Monthly Archives: April 2019

To the surprise of as many as five people in this country, Joe Biden has announced he's running for president. I think Joe Biden would make a fine president and I don't just mean that in the sense that after Trump, I think a caterpillar would make a fine president. The bar's about as low as it can go but Biden would even be good by the old standards.

Here comes the "but"…

I don't think he's a great candidate. I could be surprised but I think we have a whole new set of rules for that and they require someone tougher, feistier and less inclined to be polite. If Trump is the candidate — and I still don't think that's inevitable — the nominee oughta be someone sharper and perhaps less statesmanlike. I also don't see Biden as a great uniter of his party.

Democrats need to learn a lesson from all the Republicans who decided, "We'll take anybody — A-N-Y-B-O-D-Y — who will win." There are Trump backers who are privately appalled at the way he treats women, minorities, disaster victims, immigrants, etc. and once would never have considered voting for someone who lies constantly, changes position from day to day, brags about assaulting women, flaunts his ignorance, kisses up to dictators, obsesses about himself and probably has multiple criminal acts in his past business dealings…

…but they'll live with all that if it means their side is in power. Look at the way many so-called evangelists are licking the face of a man who signs Bibles but has probably never opened one.

Democrats will threaten to vote Independent if their nominee likes to sniff women's hair. Or isn't "progressive enough" on some issue.

I'm not sure there's any nominee who can please enough of the Democratic party to get them all behind the ticket. If there is, I don't think it's Joe Biden…but boy, am I ready to vote for him.

From a 1967 episode of The Carol Burnett Show, here's the real Gwen Verdon. It's one of those numbers where someone took "one of those songs the kids today like" and tried to make it palatable for older viewers…

A musical based on the movie Tootsie opened on Broadway last night and it got the kind of reviews that suggest it'll be there for a long time. Almost all the critics called it hilarious and crowd-pleasing…and an even better indicator is that Rex Reed said it was a mess. It would not necessarily be a foolish policy to make your theatergoing selections by going to everything Rex Reed said was bad and avoiding the shows he's liked.

Anyway, here's a page with links to many of the reviews of Tootsie. I wonder how many (if any) of the lines they said were so wonderful were written by Larry Gelbart.

I have three days in New York coming up and I've got to figure out what I'm going to see while I'm there. I kinda want to see the King Kong musical. I've heard mixed things about the plot/music part but everyone's saying the 20-foot King Kong puppet alone is worth the price of admission. I'm also spending way too much time wondering what's going to become of that massive monkey marionette when this show closes. It weighs a ton (literally)…so where do you put it? Do you store it? If so, why and where and for what future usage?

For that matter, might this be the only opportunity ever to see this show? I mean, it's not like they can do a national tour with a star who takes weeks to set up and take down. And the little 99 and 300 seat theaters around are unlikely to do this musical. They could just put a guy in some costume that's not being used for National Gorilla Suit Day.

I'm going to guess they're going to try and find a permanent home for this show and its title star, perhaps at a theme park or someplace. Las Vegas is probably out. It hasn't had much luck with musicals.

I'd just hate to see Kong wind up with a talk show on basic cable or sitting behind a table at an autograph show. Maybe he can go on Jeopardy! He could win easily. All he has to do is step on James Holzhauer

As a kid, I was a real fan of a recording artist named Ross Bagdasarian who sometimes went under the name David Seville.  And as an adult, I'm still a kid and still an admirer of his clever, fun-to-listen-to records.  He became most famous for The Chipmunks — Theodore, Simon and especially Alvin but he did non-Chipmunks records like his big hit, "The Witch Doctor" and my favorite single of his, "The Trouble with Harry."

I know a lot about him but I must admit I don't know as much about Mr. Bagdasarian-Seville as I'd like. This, I hope to rectify by reading a new book by our pal Mark Arnold, who writes great books about stuff I like. The new one is Aaaaalllviiinnn!: The Story of Ross Bagdasarian, Sr., Liberty Records, Format Films and The Alvin Show…and if you're going to read that title aloud, you'd better have them speed your voice up. You can order a copy at this link.

Mark will be discussing this book and its subject today on Stu's Show. He will be joined there by another pal, Scott Shaw!, who will tell you why the Chipmunks' 1961 prime-time series, The Alvin Show, was one of the best cartoon programs ever done for television.

Stu's Show, hosted by your genial host Stu Shostak, is a simulcast. You can stream the video on a Roku-enabled TV or device or on your computer or you can just listen to the audio. To find out how to do this, go to this page…and you can even watch it there at the appointed time. That time begins at 4 PM West Coast Time, 7 PM in the east and other times in other time zones. It'll run at least two hours, more likely three, maybe even more. If I were Stu, I'd pre-record the whole thing and speed it up.

Remember, it's live and it's free. After the webcast, you can download the show from a different section of the same website for a very modest price. And while you're there, check out some of the other fine episodes of Stu's Show. You have plenty to pick from.

Here's a few minutes about a wonderful man named Jack Kirby…with testimony from another visionary, Neil Gaiman, whose view of Jack precisely matches my own. And it pretty much matches that of everyone who worked with Jack or just knew him well.

I'm not sure I'd call him the Creator of the Marvel Universe, as this video does. I think that was a collective work. But if you don't get that he did a lot more than draw pretty pictures and that so much that is Marvel came from his imagination and concepts, you don't — to coin a phrase — know Jack…

This is the first part of a Cranky, Rambling Rant that will run on this blog over the next few days…

I was 14 when the original Star Trek TV series debuted in 1966. I didn't catch the first few episodes but a few of my friends did and loved 'em madly. It was probably around Week Four that I gave it a try and didn't see what the fuss was all about and I'm sorry. I just never warmed to the show or to any component of the massive franchise that it became. I wish I could. It's always nice to have one more thing in your life that brings you joy.

I absolutely do not hate it. I don't feel like I have much hate within me and if I did, I certainly wouldn't waste any of it on a TV show. I'd save 85-90% of it for people who do evil, hurtful things to me and/or others. The rest, of course, would all be directed at cole slaw.

If I have any negative feelings about Star Trek — and I really don't — they have to do with the kind of folks who get genuinely angry when you don't love what they love. One occasionally encounters such people — these days, not so much about Star Trek as maybe Harry Potter and/or Game of Thrones or something else I haven't gotten around to sampling. Back in high school when the original Star Trek was on, I'd have conversations that went sorta/kinda like this…

SOMEONE ELSE: Hey, what did you think of last night?

ME: What happened last night?

SOMEONE ELSE: Trek, of course.

ME: I didn't watch it.

SOMEONE ELSE (out of genuine concern:) What happened? You sick or something? Family emergency?

ME: No, I just don't watch it.

SOMEONE ELSE (a look of shock followed by either mounting hostility or pity:) Don't you understand it's the greatest TV show ever done?

No, I didn't understand that…or why we all had to agree on one. Sometimes, the Someone Else would embark on a holy mission to indoctrinate me to something I couldn't help but love as much as they did…for my own good, of course. I finally got fed up with this but before I did, I ceded to their urgings that I catch this or that "wonderful" episode in reruns.

One girl in my class thought it was humanly impossible — like flapping your arms and flying to Mars impossible — to watch "The Corbomite Maneuver" and not beam forever aboard the Trek Fan Club. I watched it and didn't dislike it. I just didn't like it enough to care if I ever saw another episode. From that point on, she treated me like I was someone to be avoided at all costs. Women have found so many valid reasons to stay far from me that I couldn't understand why anybody would seize on that silly one.

Some time later, I was working on a project Friday evening at a friend's home. The friend announced — like I should have known this — that it was the first night of Season 3 of Star Trek and that at 10 PM, all work would stop on our project because we absolutely had to watch you-know-what. The way he said it, I could tell non-compliance was out of the question. "You'll see how great it is," he said.

It was an episode called "Spock's Brain" and during it, I could see him slowly understanding how someone could not love Star Trek. At its end, he turned off the set, said "Let's just pretend that never happened" and we went back to work.

That was the first time I felt it might be okay to mingle in the circles of comic book and science-fiction fans and not worship that show. Later on, I encountered more folks who were indifferent to it and even some who wasted perfectly usable hatred on it. They're fewer in number now but I still sometimes come upon people who cannot imagine the non-love of that which they adore.

A comic book editor once called and went on for three minutes telling me how I would be thanking him for the rest of our mutual lives because he was about to offer me my dream assignment.  Over and over, withholding the name of this dream assignment, he told me, "You're gonna be so excited."  I finally said, "Okay, okay. I'll thank you forever. What is it?"

He said he wanted me to write the Star Trek comic book.

Even over the phone, I could hear his stunned expression when I immediately said, "Thanks but you should offer that to someone who loves Star Trek and follows it" and I even tossed out a few nominations. That editor is no longer among the living and he never spoke to me again without telling me he still couldn't believe I'd turned that down. He'd say, "Do you know how many other writers begged me for that job?"

This feels like a good place to end Part One of this Cranky, Rambling Rant. Part Two will be along in a few days and little (if any) of it will be about Star Trek. In case you haven't realized it, this isn't a rant about Star Trek. It's about people who confuse their opinions with inarguable fact and how as I get older, I have less and less time in my life for those discussions. This, even as the Internet makes it harder and harder to avoid them.

I was a big fan of Steve Allen, one of the wittier performers ever on television. Milton Berle used to say that Allen's mother — a stage performer in vaudeville named Belle Montrose — was the funniest women in that field and the source of Steve's sense o' humor. I'm not sure how true that is but I just came across this rare video, introduced by Mr. Berle, of Steve performing with his mother on some TV show. This is reportedly the act she did for many years with Steve's father…

Someone who, like me, thinks most restaurants are too noisy has invented an app to do something about it. He's concerned about hearing loss. So am I but I'm also annoyed when I can't hear the people sitting right across the table from me.

I just downloaded this and I'm going to experiment with it. I'll report back.

Jerry Seinfeld on How To Write A Joke…

Friends keep asking me if I think Donald Trump should be impeached.  No.  Impeachment is a political process and the politics in this country are too screwed-up right now to function properly.  We have Senators who voted to remove Bill Clinton from office for lying about an affair who wouldn't vote to remove Donald Trump from office if he really did shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue.

I think Donald Trump should be tried by criminal courts, assuming there will be any that will not be dysfunctional by the time he's outta office and therefore indictable.  In the meantime, he oughta be investigated in all the areas where there's plenty of smoke but Robert Mueller wasn't charged with watching for fires.

And there are other reasons why I think Trump should not be impeached, at least not now.  Ezra Klein makes a much better case than I can.

Most days, I embed a video clip on this site. I've been doing this since March of 2006. This was the first one.

I've posted something like four thousand of them in that time…all videos on other sites that I embedded here for you. In some cases, the site where the video was hosted took it down or the entire site went away. Either way, that link now goes to nothing. That's one reason why if you look back on this weblog, a spot that used to display a video sometimes now has a big blank area or one of these…

Another reason though is that in July of 2017, YouTube stopped supporting video embeds that involve the flash protocol. Most of my embedded videos have come from YouTube and for a long time, all of those used the flash protocol. Well more than a thousand videos on this site went blank when they stopped supporting flash. The code was still there but you henceforth saw (and may still see) a blank space unless I manually replace that spot with the above graphic.

There does not seem to be any simple software way to convert the old flash-driven video links to the newer, preferable iframe format. It's necessary to…

1. Go in and find the video on YouTube. That is if it's still there…
2. Get the code that will now allow that video to be embedded here via iframe…
3. Slightly alter that code so it works with the special needs of this board…
4. Go back and edit the old post to take out the flash link and put in the iframe link.

This takes time and I ain't got a lot of it lately.  So I'm doing a little of it and will do more if/when I can.  But I thought I oughta let you know that some old dead videos will reappear.  In some cases, I'm embedding a newer video in an old post when the old video is no longer where it used to be.  I just replaced one video clip in a 2009 post with a copy of the same clip that was posted on YouTube in 2016.  Don't be confused if you notice this kind of thing.

I may not be able to do a lot of this but you should know that I'm doing any of it.  If someone knows of a better way to do this than editing each friggin' dead video embed by hand, I'd love to hear it.  I'm not going to fix any text links so if an old post invites you to click and read some article on another site and the article is no longer at that web address, too bad.

• Everyone's getting so damned lazy these days. The Easter Bunny hid all my eggs in the same place — in a carton in my refrigerator. He didn't even bother to color them. Next thing you know, Santa will have us all getting all our presents from each other.

McKay Coppins, who works for The Atlantic, wrote one of the most perceptive (I think) pieces on the Mueller Report I've seen in the past few days. Here's a key excerpt…

From the moment the 448-page document was published, two separate news universes took shape. In one, the special counsel's report was presented as a smoking-gun chronicle of high crimes and misdemeanors. In the other, it was heralded as a credibility-shredding blow to the president's opponents.

In between those two poles were plenty of journalists laboring dutifully to make sense of the report and give it proper context. But if what you wanted as a news or social-media consumer was simply an assurance that you'd been right all along about Trump and Russia and everything else, you could nestle yourself safely in a cocoon of validation, and stay there for the remainder of the news cycle.

As I read the piece, I was reminded of a moment in The Final Days, the chronicle of the end of the Nixon presidency written by Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward. The "smoking gun" tape had been found and a transcript was about to be released. Nixon called his family to the Lincoln Sitting Room in the White House to tell them about it. Included in the group were his daughter and son-in-law, Julie and David Eisenhower. Nixon described the piece of evidence that the world would shortly see and David asked to see the transcript. It was obtained and David and Julie took it to another room to study…

As he read the transcript now, David was convinced it was over, either by impeachment or by resignation. Julie did not express disagreement, though she was not ready to agree either. They went back to the Lincoln Sitting Room, and David went to the President's side. "It's been my feeling that we're not as innocent as we said, or as guilty as they said," David said.

Nixon did not react; he kept looking into the fire.

I don't think the Trump presidency is over, not by a longshot. The trouble is that more than ever, he looks like a guy who won the presidency because Russia helped him and who, confronted with an investigation, reacted like a mob boss with plenty to hide. He may not have been as guilty as his opponents said but he's not as innocent as he insisted he was.

Do as I tell you: Enlarge this video to fill your screen. Then as it plays, use your mouse to click around and move the image. This is one of those 350° videos where you can rotate the image on your screen and see the view you'd see if you were in the middle of the action.

This is the "Embassy Ball" number from the current production of My Fair Lady in New York. Enjoy.