Monthly Archives: July 2021

Longtime reader of this site Galen Fott just wrote to tell me something I didn't know; that the version of "The Glamorous Life" that Audra McDonald sang in this video posted earlier is the version that Mr. Sondheim wrote for the movie version of A Little Night Music. It starts the same as the song of the same name did on Broadway but then turns into a very different tune. I just checked out the cast albums and he's right. I like the movie version better. I suppose Sondheim did too or he wouldn't have changed it.

Here's another instrumental that oddly topped the charts during the years I was listening to 93/KHJ Boss Radio. "A Walk in the Black Forest," which we discussed here, never sold as many records as "Love is Blue" by Paul Mauriat. Contrary to what many assumed, Mauriat did not write it. As many around the globe were recording it for different countries with translated lyrics, he recorded it for the American market…and wisely, without lyrics.

The original song had French lyrics by Pierre Cour and the tune was composed by André Popp. Someone named Bryan Blackburn wrote the English-language lyrics for it and I'm afraid they went like this…

Blue, blue, my world is blue
Blue is my world, now I'm without you
Grey, grey, my life is grey
Cold is my heart since you went away

Red, red, my eyes are red
Crying for you alone in my bed
Green, green, my jealous heart
I doubted you and now we're apart

They went on from there but didn't get any better. Still, the instrumental was on my mixtape so the song goes here, as does this video of Muriat leading an orchestra that seems to be actually playing it…

This is from the concert on Stephen Sondheim's eightieth birthday at Avery Fisher Hall in Lincoln Center. Paul Gemignani is conducting the New York Philharmonic as Audra McDonald sings "The Glamorous Life" from the Wheeler/Sondheim show, A Little Night Music. And sings it about as well as it's humanly possible to sing it…

In a non-COVID year, I'd be packing for Comic-Con right now but everything is different now in CoronaWorld. Nevertheless, I'm kinda busy so I figured that this week, I'd reprise a few past posts about Comic-Cons back in the good ol' days when we actually went to them. This post ran here on July 28, 2010…

Super Retailer Joe Ferrara took the pic below of Comedy Legend Chuck McCann posing with the three cartoonists who competed in Quick Draw! at the Comic-Con on Saturday. The three fast 'n' funny sketchers were, left to right, Sergio Aragonés, William Stout and Scott Shaw, who spells his name "Scott Shaw!" with the exclamation point. Quick Draw! is always great…and I can say that because it's not great because of me. We get three speedy cartoonists and I throw challenges at them and more than 2000 people watch as they draw and howl with laughter.

Here's one thing that happened there. Our cartoonists onstage were Sergio Aragonés, William Stout and Scott Shaw. I then brought three more up: Katie Cook, Sam Viviano and Tom Richmond. The idea was that one cartoonist would draw the top half of someone — a character, a monster, an alien, an animal, whatever — and then we'd cover over that drawing. Another cartoonist, who hadn't seen what the first one drew, would then draw the bottom half of the "someone" without having any idea what the top half was. Then we'd uncover the two halves and see what resulted. Here is one of the drawings done that way. Tom Richmond, who is the star caricaturist in the new generation of MAD, drew this…

We then covered Tom's drawing — everything but the belt — and had Sergio draw the bottom half. Remember now: Sergio had no idea what Tom had drawn…

Once Sergio was done, we unveiled the joint creation…

See? That's how it's done!

As we all know, The Dick Van Dyke Show evolved out of an unsold pilot that Carl Reiner wrote and starred in called Head of the Family. It's amazing how something that missed so totally could have turned into such a fine, on-target TV series.

Head of the Family had its one and only network broadcast 61 years ago yesterday. Ramsey Ess takes a look at what went right and wrong with it. I think the main thing that went wrong with it is that Carl Reiner was trying to play the kind of beleaguered, unappreciated father that was then fairly common in sitcoms. Of course, there was also the uninspiring theme song and opening and supporting cast and bad canned laughter and thirty or forty other things.

Even before this Pandemic Thing was in all our lives, I was becoming more and more convinced that the three most dangerous creatures in the world are — and this is not in order of threat-level —

1. The West Nile Virus Mosquito
2. The Black Mamba Snake
3. That friend of yours who thinks he or she knows more about medicine than Real Doctors

I've managed to avoid the first two of them so far but, alas, #3 can be found everywhere these days.  None of what follows is meant to suggest that Real Doctors are infallible or that some of them might not be unworthy of the title.

But you know, if I ever need open-heart surgery, I think I'm going to go with the recommendations of my cardiologist over, say, a certain friend of mine who inks comic books for a living.  The following sentence is not an exaggeration: I have lost friends and loved ones who I believe would be around today if they'd listened to Real Doctors…or even just listened to them a lot earlier than they did.

I understand and on some levels encourage skepticism of alleged experts. Life and years of reading MAD taught me to question authority…but some people get so paranoid that "the world is always lying to me" that they presume that if something sounds official, that alone proves it's wrong. If putative experts say "don't drink bleach," they want to run out and chug-a-lug a half-gallon of Clorox.

On the matter of vaccinations these days, I keep reading anti-vaxxers say, "Do your own research!" Do your own research where? On the Internet, where even they agree a large percentage of the alleged "information" is dead wrong?

Organizations like the F.D.A. and C.D.C. are spending zillions to test out vaccines and they employ folks who've spent decades studying this kind of thing. Maybe I should ignore that, haul out my old Gilbert Chemistry Set from when I was eight, get a sample somewhere of the Pfizer vaccine and run my own tests.

Or it just might be easier to listen to my own doctor. Or to be more specific, my general physician, my proctologist, my gastroenterologist, my dentist, my orthopedist, my urologist — I went through this list in an earlier post — my orthopedist, etc., and just take the vaccine they all recommend…which, of course, I already did.

The new Groo Website is live! Or at least, it's off to a start! There will be more goodies there in the months to come but there's plenty already there for you to enjoy…including a place where you can sign up to keep abreast of all the latest Groo News. What more do you need out of life?

I was thinking of writing a post about how the low (undoubtedly) ratings for the coming Emmy Telecast have a very simple, obvious reason. But I don't have to write that article because my buddy Paul Harris did.

A few weeks ago, I changed the header picture on this blog from the one of me masked and wearing gloves back to the one of me sitting happily at my computer, working away with an unmasked face. I also stopped titling posts "Dispatches From the Fortress of Semi-Solitude." In light of the new resurgence of the Delta variant, I decided to go back to semi-isolation mode. So it's Day 496 here.

If they hadn't called it off, Day 500 of my avoidance of possible COVID contacts would have been the Friday of this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. I recall that when they announced the con would be online instead of in-person, a lot of folks thought this was caution taken to a needless excess…and maybe it was. But it seems somewhat wiser today when the headline on this morning's Los Angeles Times is "L.A. County coronavirus spike hits alarming levels."

One hopes the reinstituted precautions are not as necessary as some say…especially if One understands that if the worst doesn't happen, that doesn't mean you were wrong to take precautionary steps. If the weather forecasting people say there's a 60% chance of rain and it doesn't rain, that doesn't mean you were foolish (or deceived) to take an umbrella.

I dunno what the chances are of us vaccinated folks getting this Delta strain — I'd imagine they're pretty low — but maybe we need to roll back that feeling of "it's over" a notch or two.

It's not so much that we're afraid of getting it. It's just that we want it to be over for everyone.

It's John Oliver again, this time with no mention of octopuses. But I'll bet you can guess what his topic is this week…

This essay/rant is about instances of commerce wherein you receive goods and/or services. I shall divide them into two groups…

Type 1 is when you merely order something and you receive it with no human interaction. I click what I have to click to get Amazon to send me a book or a piece of electronics equipment or a life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn and soon after, the book or the piece of electronics equipment or the life-size bronze statue of Gene shows up on my front porch…or doesn't.

Type 2 involves some discernible action by a representative of the company with whom I speak or whose name is given to me so I know who is doing whatever they're doing for me. Here are some examples of what I am calling Type 2 cases…

• I have to talk to someone at my cable company about why I am not getting all the channels for which I pay.
• I have to have someone from the cable company come to my home to fix the problem that the person at the cable company could not fix from there.
• A service like Grubhub or DoorDash sends someone to a restaurant to pick up an order and bring it to me.
• I go into a store and a person there waits on me or rings up my purchases.

…and you can probably imagine other examples but you can see the difference. Yes, someone in a Type 1 transaction fills my order and wraps up the statue of Gene but I don't see that person, I don't talk with that person, I don't know where that person is or who they are, etc.

These days, almost every time I have a Type 2 transaction, I get a little e-mail, often with the subject line "Tell Us How We Did," asking me to rate my experience.  But that's not really what they ask me to rate.  I'm usually being asked to rate the one person I dealt with, who is usually the last person in the whole process and often, the least important.

And in many cases, I suspect, the one being paid the least and/or the easiest one for the company to replace.

Example: The other day, I ordered some supper from a meal delivery service…and a neat thing about many of these services is that you can monitor the process on an app or your home computer screen.  I got the notice that the restaurant was starting to prepare my order.  Then I got the notice that the kid making minimum wage delivering for them was en route to the restaurant.  Then I could look online and see that he was waiting there for my order…and waiting and waiting…

The initial notice that my order was accepted said it would be here between 7:10 and 7:20.  But at 7:20, the kid was, according to the app, still waiting at the restaurant for it.  He got it at 7:25 and I received it at 7:45, which meant he came directly here as swiftly as the speed limits would allow.  Then the company sent me one of those "Tell Us How We Did" e-mails and asked me to rate only the kid.

There was no spot to complain about their app, which I found a bit confusing…no place to rate the quality of the food, which you'd think might matter somehow to someone…no place to write, "The order was 25 to 35 minutes late but that might have been the fault of the restaurant, not the delivery kid."  It could even have been the fault of the software or hardware involved in conveying my order to the restaurant.

But they were just asking me to rate the kid.  Maybe I'm assuming too much but I figure anyone doing this kind of work needs the money and there isn't much of it even with us generous tippers. They probably all have lot of things they'd rather be doing for a living but they can't get that work, maybe because of The Pandemic…

I don't want someone to say, "That's the fifth complaint about an order handled by this delivery kid.  Cut him loose!"?

I don't want to fault the delivery person when it's not his or her fault. I do sometimes want to fault the company that employs them. When I call my cable company with a problem — as I have to do, way too often — the "Tell Us How We're Doing" questionnaire I receive after we're done gives me no place to complain about the long hold time, no place to complain about my calls dropping, no place to complain about how often I find myself calling to complain. All they want to know is how was the person I spoke to? Were they polite? They're always polite.

Did they solve my problem? Often, the correct answer to that would be "No, the problem is with your equipment and even though they knew what they were doing, it wasn't within their power to fix!!!" But there's nowhere I can enter that. I have to rate the person I spoke to on a scale of 1 to 5…and that's it. I wish some company would ask me to evaluate their evaluation system. To start with, how do I explain I never got my life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn?

Has anyone ever told you you're funny? Well, maybe this is your chance to step up to big pay with the help of Albert Brooks' Famous School for Comedians…

As someone who used to go to Las Vegas often, I'm curious about what it's like these days when The Pandemic is over as far as some are concerned, no matter what some experts say. I have no plans to go and find out for myself and after reading T.M. Shine's report on Las Vegas, I'm more confused than ever.

In the meantime: The White House COVID team put out a list of "Select High-Burden Core-Based Statistical Areas" and Vegas was numero uno as "the nation's worst metro area with more than one million people for transmission of the coronavirus." The Las Vegas Advisor reports: "Masks are now recommended, though not mandated, for everyone in Las Vegas and several casinos, including the Venetian and Westgate, are now requiring all employees to wear masks again."

Jordan Klepper with another segment on guns…

A number of folks on Facebook and Twitter were featuring the above sign today. It strikes me as one of the few arguments I've seen that might actually prompt a few anti-vaxxers to go get the jab. A lot of them seem to have their political worldviews wrapped up in this issue. It's not so much that getting the shot or not getting the shot might affect whether or not you get a killer disease. It's that not getting the shot will certainly save the American way of life from Communist Takeover.

I am not exaggerating about some of these people. I think some of them are the same folks who insisted that legalizing Gay Marriage would completely destroy the entire institution of marriage within two years. It's now been thirteen years, two months and two days and I'm waiting.