Monthly Archives: February 2023

A lot of folks who guest on Stephen Colbert's show get persuaded to record an extra segment of some sort. Some of them get put on the Internet. Some of them which involve the host are collected into an episode that's aired when the show wants to take a night off. Here's a nice little one that John Oliver did recently for Internet usage…

I mentioned in a previous item here that a portable battery charger for your cellphone is a good investment. Here's a recommendation. Amazon is currently selling a two-pack of the Miady 0000mAh Dual USB Portable Charger for under twenty bucks. You get two of these for that price and I bought a bunch of them for myself and for friends. I keep one around the house for when the power goes out (which it likes to do around here) and another in my car or travel case.

They're lightweight and they've served me well. You can read the specs, see if they'll work with your phone and even order the two-pack via this Amazon link. They also have a version that holds 50% more power and a two-pack of them costs 50% more.

If you buy a set, I have something else to recommend to you. The Miady chargers come with a USB cable which you use to connect the charger to a power source for charging purposes. But once it's charged, you need a different cable to connect it to the phone or device that needs charging. I suggest using one of these SDBAUX Multi USB Retractable Charger Cables. They look like this…

One end plugs into a USB port.  The other end has three different connectors. Again, check the Amazon page and make sure but it's likely that whatever you're going to want to charge — an iPhone or an Android or something else — can be connected with one of those connectors. I've used one of these and a Miady to charge my phone, my iPad, some friends' phones, my wireless headset, my camera and a couple other gizmos.

You can even throw away the cable that comes with the Miady and use this to charge it. It's easier than having separate charging cables for each device.  And the cable extends to over three feet in length when you need it to.

A two-pack of SDBAUXs is presently nine bucks. You might also like to add one of these to your little travel kit…

That's a USB wall charger for when you have to plug into an outlet because there's no powered USB port available. There are about eight thousand offerings of these on Amazon and you should be able to find a two-pack of them for under seven bucks. I gave several friends who seemed to need portable charging a little combo of a Miady, a SDBAUX and a wall charger. The combo ran me about $23 a set.

Remember before you buy to check that the SDBAUX is compatible with what you'll need it to be compatible with. Also remember that this setup is for charging, not for data transfers.  Also remember that I don't make these things so if they don't work for you, complain to Amazon, not me. And lastly, in the interest of Full Disclosure, I remind you that if you buy through my Amazon links, I get a teensy share of what you spend there.  So while you're at it, order something else that's real expensive. I hear the new 2024 Mercedes-Benz E-class sedans are nice.

Have you folks been watching Seth Meyers lately? And especially his "A Closer Look" segments? I think they're some of the sharpest, funniest bits of topical comedy ever done on television. Here's the one on tonight's show which is all about the revelation that the folks at Fox News don't even believe a lot of their own bullshit. I'm not shocked that they don't. I just wouldn't have imagined we'd ever have such clear evidence of it…

People always complain about the "In Memoriam" reels at awards shows…and I'm sure someone will be outraged at someone being left out of this one. This is the presentation from last night's Screen Actors Guild Awards. I think it was pretty good for what it was…which was, of course, one that excludes Producers, Writers, Cinematographers, Directors, Costume Designers, Composers…even Stunt People.

And it really oughta please most of the people who are furious about the videos at the Oscars or the Emmy Awards. Those folks never complain about omitting a Producer, a Writer, a Director, etc. They just care about on-screen personalities.

This can't be the first one of these to be set to a song performed by one of the departed folks, can it? It was a nice touch and so much better than doing it to a live, in-person musical performance by someone irrelevant to the montage. That removes the need to cut away from the names and faces to show that performer…

As a search of this blog would confirm, I used to like Scott Adams' newspaper strip, Dilbert and I remember defending it at some long ago party of the National Cartoonists Society. A member who drew much, much better than Adams — in fact, better than maybe half of the N.C.S. — was lambasting it as garbage.

None of this had anything to do with politics or race or anything controversial. I liked it then because I'd seen some strips that made me laugh. The lambasting gent didn't like it because the cartooning looked (to him) amateurish. Like any grouping of professionals in any field, there is some resentment of someone who comes out of seemingly nowhere, doesn't seem to have learned their craft but then is making oodles of cash, more than arguably more accomplished competitors.

And I defended Dilbert because, like I said, it had made me laugh. A lot of very well-drawn, classically-styled strips never have.

But about 1.8 decades ago, Dilbert somehow slipped off my radar. I more or less gave up newspapers for online sources and the online sources did not show me Dilbert. Outta my sight and outta my mind, it apparently became more right-wing political…or, of perhaps of more relevance to this discussion, its maker did. I've never met Scott Adams and that might be fine. I don't get along with real successful rich guys who are constantly playing the victim card, complaining how everyone conspires against them.

Because of some recent comments of his, newspapers left and right (but mostly left) are dropping Dilbert. He's lost more client papers than most syndicated strips ever have.

I don't see this as a Free Speech issue. Nothing in the First Amendment guarantees a Free Speaker an audience. An occasional annoyance to me is something too often done by comedians and other folks who express viewpoints to the public. It's when they claim that their rights under that amendment are being trampled if someone makes the individual choice not to hire them or the individual choice not to listen to them.

Without directly mentioning Scott Adams, the N.C.S. just issued a statement condemning racism. So has his syndicate though they mentioned him. So have a lot of newspapers that have given him a great platform and vast amounts of money over the years.

You wonder if he's stopped to wonder if maybe he's looking at things all wrong but probably not. He's probably too happy to have a whole new deck of those "I'm being discriminated against" cards to play with.

After reading some Vegas tips I posted, Robert Forman sent me the following…

I've been to Las Vegas a couple of times but never saw a show there. I have seen a couple of shows in Tahoe at Harrah's which I assume is kind of the same thing. This was in the mid-eighties. I saw separately Sammy Davis Jr. and Boz Scaggs. Both shows had ticket prices that were very high for the time. Both shows required a 3 drink minimum like your Golden Goose story, and like that story, the drinks came at the same time.

Both times, I ordered Bloody Marys and both times, I received pink water. They had to serve the drinks at the same time because the "shows" lasted 30-35 minutes. So my question here is is that what a person going to an expensive show in Las Vegas should expect? Was I just unlucky?

Well, if you only got a 30-35 minute show for your money, I'd say yes. Even Dean Martin, who was infamous for doing the shortest shows of any major headliner in Vegas, used to do 40 minutes. By contrast, Red Skelton stopped performing in places that restricted how long he could be on stage and it was not uncommon for him to go over two hours. I suspect the shows you saw were really longer than you recall.

Serving drinks at shows is much rarer now. I can't remember the last show I went to where drinks were included or mandatory. A lot of showrooms in Vegas — and I'm sure elsewhere — don't even have servers. Some have a bar where you can purchase a beverage and carry it to your seat. But if they do build two or three drinks into the admission, they serve them all at once. The most popular headliners insist on no cocktail or food service during a performance.

Quick story. One time back at the old MGM Grand in Vegas — not to be confused with the current MGM Grand in Vegas — some friends and I were seeing Jubilee!, a show that included two drinks. Mine were ginger ales. Seated next to our party were two elderly ladies who seemed upset. They had to order their two drinks apiece and while each wanted one alcoholic beverage, neither of them wanted two. They asked me if the two drinks both had to be the same thing.

I told them that they probably did…but pointed out that one of them could order two alcoholic drinks and the other could get two 7-Ups or ginger ale or something and then they could do a swap. Somehow, this had not occurred to them but they did it and they were very happy with whatever cocktails they chose. In fact, they were so happy that they offered me their ginger ales.

I'll stop with the Bilko shows soon but here's another one. This aired first on October 16, 1956 and it should be noted that that is before they stopped having a live audience in the studio for the filming. It was called "The Face on the Recruiting Poster" and it has a great punchline at the end which that audience loved.

As was not uncommon for this show, there are a lot of actors with speaking parts who later became famous. One of them is a young Tom Poston. At the time, he was hosting a local TV show in New York and he had the lead role in the Broadway play, Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, replacing its original star, Orson Bean. This was before Poston joined the company of comedians on Steve Allen's TV show and before Poston became a panelist on the game show, To Tell the Truth along with Orson Bean.

Poston though was not really involved in that great punchline, nor was actor Eric Fleming, who you may spot in a bit part. He later became well known in the TV western, Rawhide.

Phil Silvers told me a story about this episode but it will kill that punchline if I repeat it here. I posted it on this blog back in the Stone Age of the Internet, all the way back in May of 2001. So if you're inclined to watch the episode, watch it and then click this link to go read that story…

I've received a number of e-mails asking me if I think there's going to be a Writers Guild strike this year and if so, what the heck is it about this time? What it's about is pretty much summed up in this article in Variety. Many studios are making a lot of money off content on streaming services and more of it needs to go to the folks who create that content.

This is not just an issue for writers but the way things usually work in this town is that the writers wind up being the first one into battle on matters that affect all the labor organizations. Anyway, that article is a good summary of the issues involved.

How likely is a strike? I'm not as involved with the Writers Guild as I used to be. I just pay my dues and support the leadership, which I believe is currently very good and very smart and very realistic…but even given that, I would tend to think a strike is very likely.

J. Maine wrote to ask your obedient blogger…

I love the Sgt. Bilko episodes you've been linking to. Every word and gesture from Phil Silvers is funny. He's really a great example of a TV star who carries every scene he's in, not that the writing needs that kind of help. I don't recall laughing out loud at many situation comedies the way I laugh at Bilko and the audience sure seems to love it. Is that a live audience? It sure sounds like one. They did this with a three-camera set-up, right?

I don't know how many cameras they used and given how complex some episodes were, it's possible it varied. "Three-camera" became kind of a generic term in the industry for any show filmed with multiple cameras at the same time. There were shows that used four cameras that were referred to as "three camera" shows the same way that if two people opened a show talking to the audience, à la The Smothers Brothers or Sonny & Cher, it was sometimes still called a "monologue."

You're mostly hearing a live audience on these shows. Even shows that boast as to being "filmed in front of a live studio audience" sometimes have to dub in canned laughter here and there for editing purposes. But the audience for The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko, aka You'll Never Get Rich) was sometimes not present in the studio when they were laughing. I explained this once before here on the blog so here's some of it again. For the first season and most of the second, they filmed each episode in sequence in front of a live audience. Then…

In the middle of their second season, show #60 of 143 was called "Bilko Goes Around the World." It was inspired by the then-current movie, Around the World in 80 Days and it featured scenes with that film's well-known producer, Mike Todd. In the midst of rehearsal, Mr. Todd suddenly announced that he couldn't stay until the scheduled filming night; that pressing business elsewhere beckoned and he had to go. The producers made the decision to just film the show a few days earlier, sans audience. It was still done multi-camera but with no one in the bleachers…and it turned out fine.

I'm not sure if it was immediately after Show #61 or if it happened a little later but the Todd episode convinced them that a live audience was a needless expense. Phil Silvers thought it even made the show better. Without one, they could do retakes easier so it wasn't necessary to rehearse every line and move in every scene to within an inch of its life. Silvers felt free to improvise more and to do each scene a few times, plus they could film when he and the director thought they were ready, not when the audience was scheduled. They could film scenes out of sequence if that seemed appropriate. The writers could write scripts with scene and wardrobe changes without worrying about how fast they could be accomplished. The mood on the set got looser because the actors could cuss and ad-lib and screw up without an audience there.

They could also edit out mistakes or reshoot more easily.  If you watch the first season and a half of Bilko, you'll see a lot of them left in.  There are places where actors (especially Paul Ford) forget what they're supposed to say and Silvers ad-libs around this or prompts them.  Because so much of TV then was broadcast live and those moments happened so often on those programs, there was a tendency to not do much editing on film done in front of an audience.

When an audience-free episode had been cut to time, it would be taken and shown to warm bodies…often at some sort of military facility. A cast member — one of the supporting players — would go along to welcome and "warm up" the house before it was shown. Legendary was the one time they sent Joe E. Ross, who played Sgt. Rupert Ritzik. Ross was a burlesque comic with a very raunchy act and virtually no sense of judgment about what was appropriate to say before a given audience. He got up in front of a room full of elderly women and even a few nuns and launched into jokes about hookers and rapists. Enough people walked out that it was necessary to schedule another "sweetening" screening of the episode he was hosting…and they did not send Ross out with it or any other one.

Anyway, the recorded laughs of those audiences were layered onto the shows and according to Mr. Silvers, "Nobody could ever tell the difference." If you watch them, you probably won't. Once in a while, a laugh continues over someone's line and it's obvious the actor speaking that line wasn't hearing that laugh so you may figure it out. Interestingly, the performer in such a situation is almost never Silvers, even though he had close to half the dialogue in some episodes. He just had such a good sense of timing that he knew how long the pauses for laughter should be. I'm not sure you could do that with most situation comedy actors today.

That's what I wrote before but as I read it over now, there are a few things I can add. First, I thought of a reason why Michael Todd might have had to leave town and not stay for the schedule filming date. Around this time, Mr. Todd participated in the popular fad of marrying Elizabeth Taylor so that may have had something to do with it.

Also worth mentioning is that Larry Gelbart told me there was a discussion about doing M*A*S*H, filming without an audience and then showing the edited episode to one to record laughter. They didn't because the studio decided it was just easier and maybe cheaper to go with normal canned laughter. He also said that when you're putting all the laughs in in post-production, there's just too much temptation to add in laughs that didn't come from a live audience so you might as well go all-canned.

The Crazy Russian Hacker tests devices to cut bagels in half. I think his problem here is that his bagels are too big and too soft. In my kitchen, I have the third device he tests — a gift from Howie Morris many years ago. Mine works fine.

Don't ask me why but I've been thinking a lot about how effective masking has been during COVID.  I'm not going to write a lot about this topic because I think the Internet has way too much medical advice from people who have not graduated from medical school.  There's no hard data on this but I suspect a leading cause of death stems from getting serious medical advice from people who have not graduated from medical school.  I don't think real doctors are always accurate but I think they have a much better batting average than non-real doctors.

I keep seeing these discussions about "Do masks work?" and it seems to me that's like asking, "Do medicines work?"  Some do and some don't and it depends greatly on, first of all, which ones you're talking about and, secondly, how you use them.  Does anyone really think all masks are equally effective and that they're always worn properly?

When I have gone places where I felt I should be masked, I have worn this kind, an N95 which my physician recommended.   And when I have worn them to the offices of other doctors — my dentist, my orthopedist, my podiatrist, etc. — I have usually been complimented for my selection. My urologist was even wearing the same model.

But when in public the last couple of years, I see a lot of masks that look like thin cloth…or look like they've been selected for looks, not prevention of disease…or that someone just grabbed something cheap because they had to wear a mask to gain entrance somewhere. An awful lot of them don't know it's supposed to fit tight and not be worn under your nose.

My conclusion is that masks may be useful but the studies that try to determine if they are aren't. Some of them include pre-COVID or non-COVID data. None of them seem to differentiate between high-quality masks and those made of the cheapest-possible cloth. And none of them really track how and when the people who wear them wear them.

Everything above this paragraph was written a few days ago and then I stopped, planning to finish this piece later. Then Rob Rose, a devout reader of this site, sent me this link to a very good article about this. And of course, I say it's a very good article because it aligns with what I was already thinking.

It was written by an emergency medicine physician at Yale and posted by an epidemiologist. On a question like this, you should be listening to people like that and not, say, people who write comic books and cartoons. Which is what I'll be spending the rest of the day doing.

Here's another episode of The Phil Silvers Show, aka Sgt. Bilko.  It's called "The Eating Contest" and there's a great story behind it.  I hope it's true. This was told to me by none other than Phil Silvers and if it's not 100% accurate, blame him.  Nat Hiken, who was the guy behind that series, wrote the tale of Bilko's platoon betting another platoon that their man could out-eat the other platoon's big eater.  To play Bilko's guy, he hired a very heavy man.

It wasn't working in rehearsals and Hiken decided the remedy was to replace the very heavy man with a very thin man.  Silvers claimed that Hiken leafed through an Academy Players Directory — which was like a mugbook of actors looking for work — and picked out the guys with the skinniest faces he could find.  One they called in to audition was a fellow who had more or less given up acting and who was now making most of his income working in the art department of an advertising agency.

But he got the role and he was so good that Hiken wrote him into another episode later. Those two appearances led to other work and this part-time actor became a full-time actor, though he did later write and illustrate a number of children's books. Years later, when Hiken was casting his other TV sitcom, Car 54, Where Are You?, he hired that actor for one of the lead roles. It was Fred Gwynne. Some of you might know him better as Herman Munster.

There are biographies of Fred Gwynne that tell a somewhat different story but that's the one Phil Silvers told me. And as you'll see, Gwynne is very, very good in this episode…

Two other things you might notice: One is how many actors are in this and how many have speaking parts. A lot of episodes of The Phil Silvers Show had many, many sets and many, many actors and it was a pretty expensive show to do. It ran for four seasons and Silvers told me it could have run two or three more but CBS was eager to move it into syndication and recoup some of its deficits. Again, I don't know if that's true but it was hard to not believe Phil Silvers, the man who could talk anyone into anything.

And those of you who love the musical Li'l Abner may recognize the actor playing the other platoon's eating champ. It's Bern Hoffman, who played Earthquake McGoon (the world's dirtiest wrassler) in the movie and the Broadway show. The episode was shot before the musical was cast but he was in other Bilko episodes that seem to have been filmed while the play was still running in New York. On Car 54 also, Hiken hired a lot of folks out of plays then running in New York.

Regarding the previous post, a dozen Jeopardy! watchers sent me messages like this one from past Jeopardy! champ Michael Rankins…

Just a quick thought about why Mike Towry was the Comic-Con co-founder mentioned: This current run of Jeopardy! episodes is a "High School Reunion Tournament." All of the contestants previously competed in Teen Tournaments a few seasons ago. Without actually having inside knowledge, I'd guess that the writers thought that Mike Towry being 15 when SDCC began made an interesting tie-in to the present tournament.

Makes sense to me. Meanwhile, Steve Bacher read this post and sent me this…

Your advice "Do not drink too much" reminds me of a TV ad I used to see for some drug or other that said "Do not drink alcohol in excess while using this product." I wondered: do they mean that it's OK to drink alcohol in excess while not using this product?

I would think they meant, "Our lawyers advised us to caution you not to drink alcohol in excess while using this product because saying that might help get us off the hook if using our product while drunk leads to a lawsuit against us.  Frankly, we don't care what you do when you're not using our product because we wouldn't be liable."

This was on the Jeopardy! board last night.  I'm glad they put the "co" in "co-founded" and I'm wondering why they picked Mike to single out. Guess they thought the "15-year-old" angle made it more interesting.

Right now, if you type "Who founded Comic-Con?" into Google, what you get back is: "The convention was founded in 1970 by Shel Dorf, Richard Alf, Ken Krueger, Mike Towry, Ron Graf, Barry Alfonso, Bob Sourk, and Greg Bear." They could probably have found many different lists of names if they'd looked…because the correct answer is indeed a list of names.

I wouldn't even try to make a definitive one and since Jeopardy! decided to mention just one person, I'm glad they picked Mike.  Too many times in the past, the one name that got mentioned was Shel Dorf's and that's just unfair to quite a few other people who were responsible.  (I was about to write, "Mike probably did a lot more than Shel" but that's true of several other folks as well.)

Mike Towry certainly deserves recognition and thanks for what he did to launch that "pop culture phenomenon."  And he'd be the first guy to start naming the other ones.

A lot of folks are upset to hear that…

New editions of legendary works by British author Roald Dahl are being edited to remove words that could be deemed offensive to some readers, according to the late writer's company. Dahl wrote such books as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, James and the Giant Peach and Fantastic Mr. Fox.

This is one of those cases where I'm kind of on the fence, looking at both sides of the issue, not sure where I want to land. I have never been a particular fan of Mr. Dahl's work. I read a few of his books and was not motivated to seek out the others. That probably doesn't matter in this discussion, which is of the larger issues. If this hasn't already been done to some books I love, it will be.

As a writer, my natural reaction is to leave authors' works the way they wrote them…but they get changed all the time when adapted into other media. My indifference to the movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory is not widely shared. People love that film and other adaptations that changed what Dahl wrote. Those adaptations probably also sold a helluva lot of Roald Dahl books. His work has been kept in print and more widely read…

…and I'll bet when a lot of new readers experience the book of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory now, they're imagining Willy Wonka looking like Gene Wilder or Johnny Depp and hearing the voice of one of those men. Is that changing what Mr. Dahl wrote? Maybe. In some sense. How about if the text is unchanged but a new edition features a cover and illustrations by an artist whose drawings are contrary to what the author intended?

Seems to me there are three overriding questions here. One is should an author's work be changed at all? Should it be kept sacred, untouched and exactly like that author wrote it? If we say "No, never change it," then this discussion is over…except maybe if that author made some firm statement as to how he/she wanted his/her work handled after his/her passing. Certainly some would prefer that their work live on, be read and maybe even make money for their descendants even if that means expunging the "n" word or other things that date the work.

The second question: In the absence of clear orders from the author, who has (a) the legal authority and maybe (b) the moral authority to preside over such changes? I don't have an answer to this question but does it matter if it's a close relative who knew the author or some non-relative who never knew him or her but works for a corporation that acquired the copyrights? Some of this may come down to mind-reading dead people: "I know he would have wanted us to do this…"

Final question — and I guess these all come down to a case-by-case basis but this really does: Are the changes good changes? It's certainly possible to be on a good and proper mission but to do more damage than good. I'm not qualified to have an opinion on this regarding Dahl's books but the writer Imogen West-Knights seems to be and she thinks the changes are unnecessary and in some cases, just plain wrong.

I have no opinion on whether they are or aren't but I think this third question is the big one. If the author specified absolutely no changes, even if that means the work dies and is forgotten…well, that might not be the final word but it comes close. But then that leads us to the question about well, what if the original work remains unchanged but all adaptations are fair game? Which leads us to the question of what happens when the work goes into public domain and anyone can do anything they damn well want to it, including revisions the author would have loathed?

And before that day arrives, how likely is it that any work will be left unchanged if the entity that controls it sees an opportunity to make a lot of money off it and perhaps make it relevant to a new audience?

I apologize that this essay does not lead to many — maybe even any — real answers. But maybe that's the whole point of what I've written here. If you can make this make more sense, feel free to rewrite this piece. After I die, of course.