Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didn't think
of
myself as a potential politician when I got out of college. I went to
work
in neighborhoods, working with Catholic churches in poor neighborhoods in
Chicago, trying to figure out how people could get a little bit of help.
And I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of
Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now.
Because my working assumption was when push comes to shove, all too often
folks in elected office, they're looking for themselves and not looking
out for the folks who put them there; that there are too many compromises;
that the special interests have too much power; they just got too much
clout; there's too much big money washing around.
And I decided finally to get involved because I realized if I wasn't
willing to step up and be true to the things I believe in, then the system
wouldn't change.
My friend Brian sent me an article about the
new Gilligan's
Island movie. But before I read it, I came up with my own dream cast.
Gilligan - Will Ferrell
The Skipper - Chevy Chase
Mr. Howell - Steve Martin
Mrs. Howell - Angela Lansbury
Ginger - RuPaul
Mary-Anne - Michelle Trachtenberg (from "Mercy")
The Professor - Stephen Colbert
Got a better idea? Send me an e-mail!
(Er, but put "Gilligan's
Island" in the subject line...) :)
I'd also been thinking Steve Martin for the Skipper -- or maybe Vincent
D'Onofrio?
In an act that should qualify him for the brilliant editors hall of fame,
Dan Walsh discovered that if all traces of Jim Davis's lazy,
lasagna-scarfing cat were expunged from his own comic strip, Garfield
became a funnier, much darker series, about a desperately lonely,
self-loathing man's existential despair.
Walsh started posting his
altered
strips at garfieldminusgarfield.net.
And in an act that definitely
qualifies him for the good sport hall of fame, Davis not only didn't sue
him but approved of the project...
If Samuel Beckett had been a strip cartoonist, he might've produced
something like this.
Barack Obama - interrupted by gobbling - pardoned a turkey before
Thanksgiving in a ceremony at the White House. But he
also revealed the secret history of the ceremony.
"I'm told Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson actually ate their turkeys...
President Kennedy was even given a turkey with a sign around its
neck that said, 'Good Eatin', Mr. President.'"
"You can't fault them for that. That's a good-looking bird."
"Well, Bret came down to Hartford and we talked it over, and then Bret
wrote it while I played billiards, but of course I had to go over it to
get the dialect right.
Bret never did know anything about dialect."
Twain's literary executor, Albert Paine, records that Twain's
statement is
unfair, and in fact both men "worked on the play, and worked hard."
Twain missed its opening, but sent a humorous telegram to be read during
the curtain call.
I have prepared two speeches -- one to deliver in event of failure of
the
play, and the other if successful. Please tell me which I shall send.
Losing the gig was another blow to Lennie, though far from the biggest.
Larger problems persisted in his life and a few years later, he decided he
needed to change that life. He sold his jade green Rolls Royce and his
mansion in Hancock Park and spent the rest of his life in peace and love
with a newly-started family in Chile. That's right: Chile. He used to
phone me at least once a week to chat and tell jokes, and he was obviously
very happy there. He passed away in 2006.
Ironically, Hanna-Barbera replaced him with Don Messick, who was
already
also doing the voice of Scooby Doo.
The band's name "was inspired by the poem Mungojerrie and
Rumpelteazer,
from T. S. Eliot's Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats" (according to
Wikipedia).
"Farrah Fawcett was the perfect practitioner of that most prized of
American feminine arts: that of semi-wholesomeness... She had an utterly
American sense of openness and fun, with a
smile that suggested that life was fundamentally good and full of promise,
that anything could happen (and that a few really fun things certainly
would).
Arts and Letters Daily linked to an
essay by an editor at Forbes about how Farrah's famous '70s poster
affected a young boy's school in India. ("That one poster did more for
America's image abroad -- and for a sturdy Amerophilia -- than all the
U.S. embassies and State Department initiatives of the time put
together...)
Nathan Lane (from "The Producers") will play Gomez,
and who's playing Morticia? Bebe Neuwirth (from "Chicago").
I just found out that their making a musical out of The Addams
Family. Their daughter Wednesday is now turning 18, and the family has
to deal with her coming of age...
Q: What was the first movie ever released on Blu-ray DVD?
A: Charlie's Angels II: Full Throttle
Somehow this Memorial Day, while everyone was watching McG's
Terminator: Salvation, I ended up watching the director's
previous
summer
blockbuster from 2003.
Mr. Spock says it again in the new Star Trek movie. But MTV has
discovered what
William Shatner's dialogue would've been. To convince his younger
self that a friendship would bloom between Spock and Kirk, Leonard Nimoy
delivers
a recording from the future that Captain Kirk made before his death in
Star Trek VII.
"...I want to tell you how much you've meant to me — and how amazing
it was that we had all these adventures together."
It was to be played as a voiceover during the final scenes as young Kirk
assumes his first command of the starship Enterprise.
When O'Reilly listed the Chicago Sun-Times in his "Hall of Shame,"
66-year-old Ebert
composed a scathingly funny defense.
I understand you believe one of the Sun-Times misdemeanors was
dropping
your syndicated column. My editor informs me that "very few" readers
complained about the disappearance of your column, adding, "many more
complained about Nancy."
I know I did.
That was the famous Ernie
Bushmiller comic strip in which Sluggo explained that "wow" was "mom"
spelled upside-down...
Ebert says O'Reilly "turns red and starts screaming when anyone disagrees
with him," then offers a perspective from his Chicago childhood.
"My grade-school teacher, wise Sister Nathan, would have called
in your parents and recommended counseling with Father Hogben."
Speaking of Nancy, cartoonist Ernie Bushmiller also drew a line of
sexy comic
strips about her Aunt Fritzi.And some readers say they even see sexy subtexts in the
Nancy comic itself...
"I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,"
said Huckleberry Finn, "because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me
and sivilize me, and I can't stand it."
...as for me, betwixt lazying around and pie, I hadn't no choice, and
wouldn't know which to take..."
The book opens with Huck and Jim having
"Plenty to eat and nothing to do," but Tom urging them to head west.
Twain records the boys' first friendly encounter with "Injuns" -- and then
a not-so-friendly encounter which leaves them trapped in the
wilderness far beyond the mid-continent boundary of the United States
in 1848.
Tom and Huck "journey homeward and meet new characters," says
Amazon,
"like the
white man Cedric
who lives with the Indians, and attend Indian celebrations. They are
also able to play one final, avenging trick on the duke and the king,
bringing the story full cycle."
I just found a wonderful 9-minute video clip of jazz singer Blossom Dearie
gently dazzling
an audience with some wicked piano playing and her sweet, hipster voice.
Blossom Dearie died Sunday at the age of 82. But she'll always be
remembered as the voice of the little girl in the Schoolhouse Rock
cartoons who sang about
unpacking her
adjectives, and skated in a figure eight.
I'd mentioned that Alan Merrill sang his own version of the song
Daydream
Believer.
But one of my readers points out that it was one of Merrill's
own songs that became pretty famous — and was covered
by Joan Jett.
"He was the lead singer (and he also wrote the first version of) 'I Love
Rock and Roll' with his band The Arrows in 1975," reads the email.
"Joan Jett and Britney Spears later covered it."
"The Arrows" even had their own weekly TV show in England for two
years -- "The Arrows Show."
I originally wrote that "Merrill played in several bands in Greenwich
Village before he became a
Japanese TV host and soap opera actor, and also recorded with Rick
Derringer and Meatloaf..."
"When she was good, she was very good..."
I've finally discovered the first person to ever say that.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. (American poet, 1807-1882)
There was a little girl, who had a little curl
Right in the middle of her forehead,
And when she was good, she was very, very good,
But when she was bad she was horrid....
In a Corvette convertible, "Buz Murdock" and "Tod Stiles" drifted
across
America in the early '60s TV series, Route
66.
I just watched an episode that ended with what seemed like iconic
dialogue.
"Take me with you," says a woman Buzz met on the road...
"I've already bought my ticket. I'm going to stay with a girlfriend in
Denver until I get a job. That's my plan -- you can change it.
(Buzz remains silent)
I'm ready and you're not. I hope you find what you're looking for."
Buzz says, "We're leaving town," and the woman whispers "Good luck."
Outside in the car, a gloomy Buzz turns to Tod and says,
"You know what? I've got that restless feeling. Let's just go."
I'm no hipster, but even I'm awed by the 1991 album
Loveless
released by My Bloody Valentine.
(Rolling Stone called it one of the greatest albums of all
time, and it took over two years to record -- in 19 different studios.)
I found out tonight that the band released a video for the
album's final track, "Soon."
The band's
beautiful, fuzzy
sound is said to have launched the musical genre known as "shoegazing" --
and the video captures it perfectly.
"Someone had to be the first," my girlfriend said.
44 years ago, Sammy Davis Jr. appeared in a Broadway musical called
"Golden Boy," and sang the song "Yes, I Can."
Yesterday someone uploaded
the song to the internet.
"On this, the eve of perhaps one of the most important elections of
our
lifetime, I would like to post this wonderfully uplifting song...
I'm urging you to go out and defend your candidate, whether you be a
Democrat or a Republican, as long as your voice is heard and you use your
right to vote."
A Destiny-land reader writes:
I won tickets to that play in 1965 when I was a senior in high school.
I bought the album and have every song memorized.
Now, 43 years later, when I would
drive to Democratic headquarters to start my day of phoning, going
door-to-door, etc., I'd sing: "Yes, I Can." The golden boy image
and that song just resonated the whole time.
The ultimate Paul Newman tribute came from an episode of Friends
in May of 2001.
Flinchy Chandler runs away on the day he's supposed to marry Monica. He
explains his fears by arguing that it's always impossible
to make a marriage
work.
"The only person who can make marriage work is Paul Newman.
And I've met me. I'm no Paul Newman.
I don't race cars. I don't make popcorn.
A few years before his death, 59-year-old Dashiell Hammett wrote a
short story called
"Tulip." A no-good drifter visits a writer, offering to tell his life
story as juicy material for a mystery.
Hammett's writer character isn't interested.
"[W]here in the name of God do you get the notion that writers go around
hunting for things to write about? Organizing material is the problem, not
getting it. Most of the writers I know have far too many things on tap;
they're snowed under with stuff they'll never get around to."
I wondered if Hammett secretly wrote himself into the story. And I really
enjoyed this exchange between the drifter and the writer.
"Pop, do you want me to tell you why it is you always start to sulk as
soon as anybody says anything about your writing?"
Henry
Mancini also wrote the music for "The Great Race."
In this clip you can hear the oompa-pa music for the bad guys,
"Professor Fate" and his henchman Max.*
(Played by Jack Lemmon and Peter
Falk).
Professor Fate tries to out-do "The Great Leslie" by setting a new
land-speed record with a black-and-red rocket car (decorated with a skull
and crossbones).
It's a really wonderful scene. (Directed by the legendary Blake Edwards)
*On the soundtrack, the song's official title is "Push the button, Max." I
was amazed to discover that hipsters had recorded their
own alternative version.
Henry Mancini wrote a gazillion soundtracks for movies (and TV shows).
But at the age of 70, just a few months before he died,
Mancini also did a
surprising and funny bit
as one of the troubled callers to Dr. Frasier Crane's radio show on
Frasier. (According to Wikipedia...)
The joke was he played a caller so boring that Frasier and Roz can't
resist
goofing around silently while he rambles on about his problem...
So... yeah, toward the end Vincent Price goes nuts and starts killing
people... he
goes nuts in a comedic way spouting actor-y Shakespeare lines while
discovering vitality in being a man, but I chose to see it as somewhat
more sinister. He just cracks and finds out that he enjoys killing. It's
awesome.
He also says stuff like "this is man's work, women are for
weeping!"
To promote the 1954 movie
Underwater,
Howard Hughes flew 200 journalists
and movie stars to a Florida
lake, then gave the journalists
scuba gear so they
could watch the movie
25 feet below the lake's surface.
I just received an email with some glamorous memories. Jayne Mansfield
was there in a bathing suit, and "When she went into the water...it became
translucent!"
55 years later, William Ray (the PR director) wanted to reminisce -- and
to tell me the complicated arrangement he'd worked out with RKO pictures.
Nearly 500 years ago, Little "Bo Peep" was told of her sheep to
"Leave them alone, and they'll come home, and bring their tails behind
them."
But there are actually five verses
to the poem, which explain
what happened next (and why the syntax was so garbled in the first verse).
Then up she took
her little crook,
Determined for to find them;
She found them indeed,
but it made her heart bleed,
For they'd left all their tails behind 'em!
It happened one day,
as Bo-peep did stray
Unto a meadow hard by--
There she espied
their tails, side by side,
All hung on a tree to dry.
It makes more sense when you read the Wikipedia
entry. "Bo Peep" was a customs house on the south coast of
England.
"Little Bo Peep herself refers to the customs men, the sheep are the
smugglers and the tails are the contraband (probably barrels of rum and/or
brandy)...
She didn't know where to find them, but was told to leave them alone and
they'll come home, dragging their "tails" behind them.
And the final verse makes more sense as a description of a
dutiful British customs man assessing the abandoned booty.
She heaved a sigh and
wiped her eye,
And over the hillocks she raced;
And tried what she could,
as a shepherdess should,
That each tail should be properly placed.
After 10 years, and the last episode of Friends, Matt LeBlanc gave a
speech about
his future for the first episode of the short-lived spin-off series
Joey. "It's
time to move on," Joey
tells his sister Gina. "Change can be good."
"Oh, it's easy for you to say," Gina says. (She's angry that her son is
moving in with Joey). And the writers gave Joey a good response.
"No it's not! No...
Look, nobody understands wanting things to stay the same
like I do.
I was happy in New York, okay? And I tried really hard to keep things
from changing. But everyone else got married, and had kids, and moved on.
They all changed.
So I'm giving change a shot. And it has been hard. But just hoping things
stay the same? It doesn't work."
"Are you smarter than used to be?" Joey's sister asks sweetly.
"Nah, I don't know where that came from..." Joey replies.
Mr. Rogers drove the same old Chevy Impala for years -- until one day the car
was stolen. After filing a police report, every newspaper and media outlet in
the area picked up the story, according to a
story on CNN.
Amazingly, within 48 hours the car was left in the exact spot where it
was
taken from, with an apology on the dashboard.
It read, "If we'd known it
was
yours, we never would have taken it."
"Elvis used to have parties at his house and — I've told this story
a
million
times — but they weren't really parties, because there was no chips or
dip. Just
Elvis and his boys watching TV, and him making funny comments, and everybody
laughing at them.
Is that a party? Not really. But that's Hollywood."
"I am Henry the Eighth, I am.
Henry the Eighth I am, I am.
I got married to the woman next door.
She's been married seven times before.
And every one was a Henry.
She wouldn't have a Willy or a Sam.
I'm her eighth old man named Henry,
Henry the Eighth I am.
(Second verse! Same as the first...)
But there's a strange second verse that hasn't been been popular since 1910.
Archive.org has a recording of the original 1910
version — which reveals how the marriage worked out.
"It was against the law," Paul Simon sang. "What the mama saw? It was
against the law."
It's one of the great enigmas of pop music — what exactly did
she
see?
The song is "Me and Julio Down By The Schoolyard." But what incident is it
describing?
It made the mama "spit on the ground every time my name gets mentioned,"
according to the mysterious lyrics, and made papa determined to stick him "in
the house of detention."
In a couple of days they come and take me away but the press let the
story
leak.
And when the radical priest come to get me released we's all on the
cover of
Newsweek.
It's bothered me for years, so I finally researched the song on Wikipedia.
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High" also became a TV series in 1986.
22 years later, someone has magically obtained over two minutes of video
footage from the series. (Jeff Spicoli was played by Dean Cameron instead of Sean Penn --
but they kept the same actors for teachers Mr. Hand and Mr. Varga.)
The word usually used to describe this series is "short-lived"
Nearly 40 years ago, a cartoon aired for two years -- then disappeared.
(Although 20 years ago it was re-broadcast on Spanish television as Ahi
viene cascarrabias.)
Imagine my delight when a cartoon I last saw at the age of six turned up on
YouTube.
Archie explains to Jughead about that girl
"whose dad was loaded," and
before long she's telling him "I want to live like common people...I
want to sleep with common people...."
Veronica never got a smackdown like this before... It's a
mashup of
the lyrics to the subversive Pulp song "Common People" with the
hopelessly
square comic strip Archie.
I wish more people on the net would do stuff like this.
It was the only time a fictitious rock group had the #1 song of the
year.
But The Archies got nearly all their voices from a man named Ron
Dante.
He
was Archie, Jughead, and Reggie — and according to Wikipedia, he even
sang
in a falsetto voice as Betty for the song "Jingle, Jangle."
"In 1969, Ron [also] recorded an album under the group name
of
The
Cufflinks... Providing both lead and background vocals through overdubbing,
Dante hit the U.S. Top Ten with the single "Tracy",
at the same time that The Archies' "Sugar, Sugar" was at the top spot on the
same chart. Dante was anonymous on both tracks..."
"We recorded maybe thirty or forty songs in a three or four week period, and
'Sugar Sugar' was just another song," Ron remembers.
In fact, he recorded over 100 songs for the Archies' show and five albums.
But over 40 of
those songs were never released on CD.
"[T]here is a chance that I will
get my
hands on the masters someday and release them on my own label," he vows in
this
interview.
In 1971 Archie's cartoon band even issued a pretentious "Summer Prayer for
Peace."
"The Archies are sometimes jokingly compared to the seminal 60s rock band
The Doors, as the Doors also had no bass player." — Wikipedia
The Archies burned through three
different female vocalists.
Dante's voice also sang the "Coke is..." counterpart on the famous "I'd
like
to teach the world to sing" commercial.
Jeane, I am so sorry. I know you swore to me that you'd never serve
another term in prison for prostitution, or anything else. You almost lost
your eyesight the first time. I'm sure you asked your lawyers if there was
any hope for your sentencing, and I guess it must have looked bleak.
I know how pissed you were. This was an act of revenge, and I know who
you're determined to haunt....
I feel like I committed the perfect crime. For 100 days Helium.com
promised their members up to $3 for every 400-word article they wrote. So
I cranked out nearly300quickarticles, and now they owe me about $900.
MTV offers lyrics to Devo songs on their web page. But they got
frightened by the title of Devo's famous "Are we not men" song, and
couldn't bring themselves to write "Jocko Homo" on their page.
It's no accident. They have a page listing every track on
all of
Devo's
albums — and each of the 11 times "Jocko Homo" was
included in a new compilation, MTV changed its name.
William F. Buckley
talks
about Graceland. Buckley actually had kind words for young Elvis
Presley,
but he still bemoaned...
...the spiritual inclination of the American people, who do not require
that
the memory being venerated should have been a martyr or a prophet. Just
someone truly singular and mythogenic, who contributed to his own legend
his suicidal ending as a victim of the drugs he inveighed against with the
strange, disquieting, appealing innocence that marked his entire life.
Over? Nothing is over. It's only a beginning. A kindling of the
flame.
The 1957 movie Johnny
Tremain ends with the story of Paul Revere's
ride,
the battle of old
North Bridge, and "The Shot Heard Round the World." The colonies
will go to war with Britain after all...
Feed it, lads, as you fed it with your blood today.
It is the spark of liberty that you've touched a-fire.
Its light must grow until every dark corner has vanished
and it illuminates the world.
It was written by a med student (who later became
a doctor), who'd been friends with Jan Berry.
[T]he "union man" would knock
on the door precisely as the second hand would hit the "twelve,"
marking the end of the third hour. If the session didn't end at that
second, it was "overtime pay" for the musicians--which was about
triple the ordinary rates...
There are six minutes left until the
three-hour deadline is up. Jan rushes out into the room and passes out
the sheet music to "Little Old Lady." Take One . . . No good. Take Two
is finished as the "union man" starts knocking on the door...
It
spends the Summer of '64 climbing all the way to Number Three on the
Billboard pop charts.
A sequel to the famous Star Trek episode about tribbles was written
in 1973 by its original author as part of the often-overlooked Saturday
morning cartoon, Star
Trek: The Animated Series.
Apparently Cyrano Jones escaped from his
tribble-collecting
duty using a stolen tribble-eating predator developed by the Klingons.
Now the Enterprise is, again, on a grain transport mission at the exact
moment when the Klingons attack the space trader's ship. Inevitably
he's
beamed aboard -- along with his tribbles.
I
watched the episode tonight, and then discovered that it also has a bunch
of fan pages on the web. Ultimately Mr. Spock has the
best
line of
dialogue, after the Klingons have disabled the Enterprise's phasers and
photon
torpedoes.
A noiseless patient spider,
I mark'd where on a little promontory it stood isolated,
Mark'd how to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launched forth filament, filament, filament, out of
itself.
Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detatched, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres
to connect them.
Till the bridge you will need be form'd, till the ductile
anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my
soul.
You already know he's kind of a lech if you're reading Marvel comics'
The Irredeemable Ant-Man.
("The world's most unlikeable super hero.")
Young security guard Eric O'Grady stole the Ant-Man suit, and is living on
the run.
And being young, irresponsible, and able-to-shrink-down-to-ant-size,
he's been using his powers to peep on the ladies while they're
showering...
In Ant-Man #7, he stows away in a blonde woman's purse. (And yes,
those
were tampons in the
background.) He realizes she's a super hero, but then decides maybe her
apartment will be as cool as Batman's. "I bet this broad's got all kinds
of cool stuff back at her lair.
I could probably make off with a dinosaur, or a giant penny."
And then, it happens.
Hm. My 'Ant-Senses' are telling me that sounds unmistakably
not unlike a shower running. I must go immediately -- to investigate.
It's followed by eight small panels of Eric O'Grady, sitting motionless
on Ms. Marvel's shower head and smiling.
"You'd think this would get old after a while, but you know
-- it really doesn't."
I've always felt like an outsider. Every Thanksgiving, every Christmas,
it
was me, sitting at someone else's table. It was that vibe like when
you're over at somebody's house and they're whispering in the kitchen,
"Why is he here?"
I came into life so hard that when I see other adults who say they need or
want their parents, it seems corny to me. When there's nobody to hug you
when you cry, eventually you stop crying. I think that's how I ended up
getting called "Ice."
In the early 1970s, four American ex-patriates in Paris had formed a band
called King
Harvest. But their one hit single was released
after the band
broke up...
It reached #13 on the U.S. charts in 1972, and stayed on the charts longer
than any other song that year (except one). The band re-united for their
first -- and
last -- American tour. (Their opening act was a young stand-up comic
named
Jay Leno.) Then they broke up again. (Though some members of the band
later toured with the Beach Boys.)
"A day after the recall of millions of Chinese-made toys
because of the lead content of their paint, critics are trashing Bratz:
The Movie...because of
the lead content of its story."
See, this is why
I
enjoy reading "Studio Briefing" at IMDB.com.
Ty Burr in the Boston Globe describes it
this way: "It's pure marketing chum for tweeners: a proudly shallow,
purposefully bland ode to girly-girl narcissism. I could actually feel my
brain stem shrivel up as I watched it."
Amy Biancolli in the Houston
Chronicle begins her review this way: "O.M.G. ! This movie is SO BAD!
I
can't believe I just spent an hour and a half of my life, like, watching
it, when I could have been totally trying on hairbands instead!"
And
Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune dismisses it as "the most
horrifying film of 2007."
Finally, since we're talking about it, here's my own "artist's conception"
for the
origins of the sexiest Nancy panel ever. (Google Images just put it on
their fourth page of results for the phrase "bondage drawing.")
I really enjoyed this
article.
Here's how one
To promote the 1954 movie
Then up she took
I feel like I committed the perfect crime. For 100 days Helium.com
promised their members up to $3 for every 400-word article they wrote. So
I cranked out 
