Yearly Archives: 2015

William Saletan has a very long article over on Slate about GMOs in our food — a topic which interests me greatly but which I don't know enough about to have informed viewpoints. Yes, I know that doesn't stop a lot of people in this world but I occasionally own up to that which I do not know.

Saletan makes many good points. One, which I don't doubt, is that the folks who have championed GMOs and those who want them banned have both used some misleading and perhaps phony data to make their cases. Another, also undoubted by me, is that no evidence can ever exist that will cause some folks to alter their positions on this. Yet another is that just because a food item is free of GMOs, that doesn't mean it's safe and that it can't have other things wrong with it.

Beyond that, I'm kind of confused. Saletan cites many, many instances where contradictory evidence has been introduced into the debate but that, of course, makes me wonder if anyone really knows as much as they think they do. He also convinces me that people who know far more about this kind of thing than I ever will are at odds with each other. That makes me wonder how I, a non-expert and likely to remain one, could ever arrive at a satisfactory conclusion.

Please do not send me your satisfactory conclusions. I already can't process all I've read about this topic. I'm just directing to you an article that tosses out plenty to think about with regards to what we eat.

Oh — and whatever I ultimately might decide, I do think it's wrong to not have GMO food labeled. Even if I ultimately decide it's all safe, I think you have the right to decide it's not and to know what you're getting. I think everything people ingest should be labeled. All cole slaw should have a big sticker on every container that says: "WARNING! CONTAINS COLE SLAW!"

In the early seventies, I was writing a lot of comic books for Gold Key, the company that published the Disney comics and the ones featuring the Warner Brothers characters, plus they also had Woody Woodpecker and The Pink Panther and Scooby Doo and a lot of other famous properties. I wrote for most of the comics produced out of the firm's West Coast office and occasionally did a smidgen of drawing here and there.

Mostly, I'd do a rough sketch for a cover and then one of their experienced artists would redraw it more professionally. The two covers above are examples. They're kind of my drawing but fixed a bit and inked by someone who drew a lot better than I did. (The Pink Panther finished art was by Warren Tufts. If you know who that was, you're very impressed right now.)

I was never as serious about my drawing as I was about my writing, in part because I recognized that whatever ability I had as a writer was greater than whatever ability I had as an artist. Drawing for me was like another interest I had: Magic. I knew a lot about both and I could do both well enough to impress the easily-impressed…but only them. I could be the best cartoonist or magician in any room where nobody else was a cartoonist or a magician. Obviously, as I got more and more into the comic book industry (or after I became a member of the Magic Castle), I was rarely in such rooms.

But during the time I worked for Gold Key, I always seemed to have a girl friend who'd take me to her friends' parties and introduce me around as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comic books. I'd ask her to just say I wrote them and then the following conversation would ensue…

SHE: But you draw Bugs Bunny. You drew Bugs Bunny on the paper tablecloth at the restaurant last week.

ME: Yeah but that's a paper tablecloth. I don't really draw him in the comics.

SHE: Yes, you do. You showed me that issue with the cover you drew.

ME: And I explained to you that all I did was the rough sketch of that cover. Someone else — a real cartoonist — did the finished art.

SHE: Okay but the point is you drew Bugs Bunny on that cover. You showed me the sketch you did. It was a drawing of Bugs Bunny. I don't know why you don't just draw the finished comic books.

ME: Maybe it has something to do with me not being good enough…

SHE: Nonsense! You did that drawing of Bugs Bunny for my niece. She loved it!

ME: She's nine years old.

SHE: And how old are the kids who read those comic books?

ME: Oh, they're much older. They're like…ten or eleven.

SHE: You see what I mean?

And she'd go on introducing me as the guy who wrote and drew the Bugs Bunny comics. Depending on my mood, I might stop arguing the point, especially around people who couldn't grasp the concept that those might be two separate jobs. I'd say, "Yes, yes…I do the pictures. I make up the words in the 'bubbles.'" (Folks who don't know comics always call them "bubbles." Those of us who know better call them "word balloons.")

Or she might say I wrote and drew the Donald Duck comic books or the Goofy comic books. For some reason, any time at a party I was passed off as a Disney artist, someone would ask me if I would do a drawing for them of Donald and Daisy or Mickey and Minnie having sex. No one ever wanted a dirty picture of Porky Pig and Petunia getting it on but there was some repressed sexuality attached to the Disney characters.

I did no such drawings of Disney Ducks for anyone, partly because I had integrity and respect for those characters…and partly because I didn't draw well enough to put them into those poses.

I'm sure I could have been better at drawing — and also at magic — had I practiced and studied a lot more than I did. But as much as I enjoyed those two areas, I enjoyed writing ten — no, make that twenty times as much and I also seemed to have more of a flair for it. I don't think I could ever have gotten good enough at drawing or magic to make even a low-grade income at either, nor did I ever wish for either profession.

The last few years, it has come to my attention that my drawing, which was never great, has gotten a whole lot less great. In fact, it's gotten so bad that I can't do much more than draw Bugs Bunny on paper tablecloths.

It's not just that I'm out of practice. It's that all these years of working on a computer and not using a pen or pencil has caused my manual skills with a writing implement to deteriorate. My lettering used to be good enough that I could design cover logos, do lettering corrections and occasionally even letter a story. Now, I can't and a touch of arthritis has furthered degraded both skills.

Does this bother me? A little but only a little — and the decline of my lettering skills bothers me more than the worsened drawing. Lettering was more useful to me and I was a better letterer than I was an artist.

As I get older, there are lots of things I can't do as well as I once did. I've learned you can't stop that. You have to accept your new limitations and focus on those things you can do as well as you used to. If you're fortunate, there are one or two you now do better than you did then.

You can even rejoice in the fact that less is expected of you in some areas as you get older. I was a terrible dancer when I was young. I'm a terrible dancer now but when you pass the age of 60, people stop expecting anything else. If and when I hit 80, I'll probably be just as terrible a dancer as I was when I was 18 but by then, it'll be kind of impressive.

Stu Shostak has two of my buddies on today. One is Jerry Beck, seen above at left. Jerry may be the wisest and best informed person around these days on the subject of animation and he often appears on Stu's Show to discuss what's new in the theaters, what's coming out on DVD and the general history of cartoons. Today, he'll probably do all three and the historical part will be about the Columbia cartoon studio and the struggles Jerry endured to get that library remastered and released for television and home video. He was aided in that crusade by Stu's other guest, Mike Schlesinger (the guy at right) who was then an exec with the Sony company…but that's not why he's on Stu's Show today. He'll be talking about newly-found, soon-to-be-released film treasures starring that great comedy team, Biffle and Shooster! If you live in the L.A. area, you might want to attend this exciting and upcoming screening of their films.

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 measly 99 cents each and you can get four for the price of three.  How many times do I have to tell you this?

A whole bunch of clips and comments about Jon Stewart over at The New York Times.

Well, I failed to make the cut for the Fox News Republican Debate. I don't know why. I can say nothing constructive as well as any of those guys. I can pander to the nutcase right and do my best to keep alive silly, inflammatory charges that I don't even believe. I can curse out the current administration for doing just what I would have done and then offer no practical alternative.

Just because I'm neither a Republican nor a candidate, they exclude me from their debate? Well, who needs them? Instead, I'll go out to dinner with Rick Santorum, Carly Fiorina, Lindsey Graham and the rest of the rejects and we'll talk about how we're going to spin this and everything else that happens to us in this election as a stirring moral victory.

I'm so disgusted by this turn of events that I'm putting up one of my decorative soup can illos and taking the rest of the day off from blogging. I hope you're satisfied, Roger Ailes.

The late Huell Howser was a local treasure…a TV reporter who covered interesting people and places in Los Angeles with great enthusiasm. Mr. Howser loved everything and everyone he encountered in our fair city and he had a knack for finding the unusual. He did some really fine shows documenting things that are no longer there and he did them while they were still there.

His shows appeared on the local PBS station, KCET. KCET is no longer a PBS station but they occasionally rerun old Huell Howser shows and they just put a huge batch of them online. I'll link you to a few of the best ones in the coming weeks and you'll see what I mean about Howser's unabashed interest and enthusiasm in almost everything.

This one is from 2000 and it's a tour of Forrest J Ackerman's "Ackermansion" in Los Feliz. Forry Ackerman, who passed in 2008, was an editor, writer, agent and historian of science-fiction and monsters with a penchant for horrid puns and self-promotion. He collected enough monster and s-f memorabilia to fill his home which he passed off as a museum filled with "millions of dollars" worth of artifacts. Near the end of his life, not long after Howser's video visit, Ackerman began liquidating his "museum" and the contents brought considerably less loot than he or anyone expected.

I visited there a few times and also went to his previous Ackermansion in Beverly Hills, back when he was still engaged in editing the magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland. I found Ackerman to be colorful but awfully silly at times for reasons that will become evident if you watch this video. It's a pretty good record of what it was like to have Forry take you around his abode, which impressed me somewhat less at age thirteen than it seems to impress Huell Howser in this tour…

• I hope I get a spot in the Republican debates. I haven't filed as a candidate but I still have almost as much support as Lindsey Graham.

Rick Lax is a magician and the inventor of several quite remarkable tricks. There are some magicians who just do the old standards, occasionally putting a new coat of paint on them or making an old trick look different…and there are magicians who invent. Lax is an inventor. But he's an inventor frustrated by the fact that if you figure out how to do the seemingly-impossible, it seems to be impossible to protect your idea. I'll let him tell you all about it.

People who worked with Jon Stewart on The Daily Show tell what it was like.

You'll notice it mentions that at one point, Stewart was signed by David Letterman's Worldwide Pants company. This was when Tom Snyder was hosting the program following Dave and the industry buzz at the time was that signing Stewart was someone's way of telling Ol' Tom it was time to retire again. The assumption was that Dave (or someone) wanted Stewart there to "young up" the demographic and maybe to be in the "on deck" circle if and when Dave decided to retire.

If it was intended as a hint at the time, Snyder didn't take it, not even after Stewart filled in for him a few times. When Snyder was finally nudged aside, it was not Stewart that got the job but Craig Kilborn. He left The Daily Show to do it and guess who they got to replace him over there.

I'd be curious to know if Stewart thought, as many did, that Worldwide Pants signed him with no intention of ever giving him the show after Letterman's, let alone Letterman's. A lot of people in the business seem to think the whole idea of signing Stewart was to keep him off the air lest he compete with Dave either by going on opposite him or following him and looking like a viable replacement. I suspect Mr. Stewart is too much the gentleman to ever say that's what he thought was done to him but I wonder if he thinks that.

You may have seen this. It's Ray Jessel on America's Got Talent. Ray, who died July 17, 2015 at the age of 85 was a very successful comedy writer who worked on Broadway and then came to Hollywood where he wrote for The Dean Martin Show, Love Boat, The Carol Burnett Show and many more. Around the time he hit his seventies, he began turning up on the L.A. cabaret circuit singing his original and highly amusing songs. His act was delightful and he was delightful — and as you'll see, the judges agreed. It's always a shame to lose a funny human being like this…

The consensus in the computer world seems to be that the new Windows 10 is (a) a spectacular operating system and a vast improvement on its predecessors and (b) very bad at protecting your data, your privacy and your bandwidth. I have not installed it yet. Unless there's an urgent reason to do so, I usually let major upgrades on software simmer for about a month to see how they go over and what gets changed.

If you must have it now, you might want to read David Auerbach on things you should do to reduce how much of your life you'll be entrusting to the Microsoft company due to certain settings. I would definitely turn off the option to allow the anal probes. Unless, of course, you like that kind of thing…and knowing you, you probably do.

On Tuesday, Fox News is going to announce which candidates will take the stage in their debate. It's supposed to be the top ten as determined by some sort of averaging of five unspecified polls. In other words, Roger Ailes is going to decide which ten people he wants to have up there and then the Fox research team is going to figure out which polls and how you average them to get to those ten. Apparently, if two or more people are tied for the tenth spot, there will be more than ten.

Harry Enten has been trying to figure out who'll make the cut…or who would if they did it fairly. He says Jeb Bush, Ben Carson, Ted Cruz, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Marco Rubio, Donald Trump and Scott Walker are pretty certain to be up there. Then Chris Christie, John Kasich, Rick Perry and Rick Santorum are fighting for the last two positions. That leaves Carly Fiorina, Jim Gilmore, Lindsey Graham, Bobby Jindal and George Pataki all eating and debating at the children's table. I still think that if Stephen Colbert had entered the race, he'd now be polling high enough to guarantee him a podium.

As this article notes, the viewership for late night talk shows is way, way down…in some cases, on a par with daytime soap operas, which are thought to be a kind of programming on the endangered species list. So will late night talk shows go away?

At most, I can imagine them eventually going away from late night. With more and more people time-shifting their viewing these days, time slots don't matter as much as they once did. We might very well wake up one morning and find that the most-watched talk show on television is broadcast at 3:00 in the afternoon and viewed at all hours according to the viewers' convenience. But to the extent a large part of the audience is still watching shows when they're transmitted, I think talk shows will endure at 11:35 because that does seem to be a kind of programming people enjoy just before bedtime.

And I sure don't think talk shows will ever go away. They're cheap to produce, easy to launch and unlike soap operas, they have promotional value for their networks. They also have a little more rerun value than soaps…not a lot but some. I do think we're going to see more cases where a show that initially airs at 11:35 is rebroadcast several times the next day the way Comedy Central runs each Daily Show umpteen times. No one has ever tried to do that with soap operas.

I also think — and this is not so much a prediction as something I think is likely — that Stephen Colbert is going to be a real game-changer. I think his selection to succeed Letterman is the smartest programming decision CBS could have made. The guy has every single skill you need these days to be a successful late night host: He's funny. He's likeable. He can do characters and sketches. He can improvise. He can sing. He's smart, which matters especially in an interview situation. He also understands the Internet and has shown he can generate buzz on social media.

Want more? He's respected in the business — the kind of star that other stars want to appear with not just because he has an audience to receive their plugs but because they want to be seen alongside someone they think is brilliantly talented. He's also very up on current authors, current shows, current music, current movies, etc. Also, someone once said that one of the secrets of Carson's appeal was that men found him funny but whereas women didn't want to look at a Buddy Hackett or a Don Rickles, they thought Johnny was cute. I think Colbert probably has some of that, too.

This is not to say I'm certain the U.S. viewing public will embrace him. I don't think Conan O'Brien (a performer I used to love) ever found the right note to strike on his Tonight Show and Colbert could have the same problem. But I still think he was the smartest gamble CBS could have made. If anyone can bring new viewership to late night TV, that's the guy.

I like Larry Wilmore's show, especially when it's just Larry talking to the camera, but it has largely become a two-issue program. One issue is Bill Cosby and the other is cops killing black people with insufficient provocation. I don't think it's a coincidence that these are two issues that The Daily Show hasn't done much on.

Fortunately/unfortunately, there is much to say about these two issues, especially the last one. I'm embedding a good piece they did the other night on the recent killing by a University of Cincinnati campus officer. Even a local prosecutor who is apparently not disposed to give minorities the benefit of any doubts is calling it murder. Watch what Larry has to say about it all. This is important stuff…

We have more than fifty weeks before the Republicans convene in Cleveland to formally nominate their nominee for president. Let me give you that number again in boldface and all caps: MORE THAN FIFTY WEEKS!!!

Much can change in that time so I'm not taking Paul Waldman's scenario as a prediction so much as an outline of how Jeb Bush becomes the nominee if he becomes the nominee. If you pointed a crossbow at me today and forced me to say who I think it'll be, I'd probably say Bush. (It's intriguing to imagine the whole election as a replay of 1992 with that year's Republican nominee's son versus that year's Democratic nominee's wife…and Donald Trump in his greatest role ever as Ross Perot…)

But like I just boldfaced, it's MORE THAN FIFTY WEEKS!!! We don't know what the economy will be like then. We don't know what the situation with Iran or any foreign troublespot will be like then. We don't know what scandals will erupt or where there might be terrorist attacks or how the Supreme Court may change our lives. By that date, the consensus about the Obama Administration will have gone up or down, John McCain will have found nine more countries he thinks we should invade and there'll be at least three major issues that are presently not even being discussed, perhaps because they don't yet exist.