Monthly Archives: January 2018

Here are two articles that say the Obstruction of Justice case against Donald Trump is getting stronger. One is from Jeffrey Toobin and the other is from William Saletan. The two pieces say pretty much the same thing and I don't think there was any, as they say, collusion.

Matt Yglesias analyzes a recent interview of Donald Trump and concludes that the man isn't really president. He's just kind of a front for the people who are actually doing the job.

Jonathan Chait says that Trump promised to raise clean air standards and has instead lowered them. Anyone surprised?

Rick Lax is a magician but he's also something of a consumer crusader. I'll post some of his magic one of these days but for now, watch this exposé…

The Academy Awards nominations came out earlier this week and there is probably no one in my area code who cares about them less than I do. I don't get to a lot of movies the same year they come out. I generally get to them a year or three later.

That's the great thing about movies: They never disappear and they never change. When I take Amber out for entertainment, we mostly go to plays, concerts and other live events since those do go away. Next year or the year after, we'll probably watch the screener I received of The Post or the one here for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri or the one for The Shape of Water. They'll be just as good then.

That explains why I can't muster a whole lot of rooting interest in the Oscars. What does interest me is how people try to predict who'll win in this game for which we don't have any idea who votes or why. Analysis of political elections involves knowing how blacks between the ages of 18 and 40 voted or the past voting trends of people who make $200,000 a year or more and what they thought was the Number One Issue. Data like that. With the Oscars, all we know who's won in the past — and we don't even know whether they got 51% of the vote or 99%.

We also don't know who voted or how many. Did 90% of eligible Academy members vote or did 10%? It's probably somewhere in-between but where in-between? There are indications that the key to winning our political elections is turnout. It's not how many people are on your side. It's how many of them went to the polls. So what was the turnout for last year's Oscars? How many people returned their ballots? Answer: You have no friggin' idea.

And here's the thing I'd really love to know: What is the criteria for a category like Best Actor? I mean, I assume it's different with everyone but how different?

Some years, it seems to me — and remember, I'm basing this on no data whatsoever — that a lot of voters are voting for the actor who most successfully tackled a controversial, non-glamorous role in a film that didn't seem like a shoo-in at the box office. The Oscar, it seemed to me, was about taking big risks…which is why you see so few nominations for raunchy comedies or movies with a lot of CGI. (General rule of thumb: If the movie's up for Best Visual Effects, it'll get zero acting nominations.)

But maybe some people are voting for the actor they think is overdue to win for past work. And some are voting for the actor they just plain like more than the others. And maybe some are voting for the actor they think will give the most exciting acceptance speech. And maybe a lot of 'em are voting for the only nominated performance they saw last year.

And maybe — and I have a hunch this is true in more cases than one might imagine — they vote for the performance that "the buzz" (industry chatter) says is the most outstanding. Since we have zero data, my hunch can never be proven right or wrong but there are folks out there who do a pretty good job of predicting the Oscars and most of them seem to basing their predictions on "the buzz." I think that may be it.

Then again, maybe they're all voting for the movie star they last saw in a fast food restaurant…and Meryl Streep wins so often because she eats every meal at a Burger King. Yeah, that could be it.

He's coming back February 18. Not soon enough for me…

One way or the other, I think we're going to be talking about the Donald Trump presidency for the rest of our lives…which Trump would probably consider a "win" for him, even if we're all saying what a monster he was.   He strikes me as the kind of guy who would prefer that to not being mentioned at all.

You may find this hard to believe but there are moments lately when I kinda feel sorry for the guy.  I know he's the cause of a lot of his woes and I know he gleefully did the same things to his opponents but, for example, I didn't think any pundit or commenter from afar knew as much about the Clintons' marriage as they pretended they did.  I didn't think any pundit or commenter from afar knew as much about the Obamas' marriage as they pretended they did.  And I don't think any pundit or commenter from afar knows as much about the Trumps' marriage as they pretend they do.

I also think there is such a thirst out there for jokes and insults of Trump that the Stephen Colberts and Seth Meyerses of the world are faulting him for every stupid thing he says (which is fair) and a lot of picayune, arguable ones (which is not).  There are plenty of the legit kind, guys.

The other night, Michael Wolff was on with Trevor Noah, and I didn't get that Mr. Noah had a high opinion of Mr. Wolff.  He kept pressing Wolff on his new allegation that Trump is currently having an affair with someone on the White House staff and that you can figure this out if you "read between the lines" of Wolff's new book.  It sure sounded like Wolff has insufficient proof to say it out loud but he's suggesting it anyway because, hey, the idea is to sell books, right?

I haven't made it all the way through Wolff's Fire and Fury yet and I may not.  Much of it feels a little too National Enquirer for me…and by the way, I flipped through the latest Enquirer while waiting in the supermarket check-out line lately and I think their new Mission Statement is to make Fox News look fair and balanced by comparison.  Did you know that every bad thing you hear about Trump is a lie planted by Barack Obama?  Apparently, he's even found a way to make Trump say stupid, racist things.  If Obama could do that, how come he couldn't get us real, bulletproof Universal Health Care?  Now this…

• Fred Kaplan has one of those Good News/Bad News columns.  The good news is that with regard to foreign action and military operations, Trump is doing what the generals tell him to do.  The bad news is what the generals are telling him to do.
• Trump has been tossing red meat to his base, warning them that to let one immigrant in is to let in dozens.  Politifact explains how it really works and — surprise, surprise! — it's not the way Trump says it does. Also, immigrants have a much lower crime rate than he'd like you to believe.
• Here's two views on the same matter.  Zack Beauchamp says the Obstruction of Justice case against Trump is pretty strong.  Andrew Prokop thinks otherwise.
• Jonathan Chait makes a good case that "Trump Hasn't Destroyed Obama's Legacy. He's Revealed How Impressive It Was."  Part of the reason Trump's approval rating isn't in the twenties is that most of the economic news is fairly good.  But if you look at any chart of any indicator, I don't think there's one that doesn't show the good news is all continuing some trend from the Obama years or before.
• Matt Taibbi discusses the Trump News Cycle, where it's All Donald, All the Time.
• And finally: Evangelical leaders are still standing behind their boy Trump despite the story about him cheating on his wife with a porn star and paying hush bucks to cover it up.  I'm sure they'll apply the same standards of judgment to the next Democrat who gets enmeshed in a sex scandal.

Speaking of that scandal: The porn star, Stormy Daniels, was out of the business but she's back now, touring strip clubs with her "Make America Horny Again" tour.  Donald always was a great Job Creator.

This is the work of Michael Zajkov. Stunning…

Well now!  According to my Meater probe, my Butterball Frozen Turkey Roast, which I'd thawed a few days in the refrigerator before cooking, hit an internal temperature of 168° and then Meater told me to remove it from the heat and let it rest ten minutes before cutting into it. I checked it with another thermometer which said it was at 163° so I took it out and rested it for the prescribed time. At the end of the ten minutes, both thermometers told me I was at 170°.

The turkey came out great. Then I mixed the drippings with the little gravy packet that was included with my bird and that came out pretty good. I added chicken stock instead of water and tossed in a tablespoon of flour and I'd give the resultant gravy a B+. I am enormously impressed with both the Meater probe and the Butterball product. Total cooking time was three hours and eleven minutes.

I phoned the Butterball Hot-Line, told a nice lady what I'd done and asked her, "Aren't these supposed to take seven hours?" She said, "You must have a newer slow cooker. Their low temperatures all seem to be higher." My Rival Slow Cooker is about eight years old and the Meater probe, which measures the internal temperature of the oven along with what you cook in it, said the temps inside the cooker got up to 210° near the end…but for most of the cooking time, it was below 190°

So I don't know what to think except that I'm going to do this again. You don't get golden, crispy skin in a slow cooker but the meat itself would not be outta place in a fine restaurant…or at least the kind I go to. If you wanna try it, check your local market for Butterball items and you can pick up a Meater over at their website — and apparently nowhere else. They have oodles of videos there explaining how the thing works.

In my first experience, it worked exactly the way they said it would so I'm going to give it a try soon on steak. If that comes out as well as this did, Amber may never get her Benihana Fried Rice again.

At this very moment, I'm trying a cooking experiment…and have I ever mentioned here what a lousy cook I am? I usually botch up anything more complicated than Campbell's Bean with Bacon Soup…and even that doesn't always come out the way I want it to. Beans undercooked, bacon overcooked…

So I'm trying a new device called a Meater. It's a meat thermometer that works on your wi-fi connection. At this very moment, a three-pound Butterball Turkey Roast is in a Rival Crockpot in my kitchen downstairs. As you can see, I am upstairs working on my computer. My iPad sits downstairs next to the Rival Crockpot and the Meater probe is in the Turkey Roast which is in the Rival Crockpot, which is set to "low." Via a bluetooth connection, the probe relays the internal temperature of the Turkey Roast to the Meater app in the iPad…

…and the Meater app on my iPhone is connected via my home wi-fi to the Meater app on the iPad. Is that too complicated? Basically, I can sit here upstairs and look at the Meater app on my iPhone and it can tell me the progress of the Turkey Roast downstairs. Everything is supposed to beep and my Turkey Roast is supposed to be done when it reaches an internal temperature of 170°.

So here's the problem.  I started this thing around 10:45.  The Butterball website says it's supposed to take seven hours and it won't hurt anything if I overcook by an hour or two.  They also say that the roast must reach an internal temperature of 140° in the first four hours.

That, it did.  Based on the first half-hour of cooking, the Meater timer estimated a total cook time of almost eight hours, which seemed right in line with the instructions…but since then, the internal temp has shot up, the timer estimate has gone down and as I write this, I'm getting an internal temperature of 144° in the Turkey Roast and an ambient temperature (the temp inside the slow cooker) of 202°. A setting of "low" on a slow cooker is supposed to be 190-200° so that doesn't seem terribly wrong.

Anyway, I'm now being told that my Turkey Roast will hit 170° in 35 minutes — for a total cook time of not seven hours but around three hours and fifteen minutes. Something here is not right.

When the time's up, I'm going to check the Turkey Roast with a conventional meat thermometer and maybe I'll figure out what it is that's not right. Stay tuned.

Here's another of my silly theories about politics. Give this as much or as little respect as you think it deserves…

Every so often, an elected official does something that we as spectators can't understand. Like, let's say a Congressman comes out one day and announces he has information that a band of radical scientists has bred a mutated species of gopher that is capable of pressing the levers of a voting machine and they've already got thousands of them secretly registered to vote. He wants to hold Congressional hearings into the scandal he is now calling Gophergate.

This demand goes nowhere but for a time, analysts try to explain it. Some poll somewhere says that a certain voting bloc has a deep, tribal distrust of gophers so he's probably trying to appeal to them. Or maybe a rogue official within the C.I.A. has leaked information to the Congressman. Or maybe the Congressfella is confusing a now-defunct attempt to train gerbils to help register voters. They come up with all sorts of explanations for why he said such a wacky thing but they overlook the most obvious explanation. It involves a conversation over dinner in the past week…

CONGRESSMAN: So, my staff and I were hoping you could help us on our crusade with a small donation…or at least what would be a small donation to someone in your position. Maybe two million…

SCREWY RICH PERSON: Well, I'd like to help you because I like a lot of the things you're saying…especially that stuff about how it'll be better for the economy if screwy rich people like me don't pay taxes. But I haven't heard you address the single most important matter facing this country today…

CONGRESSMAN: Uh, which single most important matter facing this country today would that be?

SCREWY RICH PERSON: Gophers voting, of course.

CONGRESSMAN: "Gophers voting?"

SCREWY RICH PERSON: Of course. Don't tell me you haven't heard all about it! I thought you were the kind of representative who was on top of all these threats to our American way of life!

CONGRESSMAN: Oh, yes, yes. (lowering voice) It's just that some things are supposed to be, you know, top secret. I'm impressed that you heard about it. I guess I shouldn't be surprised, what with you being so perceptive and connected to everything that's going on in this country. Now, about that donation…

SCREWY RICH PERSON: I'm not donating a dollar to anyone unless I see they're doing something to stop those damn gophers. They're not only going to destroy democracy but my front lawn is full of holes.

CONGRESSMAN: Well, I guess it's safe to tell you that I've planned a major address about the problem next week. It's time to alert the public to this insidious menace.

SCREWY RICH PERSON: You're damned right it is. Way past time. I know for a fact that's how my dear friend Roy Moore lost that election down in Alabama. They say his opponent got 673,896 votes. Ridiculous! I know for a fact that more than 588,000 of those were cast illegally by gophers.

CONGRESSMAN: My sources tell me more than that…and it wasn't just gophers. Raccoons, too. I'm going to hold off dropping that particular part of the bombshell until I have more solid proof but I will be going public with what I like to call "Gophergate" next week.

SCREWY RICH PERSON: Good. I'll be watching for it.

CONGRESSMAN: I'll call you right after the speech because I'll want to get your reaction…oh, and maybe we can talk more about that donation. Before I go though, I'm curious. What else have you heard about the gophers?

I often think it must be something like that. We underestimate what even the politicians we like will do to extract support from one wealthy person. This is assuming the other possible explanation isn't true; that there really are mutant gophers voting. It would explain Trump.

Comic book writer-editor Bill Harris died January 8 at the age of 84. Harris started and ended his career in the field of advertising and promotion, moving from company to company for many years. When he secured a post doing promotional work for Dell Publishing, he took a special interest in their comic book line and wound up moving into editorial work on it. That meant leaving Dell and going to work for Western Publishing, which produced Dell's comic book line until 1962. (If anyone isn't clear on the relationship between Western, Dell and Gold Key, I explained it here.)

Harris continued working for Western. He was proudest of his editorial work on Western's Bullwinkle comics and of his writing work on the comic starring Lee Falk's classic character, The Phantom. In 1966 when the King Features newspaper syndicate attempted to start their own line of comics, Bill was hired as editor of its small list of titles which included Flash Gordon, Mandrake the Magician, The Phantom, Blondie, Beetle Bailey and Popeye. The line was not successful, lasting a little over a year and while Bill briefly did editorial work for Warren's Creepy and Eerie, he did not work much more in comics. Most of his career thereafter was spent working in the promotional department of the New York Times.

One of his innovations when he was in comics was that he was one of the first editors to recognize that there was a promotional value in comic book fanzines. Many of the early zines of the sixties featured letters from Bill, telling fandom what would be forthcoming in the comics he edited. Few others in comics at the time saw any value in that but Harris predicted correctly the growing impact that fanzines and comic conventions would have on the field. For that and for writing some pretty good Phantom comics, he certainly deserves to be remembered.

I'm going to date myself here: When I started collecting comic books, there was absolutely no investment potential in them. New comics sold for ten cents. Once one was no longer new, the only place it would be sold was in a second-hand book shop and there, the going price was usually a nickel and most stores would sell you six for twenty-five cents.

In the mid-sixties, a soon-to-be-thriving market for old issues began to thrive. Shops and dealers began to sell old comics for more than their face value. I remember being up at Cherokee Books up on Hollywood Boulevard where its impresario Burt Blum would fan out a "poker hand" of five mint condition copies of Superman #1 he had for sale. I think they were twenty bucks apiece and that seemed outrageous at the time.

There was vast interest in old comics and most of the collectors I knew were way more interested in the content of the books, as opposed to their investment potential. Still, it was easier to rationalize spending money on what some then called "junk" if the "junk" you were buying was going up in value. Then again, I used to get annoyed when people thought that was the sole reason I was buying 'em.

I had a truly-impressive collection in my bedroom when I was fourteen or so — one whole wall had a bookcase that was filled with old comics. When my parents had visitors over, it was somehow required that the guests go in and see what Mark had. Almost invariably, the comment I heard was, "Wow, you should open a store!" They probably thought I was nuts when I'd reply, "I don't want to sell them. I want to read them."

Sometimes, I'd say, "I will never sell my comic collection" — a vow I kept for close to half-a-century. Actually, somewhere along the way, I modified it to "I will never sell my comic collection unless I really need the money" and I never really needed the money. But eventually, I needed the space and I realized it had been, literally, more than a decade since I'd looked at any of them. When I wanted to revisit an old issue, I almost always had some recently-published reprint that was easier and safer to handle and maybe even had better reproduction. There are also scans of many of them on my computer here.

What I loved about them was the content, not so much the physical (deteriorating) paper…so I turned a lot of them over to an auction house and they are now residing in someone else's collection, in some cases probably "slabbed" for future resale.

As I'm writing this, it dawns on me that I sold off most of the comic books in these photos about the same time I sold the house in which these photos were taken. It would be ironic if I'd gotten close to the same money for the comics as I did for the house but I didn't. However, if I'd bought even one of those first issues of Superman from Burt Blum back in 1967, I would have gotten more for the comics.

I don't want to scare you but any day now, robots could be making your pizza…

If you ever want to hear from half the people you ever met, just guest on Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast. Yow. They're going to have me back soon so maybe then I'll hear from the other half.

Well, the shutdown's over — for now. Hope you enjoyed it because they're going to rerun this thing more often than A Charlie Brown Christmas. But it's nice that they're no longer arguing over what the deal should be and are instead arguing over which party screwed the other. I am reminded of an animation studio that I stopped working for. My lawyer, who twice had to go to them and explain their own contracts to them, once said "They aren't interested in a deal that leaves both sides happy. They only want the deal that leaves their side happy and other side, crying, humiliated and begging for mercy."

Went to see my fave local musical group Big Daddy performing last night and boy, were they great. They had a lot of new material even though everyone in the place would have been quite satisfied with the old stuff. I won't tip any of the new mash-ups but I'll never be able to hear Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" again without thinking of what Big Daddy did to it.

Coming soon to this blog: An article about why my support for the #MeToo movement is growing and so is my belief that Woody Allen is innocent.

I recorded my interview for Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast some time ago and I'm listening to it now. Why did I say that Allan Melvin was the voice of Droopalong on the Ricochet Rabbit cartoons? I know darned well that Mel Blanc was the voice of Droopalong on the Ricochet Rabbit cartoons.