Now with 50% more irrational depression.

I am super bummed out that Heath Ledger died.

It isn't that I'm particularly interested in Heath Ledger- other than his Batman involvement; it's just that I am so tired of people ruining their lives with drugs and alcohol. Young people dying for no good reason.

It makes me angry and sad.

Maybe it has to do with my enchanting family background.

Heath Ledger,
You were a good actor and a handsome fella. I'm sorry your daughter will grow up without you. It makes me sad.
The End.

More story via Comic Book Resources.

Notable News

Headline which inspired loathing:
Isaiah Washington: Fired & Bitter

Most irrelevant headline ever:
Journey's Steve Perry Thinks Sopranos Finale Hit Right Note
Also wins award for most ridiculous music pun ever.

Unluckiest headline today:
19th-century weapon found in whale
Whale learns that cheating death can only be accomplished for a century. (This will teach him to make metaphorical deals with the devil. And by devil, I mean robot devil. And by metaphorical, I mean get your coat.)

Saddest headline today:
TV's 'Mr. Wizard' Don Herbert dies at 89
Mr. Wizard was one of my all time favorite shows. I really loved science and Mr. Wizard nurtured that fascination. I am sorry to know he is gone.
I am also reminded of Mr. Wizard's counterpart, Mr. Lizard of Dinosaurs fame: "We're going to need another Timmy."

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut passed away yesterday. I feel the need to say something, but I can't make my words work together.

His work greatly influenced me in my youth.
It is strange to me how you can do amazing things and then die from falling down. We learn to walk so that years from that day we can fall over and crack our skulls or fracture a hip. I just don't understand.

Sorry, that's all I've got.

Thursday News

Lead singer of Blues Traveler, John Popper, totally crazy, also no longer fat.
His car was pulled over and the picture below is what the police seized from secret compartments (?!) of Popper's Mercedes SUV. Said Popper, "I didn't want to be left behind, [in case of natural disaster]."

Also said Popper, "I have big man boobs."

No seriously, I'm not making that up.

I'm Free.

John Inman, the actor who portrayed Mr Humphries in the BBC comedy, Are You Being Served passed away in a London hospital, after battling Hep A. John Inman was a very funny man, and I am sad at his passing.

Bitch Please.
Japan is starting an internal probe of the "comfort stations" run during WWII.

Last week Prime Minister Abe said there was no proof the women were coerced into sexual slavery. Abe claims Japan has apologised already for the program of institutionalized brothels, and will not apologise again. In spite of a wealth of evidence that Japanese agents kidnapped or coerced thousands of Korean and Chinese women into sexual slavery (including living survivors of the program and former soldiers) Japan has never properly apologised.

The previous apology was along the lines of "we are sorry about institutionalizing brothels." Rather than "we are sorry and will never again kidnap or coerece women into sexual slavery."

I do not believe in reparations for acts so far in the past, but I am damn tired of Japan trying to pretend that none of their war crimes occurred. I don't think that anyone believes that Japan can make up for what the past regime did, but saying it never happened is absolutely shameful.

I wanted to end this on some point about the sex trade, treatment of women, or treatment of Koreans in Japan, but I can't express what I want to say. I think I'm too disgusted.

You can't undo things by failing to admit them. You can't learn from your mistakes be declaring that they never happened. Looking at the acts of my own government, it isn't a stretch to believe that Japan could repeat their war atrocities.

It's pretty sad that I have to post more news about Comfort Women on International Women's Day.

Yvonne De Carlo

Yvonne De Carlo passed away Monday of natural causes. You may remember her as Lily Munster, but I will always remember her as Mrs. Warren in John Wayne's McLintock! as well a number of other westerns.

She was a beautiful woman and a good actress. She will me missed.

Gerald Ford

I suppose it is expected that I make some kind of thoughtful comment on the passing of President Gerald Ford. Something about the Warren Comission, Vietnam, the infamous Nixon pardon, maybe.
Well, no dice.
Former President Gerald Ford, when you were a young man in the Navy during WWII, you were a total dish.

Thanks, Joe.

Animation Giant Barbera Dead at 95
by Joal Ryan

Tom was a cat. Jerry was a mouse. Joseph Barbera was the man who helped bring them together.

Barbera, the animation giant who, with partner William Hanna, set Tom chasing after Jerry, Scooby-Doo scurrying after ghosts, and Fred Flintstone peddling after brontosaurus burgers, died Monday at his California home. He was 95.

Barbera, who dreamed up new cartoon ideas into his 90s, had been the surviving half of the legendary Hanna-Barbera tandem, a team so synonymous with Saturday morning TV of the 1960s-80s. Hanna died in 2001.Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, The Flintstones, The Jetsons, The Smurfs and Josie and the Pussycats were among the pair's best known series. There were dozens upon dozens more, many of them variations, spinoffs and/or outer-space riffs on their signature shows. By one popular estimate, Hanna-Barbera produced more than 3,000 half-hours of animated entertainment to eat your Sugar Smacks by.


Barbera, credited with often working out the stories for his and Hanna's creations, never stopped thinking about the next project. "Joe Barbera was here at the studio until about three weeks ago," Sander Schwartz, president of Warner Bros. Animation said in an interview Monday. "He usually came in after lunch. Most days, I greeted him. He pitched me a couple of shows."And Schwartz bought some ideas, too, including one that became the 2005 direct-to-video movie Tom and Jerry: The Fast and the Furry. (Barbera might have been unusually hip for a nonagenarian, but the Fast and the Furious reference was courtesy Warners, the current studio home of what once was Hanna-Barbera Productions.)

Schwartz admired Barbera's energy, attitude—and legacy. "Joe really set the standard for television animation," Schwartz said, "and pretty much single-handedly with...Hanna invented television animation."Through it all, according to Michael Mallory, author of Hanna-Barbera Cartoons, there was one unmistakable trait in the partners' work: "Everything they did had heart." "That's kind of an old-fashioned, but it's true," Mallory said Monday. "The characters generally had relationships with each other."This was the case, Mallory said, even of the most famously at-odds Hanna-Barbera duo: Tom and Jerry. Tom may have wanted to eat Jerry, as Mallory put it, but Tom always felt bad if he believed he'd actually killed his outsized opponent. "These characters really had a tie to each other," Mallory said.

And Tom and Jerry really had a tie to Hanna and Barbera. The characters were the duo's first notable creations, debuting in 1940's "Puss Gets the Boot." The Oscar-nominated short wasn't billed as a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and the characters weren't referred to as Tom and Jerry, but the sparring was vintage Tom and Jerry.

Born March 24, 1911, Barbera was a bank teller with an artistic bent until, as biographies have it, he ditched the desk job for an easel job. Barbera, the fledging fulltime animator, bounced around various studios until he landed at MGM in 1937. It was at MGM that Barbera met Hanna, and, eventually, Tom met Jerry. Barbera and Hanna's cat-and-mouse games went on to net seven Oscars, from 1943 to 1952, all awarded to producer Fred Quimby. As the Academy statuettes suggested, Barbera and Hanna hadn't just created cartoons; they'd created movie stars. Accordingly, Jerry danced with Gene Kelly in 1945's Anchors Aweigh and 1956's Invitation to Dance. Tom and Jerry both costarred opposite swimming thespian Esther Williams in the 1953 splashy live-action musical Dangerous When Wet. According to Mallory, Barbera viewed Tom and Jerry as a natural duo whose adventures almost wrote themselves. "He'd say you have a cat, you have a mouse--half of your story is already done for you," Mallory said.

Hanna and Barbera, as they were professionally known, alphabetical order aside, left MGM to set up their own shop in 1957. The Huckleberry Hound Show, starring a folksy blue dog and featuring a stable of characters including a picnic-basket-loving bear known as Yogi, followed in 1958. Hanna-Barbera Productions was on its way. Besides the characters it produced, the duo's company is best remembered for figuring out how to make animation doable, budget-wise and production-wise, for TV. And while so-called "limited animation," a break from the fluid, classic Disney style, eventually gave way to Josie and the Pussycats robotically rocking out in front of a moving background, without it, the band and others might never had had Saturday morning gigs. Other early Hanna-Barbera shows included: Quick Draw McGraw, The Magilla Gorilla Show, Top Cat and the adventure-minded Johnny Quest.

The Flintstones paved the way for The Simpsons, et al., becoming prime-time's first animated series. The show about a modern stone-age family ran for six seasons on ABC (1960-66), before spawning several spinoffs and TV-movies, and inspiring two live-action comedies. The Jetsons followed The Flintstones briefly to ABC in 1962, before becoming a Saturday-morning staple. The space-age flip side to The Flintstone's prehistoric setting, the show could be viewed as a precursor of Partridge Family 2200 AD, Yogi's Space Race and Josie and the Pussycats in Outer Space—in the Hanna-Barbera universe, it seemed, all characters eventually ended up in another galaxy. Hanna-Barbera championed more traditional science fiction and superheroes with Space Ghost, the 1960s version of The Fantastic Four, the Godzooky-introducing Godzilla Power Hour, and the Justice League of America-aspiring Super Friends.

In 1969, the Mystery Machine gang rolled onto CBS' Saturday morning schedule in the form of Scooby-Doo, Where Are You?, and another hit franchise—and character—was born.The series' namesake dog went onto get a sidekick (in Scooby and Scrappy-Doo, among other spinoffs), host an athletic event (in Scooby's All-Star Laff-A-Lympics), and inspire the big-screen, live-action franchise. "Right now, Scooby-Doo is probably the No. 1 [animated] character—over Mickey Mouse, over Bugsy Bunny," Mallory said. Hanna-Barbera continued to dominate Saturday mornings of the 1970s and 1980s with the likes of: Hong Kong Phooey, another show about a crime-fighting dog, albeit one who sounded like Scatman Crothers; The Smurfs, the Americanized version of the blue, European-born woodland creatures; and, every possible Yogi/Scooby-Doo/Flintstones/Jetsons mutation imaginable. The Hanna-Barbera factory made cartoons out of live-action comedies, à la Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days. It made cartoons out of presold toy lines and games, à la Pac-Man and the GoBots. All this, and the Banana Splits, too. "They really were a full-service team," Mallory said. "They could do everything."

Generally, Mallory said, Barbera handled the first half of the animation process, laying out the stories, characters and overall design. Hanna took over as a show moved to production. Of the two, Barbera was more interested into moving beyond animation, hence his credits on projects that ranged from the Emmy-winning 1977 TV movie The Gathering to the unacclaimed 1978 TV movie KISS Meets the Phantom of the Park.

To the end, Mallory said, Barbera--the animator, producer, director, writer and mogul--was an entertainer. "You'd go into his office...and he'd go, 'Did you see Seinfeld last night? And he'd go and he'd act out the entire episode for me," Mallory said. "You haven't lived until you've seen Joe Barbera at 89 sliding through the door like Kramer—and doing it brilliantly."

Mo Betta

Mo Betta was a good fish.

He passed away today at approximately 1 pm, at the age of 4 years. He died of some kind of neurological issue, as evidenced by the seizures which ended his life.

Mo started his career as a professional entertainer several years ago when a former roommate acquired him from the Jones & Co. pet store, formerly of Lynnwood. After a few months of deplorable neglect and mishandling, Mo was relocated to my office where he took the position of Curriculum Fish. He even had his own placard in our shared cubical. He primarily spent his time fighting to protect his territory from various objects and blowing bubble nests to attract lady fish.

I don't know what happens to fish when they die. But if there is a fish heaven, he is surely there.

He was a really good fish.

Local Blogger Damn Tired of Death

So two weeks ago it was my uncle, this weekend it was ghoulish tv specials, now it is Mo Betta. My fish.
This morning I came into the office, opened his bowl, dropped food in, turned my computer, and in the slowest double take ever, finally turned around and threw the lid of his bowl back open and peered in anxiously.
There he was, floating nose up, tail down. A co-worker stopped to see what I was doing as I vigorously shook the bowl. Mo did not move. "Maybe he is just cold," she suggested,"Do fish hibernate?"
When I was young our heat was turned off. In north Idaho. In winter. And my fish bowl froze solid. As my mother defrosted the bowl in the sink and I hid in bed weeping pitifully the fish came back to life.
"Fish can freeze solid and come back, he is not hibernating."
I went to the workroom to get a plastic cup to scoop Mo out of his bowl so as not to clog the burial receptacle with fish rocks.
As I was walking back my co-worker yelped and cried, "He just moved!"
I shook the bowl, and his gills flapped. I was thrilled. My own Halloween Miracle.
And then he kind of slid sideways to the bottom of the bowl.
This is not a miracle. This is a replay of the death of my Great Grandfather. The joy you take from tiny upturns in a fatally ill person's health. The belief that they can pull through that will only result in eventual disappointment.
My fish is 4. Bettas live to two years, absolute tops.
And now I get to watch him suffer and finally die.

Not enough time.

When I was 6 I broke my leg. It was a bad break and I had a cast from my toes to my hip. Uncle Brett came to Post Falls to visit, and I remember he picked me up and held me in the air. I had never been so high off the ground.

He was irritatingly smart. He could tell you the common and scientific names of any animal. He could tell you where it lives, what it does, what it eats. Sometimes I thought he knew everything. He was insufferable to play against in Trivial Pursuit.

He was an emotional person. A person who had made a million mistakes and held each one in his heart. A million regrets can fit in their too.

He passed away a few days ago, suddenly and alone in his apartment. We didn’t find out until last night. Telling my mother that her big brother had died was the worst thing that I’ve ever had to do.

Before he died he kept making plans with me and then literally sleeping through them. I kept falling for it and I was mad at myself for being such an idiot.

And I’m mad at myself now. I feel like I blew him off, but I didn’t.

I think maybe I feel bad that he felt so strongly for me and I don’t know what to say about "my other uncle."

The things that you learn when your pride dies.

Michael Franti and Spearhead play a song called "Never too Late" and I have been meditating on it. The Live at KEXP version has a little story at the beginning about a man trying to turn his life around after having a stroke.
My own grandfather was a hard man. An alcoholic. Late in his life he had a stroke and began to reach out to his children. My mother never accepted his apology before he died. I think a lot about that.
We all make mistakes in life. Sometimes life rides us hard and makes us sour. I think it is an amazing thing for anyone to apologise, to try to move on. I really don't think it's ever too late. I know you can't undue your wrongs, but sometimes all it takes is an apology to move the wronged from a place of wounded bitterness, to acceptance.

Michael Franti and Spearhead are in concert in Seattle at the Paramount on the 13th of October, in case you'd care to join me.

Anyway, I put the lyrics below.
*********************************************

Don't fear your best friends,
because a best friend would never try to do you wrong.
And don't fear your worst friends,
because a worst friend is just a best friend whose done you wrong.
And don't fear the night time,
because the monsters know that you're divine.
And don't fear the sunshine,
because everything is better in the summertime. (summertime)

And it's never too late to start the day over,
it's never too late, pick up the phone.
(pick up the phone and call me)
never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
never too late to come on home.
(come on home)

Don't fear the water,
because you can swim, inside you, within your skin.
don't fear your father,
because a father's just a boy without a friend.
And don't fear to walk slow,
don't be a horse race, be a marathon.
And don't fear the long road,
because on the long road you got a long time to sing a simple song.
(sing along, come on)

And it's never too late
to start the day over,
it's never too late,
pick up the phone.
(pick up the phone and call me)
never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
never too late to come on home.
(come on home)

Don't fear your teachers,
because if you listen you can hear music in a school bell.
And don't fear your preacher,
if you can't find heaven in a prison cell.
don't fear your own self,
paying money to justify your worth.
And don't fear your family,
because you chose them a long time before your birth.
(yes you did, come on)

And it's never too late to start the day over,
it's never too late, pick up the phone.
(pick up the phone and call me)
it's never too late to lay your head down on my shoulders,
never too late to come on home.

Hold to your children, hold to your children, hold to your children, let them know.

good bye

Robert Baron, 1944-2006: Listeners sought out Madman Moskowitz

By BILL VIRGIN P-I REPORTER

Robert Baron, better known to radio listeners in the region as Madman Moskowitz, died Friday after a brief illness. He was 61.

For more than two decades the self-proclaimed "maniacal maestro of malodorous melodies" entertained audiences with a radio program on which he played comedy routines, musical satire, novelty tunes and songs that were intentionally or unintentionally funny, along with classic country tunes from what he called his "nostalgia bin."

Over the years his show aired on just about every country station in the market, many of them now gone. Most recently "Music With Moskowitz" aired at noon Saturdays on Everett community station KSER-FM (90.7).

In his day job Baron was a middle-school teacher in the Edmonds School District. He retired at the end of the most recent school term after 35 years teaching here and in Los Angeles.

"He was a tremendous asset to the station," said Ed Bremer, the former manager and now news and public affairs director at KSER. "His was one of our most popular shows. He just made Saturday afternoons fun. He enjoyed coming in and doing his show, and we enjoyed having him."

A native of Pasadena, Calif., Baron got an early start in entertainment as an extra in such films as "Rebel Without a Cause." His radio career started in earnest in this region in the mid-1970s at KRAB-FM, but he had stints at KMPS-FM, KRPM-FM, KKBY-FM and KYCW-AM. The Moskowitz name came from an artist's signature on a poster of a rabbit.

Continual shifts in station formats forced Baron repeatedly to seek new homes for his show. It was an effort his listeners appreciated. "People were always seeking out his show" and were constantly calling to find where they could hear it, said Becky Brenner, the program director at KMPS-FM, who worked with Baron.

In the mid-1990s "Music With Moskowitz" was the No. 1- rated program among listeners 25-to-54 in its Sunday evening slot on KRPM-FM, said Nathan Judson, who as "Nathan Detroit" served as Moskowitz's on-air sidekick and took listeners' calls.

The phone calls for song requests and votes for the show's top song mattered greatly to Baron, Judson said. "Their feedback was critical to Robert," he said. "He felt that to be disconnected from your audience is the worst thing you can do."

Baron's show was virtually the only on-air outlet for the works of legendary musical comedians such as Tom Lehrer, Stan Freberg, Allan Sherman, Spike Jones and Weird Al Yankovic. But his show also featured many local comedy songs that would otherwise have had no airing, from Stan Boreson to "Godzilla Ate Tukwila" and "The Aroma of Tacoma." All were drawn from a huge personal library of 50,000 records, 2,000 reels of tape and 2,000 CDs, all of which he referred to as his "little flat friends."

"He was just so dedicated to making sure there was an outlet for that music," Brenner said, adding that Baron did extensive research on the material "to have great stories to tell" about what he was playing.

"I just loved his passion for everything that was wacky and crazy" in music, she said.

Services will be at 10:30 a.m. Aug. 26 at Blessed Sacrament Church in Seattle. Judson and Catherine Sinclair, Baron's longtime close friend, plan a tribute on today's show at noon at KSER.

KSER's Moskowitz dies at 61

DJ Robert Baron gave offbeat music a home on the dial

By Scott Pesznecker Herald Writer

EVERETT - Robert Baron, known by many in the region as radio host Madman Moskowitz, died Friday after a sudden illness. He was 61.

Baron, who lived in Seattle's Magnolia neighborhood, entertained listeners with his shows for more than two decades. His most recent show, "Music with Moskowitz," aired from noon to 2 p.m. Saturdays on Everett public radio station KSER (90.7 FM).

His show featured a mix of comedy routines, musical parodies and songs that were "unintentionally funny," said Nathan Judson, who produced Baron's radio shows and assisted him on the air as "Nathan Detroit."

On Wednesday, Baron met with Judson at the radio station in Everett and asked him to handle Saturday's show. He was admitted into the hospital later that day.

Judson made good on his promise. Saturday's show became a tribute to Madman Moskowitz, he said.

"He will be sorely missed," Judson said. "His greatest strength was his commitment to his listeners. His show was all about them; it wasn't just something he wanted to do. It was really connected."

When Baron wasn't in the radio booth, he was often in the classroom. Baron recently retired after teaching math, journalism and English for more than 25 years at Alderwood Middle School.

"He was such a giving person," Judson said. "It was his way of trying to give the world more than he took."

Baron, who was from Pasadena, Calif., got his start in show business at a young age.

He was 10 years old when he appeared in the classic 1954 Christmas movie "White Christmas," the last child on the right listening to Bing Crosby sing near the end of the film.

His mother was a Ziegfeld Follies dancer, and he loved show tunes.

Baron carried his eclectic taste for entertainment with him to the radio booth, coworkers said.

"He was a nice guy," said Van Ramsey, who is the host of "Pull the String" on KSER. "He had a great sense of humor, and he was a fun guy to work with."

The station will air "best-of" moments of Moskowitz's shows during its next two Saturday slots, station manager Bruce Wirth said.

"He's pretty irreplaceable," he said. "It's kind of hard to imagine continuing on. He was a great asset to the station."

2 pm Snack Time Reminiscences

Today as I consume my 2 pm snack of yogurt I'm reminded of yogurts of the past. My friend Julie sent me home with a black bear hamster a few summers ago and I loved him. He never bit or peed on anyone and he was just a good little guy to cuddle. He got very ill at the end, and I was hand feeding him yogurt on his own little spoon to keep him going. He walked on a leash. He bit my ex's nipple. He was such a good friend.
Of course this is in contrast with my first hamster, Shnooky Slush-Bucket who hated everyone, constantly escaped, bit me, peed everywhere and lived- in spite of eating a fair amount of dishwasher detergent, aquarium sealant, and chewing through several cupboards- for like 4 years. Apparently his evil immortality did not extend as far as anti-digestive powers. Kit Edward Kat enjoyed a hearty brunch one Sunday, lucky little bastard. We buried what remained of Shnooky's remains in one of those cookie boxes for those cookies that were vanilla on one side and chocolate on the other (which I used to call Daddy Cookies) somewhere outside of Vegas.
I had another hamster as well, who tragically passed away of testicular cancer. It was very sad and also anatomically hilarious. I tipped the entire contents his bed-pod into a Puma box and wrapped it in an Abercrombie and Fitch bag and left him next to the clogged garbage chute. He was an ok hamster, he bit me twice, but he peed on Steve.