Monthly Archives: May 2018

• The North Korea summit is off. Can't wait to hear how it's Hillary's fault.

For some time here, I've been planning an article about why I am seriously unconvinced that Woody Allen molested a seven-year-old girl. I haven't gotten around to it, in part because I can't fully wrap my brain around why some people are so Absolutely, Positively, Without a Shadow of a Doubt Certain that it happened, and that you're as bad as any child molester if you question that he did that foul deed.

For the record, I think a lot of people have been wrongly convicted of murder — like, for example, those who have been freed from Death Row due to DNA testing — so I guess that makes me as bad as any murderer.

I think we ought to listen to any woman who claims to have been violated — or even to any male who claims to have been abused by someone with greater power. All should be heard and their charges should be investigated and, where warranted, prosecuted.

And if you've listened to Dylan Farrow insist that she was abused by Woody Allen, you should also listen to (read, actually) Moses Farrow insist that she was not but that he and his siblings were abused by their mother.

Here's a clip of Allan Sherman I'd never seen before singing a song from one of his albums. It's supposed to be from an Australian TV show in 1966 and the year seems about right given that Sherman was then going through a stage of not wanting the world to view him as a short, fat guy with glasses. He lost weight, let his hair grow and ditched the glasses plus his wife of many years.

Mr. Sherman had an amazing roller coaster of a life. In 1961, he was an oft-unemployed producer of TV game shows who couldn't pay the rent on his Bel-Air mansion. In 1962 with the release of his record, My Son, the Folk Singer, he was the hottest act in show business. By 1965, his stardom had cooled dramatically. His recording career was over by 1967 when his label dropped him. In 1969, a Broadway show he wrote closed after four performances. In 1973, a book he authored about the sexual revolution failed and later that year, he died at the age of 48. Hard to think of anyone else who went up so quickly and down so suddenly.

When he was on the rise, he was a wonderful, funny performer. Here he is around the time he was just into his runaway descent…

Kent Cross wrote to tell me…

A TiVo search for Wait for your Laugh doesn't find Sunday's showing because MeTV lists the show as Me-TV Special Presentation: Wait for your Laugh. I found that it is on at 11:00 PM here in San Diego it using the TiVo Guide option.

Thanks, Kent. Very helpful.

I forgot to mention that last Sunday afternoon, I went to see this lady sing…

If there's a better singer than Audra McDonald warbling these days, I'd like to know who that might be. She did one Sunday matinee down at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion accompanied by the LA Opera Orchestra and if they'd been selling tickets for future performances, every single person there might have bought a few on their way out.

The music was great, her voice was great and the in-between-the-showtunes banter was delightful. My favorite moment was when she sang "Summertime…and the Livin' is Easy" without the orchestra and without the microphone. She did this the last time I saw her perform but that was in a much smaller room. To hear that magnificent voice fill the Dorothy Chandler — that's the place they used to telecast the Oscars from — was as thrilling as anything I've ever seen or heard on a stage.

• If the Korean summit doesn't happen, Trump expects a Nobel Peace Prize anyway…for reuniting John Goodman with Roseanne.

Being a total cynic about Donald Trump means you have to watch a lot of position-shifting…you know, like how when Barack Obama played golf, people who didn't like him would say he was a lousy president because he spent too much time on the links but now they're fine with Trump spending a whole lot more. Or people who chanted "Lock her up!" because Hillary didn't take every possible security procedure don't mind one bit that Trump uses an unsecured cell phone, ignoring his aides' pleas to not do that. This shifting-of-supposed-principles is not new to politics but we've never seen it on quite this scale before.

We all remember Trump on the campaign trail accusing Ms. Clinton of "Pay for play" and now it's pretty clear that in his White House, there's no play without pay. China invested $500 million in a venture involving Trump-branded hotels and, just by an extraordinary coincidence, Trump decided to remove the ban on U.S. companies selling to ZTE, the failing Chinese telecom giant. No connection! And read Kevin Drum about another couple of deals, one of which could be our next big White House sex scandal. Would so-called "pro-life" people turn on a president if it turned out, he'd not only had an affair but arranged for the lady to have an abortion? A few of them would.

John Cleese has a message for all of his fans who live in Belgium. The rest of us can ignore this…

If you want to know what's happening with that Korea summit, the reporter to follow is Fred Kaplan. Here's his latest.

And I actually do have a TiVo. A few years ago, I checked out some of the DVRs that cable companies offer and didn't like any of them.

Late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning (depends how you look at it), mine will be recording Late Night with Seth Meyers because his first guest will be David Letterman. Beard and all.

The image of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup on this blog indicates a day of reduced activity on this blog.  I could probably have come up with a better indicator but I made up all these cute soup can graphics and I don't want them to go to waste.  When you see it, it means I'll be posting once a day (or so) instead of several times a day (or so) because I'm busy with some non-blogging activity.  You will be seeing my cute soup can graphics a lot here for the rest of this month.

I'll tell you why in June.  It's not medical, it's not important and it's not even a top-secret writing project. The same lack of online presence may apply to my responses to e-mail. I'll be around. Just not as often as I usually am.

Zack Hample doesn't have nearly enough baseballs. Make sure you stay for the end…

• Here's a frightening thought: What if Rudy Giuliani is actually a great lawyer and that's the best defense anyone could possibly offer for Donald Trump?

• I posted a couple of tweets that were critical of Donald Trump and now he's demanding that I pay twice as much to mail a letter.

Thrifty Drugstores used to be everywhere around Southern California.  Since all such chains sell pretty much the same Bayer Aspirin and calamine lotion at pretty much the same prices, most people go to the drugstore most convenient to them.  If you were the owner-operator of some chain, you'd probably be thinking, "Okay, a certain amount of people will come to us because we're in their neighborhood or because their business takes them past one of our stores and they find it easy to pop in and out of our parking lots.  What additional reason can we give them to patronize us instead of our competitors?"

The main thing (of course) is to sell people on the idea that you have the very lowest prices and the folks who ran Thrifty Drug and Discount Stores tried that with their name and in every bit of their advertising.  They also tried it with ice cream.  Every Thrifty store I ever went into as a kid had a counter selling very good ice cream cones for an unbelievable bargain.  I remember a nickel for a one-scoop cone and a dime for a two-scooper.

You did not go to a Thrifty ice cream counter for anything fancy.  Some stores offered milk shakes and sundaes but I do not recall ever seeing anyone get anything but a cone or a scoop or two in a cup.  They usually had around a dozen flavors — standard ones like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, a sherbet or two, plus one odd one that whatever it was called, it was pink and filled with multi-colored sprinkles. I usually had the orange sherbet — or,if I went for two, orange sherbet and vanilla with the vanilla on the bottom. The arrangement was important because it was better if the orange melted down to flavor the vanilla than if it worked the other way around.

It was very cheap ice cream and it was also very good ice cream. I mysteriously lost my sweet tooth in 2007 and have tasted no dessert-type edibles since then. Still, I can remember how good a Thrifty ice cream cone was. There was nothing wrong with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone but you had to make a special trip to get one of those and since they cost more, they seemed like more of an extravagance. Few parents hesitated to buy their kids a nickel cone when they stopped in at those drugstores to pick up some kaopectate and Band-Aid® brand band-aids.

It was expert marketing.  It gave you a reason to buy your medicines and small necessities at Thrifty instead of, say, your friendly neighborhood Sav-On Drug Store.  Some Sav-Ons had ice cream counters too but they weren't as good or as cheap.  Also, the cheap ice cream made people assume that everything at a Thrifty was a bargain.

I'm repeating a few of the things said in this newspaper article which our pal Vince Waldron called to my attention.  Long ago, the Thrifty drugstore empire was purchased by and merged into the Rite-Aid chain but most still had Thrifty ice cream counters…and now, the company that owns Von's Markets (and Safeway and Albertson's) has purchased the Thrifty ice cream business.

Does this mean the end of those counters?   I dunno and neither does the person who wrote the article.  It doesn't matter a lot to me since I don't eat ice cream and the Thrifty product is no longer so notably cheaper.  Still, it's nice to remember those great ice cream counters with their unique cylindrical scoops and the way you felt the cones were almost free.  I recall one time when I was probably around seven and my Aunt Dot was about to buy us two — one for her, one for me.  I had a dime in my pocket and before she could open her purse, I flipped the coin up onto the counter and said, "Don't worry.  I've got this."

Dave Portnoy, aka "Davey Pageviews," is El Presidente of Barstool Sports, a big website devoted to sports, though Dave seems more interested in great pizza. This works for me as I have zero interest in sports and more than a passing interest in great pizza. He and I agree that John's of Bleecker Street has the best pie in New York City.

Do not write to tell me of a better place since a hundred other people will and I probably will never get to any of them.

Dave does these pizza reviews — "One bite, everybody knows the rules" — and I find them very entertaining, as much for what happens to him on the streets of Manhattan (and elsewhere) as for what he thinks of the pie. In case you are not one of those people who knows the rules, here are some I've learned from watching Dave's videos…

1. Pizza should be scored on a scale of 0 to 10.
2. But you should never give anything a 10 because, as in figure skating, you're then closing yourself off to the possibility of something better coming along.
3. On the other hand, Dave was fine with giving a Zero to Blaze Pizza, in part because Lebron James is a big investor in it.  So what happens if someone comes out with pizza that's identical but it has a dead mouse on it?  How do you give that a worse rating than Zero?  And if you're going to go into negative numbers, why can't you give a great pizza a 10.3?
4. You take one bite and then score it and you can't change your score.  Unless you're Dave.  He takes multiple bites (the third is usually of the crust) and he sometimes scores a slice then amends that score.
5. He scores plain cheese with no toppings.  With this, I absolutely agree.  Great pizza should be great pizza before you add pepperoni or mushrooms or pineapple.
6. You can lower the rating of the slice if the guy who sells it to you is kind of a dick.  Of course.
7. Ideally, pizza should be rated when it's so hot it's burning your mouth a little.  But it's okay if you're busy with something to let it get cold first.
8. Ratings in whole numbers are "rookie scores" and are to be avoided.  A true pro might rate a slice as 6.9 or 7.1 but he would never give it a seven.
9. Pizza that is identified as "Neapolitan pizza" is mostly all the same but I don't understand Dave's designation of some pizza as "Neapolitan" that isn't billed as such, nor do I get why he doesn't think certain other slices are "Neapolitan."  He knows more about this stuff than I do.
10. And lastly: Every so often, it's nice to get a slice for your camera guy.

You get the feeling I've watched a lot of his videos?  I have…and I have a lot more to go.  I like this guy and I don't know why he doesn't have a series on truTV and Billy Eichner isn't selling him slices.

Here's Dave in Las Vegas last year at a Sports Illustrated press event, getting supermodels to try and rate pizza with him.  You can just tell by looking at some of the women in that magazine that they haven't had enough pizza lately. This may be the last one of his videos I post for a while since there are literally hundreds and I have to stop somewhere. If you enjoy them, you can check out this page.