Monthly Archives: March 2018

Is there anyone alive who doesn't think Donald Trump had some sort of sexual relationship with Stormy Daniels?  I'm sure there are some who for partisan reasons would officially deny it but deep-down, they know that D.J.T. wouldn't be going to all this trouble 'n' expense to shush her up if there wasn't something to it.  I'm not even sure if Trump is still denying it.  His lawyers are tap-dancing on the high-wire, threatening to sue her for revealing that which they insist didn't happen. 

But if they do sue her, doesn't that mean everything gets aired in court, plus her side gets to subpoena evidence and Trump has to give a deposition under oath? We saw how well that worked out for Bill Clinton. They even seem less interested in branding the lady as a liar than as a woman who's reneging on a contract to not spill dirt.

Two thoughts keep popping into my head about this.  One is that Trump has benefited greatly in his political career from having no shame.  The things no president would ever do or say, he does and says.  But if he gets into an all-out war with Stormy, he's battling a professional shameless person.  That's kind of what porn stars are — by definition. Whatever it is that you'd be ashamed to do, they'll not only do it, they'll do multiple takes on camera and then proudly pose for the cover of the DVD.

Other thought: Can you imagine what someone like Sean Hannity — or any rabble-rousing Republican — could so with this if we had the exact same situation with a Democratic president? It would be 24/7 on Fox News with constantly Breaking News, whether there was any or not. We heard so much from them about how Bill Clinton's pecadilloes, real and rumored, spoke to his "character" and how no one with that "character" was fit to be POTUS. Odd how that no longer matters if the guy can check off some boxes on the right-wing wish list.

Just fixed a silly typo in the previous post and it wasn't even mine. I have a spell-checker that wants to turn Stephen Sondheim into Steven Spielberg. Which one was responsible for Sunday in the Park with Jaws?

In the past here, I've raved about productions out at the Cupcake Theater in North Hollywood — a little storefront establishment where the shows are low on budget and high on talent and ingenuity. A friend of mine used to call places like this "no frills theater" because you don't get expensive costuming or sets or a big orchestra or huge stars…but it still gets you there.

For several months there, they've been taking audiences Into the Woods and I wish I'd seen it earlier so my high recommendation might be of more use to some locals who read this blog. Alas, it closes next weekend…but it's really good. You could go to a big theater and pay a lot more for a seat and not see a production half as good as this one.

Into the Woods is not my favorite musical or even my favorite Sondheim musical. It's very long and the second act always feels to me like a disappointing sequel to the first act. In fact, I have a friend who loves the first act, hates the second and so goes to productions and leaves at intermission.

So what little I didn't enjoy last night was not the fault of the production. They really performed the heck out of the material…and I wish I could cite some of the actors by name but I can't. As they often do there, this staging is double-cast. They have two people playing each role and they take turns. So now as I look at my faux Playbill, I don't know which actress I saw paying the Witch, which actor I saw playing the Baker, etc. Whoever they were, they handled all those difficult Sondheim lyrics to perfection.

The fellow who runs the Cupcake, Michael Pettenato, is pretty clearly the main reason this place does such good work. He produced and directed Into the Woods and before the show, he welcomed everyone in the lobby and then made a pre-show speech on stage. Watching him scurry about everywhere managing everything, I am reminded of how the essence of theater is enthusiasm — enthusiasm for the project, enthusiasm for the work, enthusiasm for all the participants. He is a grand champion for the people who perform on that stage and for the ones off-stage who contribute, as well. It's a shame he can't be double-cast and cloned because every little theater needs someone like that.

Into the Woods runs through next weekend. They may still have tickets on their site and if you want to be cheap about this, you can sometimes find them discounted on Goldstar. But hurry. I've now been to five or six productions at the Cupcake and I've never seen an empty seat. There's a reason for that.

Here's a little video essay about cartoon sound effects. It's good as far as it goes but it oddly omits one important source of noises in cartoons: Vocal sound effects performed by cartoon voice actors.

At the end of this video, there's a quick cut of Marvin the Martian playing a little tune on a trumpet.  That sound came out of the amazing mouth of Mr. Mel Blanc and it was heard in many Warner Brothers cartoons, as well as Mel's ability to sound like an old car chugging along or an old airplane or any of  a number of noises.  Other vocal performers like Frank Welker and Don Messick (and more recently, guys like Dee Bradley Baker) have given us sounds that have more personality than any non-organic source.

But this is still a pretty good little video.  Give it a look and listen…

Is Donald Trump going to fire Robert Mueller, the special counsel? It sure looks that way, especially after yesterday's ouster of Andrew McCabe, the deputy director of the F.B.I.

But you don't know for sure and I don't know for sure and Trump may not even know for sure. I'd like to suggest an interesting way to look at this question…

I'm a big believer in Alternatives. When someone makes a decision to do A and you wonder why they did A, you need to consider option B…or even if there was an option B. Sometimes, you discover they did A because there was no option B or there was but option B was worse. A long-ago friend of mine who committed suicide obviously did it because all his alternatives were horrendous and more painful than — in his case — jumping off a very tall building.

We don't know all of what Robert Mueller is investigating and what charges he could potentially bring against Trump and those around him…but Trump probably has a good idea. When he decided to run for the White House, he had to have himself internally-vetted. He had to figure out what he'd done that his opponents could possibly learn. There might be files to hide, papers to destroy, witnesses to silence, porn stars to pay off, etc. Even honest politicians have to ask the musical question, "What can be used against me?"

Trump may not know everything about the dirty deeds that he's done dirt cheap but he knows a lot and he can pay people who function under attorney/client privilege to look into matters, weigh them against actual statutes and advise where lie the potential land mines. I'm imagining him sitting there with two reports — and while they're probably both too long and complicated for him to read in full, he might make it partway through each since they are, after all, full of the word "Trump."

Anyway, he can have his attorneys explain things to him and become at least as informed as he is about anything about which he makes decisions. One report lists all the charges and indictments that might result if Mueller is allowed to complete his investigation in full. And the other report summarize the problems that will result if he dismisses Mueller.

Some of his supporters will hail him for nuking a bogus, politically-motivated witch hunt but a lot of people will not, including maybe even some former Trump loyalists in Congress. He might have most of them by the 'nads but not all. There are those who face tough re-election prospects. That's what caused a lot of elected Republicans to abandon Nixon during Watergate. They looked at their alternatives — support him and lose this part of their base, back him and lose the other part of their base — and many let him know he could not count on their backing. There will be some price to pay for firing Mueller. If there wasn't, he would have done it long ago.

Obviously, I don't think Trump is a very smart man but he's gotten too far in life to dismiss him as totally inept at everything. No, he's not good at chess but he's a master of dodgeball. I think it's just a matter of him looking at A or B and deciding which one augurs worse for Donald J. Trump. Has he really committed so many crimes and shady deals that firing the special counsel will seem like the lesser shit storm? It's starting to look that way.

Bazillions of people have written to ask if I've heard the announcement that Ava DuVernay, who directed the film A Wrinkle in Time, will helm a mega-budget feature based on Jack Kirby's The New Gods. Sure. They want to know if I'm excited about it. Yeah. I don't ever get too excited about this kind of thing but I'm sure glad they're doing it.

As seems to always happen when these kinds of thing are announced, there are already folks on the 'net proclaiming it a huge hit and others who are sure it's going to suck. Not one role has been cast. Not one frame of film has been shot. They may not even have started on a script. But the fate of the movie has been sealed for some, which I guess saves time. Me, I think I'll wait to decide how good it is until they actually make it. I may even be so non-intuitive about judging films that I'll need to wait until I see the trailer if not the entire movie.

But like I said, I'm glad they're making it — for two reasons. One is that I think it was a wonderful creation even if its abrupt termination as a comic book caused it to never reach its full potential. The other reason is more personal.

Just in case there's anyone reading this who doesn't know, I was privileged to be on the premises when the New Gods happened. My then-partner Steve Sherman and I had very little to do with the contents of these comics when we worked as Jack's assistants but we suffered along with him when DC Management, after first telling him the books were doing well, abruptly canceled them. One reason that was given was that the folks who handled DC licensing decreed that there would never be any interest whatsoever in those characters for toys or film adaptations or movies or television or anything of the sort.

Jack is no longer here and even if he was, he was too classy to point out how wrong they were. I, however, am here and I'm nowhere near as classy as he was.

The other reasons had to do with allegedly poor sales…but New Gods was selling better than a lot of comics they didn't ax, and DC at the time was a pretty dysfunctional company, launching new books and quickly canceling them, launching new books and quickly canceling them. Anyone remember Bat Lash? Or The Secret Six? Or Beware the Creeper or The Hawk and the Dove or Anthro or the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series by Denny O'Neil and Neal Adams or many, many others?

Some of those comics lasted six or seven issues, meaning that the decision to cancel came about the time they were getting final sales figures on issue #3. I never understood how they expected to find a new audience when they kept giving up right away on a new audience finding them. When Marvel launched Conan the Barbarian as a comic book — about the same time DC launched New Gods — Conan initially got the kind of sales figures that usually warranted termination at either company…but it stuck around, found an audience and flourished.

Back then, DC's distribution channels were atrophying and there was rampant fraud in the tallying of unsold copies versus sold ones. Also, around the time New Gods was just getting going, they moved to a new, larger size for all their comics, leaping from 32 pages for 15 cents to 48 for 25 cents. Not many industries can suddenly raise prices — what is that, like 62%? — without losing customers. It was especially bad for comic books because young readers have limited funds, and Marvel was at 20 cents.

Sales plunged on every single DC title and only when they abandoned the idea did some books rebuild their audience. Jack's rebuilt slower and I honestly believe he paid a price for being viewed as a guy who could create whole new books in an instant. DC was losing a few bucks — and really, only a few — on his titles when someone got the idea of "suspending" them (that was the term used at the time) and seeing if he could come up with something else that would suddenly change the whole dynamic of the marketplace.

In hindsight, that looks more and more like it was a bad idea. New Gods and its allied titles have had great value to DC over the years. I don't know how many times they've reprinted that material. I should because I'm called on to write forewords for most of the new repackagings…but the characters have since been seen in revival series and on toy shelves and TV and, inevitably now, movies.

I'll bet — heck, I know because some there have told me — the current management wishes Jack had done a few dozen more issues of Orion, Lightray, Darkseid, Mister Miracle, The Forever People and all the rest. He was adding new characters and concepts to the book at a breakneck pace. Who knows what new wonders would have appeared?

I have very little skin in this reckoning. No one blamed his assistants when the books were terminated and labeled as failures. But I loved Jack and I love his work. (Full Disclosure: I wasn't as unreservedly wild about his Fourth World series at the time because it didn't read like what everyone else was doing…but the more and more I re-read it, the more I love it and that's in large part because it doesn't read like what everyone else was doing.)

There's an unfortunate tendency in the creative arts that when a film or a book or a TV show succeeds, everyone involved is a hero, everyone involved claims a large chunk of that success. The producers, the publishers, the marketing people, the publicists, the wholesalers, the retailers, the assistants, the assistants' assistants…every one of them did their job well…

But when something fails, there's usually only one reason: The creative people screwed up.

The director made a bomb. The writer did a lousy script. That's where the blame always falls, even if that director wasn't allowed to make the film he or she wanted or the writer had her or his work trampled and rewritten. Kirby took a lot of abuse for the New Gods being branded a flop when it first came out. Everyone kind of forgot that Marvel's three biggest successes — Spider-Man, the Hulk and the X-Men — were all considered failures on first publication. The Hulk lost his comic after six issues and Spider-Man went away after one.

It makes you wonder how many comics that didn't get a second chance could have been just as big.

Speaking now as maybe the only person posting to the Internet who isn't sure how successful the New Gods movie will be, I'm glad they're doing one. I'm also pleased that most of the announcements are reminding people that Jack was not only the co-creator of most of the Marvel heroes who are now doing so well on the screen, but that he was not merely a guy who drew someone else's ideas and stories for them.

And maybe this will make more people realize that when something gets canceled — a movie, a TV series, a comic book, whatever — the blame might lie with the folks who created it but it might also lie with those who canceled it. Or those who were supposed to market it better than they did.

I'm going to wrap this up even though I'm having enormous fun writing it. Since I started on it yesterday, I've gotten a couple of e-mails asking me what I think Jack would have thought of the news that New Gods was about to become a movie with a budget of something like a hundred million bucks. That's a real easy question. people. He would have smiled and asked, "What took them so long?" But he wouldn't have gloated. Like I said, he was a lot classier than I am. Probably a lot classier than you, too.

My mother passed away in October of 2012 at the age of 91, a sterling example of the old line, "If I'd known I was going to live this long, I would have taken better care of myself." The last few years, she could barely walk and barely see, and if she'd lived six months longer, she probably would have not have been able to do either at all. Almost every week those last few years, she wished aloud — with the clear, sane mind she still possessed — that there was a way she and I could have signed some paper or pushed some button and ended her life painlessly, then and there.

But this isn't a piece to debate the merits or morals of that. This is about one of the very few joys she had after around the age of 80. It was her daily phone call with her friend Sarah. She and Sarah were friends from around 1962 onward.

When they met, Sarah was living with her family in a huge mansion in Beverly Hills. I don't know what it was worth then but I just looked it up on Zillow and here is what it said…

…a single family home that contains 12,029 sq ft and was built in 1926. It contains 5 bedrooms and 7 bathrooms. The Zestimate for this house is $25,089,859, which has increased by $456,077 in the last 30 days. The Rent Zestimate for this home is $107,286/mo, which has decreased by $819/mo in the last 30 days. The property tax in 2017 was $147,775. The tax assessment in 2017 was $12,746,579, an increase of 2.0% over the previous year.

So you figure Sarah and her family had a few bucks. My parents and I would go over to that house every few weeks to visit and I would play with Sarah's daughter Lynn, who was roughly my age, my age at the time being around ten. I sensed a vague hope in both families that Lynn and I would become so friendly as to someday marry so we could all be related but that did not happen.

Quick story. One day, a lost dog wandered onto that lovely estate and Lynn and I spent some time playing with the dog. Some grown-up found us doing that and insisted on calling the Animal Shelter or whatever agency one phoned if one found a lost dog. Fifteen minutes later, a black-and-white Beverly Hills Police car roared up to take the dog back to its owner. This is how it worked in this town when Dean Martin reported his kid's dog was missing. Dean lived a few blocks away.

A few years later, Sarah lost the home and fortune — a big Hollywood scandal I may or may not tell you about some day — and thereafter lived a much more modest life in much more modest surroundings. Oddly enough, she was probably happier that way — or at least, that was my mother's opinion based on things Sarah said to her. The two of them stayed in touch. I gather that not all of Sarah's friends stayed in touch once she was no longer in the mansion…but my mother did.

They remained friends into this century, long enough to refer to each as other as "My only friend who hasn't died." By then, Sarah was living with her family in New York and their friendship consisted of a daily phone call. They spoke every single day except sometimes when one of them was in the hospital. During the last decade of my mother's life, she was in the hospital a lot. Whenever Sarah called her home and didn't get an answer, she called me. Sometimes, I was able to phone Sarah first to let her know.

When my mother finally did leave us, one of the toughest things I had to do was to call and tell Sarah. She knew it was coming but I could hear in her voice that it was a jolt. A real jolt. Sarah did not herself live long after that because, with my mother gone, she had one less reason to stick around.

They had not seen each other in at least thirty years. During that time, there was occasional talk of one or both traveling to be together for a while but various issues, most of them health-related, prevented that from happening. I'm sorry we didn't try harder to make that happen.

Last Wednesday afternoon, Lynn and I got together for lunch. I think it was the first time we'd seen each other in well over half a century…maybe close to sixty years. We toasted (with glasses of water) our mothers and their long friendship. We shared memories and caught each other up on our lives…and promised to do this more often than every fifty-five years. I hope if I make 91, I have at least one friend as good as Sarah.

Sam the Shoplifting Seagull…

Andy Rose writes…

I agree with the video on Letterman's new show, although I think the guy who made it is mislabeling what he calls "edits." But there's a whole other reason I've stopped watching the show: I don't particularly enjoy Friendly Dave. Letterman's interviews were always at their best when Dave was engaged, but a bit annoyed by or confused by the guest. The only friendly interviews I liked were the ones where the guest knew how to needle Dave, and he could play off of it. Julia Roberts being the best example.

This show's entire premise is that Dave only interviews people he likes, and it brings out a sycophancy in Dave that's just not enjoyable.

I understand that but I have another way of looking at it. I think David Letterman has outgrown being annoyed or confused on television. I bought his pissed-offedness (that should be a real word) when he was younger and on at 12:30. When he became one of the most successful and honored television performers ever, it started to sound to me like…well, like Donald Trump pretending he can relate to the problems of coal miners.

There was a point on his CBS show when Dave for some reason was doing a lot of jokes about the body odor of New York cab drivers and I thought, "Is that really a concern in your life, Dave?" I mean, even if a guy who owns a fleet of cars and has limos at his disposal does take the occasional cab ride, is that something he really cares about? I think one of the main reasons for his ratings decline is that much of America doesn't want to listen to a fabulously-rich, successful guy talk about how rough his life is.

I'm not saying his feelings weren't genuine. Jay Leno, I'm told, still drops in at McDonald's for a burger…but he cut all the jokes out of his act about eating at McDonald's because he could hear audiences thinking, "You can afford to eat somewhere better." George Carlin, when asked to perform some of his earlier monologues, would tell people, "That's not my act these days. My act is about who I am now and I'm not the same guy I was when I was thirty."

Seems to me David Letterman has realized that. Maybe it's expressly why he grew the beard: To make clear that he was moving into a new stage of his career as elder statesman. Either that or he's hoping to audition for any productions of Miracle on 34th Street that occur.

Before he passed, comic creator Jerry Robinson inaugurated the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing — an honor presented each year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego. The award recognizes a writer of comics who produced a splendid body of work but who did not receive proper recognition and/or financial reward. At the time Jerry proposed this award, that was all too true of Bill Finger.

It ain't anymore. These days, Finger is acknowledged for his contributions to his most important work…but since others are not, the award lives on. This is the annual announcement that as its Administrator, I am now open to receive nominations and suggestions for the 2018 presentation. We give out two of them. One is a posthumous award. The other is for someone who is happily alive and who can (we hope) be there to receive it in person. Here's what else you need to know…

This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist might have written a story or two so we can give him this trophy. That is not "a body of work," nor are a couple of recent stories that didn't get the attention you thought they deserved.  Note that all our past recipients (listed below) produced hundreds if not thousands of stories over at least a couple of decades.

This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her fine body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of cash or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books.

Anyone who nominates Stan Lee for the award has to also write an essay on how the credited Executive Producer of the highest-grossing movie of the year (and 40+ other huge successes with a cameo appearance in each) has been unrecognized and/or unrewarded.  I wish the man good health and many more years but come on, people.  If I was Stan and you tried to give me an award for not being famous, I would sue my publicist for malpractice.

Also, it's for writing comic books — not comic strips, not material for other media based on comic book properties or anything else. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.

To date, the award has gone to Otto Binder, John Broome, Del Connell, Frank Doyle, Arnold Drake, Gardner Fox, Gary Friedrich, Steve Gerber, George Gladir, Archie Goodwin, Bob Haney, Richard E. Hughes, Frank Jacobs, Robert Kanigher, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, Larry Lieber, Bill Loebs, Elliott S! Maggin, Bill Mantlo, Don McGregor, Jack Mendelsohn, Don Rosa, Alvin Schwartz, Jerry Siegel, Steve Skeates and John Stanley. Those folks, having already won, cannot repeat. Unlike when you drive L.A. freeways, you can only get The Finger once.

If you have already nominated someone in years past, you need not nominate them again. They will be automatically considered for this year's awards. And unless they win, the year after that and the year after that…

If you nominate someone for the posthumous award, it would really help if you also suggested an appropriate person to accept on that person's behalf — ideally, a relative, preferably a spouse, child or grandchild. It could also be a person who worked with the nominee or — last resort — a friend or historian who can speak about them and their work. And if it's not a relative, we would also welcome suggestions as to an appropriate place for the plaque to reside — say, a museum or with someone who was close to the honoree.

Would you like to nominate someone? If so, here's the address for nominations, which will be accepted until April Fool's Day. That's when all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee. Their selections will be announced before April is out and the presentations will be made at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which is Friday evening at Comic-Con. Thank you.

I've just started watching the episodes of David Letterman's new interview show, My Next Guest Needs No Introduction and I hope when they make more of these, they consider some people who do need introductions.

Dave has always been a fine interviewer when he's genuinely interested in a guest. He did not seem all that happy to have some of them in the chair during the last decade or so of his CBS show which is one of the reasons I think it was not getting the ratings that he and the network wanted. So it's great that he's now got a program where they can be more selective of his interview subjects and I'd like to see them not always be the biggest stars they can bag. Dave was great with lesser-known folks when they were somewhat interesting and he always made them more interesting. Or at least, he was more interesting.

One thing though bothers me about the new show. There's a saying in movies that if you're conscious of the editing, it's not good editing. The cuts they're choosing for Dave's new series are arbitrary and distracting as this gent, Thomas Flight, points out. I agree with him…

Can Kathy Griffin regain the career she once had? Sure…though the article I just linked to seems more interested in how much money she's made in the past than in how much she might make in the future.

I have no particular opinion of the lady as a comedian since I've never seen her perform live and I usually reserve such judgments until I do. But when I first saw her on TV, she was doing some pretty sharp, insightful (and funny) material…and I honestly don't know if she still does.

All I hear now is how she did some bit somewhere that may or may not have been funny but it was definitely shocking. Seems to me she needs to chuck the "how outrageous she is" routine and get back to the "how witty and funny she is," not because of political correctness or fear of reprisals but because I suspect people are forgetting — or never learning in the first place — how well she could do the non-shock stuff.

The comic book community is just now hearing of the death of writer Michael Fleisher, who passed away last February 2 at the age of 75. I don't know a lot about the man. I met him once — a brief, unpleasant encounter — and will leave it to others to write more fully about him. I understand the Comics Journal staff will have a story about him shortly on their website.

What I can tell you is that Fleisher came into the industry around 1971 when he secured a contract to write several super-hero "encyclopedias" and was granted access to the library at DC Comics for research purposes. He spent so many hours in the office that he got to know the staff and began writing scripts for their comics. A special favorite of editor Joe Orlando, Fleisher wrote countless stories for DC's mystery/ghost comics and did long runs on The Spectre, Jonah Hex and many others. His work had many fans and some hard-to-gauge number of detractors.

A lot of people in comics probably remember him best because in 1986, he sued The Comics Journal and writer Harlan Ellison for what Fleisher felt were defamatory remarks in an interview Ellison gave that publication. The suit created great controversy and consumed weeks of court time but the jury was out less than 90 minutes before finding in favor of the Journal, Ellison and the First Amendment. (Full Disclosure: I was supposed to testify for the defendants but the judge disallowed my testimony on a technicality.)

Not long after the verdict, Fleisher largely disappeared from the American comic book industry. He was reportedly living in Oregon when he died earlier this year. We do not know the cause.

Frank Oz — in my opinion, the best puppeteer ever on television…

The other night, Fox aired a previously-unaired 2006 interview with O.J. Simpson, with the network doing everything possible to sell it as Simpson's confession to the 1994 murders of ex-wife Nicole Brown Simpson and her friend, Ron Goldman. It wasn't exactly that but this is my confession that I watched it and I probably feel more guilt about that than Simpson does for the murders.

I guess you could take what came out of Simpson's mouth as a confession if you wanted to but at no time in it did he say, "Yes, I murdered those two people." What he did so was to talk about the crime in "hypothetical," if-I-did-do-it terms and with enough specificity that just about owned up to being present for the murders without making the ultimate admission.

Unfortunately, it's hard to tell what's true and what isn't because he contaminates his account with loads of obvious lying, mostly involving a non-existent accomplice named Charlie. How can we be sure Charlie is fiction? I'll let Jeff Toobin explain it.

So if someone wants to know what really happened that night and hear O.J. Simpson admit he dunnit, it ain't there. For me, the major surprises were that I watched it at all…and that I found myself not caring very much about any of it. There was a time when I really obsessed on that story, read all the books, watched all the specials. Now, I lack any emotional connection to the story.

I do not think what Simpson has endured since — time spent in jail awaiting the first trial, going through the second, financial penalties paid both to the victims' families and to lawyers and court costs, damage to his rep and serving time for the Vegas crimes — adds up to proper justice. Still, it's a lot more than we see in many murder cases where no arrests are ever made. Something is better than nothing, I guess. But I ain't watching any more O.J. Simpson confessions until he actually confesses. I wonder if anyone has said to him, "You know, you have nothing to lose…"