Monthly Archives: October 2006

Fred Kaplan on Hillary Clinton's "major policy address" about Iraq and other foreign affairs. Quick summary: She gave a shallow speech full of easy, obvious generalities — the kind of thing with which few could argue. But at the moment, that still puts her in opposition to the policies of the Bush administration.

You may have heard that Rush Limbaugh apologized for some of his remarks about Michael J. Fox. As Eric Boehlert notes, you heard wrong.

…and may I just remind you how much I don't like this holiday? I especially don't like candy corn…but then no one does. (Every time I post that simple fact of life, some pathological liar writes me and says, "Oh, I love candy corn! I can't get enough of it!" These are the same people who say, "Hit me again with that tire iron, Martha! My eyes are not sufficiently blackened!")

If you have children, do them a favor. Do not encourage them to dress up tonight as something they are not and to go around and beg strangers for things that they will then put in their mouths. Do not try to traumatize them with scary imagery, especially that which depicts human beings as seriously maimed or bleeding. Above all, do not sneak up behind them or anyone and yell, "BOO!," thinking they will enjoy the jolt. And of course, it goes without saying: No candy corn.

Stupid holiday.

It is now possible to watch complete episodes of The Daily Show With Jon Stewart on the Comedy Central website. The site itself is difficult to navigate and full of way too many pop-ups and clips that run without being asked but this link may just get you to a page where you can click and watch last night's show, carved neatly into four segments.

The other day here, we told you of the wonders of the "Stomp 'n' Chomp" promotion at the L.A. City Zoo this past weekend. You know how much we love baby pandas? Well, hippopotamuses eating pumpkins aren't quite as cute as baby pandas — nothing is — but they're darn close.

They had a "Stomp 'n' Chomp" at the San Francisco Zoo the other day also, and we have a short film that was made to preview it. It's not anywhere near as exciting as the Pumpkin Orgy that we attended. Matter of fact, the hippo in it is apparently on a lo-pumpkin diet because he doesn't eat ten or twenty of them and he only kind of picks at his food. But the film does have a pumpkin in it and it does have a hippopotamus in it and beyond that, you'll just have to trust me that a real Hippo Pumpkin Feast is a lot of fun to watch. Consider this the briefest taste…

Do I look slower than usual? I should. I'm on a dial-up connection at the moment. My high-speed Internet connection — which used to come from Comcast and now comes from Time-Warner, like that's supposed to be better or something — has taken a hike on me. Want to waste a half-hour of your life? Try calling Time-Warner Cable to perchance tell them your modem is out. You will, first of all, never get to talk to a human being. There are no human beings there. The company employs only robots and they're all on their breaks.

At some point, you will get a prompt that will say, "If your Internet connection is out, press 1." You will press the damn one, thinking that will get you closer to having your Internet connection repaired. It will not. Instead, you'll go on hold and you'll listen to annoying music and announcements that repeat and repeat. One set of announcements will tell you repeatedly, "Your call is important to us" and you, being the logical sort, will think, "…but apparently not important enough to hire anyone to answer your bloody phone." The other set of announcements will tell you that you can get solutions to various problems they describe by visiting their website. And you, still being logical, will think, "Uh, the reason I'm on hold is because I can't access the Internet."

Eventually, after you've been holding twenty or thirty minutes, the phone line will just hang up on you. That's when you'll be so disgusted that you'll find an old phone cord, rig up a dial-up connection, log in at the speed of an Albanian Rain Tortoise and post this message on your weblog.

At least, that's been my experience.

We've been talking here lately about what a great artist Jack Davis is. Let's have a look at some of his many movie posters, which we can do because comic book artist Al Gordon sent me this link. Ignore the several posters on the page which are by others but are wrongly identified as Davis. Just enjoy his work…and I'll bet you spot at least one you'd never seen before. I never saw that poster for The Impossible Years, even though I saw — and walked out on — the movie in a theater. They also have his poster for The Smallest Show on Earth, which Mr. Davis told me at that recent dinner was the first movie poster job he ever got.

You will notice that above, I selected two posters to illustrate this item — Jack Davis posters (actually done by Jack Davis) for It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and the Woody Allen film, Bananas. I picked these because I own the original paintings to these two, gloat gloat. I've recently been entertaining offers to sell the Bananas original but the chances of me parting with the Mad World painting are about the same as the chances of getting Charlton Heston's guns away from him.

As you know, I post at least one video link a day here. If you notice that any of the older ones don't connect any longer, drop me a note and let me know. I'll either correct them or remove them, thereby saving others the trouble of clicking on dead links. (This is just for embedded video links. A lot of older text links no longer connect to extant pages but I can't go mopping up all those.) Thank you.

Michael Kinsley on voting for the party over the person. An area he doesn't get into is that this has become of increasing importance because of the "winner take all" mentality that now pervades Congress and the White House. The party that wins now controls everything and freezes out the party that lost, even if they lost by a hair. It didn't used to be like that.

A few years ago, I was entranced by some footage I saw on a news show. It was on Halloween or maybe a day after. At some zoo, the management brought in a few truckloads of pumpkins and fed them to the animals, mostly notably the hippopotami. A man with a shovel was scooping up pumpkins and throwing them into the hippos' mouths the way you'd put coal in a furnace. And the hippos were chomping them down like mouthfuls of cheese puffs.

This past weekend, the Los Angeles Zoo had an event called the "Stomp 'n' Chomp," the premise being that at announced hours, certain animals would be treated to a pumpkin snack. The elephants, it was expected, would mostly step on them and/or kick them around like footballs before eating them. The bears would toss them around before dining. And the hippos…well, I knew what the hippos would do and I wanted to see them do it in person.

Through a connection, I arranged for us (my friend Carolyn and me) to get V.I.P. access to the festivities. We not only got to watch hippos gorge on pumpkins but we were taken into the pen to feed them the rest of their diet — Romaine lettuce and apples. Here's a picture I snapped of Carolyn's hand lobbing a head of greenery into the gaping maw of a hippopotamus named Otis. Or maybe this hippo is Maggie and the other one in the photo is Otis. Whichever one it was, it kept opening its mouth to almost a 90° angle, waiting like a trash compactor for us to throw more food in. We did…as long as the supply lasted.

We also got an amazing and impressive guided tour of the zoo's hospital where ill or injured animals are treated. The facility seemed spotless, modern and well-equipped to handle anything from a pachyderm to a pismire. (There's a room full of medicines that they call "the pharmacy." When we were taken in there, I joked that I could use some Prilosec. The "pharmacist" grinned and pointed to a crate of it on a shelf. Turns out, they give it to some animals with stomach problems.)

I was glad I saw the clinic because I've occasionally thought there was something wrong with zoos; that it was a shame for the animals not to be roaming free in their native habitats. I still think there's something to that, but I hadn't realized what excellent medical care they receive in a zoo like this one. A creature in the wild that breaks a leg might as well be dead. In the zoo, they get surgery and a splint…and of course, the zoo feeds them well and protects them from the elements and being eaten by other animals. That's not the whole story but it's obviously something to consider.

After that, we were driven over to the rhinoceros pit and taken in the back way. There, we got to pet Rhonda the Rhinoceros — amazing skin that could use a daily application of Neutrogena — and feed her chunks of melon. Here's a photo that I took of Rhonda from about three feet in front of her…

Later, we wandered around the zoo for as long as our feet could stand it. The Los Angeles Zoo is a very nice place with a friendly atmosphere and a nice selection of critters to look at. The place was a little crowded — it's their pre-Halloween weekend and it was crawling with kids. (Most of the boys were pirates or super-heroes. All of the girls were princesses.) But really, my only criticism was that the meal I got at a snack bar turned out to be largely inedible. The hippos ate a lot better than I did.

We only saw about a third of the place so we'll be heading back soon. It's one of those places that you take for granted: It's always there so you figure, "I can go next month." I'm sorry I put it off as long as I did because it really is quite a nice place to spend an afternoon. Especially if they let you feed the hippos.

Jack Kirby died in 1994. That's far enough back that we now have a whole generation of comic book readers who never had the opportunity to meet the man. If you went to a San Diego Con before that, you could usually have talked with Jack because he was totally accessible to anyone who wanted to talk to him. And if you didn't go to one of those conventions but you passed through Thousand Oaks, California, all you had to do was phone the Kirby home and you'd probably get an invite to drop by, and some of those visits could last well into dinner. He and his wife Roz were enormously gracious to anyone who was interested in his work…too gracious with some who abused the privilege. (There's an amazing interview with Roz — as yet unpublished — that someone conducted shortly after Jack passed away. In it, she let fly with some of the anger she'd developed towards some of the people who exploited Jack his last decade or so, under the guise of friendship or partnership.)

Anyway, there are now a lot of people around who are interested in comics who never talked with Jack, which is a shame. Interviews were recorded with him but they don't give you a real sense of the man because Jack was terrible at being interviewed. Great at drawing and thinking up the wildest stories in the galaxy…bad at being interviewed. One of the reasons Stan Lee got so much of the attention for their collaborations is that Stan, by contrast, is a great interview — glib, funny, able to speak in sound bites, etc. Jack always got very serious and tense when a microphone was in front of him and especially when there was a video camera or an audience larger than about ten people. In everyday life, that magnificent brain of his was known to ramble from topic to topic, often with no visible segue, sometimes changing planets three times in a single sentence. When speaking before a crowd or into a microphone, however, he strained to focus and make logical, direct points…and since that was not the way he naturally thought, what came out was halting and humorless…and it usually wasn't logical or direct, either.

Still, that's all we have left of his actual voice and obviously, I'm mentioning all this because today's video is a short interview with Jack. It's from the 1987 documentary, Masters of Comic Book Art, and the gentleman you'll see introducing it is Harlan Ellison. The whole thing, with intro, only runs a little over five minutes. I don't think you get much of a sense of what Kirby was like…but I'm not sure any piece of film or video exists that does it any better. So take what you can get…

Any discomfort I felt at the Michael J. Fox political commercial for Claire McCaskill (as discussed here) has of course been displaced by the attempts, by Mr. Limbaugh and others, to smear the guy. This is how the game is played these days. When someone comes out and tells you something you don't want to hear, you have to argue that the viewpoint isn't real so it doesn't count. Claiming that Fox was acting or exaggerating his symptoms comes from the same mindset that insists, every time some military veteran denounces the war, that the guy really didn't serve with any honor so what he says really doesn't count.

My negative reaction to the ad was tempered a bit more when I read here — and I'm assuming this is so — that the spot came about because Fox himself heard McCaskill give a radio address regarding stem cell research. He then produced the commercial, sent it to her and asked her to use it if she felt so inclined. In any case, it doesn't look like he's being exploited in any way.

Several folks wrote in to say that my unease was surely due to not having seen Michael J. Fox like that before. Well, no. I've known people who suffered from Parkinson's and other conditions that produce similar symptoms…and I had seen Fox interviewed when his body seemed way out of his control. I forget where but I had. Others wrote that the tastelessness is because it's a raw appeal to emotion over intellect. That's true to some extent but it's also true of about 60% of all the political commercials out there.

I finally decided that what made me a bit squeamish when I first saw the ad was my sense of where it would lead. Obviously, Michael J. Fox would be attacked for it. Obviously too, if there was any sense that it might have gotten his candidate some votes — whether she won or not — there'd be similar ads, trotting out the ill and infirm to say, in effect, "Don't vote for Candidate X or I'll die." Given the low standard of "truthiness" in campaign ads these days, you could probably find a way to make that case against any incumbent.

The most interesting (to me) argument against the commercial is the one that deals with it not as political weaponry but as something that gives "false hope" to people with conditions like Fox's. This argument is advanced by people who believe that embryonic stem cell research is a scientific snipe hunt with little or no chance of ever yielding a cure for anything. I have no idea if this is true…or even if the research is anywhere near the point where that could be judged. However, I will note that folks like Limbaugh who say this often get hysterical when someone suggests shutting down the development of the "Star Wars" missile defense system in spite of a certain paucity of evidence that it will ever work. Still, it sounds like such a wonderful remedy for such a troubling problem that I think some people just don't want to turn loose of the comforting thought that a Miracle Cure may be possible. Let's hope that embryonic stem cell research never seems that hopeless.

George F. Will on what's going on in Iraq and how everyone seems to know it but Dick Cheney.

Continuing with our Film Festival of Flintstones commercials for Welch's products, here's Fred enjoying their grape jelly. Again, that's Alan Reed as Fred but the announcer is played by Art Gilmore, whose voice was heard on more commercials, radio shows, movie trailers and TV spots than any human who ever lived. This can't be the only time he ever voiced an animated character but I can't think of another.

I received the following from Len Wein, who co-created Wolverine and wrote the comic book he mentions below…and who, more importantly, owes me many lunches and his undying gratitude for my friendship. Len writes…

FYI, the Wolverine image on the stamp is from the splash page to Giant-Size X-Men #1. It's both penciled and inked by Dave, though the version on the stamp is probably from a bad stat. You can check out any of the 42 million reprints of said issue for verification if you'd like.

BTW, I own the original art from this page. Trust me, the original looks better.

Who cares? It's only a UNITED STATES POSTAGE STAMP. Why should they bother getting a clear image on it? For that matter, why should they not print their expensive hardcover reprints from eighth-generation stats? Really, I don't know why consumers (and the artists themselves) aren't more outraged at the bad reproduction we often get when anything is reprinted.

In the meantime, several folks have identified the source of the Iron Man portrait stamp. It's from Avengers West Coast #50, pencilled by John Byrne and inked by Mike Machlan. So I think we've now identified all of the art sources and there's one more name that should be mentioned.

I've also heard from people who've written to the website address of the United States Postal Service about this and have gotten back a form response. It tells them that if they believe a correction is necessary to a stamp, they should write (paper-style) to a certain address. That's fine but I think the burden of correcting these errors should lie with the Marvel people. You can't expect the U.S.P.S. to know the difference between John Buscema and Gene Colan but someone at Marvel should. There's some individual at that company who's in charge of working out the details of this arrangement with the postal people and that person needs to put things right.