Monthly Archives: August 2007

Timothy Noah reviews the O.J. Simpson If I Did It book…which I guess has now been retitled, If I Did It. It's a two-part review. Here's part one and here's part two. I agree with what Noah says about the text revealing Simpson as a very sick man with great anger towards his murdered spouse. I don't agree that the new character who's been introduced into the scenario — a friend named "Charlie" who helped Simpson commit the murders — is real.

I recently purchased one of these. It's the Sony DVPCX995V 400-Disc DVD Mega Changer/Player — a carousel that holds 400 DVDs. I have it in my office, all loaded with about 250 of my favorite movies and another 150 or so DVDs from my stack of ones I've had sitting here and never gotten around to watching. The machine is a bit slow and clunky but it does work. My plan is to keep taking out movies I will probably never re-watch and insert better films…to the point where I eventually have it all or mostly filled with fave flicks.

Here's one silly little problem I have. As you may know, a DVD of a movie sometimes has the name of the film encoded into it. Some players will read and display this encoded name, and my DVPCX995V builds a whole TiVo-like menu of them. I push a button on the remote and get a screen I can scroll through of all the movies in my player and then select the one I want to watch. In many cases — most, actually — there's no title encoded so I have to enter it manually. That's okay. My problem is that frequently, when there is a movie title encoded, I want to change it on the screen…and the Sony player won't let me. I have to live with their encoded name on my menu.

In some cases, it's not all that coherent. The name encoded on A Fish Called Wanda is "fisch_wanda." So that's what pops up on my menu and I can't change it. On Dr. No, the encoded title is blank…so a blank title appears on my menu and I can't change it. There are several encoded titles that misspell the name of the movie. Anyone have an idea how I can change this? Or how I can recode the DVDs to strip out that disc info? I have a hunch I'm outta luck on this.

Other than that, it seems like a great little machine. If you're thinking of getting one, wait a few weeks. I'll play with the one I got and let you know if I change my mind about it.

Isn't it interesting how everyone in the country except Larry Craig knew that he'd have to resign?

Time for a clip from some Milton Berle program or another. This one's four minutes and you can ignore the first minute or so, which is kinda lame. But then Arnold Stang enters. We love Arnold Stang. He was a great cartoon voice actor. He was Top Cat and Herman the Mouse and many others. He was a great character actor. He was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. And he's still with us. (I had the honor of directing him once on a cartoon show and he still sends me a Christmas card every year.) So let's watch Arnold.

Radio Master Paul Harris did a great interview yesterday with Noel Blanc, son of Mel. Meanwhile, Stu Shostak has a great interview up this week with Bill Marx, son of Harpo.

So you have your choice. You can listen to the son of the Man of a Thousand Voices or the son of the Man with None.

Matt Taibbi has written a long article about how military contractors are raking it in because of the Iraq War. Just in case you need something else to make you angry about this whole mess.

According to this story, Tribune Studios — more commonly known as "The KTLA lot" — is on the auction block. This is the former movie studio on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, bordered by Van Ness and Bronson. It was originally built by Warner Brothers in 1919 and they made most of their early pictures there, including The Jazz Singer starring Al Jolson. Leon Schlesinger's cartoon studio, the birthplace of Bugs Bunny and his amigos, was on that lot.

After Warners built a bigger lot in Burbank, the Hollywood lot was sold to Paramount, which housed its local TV station (KTLA, Channel 5) there and used some of the soundstages for filmed TV shows. (Gunsmoke shot there for a time.) Gene Autry purchased KTLA and the lot in 1964 and thereafter, it was a studio that housed a TV station but primarily rented space to other producers. I wrote a lot of shows for Sid and Marty Krofft that taped there. The first season of WKRP in Cincinnati was taped there. Dinah Shore did her talk show there. Hundreds of game shows taped there. Solid Gold taped there. Donny and Marie taped there. And so on. In 1985, Tribune Entertainment bought KTLA and a few years later, they bought the studio, too.

Someone in the above-linked article predicts that the new buyer, whoever it is, will upgrade the property and keep it functioning as a TV production facility. I'll be delightfully surprised if this happens but it feels like another of those "mixed-use" developments with some production facilities but also condos and retail outlets. In terms of history, I'd like to see it remain a big TV studio but geographically, it's probably more suited nowadays for a big mall anchored by a business not unlike Walmart. KTTV/Metromedia, which had a similar history and which used to be across the street, is no longer across the street. There's a new school building going up on that property…but the point is that the owners of that facility didn't try to keep TV production going there. I have no idea who'll buy KTLA but I'd bet they won't, either.

There's no shortage on the web today of articles and weblog postings about the stupidity, hypocrisy and general sickness of Larry Craig. But this piece by William Saletan makes a simple, pungent point. It's that Craig has been a fierce supporter of military policies that would cause a soldier to be kicked out of the service for doing what Craig admitted to doing. One hopes that people will realize that it's not just Craig who's in the wrong on this. It's the policy.

Tonight, Charlie Rose spends the full hour chatting with Don Rickles.

By the way: Not only are dozens of full episodes of The Charlie Rose Show now available on YouTube and Google Video but there are many excerpts that are viewable over at the Charlie Rose Show website. So if you like the way the man interviews — and I do — there's plenty on the 'net to enjoy…and the shows usually work as pure audio. So I can start one running, minimize the window on my computer, and then listen to it as I work. Very nice.

The opening to The Yogi Bear Show in Polish. At least, I think it's Polish.

Someone wrote me recently to ask how come I keep linking to Fred Kaplan's articles about Iraq. I wrote back that I link to them because they strike me as extremely accurate, informative and — most of all — realistic. In this latest piece, Kaplan deals with a simple fact that a lot of the arguments about Iraq overlook; that the U.S. will be lessening its presence in Iraq because we are running out of troops to send. An amazing percentage of articles I've read seem to treat that as one of those little details that we can just ignore if we really need to have more soldiers there.

If you've been toying with buying a TiVo, I'll suggest a deal you might consider…and I don't make a nickel on this. The best company I've found that handles TiVos, especially for repair and upgrades, is a firm called (for some reason) WeaKnees. They've come up with a stash of refurbished Humax TiVos with built-in DVD burners. This is the only TiVo system out there for which one can still purchase TiVo Lifetime Service, which at $299 is a bargain if you're going to keep the machine more than two years.

WeaKnees is offering the Humax TiVo for $199 with free shipping. There's a $150 rebate available so the machine costs you $49. Actually, if you go for this deal, spend a hundred bucks more and get the version in which WeaKnees installs a larger harddisk, thereby boosting your recording capacity from 40 hours to 350.

It won't handle hi-def but if that doesn't matter to you, you can get a TiVo with lifetime service and a DVD burner for a grand total of $348-$448. And yes, it's refurbished but you'd be buying it from a pretty reliable company. Here are the details.

A couple times a month, I get an e-mail asking me if I think TiVo will be around long enough to make it safe to invest in one. Yeah, I do. A few years ago, there was a period when that seemed iffy…but even there, if you'd bought a machine then and it all blew up today, you'd have gotten your bucks' worth out of it. At the moment, TiVo looks somewhat stable. The big threat is probably not that the company would go under but just that someone else will come out with a machine you'd rather have. (The odds are it would be the TiVo company and given their past behavior, there's a good chance — though no guarantee — that they'd allow you to transfer that lifetime service contract to the upgraded machine.)

A newer, better model is pretty much the risk when you buy any piece of technology today. A week or so ago, I purchased the new Blackberry Curve cellphone and on my way out of the store (italics, mine) I heard another salesguy talking about a new phone that'll be out in a few weeks that sounds even better. And if I waited for that and bought it instead, on my way out of the store, I'd hear of yet another coming out in a few weeks. Still, I've been a TiVo customer since the first few months they were on the market. That was mid-1999 and I haven't seen another brand of digital video recorder I thought was preferable. It'll happen but it hasn't happened yet.

In her will, hotel magnate (and Cruella DeVille look-alike) Leona Helmsley left twelve million dollars to her dog. Gosh, I hope the "death tax" doesn't kick in on this. Raise payroll taxes on people who make minimum wage if you have to but it would be such a crime if the bitch didn't get the full twelve million.

By now, you've probably seen the video of Miss Teen South Carolina giving a pretty clumsy answer to a question in a beauty contest. Matter of fact, I don't know how you could have avoided it. We have a guy in the White House sending men and women off to war who gives equally incoherent answers to questions…but somehow, this eighteen year old woman who has no responsibility for anything (and no real job except to just look cute) gives a lunkheaded reply and it's Front Page News.

A dumb answer in the Miss Teen USA pageant? Wow, what are the odds of that? I'll bet all the other contestants were up there discoursing on the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre in between the swimsuit competition and the parade of evening gowns. Come on, people. It's a beauty pageant, not a MENSA meeting. Give the lady a break. She got the important part of the pageant down. She looked great in the bikini.

While we're at it: For some reason, much of the press coverage (do a search if you don't believe me) described what we saw in that clip as a "meltdown." How is what she experienced a "meltdown?" Here's the definition of that word in the Free Online Dictionary…

1. Severe overheating of a nuclear reactor core, resulting in melting of the core and escape of radiation.
2. Informal. A disastrous or rapidly developing situation likened to the melting of a nuclear reactor core: "After several corporate meltdowns, only two reporters remain in [the] bureau" David Fitzpatrick."
3. Informal. An emotional breakdown.

Okay, there was no nuclear reactor involved in the incident, and I think it's a bit of a stretch to compare one dumb answer that harmed no one to a nuclear accident. She also didn't have any sort of breakdown in the clip. Maybe she had one afterward when she realized she'd become a national laughingstock but we didn't see one. Is the word "meltdown" becoming an all-purpose descriptor for any time something doesn't go right in public? Given its nuclear connection, maybe we oughta save it for something a bit more destructive than this.

This one runs nine minutes. It's one of my favorite burlesque sketches as adapted for the Abbott and Costello TV show. The man running the employment office is Sidney Fields, one of the great burlesque straight men. So was Bud Abbott. Lou Costello was the kind of comedian who sometimes needed two straight men.

The other thing that's interesting about this sketch is how many lines seem to be bobbled or ad-libbed. They were filming on a soundstage with no audience but still, they often didn't stop and refilm when someone stumbled on dialogue. Part of this was because these shows were shot fast and cheap, and they figured that since audiences were used to mistakes of that sort on live TV shows, you could get away with them on a filmed show. But there was also the fact that Costello hated doing multiple takes of scenes. He liked to get it in one and head for the track, and since he controlled this particular series, that's how it was done. It still turned out funny.