Monthly Archives: October 2018

Matt Yglesias makes a real good point about what's driving our national "debate" (it's more like a slap fight) these days. The so-called "Liberal Press" is bending too far backward to report on — and therefore give weight to — darn near every charge that right-wingers make about left-wingers but the reverse is not true. The New York Times cares way too much when it's accused of being biased towards the left and therefore tries to demonstrate fairness by reporting the right's accusations. Fox News, on the other hand, doesn't care all that much about being accused of being biased towards the right…at least not enough to cover more stories that would disprove that.

John Nesbitt's Passing Parade was a popular series of mini-documentaries that ran in movie theaters back when movie theaters ran shorts. This one — entitled "People on Paper" — features newspaper cartoonists who were famous when the film came out in 1945: H.H. Knerr, Bud Fisher, Fred Lasswell, Frank King, Chester Gould, Dick Calkins, Milton Caniff, Chic Young, Raeburn Van Buren, Ham Fisher, Hal Foster, Harold Gray and Al Capp. There's an impressive list of men who were either really, really good at drawing their comic strips or really, really good at hiring someone good to draw their comic strips…

Kevin Drum gives us a brief rundown of some of the things Donald Trump is lying about in his current stump speeches.

I continue to be curious as to how many of his supporters really believe all this stuff and how many are saying, in effect, "Yeah, yeah…we know he says a lot of shit that isn't true but we love the direction in which he's taking this country so we'll put up with it." I suppose there may also be a middle ground who believes it's just exaggeration and getting ahead of himself: "Yeah, he probably isn't really going to deliver a middle-class tax cut any day now but I just know he'll do it eventually, assuming those evil Democrats don't stop him!" (And we all know how much Democrats hate middle-class tax cuts..)

I doubt there's a way pollsters could separate out the various mindsets. If a pollster asks you about a guy you love, you don't admit to his flaws because you don't want to see his numbers go down even the slightest in any way. But I'd still like to know.

I like watching Alton Brown's cooking show, Good Eats — and I like it for three reasons, two of which may be unique with me. First off, I like the knowledge he presents. He not only tells you to add three anchovies to the recipe, he tells you where the anchovies come from, what kinds of anchovies they are, their names, their kids' names, what they do in their spare time when they're not being anchovies and so on. This is a reason I think every watcher of Good Eats has for watching Good Eats.

Only a few of them probably consciously share my second reason. I like the presentation. The shows were cleverly produced and aren't just one person — clearly more skilled at cooking skills than on-camera presence — explaining how to dice your onions. The guy is entertaining and his shows are always ambitious in production values and spending time and cash on being entertaining. No one will ever hire me to work on a cooking show but if I ever did an instructional show in one of the few areas I know something about, I'd want to do it like Alton Brown.

And the reason I (and maybe, I alone) have for watching Alton Brown is that he frees me from any desire to cook for myself. I suspect he's being subsidized by the restaurants in my area because the more I watch this guy, the more I'm convinced I simply don't have the skills or knowledge to do much more than empty a can of Chef Boyardee spaghetti into a microwave-safe bowl.

When I don't watch Alton Brown for a while, I get this foolish notion to cook something. I don't get ambitious but even when I attempt a simple meal, it ends in disaster. Then I go watch me some Alton Brown and he reminds me I shouldn't even attempt that. Two weeks ago, I made an entire corned beef precisely according to the recipe, taking it off the heat the moment an internal thermometer told me it was done. This is one of the easiest things in the world to prepare but what I wound up with had the texture and taste of an old Artgum eraser. It went immediately into the garbage and I realized that if I'd watched Alton Brown more, I would not have tried that would have therefore saved a lot of time and money.

Brown and his crew served up 14 seasons (249 episodes) of Good Eats, ending in 2012. They rerun incessantly on The Cooking Channel but they don't seem to have all 249 in rotation. Every time I tune in, there's about a 40% chance I'll get the one about how to make French Onion Soup. He's back now making new ones which will debut next year but in the meantime, he's doing something interesting: Thirteen episodes of Good Eats Reloaded.

What these are are episodes from the original Good Eats show which Brown has annotated and updated, correcting errors or inserting segments to talk about that which is outdated. He's found better ways to do some things, there have been technological advances in some areas and he got some things wrong in the first place. That he occasionally made mistakes is comforting in some ways but he doesn't do it often enough to make me think I could ever be a decent cook.

I really like Good Eats Reloaded. How many other TV shows have you ever seen that went back to correct screw-ups? Last week was the first of the thirteen and the episode was about 60% new material. The second one airs tonight on The Cooking Channel — at 6 PM on my TV. It's the "reload" of the episode on cooking pasta. I believe I tried to cook pasta his way and it didn't work. I can't wait to see his new way of cooking pasta which won't work for me either. It's not him, you understand. It's me.

The Sesame Street folks put together this tribute to Caroll Spinney, who's retiring from his roles as Big Bird and Oscar the Grouch. Boy, Jim Henson sure picked the right guy for that job…

Back in the eighties and early nineties, I spent an awful lot of time in Las Vegas.  It seemed like I was there practically every week and on at least two occasions, I flew back to L.A. for some important meeting, then scurried back to the airport and returned to Vegas after only about a one-hour stopover at my house.  I was in Vegas a lot for about seven reasons…

1. I had a lot of hotel comps (i.e., free rooms).
2. I found that I could get a lot of work done if I could get away from the phone.  Nowadays, of course, we all take our phones with us everywhere we go.
3. I was dating a showgirl there.
4. I was…well, not exactly hooked on Card Counting at Blackjack but I'd gotten pretty good at it and if you have that ability, you want to explore it.
5. I had various ways of getting backstage at hotels there and hanging out with Vegas performers.  I love show business and that often felt more to me like it than working on a network TV program.
6. It was raining a lot in Los Angeles and I don't like rain.  When it rains in Vegas and you're inside a big hotel, the rain's impact on you is negligible.
7. And I'm sure I had at least one more but I can't think of it at the moment.

So one time around 1988, I didn't have a free room available but I had a coupon from the Riviera Hotel for three nights @ $22 a night.  As I was arriving on a Friday, that was a tremendous bargain.  You could get a rate like that at many hotels for Sunday through Thursday nights but Friday and Saturday were at least double that, sometimes triple.  I called up and a lady on the phone verified that, indeed, the coupon was valid any night of the week so I booked three nights — Friday, Saturday and Sunday — and my credit card was charged twenty-two bucks plus tax for the first night. CUT TO:

THE FRONT DESK OF THE RIVIERA HOTEL, where a clerk there informed me that that rate was not available on a Friday check-in, which is what I was attempting to do. I showed him the coupon and he agreed it said nothing on it about dates when it was not valid. "That doesn't matter," he said. Their cheapest room, which is all I wanted, was $52 a night and no coupon could overrule that.

I pointed out that the hotel had already charged me for the first night to "guarantee" my room and they'd charged me $22. There was no disagreement that they'd done that but he explained that only guaranteed my room. If I wanted to actually inhabit my room and sleep in it, I would have to give them $30 more for the first night and $52 for Saturday night. That struck me as a very odd definition of the phrase "guaranteed" with regard to a room reservation. And then, to add insult to my financial injury, I'd have to pay $52 for Sunday night since at the Riviera then, your rate was based on when you checked in. "If you want," he said, "you can check out on Sunday and then immediately check back in and we can give you the $22 rate."

I argued. Managers got involved. The line of suitcase-toting folks behind me grew longer and more impatient and I always feel guilty when I'm keeping people waiting. That put more pressure on me…but oddly enough not among those who worked the front desk. They didn't care how the hell long the line got.

Finally, negotiations hit one of those "take-it-or-leave-it" moments: I could stay there Sunday night for $22 — and stay in the same room without checking out and in, and they acted like they were giving me a great, generous concession in conceding that much. If I wanted to stay there Friday and Saturday night, it would be $82 more, plus taxes. End of dickering.

I said, "If I go somewhere else, you'll refund my $22 deposit, of course." The manager said, "We're not authorized to do that, sir. We can credit it to your room payment if you stay but the reservation clearly states that such fees are non-refundable." If I wanted my twenty-two smackers back, I had to take that up with someone else — the Senior Vice-President of Price Gouging, I believe. Whoever it was, he'd already left for the weekend and might not be back 'til Monday or even Tuesday.

This must have taken a half-hour and finally, I reached a peek of pique. I don't get angry very often and to make that happen, you usually have to harm someone I care about. But I got riled over all this and suddenly found myself telling them I wouldn't be staying in their crummy excuse for a hotel then or ever, and my lawyer would be talking to them about the $22 deposit. And with that, I grabbed my rolling suitcase in one hand and my laptop case in the other and I stormed out and headed directly to…

…well, nowhere. I had gone too far to reverse course when I realized I had nowhere to go.

The Desert Inn was next door so I shlepped my luggage and laptop over there, which took a helluva lot of shlepping.  Exhausted, I waited twenty minutes in a long line at that front desk only to be told that the only available rooms were $200 and up. That was per night. Then I located a pay phone and began calling around.

Another half-hour later, much of it spent on hold, the best deal I'd found was a room at the off-strip Palace Station. The price for three nights? $178. I also penalized myself in other ways: The effort of dragging my gear around, the exasperation, the waste of about two hours of my trip, etc.  The Palace Station was also not near the Riviera, nor was it near certain places I planned to go and could have walked to from Riviera.  So if you're keeping a running tally of how much more it cost me to not just take what the Riviera wanted, add on another $20-$30 in cab fares…and don't forget all these amounts are before taxes.

But I sure showed that Riviera Hotel, didn't I?

No, not really.  Not in the slightest then.  I'm sure they didn't lose any business. If the hotel next door was getting $200+ for rooms, we can assume someone else snatched up the $52 room I walked out on. The Riv also kept my $22 deposit. I wasted still another half-hour on the phone the following Tuesday (it's always a half-hour with these people) trying to get that back and the best they'd do was issue it to me as credit be used the next time I stayed at the Riviera. Like I was ever going back there.

Bottom line: I didn't hurt the Riviera one bit.  I hurt myself.  I would have been so much better off paying the Riviera the $104…and no, it was not fair.  Show me where it ever says life is always fair.

What I did accomplish though was to teach myself a fine lesson.  Sometimes, you can't win.  No matter how clever or reasonable or unreasonable you are, you have limited options and none of them are great.  All you can do is to pick the one that's the least rotten…the one that does the last amount of damage to you. I try to remember that to this day.

But before I end this: I don't want to leave you with the impression that I didn't get the last laugh on the Riviera Hotel.  I can't tell you how I did it because I may need to use this technique again some day when another hotel foolishly wrongs me.  But thanks to a series of events that I personally set in motion, the morning of June 14th, 2016, the Riviera Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was imploded and it's now gone forever.  And yes, it took thirty years but that's the beauty of it.  They never expected it.

As we all know, the "Reverend" Pat Robertson — who's kind of a Reverend in the same way Professor Irwin Corey was a Professor and who makes even less sense — feels we should not let a little thing like Saudi Arabia murdering a U.S journalist get in the way of a $100 billion dollar arms deal. What's even weirder about this position is that, as Steve Benen reminds us, there is no $100 billion dollar arms deal. It's just something Trump made up because it sounded good in his speeches.

Remember — assuming you're old enough to remember — how back in 1987, Senator Gary Hart of Colorado looked like a shoo-in to be the Democratic nominee for President in '88? Then he was accused of having an affair. In those more innocent of times, that was enough to disqualify him for the job even though there was no proof the charge was true.

In this article, James Fallows looks at the very real possibility that Hart was framed as part of a political dirty trick that did what it was supposed to do: Get him out of the race.

If you listen regularly to Gilbert Gottfried's Amazing Colossal Podcast, you've already laughed yourself sick listening to the latest guest on it, my pal Ron Friedman. Ron's one of those guys who wrote for half the TV shows of the sixties, seventies, eighties and beyond…so many that Gilbert and his co-host Frank Santopadre couldn't even get through a third of Ron's résumé.  The list includes The Danny Kaye Show, The Jonathan Winters Show, Get Smart, The Odd Couple, All in the Family, G.I. Joe, The Transformers, Starsky & Hutch, I Dream of Jeannie, Bewitched, The Partridge Family and so many more.

The episode will soon disappear behind a paywall, accessible only to those of you who splurge for Stitcher Premium.  If you don't wanna pay for the privilege, go listen to it now.

I have a new rule to propose and I'll get to it in a moment. This is about last night's Bill Maher retrospective which took the place of last night's Real Time with Bill Maher and which repeats throughout the week. The retrospective covers that show and his previous series, Politically Incorrect. I have been an avid fan of both programs.

Very little has bothered me about either. I didn't like the title of Politically Incorrect because I think that term is one of those phrases that people use according to varying, self-serving definitions. Maher, if I understand correctly, employs it to refer mainly to things that are true but people are afraid to say them out loud or are discouraged from expressing them. That's fine but a lot of racism, misogyny, junk science, hatred and stuff-said-just-to-get-attention gets defended and justified as a blow against "political correctness." Just because a lot of people frown on certain viewpoints doesn't mean you're a hero (or even correct) for saying them. It's Politically Incorrect to insist the Holocaust is a Zionist fantasy.

On Real Time, I think he's smart and gutsy and often very, very funny. My only occasional gripe here is that while (correctly) decrying those who reject Real Science as it relates to Climate Change, Maher often commits the same crime with regard to science about the human body. The worse example was in 2016 when he gave a lot of camera time to a "doctor" who claimed to have cured Charlie Sheen of AIDS with the milk of — I am not making this up — arthritic goats. He hasn't done that kind of thing lately and there was none of it in the retrospective so maybe he's wised up about that kind of thing.

And I guess I sometimes feel sorry for the kind of Conservative guest he can lure onto his panels. Some of them seem to think they can "win" on that playing field with that host and that studio audience…and I guess, about twice a year, one scores a point or two. So does the team that plays the Harlem Globetrotters. I usually wonder which right-wingers on Maher's program really thought they could do their cause some good and which ones merely have Alan Dershowitz Disease, i.e., the emotional inability to decline any opportunity to be on television.

Generally though, I like watching Maher. The few times I've met him or been around him — admittedly, some time ago — I sure got the idea I wouldn't enjoy prolonged exposure to him personally but on my TV, he's great. His "New Rules" segment is often the brightest, most perceptive bit of political commentary I encounter all week. In light of that, I'd like to offer a New Rule inspired by what I saw last night…

New Rule: If there's ever an hour-long special about you that goes on and on about your greatness and brilliance, with all your friends testifying to how incredibly awesome you are, it should not end with a title card that says, "Executive Producer: You."

That's like Trump giving himself an "A-Plus" for everything. That's what, literally, Jerry Lewis did on the last half-dozen or so retrospectives of his career that did nothing but gush at his infinite genius. You might just as well have an announcer proclaim, "This tribute to Your Name Here which treated him as a capital-G God was created by and carefully supervised by Your Name Here."

If Maher had turned the hour over to an outside entity — one with no ax to grind, pro or con — and they'd done a "Fair and Balanced" look at his career, I think he would have come off very well. My little list of things I think he's done wrong is pretty sparse.

I just have a natural distrust of people blowing their own horns. When someone tells me how great their work is, my immediate thought is: You're telling me that because you know I'm not likely to come to that viewpoint on my own. In my experience, that which is self-praised is usually disappointing. And when it isn't disappointing, it's embarrassing to see it sold that way. Bill Maher is better than that…and that's not him saying that. It's me.

Residents of Sesame Street answer some of the most-asked questions from the web…

In 2012, The Houston Chronicle endorsed Ted Cruz for the U.S. Senate. This time around, they're recommending Texans cast their ballots for his opponent, Beto O'Rourke. Their endorsement editorial is kind of amazing because I don't think Ted Cruz's worst enemy could write a more negative, damning condemnation of the man.

I have no idea how that race is going to turn out. The polls seem to be all over the place and, as I mentioned earlier, filled with all sorts of caveats as to why they might be way off. I do get the impression though that that's one seat that most Republicans in the Senate wouldn't mind losing to the Democrat.

For those of you interested in the ongoing destruction of Sears and Kmart, Joseph Russo (a former Sears employee) has a sorta-inside look at how it's going.

What he says about the shoddy condition of the buildings is true of the Kmart I've been going to for many years.  What an utter dump that place is.  Now, that might not matter to a lot of people these days if they can get the lowest price there…and it's been my observation that often, you can.  It's just that in the one I frequented, service was often non-existent and amidst the decent stuff that you might want to purchase, there was an awful lot of crummy stuff that you didn't.

Back in this message, I joked that someone somewhere was probably making a Lego version of Goldfinger.  Well, as Friend-of-the-Blog Richard Gersh informs me, they're getting close.  I was shaken (not stirred) when he told me that Lego has put out their version of the Aston-Martin that Sean Connery drove in that film.  Can the movie itself be far behind?

Haven't done one of these in a while. Haven't looked at the news a lot.  I kinda feel like everyone has made up their mind by now as to whether it would be a good thing or a bad thing for Republicans to retain as much control as they have of the government.  It's now just a question of which side can do a better job of making their voters feel like the world will end if they don't turn out on Election Day.

Trump continues to do something almost every day which is morally and/or legally wrong.  His backers continue to deny it or just outright say, "Who cares?  We're in power and that's all that matters."  They'd howl if President Obama had done the same thing and howl even louder if President Crooked Hillary had done it…but Trump was right: He could "stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and not lose any voters."  Especially if the person he shot was a journalist.

It was kinda refreshing the other day to hear Pat Robertson throw the sanctity of human life under the bus to save a big-money arms deal.  He said, in effect, one dismembered reporter is a small price to pay to be able to sell all those guns.  And of course, what possible Teaching of Christ could possibly be violated with $100 billion dollars worth of weapons or however much it really is?

I wish someone had asked him what if they dismembered two reporters?  A hundred?  A thousand?  At what point does the cost/benefit ratio swing the other way?  How about ten thousand reporters and one TV evangelist motivated solely by money?  That would take a lot of bone saws.

What's going to happen is going to happen.  I'm not really following the polls this time.  After the last election, all the pollsters are filling their projections with qualifiers and disclaimers and prearranged excuses for why they might not be right.  It's like watching a baseball game where the announcers keep reminding you that the scoreboard may not be accurate.  I'll probably care like hell when we get near the bottom of the ninth.  And now, this…

• Fred Kaplan explains what's up with that War in Afghanistan we seem to all care about less than we care about what Trump and Stormy Daniels are saying about each other on Twitter.  What Fred says about Afghanistan is that there is no path to victory there and there never has been one…and by the way, it's now the longest war in American history.  That just demonstrates the folly of fighting this kind of war and how we'll never get anything out of it; not even a damned Bob Hope Christmas Special.
• And here's a right-winger saying essentially the same thing Fred says in his piece.  Can someone — anyone? — point me to an article by anyone with foreign policy cred arguing that that war is still or ever was winnable?
• And here's Daniel Larison discussing how else our foreign policy is going in precisely the wrong directions.
• Our President continues to denounce Democrats as "an angry mob" while inciting his own angry mobs.  It's yet another example of how nothing is immoral or wrong these days if you do it on behalf of Trump.  If I were you, I'd stay off Fifth Avenue any time Donald is in town.
• Reports of clerical sex abuse continue to mount.  Atheism continues to become increasingly popular.  Gee, you think maybe there's some connection there?  How about folks like Pat Robertson placing profits over principles?
• This may be the stupidest thing Trump has ever said.  And the most dangerous.
• And here's another example of how the Number One priority of this administration is the financial enrichment of the Trump Family.
• And lastly for now: A lot of folks are bemoaning how the U.S. Constitution gives the same number of Senators to a state like Wyoming that it gives to a state like California.  It is, of course, a matter of unequal representation for the larger states and they're saying something should be done about it.  Kevin Drum explains to us why nothing will ever be done about it.

I have my mail-in ballot here.  I'm going to spend some time this weekend reading up on the various propositions.  Then I'm going to mark it, send it off and go back to paying less attention to the election that's the most important one of our lifetimes — until the next one that's the most important of our lifetimes and the one after that and the one after that…