Monthly Archives: March 2021

There's a bit of self-advice I've occasionally heard from folks who are in positions that require them to make a lot of important decisions. It's about the power of "no" and it goes something like this: Every time you have to say "yes" or "no," say "no." You'll be right 90+% of the time and in most of those jobs, to be right 90+% of the time is quite an achievement.

I don't necessarily endorse that position for all matters but when it comes to talking about Gun Control, you'll be right an acceptable percentage of the time if you always say "Nothing meaningful will be done." It's one of those hills which too many people are prepared to die on. And it doesn't even matter what's in the bill or proposal. The mere fact that it controls one or more guns anywhere is reason enough for some people to oppose it.

So that's my view after the most recent mass shootings: Nothing meaningful will be done. I'd be delighted to be proven wrong but I bet I won't be.

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Whatever else you may think about Bernie Sanders — and I think he's a good man who could never have beaten Donald Trump — he is a staunch defender of Freedom of Speech. I say this as a firm believer that you are not any kind of defender of Freedom of Speech when you are defending someone's right to say what you believe. Anyone could and would do that. You're only a defender of the staunch kind when you defend the kind of speech you'd rather someone wasn't saying.

Bernie is not comfortable with a private company with the reach of Twitter banning Donald Trump. There are two sides to this issue and I'm not sure which side I'm on…but I do admire anyone who does what Senator Sanders is doing here, even if I ultimately decide he's wrong.

The complete run of Thundarr the Barbarian — a cartoon show I worked on 41 years ago — is coming out on Blu Ray and the hero is also receiving that highest of dubious honors. He and his co-stars are appearing as Funko Pop figurines that, of course, look exactly like the original Alex Toth designs.

(People get confused about this so here it is once again: When Steve Gerber and Joe Ruby created Thundarr, Alex Toth did the initial designs, including the models for the three lead characters. This was all pitched to the folks at ABC. They were hesitant to buy the show. More written material was generated and more artwork was drawn. By this point, Alex was unavailable so I suggested Jack Kirby be engaged. He was…and he did the additional presentation art and when ABC then bought the show, Jack did most of the additional designing.)

I don't make anything off the Blu Ray just as I didn't make anything off the DVD.  I just enjoy pointing out the longevity of this property which was only on ABC for two seasons and 21 episodes.  That's usually considered a failure in TV but those episodes keep being rerun and rerun, and there is now more Thundarr merchandise than there was when the show was a current network TV program.  I wish my buddy Steve was around to see that.

You can pre-order the Blu Ray at this link you can order your Thundarr Funko Pop figure on this page and also find links to the Funko versions of Ookla and Princess Ariel.

I don't watch The Masked Singer or The Masked Dancer because, among other reasons, whenever one of their mystery performers unmasks, there's about a 75% chance I've never heard of them. But the true identity of "The Snail" was recently revealed on The Masked Singer and it turned out to be someone familiar to me…and to you, as well. If you didn't see this and didn't hear who it was, you might enjoy watching this great unmasking…

The news feeds I follow contain much debate about that man who went on the murder rampage in Atlanta last week and whether he was motivated by anti-Asian racism. It was a pretty horrible thing to do, no matter what drove that guy and it's curious to me that some people seem to think it can or should be narrowed down to one reason. Misogyny and racism would certainly seem high on the list of factors but a person that screwed-up might have a pretty long list.

I think back to a college-type course I took back in the seventies about Criminology. The instructor, who seemed overwhelmingly qualified to teach that subject, got to talking about a kind of novel or movie that was prevalent then. They were stories in which the crime-solver caught the serial murderer by studying what little was known about that serial murderer — his actions, his modus operandi — and achieving some sort of mental connection.

The premise was that to catch someone who was criminally-insane, the Good Guy had to go to the darkest of places and think like the criminally-insane…and my instructor said that was largely hokum. You couldn't think like a crazy person any more than you could think like a cocker spaniel or a grizzly bear. The serial killer might as well have been of a different species and he — assuming it was a he — might have no conscious thought as to why they were doing what they were doing.

There was a limit, my teacher said, to the usefulness of applying rational reasoning to irrational thinking; of trying to put yourself in the place of someone who would do something you would never in a million years do. He said, "A truly crazy person might kill someone because he didn't like the color of their socks or because the Mind-Masters of Saturn told him to."

I don't think it's quite as pointless as that and I certainly don't think any of the motives ascribed to the Atlanta killer — hatred of a race, hatred of a gender, sex addiction, et al — can be ruled out. I just think maybe we sometimes try too hard to boil these things down to a one-sentence explanation when it might take a book the length of one of Stephen King's to really explain it. A lot of that book might very well be in the language of the Mind-Masters of Saturn.

We should fight racism and misogyny and all other kinds of hate in every way possible. We just shouldn't think they explain everything.

Here's some really sharp footage of Las Vegas in 1954, though there aren't many marquee signs to see. Nelson Eddy is at the Flamingo with Gale Sherwood and George DeWitt. Ms. Sherwood was the person Nelson sang with when he wasn't singing with Jeanette MacDonald, and Mr. DeWitt was the singing host of the game show, Name That Tune.

Patti Page was headlining at the Desert Inn which in this video probably looks just like it looked when my parents were married there in 1951.

Lots of e-mails about the Las Vegas video I linked to yesterday. About a dozen of you think that the other name on the Sands marquee under that of Jack Jones is Rich Little. Okay.

Christopher Bay (Hi, Christopher!), Michael Miller and a few others inform me that the reference to "The Band" on the Caesars Palace signage is not the musical group by that name. It's actually a production of Mart Crowley's off-Broadway gay-themed play, The Boys in the Band. It opened the Roman Theatre at Caesars that year.

Meanwhile, my post about hotel rooms brought an e-mail from my longtime buddy Joe Brancatelli…as I guess I knew it would. Joe knows more about air travel and travel-in-general than anyone I know and the following is an excerpt from an even longer e-mail. Even this is so long I'm going to interrupt a few times to respond…

Some of your questions have easy answers. The "resort/destination fee" is, of course, a scam. Online sites and and third-party bookers such as Expedia only display the "nightly rate." But if you add a destination fee, it gets buried later as part of the taxes/fees line. So a hotel that would normally charge $90 a night can scam the unsuspecting customer by advertising a $60 rate and burying a $30 destination fee on the last page.

It's despicable and nasty and I now have a policy: I simply won't stay in a place that charges destination or resort fees. And when I book away, I send a note to the G.M. telling him/her that they lost my business because of the fee.

Agree it's despicable and it scams unsuspecting customers. But I think my last few trips to Vegas, I got what seemed to me the best room at the best rate by factoring in the resort fee. Harrah's, as I recall, gave me a "free room" because of my Harrahs card. I just had to pay their resort fee which was still less than the options I had for any room where I didn't pay a resort fee.

I object to it because it's insulting…and I'm sure it does deceive tourists who don't know how to do math. Then again, Las Vegas was built on tourists who don't know how to do math.

Now, as for the lack of USB ports and electrical outlets where they should be, might I suggest you stay at newer hotels? Older properties (anything built before the 2000s, for sure) must retrofit this stuff and it's expensive. But newly built properties know that this stuff is key to a happy stay.

Many have USB ports built into sidetables or headboards. New-wave clock radios have them, too. Older hotels that are paying attention do use workarounds (the clock radio with built-in USB ports, for instance.) And, of course, they are all switching to "smart TVs" that allow you to connect to everything from Netflix to Spotify without even using your own devices.

And remember, hotels spent decades buying and amortizing the cost of expensive phone systems. Think of all those wires in the walls! Now they have rooms with phones in the bathrooms even — and no one uses anything but their mobile. Makes older hotels a little wary of jumping on stuff that requires going into walls and running up big costs.

Agreed…though that "free room" at Harrah's was newly-refurbished and had USB ports. There just weren't enough of them, nor were they placed where they were handy.

I wonder how long it's going to be before hotel rooms have their own special version of Alexa or some other A.I. servant who'll tell you the time, set an alarm, bring you more towels, place a room service order, answer certain questions, book restaurant reservations and so on, all at voice commands. Someone's got to be developing that now. Or does that already exist somewhere?

Several of the other items on your list — not enough hangers, hooks for garment bags, etc. — believe it or not have to do with the switch from old CRT TVs to flat panels. Back in the day, to accommodate TVs, hotels needed a chest of drawers or an armoire to handle the bulk.

But now that the TV is a flat panel and hangs on a wall, they don't need armoires or drawers anymore. So the rooms shrink (average room size in the U.S. 20 years ago was 350sf, now you'll find newly built rooms under 200sf) and you won't find closets or armoires or drawers at all! Plus, as we've moved to casual business attire, there isn't a lot of people whining "Oh, my suit! Oh, cocktail dress! Where can I hang them? People basically live out of their suitcases now…

That's true. Years ago when Carolyn and I traveled, we both — out of habit, I guess — would check into a hotel and do a lot of unpacking, putting this in that drawer, that in this drawer, etc. It was always a problem when it came time to check out because we had to reverse the process and that always took more time than expected.

The last few trips I took with Amber, neither of us did that. Just about everything stayed in our suitcases except clothes that needed to be hung up for wrinkle-removal. I got a little "kit" that held everything I need in the bathroom so unpacking was just a matter of moving it from my suitcase to the bathroom and packing just meant putting it back. We could vacate a room in ten minutes.

On switches and stuff, well, welcome to existing properties. Every damned lamp in a hotel has its own kind of switch. I was once in a hotel that three TVs — one in the living room, one in each of the two bedrooms. Each TV had its own remote, of course — but no remote worked for anything but its specific TV. You'd think the remotes would be universal.

No, I wouldn't. What if Amber's watching one TV in one room and I'm watching a different program in another? We'd be changing each other's channels.

But, of course, the TVs were placed at different times over the lifespan of the hotel. Ditto lamps and switches. Think of our own house. Do all the switches work the same way? Course not. Hotel rooms are the same way. Equipment changes and it is hard for a hotel owner to make everything match.

Too many pillows? Yup, it's a cheap amenity. You put 10 pillows on a bed, the average guest thinks it's luxury and may ignore the fact that the bed is lumpy and should have been replaced several years ago. Of course, this has been changing during the pandemic as hotels have rushed to eliminate "touch points" that required cleaning. So pillows are disappearing. So are pads and pencils and tent cards promoting stuff.

Know what's also disappearing? Printed guest guides. Once upon a time, hotel rooms had two books: The Bible and the Guest Book that explained services and products and procedures. But printed stuff is disappearing now, partially for cost and partially because guests are increasingly more comfortable with stuff displayed on the TV monitor. Plus keep in mind that some things (Internet, for instance) is farmed out to third parties. The hotels literally don't know how it works. It's maintained by third parties and you have to call the third party for tech support…

Yeah…and the third party support never seems to know anything — if they even answer. I'll bet it would be a selling point for some travelers if a hotel could advertise, "Internet Expert on site."

Lastly, hooks and grab bars and such. In the end, it's about cost. Not that the items themselves are expensive. But installing them is (they can't come modular, as many hotels are now made) and they must be installed by a human being. Worse, bars and hooks eventually come loose and break walls and bathroom tiles. That, too, requires human intervention for repairs. All very expensive.

More expensive than having guests slip and injure themselves and sue?

Ever since I had my knee replaced, I kind of need a hotel room with a little more than the norm in terms of handrails and grab bars in the shower…but not as much as in what they call an "accessible" room with a lower bed and a roll-in shower and such. Once in a while when I ask for a room with a shower that isn't a tub/shower combo, they stick me in one of those rooms and I feel bad because I might be taking up one that is needed by someone who requires all that. And the lower bed is worse for me, not better.

I understand the reasons for a lot of these things. In most cases, it's money but that doesn't mean that I can't complain that they aren't spending that money. As I noted here, a shower caddy costs under $20 and the cleaning lady could "install" it in five seconds.

Anyway, my thanks to Joe Brancatelli and all who wrote. Joe operates the best business travelers' website on the web, JoeSentMe. If you subscribe to it, you don't need any other site to tell you how to fly, where to stay, how to get through customs, why the travel business is the way it is and so forth. There's also plenty of useful info there if you don't subscribe but if you travel much, you'll want to subscribe.

On YouTube, you can find a lot of folks' old home movies of driving around Las Vegas. I like these because I like seeing how the town (or at least, The Strip) has evolved and I like to read the big signs that tell you who and what is playing where.

This is one from 1969. The Hacienda is still standing. It opened in 1956 and I was present to watch its implosion on New Year's Eve of 1996. Featured there at the time of this video are "Topless Follies" and the Ink Spots. I assume those were not in the same showroom at the same time.

The Tropicana has Julie London and it also has the Folies Bergere, as it did from 1959 to 2009. For a few years there, the headline act at the Folies was Charlie Frye and Company. I have posted many a video here on my pal Charlie who is still juggling and doing impossible feats of magic.

The Aladdin has "Minsky's Burlesque '69," which I later saw when it moved over to the Hacienda when there was a Hacienda. (There is now a different hotel nearby in Boulder City by that name.) At the time this video was shot, there was apparently no hotel between the Tropicana and the Aladdin worth photographing but there was a few years later. In 1975, the Marina opened there. It was torn down in 1990 so the MGM Grand could be built on that property.

Further down The Strip at Caesars Palace, we find David Frye opening for Anthony Newley and elsewhere on the premises, country-western star Judy Lynn, as well as The Band. Across the street at The Flamingo, they had Paul Anka and Myron Cohen. (If you're wondering why the cameraperson skipped Bally's, it wasn't there then. The first MGM Grand opened on that piece of real estate in 1973 and it became Bally's in 1986.)

At the Sands, they had Jack Jones and someone else I can't make out, with Buddy Greco also on the marquee. The Frontier has George Burns and Barbara Eden with Jack E. Leonard somewhere else on the premises or maybe Coming Soon. I would have loved to see all three of these folks in Vegas, especially Jack E.

The Desert Inn has something called "Pzazz 70," a musical revue staged by Donn Arden, who staged a lot of the big musical revues in Vegas. On eBay, I found a 1969 program book for the show which listed two performers I actually met — Marvin Roy, a famed magician also known as "Mr. Electric," who just passed away last year, and impressionist Will Jordan.

The Desert Inn sign also lists "Tom Jones" but I don't think this is the singer by that name. I think it's the bawdy musical comedy based on the 1963 British film based on book of the same name. It played Vegas off and on for years.

The Stardust has the "Lido de Paris," which was there from 1958 to 1991 and was the first Vegas presentation to feature topless showgirls. It always had a headline act in it and at the time of this filming, it was the Korean-born trio, the Kim Sisters.

And that's about all I can make out. Take a drive down The Strip and see for yourself…

A while back, I recommended Laraine Newman's autobiography to you, sight unseen. Well actually, it's an audio book so it was more like "hearing unheard" but you know what I mean. It's nine hours, I'm a few minutes into Hour 9 and I'm going to e-mail her and ask that she quickly go record a few more hours so it doesn't end so soon. She's very sweet and I'm sure she'll do that for me.

I recommend it even more now because it's so stunningly honest and naked. You know the old conundrum about how the prettiest girl in your high school class couldn't get a date for the prom? Laraine's book will have you wondering how such a talented lady could be so insecure and, at times, unhired. Her book is called May You Live in Interesting Times and she sure has…surrounded by some of the most interesting people in the entertainment world.

Hearing about them is reason enough to give her nine hours of your life to hear about hers. But the special feature is seeing someone who became so self-aware of what has gone right and wrong for her. It may give you a lot of clues as to why things have gone right or wrong for you.

It has a special resonance for me because so much of it happened in my own world. Laraine and I were born the same day and grew up not far from each other. Long before we met, we knew a lot of the same people and went to a lot of the same places. She drank lemonade at Uncle Bernie's Toy Menagerie on Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills and so did I. She ate at Nate 'n Al's Delicatessen nearby and so did I. I dated a good friend of hers. There are a couple dozen of these in the book.

Before you think this is proof that there's something to astrology, I'll point out how our lives diverged, especially in the category of drugs. She took a lot of them and I took none of them. Also, she can act and I have enough trouble being convincing as me. This aspect of the book — how two folks born the same day have lived lives that were in some ways parallel but were often so perpendicular to one another — won't mean anything to you. But it's kind of a bonus reason I'm enjoying the book and don't want it to end.

Here's a link. You know what to do with it.

Broadway is still standing. And coming back…

I was talking earlier about going to Las Vegas where, according to some announcements today, things are opening up a bit more. In fact, two new hotels will be opening in the next two weeks and the Rio All-Suite Hotel & Casino — where Penn & Teller perform and where I often stay — is beginning the process of a total remodel as it turns into a Hyatt. No word yet on if it'll be changing names.

The topic of new hotel rooms got me thinking about what bothers me about old hotel rooms so…

1. I don't understand why the showers and bathtubs, unless they're in special "accessible" rooms, don't have more (or in some cases, any) grab-bars or things to hold onto when the floor is slippery or your balance is off.  Don't people not in the special rooms ever slip?
2. I don't understand why so many showers don't have a shelf on which you can put your little bottle of conditioner, your little bottle of shampoo, that razor you use in the shower, the larger bar of soap you travel with, etc.  When you're naked, wet and have soap in your eyes, that might be handy.  So would a towel rack inside the shower.
3. I don't understand why you often have to figure out which switch controls which light or — even harder to figure out sometimes — which electrical outlet. How about a few little signs on the switches?
4. I don't understand why they don't have alarm clocks that reset the alarm each night so that you aren't awakened at 5 AM because that's when the previous guest set the alarm to ring.
5. I don't understand why every hotel room doesn't have a little, easy-to-read manual telling you how to connect with the Internet, how to set the alarm clock, how to find the damned ice maker and vending machine on your floor, how to listen to and delete voicemail on the in-room phone…
6. I don't understand why they don't mount a big, strong hook on a wall or somewhere so you can hang up a garment bag if you're traveling with one.
7. I don't understand why they always give me way more pillows than I or my traveling companion (if any) could possibly use but not enough hangers, laundry bags, soaps or places to plug in a USB cable.
8. I don't understand why a $30 room has a $35 resort fee which gets me all sorts of things I don't want or need except for the $1.00 bottle of drinking water.  And shouldn't a room advertised for $30 that has a $35 resort fee be advertised as a $65 room?
9. I don't understand why it's often so difficult to find an empty electrical outlet next to the bed.  This problem is getting better, I'll admit.  I sleep with a C-PAP unit that needs to be plugged-in and I travel with an extension cord and an "octopus" adapter and I still sometimes have to move the bed and/or disconnect a bedside lamp to plug in.
10. And I don't understand why the person who decides where to put the mirrors thinks we all want to look at ourselves when we're seated on the toilet.

I used to go to Las Vegas a lot. I was card-counting at Blackjack (sometimes) and I was dating a lady in a show there (sometimes) and I just found it easier to work in a Vegas hotel room than in my home (sometimes) and I liked exploring the showrooms and the history and the performers (always). I stopped going when my mother was in failing health and needed me to stray no farther than the adjacent zip code.

When she finally passed, I didn't resume my Vegas-going because my dear friend Carolyn was in failing health. After she died, I went a few times but not as much.

I'd stopped card-counting. I got an "Ask ME" question I never answered as to why. Simple: I got ahead and I got bored. And I was well aware that if I kept playing, there would come a moment when I would slip behind and then I'd feel compelled to keep playing until I got ahead again…and that might not happen. Meanwhile, the showgirl lady gave up that profession and moved away so that was over.

I now find it easier to work at home and since most of "Old Vegas" is gone, exploring the town and the shows and such isn't as fascinating to me. And there's another reason why I haven't been there in over a year but I can't quite remember what it is…

Oh, right. The Pandemic. Almost forgot about that.

And even if I'd been immune to it the past year, I wouldn't have gone to Vegas. So much of it is not open. A lot of what I've seen online looks like a creepy place to be these days. It's coming back but it has a long way to come back before it'll look enticing to me.

When I go back, I won't be playing Video Blackjack. I probably won't gamble even a quarter on anything but I definitely won't be playing Video Blackjack. I'll play it at home on my computer or phone but not for money. But if you want to play it anywhere, you might appreciate a lesson from Anthony Curtis.

Mr. Curtis publishes the Las Vegas Advisor, which has made my Vegas-going much, much better since I started subscribing in 1993 or thereabouts. It was only a printed newsletter then. Now, it's more like a website that you join and you can read the monthly newsletter online or, if you insist, receive a paper version of it. There's also plenty of useful news and advice on their website if you don't subscribe.

Lately, they've also been doing videos. Here's a little lesson in Video Blackjack, which is a lot different from Live Blackjack. For one thing, you can't count cards. You can't even keep track of how many aces are left in the deck because the "dealer" (the machine) shuffles after every hand. And as Curtis notes in this video, some of the rules of Video Blackjack make it much harder to leave with more than you had when you sat down…

• I feel so much safer since I found out that the vaccine I got (Moderna) is the same one Dr. Fauci got.

Happy Wear Green and March in the Street Day. I'm still dealing with that deadline but I just can't quit you folks for long.

I'm not looking at a lot of political stuff lately. I kinda peek every so often just to make sure Trump isn't still in office but that's about it. When I do plunge in, I always stop by a couple of fact-checking sites, mainly Politifact, FactCheck.org and Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post.

Every so often, I think they come down on the wrong side of whether a false statement is bad phrasing or stupidity, as opposed to a lie…but I find them to be pretty darned accurate, way ahead of any news source I could follow. And it isn't just that they say something is true or false as that they back it up with sources and links and other info that allows me to fact-check the fact-checkers.

Our political discourse in this country would not be the perpetually-wrecking train that it is if more people went to these sites and were open to saying, "Hmm…maybe I'm wrong about that…" I'm not saying you should believe every word they say but if a couple of seemingly-intelligent people tell you you're drunk, it's not a bad idea to try walking a straight line and see if maybe they know something you don't.

Here from a 1958 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, Buddy Holly sings my favorite Buddy Holly tune…