Monthly Archives: June 2020

• I keep seeing people saying, "I can't breathe with one of those masks on." For some reason, I haven't seen anyone reply, "Well, maybe you haven't found the right one, pal."

• The story keeps shifting but right now it seems to be that Trump got a written brief about the Russian bounties but didn't read it and you can't blame him because no one reads everything. So say a lot of people who would have demanded Obama resign immediately if he'd done that.

Carl Reiner was the friendliest, most talented person in show business. Or if he wasn't, he was tied with a couple of other contenders for the title. He was a guy I admired not just for his fine work as a writer, producer, director and performer but for just the way he was as a person. Every time I was around him, he was an absolute delight…funny, engaging, willing to talk with anyone about anything. He was just what you'd want an idol to be.

He was a role model for how to be truly successful and sane in show business. He didn't care about stardom…just doing good work. When he created a sitcom to star himself and they told him they wanted someone else to star in it, he said, "Fine. I'll just write and produce it." And we got The Dick Van Dyke Show and he got all the rewards and accolades and offers. When he interviewed Mel Brooks as The Two-Thousand Year Old Man, Carl knew that he was the straight man and he should act like a straight man and not, as most comics would do in that situation, say or do something to remind the audience, "Hey, I can be funny, too!"

And he was a role model for how to get old without getting inactive and useless. He mastered the Internet and wrote books and he was on Twitter often with witty and wise observations about current events. When I heard this morning that he'd died at the age of 98, my first thought was, "Aw…Carl won't get to see Donald Trump go totally down in flames."

He was involved in a lot of stuff I love like the various Sid Caesar shows, the Van Dyke program, the records with Mel, some great movies (I just happened to watch The Thrill of it All the other night)…he was one of the best talk show guests ever…he was in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and so what if he didn't like it very much? He was in it.

I just liked Carl Reiner. I liked not just what he did but who he was. My condolences to Rob and Mel and all of us.

The last of the great variety show comedians, Alan Brady, has died at the age of 98. Like most of then, Brady was rumored to not be the nicest man off-stage and there are tales of him verbally abusing his longtime producer Mel Cooley and of having an ego that dwarfed his talents in size and scope. Some even said he wasn't the comedic genius he claimed to be; that it was his fine writing staff that made him the star he was for so many years.

Perhaps. But let us not forget that he made an awful lot of people laugh over the years. So what if he wasn't the friendliest, most talented person in show business?

He's got another one…

George Conway, one of the anti-Trump Republicans behind the Lincoln Project, says this…

This Russian-bounty story is as huge a presidential scandal as there can be. It's an order of magnitude more outrageous than what he got impeached for, even though the Ukraine scandal was plainly criminal from the beginning. And it's clearly not going away.

He's right. It's like Fate (call it God if you like) is telling us, "You've really, really got to get rid of this Trump guy" so every week, it gives us a new outrage which on its own would be reason enough…a pandemic, a horrific abuse of power, a racist appeal, riots that bring out the worst in him, a financial scandal…now this. Jonathan Chait ticks off all the different ways the White House is defending itself and, like most White House defenses, they confess as much as they try to explain.

• I may start betting money on which outspoken person who says the virus is a hoax and we should stop wearing masks and reopen everything will be the next to come down with COVID-19. It's like every day lately…

I keep thinking back on all the discussions I've had in the past year or three with folks about how likely/unlikely Trump was to get a second term. A select few were in the category where a Trump-backer who considered himself my friend wanted to say "Trump will win in a landslide" because he (a) wanted to believe that and (b) wanted to see the expression on my face.

Those kind of folks always remind me of a "friend" (air-quotes) who would always e-mail to tell me of a bad review my work had received somewhere on the Internet. "Just thought you oughta see this," he'd type with a certain amount of glee/hope that he was causing me a bit of pain. There's a quiet sadism that exists in some people, living as they do for the schadenfreude. Fortunately, there are people who are on the Trump side of the aisle that I can get along with. We don't dislike each other. We just disagree on some things. Mostly, it's that they simply prefer Republican control of government to Democratic and at the moment, Trump seems like the only route to that.

My suspicion is that some prominent Republican — don't ask me who — will soon start a Dump Trump movement, saying he will bring the party down to defeat in so many places and races and so to save the G.O.P., they must repudiate D.J.T. It probably won't rid us of him but it might take his poll numbers down another few pegs.

Anyway, as I think back over those old discussions about Trump getting re-elected, I'm reminded they weren't about the global pandemic and Trump saying sunshine would make it go away after maybe a dozen people died. They weren't about his reticence to alienate the white supremacist vote at a time when a record number of Americans want black folks to be treated better. They weren't about compromising the Justice System to free his convicted (or should-be-convicted) cronies. They weren't about this latest allegation about Putin putting a bounty on U.S. soldiers and Trump doing nothing about it. They weren't about so many of the "best people" he once bragged about hiring turning on him.

They were about Hunter Biden. Somehow, we aren't talking a whole lot about him these days.

Featuring Alan Oppenheimer, Alicyn Packard, Jason Marsden, Elle Newlands and John Mariano…

Some of you have read about this. Some of you have written to ask for my views on it…

The Simpsons will no longer use White actors to voice non-White characters, according to the show's producers. "Moving forward, The Simpsons will no longer have white actors voice non-white characters," Fox spokesman Les Eisner said in a statement Friday.

My view? That's fine. I think it's a small step but small steps are better than no steps, assuming they're in the right direction. What is the possible objection to this? Is someone saying they prefer to have cartoon black guys voiced by white guys?

What I would hope is that it doesn't lead to fewer non-white characters on cartoon shows for budgetary reasons. I'm talking here about minor characters, not major ones. Back in the early Hanna-Barbera days, when Bill Hanna went around the studio turning off lights to save money, the non-primetime shows had almost no female characters in them. The Yogi Bear cartoons had Daws Butler doing the voice of Yogi, Don Messick doing Boo Boo and the Ranger, and both of those Caucasian gentlemen taking turns doing all the incidental roles.

Cindy Bear and other female characters rarely turned up in those cartoons because Mr. Hanna didn't like the idea of paying three voice actors. Once in a while, they would spring for it but for the most part, the writers were told to avoid writing female characters. (And once in a while, when a lady had a line or two, they would have Messick do it.)

The Simpsons, of course, can afford anything, it being the most profitable entertainment franchise in the history of mankind. I just hope shows with shallower pockets don't skimp on minor non-white characters because someone says, "That character only has two lines. I don't want to pay an additional actor to come in for two lines. Make that character white so one of our white actors can do the part." I've known animation producers who were cheap enough to think that way.

Of course, ideally most shows would have a multi-racial cast and there'd be folks of all colors among the regulars. I also wouldn't mind seeing them hire older actors more. On The Garfield Show, I hired many actors who were in their seventies and eighties, and even a few in their nineties. We had Stan Freberg, June Foray, Marvin Kaplan, Rose Marie, Jack Riley and a number of others on the program.

But I think the new policy on The Simpsons is fine. I just hope they don't feel they have to take Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith, et al, and spray-paint them yellow.

As you wander the Internet, you have perhaps happened upon videos of the infamous 11-foot-8-inch bridge in Durham, North Carolina. That's a bit lower than most bridges and as a result, there's a crash there every few weeks. An awful lot of truck drivers who don't pay attention to warning signs wind up shearing the tops of their trucks off as they innocently try to pass beneath it. Whole trucks have been destroyed.

A gent named Jürgen Henn who works in the area saw so many trucks decapitated there that he set up a couple of cameras to record each accident. He posts videos of 'em to YouTube and on a website he runs that's devoted to the bridge. In this post a few years ago, I linked to a short documentary on the bridge and you can see several dozen of the crashes in the video below…

Well now. Late last year, someone finally did something about this problem. As you'll see in the videos below, engineers managed to jack the bridge up, build up its structure, regrade the railroad tracks…and the result is that the 11'8" bridge is now 12'4". This is the same process they used in the Rambo movies to raise Sylvester Stallone.

So does that mean no more crashes? Well, so far, no big ones. But on November 26, which was 22 days after the new height was open for business, this happened and there have been a few more like it since then…

• I have 427 channels on my TV. You'd think I could I find one that isn't running an interview with John Bolton.