I raved here Sunday evening about that night's Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. A number of you who apparently don't subscribe to HBO or MAX or whatever-the-hell channel it is have written me about this episode, the rudest of whom wrote, "If Oliver's show this week is so good, why the f*ck haven't you posted it so we could all see it?" (The asterisk was his, not mine.)
My answer: Because I couldn't. And Steve Bacher, a loyal reader of this site, snooped about and found an online article that explained why…
HBO is delaying the upload of clips of "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" to YouTube in hopes of encouraging viewers to sign up for subscriptions to its streaming platform.
In a post Monday, Oliver explained that the streaming giant would hold off until Thursdays before posting the clip. "Last Week Tonight with John Oliver" airs Sundays.
"I know I usually share a link to our main story here on Mondays, but HBO has decided they're going to wait until Thursday to post them to YouTube from now on," Oliver wrote. "I hope they change their mind, but until then, you can see our piece about the Supreme Court on HBO, on MAX, and on YouTube in a few days."
So I'll post the segment when I can and those who are too impatient can go f*ck themselves or buy a subscription. I know one guy who will probably opt for the former.
Hi Mark, Here's a question for you and forgive me if you already answered it – Do you ever contribute (edit) Wikipedia or other crowd sourced online compendiums? If not, is it a question of time, a question of standards or something else?
I did for a while but I gave it up. Either I forgot how to do that or they changed the software and I couldn't figure out how to enter corrections. Since then, I've occasionally asked someone else to that for me…but most of the time, I just let it (whatever "it" is) go.
I submitted a few corrections on topics where I felt I had some authority and too often wound up on some discussion page arguing with someone who thought he knew my work better than I did.
And I'll tell you another problem I had: I was friends with a well-known but older comedian. He didn't understand just about anything about how the Internet — which for some unknown reason, I always capitalize — worked. He called me once, very upset about some bogus (according to him) "info" that had been posted on his Wikipedia page.
I went to Wikipedia, edited out the lines in question and that was that……except that by so doing, I had instilled in him the idea that I could get anything he didn't like off any page on the World Wide Web. Which of course, no one can do. Heck, I sometimes even have trouble editing this blog. But he kept calling and calling…
Here we have one of the funnier episodes (I think) of The Dick Van Dyke Show and it's built largely around my buddy, the late Lennie Weinrib. I suspect it was written around him since Lennie was an obsessive practical joker, especially on the telephone. He owned a green Rolls Royce with a phone in it back at a time when you rarely saw a green Rolls or a phone in a car.
Once in a while, he'd give me a lift in the car and I'd be a captive audience as Lennie, employing the same verbal and acting skills that made him a top voiceover, cartoon and occasional on-camera actor would "hook" someone via phone the way his character "hooks" Rob Petrie in this episode.
I happen to dislike practical jokes about as much as I dislike cole slaw and generally find them about as funny. But even I had to concede that Lennie was a master of that questionable art form…
Boy, John Oliver was good tonight. If you didn't see it, see it.
Hey, if you're bothered by that report that said Joe Biden mishandled classified documents and the Special Prosecutor declined to prosecute him because he was such a doddering old man, read this. It's a piece by journalist Marcy Wheeler and she makes a darn good case that the real reason Biden's not being prosecuted is because the charges against him are so minor. She also argues that the stuff about him being feeble are there because Special Prosecutor Robert Hur is a Republican. Special Prosecutors are always Republicans.
Allen Miller, who knows of what he speaks, sets us straight on a few theater facts…
Man of La Mancha was never "Off-Broadway" in the way we usually use the term. It opened in the ANTA Washington Square theater in November 1965 on 4th Street off the Southeast corner of Washington Square, a sort of prefab construction on land leased by NYU.
The show moved uptown in 1968 when NYU started constructing a monolithic red stone library(?). It continued on the "real" Broadway until 1971. I'm sure the 2000+ performances include the run on Washington Square.
In April 1967, our College Bowl team from Ursinus College were given free tickets to a show and picked Man of La Mancha. I think we were a bit confused by the subway ride and walk to this unconventional theater from midtown. I don't think we appreciated Jose Ferrer as Don Quixote as much as we should have. We had been indoctrinated by the sound of Kiley on the cast album. Jose Ferrer's career and celebrity peaked when we were just children.
By 1971, when my wife and I moved to Brooklyn and I worked in the Village, the ANTA theater was gone. Every great and not so great singer had to do "The Impossible Dream" until Man of La Mancha was fit for only squares.
(I, of course, Wikied the factual information to refresh my elderly, well-meaning memory.)
Well, there must be a lot of us squares around. The show keeps being revived and every time I've seen it staged — at least three times so far — the place is pretty packed and the audience seems really happy to have bought tickets. I suspect that if you can cast the right lead, the show is just about bulletproof.
I once heard Robert Morse address a class of wanna-be actors. He was asked for the best advice he could offer to someone auditioning for a musical and his answer went something like this: "Prepare a song that nobody else will be singing that day. If you open your mouth and out comes ‘The Impossible Dream,' you'll be the ninth one that day, probably not the best and none of you Don Quixotes will get the part, even if the part is Don Quixote." Thanks, Allen.
I first posted this here in August of 2009 and gave it its first encore in 2014…so it's time for another reprise of the tale of how one of my idols sorta threatened to sue me when I was barely in my teens. But first, let's kick things off with a video of that idol performing the song in question…
And now, here's the story…
This took place in 1965. I was 13 years old and attending Ralph Waldo Emerson Junior High School in West Los Angeles. Allan Sherman had a hit record out called "Crazy Downtown," which was a parody of the Petula Clark mega-hit, "Downtown."
Like Stan Freberg, MAD Magazine, Soupy Sales, Laurel and Hardy and a few others I could name, Allan Sherman was a huge influence on me. Even at that age, I was writing a lot of silly poems and song parodies…and I guess he was my second-favorite writer of the latter. (My fave was Frank Jacobs in MAD. Mr. Jacobs is the gent to whom we gave the Bill Finger Award this year at the Comic-Con International…and I'm currently lobbying to get someone to publish a book collecting Frank's fine work for that publication and to include a CD of gifted folks singing some of his better efforts.)
Anyway, what you need to know is that I was in Junior High and that Allan Sherman was kind of a hero. His son Robert was a classmate and while we weren't close friends, every now and then Robbie would tell me how his dad was going to be on some TV show or had a new album in the works. I couldn't believe that I was even that close to the guy who wrote and sang those funny records I played over and over and over.
So one month, a campus group called the Girls League decided to stage a talent show/benefit with various students and teachers performing to raise money for I-don't-recall-what-cause. The festivities were to commence with an elaborately-staged (elaborate for a show with zero budget) dance number to "Crazy Downtown." The school orchestra knew the tune and some male student who, sad to say, looked a lot like Allan Sherman would be singing the lyrics while everyone did the frug and the pony around him.
That was the plan until two days before the event. That was when Mr. Campbell, who was the school principal, received a call either from Allan Sherman or Allan Sherman's lawyer vowing to sue if Mr. Sherman's lyrics were used. The obvious assumption was that Robbie had told his father about it. Mr. Campbell explained that this was a pretty low-profile event; that the number was to be performed but twice (two shows) in a Junior High School auditorium before, collectively, less than a thousand people, and that the money was going to a worthy charity. This made no difference to the caller.
With a deep sigh, Mr. Campbell called in the organizers of the benefit and told them to drop the number. They said they couldn't drop the number. It was the opening of the show and there was no time to write and stage something else. "Well," Mr. Campbell suggested, "How about dropping the Allan Sherman lyrics and just singing the real lyrics of "Downtown?" The students argued that, creatively, the number they'd staged really cried out for silly lyrics. Mr. Campbell said, "I'm sorry but this is final. You can't use Allan Sherman's lyrics."
The students behind the show didn't want to use the real "Downtown" lyrics so one of them — a way-too-cute girl named Cady — came to me at lunchtime and said, "Hey, you're always writing funny poems and things and reading them in class. Can you write us a new set of funny lyrics to 'Downtown?'" If Cady had asked me to trisect angles, I probably would have been motivated to learn how but this request was in that small subset of things in this world that I think I can actually do. She took me over to a rehearsal for the show and I watched the number. Then the next morning, I handed her a set of parody lyrics to "Downtown" that used none of Allan Sherman's jokes or even rhymes. I no longer have a copy of what I wrote but I can recall the opening. It went…
I'm feeling low
'Cause every radio show
Keeps telling me to go…Downtown.
All of my friends
Say it's the newest of trends
The party never ends…Downtown.
And from there on, it was all about how the singer was such a terrible dancer that he didn't dare go downtown and attempt to join in the fun. I do remember being pretty proud that I rhymed "fugue" with "frug" and that I got in a reference to Mr. Campbell, whose name I happily decided rhymed with "gamble." But what I really remember were a couple of big tingles 'n' thrills, first when I heard my lyrics being sung on a stage in what seemed almost a semi-professional fashion (a first for me) and then getting some decent laughs at the actual performances (another first).
And then I remember the summons, a few days later, to the office of Mr. Campbell. I didn't know what it was about but I knew I couldn't possibly be in any real trouble. My entire time in school, I never got in any real trouble. This was about as close as I ever came.
Mr. Campbell had someone on the phone when I walked in. My memory is that it was Allan Sherman himself but as I think back, I'm wondering if it wasn't Sherman's attorney who, in turn, had his client in his office or on another line. In any case, Mr. Sherman had heard that most or all of his lyrics had been performed at the benefit and he was going to sue Emerson Junior High, win, tear the school down and put up a Von's Market on the site…or something like that. He was also going to sue all the students involved, including whoever it was who, he insisted, had just "changed a few words" of what he'd written, hoping he [Sherman] wouldn't catch on that his lyrics had been used. I guess that meant me.
Cady and some other Girls League officers were in the office already and they'd explained eleven times that I had written completely different lyrics that had not employed a syllable of Mr. Sherman's work. The person on the other end of the phone refused to believe that.
So it came down to me reciting my lyrics — which I remembered in full then even if I can't today — and Mr. Campbell repeating them, line by line to either Allan Sherman or to a lawyer who was, in turn, repeating them to Allan Sherman. They didn't sound particularly clever that way but eventually, my hero was convinced and he agreed to withdraw his threat. I wish I could report that he also said, "Hey, whoever wrote those may have a future in this business" but no such compliment was voiced.
That was pretty much the end of the story except that it took a while before I could listen to Allan Sherman without getting a tight feeling in my tummy. Years later, I met some of Sherman's associates and learned that I was in good company; that though generally a decent guy, Allan was known to threaten to sue waiters if his soup was lukewarm. Despite that, I still love his work and can probably sing 90% of everything he wrote from memory. That's right. I can remember his lyrics but not my own.
Incidentally: A few years later at University High School, I was called upon again to write last-minute lyrics for a talent show. Students in this one were performing a number of recent hits. The faculty advisor decided that some of the lyrics of these songs, which were played non-stop on the radio, were too "suggestive" to be sung by high school students. I had to "clean up" the lyrics to a number of tunes, including "Never My Love" (a hit of the day for The Association), "Young Girl" (Gary Puckett and the Union Gap) and even the Doors' immortal "Light My Fire." In the last of these, I had to take out the part about lighting the guy's fire.
I did, and the revised lyrics passed inspection by the faculty advisor so the show could go on. But during the actual performance, as all the singers had agreed among themselves, they abandoned my laundered versions and sang the real lyrics. This struck me as the proper thing to do.
We all kept waiting for the faculty advisor to stop the proceedings or haul all the singers out to be shot…but if she noticed, she decided to pretend she didn't. In later years, writing for TV shows, I often employed the same trick of feigned compliance…and you'd be amazed how often it worked. The things you learn in high school…
And I can recall when that phrase was synonymous with watching cartoon shows…
My pal Bob Elisberg writes to inform/remind me that…
…though the judgement against Trump was officially for $355 million, when interest was included, it's been reported as $453 – which is pretty close to that "half a billion" you noted in an earlier post. (And the interest keeps accruing until it's paid off, even if he appeals.)
Yeah. I wonder if there will be many or even any Trump supporters who will say, "I'll donate to trying to put him back in the White House but not to paying off fines and legal fees for criminal actions." He seems to be doing a pretty good job of convincing folks that all of his legal problems are just ginned-up Election Interference against the man who used to lead his rallies in chants to lock up Hillary.
Changing Subjects: I got one (and only one) e-mail this A.M. from someone who said that I erred; that when they clicked on the video embed I said was a scene from Man of La Mancha, they instead got a rerun of Laraine Newman Hanging With Doctor Z. In 15+ years of video embeds here, I've only made that kind of mistake once and I knew it within minutes because I suddenly got 70 e-mails pointing it out.What it usually means when you see the wrong video is that you need to flush your browser. If you don't know how to do such a thing, this page will tell you what you need to know.
Changing Subjects One Last Time: I can't be the only Facebook user who's suddenly seeing dozens of posts of photos of women who are so beautiful and physically desirable that you suspect A.I. (or at least, industrialist-strength Photoshopping) has been employed.
These ladies all look approximately the same, they're all posing with and cross-promoting each other, they all have breasts the size of the Louisiana Purchase and most of their accounts are clearly the work of one person or agency. So what's the deal here? Is someone just phishing for info on anyone who subscribes to their feeds or is there something more nefarious afoot?
Sorry I've been too busy today to post anything…and that I'm too busy this evening to post much more than this and maybe a video link if I have one formatted. Hope it was a much better day for you than it was for Donald Trump. Actually, the $350 million in fines he was ordered to pay was less than a lot of legal forecasters were forecasting so maybe he got off lightly.
I am kinda hooked on the (relatively) new game show called The Floor. It's not the kind of show you can fully appreciate if you tune in on Week 5. You need to watch from Show 1 and follow along in sequence. If your source of television will allow you to do this, give it a try. It's an interesting mix of trivia and strategy.
And that's all I have time to write tonight. I'll make it up to you but maybe not right away.
Richard Kiley sings the big hit song from the musical, Man of La Mancha on The Ed Sullivan Show for February 20, 1966. The show opened off-Broadway on November 22, 1965 to, legend has it, great reviews but not the greatest business. After this appearance on Ed's show, the box office picked way up allowing the show to move to Broadway the following May. It ran there for a staggering 2,328 performances…
What I wrote here yesterday about how you shouldn't infer anything if I don't write an obit about someone who has passed prompted a couple of messages like this one from Jeff Wasserman…
You had mentioned that you'd get around to commenting on Steve Ditko when he passed but I don't recall you doing so. You and I were kids no doubt highly influenced by Steve's forceful story telling and would always have much to say about him.
Yes, I said I'd write about Mr. Ditko here. No, I never did. A few of you figured out that that was because I'd been asked (and agreed) to sit for a deposition on behalf of the Ditko family in their legal action — since settled — against Disney/Marvel.
What I would have written (and may yet some day) would have included my opinion that Steve Ditko was one of the ten-or-so great creative talents in the kind of comics he did. His work was usually quite brilliant and quite popular and I doubt I'll hear from anyone who wants to argue the point.
I have somewhat less respect for Ditko the Philosopher and many of his stated principles. And I really don't understand how someone takes a vow of silence about his career, refuses all interviews, finally writes a little many years later, then expresses shock and outrage that the history of his collaborations with Stan Lee has been written Stan's way. Gee, I wonder how that happened.
I corresponded with Ditko for a few years…until he didn't like something I wrote. In 1970, my then-partner Steve Sherman and I spent a day and a half with him hearing his versions of Marvel History and I cannot stop wishing he'd let us record and publish — or let anyone ever record and publish what he told us then when his memories were fresh. It would have helped constituents like Jack Kirby, Wally Wood, Don Heck and others who never got their due.
People have a right to not stand up for themselves but I don't respect not standing up for others. One of the places I learned that was from the first Spider-Man story…the one drawn by Steve Ditko.
I'm kinda busy with something I'll tell you about in a few days. I will soon be posting at my normal rate again.
Reportedly, the judge in the civil fraud trial of the Trump family is going to announce a decision this Friday — how much money Donald and Sons will have to shell out. Pundits are estimating it'll be over half a billion dollars — that's Billion with a "B" — so the tirades oughta get even less rational. I'd feel sorry for the guy if I thought that (a) the amount was unwarranted and (b) Trump has at some time in his life, even when he was under ten, ever felt sorry for anyone but himself.
I need to remind readers of this blog that when someone in the field of comic books or strips dies and I don't write an obituary about them, that doesn't mean I hated them or thought their work was insignificant or anything of the sort. It might mean that I never met them and/or don't have anything to say about them that others aren't saying with more knowledge or eloquence.
Posted on Wednesday, February 14, 2024 at 11:14 AM
Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone explains why the Highest Court in the land (not counting Judge Judy's) is unlikely to rule that Donald Trump has immunity from anything more serious than being voted off Survivor — and maybe not even that…
I really enjoyed Jon Stewart's return to The Daily Show and was unbothered by his main thesis, which was that Joe Biden is too old to hold The Most Important Job In The World for four more years. I don't disagree.
But I just think Biden would be a too-old president doing his best for America whereas Donald Trump would be a too-old, too-psychotic president doing his best for Donald Trump and no one else. Between the two men, it's an easy choice but wouldn't almost all of us rather have two other real options?
It's not impossible, I tell myself, that one or both of those men won't be on our November ballots…but don't ask me who'd tag in for either or how the substitution(s) could come about.
The lovely Laraine Newman is Hanging With Doctor Z, who sounds suspiciously like Dana Gould. Thanks to longtime pal Marc Wielage for recommending the link on which you are about to click…
