posted by Neil
In
January, I was here:
I was given a copy of this.
And I recorded my part here, with Producer
Matt Selman directing me as hard as he could.
And now, eleven months later, here we come... walkin' down the street... we get the funniest looks from... No, that's something else. Anyway, I like this shot because I am wearing a suit and tie.
If you're in the US, then the episode of
The Simpsons with me in it, "The Book Job", goes out tomorrow. 8 pm or 7 Central.
If you're not in the US, then you may have a while to wait until it's on.
No, I haven't seen it yet either. I am hoping to watch it tomorrow with a daughter, her friends, and probably doughnuts.
...
I learned from
Mark Evanier's blog that Les Daniels had passed away. Here's the
New York Times obituary. I had Les's book "COMIX. A HISTORY OF COMIC BOOKS IN AMERICA" as a boy, and loved it and learned from it. I didn't meet Les until I was a guest at NeCon, in Providence, Rhode Island.
I really liked him, I got to thank him for COMIX, and it's good to say thank you. My obsession with Jack Benny really started when Les and I were talking about radio, and I was saying that the best radio comedies were all British, pointing to Hancock's Half Hour and the Goons and Round the Horne and The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Les agreed that they mostly were... but then there was the Jack Benny Show. And a few weeks later, he sent me some cassettes, so I could hear for myself. And I was both convinced and hooked. Thank you, Les.
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posted by Neil
Today is a very important day.
Viz and to wit: Jack Benny's 116
th Birthday. Which means that somewhere out there, he is still 39.
(A quick Google found 12 episodes of the Jack Benny Radio Show that you can download at
http://www.oldtimeradiofans.com/template.php?show_name=Jack%20Benny. Very much worth a listen: the
show's dated less than you'd expect, because the humour of the Benny show tended to be based on people, rather than topical gags, and I'd say that from around 1942 to around 1951 it's pretty consistently funny, with its best material between about 1946 and 1950. I'm not a fan of the 1930s Benny shows -- the writing was patchy, and there are occasional racist tropes and gags that lurch between unfortunate and just plain horrible, and as the 50s went on Jack's attention is on his television show, and there are weird moments in many of the radio shows where Mary Livingstone, Jack's wife, was recording her lines in the bathroom so she didn't have to stand in front of a studio audience, and the timing is off, which is a hard thing for a show that's all about timing, while Bing Crosby's brother Bob was no substitute for Phil Harris.... But when it was good, it was wonderful. And we'll not even go into the sexuality of the show at this point, other to say that it's consistently interesting).
...
Christopher Handley was sentenced to six months in jail yesterday. He
pled guilty to owning obscene comics - seven comics, imported from Japan, out of a
manga-
anime collection of thousands. He's a computer programmer, who had moved back in with his mother when she had health issues, who had, as far as I know, no interests apart from obsessively collecting
Manga and bible study.
I wish he'd fought the case. But I can also understand why his lawyer persuaded him to go the way he did: he was facing a $250,000 fine and a maximum sentence of 15 years in prison.
The
CBLDF was brought in after the case was underway as consultants. (Read why we signed on here and the background here:
http://www.cbldf.org/pr/archives/000372.shtml .
Mr. Handley's case began in May 2006 when he received an express mail package from Japan that contained seven Japanese comic books. That package was intercepted by the Postal Inspector, who applied for a search warrant after determining that the package contained cartoon images of objectionable content. Unaware that his materials were searched, Handley drove away from the post office and was followed by various law enforcement officers, who pulled him over and followed him to his home. Once there, agents from the Postal Inspector's office, Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency, Special Agents from the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation, and officers from the Glenwood Police Department seized Handley's collection of over 1,200 manga books or p
