News from me - June 1, 2001

June 1, 2001

HERE'S A CURIO I thought someone out there might like. At left is the cover of a pretty crummy rip-off of Famous Monsters of Filmland published back in the sixties. This one came from Charlton Press and is only of interest — albeit of the limited variety — because the cover is a painting by the great Steve Ditko. He didn't do much work like this but what he did, he did pretty well...as you can see. The inside of this magazine, as I recall from my monster mag reading days, was always pretty dreadful. Charlton had an unerring capacity to make even a cheap kind of publication look cheaper.

FROM MY E-MAIL, I gather that many of you are as engrossed as I am in finding out what the hell happened with the voting in Florida last November. A new "must read" is today's article in The Washington Post — a follow-up to the one I recommended the other day. Here's the link...and for those of you who don't have time to click on it, here's a summary...

Boy, darn near everyone involved in running the election and counting the ballots screwed up royally, and almost all the screw-ups worked against Al Gore.

IF YOU LIVE in Los Angeles: On Sunday, before the Tony Awards, KCET (Channel 28) is rerunning the recent video of the Gershwin musical, Crazy For You. Silly story, great dancing...and you can't beat the music. I enjoyed it and it doesn't seem to be coming out on VHS or DVD, and it probably won't turn up on TV again for a while. So record accordingly.

THOSE WEIRD WEBSITES: The late Bob Crane was best known as the star of Hogan's Heroes, though I recall him from when he was a darn good disc jockey/radio personality on KNX here in Los Angeles. How he became "the late" Bob Crane apparently had a lot to do with his penchant for having sex with a wide array of women and taking pictures of these encounters. Well, Bob Crane, Jr. is publishing a book...a fancy pictorial history of his father's life, including a generous sampling of the motel room photographs. So if you're dying to see a dead sitcom star in the act of humping Denny's waitresses whose faces have been digitally obscured, hurry on over to www.bobcrane.com.

(Sarcasm Alert: I am not actually suggesting you purchase said volume or even visit the website. I'm just reporting it because it's so weird and because it substantiates my theory that, eventually, every single piece of writing, video or audio that has ever existed will be available on the Internet. Yes, that includes the Polaroids you keep in that shoebox in the back of the closet under your old sleeping bag.)

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