Monthly Archives: April 2021

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Bjørn Jørgensen and his Big Band…

If you want to know what's going on with the threatened recall of California governor Gavin Newsom, read Ed Kilgore. (My Take: Barring some unpredictable calamity, I don't see a chance that Newsom will be removed. He's not much less popular than he was when he was elected and heavily-Democratic California is not going to replace him with a Republican as the backers of the recall fantasize.)

If you want to know what's up with Ted Cruz's threat to remove the anti-trust protections for Major League Baseball, read Jonathan Chait. (My Take: I've long thought M.L.B. should lose those protections but if Cruz is for it, I probably need to rethink this. Anyway, they aren't even pretending that this is about anything other than trying to make it harder for minorities to vote.)

If you want to know why the U.S. is withdrawing from Afghanistan and what will likely happen, read Fred Kaplan. (My Take: I agree with Fred.)

Alex J., who I assume is not Alex Jones, writes to ask…

It would seem you've been going to Las Vegas for quite some time. What was it at the time that attracted you to the city then and how has it changed?

Well, it seems to have changed a lot since COVID-19 descended upon this world but I haven't been to Vegas to see what it's like now there because of that. It sure doesn't look enticing from afar and here's one of many reasons: Something I liked about the town was that when you were there, it was like being on a different planet where nothing mattered except gambling, food and entertainment. You could just turn off the part of your brain that might have to even think about anything else.

I doubt I could do that in an environment of who's wearing a mask and who isn't and "What's open?" and "Where do I sit to eat?" and "I just touched that so I need some hand sanitizer" and so on. And I really don't want to fly either.

Going back to before The Pandemic: Las Vegas got more expensive. There were lots of bizarre-sounding shows that one could go to that were nine bucks with a coupon so I'd take a chance. Now, they were thirty or forty bucks so I didn't take that chance.

There were also acts playing Vegas that had been around for years. I love Old Show Biz and when I started going to Vegas, they had plenty of Old Show Biz in their showrooms. My pal Pete Barbutti was playing somewhere. Dave Barry was at The Mint. Jackie Vernon was at the Marina. The last two burlesque comics — Dexter Maitland and Irv Benson — were at the Hacienda…and they were followed in there by Lance Burton. Lance was a (relatively) new guy but he had a wonderfully-intimate and classic magic show that was $15 with a coupon.

I knew a lot of folks who could get me backstage. All the time I've worked in television, I've rarely felt surrounded by "Show Business" the way I felt it backstage at the Union Plaza or the Paddlewheel or the Stardust. It was not just the showgirls walking around naked, though I doubt any male would be indifferent to that. It was the immediacy of what was going on there: Live performances, live audience, live applause…

There's not as much of that anymore. When they replaced the Sands with the Venetian, they kept the gaming but not the history.

Blackjack has even changed…or is changing. When I was playing a lot and counting cards, a "natural" (an Ace plus one card worth 10) got you a 3:2 payout. Now, casinos are increasingly changing it to a 6:5 payout. Doesn't seem like much I know but the old way, the casino only had about a 0.5% advantage over the players. 6:5 gives them more like a 2% advantage and that just kills even the remote possibility that I would ever get back into that game.

Blackjack was the only game in town that interested me. It was not the money. It was that it was a game where skill mattered, especially if you were counting cards. I gave it up once I satisfied myself that I was playing it well enough to give me that microscopic advantage over The House instead of the other way around. I got "ahead" but I was well aware that if I kept playing, I'd eventually hit a streak of bad hands and lose all that I'd won. It was impossible that that would not happen.

Then I'd have a choice: Commit to playing until I got ahead again and then quit…or end my Blackjack binging as a loser. It seemed easier to quit while I was ahead. It was getting to feel like work anyway. The way I played, it took long hours at the tables, much of it surrounded by cigarette smoke which I can't stand. I could have made the same money in that amount of time (and breathed more easily) by going up to my room and writing a comic book script on my laptop.

I quit Blackjack. I lost my access to (and much of my interest in) "going backstage." The ladies I knew there all stopped performing and married and/or moved outta town. Writing in hotel rooms got to seem like a little less fun.

I still like Las Vegas — or at least, pre-Pandemic Vegas — and I'm sure I'll be back there when/if it's like that again. I like exploring the corners of it I've never visited. I like watching the people. I like keeping my own hours and eating when I feel like it…and I know some great places to eat there. I like the air of excitement and the fact that you can wallow in it and then when you've had enough, shut it off by going back to your hotel room.

But I don't like it as much as when I was younger and there was more of what I call "Old Show Biz" and I could go backstage and feel a certain glamour that I rarely felt in television. It went away for me somewhere between the time they imploded the Hacienda and they opened the fifth or sixth Cirque du Soleil show in town.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by a group called Postmodern Jukebox…

Several news sources reported today that the folks who run Comic-Con International have abandoned plans to have their "Special Edition" in-person, not-online Comic-Con on Thanksgiving Weekend this year. These reports were in error. As of today, the event is still a "go" but a lot of details still have to be ironed out.

As you may know, a recurring belief of this blog is that The Pandemic has rendered the future very uncertain so I tend not to put much stock in anyone's predictions. There might be a new variant of the virus. There might be a new surge of the old version of it. There might be a lot of things that will render today's forecasts inoperative.

I see a lot of people are saying things like, "Hey, if Disneyland can open up April 30 and Governor Newsom can say that all restrictions in the state will be lifted by June 15, why can't they have an in-person Comic-Con in July or soon after and be sure they can do one in November?" Well, Disneyland may change its mind…and they're probably doing a helluva lotta things to modify the park before they reopen. And like every single governor and mayor in the country at one time or another during The Pandemic, Mr. Newsom may have to modify his projections.

And there's one other point: When the state may fully open is one thing. When San Diego and the convention center and surrounding businesses will be ready to welcome Comic-Con may be a different thing. Comic-Con requires a lot of advance planning and the planners need to coordinate literally hundreds of agencies, suppliers, services, vendors, insurance companies, transportation enterprises, etc. Here is something I've learned working with these people, lo these past few decades: However complicated you think it is, it's way more complicated than that.

Wait and see. Just wait and see and trust that it will all come together — or not — in due time.

Yesterday here, I posted the sad news that Pacific Theaters was closing all its California movie-showing-places including the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood. The Internet — especially the parts of it located in Southern California — has erupted with laments and petitions and crusades to Save the Dome. Great. But it seems to me folks are over-reacting to the possibility that all those theaters are going to be destroyed, replaced, disappeared. etc.

The odds are pretty good that some of them will be acquired by one or more other companies. It sure doesn't seem impossible that all of them will live on. They may change…they may not be as well-managed…they may charge more for tickets…but I don't think they're all goners. The movie theater business is not what it once was for reasons we can all enumerate. Still, we're not to the point where no one in it can show a neat-'n'-tidy profit.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by the Jazz Ambassadors, who seem to be a subset of the United States Army Field Band…

• In his memoirs, John Boehner says Bill Clinton was only impeached because Congressman Tom DeLay convinced enough of the GOP that it was a good move politically which would win them lots of seats. Nice of John to tell us that 23 years later.

Just days after I wrote about the joy of seeing my favorite movie — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — at the Cinerama Dome theater in Hollywood, we get the news that the Pacific Theater chain is permanently closing all its outlets in California. That amounts to 300 screens and includes the ArcLight complex near Sunset and Vine. And the ArcLight complex includes the Cinerama Dome.

The Cinerama Dome was literally built to show Mad World. It was the opening attraction there on 11/7/63 and I first saw my favorite movie there on 11/23/63 and many times since. I went to other movies at the ArcLight, as well. It was a great place to see movies. I can't quite explain why but I always had the feeling that the operators of the theaters there and the people who went to see movies there respected movies a little more than what I felt at other theaters around.

The news reports (like this one) suggest that someone or some company may step in and acquire the chain. I hope so. I'd sure like to see the theater complex at The Grove remain up and operating also.

Here's a highly-belated movie review. Friday night, I watched the 1980 movie Xanadu for the first time.  I had seen excerpts from it when it first came out.  I'd seen and really enjoyed the 2007 Broadway show based on it.  For some reason, I even had a DVD of the film…but I'd never watched it, start to finish.  A friend of mine was here and we decided we would.

I think I can explain why I'd never watched it before.  When it was in production, you could barely escape the advance publicity.  It hadn't even finished shooting and already — its publicists wanted us to believe — the world had embraced it as the greatest movie musical ever…a unique blending of Classic Tradition and Today.  "Today" in this case was the era of Roller Disco and other concurrent fads you could sense becoming passé as you heard about them for the first time.

When it finally came out, I felt like I was being ordered to go see it.  Sometimes, we don't do something just because we resent someone telling us to do it.

Plus, with that kind of pre-hype, you'd better be damned awesome and most folks I knew said that Xanadu wasn't.  But then again, it also wasn't harmful or evil or without hummable, fun moments.  It was just a silly movie about nothing of consequence treated as a story of great significance…and 1980 was the time of Apocalypse Now and Norma Rae and Breaking Away and Kramer Vs. Kramer and a lot of "issue" films that made the "non-issue" ones seem even more trivial.

I think I felt sorry for Xanadu. People were dumping on it like the filmmakers had committed mass genocide by not talking about an important issue…like mass genocide. I know I often cringe at the "pile-on" damnation of certain creative works. I felt that way about the recent movie of Cats.  This was Cats, people.  What were you expecting?

I had a friend — and I haven't seen or talked to her in four decades — who played one of the muses in the film of Xanadu. We were dining one evening in a steak place and couldn't help but hear a too-loud party at the next table. Abetted by alcohol, they were whooping it up about how horrible Xanadu was and the air was thick with schadenfreude.

Not liking a movie is one thing. I've not liked plenty in my days. But this was raw, childish glee that the people who made it were or deserved to be in pain. One guy was taking it personally that "shit like that" gets funded, whereas all the genius movies he obviously could create — every one of them, a surefire Best Picture honoree — do not get made.

I asked my date if she'd like me to call over a waiter to see if we could be reseated farther from the Xanadu-bashing table. She said no, it didn't bother her. But you could tell it did…a lot.  If the movie was lousy — and not having seen it, I didn't know if it was or wasn't — it wasn't because of what she'd done. She was proud of what she'd done.

She did tell me about a dancer she knew who auditioned for Xanadu and somehow not gotten hired. Given how many it had employed, that was embarrassing. When the reviews of the film came out, that dancer had not been able to resist calling with some faux sympathy: "Oh, I'm so sorry your movie is a flop!"

I'm not defending bad movies here; just suggesting that often, as per Gilbert & Sullivan, the punishment does not fit the crime. And I long ago got tired of people trying to prove what great, refined taste they have be declaring that almost everything is beneath them. Just let it go. It's just, at worst, a bad movie. You've seen them before, you'll see them again.

And that's kind of how I felt about the film of Xanadu: A couple of great songs. Olivia was adorable. Much of the dancing was great…and it was nice to have a relic of that period and to see Gene Kelly still being Gene Kelly at the age of 68. I didn't hate it but I wasn't furious it got made. I just can't get that incensed over something that inconsequential.

I tried this once before and it didn't take. Let's try it again…

The late Bill Finger, as many but not enough of us know, was the unbilled-for-far-too-long co-creator of Batman and much of the Batman mythos. Throughout his life, he received way too little credit for this (i.e., none) and nowhere near enough financial reward.

That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately, his face continues to be miscredited. Very few photos of Finger exist and one often sees photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger.

Most often, it's a photo of Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured a photo of him from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.

The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.

Because the photo of Kanigher often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display it when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing Kanigher identified as Finger.  I made up this graphic and I'm posting it here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting it because I want them to get into the databases of Google, Bing and other search engines.

If you have a website that has anything to do with comic books or Batman or which just gets a lot of hits from the "spiders" that crawl the web collecting images for search engines, please copy the image below and post it on your site. Do not change the name of it.

Put it up and if enough folks do this, it will be seen among the first images when someone searches for a photo of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics.  Thank you.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by the great guitarists Barney Kessel and Herb Ellis…

• John Kerry is currently serving as the Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Science. He needs to take a few minutes out of that job and get his wife to do something about the Ketchup Shortage.

Our current view on The Pandemic here at newsfromme.com is Guardedly Optimistic. We're impressed with the speed and scope of the vaccinations but feel that there are too many folks and elected officials who think it's over…too much unmasking and public gathering.

I'm as vaccinated as a person can be right now and I still wear a mask and keep a good distance from others when out in the wild. When people ask me if I expect to go to this or that public event in the future, my answer is still "We'll see" and I don't put much stock in anyone's predictions of when things will be "normal" again. I don't even believe in anyone's notions of what will constitute normality. Clearly, a lot of things have changed forever.

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I'm not watching politics much but every time I peek, I see Donald Trump throwing his little Sore Loser "I won in a landslide!" fit. A lot of those who back him up seem to me to not really believe he won but they do believe that's a good position from which to operate. And as Matthew Rozsa notes in this article, a lot of Republican leaders are trying to have it both ways. They want to keep Trump voters angry about "The Steal" without insisting that there was one.

The Trump/Hitler analogies in that article go too far, as all Anyone/Hitler comparisons usually do. But I'm going to quote this one paragraph because I may want to refer people to it at a later date…

It isn't really necessary to go through every specious Trump claim with a fine-toothed comb. He already had the opportunity to do so multiple times, and he lost on every single occasion. His own attorney general, William Barr, investigated Trump's claims and found that Biden had won legitimately. Republican leaders in the key states whose results would need to be overturned for Trump to win admitted that he had lost. The Supreme Court unanimously ruled that Trump's assertions had no merit. He filed dozens of lawsuits and lost every single one that asserted fraud, as well as nearly all of the ones in which he did not claim fraud. (More than two-thirds of the 60 cases he brought to court did not claim fraud at all but appear to have been PR stunts; he won only one of those, a Pennsylvania case over technical procedural issues.) Many of those judges were Republicans, including some appointed by Trump himself.

And I'd add one more big point to that: Before the election, every single poll major poll — including the Fox News Poll and those from other agencies that skewed pro-Trump — showed him losing by a significant margin…and then he lost by a significant margin. Explain that conspiracy against him along with the dozens of others.

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These days, I'm probably more interested in what's going on with the San Diego Convention Center. The center's website now lists "Comic-Con Special Edition" for November 26-29 — four days instead of three. That's Friday through Monday but perhaps the idea is that Monday is a teardown/moving out day and not a day the convention would be open. The calendar there also shows so many other conventions booked that it's doubtful the Comic-Con people could switch to any other dates later this year.

And it says the "Special Edition" — details of which I understand are still very, very "iffy" ‐ would have an attendance of 130,000. I seriously doubt they'll be trying to make it that large.

In the meantime…

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has transferred about 300 teenage girls who had arrived this month at the San Diego Convention Center to a facility in Texas to make room for younger children. The San Diego Convention Center, which is currently being used to house unaccompanied minors who arrived in the United States to seek asylum from their homelands, reached capacity last weekend at about 1,450 children — all girls ages 13 to 17 and some younger who were accompanied by their teenage siblings.

I am resisting the compulsion to go down there and host panels for them. And if I read the news correctly, the homeless folks who have been occupying another part of the convention center are now being relocated elsewhere and it will soon cease to be a place for them.

Also in the meantime, the San Diego City Council is grappling with the question of last year's Measure C, which was a ballot proposal to raise the local hotel tax to finance a major expansion of the convention center along with several homeless programs and an awful of much-needed street repairs. The initiative garnered 65.24% of the vote but it technically needed two-thirds…

…or did it? There are currently all sorts of court challenges and arguments saying that it only needed to surpass 50% or maybe that it came close enough…or something. The Mayor and City Council are (mostly) saying yes, it passed, let's go ahead with it. Further discussions and court decisions are pending.

The forecast for the 2022 WonderCon is that it will take place for real at the Anaheim Convention Center and the dates circulating are April 1-3, which is not Easter Weekend. I place no stock in predictions but if I did, that would seem like a pretty safe one. As with everything in this dispatch, we shall see.

Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Dominik Hauser…