Hooray for Captain Spaulding |
Posting to you live
|
Saturday, August 31, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:43 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:38 PM
I'm wondering why MTV doesn't go ahead and pre-record (and censor) like they do with the movie awards. Also why bother cutting that stuff out when it'll be part of the various crazy behind-the-scenes what-we-can't-show-you clip shows they'll run next year and every year after. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:23 PM
UPDATE: Instapundit wants to know why Big Media can't use Google and find out this stuff itself. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:45 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:44 AM
# | | Friday, August 30, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:04 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
2:51 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
11:34 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:22 AM
I was scheduled to open in Houston for Ron "Tater Salad" White (he's the one in the cowboy hat). The week before, I check the club's web site and find Jackie Mason is headlining. At the time, Jackie Mason was bringing his own opener, Melrose Larry Green (who was as awful as you'd suspect. Howard Stern once hypothesized that the reason Mason used Green was to show folks that comedy wasn't as easy as it looks). I call the club to ask if I was working that week. They apologized for not informing me and said that White and I were working the late Friday and Saturday shows. They at least paid me for the whole week which some clubs don't do with last minute cancellations. On Saturday, the manager talked about Green being unacceptable and making Jackie use me for an opener on Sunday but that didn't pan out. Jackie autographed my copy of his autobiography to "My Pal Daniel" and said "Look at that. I made you my pal." # | | Tuesday, August 27, 2002
Monday, August 26, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:06 PM
This site has summary Nielsen ratings for each year. It shows that Cosby was tied for #1 in 1989-90 with the Simpsons at #28. After the move, the Cos got pushed to #5 and the Simpsons were off the top 30. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:49 PM
# | | Sunday, August 25, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:50 PM
James L. Brooks noted that the move was a typical network move: Take a hot new show and move it to a timeslot against an established favorite. He said that trick nevers works, citing Miamai Vice vs Dallas and Mork & Mindy against All in the Family. I'm wondering if there exists a counter-example of a time that did work. I honestly can't think of one. # | | Saturday, August 24, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
11:07 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
7:16 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:43 AM
I still want to know why the Universal monsters were such slackers. UPDATE: This is what I'm talking about when I say I wanna see the Universal monsters fight Nazis. They could have fought the Primate Platoon. UPDATE 2: The Creature Commandos are actually not, to my disappointment, the classic monsters fighting Nazis. They are people who were essentially turned into monsters that look like the classic monsters. Here's their history (scroll down). # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:34 AM
A great counter-example to conventional wisdom (I believe cited by Isaac Asimov) is a guest asking "Can I have some milk?" The pedant would say "may" is correct. But the person is a guest; of course, he may have some milk. He's asking about the milk's availability so "can" is right. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:26 AM
Max cites an article by Steven Pinker which is itself an excerpt from a great book called The Language Instinct which I once recommended (and as you can see, intended to discuss this article at some point). Basically, Pinker's thesis is that most of the perscriptive rules of English are nonesense: Latin was considered the language of enlightenment and learning and it was offered as an ideal of precision and logic to which English should aspire. The period also saw unprecedented social mobility, and anyone who wanted to distinguish himself as cultivated had to master the best version of English. These trends created a demand for handbooks and style manuals, which were soon shaped by market forces: the manuals tried to outdo one another by including greater numbers of increasingly fastidious rules that no refined person could afford to ignore. Most of the hobgoblins of contemporary prescriptive grammar (don't split infinitives, don't end a sentence with a preposition) can be traced back to these 18th Century fads.The old double negatives rule is a perfect example: At this point, defenders of the standard are likely to pull out the notorious double negative, as in [I can't get no satisfaction.] Logically speaking, the two negatives cancel each other out, they teach; [...] But this reasoning is not satisfactory. Hundreds of languages require their speakers to use a negative element in the context of a negated verb. The so-called "double negative," far from being a corruption, was the norm in Chaucer's Middle English, and negation in standard French, as in [Je ne sais pas] where [ne] and [pas] are both negative, is a familiar contemporary example. Come to think of it, standard English is really no different. What do [any], [even], and [at all] mean in the following sentences? I didn't buy any lottery tickets. I didn't eat even a single french fry. I didn't eat fried food at all today. Clearly, not much: you can't use them alone, as the following strange sentences show: I bought any lottery tickets. I ate even a single french fry. I ate fried food at all today. What these words are doing is exactly what [no] is doing in nonstandard American English, such as in the equivalent [I didn't buy no lottery tickets] -- agreeing with the negated verb. The slim difference is that nonstandard English co-opted the word [no] as the agreement element, whereas Standard English co-opted the word [any].This page valiantly fights for the singular their. One sub-rule is so counter-intuitive that the chapter about it required a week of study in my grammar class: the rule that says the their in the sentence "Everyone returned to their seats" should be a his. In the site's Pinker excerpt, he has the perfect counter-example: Mary saw everyone before John noticed them.I'll also just quickly note that before the Ebonics controversy, Pinker writes offhandedly in the article Black English Vernacular is uncontroversially a language with its own systematic grammar. # | | Friday, August 23, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:04 PM
He then says [and for some reason Zmuda left this out of his book], "You don't have anything new to do. As a matter of fact, that's why he hired me tonight to come here." The planted heckler is now making fun of Kaufman for planting a heckler. He points out the microphone he has. Andy starts screaming that Zmuda has f&*$ed up the act. Then a very obvious edit occurs and Kaufman does his Elvis impersonation. One of the most brilliant pieces of comedy about comedy. (Tied with Lenny Bruce's "The Palladium" on this CD.) # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:49 PM
If your only knowledge of Kaufman is that horrendous movie they made a few years back, you owe it to yourself to check out Lost in the Funhouse, Bill Zehme's great, well-researched biography of Andy Kaufman. Bob Zmuda (Andy's partner in crime) autobio is to a lesser-extent also good. One of the dopier decisions made in that film was to move his Carnegie Hall concert from 1979 to around his death in 1984. First, this didn't make sense logically as the movie had established that Kaufman was hated near his death, yet he's able to fill Carnegie Hall. Second, keeping the chronological order correct makes for a better story: A comedian whose act consists of conning the audience becomes very popular, so popular that he fulfills his dream of doing a show at Carnegie Hall. If you're so popular that everyone knows that what you're doing is a con, what do you do for an encore? # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:30 PM
In the announcement, Max, who's always goofing on my typos, uses "who" instead of the correct "whom." He should use the he/him method. # | | Thursday, August 22, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:22 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:20 PM
Granted, a Stan Lee-esque nickname wouldn't work for him, but why not a superhero name addendum? You know, like "The Man of Steel", "The Dark Knight Detective", "The Wacky Wall-Walker". Ok, maybe not that last one, but something along those lines.An interesting sidenote: DC superheros tend to have majestic nicknames like "The Man of Steel" whereas Marvel superheros tend to have more insulting ones like Webhead, Goldilocks, and Shellhead. Probably part of early Marvel's humanizing the heros. The intermediary is the original Captain Marvel who was both the World's Mightiest Mortal and the Big Red Cheese (although that was only used by Dr Sivana). Anyhoo, I hereby dub Combustible Boy the Blazing Blogger. # | | Wednesday, August 21, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:06 AM
# | | Tuesday, August 20, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:25 PM
I have no Stan Lee-esque nickname for Combustible Boy because his nom de plume is already too comic bookish to mess with. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:57 PM
# | | Monday, August 19, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:18 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
2:55 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:48 AM
UPDATE: Another guy complaining about the lack of Groucho coverage. UPDATE 2: Hello, Instapundit-readers (Hey, I know why my counter's suddenly spinning rapidly). If you're interested, here I complain about other Marx Brothers' history ignored. And, what the hell, as long as you're here, let me point you to a post that Max Powers liked a lot. UPDATE 3: I am also tempted to plug a gig of mine tonight or a gig I have on August 31st, but that would just be crude exploitation. # | | Sunday, August 18, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
11:00 PM
The Oz books were one of the first examples of the franchise concept. Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz as an American fairy tale. The book became so popular that he wrote a dozen sequels. He even moved Uncle Henry and Auntie Em to Oz, probably so he didn't have to deal with the problem of "OK, how do we get Dorothy to Oz this time?" (This may or may not have been the same book which revealed that, yes, Toto could talk when he came to Oz; he just chose not to.) When Baum died, the publishing company brought in successors. The books were delightful or so I recollect them being when I was seven. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:52 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:07 PM
A second point that's buried is this: TV rights for the Dodgers are so valuable that Fox bought the team rather than risk losing those TV rights to ESPN. A non-Fox owner could assumably start a bidding war between Fox and ESPN. Not to mention that since the Dodgers were the cornerstone of the founding of the Fox regional sports network, even if Fox lost the TV rights now, they owe part of the network's existence (and its accompanying revenues) to the Dodgers. UPDATE: New feature of "Hooray for Captain Spaulding": You can log into any LA Times article with login/password cptspaulding/cptspaulding. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:37 AM
UPDATE: Said movie is playing on AMC on August 28th at 10:15 PM EST. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:35 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:28 AM
All I know about the potential baseball strike is that my day job of computer programming has a longer history than baseball does of people doing it for the love of doing it rather than for money. And the minute my boss says I should not worry about my salary but program for the love of programming is the minute I quit. If you don't believe me about players never playing for the love of the game, check out A Clever Base-Ballist, a book about an attempt to start a players' union in 1885. The blurb has a great quote from John Ward, the founder of this union and the Players League, that maybe needs to be remembered: Baseball is not a Summer snap, but a business in which capital is invested. A player is not a sporting man. He is hired to do certain work, and do it as well as he possibly can. UPDATE: I stumbled upon a book called Never Just a Game which deals with labor issues in baseball since 1920. Its companion volume Much More Than a Game deals with these issues after 1920. # | | Friday, August 16, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:55 AM
# | | Thursday, August 15, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
7:10 PM
What if we followed that guy? Does he make good on his vow? How far was his decline into alcoholism? Is AA enough or will he have to check into a program to dry out? Are his children upset that it took a supposed hallucination to get him to clean up? Some sitcoms have the callback of the guy seeing whatever again and running into a bar, throwing all his hard work away. Can he find the strength of character to get back into the program? Would learning that there really is a Frankenstein's Monster in the neighborhood affect his recovery in any way as his reason for hitting bottom is apparently a lie? # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
7:02 PM
As the performers were asked not to do their normal stand-up and since the show will be occuring on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend, I will take the opportunity to plug my telethon and talk about the important work I do for my kids. I will show the same sensitivity as another comic. This is a test for a one-man show concept I've been kicking around called You'll Never Walk Alone where I am hosting the last half-hour of a 24-hour telethon (and had stayed up for the full 24 hours). My concern is that this idea is like my other two ideas for one-man shows, the concept is good but it wouldn't actually hold an audience's interest for a full 30 minutes. I'm seeing if I can make it to the ten-minute mark. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
6:40 PM
Who knows? I might do my Robert Evans impression. # | | Wednesday, August 14, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:41 AM
# | | Tuesday, August 13, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:02 AM
# | | Monday, August 12, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
7:56 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
4:29 PM
UPDATE: I mean, he provides commentary on From Dusk til Dawn, fer Chrissake. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
11:20 AM
# | | Sunday, August 11, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
2:53 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
2:03 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:34 AM
# | | Saturday, August 10, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
4:00 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
3:52 AM
# | | Friday, August 09, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
9:17 AM
# | | Thursday, August 08, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:33 PM
I remember my first one-man show. I put on the white serge-suit, the wig and the moustache and dammit, I was Mark Twain.Excerpt 2: Where's my stove-pipe hat? I can't go on stage dressed as Lincoln without a stove-pipe hat! I'll look silly! # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:21 PM
>Tell us more about the musical one-man show about the life of Joe Besser, # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:14 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:13 PM
Were I a star of that franchise, I would have just held out for the right to opt out if no one else signs up. You don't want to be in a stiuation where you're in Police Acadmey 7 and it's just you, Michael Winslow and GW Bailey. (Of course, that franchise was dead by Police Academy 6 which was so bad that Bubba Smith refused to do it.) # | | Wednesday, August 07, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:15 AM
# | | Tuesday, August 06, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
5:44 PM
This campaign is better than a Fanta campaign I've suggested You know, I work for Fanta and I had to go to seven stores to find this can. [drinks] Ahhhh, it sure was worth it. Fanta's orange, strawberry, and grape sodas have the great flavor that beat Safeway Select in nationwide taste tests. Four out of five people surveyed said that they'd buy Fanta if they were in the market for orange soda and were willing to drive to a convenience store twenty miles out of their way. # | | Monday, August 05, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
10:01 PM
UPDATE: To clarify, the recommendation by Max Power was the bestest birthday present ever, not the dopey ASCII art. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
9:52 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
9:49 PM
Here's one of my early posts to Usenet; then, like now, I'm whining about crappy Barney jokes. # | | Sunday, August 04, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:46 PM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:44 PM
The site gives no real explanation for why Shasta is a shell of its former self. Maybe if they'd invest in advertising some of the R&D money they're putting into flavors like Fruitabomba and Caribbean Cola Champagne, they could be the giant they once were. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:18 PM
WARNING: Spoilers for Signs below Interesting thing in Signs is that while, yes, these crop circles are from spacemen, the crop circles prior to this were hoaxes. Since before the movie, there weren't 600 crop circles in India within a 72-hour period and spacemen weren't immediately invading afterwards, one can argue that they have nothing to do with our world's crop circles. (Similar to how Babylon 5 while there was a Psi-Corps, psychics were a recent phenomenom.) As you've probably heard elsewhere a hundred times, it's a movie more about faith than aliens. The aliens are conquered offscreen and we're not even sure how. (Similar to how Astro City would dispatch in five panels with what in a normal comic book universe would be a twelve-issue retcon mini-series crossed over with every book published by the company.) The alien in the house is beaten by the various crazy quirks and ticks of the family (the little girl's constant leaving of water glasses, the boy's asthma, the failed baseball career). The idea being that a higher power caused these things so the son would live. To me, this is a cheat because, yes, a higher power put these things there; his name is M. Night Shyamalan and he wrote and directed the picture. Also assumably only a spoilsport would ask if there wasn't some other for Mel Gibson to put the pieces together besides killing his wife so he'd flashback to her last words. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:10 PM
It's the weakest of his three major movies but considering how good the first two were, he's entitled. He's still good with a spooky movie. Reservations I have will spoil the movie (nothing to do with my new obsession with crop circle hoaxes; I have no complaints there). UPDATE: I'm annoyed with myself because I meant to stay for the end of the credits and see if they give special thanks to Shasta. If you haven't seen the movie, could you stay for that and let me know? (Or if you saw it and noticed, let me know.) # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
8:05 PM
In 1992, a crop circle apppeared in Hungary. It was a perfect example of why believers claim to still believe. Abnormal levels of radiation were said to have been measured. The nodes were bent, not broken. Witnesses spoke of UFOs making the circle. Problem is it was made by two high school students. A picture of a crop circle two days after it was created. The grain is growing towards the sunlight. This may be the cause of the exploded nodes which can "only" be extraterrestrial in nature. # | | Saturday, August 03, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:41 AM
“My intentions to stay with this and try to see it through certainly received a boost” from these interviews, he said. One formation in particular fueled his curiosity — a 700-foot-wide pattern near Stonehenge that ranks as the second-largest crop circle found in England.One paragraph later, crop-circle-maker John Lundberg talks about what he's been up to lately: “It’s turning out to be a good season,” Lundberg observed. “We had the second-largest formation ever, which is at Stonehenge..." # | | Friday, August 02, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:05 AM
# | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
12:01 AM
Carvey pours a can of the yellowish-green liquid, replete with big foamy head, into a glass and asks Hammond, "Darrell, what does that look like to you?" Hammond, seeking a graceful way out, answers "Well, Dana it looks like a cool, refreshing soft drink." "Yeah," Carvey continues, "but what does it look like?"A sketch that I recollect was Rich Little's Greatest Story Ever Told, goofing on those specials Rich Little did for HBO in the early 1980's where he'd play all the characters in Robin Hood or A Christmas Carrol or whatever. It was pitch perfect version of those specials with arbitrary celebrity impersonations as various characters. I left wondering how come I hadn't written it as it combined two themes running through my comedy: goofing on Jesus and allusions to bad entertainment no one else remembers. Of course, if I had written it, it would have stepped on my Muppets do the Greatest Story ever Told sketch. # | | Thursday, August 01, 2002
Posted by Daniel Frank at
11:35 PM
However, as I discovered while arguing crop circles with a UFO-nik, the other side can be just as close-minded. "Wait", you say, " didn't you say that people who did the original crop circles confessed? What's the problem?" The answer can be seen in a common response to Doug Bower and Dave Chorley's 1991 confession: "So these two guys from England did every single crop circle ever? How silly!" The response that if these two guys could figure out how to do it one night at a pub, perhaps there are other drunks also working out the problem on the back of a napkin falls on deaf ears. Suppose your buddy the magician shows how he does the sawing-a-woman-in-half trick. If you see other magicians saw women in half, you would then infer that they were using the same method as your pal. If perhaps they clearly weren't using your pal's method, you would probably guess that they were thus doing the trick in a way you're unfamiliar with. UFO and/or psychic believers do the equivalent of insist that every single magician except your buddy saws a woman in half via magical means. The burden is on you to prove he doesn't and the fact that others can do it via non-magical means is somehow irrelevant. After all, you know what happens when you ASS-U-ME? You make a reasonable inference based on past behavior. Believers in phenomenom will claim that skeptics are uncomfortable with anything that doesn't fit in their worldview. I would argue that the believers are guilty of a different type of arrogance: Because they don't know how something is done, it must therefore be impossible. # | |
Posted by Daniel Frank at
1:18 PM
I thought I was a dope for driving fifty miles to the Fair; people were flying in from across the country. (Special thanks to "Jovial Jim" Woster for calling this article to my attention.) # | |
|