Monthly Archives: April 2004

For some reason — probably to confuse terrorists — if you book Alaska Airlines flight 1856 from Los Angeles to San Francisco, you are automatically booked instead on American Airlines flight 1928 from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Alaska Airlines has no actual flight 1856. It's all a sham to get you on American.

Anyway, I fell for it and flew this morn to that city we're all sick of hearing Tony Bennett leave his heart in. A funny taxi driver asked me if I knew why driving to and from the airport was the safest gig a cabbie could have. Lapsing momentarily into Steve Rossi mode, I said, "No, why is driving to and from the airport the safest gig a cabbie could have?"

He said, "Because your fares never pull a gun on you. If they're coming from the airport, their luggage has already been screened. And if they're going to the airport armed, they've got bigger things in mind for that gun." He seemed to think this was very funny so I gave him a big guffaw in lieu of tipping.

Checked into a hotel a few blocks from where the gala WonderCon (which I keep plugging here) is being held, then linked up with my pal-partner Sergio Aragonés. Sergio promptly kidnapped me and drove us to Santa Rosa and the Charles M. Schulz Museum, a beautiful structure that chronicles the life and art of a man who created a beautiful comic strip. If you have the slightest interest in Good Ol' Charlie Brown, you owe it to yourself to make a pilgrimage to this place, and don't just stop there. Go across the street and see the public skating rink that "Sparky" Schulz had built, then go see the huge Peanuts gift shop, which is crammed full of stuffed Snoopy dolls and lovely Lucy figurines. (There's also a lot of historical material in the gift shop.) Nice to meet Jean Schulz in person after knowing her only on the phone and by reputation. She is really doing a terrific job of managing the legacy.

Then we drove all over Northern California, walked around Sonoma and ate lobsters, then bought gas and came back to the hotel. I'm sitting here in my room, writing. Sergio is eleven stories below me in his room, drawing cartoons. It was a nice vacation while it lasted.

The greatest scientific breakthrough of our time is not fiber optics or cloning and it has nothing to do with stem cells. It's the Reach Access Daily Flosser. I bought one the other night and can't believe it's taken this long for someone to come up with a product that makes it easy…almost fun to floss your teeth and gums. Those little floss-picks are okay but they have short handles that come off one side so you're limited as to how you can angle them. The Reach Access Daily Flosser has a toothbrush-length handle and it's centered on the flossing-part which makes it much easier to manuever. I may give up writing and just sit here and floss all day. This website will tell you more about it and there's even a coupon there for a buck off, which isn't bad because this wonderful invention sells for around five dollars…and that includes 21 replacement heads. I'd tell you more about it but I have to go floss.

[VITAL UPDATE: Here's a link to sign up for a free Reach Access Daily Flosser sample pack. What more could a person want?]

Here's Fred Kaplan on what's going on in Fallujah. And here's Timothy Noah on a possible future for Iraq that would probably cause even more unrest than bringing Saddam back.

Here for your purchasing pleasure is an Amazon link to pre-order the forthcoming DVD set of Garfield and Friends, a cartoon show I wrote back in my younger days. (I never quite understood that phrase, "younger days." What you did yesterday was done on a "younger day"…but let's not spoil a shameless plug with logic.) This set, which will be out near the end of July, includes 24 half-hour episodes of the most enjoyable experience I ever had in television. I'd like to think it shows. The set includes but one measly extra — the trailer for the live-action/CGI movie — but why do you need extras when you have twelve hours of jokes about eating lasagna, kicking puppies off the table, sleeping and mailing cute kittens to Abu Dhabi? A second volume of 24 more shows is tentatively set for release in time for Christmas and I'll probably harangue you about ordering it, too.

Another great eBay bargain.

Deep sympathies to the co-creator of Green Lantern, Mart Nodell, on the death of his charming spouse, Carrie. The Nodells met in October of 1941 and were married less than two months later. (Carrie always said, "I was in the wedding shop, picking out my dress when I heard Pearl Harbor had been attacked.") They were inseparable thereafter and she aided him, in a non-drawing capacity, with his work as a comic book artist and later as a commercial illustrator. The last decade or so, Marty has been a warm and welcome presence at comic conventions and we all came to love Carrie, who was never far from his side.

[NOTE: If you haven't read the previous message, read it before you read this one.]

Okay, I'm back. A lady eventually comes on the line and informs me that my account is in arrears, I must pay within 48 hours, etc. I tell her I signed up for automatic payment. She says there is no such thing at SBC. "You have to go to the website every month and pay online," she tells me. I respond by reading her the following paragraph off the website…

Pay your telephone bill automatically by having the total amount of your bill charged to your credit card, or deducted from your checking or savings account at a bank, credit union, or savings and loan. Automatic bill payment eliminates overlooked bills and the deduction is automatic; there's no need to contact us each month. Your regularly scheduled bill will be automatically paid on the due date.

To this, the lady says, "Well, I don't know what it says on the website but payment is not automatic. You have to go to the website each month and enter the information so we can charge your credit card or checking account." We then hold a brief colloquy on the meaning of the word "automatic" and when she sticks to her ground, I demand to be passed to someone higher in rank at SBC.

I'll cut to the chase here: Finally, I reach a gent who figures out the problem. I had signed up for SBC's EBill plan which used to allow automatic payments but was changed two months ago so now it's like the lady said: You have to go to the site and manually enter the info to pay your bill online. He says they sent me a statement about this but if they did, I never saw it. SBC has also instituted two new automatic payment plans which they call SBC Direct Payment (for checking) and SBC EasyCharge (for credit cards). Why they didn't just e-mail me and ask if I wanted to switch over, I don't know. But the paragraph quoted above applies not to the EBill program but to the two new services. In some parts of their site, that is clear but on the page I was on, it is not.

The fellow on the phone was very nice. He said I'm not the only person who has been confused this way and he assured me that my credit rating with SBC would not suffer for the misunderstanding. He apologized in all the right places and said he'd inform the folks upstairs that something has to be fixed here.

The whole thing took well over an hour. Ah…online bill payment is such a time saver.

So a little while ago, I get this real insulting phone call from a human being (I'm being charitable) who works for SBC, which is my phone provider. He says my phone bill is overdue and if I don't make payment in 48 hours, my phones will be shut off and I will have to pay all sorts of deposits and penalty fees along with my bill to get them turned on again. I inform the gent that I signed up for SBC's online bill collection service, whereby the total amount of the bill is deducted directly from my checking account each month. If the bill hasn't been paid, I tell him, it's their fault, not mine. The man is very persistent and he keeps saying, "Well, no matter whose fault it is, the bill must be paid in two days." I get the feeling he is on some sort of quota with his employer. No matter what the circumstances, if he doesn't collect promptly on X% of all the matters assigned to him, he gets demoted or fired or something. At least, that's my impression.

He says that I must either arrange for payment with him right now via credit card or talk to their Business Office. I elect to talk to their Business Office and he gives me its 800 number.

I call the Business Office and follow the voice prompts that are supposed to get me to the person with whom I can discuss this situation. This immediately routes my call to something they call QuickService, which is a computerized payment process that asks me to enter my credit card number so my outstanding balance can be charged to the card. There are no other options, no way by which I can talk to a human being.

I hang up, call back and listen once again to the voice prompts, figuring there must be something I can select that will steer my call to a person. No matter what I push, I am dragged back to QuickService and a cheery voice demanding I enter my credit card number so that my bill can be paid in full immediately.

I again hang up and go to the SBC website. There I find dozens of different places where they inform me how to contact them if I have a question or problem with my bill. Unfortunately, they all give me that same 800 number.

I call the 800 number again and this time, I do not follow the voice prompts. I do not enter the information for which I am asked when it is requested. No matter what I'm asked for, I hit "0" for Operator. Amazingly, this enables me to escape the dead end of QuickService. I am finally steered to a voice that tells me all of their service representatives are busy and if I will stay on the line, my call will be answered in the order received. Oh, yes — and they tell me my call is important to them, which is darned flattering. So I wait on hold for…well, I'm not sure how long it is but the above was written during the period I've been waiting so far.

Hold on. It sounds like a person is coming on line. I'll be back to you in a bit.

According to this, it's just going to be Ted Koppel showing photos of men and women killed in recent combat and giving their names.

Immediately after, Jimmy Kimmel welcomes actress Rebecca Romijn-Stamos, rap artist/TV host Xzibit "Pimp My Ride" and musical guests Flaming Lips.

Good programming flow.

As readers of this site know, my current favorite "new" standup comedian is Lewis Black. Comedy Central has two old half-hour shows in which he performs monologue material and they're running them this Friday night. If I understand the schedule correctly, they're running one at 8:30 PM. Then they run the other at 10:00, followed by the first one again at 10:30. Subtract three hours from those times for Pacific. Anyway, taping or TiVoing for an hour beginning at 10 PM (7 PM, Pacific) should get both of them. They're not as good as seeing him live but they'll give you an idea of what you'd experience if you did.

Black is currently on tour, as itemized over at his website [WARNING: Overly-fancy graphics that make it difficult to read]. He also has a major HBO Special that debuts May 15 which I expect to like a lot.

The recent continuity in Doonesbury regarding B.D.'s war injury eclipsed a dramatic plot twist in another newspaper strip. Gasoline Alley has been around since 1918 when Frank King created it. King and a couple of assistants did it until 1956 when it was taken over by Dick Moores, who many feel made it into an even better feature. Since 1986, Jim Scancarelli has been the guy in charge of what is still, in some circles, a much-loved strip about a much-loved family.

One of the innovative things about Gasoline Alley was that King allowed his players to age more or less normally and for the focus of the strip to shift as different things happened in their lives. Initially, Walt Wallet was more or less the star of the strip and in 1921, Walt found a baby on his doorstep. That baby, who was named Skeezix, actually grew up in the strip in something close to real time and eventually became the main character. Ol' Walt Wallet aged at roughly the same rate though Dick Moores found it necessary to slow down and even stop the process. Scancarelli has somewhat restarted the clock.

In the current storyline, death has finally come to one (maybe two) of the strip's oldest characters. I am not being evasive. Scancarelli is deliberately writing it so you're not sure who Skeezix and the others are grieving over. It appears to be Uncle Walt Wallet, but the dialogue and art are ambiguous. Some readers think it's his wife Phyllis while others think they've both passed away. This is actually being debated on many message boards at the moment.

I don't have a guess, but it seems like a very intriguing, well-planned storyline. At least, it prompted me to go back and read the last few months of Gasoline Alley, which I enjoyed quite a bit. The current strip can be read at this website and there's an Archive feature there which will enable you to go back a few weeks and then read forward in sequence. If you have a little time, go back to the 2/23/04 strip and read two months of strips that will take you up to today. If you're in a hurry, start with 4/5/04.

According to this article, TiVo is getting crowded out of the marketplace it pioneered. I intend to be loyal to mine no matter how many episodes of The Man Show it insists on recording against my wishes.

Here's a CBS press release that feels like it should be quoted on this site…

Dick Van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, Carl Reiner and Rose Marie reunite for The Dick Van Dyke Show Revisited, a new television special to be broadcast Tuesday, May 11 (9:00-10:00 PM ET/PT) on the CBS Television Network. Other original series cast members Larry Mathews (Richie Petrie), Ann Morgan Guilbert (Millie Helper) and guest stars Jerry Van Dyke (Stacey Petrie) and Bill Idelson (Herman Glimcher) also return for a new episode of the series set in 2004. The special catches up with Rob and Laura Petrie, in the present day, 40 years after the series was originally broadcast. Ray Romano (Everybody Loves Raymond) hosts the 159th episode. In the new episode, writers Rob and Sally each receive a phone call from Alan Brady with a strange request: Alan, who admires the eulogies that the pair wrote for Buddy and Millie's late husband's funerals, wants them to write his eulogy before he dies. He rationalizes the request by telling them that he wants to know what they will say about him and he also wants the chance to do a rewrite. To induce them, he offers to pay a very large fee for the dubious job. Rob and Sally are uncertain that they can actually complete the assignment given their real feelings about Alan, but they reluctantly agree to try…for the money! Classic clips from the original series will also be seen.

Hey, here's a coincidence: While I was formatting the above, I was interrupted by an occasional performer on The Dick Van Dyke Show…Lennie Weinrib, who was in three episodes. (He was the accountant friend of Buddy's who made Rob dismantle his phone and "scream like a chicken." He was the comedian who got injured at the lodge so Rob and a pal had to fill in for him by doing their Laurel and Hardy impression. And he was the insult comic who replaced Buddy and hammered Mel Cooley so thoroughly that he agreed to re-hire Buddy.) Lennie's living down in Chile now and seems very happy.

[UPDATE at 6:39 PM: Fixed a great typo that said Lennie was living in Chili. Sounds messy.]

The first DVD release of Little Shop of Horrors (the musical version starring Rick Moranis) contained the alternate ending that was filmed but not used in the movie. Does anyone reading this have a copy they're willing to part with?