I vote for "Old" Vader

Before I was a comics, Star Trek and beer geek, I was a stamp collector. So I still keep up with new issues and buy cool ones to address my mail. And I know some of the rules about who can be honored on a stamp.

The primary rule has been that no living person is honored on a US stamp. Traditionally, they waited until someone had been dead for ten years before putting out a stamp, except for U.S. Presidents. There have been exceptions: Walt Disney's portrait was postified in 1968, two years after he died. Gemini astronaut Ed White's 1965 space walk was commemorated in 1967, a few months after he died in the Apollo 1 fire. And there've been several stamps showing the Apollo 11 astronauts on the moon, despite Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin still being very much with us.

In some cases, the 10-year rule was more strictly enforced, leading to interesting omissions. In 1989, a block was issued honoring four of the five Best Picture nominees for 1939. They showed John Wayne from "Stagecoach," Gary Cooper from "Beau Geste," Judy Garland from "The Wizard of Oz," and Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh from "Gone With the Wind." All of these actors passed the "10 years gone" test, but the fifth nominee, "The Philadelphia Story," was not honored since their stars, Kathryn Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, were still around. There's a lot more excruciating minutiae I could go into, but I'll just note that recently the official window was reduced to five years.

Now that whole rule seems to fly out the window in 2007 with the issuance of a sheet commemorating "Star Wars'" 30th anniversary, It's a good profit maker for the Postal Service after all: every stamp sold to collectors and not used to mail something is a 39¢ profit. But let's take a look: over a dozen characters from the six movies, most of them portrayed by actors who are very much among us.

I suppose we're seeing a new rule at work here. The stamp design is actually paintings of the characters, not photographs of the actors. That just might open the door to a whole new range of subjects for future issues.
Meantime, the post office is also taking votes on which of the ten stamps from the sheet will be issued later as an individual stamp. Absent one Jar Jar Binks on this sheet, we must throw our support to "old" Darth Vader. Emperor Palpatine will get his due with the passing of his acolyte, Darth W. Bush.

Creepiest Johnny Cash soundtrack

Click here, while the link is active, for the raw footage of the overserved Chicago cop beating up a bartender:

http://video.nbc5.com/player/?id=83968

(c) 2007, WMAQ. All rights reserved.

Without the voiceover of a news reader narrating the story, we find out that the beating ends just as the jukebox finishes playing Johnny Cash' "Sunday Morning Coming Down."

Somehow eerily appropriate.

Strange Dreams

If I have dreams all the time, like some say, I don't remember 99% of them. But last night was the exception.

I dreamed I was surfing the Web and I stumbled upon a new web site. It started installing software that kept asking me for personal information. My address, my Soc., my phone number, passwords, names of my family, all that. Somehow I realized this was the Devil's personal web address, and he was using data mining to make it easier to tempt souls. The more I tried to ditch the malware (how aptly named!) and restart, reboot or reinstall, the more each file or web page I tried to open creating pop-ups nagging me for personal information.

I was losing the battle to save my online soul.

And then I woke up, wondering what that was all about. A manifestation of our general paranoia about privacy on the internet? A warning to stop surfing the net at work?

I remembered the alleged evil web address, so I checked it out. Seems like a harmless personal site. I won't put up the name here, since in real life they had nothing to do with my dream.

But does anyone has apocalyptic visions about the internet?

What I Learned Today #1: Loulie Jean Norman

I want to try and start a little feature that I may be able to update more often than I am now (my Super Bowl rant is still coming, trust me). In the course of wandering the internet, I pick up lots of halfway interesting facts. Some are answers to questions that have been in the back of my mind for years. I call this

What I Learned Today

Back in 1959, the inestimable Spike Jones produced an album called Spike Jones in Stereo--of course there was a mono version titled "Spike Jones in Hi-Fi." Subtitled "A Spooktacular in Screaming Sound!", it was a cute riff on monster movies that had become popular on TV at the time. Of course voice artist Paul Frees is there, reprising his rendition of "My Old Flame," and employing his stock voice cast of monster characters and mad scientists. He's joined by others in Spike repertoire company, plus Thurl Ravenscroft and a female character referred to only as "Vampira." Long had I wondered, after first hearing the album back in 1980; could this have been the legendary Vampira, one of the first TV monster movie hosts back in 1955, and later a star of the cult classic "Plan 9 from Outer Space?"

I was finally moved to look it up. The album's listing on allmusic.com shows the only female vocals are by one Loulie Jean Norman. As I suspected: "Vampira" was just an easy and generic name for a monster-based comedy bit.

But who was Loulie Jean Norman? Of course, she had a Wikipedia entry, where we find she was a coloratura soprano who had dubbed the singing voice of Diahann Carroll in the movie version of "Porgy and Bess," including the song "Summertime."

But, and here's the payoff: she also sang the vocalese in the opening theme for the original series of "Star Trek" back in 1966. Yes, there are lyrics that Gene Roddenberry wrote to get in on the music publishing royalties, but for most of the world, the only words to that theme are Loulie's "Aaah-AAAAAH-ah-ah-ah-ah-ahh!"

Now you know. Go read a book.

My First Cancer Scare

or; Up Mine!

Okay, this is the kind of information may save your life, etc., but when it first happens to you, it's a bit unsettling.

I have suspected my doctor just likes to order tests and push pills on me for every least little thing. Yes, I am carrying about 100 lbs. more than I should, and I'm flirting with diabetes and a heart condition, but it seems that every time I see him, I have to add another pill to my regimen, or go for another test that my insurance decides is not a test because if it was they would cover it 100%. I'm still paying off a $4,000 bill for running on a treadmill after being injected with isotopes. And I didn't even come close to "Hulking out."

That test was ordered along with a slightly less expensive one: a hemocult screening based on feces samples. Six months later, I'm back for another checkup. The doctor tells me they found blood in my stool, so I need to go in for a colonoscopy. Seems blood in your sample can be a symptom of cancer. So at the age of 47 I get my first cancer scare; yay!

So August 28 I'm scheduled to visit the hospital and get a probe stuck so far up my wazoo that I can taste it. My concern about how this procedure will go down is unsettling, as it would seem to involve pain in areas of myself known for generating great pains before. My only reference to fictional characters that have had colonoscopies is from "King of the Hill." I have to prepare for this thing by taking yet another day off work to consult with the doctor who'll be doing the procedure, and he gives me a little lecture that lasts all of ten minutes. For which I had to burn another vacation day.

Day of the procedure, I go through all the usual preliminaries. Check in, show Blue Cross cards, show cards again, get into a room, don the famous "breezy bottoms" hospital gown Get wheeled into the room where I am shown how to lie on my side and see the monitor they'll using to view my insides.

The only part that really had me worried (aside, again from the possibility of finding a gut full of tumors) was the anesthesiologist. He started an IV drip on me with a mild sedative and cheerily informed me that he was ready to increase the dosage if I felt any pain. I usually take that to mean I should expect a lot of pain.
And I probably would end up not remembering any of this visit.

Turned out, though, to be no problem at all. Really. No more discomfort than a prostate exam. I seem to recall lying on my side for about ten minutes, so maybe I lost a little time, but it sure seemed like I was up for the whole deal. And best of all, they collected a few polyps from inside of me and later told me there was nothing wrong with them.

So a lot of fears over very little. I'm feeling happy and healthy. The next day I go back to work, and on my way home, my car gets sideswiped by a semi.

Love Network

Considering we only caught the last half hour of the MDA telethon, why do I want to comment on it? Especially, why am I pushing off other posts I wanted to write in order to do this? Partly, I guess, because of the great comments on the telethon that Mark Evanier provides. My comment is that what with Jerry having mellowed out considerably in his autumn years, there's one thing that consistently annoys me about the presentation, and it's on the local cutaways.

I suspect most of the nation now can only see the telethon on the WGN Superstation feed, but I'd sure like to know if any other stations do this: during the local cutaway segment, where we go to your local studio and see the Boy scouts and firemen answering phones, the 'GN folks announced the match challenge period from one of their big sponsors. As in, "Every pledge we receive during the next three minutes will be matched by our sponsor! $25 becomes $50! $50 becomes $100!"

All fine and dandy, but they demark this match challenge by shrinking the live picture into a corner so there's room for the sponsor's logo and a three-minute countdown clock and then...

• The live picture becomes jumpy and stuttery, like the picture-in-picture function on a TV set. But I'm sure this a special effect chosen by the production crew, because:
  
• Most of the live feed is now shown by the should-mounted news cameras, whose operators keep zooming in and out, tilting back and forth, panning way too fast, like a bunch of 13 year olds playing with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision. Maybe they think this effect will hypnotize us into calling in a pledge.
  
• Once the three minute countdown gets to about five seconds, they fade the clock off the screen for a few seconds, then fade it back in, and presto! It's starting again from three minutes. The same cheap trick they use on infomercials urging us to "call within the next ten minutes" for a "special offer" that's really being extended to anybody, anytime.
  
• To really get us in the mood to send in our money, during this match period they run a music bed that for the past 16 years has featured "Gonna make You Sweat" by C+C Music Factory played over… and over… and over. Does this 1990 chestnut stir anything in anybody's breast besides extreme ennui these days?

In the interest of disclosure, I have to admit that we did not phone in to pledge, so in some regards, we really don't have the right carp about it. We did, of course, throw some change in the fireman's boot here and there, but finances have kept us pretty tight these days. But the MDA telethon is after all, a landmark of our culture, and very soon that'll be gone, too.

I Spell My Name… Danger!

Catchup time. Should have written this a month back because I actually have a Mickey Spillane story. Rather, it's a story that Spillane told a lot, but it hasn't had much currency on the web yet. So here it is.

I saw Spillane at the 1995 Chicago Comics Convention (or as it's now known, WizardWorld Chicago. What was he doing at a comics convention? Well, it's well documented that Spillane got his start in comics (I believe it was Les Daniels' 1971 book "Comix" that reprinted one of his text filler stories from a 1940's Atlas comic). And it's known that his Mike Hammer character started out as an unsold comic called "Mike Danger." Well, that year, "Mike Danger" was seeing publication as a 40's gumshoe thrown into the future, courtesy of Tekno Comix, an imprint that was big on sci-fi comics "created" by big names (Gene Roddenberry, Leonard Nimoy, Isaac Asimov, John Jakes and Neil Gaiman) but scripted by others.

So to promote his comic, he was doing the convetion circuit. I saw him at a panel with Harlan Ellison. No doubt there was a third writer on the panel, but anybody sharing a panel with Harlan and Spillane is relegated to the "third Tenor" role. Whatever the title of the panel was, it should have been "An hour in a room with liquored-up Harlan Ellison and Mickey Spillane." I think you see where I'm leading.

So these old pros are regaling the audience with tales about writing cheap fiction back in the 1950's. Harlan goes on about a certain editor who wouldn't pay him for a published story until he hoisted a 50-pound office typewriter and threatened to cave said editor's head in. The crowd is heeding the warning in the convention program not to ask Harlan what the hell happened to "The Last Dangerous Visions." Following was Spillane's story. No way is this remembered monolgue verbatim, but the story only works told in the first person:

I'm in my editor's office and we're talking about mystery writing. At some point in the conversation, he wondered if it was possible to write a mystery novel that made no sense without the last paragraph. I said "I can write that." And I did.

So next the editor says "I'll bet a thousand dollars you can't write a mystery where the whole climax depends on the last word. I said, "You're on." I start the book, and a few weeks later, I mail him with manuscript, but I leave out the last word. A few days later, he calls me yelling "What was the word? What was the word?" I said, "Gimme my thousand bucks, you sonuvabitch!"

Hey, I may spoil a lot of things, but I won't spoil this one. If you don't know already, it's one of the Hammer books. I may read it myself if I ever have time for a whole novel.

Published again!

Yes, I do understand the rules of blogging. You've got to keep posting fresh stuff every day or so. Then people will come to read, then maybe they'll click the ad links. Maybe when we move to a new house I can find the time.

But now, I must finally make time to post this bit of personal news: I've been published! Yes, I not only play a writer on the blogosphere, but I do it in real life! And sometimes I even get paid -- just not this time.

Almost two years ago, one of my college professors, Dr. John Lawrence, e-mailed that he was co-editing a book on Star Wars fandom, and that he immediately thought of me. I've always thought of myself more as an unreconstructed Trekkie, so my ideal topic was the current fan backlash against the newer "prequel trilogy" films (cough! cough! *Jar-Jar*). As you can see from the link just to the right, the book has finally been published -- it was originally to come out during the original hype for "Revenge of the Sith," but here it is, some 9 months after the DVD came out, instead. Such is the academic publishing world. The fact that I kept sloughing off my article until I dragged myself kicking and screaming to its completion only a few weeks after deadline had nothing to do with its lateness. Just check out "Finding the Force of the Star Wars Franchise: Fans, Merchandise, & Critics." Both editors keep flattering me that my little humorous piece was worth the wait. You can see for yourself with this PDF preview of my article. But of course I need to strike now while the book is fresh, so I've signed on as an Amazon Associate so you can buy the book directly from this link and I get an eentsy commission. Because in this line of writing, your usual form of compensation is a contributor's copy (but I can tell you there's also a paperback edition there). Can you guess that I'm also sticking in as many links to other Amazon stuff as I can? You betcha!

Meantime, the editor remind me that they have their own blog about the book itself, at LiveJournal.com.

The Sailorman Returns!

Best news I could get on my birthday yesterday was the announcement that all parties concerned have finally reached an accord that will allow the complete library of classic Popeye cartoons to come out on home video, starting sometime next year.

Be it known that except for a few shorts which slipped into the public domain, there has never been a legitimate home video release of the Popeye shorts. In the 50s, Paramount sold its film library to Associated Artists Productions, which managed the TV rights (and was responsible for the "a.a.p." title card on every Popeye we saw on TV in the 60s). AAP was bought out by United Artists, which merged with MGM, which was bought by Ted Turner, who was then bought out by Time Warner. None of these various owners could bring out a home video release because King Features, owners of the original Popeye comic strip and thus its trademarks, claimed only they had the home video rights. Now everyone has gotten together, and Warners will have boxed sets in chronological order starting in 2007.

It's worth noting that the Popeye DVDs will apparently be in chronological order, starting with his guest appearance in a Betty Boop cartoon in 1933. Consider that the Fleischer studios had been around for 12 years already, and the first Popeye cartoons are considered as good as any other in the series. If the Looney Tunes DVDs were released chronologically, you'd have to slog through lots of Bosko, Buddy, Foxy and Goopy Gear (not to mention many forgettable Warner Music-published songs) before you find the first Porky Pig.

Some time ago, I wrote some new rules of Cartoon Physics which codified many of Popeye's spinach-powers "feats of strenkth." I realized that many of Popeye's visual gags were alive and well in the films of Hong Kong director Stephen Chow (Shaolin Soccer, Kung Fu Hustle). There I've seen characters, through computer animation, take on the appearance of the names of their fighting stances: a giant bullfrog, or a Buddha's palm, or summon a Yin/Yang symbol in the air before them. Is it possible Chow might admit being influenced by Popeye cartoons (or more likely, the martial arts manga)? I can just see the script directions in a live-action Popeye movies:

Although his limbs are tied to each of four elephants trying to pull him apart, the Mysterious Sailor manages to rub the bowl of his corncob pipe across the front of his shirt, causing a can of spinach to appear from beneath his collar, where there was none before. With the can balanced precariously on his skinny chest, The Sailor takes a deep breath and exhales through his pipe, superoxygenating the embers inside until they emit a blue-hot welder's arc. Quickly the arc cuts away at the top of the can, and The Sailor shift ever so slightly so that the spinach inside falls directly into his mouth. as he chews, he meditates on his mantra, conveniently set to a sprightly musical ditty:

Ommm... Popeye the Sailor Man
Omm... Popeye the Sailor Man
I am what I am and that's all that I am
Omm... Popeye the Sailor Man

As he hears the music, he flexes his fists, causing his wrists, and amazingly, his ankles, too, to swell to five times their normal size, easily snappng the manacle binding him. The Mysterious Sailor then flexes his right arm. In his mind, he hears a double-time rendition of "The Stars and Stripes Forever," while we see a huge mass of muscle form on his pipecleaner forearm. Within the mightly bulge of his bicep, we see a squadron of fighter jets taking off from the deck of an aircraft carrier. The Mysterious Sailor faces his tormentors with a smile on his face. We know that his vengeance will be terrible indeed. and yet comical...

In death, I leave my resume.

This came from a thread on cartoonist Scott Shaw!s excellent Oddball Comics forum. I'm turning it into an e-mailable post. If this comes back to your in-box a year later, I'm to blame.

---

So, which writer was most concerned about his reputation after his death?

• Charles Dickens?

• Walt Whitman?

• Mark Twain?

• Ernest Hemingway?

• or Bob Kane?

Now, to be fair, some of the authors' simple markers are next to much bigger and showier monuments, or inside mausoleums. And we're not sure whether this was Kane's choice for a memorial. And sharing turf with Bob in Forest Lawn are more than a few celebrities whose markers resemble their resumes. Some people just want to make certain they're remembered after they're gone. Perhaps they've seen the example of friends who were forgotten.

Attention Radio DJs!

Today, over one thousand morning jocks will be playing drop-ins of dialogue from the movie Groundhog Day. Five hundred of them will play the same piece of dialog over and over after every song or commercial.

We get it. The movie was about a guy forced to live the same day over and over. It's already been thought of. So come up with something new.

And replaying your entire show the day after Groundhog Day has been done, too.

Headlines After Deadlines

Wednesday morning at work, all three newspapers sold in our dining room -- the  Chicago Tribune and Sun-Times, and USAToday—had the story that the 13 miners trapped in the West Virginia coal mine had been rescued. I saw these after driving to work, hearing that there had in fact only been one survivor.

I thought at the time that these were, after all, the suburban editions, which had to be printed earlier for delivery, and by now the city editions would have the later tragic news. But they didn't. If there was ever an opportunity for an editor to yell "Stop the presses!" and get an Extra onto the streets, this was it. But most papers just left the error until they had to explain the physics of deadline pressures the next day.

There's a nifty site called the  Newseum which offers a view of the days front pages from around the world. If you go to their "Map View" you could have followed the progression of headlines west across time zones, from the Eastern papers with the erroneous report, to the California papers that "went to bed" later, and had time to run with the bad news.

You can also download that front page as a PDF to look at or print out. I found it very handy to get some nice decorations of front page stories of the White Sox World series victory, printed in color on fresh white paper.