I'm kind of intrigued by this guy (this Pillow Guy) Mike Lindell. He reminds me of certain folks I've observed or encountered in life who had loads of money, insane ideas and the willingness to write a check to anyone who indulged their whims and wishes, no matter how looney. When Howard Hughes was sitting naked in a bed in a blacked-out hotel room, ordering his well-paid employees to preserve his urine in Mason Jars, none of them said, "Uh, Mr. Hughes, I don't think you want to do that."
Here, Zachary Petrizzo writes about Lindell's recent rally in South Dakota where he expected 30,000 people to show up in a hall that could accommodate 3,200…which turned out okay because only 1,500 showed up. Interesting that his opening act was Joe Piscopo. That was probably a real good booking for Joe.
I've been watching CNN's The Story of Late Night as it attempts to cram nearly seventy years of TV history into six hours, each interrupted by ten minutes of commercials. You could do six hours just on Jack Paar and not say half of what oughta be said. It's like a lot of documentaries I've seen lately or even been in. You can almost hear the filmmakers saying to each other, "Wouldn't it have been great if we'd done this fifteen years ago when 85% of the people we'd like to have interviewed were alive?"
That said, they have a lot of great clips. Wish some of them were longer. And I'll have more to say as the series progresses.
My favorite online Food Explainer Guy, Adam Ragusea, tells us all about Vidalia Onions. This video is way more interesting than you'd think a video about Vidalia Onions would be. Check it out…
BuzzR is that cable channel that most of us have that reruns old game shows. On Sunday, May 16, they're rerunning an episode of Password from 1966 with four celebrity players: Lee Remick, Peter Lawford, Audrey Meadows and Stephen Sondheim. That's right: Stephen Sondheim. Sure, he can rhyme all those words but can he guess them with Lee Remick giving him the clues? The schedule says it airs at 3 PM Eastern Time, which might mean 12 PM on your cable or 3 PM or just about anything.
I make little notes about topics I want to write about on this blog and often when I get busy, I discover some other blog I follow has beaten me to one of them, saying much of what I was going to say. F'rinstance, my friend Ken Levine wrote about Rolling Stone's list of 100 Best Sitcoms of All Time.
As with all such lists, a lot depends on what criteria you use and what you decide qualifies at all. To the latter point, I agree with Ken that The Simpsons and other animated shows probably belong on a separate list. The criteria is a little muddier. The list is called "100 Best Sitcoms of All Time" but Ken and some of the selectors for Rolling Stone seem to think that means "Best, Most Influential, Beloved and Enduring Sitcoms," which is not quite the same thing.
I'd put Car 54, Where Are You? in the Top 20 if all we're considering is "best" but I don't think it was influential, beloved or enduring. If we were weighting for "beloved," I'd put The Andy Griffith Show in the Top Three and if you don't believe me, go visit the Andy Griffith Museum in Mt. Airy, North Carolina (as I did) and talk to the people who make regular pilgrimages to the place. There's no comparable museum for Friends or All in the Family or even my favorite, The Dick Van Dyke Show. (If I could, I'd open a museum for Seinfeld and I'd have a lunchroom that serves great soup but won't let you have any of it.)
Anyway, my list would be a lot more like Ken's than Rolling Stone's but I'd have The Phil Silvers Show (aka Sgt. Bilko) in the Top Ten (Rolling Stone has it at #70!!!) and somewhere on mine, you'd see Married With Children, The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis, The Addams Family and He & She.
And did Rolling Stone omit Amos & Andy because they didn't think it was funny or because it was Amos & Andy?
I'm a big fan of the stage musical of Al Capp's Li'l Abner and of the movie that was made of the stage musical. The film was released on December 11, 1959 and a month later — on January 12, 1960 — three of its stars and Mr. Capp appeared on CBS on The Red Skelton Show for an episode called "Clem Goes to Dogpatch." That's "Clem" as in "Clem Kaddidlehopper," one of Skelton's recurring characters.
The three stars were Peter Palmer (Li'l Abner), Leslie Parrish (Daisy Mae) and Stubby Kaye (Marryin' Sam). There were two songs from the show and movie: Palmer sang "If I Had My Druthers" and Kaye did a nice rendition of "Jubilation T. Cornpone" with Skelton's dancers who played the population of Dogpatch. Ms. Parrish didn't sing, perhaps because her singing voice was dubbed for the movie and the show didn't want to go to the trouble of arranging for that assist. No Stupefyin' Jones or Mammy Yokum or anyone else.
The whole thing looked kinda cheap but it's nice to see more of those actors in those roles. Peter Palmer really was so perfectly cast. And you get to see Al Capp playing the role of a decent human being, which for him was kind of a stretch…
My great pal Christine Pedi favors us with a medley from Les Misérables as it would be performed by the great ladies of the theater. With Seth Rudetsky at the piano…
Lucian K. Truscott IV has an article up that's an interesting way to look at the Republican Party. I don't agree with all of it but I agree with some of it — mostly in the section I shall excerpt here…
Pundits are fond of saying stuff like, "Republicans used to stand for something." What they're talking about is an imaginary day in an imaginary past when the Republican Party "stood for" low taxes, small government, reducing the deficit and something called a "strong national defense," as if there had ever been a countervailing position by Democrats or anyone else that wanted a weak national defense.
It was all bullshit, the original Big Lie. They didn't stand for "low taxes." They wanted to lower the taxes of one group, wealthy people, while keeping taxes comparatively high on everyone else. They didn't stand for "small government." The size of the government grew in every single Republican administration going back at least to Eisenhower. Richard Nixon created an entirely new department of the national government, the Environmental Protection Agency, where there had been none before. George W. Bush created another, much larger division of government, the Department of Homeland Security, and bequeathed to it a budget in the tens of billions of dollars.
They didn't believe in "cutting the deficit." The deficit has grown by hundreds of billions in every single Republican administration, and under the last one, Donald Trump's administration, it grew by more than $2 trillion. As for a "strong national defense," the budget for the Department of Defense has grown steadily as a percentage of GDP under Republican and Democratic administrations alike without interruption since the end of World War II. We spend more on "national defense" than the rest of the world combined, making it hard to imagine that our national defense could possibly get any stronger no matter which party is in power.
Mr. Truscott loses me a little when he gets to the part about what it was Trump tapped into. But give it a read and see which part, if any, you like.
Another rendition of the "Meet the Flintstones" theme. This one is by Ray Brown, one of the greatest bass players in all of jazz. He played a lot for Ella Fitzgerald (married her, too) and worked with everyone who mattered who made his kind of music. This is only the Flintstones theme at the beginning and end but what's in the middle is pretty damned good…
It's Mothers' Day and I don't seem to have a story in mind about my mother than I haven't told before…so here's a story about my mother than I did tell before. It's from Mothers' Day of 2013 on this blog and it's the story about the tuna fish. I'm sure I have other stories about my mother still locked away inside me and one of these days, I'll dig deep and find a few. But today, you get a rerun of the one about the tuna fish…
Folks are writing me to note it's Mother's Day and to ask if that makes me miss my mother who left at least this planet last October. No more than yesterday did or tomorrow will. We were never big on holidays in our family. We kinda went through life as if every day was a holiday. I was just as likely to give my mother a gift on any day as I was on Mother's Day. I was less likely to take her out to dinner on Mother's Day because she hated going to restaurants when they were crowded.
I felt so bad for her the last decade or so as she suffered with endless hospitalizations and diminishing vision that I have trouble missing her from that period. And it was during that period that I got through missing the woman she was before that. I do have one lingering void. Most days between 5 PM and 6 PM, I get that feeling that there was something I was supposed to do and I've forgotten to do it. Then I realize: If I didn't see her that day, I always phoned her between 5 and 6. That's what I keep forgetting to do, now that I can't.
I learned a lot about my mother while cleaning out her house before I sold it. I also learned a few things about me. One of the things she had stashed away in a drawer was a Woody Woodpecker comic book story I wrote and drew with crayola at age 7 — or, as we might put it, 12 years before I was writing the real Woody Woodpecker comic book. I also found my first typewriter — the one she got for me with many books of Blue Chip Stamps. I was about 15 when we picked it up and I pounded away on it until I was about 22. It was a manual with keys so unresponsive that I couldn't touch-type on it. I had to type with my index fingers and space with my thumbs. The ribbon on it still seems to be good but my index fingers aren't.
Neither of my parents ever understood my career but they trusted that I did. That was one of the best things they did for me. Another was that they pretty much let me find my own way in the world. I never got a lecture about "the birds and the bees" — or much of anything else for that matter. My father was too inhibited (I guess you'd say) to deliver a father-son lesson about sex so one day, long after another male parent might have seen his duty and done it, my mother sat me down. She said, "Dad and I were talking about whether you two need to have a discussion about sex and things like that."
I said, "I think I've figured it all out."
She said, "We figured you would." Then she added, "Dad will be very happy when I tell him he doesn't have to do it."
She was a great organizer. Several years there, we volunteered our home as a polling place and my mother supervised the voting and, before voting machines came in, the actual counting-by-hand of the ballots. She also ran programs for my school and did volunteer work for charities, and some election years she'd get involved at the local Democratic Headquarters. But her greatest bit of organizing may have been her management of The Tuna Fish.
We had a neighbor who had a son who worked down in San Pedro for a company that processed tuna and other fish, canning it for restaurant sales. They didn't output small cans of the stuff. They were all huge — about a foot in diameter, six to eight inches high…and unlabelled. That is, there'd be no label on the can. Apparently, at some point on the assembly line, if a can lost its label, anyone who worked there could just take it home…and the son knew which ones were tuna and which weren't. Whenever he went to visit his mother, he'd bring her one even though she didn't like tuna. Is that a son or not? "Here, Mom…here's another ton of that stuff you won't eat!"
So she'd give it to us and my mother would direct the distribution of its contents to seven or eight neighbors. I mean, we liked tuna but you can only have it so often. And there was no point freezing it since more was always on the way.
Artist's Re-creation
My mother would pick a date a few weeks in the future…say, August 3rd. She would then phone each of these selected neighbors and inform them that August 3 would be a Tuna Day; that on that day, Mark would be bringing them a free supply of tuna so don't, for example, serve your family a tuna-noodle casserole the night before. Everyone gratefully marked Tuna Day on their calendars.
Come Tuna Day, it would be my job to open the can. This was not easy as they were too big to fit in my mother's electric can opener so I had to use the manual kind. It took quite some time. Once I finally got the lid off, my mother would spoon tuna into eight or nine plastic containers, including a big one for us, and store them in our refrigerator, which she'd already rearranged so there'd be ample space. Then she would phone each neighbor to ask, "Are you ready for tuna?" This was to prevent me from carrying a container to a house down the block, finding no one home and then having to carry it back. We decided that between the hot sun and the volume of stray cats around, it would not be a good idea for me to leave it on the porch.
If the tuna recipients were there and primed to receive tuna, she'd dispatch me on my appointed rounds…and the neighbors would be very happy. A few insisted on tipping me a buck or two, then they'd take it in and commence making tuna sandwiches, tuna salads, tuna croquettes, tuna casseroles and such. One lady told us she made tuna chow mein…to which I say, "Hey, why not?"
Then one memorable Tuna Day, I got the lid off and the contents looked odd. I thought at first we'd gotten a bad batch and I asked my mother to inspect it. She did, and it took her a minute or two to come to the shocking realization…
It wasn't tuna. It was salmon.
She laughed and I laughed and she began calling the neighbors and telling them, "Mark will be right over but it's not tuna this time. It's salmon." They were all fine with that and they proceeded to make salmon sandwiches, salmon salads, salmon croquettes, salmon casseroles…and that one woman made salmon chow mein, to which I again say, "Hey, why not?"
The following Tuna Day, I opened the can muttering, "I wonder what it'll be this time? Tuna? Salmon? Anchovies? Tennis balls?" I think I'd have preferred tennis balls to anchovies. It turned out to be tuna and when my mother called Mrs. Hollingsworth down the street to tell her tuna was on its way, Mrs. Hollingsworth said, "Oh…don't you have any salmon?"
A lot of public places I visited pre-Pandemic — theaters, restaurants, event centers, etc. — are opening up and I find myself with a small but worth-pondering quandary. Permit me to explain it in five points with a "but" in there…
I want to see these places become profitable again and make up some of the income they lost while we were all isolating, sheltering and Zooming.
And a feeling of normality — that we've weathered the worst of The Pandemic — would be nice. But…
There are still folks out there who haven't been vaccinated and have either convinced themselves via-pseudoscience that they don't need it or that the whole coronavirus thing was always a sham…
…and I did find during my 423 days (so far) of avoiding those public places that I don't need them as much as I once did. I've come to prefer letting Instacart go to Costco for me and doing certain kinds of meetings on Zoom.
And finally, there's this: These places are reopening under strict protocols — masks worn here, no gathering in certain spots, limits on attendance and even how many can use the Men's Room at the same time even though there are urinals aplenty. And a lot of them just plain don't sound like a lot of fun for now. I shall expand upon this…
I just read the list of precautions being taken in a certain movie theater I sometimes patronize. I'd like the place to thrive and I certainly support all necessary safety precautions for both visitors and staff. I even support erring on the side of caution and adopting the more onerous ones, just in case. But after I read that list, I thought, "I don't want to go see a movie there." When I read almost any article about how Las Vegas has changed — what's still closed, all that has had to be altered — I feel I can wait for a lot more normality before going there.
I just read this article about how safe air travel now is and isn't. I would certainly fly if there was a real good reason but I don't think I'll be flying just because I feel like going somewhere for pleasure or enjoyment. Like I used to.
So there's that quandary: I want to support normality and businesses that have been hurting. I just don't really want to go to New York or dine in a restaurant right now. How am I going to handle this? Well, sometimes it helps me to write about something on my blog, then go back a week or so later and re-read what I wrote. It sometimes gives me a clearer view of the situation. I'll let you know if it does this time.
I was a big fan of National Lampoon, a magazine published from 1970 until…well, its last known issue was published in 1998 but the last few years, it bounced around between handlers and it came out every so often and didn't often resemble the National Lampoon. If you subtract those years and the first, rough months when it looked like something done by high school students, you had about twenty years of some of the sharpest humor writing and cartooning ever done in this country. A lot of its contributors went on to be very important in TV, movies, publishing and other lucrative fields.
One of my favorite NatLamp contributors was the fine cartooning person, B.K. Taylor. Loved everything he drew…for that magazine and for other clients. The guy turned up everywhere, even in Jim Henson's employ where he designed a lot of well-known Muppets. And he drew tons of funny advertising. And he drew kids' books. And he wrote for TV. And he worked for Disney. And he just was everywhere. Nice fellow, too.
His work for National Lampoon, including The Appletons and Timberland Tales has now been collected into a very handsome volume from our friends at Fantagraphics. Here is where you can order a copy of I Think He's Crazy. You'll be glad you did.
