been doing.

But apart from a few of those, it's a good conversation with a great, talented man. The interviewer is Dennis Tardan, who is still doing interviews, now in podcast form…

I think I've written about this before but I'm not that wild about anyone who runs for public office. Never have been, never expect to be. Moreover, I question whether deep down, anyone really is. I think we all select the Least Objectionable Candidate and then having made that decision, we try to convince everyone that he or she is terrific, perfect, sent-by-God, flawless, the best hope of America, a true leader, etc. Often in the process, we convince ourselves of that to some delusional extent.

I can understand how some people preferred George W. Bush over the alternatives at the time but I don't believe that anyone who said he was a great man really thought that. My friends who supported him — I had more than you might think — always seemed to be cringing over the mangled English, the bad economic news, the certainty over so much of the Iraq War that has since been found to be untrue…I could make a very long list.

Time and again, they had to put on brave faces and pretend none of that stuff diminished their respect for Their President. Does anyone think it wouldn't have if it was done by President Gore?

The reverse is just as true. I may well wind up voting for and supporting Hillary Clinton. I think she's a smart woman and I have a certain sympathy for her because I think she's been smeared by fake scandal after fake scandal. But I promise you (and more important, myself) that I'm not going to start cheerleading for her and pretending she's The Best of All Possible Candidates. At best, she or anyone might be The Best of All Candidates Who'll Be On My Ballot. Which is sure not the same thing.

Lately, she reminds me of one of those candidates who if you asked them their position on a vital issue and they were completely honest, they'd say, "I don't know. My advisors haven't finished analyzing the polls yet." Her statement today of opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Deal doesn't make a whole lot of sense as anything but a vote-getting calculation. It hasn't changed much since an earlier version she supported. This is how she is lately with everything.

Not long ago, one of the worst things you could say about a politician was that he was for something before he was against it…like John Kerry was for the Iraq War before he was against it. That kind of shift was rarely viewed as new enlightenment or changing one's position due to new developments or new information. I could respect it one of those contexts but a lot of folks couldn't. They saw it as wishy-washiness, trying to have it both ways, being willing to say anything to get elected, etc.

These days, we don't even seem to expect our candidates to be consistent. Ben Carson was for some forms of Gun Control before he was against them all. Bernie Sanders was (somewhat) against national marriage equality before he was for it. Donald Trump was probably at some point for everything he's now against and against everything he's now for. The few candidates who haven't done wide U-Turns are all polling at 4% or less.

I don't like any of these people that much. I'm going to vote for whoever won't try to cripple Obamacare and health suppliers like Planned Parenthood, whoever's less likely to pack the Supreme Court with more Scalias, whoever seems less prone to initiate sequels to the Iraq War in Iraq or elsewhere, whoever's not going to slash taxes for the rich and compassion for the poor and so forth. It'll have to be someone who won't play ostrich when anyone utters the words, "Climate Change."

Sure looks like that'll be the Democrat. I'm thinking this election has a lot of twists and turns ahead but the nominee of that party could well be Ms. Clinton.

But I won't get into that trap of thinking she (or he if it's Sanders or Biden) is perfect, wonderful, ideal, etc. And if you're likely to vote for the G.O.P. nominee, you can save yourself a lot of pretending and disappointment by not getting into that trap, either. If there are such people in politics today, the silly (and monetary) demands we place on them pretty much guarantee they won't make it through the gantlet.

I never much cared for the cereal, Post Crispy Critters…but I really liked their commercials. That's Sheldon Leonard, of course, as Linus…

Tomorrow is, amazingly, the 20th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I don't know about you but I came to two pretty firm conclusions after it…

1. O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and probably did so exactly as alleged and with no hanky-panky on the part of the police and —
2. I spent way too much of my life watching this trial and reading about it and talking about it and just thinking about it.

If you disagree with #1, fine. Because of #2, I have no interest in debating any part of #1. I will say though that just as a spectator sport, I found the second trial — the civil one — more interesting.

And the best bit of reporting on that second trial was done for Slate in a series of first-person accounts filed by the Renaissance Man of Show Biz, Harry Shearer. I kinda disagree with Harry that the L.A.P.D. "enhanced" the evidence against Orenthal in order to make sure an obviously-guilty man was convicted. But that aside, Shearer's 36 dispatches offer fascinating insight into our judicial system and the way the media intersects and interferes with it.

Slate still has the pieces up but they're in a format that makes them awkward to read in sequence. I have therefore gone to the trouble — no, no, don't thank me — of compiling links to each chapter so you can read the articles in the right order by clicking on these links…

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Part 31, Part 32, Part 33, Part 34, Part 35, and Part 36.

That I went to the trouble to do this should give you some idea how valuable I think Mr. Shearer's reporting is. The least you can do is go read it.

Today (Wednesday), Stu Shostak welcomes the lovely 'n' gifted Kathy Garver to his microphone.  Kathy was, of course, one of the stars of the popular CBS situation comedy, Family Affair and she went on to do all sorts of TV roles as both an on-camera talent and a voiceover specialist.  It has not always been the easiest life as she describes in her newly-released autobiography, Surviving Cissy.  You can order a copy of it here and you can hear her talk about it today with Stu.  It all should make for an engrossing Stu's Show.

Stu's Show can be heard live (almost) every Wednesday at the Stu's Show website and you can listen for free there. Webcasts start at 4 PM Pacific Time, 7 PM Eastern and other times in other climes. They run a minimum of two hours and sometimes go to three or beyond.  Shortly after a show ends, it's available for downloading from the Archives on that site. Downloads are a paltry 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three. You'd be cray-cray to pass up this bargain!

One of my favorite cabaret performers, Sharon McNight, takes up poetry writing. But she does it the easy way…

I pretty much agree with my pal Paul Harris about The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Last night's was a bit weak and the John McCain interview contained everything I don't like about politicians coming on shows like this. But overall, I think Colbert is already better than anyone else currently doing a late night show…

…and I'll go farther than that: I think he's showing the potential to be better than anyone who's ever done a late night show. That's right: Better than Johnny or Dave or Dick or Jay or any of those folks.

I am not predicting anything about ratings because these days, who knows? But the guy is funny and charming and he's as good an ad-libber as any of them. They need to sand off a few more rough edges and he needs to relax more and they still haven't quite figured how the bandleader fits into the proceedings. But the host himself is terrific and he's actually talking to his guests most of the time instead of setting them up for pre-planned speeches.

When Chick-Fil-A came to be viewed as a company supporting right-wing causes, a lot of people urged the boycotting of the business…and Mike Huckabee ran rallies in support of it and denounced the boycotts as "economic terrorism."

Well now, Frito-Lay has an alliance with the It-Gets-Better Project, which helps kids cope with anti-gay bullying. Guess who is now calling on all Christians to boycott Frito-Lay products.

As some of you may know, I was the Supervising Producer of The Garfield Show, which is seen all over the globe. I'm still not sure what a Supervising Producer supervises but I wrote a lot of the series and directed the voices and did various producer-like chores. We did…well, I'm not sure if I should say four or five seasons. Seasons 1-4 consisted of approximately 26 half-hours each. "Season 5," as they called it, was four 11-minute episodes that could also be described as one four-part story.

The 78 half-hours that comprised Seasons 1-3 have been running for many years in the United States on Cartoon Network and/or Boomerang. Both channels are owned by the same company and they've sometimes run them on one or the other or for a while on both, usually four half-hours a day, seven days a week. They have run these over and over and over and over and over and over and over.

They do quite well in the ratings, which is why they run them over and over and over and over and over and over and over. Though they've had Season 4 and "Season 5" sitting on the shelf for a long time, they haven't aired them because Seasons 1-3 do so well as they run them over and over and over, etc. 4 and 5 have been broadcast all over the world; just not in the U.S. of A.

Right now, the shows from Seasons 1-3 air on Boomerang Monday through Friday at 10 AM, 10:30 AM, 10 PM and 10:30 PM. On the weekends, Boomerang has them at 2 PM, 2:30 PM, 10 PM and 10 PM. These are all Eastern Times I'm giving you.

And starting tonight, there's an additional half-hour every Tuesday night which will be airing the never-before Season 4 and (I think, later on, "Season" 5). This half-hour airs on Boomerang at 8:30 PM Eastern and then the same episodes air at 11:30 PM. Now, here's where it gets complicated…

Each half-hour of The Garfield Show contains two 11-minute episodes. Some of the 11-minute episodes in Season 4 are standalone 11-minute stories and some of them are 11-minute chapters of five-part stories. Tonight, for example, they're airing Part 1 and Part 2 of the five-part story, "The Lion Queen." Next Tuesday, you get Part 3 and Part 4 and then the following Tuesday, you get Part 5 of "The Lion Queen" and…well, I'm not sure. Maybe one of the standalone episodes or maybe Part 1 of another five-parter.

This is not the way I'd have chosen to air the shows but I do want to recommend them to you anyway. These episodes feature some of the best CGI animation I've ever seen on television and I was real happy with how the stories came out. (There are also songs; I wrote the English lyrics for tunes written by others in France.) "The Lion Queen" also has a superb voice cast: Frank Welker, Gregg Berger, Wally Wingert, Jason Marsden, Julie Payne, Fred Tatasciore, Phil LaMarr, Misty Lee, Laraine Newman and Stan Freberg.

I'm not comfy plugging my own work so this is as much as I'll say now. I hope you enjoy them and I hope one of these days soon, they run all five parts of a five-parter, one right after the other. I really like them that way.

This is from May 9, 2010. I happened to read it again today and thought you might enjoy it again…

Yesterday afternoon, I went to Costco for lunch and had a nice feast of Costco dim sum. That's what I call the copious free samples you can get there, wandering from aisle to aisle, taking little noshes from ladies in hairnets. The teriyaki chicken bites were so good, I doubled around for seconds, hoping the hairnet lady wouldn't recognize me and yell, "Hey, one to a customer, sport!" I could eat very well at Costco for free if I could just figure how to get out of that place without spending $300 on a lifetime supply of baking soda.

Then I replenished my car — thirsty from the long shlep to and from Riverside — with Costco gas…and got to thinking. We used to buy gas in this country based, at least in part, on the premise that one brand was better than another. I had the idea, and I'm not sure where I got it, that my old Buick Skylark ran well with Shell or 76, not so well with Chevron or Texaco. To this day, I'll sometimes bypass Chevron for Shell…and I don't even have that car anymore, nor any reason to suspect my current auto cares.

Of course, that preference is only exercised when the two brands are close to the same price. I'm wondering what percentage of Americans take anything else into account except price and maybe which station is easiest to get in and out of. A distant third might be the business practices of the company. I forget which outrage it was — the Valdez spill, maybe — but I stopped buying Exxon a long time ago. I've only purchased Exxon gas once since then. It was a time when I was in a strange and desolate area, the needle was hovering around "E" and the Exxon station looked like the only option for miles. So I bought there but I still felt like I was reneging on a sacred vow.

Oil companies used to advertise heavily that their brand was better for your car…their gas had certain additives that let it run cleaner, longer, happier. They still do a little of that advertising but my sense now is that some don't advertise much, and those that do put the main emphasis on saying, not exactly in these words, that their company isn't destroying the planet quite as rapidly as others. BP, it always seemed to me, sold nothing much beyond the same gas and the notion that they were somehow greener than their competition. (The station near me used to actually give away flower seeds.) I would imagine that a lot of the money they'll wind up spending on the clean-up of the Gulf Coast will be diverted into an attempted clean-up of their reputation.

As I was pumping my vehicle full of Costco gas, I realized I had no idea what kind of gas it was, where it comes from, how good it might be for my car. Since I don't think Costco owns any oil wells, they must buy it from other companies…probably whoever will give them the best deal that month. It could be Exxon for all I know but I prefer to think it's just Costco gas. It's cheap and that's all that really matters.

My father would have loved Costco gas. In fact, he would have just plain loved Costco. He was a very generous man. If I asked for something, I got it. This was, of course, because I was prudent enough to never ask for anything he couldn't afford…but the point is that he didn't balk. "My son wants it? Fine." That was the attitude. Same deal if my mother wanted anything. But beyond that, he was very frugal, sometimes illogically so. I guess that was the case with a lot of folks who grew up in the Great Depression (the last one) and never in their later lives got near any standard of affluence.

I'm recalling when gas was around 29.9. This was in the sixties. 29.9 was a common price but out in Venice, about a seven mile drive from our house, there was a station that was always a penny cheaper. If gas was 29.9 down the street from us, it was 28.9 at this one place in Venice. My father used to drive out there — make a special trip — just to fill the tank on his old Oldsmobile Cutlass.

I guess I thought I was helping when I pointed out how silly this was. The car held 20 gallons…and of course, he didn't wait 'til it was bone dry to fill up. He went when it was down to about a quarter-full, so the most he could save was around fifteen cents. From that, you had to subtract the cost of the gasoline consumed by driving out to Venice and back. I figured it out once and he was getting 13-15 miles to the gallon so deduct a penny. He was spending about ninety minutes, the length of the journey, to save fourteen cents. If you factored in wear and tear on the car, maybe twelve.

My father was not paid well at his job but his time was worth a lot more than eight cents per hour. Heck, he paid a kid down the block two bucks an hour to mow our lawn. But he could somehow not get over the idea that it was worth 90 minutes of his life to drive to the station in Venice. He kept telling me that if he paid 29.9, he was being played for a sucker.

I learned many things from my father, mostly having to do with common decency and compassion and honesty and avoiding pointless angers and tensions. And then there were those lessons I learned by observing him and making up my own mind to not follow some example. His kind of False Economy was one of the these. There are expenditures I don't make because I'd feel like a sucker but they're for a lot more than fourteen cents…or even the present-day equivalent adjusted for inflation. As a freelance writer for (now) going on 41 years, I've learned to value my time as well as my money. I feel like I'm doing right by both when I go to Costco…getting good prices but also stocking-up on supplies so as to save myself frequent trips to the market.

As I said, my father would have loved the chain. Similar stores were around when he passed away and I don't know why he never went to one. Come to think of it, I don't know why I'm writing about my father on Mother's Day…or why Costco made me think of him when I was there, in part, to buy crates of things my mother needs. Maybe it was because he was always buying her what she needed and now I have that responsibility. In any event, remind me on Father's Day to write about my mother. Just to balance things out.