This has been making the rounds of the 'net — a musical number from a 1968 Red Skelton Hour with a group called The Young Folks and Red's special guest that week, Liberace. It's exactly what Paul Simon had in mind and it perfectly captures the hippie generation.
I'm sure I posted this long ago before everybody did but it seems to have somehow disappeared from this site and folks keep suggesting I post it. So here it is…
This runs a little over twenty minutes but if you're interested in how magic tricks fool you, it'll probably be worth the time. The magician is one of my favorites, Daniel Roy, and a lot of what he talks about in this video is what got me interested in magic in the first place. Let him take you through Ten Levels of Deception and explain to you how you got there…
This ran here back on June 17, 2013…
As I've mentioned here the other day, my father had this horrible, horrible job at the Internal Revenue Service. If another kid at school pulled the old "My dad can beat up your dad" line, I'd fire back with "Oh, yeah? Well, my dad can audit your dad!"
But that was a hollow threat as mine was not an accountant. Matter of fact, he really didn't know how to make out tax forms any better than most people. Friends and family members would ask him to do their 1040s for them and rather than say no — he hated to say no to anyone about anything — he'd take them on and then my mother would sit down with the manual and figure out how to fill in the forms. She sort of enjoyed it because then she got to see how much money everyone made.
My father's position with the I.R.S. was as follows: If you hadn't paid your taxes in, oh, more than five years…or if an auditor had ruled that you owed more taxes and you hadn't coughed up yet…you'd receive a visit from my father. So he went through life with a lot of people hating to see him and then taking their anger (often, self-anger) out on him.
His usual mission was to negotiate some sort of payment plan with you…but he had no power to sign off on one. He'd go over your finances and suggest, "Well, can you pay thirty dollars a week?" That would be a huge hardship for you at that point but you'd grudgingly agree to do without lunch on weekends so you could pay the thirty. Then he'd go to his superior who'd look at the proposed plan and say, "No. Tell them it has to be fifty!" And he'd have to return to you with the bad news.
You can probably name more painful tasks than that…just nothing that would have caused my father more grief. He simply felt too sorry for people who were in financial trouble, especially if it wasn't their fault and if they had kids to feed. Few things made him more upset than a case where children were suffering because their parents were spending all their money on liquor or hookers or anything of the sort.
And one of those other few things began in 1969 when a man named Richard M. Nixon took office. During those years, the policy in his office — dictated from on high — was to sock it to lower-income folks and to let the rich ones, especially Republican donors, off lightly. He'd come home some days and say, "Another poor person has to pay more so that one of Nixon's multi-millionaire friends can pay nothing." One time, I heard him yelling in the living room and rushed out to see what he was yelling about.
The news was showing a party that the then-president had thrown at his "Western White House" in San Clemente. It was Nixon surrounded by many of his friends and my father was pointing at certain of those friends and saying, "I had a case on that one and that one and that one…" Some of this came out in the Watergate Hearings and it made him very happy. A few years ago, I met John Dean, the Nixon lawyer who'd spilled most of the beans, and I thanked him for doing that. On behalf of my late father.
My male parent was supposed to keep his cases confidential, even from his family, but I occasionally heard about one. He had a case — a very long, ugly case — against a man who was prominent in the animation business. It dragged on for a few years with my father playing Inspector Javert to the animator's Jean Valjean but it was finally settled and I think the fellow lost his house in the process. Two decades later at a cartoon festival, June Foray introduced me to the animator and he stared at me for a long second.
"Evanier…" he muttered, trying to remember. "I knew someone once with that name…"
"Oh, it's a very common name," I quickly told him. "I run into ten or twenty Evaniers a day." (I think there are less than twenty in the entire country…) He never did place it.
There were other cases on famous people, including a prominent TV right-winger who scolded liberals for not loving their country enough. My father seriously pondered ways to "leak" to the press how though this fellow may have loved America, he was doing everything possible to never pay it a dime. Ultimately though, Bernard Evanier was incapable of doing anything illegal or unethical…and to be honest, a little afraid of losing the only job he thought he could do or get.
My favorite case of his that I knew about involved a rather shoddy (but beloved by many) amusement facility out in Santa Monica called Pacific Ocean Park. It was in operation out there from 1958 to 1967. What happened in 1967? My father closed it down.
Or rather, he helped close it down. The owners owed the government millions. The place was falling apart and a lot of the rides were still operating even though the departments that monitor such things said they were on the verge of being declared unsafe. Making the necessary repairs would have cost more than P.O.P. could be expected to gross over the next few years. My father attempted to negotiate a deal where the owners would be able to remodel the park and bring its attractions up to code, make a profit and then pay their back taxes…but the math simply wouldn't work. When it all fell apart, the word came from above: Shut 'er down! And one morning, a veritable S.W.A.T. team of taxmen did just that.
My father had to get up at 5:30 AM to be there at seven when they moved in. Every entrance had to be padlocked and posted with a notice that the owners would face felony charges if they touched the locks or attempted to gain entrance. That was the easy part. The tough one was that everything in the park had to be inventoried and all the perishable goods (ice cream, hot dogs, etc.) had to be removed from the premises. He came home that night around 10 PM, dead tired but proclaiming proudly, "We did it."
Before he collapsed into bed, he watched the 11:00 local news where the shutdown was the lead story. In it, he heard people denouncing the "Gestapo tactics" of the I.R.S. agents who'd taken away their beloved playground…and there he was on the screen, being likened to Nazis for doing his job, trying to collect what was owed. It was not one of my father's happier evenings.
He hated being thought of a villain by anyone. He knew it came with the job and he understood why people despised the Internal Revenue Service. He said, "I hate paying my bills too but I do it." A few days later, he sat me down for a father-to-offspring chat in which he repeated something he'd said to me on several previous occasions: "Do whatever you want with your life, son. Just make sure you can make a living at it and you love it."
I'd already told him that I intended to be a professional writer…a goal I set around age six and never really considered changing. I sometimes changed my mind about what I'd be a professional writer of and there was a point in there when I wanted to be a writer-cartoonist — though never a cartoonist without the writer part. But I couldn't conceive of a future in which I wasn't a writer. I still can't.
A few years after that particular talk with him, I graduated high school and got serious about pursuing my long-planned profession. I got lucky right away. My first week trying in earnest, I made about three times as much money as my father was then making per week. But it took a while before I convinced him that I could really do it on a regular basis.
I'm dealing with a whole mess o' things this weekend, none of which would be of the slightest interest to you. I'll put up some video links because I have those backlogged and I may post a rerun or two…but you may not see much from me here 'til Monday or thereabouts. Every so often, we need to focus our attentions where they need to be. As always, we will make it up to you when we can make it up to you…
…and that's about all the writing time I can devote to this blog right now. Stay dry and if you're at WonderCon, consider yourself envied by me.
And here's Part 2 of Mike Peters talking with Chuck Jones on The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters back in '85…
A lot of people who are ranting about "illegal aliens" in this country need someone to explain to them that that term does not apply to anyone who was born somewhere else and lives here now. It applies to some of them but not all.
WonderCon is convening in Anaheim even as I type this. I keep getting e-mails asking where and when Sergio Aragonés and/or I will be signing stuff there and the answer is that neither of us are attending this year. I'm still nursing my shattered ankle back towards normal but I'm determined to make it to Comic-Con in San Diego this July. I don't know about Sergio for that one yet. But there will be plenty of great folks at WonderCon this weekend to meet amidst all the great things to see and do and buy. Go find my pal Tony Isabella and get him to sign something.
I always tell people that before you go to a con, check its website for the programming schedule and make notes on what you want to see. Well, I went to the WonderCon website and if there's a schedule there, I sure couldn't find it. But there is one on the Comic-Con app if you install it on your cell phone.
It'll be raining much of this weekend and I have no idea what that will mean for attendance. It will impact one of my favorite features of the con…the gathering area outside the convention center where cosplayers cosplay and pose. I assume it will be moved indoors…somewhere. If you attend, find out where those folks are and go see them. There are always some amazing costumes. And if you can't make it this year, mark your calendar for WonderCon 2025 — Friday March 28 to Sunday, March 30. I'll sure try to be there.
The Tropicana Hotel in Las Vegas is closing next Monday and Tuesday. At some yet-to-be-determined date, the whole mega-resort will be imploded and by some (apparently) still-being-negotiated deal, a baseball stadium will be erected on the land. If it sounds like someone is gambling a bit with the property…well, that's what they do in Vegas. They gamble.
And it isn't much of one because if they didn't tear down the casino, it would probably fall down on its own before long. Once the management of a hotel-casino starts talking about replacing it with something else, they start neglecting its upkeep and it just gets shabbier and less appealing to patrons. They've been talking about dropping the Trop for years.
I haven't set foot in the place for about twenty years but I have a few nice memories of one big Blackjack win there and of hanging out backstage at the Folies Bergere show, which was more interesting back there than it was out front. It's only a loss in the sense that it's another symbol of Old Vegas that's slipping away from us. Everything's getting so corporate and upscale and (most of all) expensive.
If you wanna take a look at how the Tropicana used to be, there's a nice history of it at this link. I'm not going to miss it but I'm already missing what Vegas used to be.
That's the most recent Fox News Poll about abortion and lately, most of them yield similar results. I'm posting it not to get into an argument about the procedure or the morality or who controls whose bodies or When Life Begins or any of that. I just want to wonder aloud about something. 59% of respondents think abortion should be available all or most of the time and an additional 32% say it should be available for certain situations.
Given what laws are being passed in this country and which ones are being promised or proposed to stop abortions, aren't you amazed that the percentage of people who want it banned everywhere is in single digits? That 7% seems to be commanding around 77% of the news coverage and just about the entire Republican party. I see people on my TV all the time talking about abortion and the ones who are against it always seem to want every single bit of it illegal — no exceptions for any reason. They're even going after things like in vitro fertilization because it seems to have a vague connection to abortion. (You get the feeling the people who wanted to ban it didn't really know what it was or how it works?)
It's like that with too many debates on television…and extreme views may make for Good Television but I think they warp the real debates. When John Oliver started Last Week Tonight several years ago, one of his first segments made this point about the debates over Climate Change. I thought this was brilliant. Go ahead. Watch it. It's only four and a half minutes…
Mr. Oliver could recycle that same script making it about almost any issue of the day that anyone is prone to shout about. Too many of them are presented as if the matter is 50/50 when it's not. The abortion issue certainly isn't.
This is, sadly, an obit for Bob Beerbohm, who was an important player in the rise of underground comix, comic book shops and conventions. In fact, he was a fixture at San Diego conventions long before they were called Comic-Con Internationals. For the last decade or three, he had been obsessive about researching the history of comics and comic shops and writing an exhaustive history of both.
Bob was 71 years old and the cause of death was cancer…one of many problems he'd been battling for years. Every time we spoke, he ticked off a long, long list of ailments so I don't think any of his friends are shocked by the news…saddened but not shocked.
Bob and I were friends though I did not endorse all of his writings on comic book history and in fact disagreed with a lot of it. Some of you on Facebook forums witnessed some of our back-and-forth and I may write about it here in the future…or I may not.
Right now, I just want to remember the guy as someone who was very passionate about comic books and the people who create them…and who was, like I said, very important in fandom and the marketplace. Despite our occasional disagreements, I have definitely lost a good friend and so has our field.
Back in 1985 or so, my pal Mike Peters — the Pulitzer-winning editorial cartoonist who is also behind the comic strip, Mother Goose & Grimm — hosted a PBS series called The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters. On it, he interviewed great cartoonists like…well, here's Part 1 of a two-part interview with Chuck Jones. You'll get Part 2 here tomorrow…
Among the many disparate topics we've covered on this blog is — or rather was a chain of soup/salad buffets called, in some climes, Souplantation. In other cities, they were called Sweet Tomatoes and by either name, they were places where you could stuff yourself with soup, salad, baked potatoes, baked goods and a limited selection of desserts. I liked them a lot and was sad when the chain folded, an early casualty of The Pandemic in 2020.
As we noted here, someone recently announced a clone opening in Tucson. And now — much closer, in Rancho Cucamonga, California — another clone has opened. It's called Soup 'n Fresh, it's in a building that used to be a Souplantation and no, I haven't been there. With my busted ankle still healing, I ain't been much of anywhere and besides, Rancho Cucamonga is 54 miles from where I live. But this review says the place is pretty good and that it has long lines…so I have a hunch someone will open more of them.
Then again, I thought that about Love's Barbecue restaurants after they closed the last one in 2017 and I'm still waiting.
Near the end of the first Die Hard movie SPOILER ALERT! , the evil Hans Gruber — played in a reptilian manner by Alan Rickman — is dropped backwards off a high-up story of the Nakatomi Plaza to certain death. It's one of the more satisfying ways of disposing of the Bad Guy in any movie I've ever seen. The audience in the theater when I saw it couldn't have been happier. After hours of hating that loathsome, murdering asshole, he was finally being killed in a spectacular manner. In slow-motion, no less.
I suspect some of them ran out and bought the DVD just so they could replay that moment over and over and over. It's one of the reasons we go to that kind of movie. We all have Bad Guys in our lives and while they're often punished or even somehow eradicated, it usually isn't in such a total and gratifying moment.
In my lifetime (72 years plus change), I have often — not always — seen my Bad Guys eliminated or punished or even in at least one instance, killed…but it's never as immediate or simple or even as satisfying as seeing Alan Rickman realizing his plan has been foiled and he's plunging to his death. If you're expecting a Bad Guy of yours to meet a similar fate in the real world, you'll probably be disappointed. Some of my Bad Guys took a long time to plunge and probably never realized what they'd done and how they were paying for it. But they did go away. I have had to learn to be content with that.
In case you're wondering about my Bad Guy who got killed: He was a roofer who worked on my house a few decades back, charged me a lot of money and ultimately did more damage than repairs. He refused to correct his destruction, leaving me no recourse but to sue him…but it turned out that wasn't an option either. My lawyer reported back that I'd have to wait at the end of a very long line of other clients who were suing this Very Bad Guy.
And even the folks in that line never got a nickel out of him. One night, that roofer got drunk, tried to kill his wife and the police shot and killed him. I was not there to see it. I hope that if I had been, I would not have enjoyed the moment because I wouldn't want to be the kind of person who would have enjoyed that moment.
But like you, there are people around — mostly in public life but a few in private — who I'd just like to see disappear. I don't long to see them shot or injured or even dropped backwards off the Nakatomi Plaza because that's barbaric and anyway, that's probably not going to happen. But I think there's a good chance of them going away and no longer doing whatever damage I think they do to the world and the people in it or maybe just me. I'll be satisfied with that.
The Legal Eagle explains all about Trump's problems with bonds and payments and deadlines and all that jazz…
If Donald Trump is successful at selling Bibles, I'm going to try selling all the books that I've never read.