Hooray for Captain Spaulding

Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:22 AM

"Marvelous Max" Power, in response to Jackie Mason cancelling an opening act, wants me to tell about my "experience as a Jewish comic who got bumped from opening for Jackie Mason". I'm sure whatever story Max is thinking of is more interesting than what happened but here we go.

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."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:36 PM

Sing along with Jerry this telethon.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:06 PM

Yesterday, we talked about whether running the hot new show against an established favorite ever worked. My brother reminded me that Survivor beat Friends in the 2000-2001 season. If our only example of the technique is two years ago, then perhaps James L Brooks's point that it had a history of never working is still relevant.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:49 PM

Reminder to LA-area readers: Big show with me in it on August 31st. C'mon! Would it kill ya?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:50 PM

Yesterday, I bought the Simpsons 2nd Season DVD set. During the second season, you'll recall that the Simpsons were put up against the Cosby Show. All recollect that the Cosby Show was the #1 show at the time which doesn't match my memories (although that same year, ABC was airing The Flash so I wasn't going to watch Cosby anyway). The Simpsons ratings suffered.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:07 AM

Group Captain Lionel Mandrake (I presume y'all are hip enough to know the reference) is checking out our site. I'd give him a Stan Lee-esque nickname but it just doesn't see, ya know, dignified.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:16 AM

Speaking of arguing with Max Power, you may recall he and I sparring over Andrew Sullivan complaining of the hypocrisy that the movie Tadpole is not raising an anti-pedophilia stink. (If you don't, see here and here.) One item of contention was whether Tadpole was more prominent than Max's counter-example of L.I.E., a movie with gay pedophilia. I would like to point out that Tadpole has made more money in five weeks than L.I.E. did in its entire 25-week release. Not to mention the fact that a July release usually shows more confidence in the prospects of a movie than a September release does.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:43 AM

I recently saw All Through the Night, a great example of the genre of guy finds Nazi saboteurs in America. This case it's Humphrey Bogart as a Brooklyn gangster who cares nothing about the war. He stumbles upon the fifth columnists while investigating a neighborhood baker's murder. He convinces a rival gang to help stop the Nazis' plot that day to blow up a battle ship. It ends with a great fight scene of Runyonesque characters against Nazis while a captured lady explains to the ringleader that it's the people he has such contempt for who are destroying his nest of vipers. All learn that the war's important and everyone needs to do their part.

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).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:34 AM

Speaking of my old grammar class, one of the things I used to do during the can-may lesson was come up with counter-examples where the other verb helper was true. For example "John [BLANK] have some ice cream?" had the correct answer of "may." I would suggest that perhaps John had been sick and unable to eat ice cream in which case "can" is the right answer.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:26 AM

Max Power chides my chiding of his who/whom mistake. Mea culpa. I can't argue with being called a pedant when pedantry was my exact intention.

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.
[...]But once introduced, a prescriptive rule is very hard to eradicate, no matter how ridiculous. Inside the educational and writing establishments, the rules survive by the same dynamic that perpetuates ritual genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing: I had to go through it and am none the worse, so why should you have it any easier? Anyone daring to overturn a rule by example must always worry that readers will think he or she is ignorant of the rule, rather than challenging it.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:04 PM

One of the greatest pieces of meta-comedy was Andy Kaufman's performance at the Catch a Rising Star's 10th Anniversary show. Kaufman does his old act. A heckler (actually Bob Zmuda) starts reciting the act along with him. He attacks Andy for having nothing new, calls his controversial stuff broing and obviously a put-on, and says that Andy Kaufman will have no career once Taxi is cancelled.

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.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:49 PM

Mark Evanier reports that this Saturday at 3:00 AM's "classic" episode of SNL is the one where Andy Kaufman was voted off of Saturday Night Live.

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?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:30 PM

Combustible Boy aka the Blazing Blogger is now part of the Sound and the Fury, "Marvelous Max" Power's blog. Archvillains beware!

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:22 PM

Speaking of Captain Marvel, here's the Captain Marvel from 1966. When he cried out "Split!", his body would divide into several parts and fly into different directions.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:20 PM

Reader Scott Helgeson has a solution to my Combustible Boy nickname problem:

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:06 AM

A debunking of the Hearst "You furnish the pictures. I'll furnish the war" telegram.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:25 PM

Circumstantial evidence indicates that Instapundit (over 300 visitors yesterday and counting!) learned of me through Combustible Boy (The post linking to me is just above one linking to Combustible Boy). Which reminded that I've been a damn ingrate who owes him a plug and a permalink. Here he shows how Afghanistan is distancing itself from the Taliban in a popular Afghani game show.

I have no Stan Lee-esque nickname for Combustible Boy because his nom de plume is already too comic bookish to mess with.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:57 PM

Mark Evanier discusses the end of an era: the era of people falsely claiming to be members of "Our Gang". He lists reasons why some may genuinely think they were in Our Gang, including that they were members of knock-off troupes and that their parents fell for a con.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:18 PM

In all the excitement of being linked to by Instapundit, I forgot about a longtime policy here. So I dub Instapundit "Glamorous Glen" Reynolds!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:55 PM

A columnist wonders why some TV stars make it to movie-stardom and others don't. This man is clearly unfamiliar with the Ted Danson factor.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:48 AM

He won't get as many TV specials or news segments as Elvis but today is the 25th anniversary of Groucho Marx's death. This Memphis article discusses Groucho. Mark Evanier complains that there were no network specials for Groucho's death when he died. He also discusses the horrendous show Groucho did at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion. In part two of the story, Evanier tells of meeting Groucho a few times.
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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:00 PM

I stumbled on a nifty find while shopping at a neighborhood used-book store shop: Little Wizard Stories of Oz, the one L. Frank Baum Oz book that my family didn't have when I was a child.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:52 PM

An interesting statistic in this New York Times magazine article: during the 1987-1993 Palestinian uprising, around 1000 Palestinians suspected as collaborators were murdered by Palestinians. This is nearly the same as the number of Palestinians that were killed by Israeli forces during the same time period. (Courtesy of Charles Johnson).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:07 PM

An LA Times article about the Dodgers losing money. Some of the things that are causing losses have nothing to do with players' salaries. For example, the Dodgers built a bunch of luxury boxes which they can't sell because 1) with various mergers, there are less large corporations that want boxes and 2) they were finished the same time the Staples Center was completed.

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:37 AM

There exists a movie starring Steve McQueen and Bob Newhart and nobody had the decency to tell me?

UPDATE: Said movie is playing on AMC on August 28th at 10:15 PM EST.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:35 AM

I'm sure all of you folks are dying with anticipation about what costume I chose for the spy party. Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. using simply an eyepatch, a two-day beard, and a cigar (or ceegar). The only problem with my costume is that I have to wear glasses to see. Wearing an eyepatch with glasses over it just makes you look like John Ford.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:28 AM

I don't understand the greed of these baseball team owners. Whatver happened to the days when people owned teams for the joy of owning, for the love of the game?

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:55 AM

Minnesota theater critic Dominic Papatola reviews a local production called Bring Me the Head of Dominic Papatola here (Courtesy of Slate).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:10 PM

Here's an idea: You are all familiar with the joke, usually in sitcoms but sometimes in movies, of a drunk guy who sees a talking horse/Herman Munster/Samantha Stevens doing magic. He does a double-take, looks at his bottle or flask, pours the contents in the sewer and says "I gotta go on the wagon!"

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?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:02 PM

I will also be appearing on Saturday August 31st at the Comedy Underground located at 320 Wilshire Blvd in Santa Monica. The show is Pepper Childs Presents!, a variety show hosted by America's most handicapable beauty queen (who may or may not be Rachel Arieff; it's a Tony Clifton thing!)

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 6:40 PM

I will be performing this Monday at Flints, located at 3321 Pico Blvd in Santa Monica. Show starts at 9:00 pm.

Who knows? I might do my Robert Evans impression.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:41 AM

New idea for the spy-themed party I discussed Sunday: Go dressed as a mailbox and say I'm Agent 13.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:02 AM

Dennis Leary is mad that Miramax is supicious that his behind-the-scenes-of-a-TV-show reality show will be similar to their behind-the-scenes-of-a-movie reality show. Who'd ever think that Dennis Leary would be accused of stealing from somebody?

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 7:56 PM

This story about Nicholas Cage probably explains this story about Nicholas Cage.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:29 PM

Whassup with Pulp Fiction and Jackie Brown not having commentary from Quentin Tarantino? Didn't he used to be the kind of film geek who'd love DVD commentaries? What else is he doing right now that he doesn't have time?

UPDATE: I mean, he provides commentary on From Dusk til Dawn, fer Chrissake.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:20 AM

Tom Tomorrow writes (quoting Bob Greene) that Bill Maudlin, the great editorial cartoonist, is very ill and can be cheered up with cards and visits from WWII veterans. He provides info on how to arrange the cards and/or visits as well as where to get some of Maudlin's work.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:53 PM

Peter Marshall has a behind-the-scenes book out about Hollywood Squares. An advantage of living in LA is that more likely than not, this book will be in the library.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 2:03 PM

Speaking as we were of the Claw, I predict that the next Austin Powers supervillain will be an Oriental mastermind. You heard it here first.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:34 AM

A couple of friends of mine are holding a sixties spy party in honor of their birthday/anniversary. (They were born within a few hours of each other. Awwwww!) Dress as a sixties spy character. So far, my ideas are:

Nick Fury, Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D.
Dum-Dum Dugan
Hymie the robot (with accompanying "Hop to it" jokes just like Holmes and Yoyo)
The Claw (and keep saying "Not the Craw! The Craw!" until someone punches me)
The Chief

When I suggested that I'd go as the Chief, another friend said he'd go as Chief Inspector Dreyfus from the Pink Panther movies. I may have to go as the Chief just so we can have an angry-boss-off ("Max!" "Clouseau!").

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 4:00 AM

Since "Marvelous Max" Power was nice enough to nominate me for moxie pet of the week (See comments), I have placed her site in my permanent links list to qualify (It is a delightful site and I probably would have done so anyway even if I didn't nakedly want to weasel eyeballs thisaway).

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 3:52 AM

My birthday presents (besides the already-mentioned X-Box and Fawlty Towers box set):

twenty-five bucks from Grandma
Explaining America by Gary Wills
The Haunted Smile: The Story of Jewish Comedians in America
Difficult Loves
a Maxwell Smart Head Knocker
a gift certificate for Meltdown Comics
four 15.5 oz bottles of Yoo-hoo and since they're having a contest, potentially four grand
A picture magnet of Pepper Childs, America's most handicapable beauty queen
Promise of a gift now that giver confirmed by perusing my bookshelves that I didn't have said book

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:17 AM

The crystal has turned red. Last day..Leo 9's...Year of the city 2002...Carousel begins. (Click on Lastday.wav)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:33 PM

The other concept I also abandoned was a one-man-show called "An Evening with Hal Holbrook". Here's a quick excerpt:

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!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:21 PM

I stumbled on an old Usenet post of mine about a since-abandoned project. Here's the meat of the post to save you, the consumer, valuable clicking time:

>Tell us more about the musical one-man show about the life of Joe Besser,
>Daniel.

What part of "musical one-man show about the life of Joe Besser" confuses you? It examines the public and private life of Joe Besser, the proverbial "tears of a clown" if you will.

The fact that he's had a rich, full career both before and after his stint w/the Stooges, but yet is a vulnerable shell of a man like all comedians is beautifully examined in the song "More Than a Stooge, Less Than a Man" (which was originally "Less Than a Man, More Than a Stooge" but there aren't any really good rhymes for "Stooge"). Just based on an informal rehearsal, the _Austin Apartment Finders Guide_ has already declared it "Besser-rific!!!!"

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:14 PM

Blogger is having a sale on medium-sized T-shirts because they overstocked. I don't want to stereotype here but I think ordering three would have been too many.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:13 PM

Variety informs us that the main stars have been signed for American Pie 3. None of them had been optioned for after the first sequel so they were demanding more dough.

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.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:15 AM

According to this great site of box office data, Signs was playing in 3,264 theaters. So what I'm saying is "Signs, Signs, everywhere there's Signs."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 5:44 PM

Speaking, as we were, of Shasta, Coca-Cola is pushing Fanta again. They have a Spice-Girls-esque band (only three years after the Spice Girls popularity waned!) called the Fantanas and are running TV commercials starring them. Also The Fantanas are also coming to a town near you! (Click on "Fanta Fantasy Tour")

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 10:01 PM

ASCII art is now in color! Thanks to how group.google.com highlights. (Courtesy of Max Power who got me a mess o' hits thanks to this article). The bestest birthday present ever (Well, not that an evening (you know, nudge, nudge, wink, wink evening) with Leah Remini would be turned down.)

UPDATE: To clarify, the recommendation by Max Power was the bestest birthday present ever, not the dopey ASCII art.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:52 PM

That link below also had the first commercial spam. Here's an old article by "Marvelous Max" Power about what a putz that guy still is.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 9:49 PM

This link was billed as the coolest one of the month and it sorta is. Google after finally sorting through its twenty-year archive lists historic posts inlcuding the first discussion of the Y2K problem in 1985, one of the first posts of B1FF, Godwin formulates his law, and an early alt.religion.kibology post by Kibo.

Here's one of my early posts to Usenet; then, like now, I'm whining about crappy Barney jokes.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:46 PM

Speaking of Shasta, let me bring up a small pet peeve of mine. If a charity thing asks you to bring soda, don't bring the generic brand. At worst, name-brand soda is $1.39 for a two-liter; spend a little!

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:44 PM

Relevant to this post, yes, they still make Shasta. In Los Angeles, it serves as essentially the generic brand for a chain of supermarkets and is also available at a chain of 99-cent stores. The fact that they can't even get Shasta.com shows the low power of this brand. (Trust me, if I tried to grab coca-cola.com, I'd be posting from court.) (yes, on a Sunday even!)

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.

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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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:10 PM

Non-Spoiler Review of Signs: Whatever relevance this movie has about crop circles in the real world is sort of ruined by the fact that in the Signs universe, they're running Shasta commercials. And when the television signals goes dead, they still use that black-and-white Indian thing.

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.)

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 8:05 PM

The honest-to-God absolute last things I'll post about crop circles besides my review of Signs, this I swear!

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 1:41 AM

Last thing about crop circles until I see Signs, I promise. An MSNBC article on the subject. Typical media "balance" where both sides get equal airings even though they're not equally right (see Mid-East coverage). I quote it because of this: Colin Andrews, the loon behind Waco:Rules of Engagement has been studying this stuff for twenty years. Here he talks of a new crop circle:

“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.
"As soon as we got to the edge of the circle, you could feel a tingling in your fingers and sort of like your elbow joints,” farmer Rachel Hosier told NBC News. “They started to sort of ache, and a feeling of, like, wow ... There was energy here, and you could feel it.”

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..."

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:05 AM

Speaking of Rich Little, here's the imdb listing of Kopycats, a show which starred impressionists Rich Little, Frank Gorshin and Fred Travelina.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 12:01 AM

The Salon panning of Dana Carvey's Master of Disguise. I refer to it because its author has the same fond memories of Dana Carvey's ABC show that I did (and trust me, I was not the biggest Dana Carvey fan by any means). The show, in a manner similar to 1950's TV shows, was named after that week's sponsor. Here's the commercial they did for Mountain Dew:

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.

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Posted by Daniel Frank at 11:35 PM

UFO-niks and psychics will often complain that skeptics are close-minded and ignore evidence of UFO visitation and psychic phenomenom. This complaint is aided by the cartoonish way skeptics are portrayed by Hollywood as ideal employees of the Argument Clinic.

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.

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