Category Archives: To Be Filed

I get many of my home services (Internet, phone, etc.) from Spectrum Communications. Occasionally, I have problems with their service. This has been true with all the other companies I've had providing services like DirecTV, A.T.& T., Charter Communications, Time-Warner Cable, etc. I've never found one to be markedly better than the others but I have to live with one of them.

Here's something they all seem to do in one form or another and it probably bothers me more than it should but, hey, that's what ranting on blogs is for.

I call them about a problem. I may have to call them several times but eventually, it gets solved. At various times during this process, I find myself talking to a computer that asks me to rate the employee with whom I have just conversed. They ask me was the person polite? Did the person provide a satisfactory solution to my problem? Did the person seen knowledgeable? Did the person explain the problem to me in a way I could understand? Et cetera.

And the problem with these questions is that, 85% of the time, what I really want to say, but the computer doesn't give me the opportunity to say, is "The person was fine. It's your company that's the problem!"

I have the same problem with some food delivery services. I order something to eat and after it arrives, I'm asked by text or a recorded voice on the phone to rate the person who delivered the meal to me. Were they on time? Were they polite?

There's no opportunity to rate the person who prepared the food — the person who put mayo and lettuce on it despite my clearly typed message, "NO MAYO AND NO LETTUCE!" The timeliness of the food's arrival is treated as the responsibility of the delivery person whereas its lateness, if late it be, is more likely a function of the food-preparer not getting it done promptly…or it could be that the company is just screwed-up. I am only being asked to rate the person who is probably least responsible for quality control, paid the least and the most easily-replaced.

And often, my options are all choices that do not apply. Spectrum always asks me if the person I spoke to provided a satisfactory solution to my problem. Sometimes, they do. Sometimes, they can't. One recent call to Spectrum resulted in the Spectrum employee on the other end of the line telling me it was beyond their ability and jurisdiction to fix my problem and they'd have someone in another division call me.

So how do I answer whether that person provided a satisfactory solution to my problem? My options are Yes and No. So it could be "Yes, they weren't able to fix it so they said someone else would call me" or "No, they weren't able to fix it so they said someone else would call me."

And then no one else called me. How do I rate the person who never called me? That's a rhetorical question because they never ask me to rate him or her.

Here's yet another unusual interpretation of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the show Sweet Charity. This is, of course, the Pontarddulais Male Choir which bills itself as "The most successful competitive male voice choir in Wales." This is from a rehearsal and they're doing the variant set of lyrics that leave out the irony and sarcasm of the original…

My e-mailbox — a different one, not the one I use for regular e-mail — is getting 10-12 of these a day. Here's one of today's. I seem to have won the chance to send him money…

Mark,

CONGRATULATIONS! You've won the Weekly Trump Patriot 1000% IMPACT OFFER!

Every week President Trump selects one of his BEST supporters to receive an exclusive 1000% IMPACT OFFER, and this week, it's YOU.

This offer is only available to you for the NEXT 2 HOURS, Ferd. After that, your offer will be given to the next Patriot in line.

Please contribute ANY AMOUNT in the NEXT 2 HOURS and you can increase your impact by 1000%. >>

President Trump knows that you've been a dedicated supporter, which is why he selected YOU for this opportunity.

He wants to know the moment you make your contribution, so don't wait.

Just contribute ANY AMOUNT IMMEDIATELY to claim your 1000% IMPACT OFFER.

The weird thing is that almost every message I get from them makes this 1000% offer. It's not something I have to act on within two hours because before the day is out, I'll receive five or six more of these 1000% offers in which they will somehow (they don't explain how) increase my donation by 1000%.

And if I'm one of Trump's BEST supporters, you can imagine what his non-supporters think of him.

This is one of "those" stories. Longtime readers of this site will know what I mean by that. I told this story many years ago, way before I began blogging, in a column I wrote but for some reason, I shortened and simplified it all down. This is the real, more interesting version — but first, this cautionary note…

For many years, I traveled to New York about once a year to meet with publishers, see friends, see shows and sometimes attend a convention. Also, I just plain liked being in New York and I expect I will again when The Pandemic is over and such travels resume. When I was picking and paying for the place I stayed, I usually stayed at a hotel called the Rihga Royal which was located at 151 West 54th Street.

Note the past tense. This is not a recommendation of that hotel because it isn't there anymore. There is a hotel there and it's the same building with a different name and different management and I have no idea how good or bad it is. It's actually changed owners and names several times since it was the Rihga.

I first stayed there in the nineties at the recommendation of Brenda, a nice lady who was my travel agent back when some of us used travel agents rather than book our flights and accommodations ourselves on the Internet. She got me a great rate and I liked it enough to stay there even after she could no longer get me as great a rate. The first time I took my friend Carolyn back there, we stayed at the Rihga.

The next time we went, I called to book it and the same room was now more than double the price…so I didn't book it. By now, not only was Brenda out of the travel agency business but her travel agency was out of the travel agency business. I looked around, found a cheaper place and made a reservation…but I didn't feel good about it.

Then I remembered something. Ten or fifteen years earlier, my Business Manager Ron had said to me, "I enrolled you in the American Express bonus points plan. Every time you use your AMEX card, you get points and they don't expire. Someday, you'll use them to take a nice vacation or something." I'd paid no attention to my running point total but I suddenly decided that maybe I should. I logged into the American Express website and found that I had something like 500,000 points. Just sitting there, unused. It was like finding money in an old pair of pants.

I called the Rihga Royal and asked if they accepted American Express bonus points for free hotel rooms. It turned out they did not.

So I called another hotel in New York I like — the Marriott Marquis in Times Square — and asked if they accepted American Express bonus points. Turned out, they did. "How many," I asked, "do I need for five free nights?" The answer: 150,000. I immediately booked us into the Marriott Marquis and canceled the other reservation. Great, terrific, perfect. Thank you, Ron.

Cut to five weeks later. It was two days before our departure when I got a phone call from someone in the Marriott organization telling me we couldn't stay for those five nights at the Marriott Marquis. Either the reservations clerk or a computer or both had erred, he explained. Two of those five nights were "blackout dates" for which one could not use bonus points. He said I had the following three options…

1. I could pay cash for the two blackout nights…a very high rate.
2. We could stay at the Marriott Marquis for the three odd-numbered nights and move to some other hotel for the two even-numbered nights.
3. I could cancel the entire reservation and find some other hotel.

I suggested a fourth option…

4. They could waive this silly "blackout dates" option and let us stay there all five nights just as they said we could when I booked the reservation.

He said they couldn't do that. I said yes, they could. He said no, the computer won't allow it. I said, "That's nonsense. Can you connect me to someone higher up in the company than you who can say, 'Gee, we screwed up here. We have to make it right for you' and authorize me to stay five consecutive nights in the hotel I booked to spend five consecutive nights in?" He said such a person would call me within the hour.

Fifty-nine minutes later, someone above him called me and said, "Gee, we screwed up here. We have to make it right for you." But he insisted that even the president of the corporation couldn't override the computer and allow me to spend those nights at the Marriott Marquis on American Express bonus points.

I said, "It sounds like the computer is the president of the corporation."

He chuckled and said, "Maybe. But I have another solution. Instead of charging you 150,000 points to stay at the Marriott Marquis, how about if we charge you 130,000 points to stay those five nights at the J.W. Marriott, which is the newest Marriott in the same area? In fact, it just opened a few days ago. The computer will let me book you in there."

I asked where it was. He said it was located at 54th and 7th, which was a very good location for me, given where I had to go while in town. That wasn't far from the Rihga Royal. I also thought, "A brand-new Marriott? How bad could that be?" So I booked it and when I got off the phone with him, I went online and looked up the exact address.

The J.W. Marriott, I discovered, was at 151 West 54th Street. That meant it wasn't near the Rihga Royal. It was the Rihga Royal. The Marriott people had bought it and changed the name.

So Carolyn and I flew back to New York as per the schedule, pleased we were going to be staying at our favorite hotel even if it was operating under an assumed name. As things turned out, it wasn't that simple.

The limo dropped us off in front of the hotel at 151 West 54th Street and it didn't say "Rihga Royal" on the front. It didn't say "J.W. Marriott," either. There was a blank sign over the front door.

A lady at the front desk asked, "May I help you?" I said, "Yes. You can tell us the name of this hotel." She said, "I'm sorry but we don't know."

She explained: It had been the Rihga Royal. Then about two weeks before we got there, it became the J.W. Marriott and the sign outside said that until a few days ago. Then there was some sort of legal squabble over the sale and several somebodies were suing several other somebodies over ownership. "The lawyers agreed the hotel should stay open and operational while the matter gets settled in court," she said. "But we had to take down the sign."

I asked, "How do you answer the phone when someone calls?"

Just then, the phone did ring and she said, "Like this…" She picked up the receiver and said, "Hotel!"

We checked in after she assured us that despite its lack of name, it was the same hotel it was days ago when it was a J.W. Marriott and weeks ago when it was the Rihga Royal. Same rooms, same staff, same amenities, same showers (the showers in the Rihga Royal could make you want to spend your entire time in Manhattan in one), same everything. The only odd thing about the place was that in some spots, you'd see the "RR" logo of the Rihga and in some, the "JWM" logo of the new (maybe) owners. When folks asked us where we were saying this trip, we enjoyed telling them we were in an Unlisted Hotel.

It was a great five days. Carolyn walked through Central Park and browsed museums. I went to the DC Comics offices, the Marvel Comics offices, the offices of MAD magazine, etc. We had lunch with Joe Simon. We ate at Carolyn's favorite restaurant, the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station.

We went to shows, including what was then the hottest, impossible-to-get-a-ticket-to show on Broadway, the recently-opened The Producers starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick. I managed to get house seats from the author…and I don't mean Mel Brooks. These were the house seats of the author of Springtime for Hitler, the play within the play, Franz Liebkind. I got them from Brad Oscar, the fine actor who originated that role on Broadway. You may have seen Brad featured on this blog not long ago in this post.

Finally, it was time to return home. On a balmy New York morning just before Check-Out Time, Carolyn and I checked out and hauled our luggage out to the curb. There, we were to wait for the limo to the airport.

Outside, we noted something had changed. The sign over the door now said "J.W. Marriott." One of us said, "I guess they settled the legal dispute."

Just then, a man wearing a dark suit and dark glasses came up to us and said, "I'm sorry, folks. You can't wait here. I need to move you up the street about fifteen yards." I noticed he was wearing an earpiece and that there were other men dressed like him scurrying about. Also, a number of photographers.

I said, "We're just waiting for the limo I ordered to take us to the airport."

He said, "I understand that but I can't have you waiting here. We'll help you move your bags up to where it'll be okay for you to wait." He and another man wearing dark glasses and an earpiece moved us about fifteen yards. I asked the first man, "Are you Secret Service?"

He said — with a bit of a twinkle — "We're not allowed to say." Okay, I had my answer.

Just then, three black luxury vehicles pulled up at the spot where Carolyn and I had been standing. Two rope lines had been set up, forming a path from the rear seat of one of the vehicles to the door of what I assumed was now the J.W. Marriott. More men in dark glasses swarmed about, the guys with cameras crowded the rope lines and Hillary Clinton got out of the back seat. She waved to some cheering onlookers, posed briefly under the sign for the photographers and then headed into the hotel where, we later heard, she was to speak at a luncheon.

Within two minutes all of it was gone — the black vehicles, the men in sunglasses, the photographers, the passers-by who'd crowded around…all of it. Carolyn waved down our limo as it arrived and as its driver loaded our suitcases into the back, we saw a man on a ladder taking down the J.W. Marriott sign, returning the hotel to its anonymous condition. They'd just put it back up for the photo-op.

If I understand correctly, the hotel briefly became the Rihga Royal again, then it was the J.W. Marriott because, you know, they couldn't let that sign go to waste. At some point, it became The London for a while and now it's the Conrad New York Midtown. I hope they all kept those showers.

A couple of you have written to me about a recent (and explosive) article in the L.A. Times about the Magic Castle that said it's become a hotbed of racism and sexism. This is distressing to me as a forty-year member of the place. Actually, one is not a member of the Magic Castle. One is a member of an organization called the Academy of Magical Arts. The Academy operates the Magic Castle as its clubhouse…so by being a member of the Academy, I have access to that clubhouse when it's open, which it is not at the moment.

From what I can tell as a member who's uninvolved with the management of the place, the article is right about some things, wrong about others and a bit outdated on a few situations which have since been corrected. Lawyers, we hear, advised the Academy's Board of Directors not to respond to the reporters' questions and that may be sound legal sense but it's bad Public Relations sense. In any case, I have confidence in the current Board to fix what needs to be fixed and at the same time to deal with the alarming financial crisis created by the Castle being closed due to you-know-what.

I may or may not write a post here one of these days about sexual harassment, which I think is sometimes a too-nice euphemism for sexual molestation. Seems to me there are many varieties of it — some worse than others but all unacceptable — and that too many people lump them all together. Then they try to treat them all with one miracle remedy that might be effective on some types but not on all. I don't know how you can truly solve a problem when you don't really understand it…or try hard enough to.

---

Thanks to those of you who have sent donations of money to support this blog. I have a big bill coming up and what you've sent will help. Do not expect anything special here week after next when newsfromme hits its twenty-year anniversary. I may light some candles, close my eyes and blow out the Trump Administration.

John Oliver is on hiatus but this couldn't wait…

• Every time you hear that today had the highest report of COVID hospitalizations or deaths ever, just remember: There are people not wearing masks and not isolating in order to ensure that record is broken tomorrow.

You no doubt recognize the melodious amphibian from the 1955 cartoon One Froggy Evening, written by Michael Maltese and directed by Chuck Jones. The frog didn't have a name in the cartoon but in 1960, Jones was one of the folks behind the prime-time ABC series, The Bugs Bunny Show and they ran the '55 cartoon along with a bit of new footage to frame it.

For the occasion, the frog got a name — Enrico, as in "Enrico Caruso" — but I don't think it was used on the program. The only place I've ever seen it was on this drawing that Jones did for publicity purposes.

Everyone soon forgot it and some years later, when (I'm told) the merchandising division at Warners felt the frog should have a name, he became Michigan J. Frog. Both names probably came from Jones. One of the songs the frog warbles in the original cartoon is "The Michigan Rag," which unlike the other tunes in his repertoire, was not a golden oldie. It was written for the cartoon.

But you know what name never appeared anywhere? Not on the show, not on the merchandise…nowhere? The name of Bill Roberts, the singer whose voice came out of the beloved croaking creature. Mr. Roberts had a nice career singing on radio and in recording sessions and many other places but he didn't have much of an on-camera presence. Here he is singing a tune in the 1942 movie, The Yanks Are Coming…

• It's like every morning, God wakes up and ponders, "Hmm…how shall I punish Rudy Giuliani today?"

• Today's potatoes are from Van Dyke and Cedargreen Farms, Quincy, WA.

Stan Laurel (né Arthur Stanley Jefferson) and Oliver Hardy (né Norvell Hardy) are still my favorite performers of all time. Starting at 9 AM (at the least on my TV) Monday morning, Turner Classic Movies is running a festival of their comedies, many of them shorts, many of them silent.

It starts with Do Detective Think?, which was technically not a Laurel & Hardy film even though they were the stars of it as a team of inept investigators. It was a short comedy in the Hal Roach All-Stars series, which threw together various combinations of comedians then under contract to the Roach studio. This one happens to feature them in roles roughly similar to the screen characters they later developed. Later All-Stars comedies cast them but not as a team, acting much less like what they later became. But it's a good film you don't often see unless, like me, you buy every single damned DVD of them that's released.

I have a special fondness for it because it was the first silent film of theirs I saw and I saw it the first time I went to the legendary Silent Movie Theatre on Fairfax Avenue here in Los Angeles. I thereafter became a frequent patron of the place and in ways I can't quite explain, that had a lot to do — for good or ill — with who I am today.

Do Detectives Think? is followed in this order on TCM by Putting Pants on Philip, You're Darn Tootin', Two Tars, Habeas Corpus, Big Business, Unaccustomed As We Are (so named because it was their first real "talkie"), Double Whoopee, Berth Marks, Men O'War, Perfect Day, They Go Boom!, The Hoose-Gow, Angora Love, Night Owls, Brats, Blotto, Pardon Us, Sons of the Desert, Pack Up Your Troubles, Babes in Toyland, The Devil's Brother, The Bohemian Girl and Hollywood Party (which has Laurel & Hardy in it but not much of them). The last seven of these are features and Sons of the Desert is the best of the seven if you only want to DVR one.

This, as I say, starts Monday morning. It runs through Wednesday morning and later Wednesday, they have a whole bunch o' movies based on books by Charles Dickens. The following Monday, TCM gives us another whole day of Laurel and Hardy goodies, again sparing me from having to turn on my DVD player to see my faves.

Here is a brief moment of Broadway history. It may be of special interest to those of you who watched the video of the 42nd Street musical that I embedded here a few days ago.

42nd Street opened at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York on August 25, 1980. It was produced by David Merrick, a producer who was famous (some would say infamous) for many hits, many feuds and many tales that involved him being not the nicest man in the world. Often, they involved him deliberately creating trouble to make others uncomfortable and/or to promote his shows. Some called him "The Abominable Showman."

The show was staged/directed by Gower Champion, who also had lots of hits and lots of stories of him not being too nice, though there were many who loved him and even more who considered him a great man of the theatre. He was not there for the opening night of what turned out to be his final show and his greatest hit. 42nd Street ran for 3,486 performances topping the previous holder of the "most performances" trophy, Hello, Dolly! — also directed by Gower Champion.

Champion was also not present for the last days of previews since he'd been hospitalized for cancer…and he died that morning of 8/25/80. The news was withheld from the public and also from the cast and crew at the Winter Garden.

The show was an obvious smash hit and the audience was standing and cheering and clapping through many bows at its close…and then Merrick wandered out onto the stage. He was nervous and twitchy and he didn't even think to grab a microphone as he signaled for the applause to stop so he could make an announcement. This is footage of that moment and he's barely audible.

He began, "This is a tragic night…" and the audience laughed, thinking that was Merrick's way of being funny during the huge on-stage celebration. Then he said, "I am sorry to have to report Gower Champion died."

The audience and cast were in shock. Folks who knew Champion began crying. It was very awkward until Jerry Orbach, who played the producer of the show within a show, called out to lower the curtain. Given the theme of 42nd Street, all about how "the show must go on," it was an eerily appropriate moment. Here it is but you won't be able to hear much…

That's right: Here are eight facts about the coronavirus to combat common misinformation. That's eight more than you'll get out of the current White House.

When I was a kid, one of my favorite TV shows was The Magic Land of Allakazam, a Saturday morn sensation and the reason I first got interested in magic.  It starred Master Magician Mark Wilson (he's the guy in the blue tux above) and his lovely assistant/wife Nani Darnell.  She's the lady at left.  An awful lot of guys who got interested in magic then did so because Nani was so adorable and if pulling rabbits outta hats could get you a woman like that…

The gent in the center is Bev Bergeron, better known as Rebo the Clown, co-star of that show and also, when out of make-up, one of the cleverer, funnier magicians around.  He was also Ronald McDonald for a time and spent fifteen years performing in the Diamond Horseshoe Review at Walt Disney World in Florida.

He died two days ago, capping off a lifetime of performing and delighting young and old alike.  I had the pleasure (and believe me, it was one…and an honor too) of meeting and talking with Bev a few years ago.  Rebo never spoke but he made up for it as Bev, telling jokes, talking about magic and telling stories of an amazing career.  I'm ordinarily not a fan of the circus kind of clown but in both identities, he was so full of wit and personality and a real love of making people happy, you had to love both of them.

And starting in 1943 when he was fourteen years old, right up until last Thursday, that's what he did: Make people happy.  Thank you for doing so much of that, Rebo.

A lot of obits lately and I have one more to post after this. I was a fan of David Lander's before he ever Squigged on Laverne & Shirley. He was part of a wonderful comedy troupe called The Credibility Gap which was big — but not as big as it deserved to be — beginning in the late sixties on KRLA radio here in Southern California. It consisted of David, Richard Beebe, Harry Shearer and Michael McKean. Michael was David's longtime friend and later played Lenny to his Squiggy.

Individually and as a duo, Michael and David did an awful lot of television and a number of movies. I don't remember them not being good in anything. David also did an awful lot of cartoon voice jobs, starting with (I think) supplying the voice of Jerry Lewis on the 1970 cartoon show, Will the Real Jerry Lewis Please Sit Down. In the late eighties, he began appearing as Doc Boy, the brother of Jon Arbuckle, in the prime-time animated Garfield specials.

I didn't work on those but I worked on all the daytime Garfield cartoons, none of which featured Doc Boy so we never called David for them. In 2011 when I was working on The Garfield Show for worldwide syndication, I was asked by the execs at the studio to do a few episodes with Doc Boy. We recorded the shows here in L.A. but the studio was in France.

I told the folks there that it would be no problem to write Doc Boy into some shows but I wasn't sure if we could get the fellow who'd done the voice. By this time, it was well-known than David Lander was suffering from multiple sclerosis. He'd tried to hide it for a while but eventually, it got so serious that that was not possible. He'd even written a book about it called Fall Down Laughing: How Squiggy Caught Multiple Sclerosis and Didn't Tell Nobody. It's very good but very sad and they seem to have copies of it for sale on Amazon.

The folks in France understood and suggested that roles can be recast. They're right but I felt that if David Lander was able to work, he should play the part again. This was not easy to make happen because, as I found out when I called, the Screen Actors Guild had no agent listing for David, nor could (or would) they give me his personal contact info.

I hit a few other dead ends before I thought of calling Paul Doherty, who's the head of one of the biggest agencies for voice actors, CESD Talent. He said, "No, David's not with us but I think his agent is Acme Talent." That's not the name he gave me but in light of what comes next, I thought I should disguise the real name of the agency. If there is a real Acme Talent somewhere — and there probably is — it wasn't them.

So I called the Acme Agency and the receptionist said, "No, we don't represent him." I tried some other agencies and the answer was the same.

I was running out of time and close to giving up when I chanced to talk to Paul Doherty again about something else. He asked me, "Did you ever manage to book David Lander?" I said no, Acme said they didn't represent him. Paul said, "It wouldn't surprise me if they did represent him and didn't know it." Paul is wise so I called back Acme and had the following conversation with a lady who may or may not have been the same receptionist…

HER: No, we don't represent him."

ME: Are you sure? His name's David Lander…he sometimes goes by David L. Lander and he was on the TV show, Laverne & Shirley.

HER: I'm afraid I've never heard of Laverne & Shirley, sir.

ME (after one of those "I'm older than I feel" sighs:) Maybe you've seen him around the office. He may have been in a wheelchair.

HER: I'll connect you with our Handicapped Department, sir.

That was their name for it, not mine. I was soon talking with an agent there who told me that, yes, they represented David Lander from the Laverne & Shirley show. Having multiple sclerosis isn't the only thing that can prevent an actor from getting work. Sometimes, no one knows how to find them.

I asked as delicately as I could if David's health would allow him to do a voiceover job. The agent wasn't sure and wound up taking my number and promising David would call me. I suspect the agent didn't want to say "Of course he can" in case he couldn't and I would accuse the agency of something. This way, I could hear his client on the phone and answer the "can he do it?" decision myself. An hour later, David called and he sounded fine. He did caution me though that he might take more than a few takes to get a line right. I told him, "If you keep it under a hundred, we'll be okay."

"Hey," he said. "I'm a professional and I always get it in ninety-nine or less." So I knew there was nothing wrong with his sense of humor. "But there's another problem," he said. "I don't drive and I may not have anyone who can take me to your studio."

I asked him where he lived. He lived three blocks from me. During those days I was searching for him, I'd walked past his house at least twice. I may even have been on my cellphone, asking someone if they knew how to get in touch with David Lander as I walked past his house.

So a few days later, I picked him up and took him with me to the session. This was not long before my mother passed away and the trunk of my car always had her wheelchair in it so we used it to get David in and out of the recording studio.

There was no problem with his performance. Yes, he did take four or five tries to get some of the lines right. I've worked with actors who didn't have multiple sclerosis who took six or seven or more.

Once or twice, it took a lot more and he got way more impatient with himself than he should have…but so what? We got what we needed. In fact, we wrote Doc Boy into some other episodes and had him back. If you check out his IMDB page, you'll see that a lot of cartoon producers got what they needed from him. He was real good. He just wasn't real good immediately all the time. There's a lesson here for all of us.

So as I was sitting here one minute ago, trying to figure out how to end this, I received a text message from Jason Marsden, who did the voice of Nermal and other characters on The Garfield Show. Jason wrote, "I'm sad to hear about Mr. Lander. Thanks to you, I can say I worked with him a couple of times. What a fun talent he was." Thank you for my closing paragraph, Jason. You're absolutely right. What a fun talent he was.