Yearly Archives: 2015

Daniel Larison takes Mike Huckabee apart for his hysterical and inflammatory claim that the Iran deal "will take the Israelis and march them to the door of the oven."

I wasn't kidding with that Tweet earlier. This is the lesson they're learning from Donald Trump: America wants nasty.

Hey, wasn't it Mike Huckabee who just a few weeks ago was scolding others for filling our political discourse with coarse language? I think what he said is coarser than any possible arrangement of Mr. Carlin's seven words.

• Mike Huckabee says something really offensive and stupid. Asked why he did this, he replies, "Hey, it seems to be working for Trump!"

We have two more weeks of Jon Stewart Daily Shows. His last one will be August 6. I dunno what they have planned for the final week, though I would expect Stephen Colbert will show up somewhere during it. The question is will it be the Stephen Colbert who hosted The Colbert Report or the Stephen Colbert who is soon to host The Late Show with Stephen Colbert? I would guess the latter but that guy is hard to predict.

This week, the guests are Ted Cruz, Tom Cruise, Doris Kearns Goodwin and J.J. Abrams. The interview with Cruz will probably be — shall we say? — interesting.

Stewart's replacement Trevor Noah debuts September 28. Has anyone heard any announcement of what happens for the seven weeks between those dates? Pre-emption? Reruns? Guest hosts?

Jef Rouner wrote a piece called "No, It's Not Your Opinion. You're Just Wrong." The sentiments against which he is battling should be familiar to you because you, my friend, are on the Internet. I encounter that problem more often in a slightly different manner: People who insist their opinions are facts…and get angry when you don't accept them as such.

Our friend Sergio Aragonés is the "cartoonist in residence" for the Ojai Valley Museum in Ojai, California. A few years ago, they featured a very nice exhibition of his drawings. Yesterday, they opened what I assume is a very nice exhibition of his drawings that he didn't do. These are pieces of art from his personal collection — mostly paintings and sketches that were given to him by the many artists he has met throughout his career.

I assume this is a very nice exhibition because I know what Sergio has and boy, is it a wonderful collection…so I'm going to get up there and see this presentation of some of it. I have plenty of time because the show is there 'til January 3.

For more info, here's a link to the Ojai Valley Museum website and here's a link to an article there about Sergio's status as a cartoonist in that town.

A few weeks ago, my friend Jon Armstrong appeared with his Tiny Plunger on the TV series, Penn & Teller: Fool Us. If you haven't see the show (which airs on the CW network Monday evenings), magicians come out and perform and they "win" if they do a trick which fools Penn and/or Teller. Jon scored 50%. He fooled Penn but Teller had once performed an act not unlike this so all Jon won was a nice showcase on television and a lot of praise from Penn Jillette.

The show only gave us a shortened version of Jon's routine so here's the entire thing as recorded recently at the Magic Castle. I have seen a lot of magic in my day and this is one of the cleverest presentations I've ever seen — and one which genuinely baffles a lot of experienced magicians…

I spent most of this afternoon at a hospital out in the valley where my longtime friend Scott Shaw! is recuperating from surgery. Let me give you an idea of what "longtime" means in this case…

The entity we now know as Comic-Con International started life as the Golden State Comic Con in 1970. A gentleman named Shel Dorf is generally credited as its founder and while that's not wrong in some senses, I believe others had a lot to do with it, including a fellow named Ken Krueger and a bevy of comic fans in San Diego. In '70, a few months before the first con was held, Shel took most of that bevy on a field trip to the home of Jack and Roz Kirby in Thousand Oaks, California.

Scott Shaw! was in that bevy — exclamation point and all — and that's when he and I first met. So we're talking a month or three over 45 years here. Later on, we worked together on any number of comic books and TV shows…and he even moved in with me for a brief time when his first marriage ended, thereby creating an Odd Couple with two Oscars and no Felix. We have a lot of history there.

A "shattered ankle" (that's his term for it) put him in the hospital and caused him to miss this year's Comic-Con so I went out to see him and he appears to be doing quite well. In fact, in the four hours I was there swapping stories with him, his doctor and a couple of other medical-type folks came by to interrupt our punch lines and tell him he was doing quite well and would be heading for home soon.

He was feeling a lot better and because of that, I was feeling a lot better when I left.

Last Monday, the rumor was saying that Keith Olbermann might be returning to MSNBC and that he might be paired with a new show hosted by Brian Williams. Now, MSNBC prez Phil Griffin is reportedly saying that he hasn't talked to Olbermann and someone there is saying that Williams does not want his own show at this time. I have no idea where Olbermann will land or even where he could land…but I'll bet he finds a place.

Fred Kaplan, who favors the Iran nuclear deal, explains why the Republicans who don't say they don't and why they're wrong. So far, they're sounding like their main problem with it is that Obama was the one who made it.

You may know this sketch from some of the live performances of Monty Python. It's something John Cleese did before Python and it's one of my favorites. Anyone know its origin? (And by "anyone," I probably mean Kim Howard Johnson, if he's still reading this blog.) Here it is performed at a benefit by Cleese and Adrian Edmondson…

In the last few weeks, I've gone through all but the last few years of this blog and done some repairs, fixing errors and cleaning up little formatting errors. I went from the first post (on December 18, 2000) through the last post in 2010 and I know I missed some things but I did a lot of buffing and sanding.

Many of the problems date back to the two times I changed the software on which this thing runs. I hand-coded it in HTML at first, then switched to Movable Type and finally migrated to WordPress, which is what about half the Internet runs on. During this maintenance, I…

• Fixed coding errors in about two dozen messages that caused them to display either in truncated formats or not at all. So these are restored.
• Deleted a few messages that were duplicates of others.
• Deleted a lot of dead video embeds. (Here's my policy: I don't fix or delete dead text links to other sites. I do delete dead video embeds if and when I happen to notice them. Don't bother writing to tell me that some YouTube video ain't there any longer. I only put up the little BROKEN LINK sign when I stumble upon them.)
• Fixed a few dead video embeds. But only a few. Again, thanks but don't bother writing to tell me about an outdated link I can update. I can't spare the time to do much of that.
• Upgraded a number of photos, especially on obits. I didn't have a good picture of the deceased when I wrote about them so I had to make do with a poor one. Now, I have a good one available so in it goes.
• And in the case of a number of words that have acceptable variant spellings, I picked one and made the word consistent throughout this site. I decided not to do this with "theater" and "theatre" because a lot of those places are pretty insistent on that part of their name being spelled only one of those ways.

In case anyone's interested, once I post this there will be 21,919 posts on this blog. Less than a hundred are duplicates.

As you may notice, we have this PayPal link for anyone who wants to send a donation and we appreciate it whenever someone does that, and also when they use our Amazon gateway to buy anything from Amazon.

A lot of sites are beginning to use a service called Patreon where you can become a "patron" of a site or creator and make either one-time donations or regular contributions to them. Quite a few folks wrote to ask me to do this and I went and signed up and started to figure it out…and then decided it was too much extra work. They want you to make a video and to write little essays about your goals and to have all sorts of little bonus goodies for those who contribute bucks. So there's no Patreon link here. It's for the same reason I decline all offers to put paid ads on this page.

I hope that doesn't sound like I'm criticizing anyone who does any of that. I am all for my favorite bloggers and creators on the web making as much as possible from their efforts, especially if they'd like to do all or most of their work on that basis. I just made a decision that for reasons I'm not sure I can put into a coherent paragraph, I don't want to "monetize" this blog beyond the few cash-generating links I already have.

So thanks but you don't have to tell me about Patreon. It's great but I've decided it's not, in its present form at least, for me. Maybe later.

P.J. O'Rourke, who was the editor-in-chief of National Lampoon around the time it stopped being wonderful — not necessarily his fault — explains a little about what happened there. One point he doesn't make is that just about all magazines began sliding down a cliff about that time. Lampoon's content suffered a lot as its best people discovered there was much, much more money to be made in television and/or movies…but that was also a period where much of America seemed to decide it just wasn't comfortable with the whole idea of reading magazines. And not just because this new thing that was coming called The Internet.

All week on YouTube, Stephen Colbert's operation has been posting "Lunch with Stephen" videos. Here's the week in review. The five videos should play one after the other in the little player below…

Daniel Larison notes that almost everyone who is predicting disaster if the new Iran agreement is signed is someone whose predictions about the Iraq War were totally off the mark. How many times in this world can you be dead wrong before people stop listening to you? On political matters, as many as you want!