Dick Cavett discusses two books by two friends of mine, both about Groucho.
Monthly Archives: March 2012
From the E-Mailbag…
Jamie Stroud writes…
I couldn't agree more with your comments on the new Stooges movie. As a long time fan, my attitude is "it could be fun, but it won't be them." Hollywood has not learned by now and probably never will that you can't replace creativity with gimmicks. Exhibits A through D: The Little Rascals, Flintstones, Rocky and Bullwinkle, The Honeymooners and the list goes on. The people that put these shows and films together originally, whether it was voice work, animation, writing, acting, or sound, were talented and gifted artists. You can't destroy the Mona Lisa with a hundred copies. You just wind up with a hundred copies.
I plan on taking my daughter who is as crazy for The Stooges as I am (I was so proud the first time she poked me in the eyes. Then I showed her how it's done so I wouldn't go blind). I wouldn't be at all surprised if she asks me to put on a Curly or Shemp DVD when we get back home. What I hope they do in the new movie is have Shemp AND Curly in the same scene. That is something I have always wanted and only Hollywood can do.
Well, as you may know, it did happen once. Curly's last co-starring short was Half-Wits Holiday, which was made in 1947. Shemp took over with the next film…then in Shemp's third one, Hold That Lion, Curly made a cameo appearance — his last time on film and the only time that all three Howard boys appeared together. (And I guess it was the only time Curly was ever on film without his distinctive haircut. When he got sick, he let it grow in.)
Reportedly, the cameo was a spontaneous addition to the short. Curly was visiting the set and someone thought it would cheer him up — or maybe give him some hope he could still return to performing — to put him in. When he left the act, his family apparently presumed it was forever but officially, Shemp was to be a temporary replacement until Curly was well enough to return. That never happened and Shemp wound up appearing in 79 more shorts and one feature over the next ten years. But Curly still hoped to resume working at the time he appeared in Hold That Lion and since he's quite recognizable even with longer hair, it had to have baffled some audiences back then. They'd just seen Curly disappear from the films and probably assumed that guy had died or something. Now, here he was back in a bit part…huh?
Two years later, Curly filmed another cameo — for the Stooge short, Malice in the Palace — but it was not used. The above still is said to show him playing a mad chef but I don't guarantee that's him. The whole photo seems a little odd to me…like what's the deal with Shemp's proportions? Someone in Columbia's publicity department liked to take heads from one photo and paste them over heads in other photos so maybe that's what happened here. There are even stills where they took a shot of Moe, Larry and Curly and pasted Shemp's head over Curly's. Anyway, you can decide about this one. Curly apparently did shoot an unused scene for that film, which could have led to something particularly ghoulish…
After Shemp died in '55, the Stooges still had four shorts to deliver on their then-current contract. By then, most of their films were composed of old footage with some new scenes added and the last four films had been budgeted accordingly. It wasn't feasible to recruit a new Third Stooge for what could have been just four more films and they didn't have the money to film four more films without employing old footage. So they made four more films with Shemp using old scenes with him and with a gent named Joe Palma standing in for the new scenes, mainly with his back to camera. That was creepy enough but one of the films "remade" this way was Malice in the Palace. If Curly had been in it, they would have had two deceased Stooges in a new film.
Anyway, the Hold That Lion scene was reused in the later short, Booty and the Beast, which came out in 1953, a little more than a year after Jerome "Curly" Howard had died. Here it is…
Keith
Just cancelled the Season Pass on my TiVo to Countdown with Keith Olbermann since it ain't on no more. I wasn't watching it often anyway but neither was anyone else.
It recorded the first episode of his replacement, Viewpoint with Elliot Spitzer, and I gave that a brief try. I've enjoyed ex-governor Spitzer as a talking head in brief increments elsewhere but have no yearning to watch an hour of him each night. And if you think Olbermann's ratings were bad…
Mr. Olbermann will, by the way, be in the guest seat with Mr. Letterman on Tuesday night. He's not on the TiVo listing yet but he'll reportedly be there, probably being very guarded in what he says since litigation looms ahead.
Recommended Reading
Back in this posting, we predicted more bad news for the Best Buy chain…and indeed, they just announced they're closing a mess o' stores. Vince Waldron sends me to this article about a company that's doing the opposite of what Best Buy has done. Unlike Best Buy, the Japanese fashion chain Uniqlo believes that it's good business to have employees who actually know what they're doing.
Recommended Reading
Matthew Yglesias salutes Murray Lender, maker of mediocre bagels. His point is that while there's a value to being able to do something better, there's also one to being able to do it cheaper.
Today's Video Link
And here we have six minutes of Henny Youngman doing what he did so well and for so long. This is from 1960 and one of his jokes will only make sense if you know that at the time, there was a big scare in the news: People were said to getting ill and maybe dying from pesticides then used on cranberries. That's about as close as Henny ever got to topical material and I'm sure that years later when there was a similar scare about apples, he just switched one word and used the same line.
I kinda "worked with" Henny once and got to spend a little time with him. You can read about it in this article I wrote many moons ago. But first, here he is on an old Steve Allen Show…
P.S.
I may have confused some folks when I said I was hoping for an orange version of the lemonade mix put out by the True Lemon folks. Many wrote to ask, "Don't they already make one called True Orange?"
No, that's not the same thing. True Lemon's main product line — and it's something you should know about — are these little packets called True Lemon, True Lime, True Orange and now True Grapefruit. They're little fruit flavor crystals that you can add (like a packet of sugar) to water or tea or recipes. I know about them and have used them on occasion.
The new things are these drink mixes which take that kind of flavoring and configure it so that it's a powder that flavors water instead of just enhancing it. You can't make lemonade with True Lemon. You can make it with their new True Lemonade with Stevia. I'd like to see them come out with True Orangeade. Sorry I wasn't clearer.
My Drinking Problem, Part 2
As I mentioned recently here, my options for liquids to drink have narrowed in the last few years . Don't like coffee, tea, fruit juices, milk, etc. Can't handle anything with carbonation or artificial sweeteners. For the last 4-5 years, it's been only water and about once a day, a Jay Robb protein shake made with water.
My water of choice has been Crystal Geyser, which I buy in cases and have throughout my house. I had home delivery of Sparklett's for a time but I wasn't thrilled with the water and I had all sorts of problems with them delivering bottles I didn't want, no matter how I told them not to. I also like having liter bottles all over my house and there's always one on my desk. Crystal Geyser comes in liter bottles.
It's obtainable, by the way, under a number of names. At my local Whole Foods Markets, they sell gallon bottles of Crystal Geyser for $1.25 apiece. Next to it on the shelves, there are gallon bottles of the Whole Foods house brand for $1.00 each. Little do some unsuspecting Whole Fooders suspect but they're the exact same thing: Same H2O from the same source, same bottle, same piece of tape for a handle, everything. Only the label is different. At Walgreens here, they sell a brand called Roxane, which is also Crystal Geyser…and I'm not sure if it still is but for a while, the Trader Joe's house brand in my area was a matter of the Crystal Geyser folks slapping yet another label on their output. The tip-off is if you look at the label and find some reference to "CG Roxane."
So that's what I've been drinking. Recently though, I've discovered a bunch of new products with which to flavor one's water. They're new drink mixes made with Stevia…which is not, as some folks think, an artificial sweetener. It's a real sweetener that lacks calories and which can be quite effective in certain applications. Years ago, I tried a couple brands of flavored Stevia and they were awful. Somehow though, someone has mastered it, particularly in a new product called Truvia. These new drink mixes come in little packets that you add to a 16 oz. bottle of water, then you shake it up and drink. Recently, I taste-tested three…
Hansen's Natural Fruit Stix – Natural Strawberry Lemonade
This was my least favorite of the three I tried, probably because it didn't taste like Strawberry Lemonade to me. It tasted like Hawaiian Punch…or at least what I remember Hawaiian Punch tasting like the last time I had one, which was in the seventies. If you like that, it's probably great but I thought it was too sweet and that its taste didn't relate to anything that occurs in nature. Hansen's sweetens with Truvia and one serving has 5 calories. For something advertised as "natural," the ingredients list sure had a lot of names I recall having in my old Gilbert Chemistry Set. Anyway, they also have an Iced Tea flavor, a Blackberry Tea flavor, a Natural Berry flavor and a Fruit Punch flavor. Since their Strawberry Lemonade tastes like Fruit Punch, I'm wondering if their Fruit Punch tastes like Strawberry Lemonade.
Crystal Light Pure Lemonade
I liked this one (also containing Truvia) but not as much as the next one. One of these has 15 calories and again, it has a rather chemically-oriented list of ingredients. The Crystal Light Pure line also includes a Grape version, a Tropical Blend, a Strawberry Kiwi and a Mixed Berry. The lemonade was fairly good and I might have stocked up on it had I not found…
True Lemon Original Lemonade
This one says on the box "made with lemons," which is always a nice sign. The ingredients list read more like a real beverage and one serving has 5 calories. Best of all, this one actually tastes about as close to lemonade as any mix I've ever had. So I'm stocking up on True Lemon. They also have a Raspberry Lemonade flavor which I haven't tried.
Are there side effects to Stevia and Truvia? There are anecdotal reports on the Internet…but on the Internet, you can find people who will tell you that they had a bad reaction to oxygen. I've had what I believe were bad reactions to Splenda, NutraSweet and saccharin but so far, no problem with Stevia. (There's Stevia in those Jay Robb protein shakes I make.) Like any food product of even slighty-questionable safety, you need to decide for yourself about yourself…and I would think that limiting one's intake of it would not be a bad idea. I limit mine to one every few days and it's a nice change o' pace from water, water everywhere.
This concludes my report. Updates will be posted as soon as they become available…like if anyone makes me happy and puts out an orange version.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and ninety-three in a series…
Countdown and Out
Keith Olbermann is no longer on Current TV, effective immediately, which should disappoint the 700 or so people who were following his program. Lately, I had not been one of them. As often as not, I agree with the man politically and I think he often makes some very solid cases. Not only that but I think he generally does so with a much higher level of factual accuracy than most folks who work the pundit beat these days…which is not to say he doesn't occasionally distort or err once in a while. Still, I've lately found myself TiVoing the program and then not watching it…or sometimes watching just the opening and being reminded why I so often deleted it without viewing.
It's the same reason I don't think Liberal Talk Radio really works. Every time I tune in Randi Rhodes or Ed Schultz, I feel this constant pressure from them to ratchet up my anger and/or despair about certain matters over which I already have sufficient anger and/or despair, thank you. It's like I've found a comfortable, appropriate level for myself and these programs seek to raise it to something uncomfortable or inappropriate…for me. Note the "…for me" in there. I'm not saying they aren't dandy for some other folks or that maybe those people couldn't stand to have their levels raised. It's just not what I want for me, especially when I need to get my mind off politics for long stretches in order to write what I need to write professionally.
When I tune in Liberal Talk Radio, the message I usually hear is "We're screwed and doomsday is ahead." When I tune in Conservative Talk Radio, the message I usually hear is, "We're screwed but we'll win." Mr. Limbaugh, it seems to me, is very good at cheerleading. He gets his listeners angry about Obama or gays or minorities or whatever but he always reassures them that victory lies ahead. I happened to tune him in once when the Democrats had just won some major victory and what I heard was how for Republicans, this was the best thing that could have happened and how the Dems would soon regret that win. Somehow, if the vote had gone the other way, I don't think Rush would have been saying the opposite. It would still have been the best thing that could have happened to Republicans.
By contrast, Olbermann seemed to always be giving me the negative, getting me riled up about things I can't do a damn thing about but stew. Even when the news for his team was good, he scowled and told us how the other side would be trying to spoil it. I'm not saying he was accurate or inaccurate; just that I am not often in the mood to hear that stuff.
Where is he going now? Somewhere. And when he gets fired from that job, he'll go somewhere else. And somewhere else after that. I have this odd feeling that somewhere in this journey, he'll even have a show on Fox News for an hour and a half. I don't mean it will be a 90 minute show every night. I mean it'll be an hour show and he'll get fired halfway through the second one.
Hollywood Labor News
Members of the Screen Actors Guild and the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists have voted overwhelmingly to merge the two unions. The margin was wider than I think anyone expected.
The opposition, as I mentioned before here, was not so much to the idea of joining the two labor organizations into one as whether to do it now. Many members, including vocal ones like Martin Sheen and Ed Asner, wanted more advance study to be done on the fiduciary impact and other questions. Some wanted the marriage not to proceed until there was an airtight pre-nup and more decisions about the final living arrangements. I presume now that the leaders of SAG-AFTRA will hustle to do that kind of research and to resolve questions so as to bind the new union together before its first negotiation. If they can, all will be well with that world.
Today's Video Link
And was there ever a better match of singer and song than this guy and that tune?
The Outlook on Outlook
Recently, I mentioned here some problems I was having with Microsoft Outlook, which is what I use for Contacts and Calendar but not for other things like e-mail or Tasks. (I'm a Windows guy, by the way, though I sync both with an iPad and an iPhone. A lot of us Windows guys have iPads and/or iPhones and the Apple folks do a good, subtle job of making us feel like we're aliens operating on their planet.)
I said I'd solved my problems but didn't say how, which has brought much e-mail. This is just for those of you who've had problems with a sync of Outlook screwing up your Contacts list. This is apparently pretty common.
First, what I think caused my problem is that while two of my computers run Windows 7, one is still Windows XP. When the Apple folks decided to get rid of MobileME and push everyone into iCloud, they presented me with a problem of how to sync that XP computer since iCloud doesn't support XP. There's a hack/workaround on the web and I used that…but right after, I began having my sync problem. I'm assuming that was the cause so now that I've fixed my Contacts list, I'm no longer running iCloud on that computer and it will just have to go unsynced until I get around to upgrading it.
Fixing my Contacts list took a bit longer. They'd gotten full of useless, erroneous info…like appending "United States of America" to every address, no matter where the person lives. Somehow also it had a birthdate — usually wrong — listed for most of my Contacts and it kept wanting to add those dates (almost all in 2010) to my Calendar and wouldn't take "no" for an answer. There were other things I had to expunge as well. Outlook is a pain to edit in bulk so here's what I did.
First off, I created a new, empty Contacts list. Then I imported all the various backups I had on my three computers. This pulled in a few old, unwanted Contacts and would have brought a ton of duplicates had I not checked the option to not import dupes. Most did not come in. Then I saved this list and exported it into the format for Microsoft Excel. It was very easy to edit it in Excel and to wipe out the phony birthdates and to clean up the address mess, delete the rest of the dupes and to fix other problems. Then I exported this file. Then I created another new, empty Contacts list in Outlook. Then I imported the file into Outlook and all was well with the world. Or at least it was after I got rid of all the extra, inaccurate Contacts lists and backups I had. I didn't delete them because you never know what you might need later. I stuck them all in a big ZIP archive.
I still wish I had something better than Outlook for my Contacts and Calendar. Last time I asked about this, a lot of you had nominations but I couldn't find one that seemed much better and would sync, as Outlook does, with everything. One of these days…
Recommended Reading
Matt Taibbi notes some common ground between the Tea Party folks and the Occupy folks: They both believe that "Too Big To Fail" has gotta go; that the government can't be in the position of being expected to always bail out Bank of America or Chase or any of those behemoths if and when they get shaky. Might that consensus ever turn into actual political action? I'm not holding my breath.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and ninety-two in a series…
