Briefly Noted…
Earlier today, Albert Brooks tweeted…
Why the F are 911 calls public? Peoples worst moments of their lives should be their own.
I agree.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and thirty-three in a series…
Tonight’s Political Musing
Back when the O.J. Simpson murder case began to dominate the news, I made what turned out to be a smart decision. I make plenty of the other kind but I don’t like to talk about them too often. In this case, I made one of the smart ones. I said to myself, “Self, this matter is going to go on for a long time. There will be books and specials and non-stop news coverage and they may even televise the trial and that could last a couple of months. If you start following it, you’ll get hooked and you’ll waste hundreds of hours of your life on it.”
And I was right: I did waste a lot of hours of my life on it because I did find it fascinating and I did start watching specials and reading books…but I didn’t waste as many as I could have. The smart thing I did was to join the proceedings late. I just didn’t pay attention to the first few months of it. I was like a friend of mine who loves basketball but doesn’t start watching most games until at least after Half-Time because, as he puts it, “That’s a perfectly fine place to start watching.”
I may not have enough sense to actually do this but I’m starting to feel this way about the presidential election.
Election day isn’t until November 6. That’s 284 days from now. I don’t know about you but I can’t take 284 days of this…and we aren’t even to the point where I have a Republican ticket to root against. There have been years when there was a G.O.P. ticket that might have gotten my vote. In ’88 if that George Bush had ditched Dan Quayle and the racist and dishonest “Willie Horton” ads, I might have gone that way. This year, I don’t see any such possibilities on the horizon so for me, the decision process is effectively over.
But nine more months and ten days of this? Gingrich and Romney are throwing feces at each other — and if they’ll do that to other Republicans, you can just imagine what they’ll hurl at Obama when they have their entire party unified behind them and Fox News isn’t still wondering who to take to the prom.
To unseat an incumbent, it’s never enough to say, “I’d do a better job.” It has to be, “If we don’t get rid of him, the world will explode.” No matter how much the economy and foreign relations might improve, we have to be told that Armageddon is at hand. Even if I had a dead-on, never-wrong crystal ball right now that could show me an Obama triumph, I’m not sure I can listen to the doom ‘n’ gloom forecasts ’til 11/6/12.
I’m also not sure it’s humanly possible to ignore the circus when it comes to town — and it’s here, defecating elephants and all.
Anyway, that’s how I’m feeling about it tonight. Tomorrow, I may find myself enjoying the show. I just sometimes wish my TiVo had a “Skip ahead four months” button on it.
The Real Divine Ms. M
Here’s an article about Mary Tyler Moore, who’s about to receive the big award from the Screen Actors Guild. As I’ve mentioned here before, I had one of my first crushes as a lad on Ms. Moore. I still recall and tremble a bit at that first moment I saw her in person when I went to see The Dick Van Dyke Show being filmed. It wasn’t just that she was there, right in front of me less than six feet away. It was the first time I saw her in color.
I’ve only met her once and in the grand tradition of Rob Petrie, I managed to be quite awkward and to actually step on her foot. I actually did that. Remember how in the flashback to how Rob and Laura first met and Rob stepped on her foot and broke it? Well, I stepped on Mary Tyler Moore’s foot — though thankfully not enough to do any harm. It was at an in-house screening of a project I worked on for her company, MTM — an attempt to turn the character from Rhoda, Carlton the Doorman, into an animated superstar. When I tried to get a seat in the screening room, I had to squeeze past her to get to an empty one and — whoops! — right on her foot. I apologized for about the next ninety minutes, then I felt the need to apologize for apologizing so much.
Her body of work speaks for itself, of course, as does her wisdom in making (for the most part) pretty sound career choices. The Mary Tyler Moore Show worked in large part because Mary was willing to play straight for others on the show. She let Ted Knight be the funny one. She let Ed Asner be the funny one. She let Valerie Harper and Cloris Leachman be the funny ones and so on. I would guess that of shows that fail which have the star’s name or character name in the title, a good 75% have crashed and burned because the star wanted to be the whole show. Some of them do this even when they know in their heads that it’s wrong. You point out to them that Jack Benny let his supporting players shine, as did Andy Griffith and Mary Tyler Moore. No one was ever more successful than Jack Benny, Andy Griffith and Mary Tyler Moore. They acknowledge the truth of that, then they point to the script and ask, “How come this guy has more funny lines than me?” The few times Mary’s ever failed — her variety show, for instance — I think the problem was that she or her managers forgot that.
I’m long over my crush on her. I think it ended around half past Julie Newmar. But I still have great admiration for Mary Tyler Moore. I would have told her that that day at the screening room if I hadn’t stepped on her foot. (Thanks to Anand Kandaswamy for telling me about the article.)
Today’s Video Link
Two weeks ago, we brought you a video of the wonderful Christine Pedi as Liza Minnelli. Here’s the sequel…
Recommended Reading
Fred Kaplan, who may be the only person in America who actually reads our defense budget, says that the proposed cuts do not go far enough. When do they ever?
My Tweets for 2012-01-27
- Newt's changed his mind about going to the Moon. He's decided it's too dark at night so he wants to build a colony on the Sun. #
- Newt wants to build a permanent U.S. base on the Moon. Hey, it's not like we don't have money to spend on playing Spaceman. #
- Bill Gates and Warren Buffett want to raise taxes on the super-rich. Shame on them for waging class warfare against themselves. #
Robert Hegyes, R.I.P.
Sad to hear of the death (by heart attack at age 60) of Robert Hegyes, who played Juan Luis Pedro Phillipo de Huevos Epstein on Welcome Back, Kotter. My partner Dennis Palumbo and I put in a season as Story Editors on that series and also wrote a Love Boat episode in which Bobby was, by his own admission, grossly miscast. In a way, he was miscast as Epstein, too. The role as envisioned was that of a big, doesn’t-know-his-own-strength dumb guy but when Bobby auditioned for one of the other roles (Barbarino, I imagine), the producers liked him so much that they changed Epstein to make him more like Hegyes. It proved to be a wise move. Audiences loved him.
I have no bad stories about Bobby Hegyes. I don’t think I’d tell them just now if I did but honestly, I have none. He was very dedicated to the work and very adept at dealing with the last minute script rewrites we threw at the cast. There was much tension around that series and grand feuds and arguments. None of that involved Bobby.
I ran into him a few times after I left the show, including one time outside a theater where I’d just seen him play Chico Marx to Gabe Kaplan’s Groucho. He was a darn good Chico there…and to some extent on Kotter, as well. I do recall him telling me that he was less interested in acting than he was in writing and directing, and I was glad to see he got to do a lot behind the camera, as well as in front. He was good in both places and a very nice guy, as well.
Today’s Political Comment
Opponents of Gay Marriage often whip out the following argument: “If we say it’s all right for two men to marry then why not three men? Or two men and one woman? Or fifteen people?” That always strikes me as one of those “we can’t make a good case so let’s make a stupid one” arguments.
Most “slippery slope” arguments are like that. My neighbor has a dog. I don’t like dogs but I can’t argue for a dog ban based on that so I try slippery-sloping it: “If we let anyone who wants a dog have one then what’s to stop my neighbor from having a rabid coyote? Or fifty disease-carrying pumas that will kill our children?” Back when there was a debate in this country about lowering the voting age from 21 to 18, all some opponents could come up with was “If we lower the age to 18 then why not to 17? Then 16-year-olds will demand the vote, then 15 and before you know it, we’ll have three-year-olds voting! Then embryos!”
There are, I will concede, some legit arguments of this nature…cases where doing X is likely to lead to Y. But most of the time, the principle is that if you can’t gin up a reality-based thesis, you invent one based on something that’s not apt to follow.
Jay Michaelson discusses the one where they leap from Same-Sex Wedlock to polygamy…or as he calls it, polyamory. He thinks we don’t know enough about multiple-partner relationships to say if they’re at all in the same category as same-sex ones. I think it doesn’t matter much until such time as there’s a real outcry to consider legalizing group marriages.
Great Photos of Stan Laurel and/or Oliver Hardy
Number one hundred and thirty-two in a series…
Feed Me
I am informed by a couple of folks that the RSS feed for this site is not working properly, at least not in Google Reader. I would ask my tech-savvy webmaster to get right on this except that my webmaster is me and I ain’t so tech-savvy about RSS feeds and syndication and other stuff like that. I’ve fiddled with a few of them over the years before deciding that it was more organic and proper to just go to each site I like individually and read them on their premises.
Before I start trying to educate myself enough to fix this problem, I thought I’d ask: Is there anyone reading this who knows RSS and knows WordPress and can advise me what to do? For that matter, is there some other kind of syndication feed I should be offering here?
Today’s Video Link
Jim Henson’s first TV show was a five minute show called Sam and Friends that aired twice daily on WRC-TV, which was the NBC affiliate in Washington, D.C. The series lasted from May 9, 1955 to December 15, 1961 so he did a lot of them but only a handful of episodes have survived. One that has is this one that we present in its almost-entirety…
As in many episodes, the big feature is the puppets “lip-syncing” to a record — in this case, Stan Freberg’s 1953 spoof of “C’est Si Bon.” The Henson character doing the lead vocal was named Moldy Hay and the two back-up singers were called Hank and Frank. Don’t ask me which one is Hank and which one is Frank, and stay tuned after the song for a word about Esskay Franks…
