For some odd reason, I like this video. It's a collection of moments from recent baseball games when a foul ball was caught by a ballboy or ballgirl. Some pretty impressive moves there.
The Senate — which doesn't seem like its members could all get together and agree on what day it is — just voted unanimously to make Daylight Saving Time permanent. No more springing ahead in the Spring, no more falling back in the Fall. If the House goes along with it and Biden signs it, how will it affect you?
It won't affect me. I work at home. I sleep when I want to, get up when I want to and rarely leave the house early in the morning when it will still be dark much of the year. But I have the feeling that when a parent has to be up before the sun is and get the kids off to school — and whoever goes off to work off to work — in what will feel like nighttime, it ain't going to seem like a change for the better.
And I just realized: If it passed the Senate unanimously, it'll probably pass the House with enough votes to override a presidential veto. Well, let's see if people who at the moment like the idea of it are pleased with the change once they get it home.
I'm kinda/sorta following certain controversies and matters in the news these days…trying to keep up on them without allowing them to occupy so much of my time and brain (two very limited resources) that I don't get other things done. One topic at which I am peeking is the co-called "Don't Say Gay" bill in Florida. Its backers insist it's just a simple, necessary prohibition of very small kids being protected from those who might groom them to be grow up to be gay or trans…or even tolerant of those who are. Or something.
There's a lot of arguing over what the bill says and what it would do. Mark Joseph Stern has an analysis that suggests it might not be as innocent as Florida governor (and aspiring G.O.P. nominee) Ron DeSantis insists.
Some of you who've seen me rave about my buddy Frank Ferrante's Groucho show but never had the chance to see it because, as he's criss-crossed this nation, he hasn't Grouchoed anywhere near you. Well, shortly he'll be no farther from you than your TV set and your local PBS station. We now have dates when many of those stations will be airing the newly-filmed special of his show.
I've seen this video and it does as fine a job of capturing his performance as any capture could. Like any good magic act, it's more remarkable in person but it's still pretty wonderful on TV. Here's the list and as you can see, it debuts in Los Angeles on April 1 on KLCS and KVCR, and on April 14 on KOCE.
And if you're in Southern California, you can see Frank perform it before your very eyes at the North Coast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach on May 2 and 3. I've seen him do it in that very venue and it's the perfect stage for him — not too big, not too small and located in the same shopping center as my favorite Japanese restaurant. He's doing it in other cities before and after that and the current list is right here. Even if you catch him on PBS, catch him in person if he Grouchos your way.
My post about how Groo migrated from Pacific Comics to Marvel's Epic line brought the following question from more than one reader. I went eenie-meenie-minie-moe and picked Al Blackman's e-mail to quote here…
OK, so Groo moved from Pacific to Marvel but in-between, there was a special issue from Eclipse Comics. How did that come about?
I'm glad you and all the others asked that, Al. Pacific Comics was in some amount of financial trouble and they weren't able to get all their books published. I forget if it was Steve Schanes or Bill Schanes but one of the Schaneses who owned the company called me and said they wouldn't be able to publish Groo bi-monthly for a while. And I forget if it was his idea or my idea but we decided to suspend doing the regular comic but to assemble a one-shot 48-page special that they could publish.
It was advertised in Groo the Wanderer #8, which we didn't know at the time would be the last issue that Pacific published. Then Sergio and I whipped up this special, we turned it in and it was sent off to Murphy Anderson and…
Murphy Anderson – Photo by me
"Murphy Anderson?" Comic book devotees are probably startled to see that name pop up in a historical note about Groo the Wanderer. Murphy Anderson was a fine comic book artist who worked for years for DC Comics on books like Hawkman and The Spectre and The Flash and The Atom and he drew a wonderful strip called "The Atomic Knights" that ran in Strange Adventures and he inked Curt Swan on Superman for many years…
…and he was a very nice man who, at that moment, wasn't doing much artwork for comic books. He had set up a company that was doing color separations for various publishers and I guess I need to explain what color separations are or were…
It's all done by computer now but a few decades ago, comic books were hand-separated, meaning that someone would prepare the book for printing via overlays. Murphy's crew would make a red plate which would indicate the areas on each page that should be solid red, the areas that should be a 50% red dot pattern, the areas needing a 25% red dot pattern, etc. They'd do this for each color for each page and then the printer would be able to print the comic on a four-color press.
No sooner had that call ended when I got one from Murphy checking to see if I'd heard and asking me, pretty please, if we took the Groo Special to some other publisher that we remember he had a full set of separations done for it. He was hoping they would be used and that he could be paid for them…certainly a reasonable request. Then I called whichever Schanes I'd just spoken with and said something like, "Hey, you want me to get that Groo Special and Murphy's bill off the list of things you have to worry about?" He said great, fine, thank you.
By this point, we'd made our deal to do Groo with Marvel so I called our editor there, Archie Goodwin, and asked if they wanted to publish the Groo Special along with the regular Groo comic that was soon to commence. He asked, "Why wouldn't we?" and I told him that I didn't think the content of the special made it a great introductory, jumping-on space for whatever new readers we'd pick up there. But if they wanted to publish it, it was theirs, providing they use Murphy's seps and pay him along with us. Archie said, "I'm not sure we can use his seps. Let me call you back."
He checked with whoever he checked with and called back to tell me the problem: Murphy had configured the color separations to the specifications of the printer that Pacific used. This was not the printer Marvel used. Theirs had different specifications and the seps Murphy had done weren't right for their presses.
Archie and I agreed I should find another place for it and I did. The company that printed Eclipse Comics was set up to use Murphy Anderson color separations and, in fact, already did. I called Dean Mullaney at Eclipse and he was more than happy to put out the Groo Special. And that led to him picking up a few other Pacific Comics that were left homeless and that's a long answer to a short question but, hey, you asked. (Well, some of you did…)
I'm convinced that at least once a week at the corporate offices of Trader Joe's, someone consults a computer, takes note of the items I like and purchase there and then immediately discontinues those items.
We haven't had baby pandas on this blog for a while but I can fix that. The Beauval Zoo in France has seven-month-old twins named Yuandudu and Huanlili. Let's see how they're doing…
If you logged into this site in the last hour or so, you may have seen strange things happening with its design. That was me trying to fix some software problems caused by the fact that I constructed this site a long, long time ago. If you've been working on a P.C. for a while, you probably have some program that worked like a dream under Windows 95 but doesn't work at all under Windows whatever-number-we're-on-now. Well, that's kinda what I'm experiencing.
I just spent some time talking with a very smart/helpful Tech Support gent at WPEngine, which hosts this site, and then I did some research and came to the conclusion that (a) I probably need a whole new construction and (b) I've got at least six months to get it built and installed before further tech advances make this one totally dysfunctional and unfixable. I'm also thinking (c) I have neither the time nor the knowledge to build the new one myself. So I'm going to start figuring out where to turn for that.
In the meantime, more strange things may happen here. Please forgive them. And if you tune in here some day and find unbridled praise for Donald Trump, Bill Cosby and cole slaw, that's when you'll know things are really broken here.
Happy 101 to the jocular Mr. Allan Jaffee, born March 13, 1921. Al started cartooning in 1942. He did his first job for MAD magazine in 1955 and he did his last job for MAD magazine in 2019. He also did a lot of work not for MAD, including vast quantities of comic books for Timely (now Marvel) Publications, the syndicated newspaper strip Tall Tales, and tons of advertising work and gag cartoons and book covers and I can't even begin to list it all. He's sticking around to prove once and for all, that not all the good die young. Some of them make it into their second century on this planet.
As some of you know, a wonderful lady named Carolyn Kelly was a huge part of my life for about twenty years…until 2017 when cancer took her away from me and all who loved her. She is still part of my life in some senses. Carolyn was lovely in every way in which a person can be lovely and in many ways that belonged only to her.
I inherited her belongings — crates of 'em, many housed in a Public Storage locker and unseen even by her for decades. A lot of what was in there was the work or possessions of her father, who was one of the best cartoonists who ever lived. Five years after her passing, I am still going through those crates, finding treasures of artistic or historical value. Everything of note will be shared in some way with the world, though it may take a while.
I also inherited her computer, which I gave to her in the first place, and I've been going through it when I have time, looking for materials relevant to the Pogo books which I now co-edit, reprinting her father's magnum opus. The other day, in a ZIP file I'd never opened, I came across a little essay that Carolyn wrote in 2002. The date on the file is 9/14/02, two weeks after the event she wrote about…a visit that three of us (Carolyn, my mother and Yours Truly) took to the home of my partner in Groo, Sergio Aragonés and his partner in life, Charlene.
I had never seen this before and I have no idea if Carolyn wrote it for any particular purpose. It may just be something she sent to a few close friends…I don't know. But I thought it was splendid and charming and I thought I would share it here with all of you. I have changed nothing about it except to fix one typo and insert the photo, which I took that day…
Sunday afternoon, the 1st of September, Mark and I are driving through the So. California heat wave up to Ojai, as Sergio has invited us up — he is making paella, it's very important to him that his dear friend Mark be his guest, and Sergio making paella is such an wonderfully rich bounteous aesthetic and rare event that it is not to be missed. Maybe a once-in-a-lifetime spectacular for us. So we are going.
It is still way over 100 degrees at 4:30 PM. We find the house in a winding lane, deeply shaded by live oak and redwoods. It's a shock to step out of the car — 72 degrees inside, 108 outside — but it's also amazingly pleasant! The air feels rare, dry, balmy.
Charlene greets us from the front of the house — she must have been awaiting our arrival. She leads us through the cool dark house, and we hear the desperate pleas of dogs who have been imprisoned to keep them from rampaging through the party.
We go out into the back, down a wide stone path alongside a winding many-leveled turquoise swimming pool that's edged with boulders, banks lined with overhanging succulents, cactus, blooming shrubs in huge terra cotta pots, hanging baskets of flowers and vines, low spreading plants — everything lush, rich, almost tropical. A grotto.
Now we are below the pool, where the rest of the company of ten is gathered around a large heavy old pine table under the broad overhanging roof of the shady outdoor kitchen with its great stone fireplace. The air softly carries smells of wood smoke, sage, olive oil and garlic.
Sergio, bare-chested, dressed in red swim-shorts, is the lovingly meticulous chef, and the paella is being cooked in a huge (nearly 3' wide) special paella pan that Sergio brought on his lap on the plane from Spain many years ago. It is stirred with the beautiful long-handled utensils that Sergio's mother used, and the wood fire beneath the pan is carefully tended in the way, Sergio tells us, he used to tend his mother's paella cooking fires as a child. He does everything with graceful competence.
The huge fireplace is made of gray boulders, a cow's skull hanging decoratively on the tall chimney. Before the comfortable guests is the shady man-made grotto, complete with waterfall that splashes into the swimming pool from a little cliff. Behind the kitchen, along the vine-draped fence at the property's edge, the bare ground is set with smooth-washed river stones. We look out over the fence at a vast panorama of rolling hills scattered with ancient walnut groves and live oaks, all backed with a mountain range, golden and lavender with the late afternoon sun and shadow. Charlene points out to us how her own profile is magically repeated in the forms of the distant ridge of the mountains.
On the table there are dozens of colorful Spanish and Mexican pottery bowls — all beautiful and all different — holding the paella ingredients waiting to be added to the pan, there are thick glass pitchers of sangria and margueritas, there are dishes of olives, platters of cheeses, plates of tomatoes and basil, baskets of breads, bowls of cucumber salad, garlic mayonnaise, salsa, dishes of salt, plates of grapes — all piled before us. The table isn't set — it is heaped. We sit around it on roughly-cut Mexican pine chairs in the remarkable dry air.
Photo by me.
And there is Sergio, laughing, jumping into the shady turquoise pool to cool off between bouts of attentive stirring at the fire — Mark informs us that this is the old custom of Rinsing the Chef — and there are the guests, delighted by silliness from Sergio and Mark, there are the bright-eyed and hopeful dogs, following every motion, there is Charlene Ryan, Sergio's beautiful freckled Irish-faced wife, who was an actress and dancer on Broadway and in many films, nearly six feet tall, blond, you may have seen her. In the twilight, Charlene lights torches along the pool's edge, and the flame casts warm light on her skin. And finally there is the paella itself, rose shrimp, golden rice, tawny chicken, pale artichokes, jade and coral green-lipped mussels — saffron, olives, fava beans, garlic, peppers — beautiful, exotic, smoky, delicious.
It is 108 degrees, but no one really minds — the air is lovely and the company is completely devoted to the relaxed but passionate enjoyment of the perfect balance of host and guest, of generosity, of bounty, of friendship and and of sensuous delights.
That's the entire piece but I've found (and am still finding) other little writings and drawings and artifacts that Carolyn left me. I'll share some more in the future. That's why I labelled this "Part 1."
Here from The Ed Sullivan Show is a number from the original production of My Fair Lady. Note the simple staging. If this show debuted today, the dancers would be doing moves that put Simone Biles to shame and all the men would lift all the women into the air — or vice-versa.
At the time, critics and audiences alike hailed this show as maybe the best musical ever presented on Broadway. Everything had to be jazzed up a bit for the recent revival…but here, with Julie Andrews and a great song, it just works so well…
We know how you feel about Bill Cosby, how do you feel about the recent accusations of abuse leveled at Jerry Lewis by several women who have came forward?
Longtime followers of this blog have seen me express a certain fascination about Jerry Lewis without thinking (a) he was that great a comedian or (b) that great a human being. I witnessed him being nasty to a lot of people…even somewhat to me when I first met him when I was seven years old.
I have no admissible evidence that he did what those women said he did but I sure don't have a hard time believing it. I think, like Cosby, he was a man who was capable of doing very, very good things but also very, very bad things…and the good things do not redeem him for the bad things or excuse them or anything of the sort.
At the core of the #metoo movement is the outrage that men of great wealth and power can get away with a lot of shit because…well, because they have great wealth and power. And because a lot of people around them benefit from that association so when they see impropriety, they look the other way and make like Sgt. Schultz on Hogan's Heroes muttering, "Nothing…I see nothing…" One of the more shocking reminders in that Cosby documentary was that even when the press was filled with women accusing Cosby of rape, NBC was still courting the man for a new sitcom.
So if you're asking me if I think the allegations against Lewis are true, my answer is "Yeah, probably." If I were on a jury, I might not vote to convict without a little more proof but I'm not on a jury. And if you're asking me if I can enjoy Jerry Lewis movies in light of these revelations, my answer is that I wasn't particularly enjoying Jerry Lewis movies before so this doesn't change much. What's changed is that my low opinion of the man has gotten lower. A few years ago on this blog, I wrote…
Look, I'll give him the "raised a ton of money" thing. The telethons were a Guilty Pleasure for so many of us. Other televised fund-raisers attract donations by offering genuine entertainment amidst the appeals for dough. Jerry offered ego excesses, self-pity, tirades against his critics, excessive praise of his friends — no wonder this guy loves Trump — and his oft-voiced worldview that people in Show Business are just plain better human beings than people who aren't in Show Business. Still, he did raise a lot of cash from those lesser human beings who aren't in Show Business and it did a lot of good.
But the other stuff….I'm sorry. "Oh, that's just Jerry being Jerry" doesn't work for me on any level. If Harry next door beats his wife and kicks his dog, you don't just say "Oh, that's just Harry being Harry." Jerry, like Trump, is proof that if you get famous enough, some people will let you get away with anything.
I wasn't particularly thinking of Lewis as an abuser of women when I wrote that. I was thinking of him being an abuser of a different kind. But it still fits.
Searching my hard disk the other day for an old file, I came across my download of a video from many years ago. I haven't seen this in a long time and I found myself enjoying it as much as I did way back when. Since there's still a copy of it on YouTube, I thought I'd embed it here in case you'd enjoy it as much as I did, then and now. It's a cleverly-illustrated version of William Shatner's classic recording of "Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds" — the one that made The Beatles all say, "Damn! Why didn't we do it that way?"
