Monthly Archives: February 2021

A lot of things I don't write about on this blog, I don't write about because I think everything I have to say about them is pretty obvious…like the passing of Rush Limbaugh. If you ever cared about Rush Limbaugh, you certainly have a firm, never-gonna-change opinion about him. And if you read this blog, you can probably guess what mine is.

But Quick True Story: Years ago — we're talking mid-eighties here — when I went to New York, I'd often stop in at an outlet of Rochester Big & Tall, a clothing store for guys like me. It was on W. 52nd or maybe W. 53rd near 6th Avenue. It later moved over to 6th, then went away completely but by then, there was one in Beverly Hills, right across from my doctor's office.

I was in that store in Manhattan one day and I'd picked out a few items for purchase. Then my salesman, obviously working on commission, started pressing me to buy a beautiful suede jacket that adorned a very dashing mannequin in the store. It's been many years since I've purchased clothing made of animal skins but I did back then.

He got me to try it on and it looked great…until I saw the price tag. Way too rich for my corpuscles. I was about to take it off forever when I heard the following exchange between my Sales Person and another customer in the shop…

OTHER CUSTOMER: Hey, that's a great looking jacket. Do you have that in my size?

SALESGUY: That may be your size, sir. But it's the last one we have in stock and I'm not sure if or when we'll get more.

OTHER CUSTOMER: Well, if he doesn't buy it, I want to try it on.

I looked and the Other Customer was, so help me, Rush Limbaugh. I turned to the salesman and said, "I'll take it."

Sometimes, I find videos to link to on this site by thinking of a song I liked back in some previous decade. Then I search YouTube to see if there's a video of the artist(s) I liked performing it live, as opposed to just doing a lip-sync on the record. If there is, I post it here.

This morning, I somehow thought of "Sweet Blindness" performed by The Fifth Dimension and I went hunting for it. I found a video of them singing it but to my surprise, they'd added a sixth member to the group for it. It was Frank Sinatra and he was wearing one of my old outfits…

• I take comfort in the fact that when I die, Twitter can't possibly be filled with as many hateful, racist, sexist quotes as I've had to read today.

A couple weeks ago, a friend of mine and I were discussing magazine cartoons — the kind where there's a drawing and then the caption is printed under the drawing — that made us laugh out loud. I'm talking about the kind that you see in The New Yorker and almost nowhere else these days.

I mentioned a few favorites to my friend and recently on the 'net, I came across a copy of one of them. It was done by Charlie Barsotti and I believe it ran in National Lampoon. At least, it was in some publication I was reading back when NatLamp was thing and it did make me laugh way more than such cartoons usually do.

As you may know, the custom in magazines that run/ran this kind of thing is for the artist to submit piles of "roughs" — quick sketches not up to publication standards. If the editor decides they want a certain gag, the cartoonist is then commissioned to do a more polished rendering of it and that's what they purchase and publish.

At least, they did it that way for a long time. But in the late sixties, there were a couple of cases where when the finished version was delivered, the editor decided the rough was funnier and so they printed the rough. And there seem to have been some instances where a magazine was about to go to press, there was a desperate need for a cartoon to fill a certain space and the editor, having no polished/finished cartoons available, printed a rough.

Around 1970 or thereabouts, there were articles in a few cartoonist magazines (Cartoonist PROfiles, I believe was one) about this and it led to more editors feeling it was okay to do that. That in turn led to some cartoonists making their roughs more polished, which in turn led to more of them being printed.

I don't know for sure that what we're looking at here is something the late Mr. Barsotti submitted as a rough sketch but it's way less slick than was usual for his work in print. If the editor to whom it was submitted laughed as much as I did about it, he might have decided to dispense with the fancy redraw and just go with this. I would have.

A couple of times on this blog, I've mentioned a small peeve of mine…when people try to pass typos or one-time spelling errors or innocent verbal gaffes off as lying. We all mistype. We all misspeak. Some of us have errors inserted into what we write by well-meaning autocorrect programs. Back when I worked in Wordstar 4.0, I'd type the name of my best male friend, Sergio Aragonés and even though I diligently put the accent mark on the final "e," it would think I meant "Sergio Arrogant" and change it accordingly.

If a person says something over and over that isn't true, that's different. We've all seen those lists that say Donald Trump lied eighty jillion times. What's amazing about those lists — and what drove the number so high — is that he said most of those things over and over and over and over. Let's say you applied a filter to one of those lists. Let's say you said that Trump would have to say something untrue three separate times before we classified it as a lie as opposed to a verbal gaffe. It would still be a pretty long list.

Glenn Kessler is the main Fact Check person for the Washington Post, which compiled one of those lists. I think he and his paper do a pretty good job of it, This morning, referencing a couple of odd things that came out of Joe Biden's mouth last evening, Kessler posted these six tweets…

Here's a guide for ex-Trump officials for how to tell whether a politician might be telling a deliberate lie or just had a verbal stumble. They were quick to declare Biden was a deliberate "liar" last night on vaccine development. So here we go…

Biden said on CNN: "it's one thing to have the vaccine, which we didn't have when we came into office, but a vaccinator — how do you get the vaccine into someone's arm?" Yep, that's wrong. Sounds bad. But did he mean it?…

A) Did he say something different elsewhere in the town hall? Yes, just minutes before: "We came into office, there was only 50 million doses that were available." That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created when he became president.

B) Is it different than what he said before? Yes, 1/26: "We want to give credit to everyone involved in this vaccine effort and the prior administration and the science community and the medical sphere — for getting the program off the ground. And that credit is absolutely due."

That's another clue. So the odds are this is a flub, not a deliberate falsehood. He contradicts what he said just moments earlier and what he has said in the past. As fact checkers, we look for patterns and context…

I know it's fun to snip a clip and act outraged on social media. But what's more telling is if a politician over and over says the same falsehood, day after day, no matter how often he or she has been fact-checked. No going to mention any names, of course.

I think that's correct…and by the way, I thought it was appropriate to leave in the typos and a bit of awkward phrasing of Mr. Kessler's. For instance, when he wrote "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created when he became president" in the third tweet, you could deliberately misunderstand what is being said.

You couldn't if Kessler had written "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was created before he became president" or "That's a clue he knows the vaccine was already created when he became president." He probably would have cleaned it up if he'd been writing something to go in the Washington Post instead of up on Twitter.

Trump's tweets (may they rest in peace) were full of spelling mistakes and missing words and bizarre punctuation. I never thought those were lies, just as when someone types "teh" instead of "the," it doesn't mean they're so stupid, they don't know how to spell "the." I don't think obvious verbal gaffes should be spun as lies. It's misleading and it makes outright, real lying seem more like an honest mistake.

And just in case anyone is going to try and make an issue of it, I didn't mean literally that Trump lied eighty jillion times. That was just an attempt at colorful phrasing. The real total was more like ninety skillion.

I really liked the score (and other aspects) of the Broadway show, Catch Me If You Can. One of the better tunes in it was called "Butter Outta Cream" and back in this post, I linked to musical comedy stars Sam Gravitte and Jason Graae (hi, Jason!) doing a virtual/online performance of it. Here's another one, this time by Thom Sesma (who I think I may have seen on Broadway in Miss Saigon) and Quentin Garzón…

Kevin Drum thinks the U.S. handling of COVID-19 has been as good as could be expected, maybe better. I'm not sure I agree with that and this is not a Trump thing. I assume the day will come when there will be studies and commissions on what went wrong and what cam be done to make them not go wrong in the future. I would love to hear what experts like Dr. Fauci — and not just him — will say then.

I don't go out much but when I do these days, I rarely see anyone not wearing a mask. Some of them are wearing two which obviously is more effective than one but what I don't get are these stats that say one mask is X% effective and two are Y% effective. Doesn't the kind of mask have a lot to do with how effective it is?

Obviously, some are too flimsy to be of some use. When mask-wearing was just starting up, I ordered a couple of different kinds off the 'net and threw one package away upon its arrival. You didn't have to be an immunologist to tell they would do no good. Might there not be masks out there that do the work of two? A mask that's more effective than two or three of some other variety? Obviously, I intend to keep masking-up when I go out in public for quite some time.

Another excerpt from Abraham Riesman's book on Stan Lee can be read over here. It's about an article that appeared in the New York Herald-Tribune in early 1966 and drove a major wedge between Stan Lee and Jack Kirby and also between Stan and his other star artist, Steve Ditko. On a list of the Top Ten reasons Jack quit Marvel a few years later, it might come in at around #5. It made Stan out to be the sole genius of Marvel and made Jack sound like a non-entity who just took dictation.

I'm quoted in the excerpt and the factual recital matches not only what Jack and his wife told me but also what Stan told me and what Danny Fingeroth reports in his recent bio of Stan. It's one of those few incidents from that period that both Lee and the Kirbys remembered the same way. (Actually, they all remembered that it was Jack's wife Roz who phoned Stan that morning and woke him up to complain about the piece but that's a minor discrepancy.)

When Riesman interviewed me for his book (which I still haven't read), he told me he was going to try to locate and interview the fellow who wrote the article that so infuriated Jack. I told him I'd bet that if he did, he'd find out that the reporter was trying real hard to get Stan to give him a job. Riesman found the guy, talked to him and then wrote to tell me, "You were right."

That was one reason Stan usually got so much better press than Jack. Stan had hiring power.

I'm keeping an eye on what The Pandemic is doing to Nevada and how the state is slowly and cautiously trying to "open up." The stats are in for last year and it turns out that for 2020, Las Vegas had — by whatever method they calculate this number each year — 19 million visitors. That doesn't mean much until you compare it to the 2019 total, which was 42.5 million. 19 million is the lowest total in 31 years.

They're loosening restrictions there. Restaurants and attractions that were limited to 25% of capacity are going to 35%. Maximum capacities in showrooms that had been at fifty people are raised to 100. That should enable some shows to reopen, though obviously not all. On March 15, some of these numbers will be raised again. You can read more about this here.

Back in this video link, I wondered aloud what the deal was with Groucho Marx's hair. Steve Stoliar — who knew the man as well as any man alive — suggests that for some reason, Groucho was wearing the toupee they gave him for the movie Skidoo.

Here in the vast newsfromme blogging empire which just consists of me, we love a cappella singing groups. Here from South Korea, we have Jang Sang-in, Kang Soo-kyung, Jeon Sung-hyun, Kim Won-jong and — last but not least — Lim Soo-yeon. As a group, they perform under the name Maytree.

This is them on Vocal Play, which is the South Korean equivalent of The Voice here but with better sets and a bigger audience. As you can see, they made quite a sensation…

43 Republican Senators voted to acquit Donald Trump. Here's an analysis of their stated reasons, most of which I suspect are not their real reasons. I would think that in most cases, they assessed how mad Trump supporters would be at them if they voted to convict and how that might affect their political future…and they assessed how rough it would be on them to explain or defend a vote to acquit in the future and how that might affect their political futures…

…and then they decided which of two bad choices they were least afraid of at the moment.

This is the way I think most politicians — including many for whom I have voted — look at their options. What's right and what's good for the people are not immaterial (usually) but the deciding factor is self-centered. And yes, I know that's a cynical way to look at things but that doesn't mean it's wrong.

The new ABC News/Ipsos Poll says that 58% of Americans think Trump should have been convicted. That includes 88% of Democrats and 64% of independents.

A lot of folks online seem really troubled by only 14% of Republicans feeling that way. I think it helps to remember that people have all sorts of different barometers on politics and reasons for thinking the way they do. A year or three ago at an outta-town convention, I met a man who felt that Abortion was not only the Number One Issue but the only one. A POTUS who destroyed everything else in this country could have this guy's support if he also stopped Abortion. And I have an acquaintance who thinks the Number One issue is and always will be the price of gasoline. If gas prices go down, whoever's in the White House at that moment is a great President. End of discussion.

If you still think Donald Trump "won" because he wasn't convicted in the impeachment trial, read David Frum. He'll tell you how big Trump lost…and will continue to lose.

My buddy Charlie Frye does stuff like this all the time…

Jonathan Chait thinks a lot of prominent Republicans, including many who voted to acquit Donald J. Trump in the Senate, want to see him prosecuted. I think so too. I have as low an opinion of Mitch McConnell as anyone but you have to give the man this: He knows how to play politics and he has his finger on the pulse of his party. His after-the-impeachment-vote remarks seemed intended to incite not a riot but some serious prosecution of a president who is no longer protected by his office.

Trump has a lot of legal problems ahead. Chait lists some and here's a list from Politifact. I know some folks who say, "Oh, he never gets nailed for his crimes" but not that long ago, these same people were saying, "Oh, he never loses elections."

So clever of Mitch to delay the impeachment trial until after Trump was outta office so Senate Republicans could have it as close to both ways as possible. They didn't have to face the wrath of Trump-lovers by voting to boot him out but they could vote with him but say, "It's just because he's already out of office." Either way, it comes down to wanting to get rid of Trump but to keep as many of his supporters as they can.

And here's a real long article by George Conway all about prosecuting Trump.

Every sixteen seconds on Facebook (it seems), a discussion breaks out on some comic book forum about why on those rare occasions when Jack Kirby was called upon to draw a cover or a panel or anything of Spider-Man, his Spider-Man did not look like the Spider-Man drawn by Steve Ditko or John Romita. Some folks seem to think there must have been a reason apart from the fact that Jack was not Steve Ditko or John Romita. Hey, when Frank Sinatra sang "I Left My Heart in San Francisco," he didn't sound like Tony Bennett.

I don't really know why this gets discussed so much. All the times Jack drew Spider-Man collectively represent about one-eighty-jillion-thousandth of his career. But I keep finding myself discussing it on forums. A few years ago on a now-defunct forum I wrote a long essay on the subject and I just dug it out and thought I oughta post it.

Since this topic is of interest to only a limited number of those who come to this blog — whereas you're all fascinated by every single other thing I post here — I've put this essay over on its own page which you can reach here. Don't bother clicking if you don't care about this kind of thing. Some of us do, more than we should.

Here's four minutes of video shot on the Las Vegas Strip in 1983. Very little of what you see in this video is still there, especially the prices…