A Grammar Quiz for Father's Day

Courtesy of grammarly.com/grammar-check and just in time for Father's Day, we have this test of grammar acumen. Check your skills and be sure to share the results on social media!

Remember, Father's Day is the third Sunday in June each year -- Sunday, June 21, in 2015!

Has It Been Ten Years Already?

Today marks the tenth anniversary of my blogging life.

Starting here on December 17, 2004, this writing platform has expanded to include Book Reviews by Rick Sincere, Where Are the Copy Editors?, Bearing Drift, and the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner, with a few smaller projects along the way. The orbit of this blog includes three YouTube channels (see the sidebar to your left).

By coincidence, I produced several interesting blog posts on December 17, without making explicit reference to its being a blogoversary.

By far the most popular of these has been one from last year, headlined "Obligatory Dylan Sprouse Nude Selfie Blog Post." To date, that report on the former Disney Channel star's naked mishap and his deft handling of it has been viewed 4,723 times, which is a pretty good rate.  It's remarkable how interested people are in seeing a celebrity's genitals.

On this date in 2007, I noted that that was the ten-year anniversary of the blog itself.

Quoting Kai Ryssdal, the host of the public radio show, Marketplace, at the time:

The blog is celebrating an anniversary today. Ten years ago a guy named Jorn Barger coined the term "weblog" to describe his website Robot Wisdom. It was shortened to "blog" two years later by someobody else.

Back then only about 23 websites were properly considered blogs. These days, whether you write them or read them, blogs are a pretty common pursuit.

Estimates are that 120,000 new ones are created everyday. No word, though, on how many are actually read.

There are a lot more than 23 "weblogs" today, that's for sure.

The most-viewed post on this blog was "Snowpocalypse!," a collection of photos from the big snowstorm of December 2009 -- published, coincidentally, on December 18.

The second most popular post is an oddity: "Shirtless and Circumcised," which traces strange search terms that lead readers to this blog.

Other blogoversary posts have included "Christmas Carols: The Odd and the New," a review of the Daily Telegraph Book of Carols, also from 2009.

On December 17, 2006, I took the Washington Post ombudsman to task for sloppy writing in "Small Pool."

Two years later, I reported on the progress of the breathtaking recount in the razor-thin race between then-Congressman Virgil Goode (R-Rocky Mount) and future former Congressman Tom Perriello (D-Ivy) in "Fifth District Recount Continues."

Only once, nine years ago, in 2005, did I make an explicit commemoration of the start of my blogging in "Anniversary Waltz." In fact, for a long time, I thought my blog-start was on December 22. I had to look up the correct date as I prepared for this post!

Let's hope I have at least ten more good years of filling this space with compelling words arranged in sentences and paragraphs.

Cheers!

The Little Typo That Could

Over on the most-neglected of my three blogs, Where Are the Copy Editors?, I have only created one post during the entire calendar year of 2011.  Yet it's proven to be unusually popular, with dozens of hits within a couple of hours of publication.

Headlined "By Far the Best Typo of 2011," it points the reader to a howler of a typographical error in a new book by Craig Shirley called December 1941: 31 Days That Changed America and Saved the World. (Suffice it to say that the book is rife with errors of all sorts. In the chapter I read last night, Shirley used the word "causality" when he meant "casualty." Every page has some kind of mistake like that, and each one could have easily been caught by an editor in the manuscript stage. Such things should never even make it to galley proofs.)

In any case, this very funny typo -- you have to read the original post to get the full impact -- has, relatively speaking, gone viral.  ("Relatively" meaning nowhere near as popular as the Lindsay Lohan Playboy photos.)

I Tweeted a link to the post that was reTweeted by the popular Wisconsin Twitter personality, MissPronouncer.

By Far the Best Typo of 2011:bit.ly/saOY4T
— Rick_Sincere (@Rick_Sincere) December 18, 2011

Then it got picked up elsewhere on Twitter and repackaged with a clever pun:

The caret and the shtick: Why everybody needs an edictor bit.ly/vMmBtq
— Jon Belmont (@jbelmont) December 18, 2011

I'm not sure whether the retweet by @MissPronouncer or the new Tweet by @jbelmont was the driver for it, but the thing is, for a blog that had an average of zero views over the past four weeks, to get 75 or 100 hits within a few hours is, as I say, "viral," in a humble and relative sense.  It's also great fun.

I have not yet finished reading December 1941 but I do wish that I had started with a blue pencil on page one, just to keep track of all the bad editing of an otherwise entertaining and educational book.

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366 Days at Examiner.com

April 6 marked my first anniversary as a contributor at Examiner.com.

In those 52 weeks, I have published 178 articles --almost one every other day, despite a few dry periods -- most of them interviews with public officials, authors, pundits, and educators.  According to statistics kept by Examiner.com, these articles have generated 25,274 page views.  Last year's page view count of 18,251 compared to a Charlottesville average of 1,617 -- that is, the average number of page views generated by other Charlottesville Examiners.

I became the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner on something of a lark.  I happened across another local Examiner's page and spotted the "write for us" link and followed it.

I'm glad I did, because it forced me to be a more aggressive reporter than I have been as a blogger.  I can't imagine so aggressively pursuing some of the interviews I did for this blog alone, which lacks the institutional support (and, dare I say it? credibility) that Examiner.com has.

Social Times reported at the end of December:

Local news network Examiner.com is closing out 2010 with two significant milestones: It posted article No. 1 million for the year earlier this month, and it set site records for monthly unique visitors and total page views in November, tallying 22.4 million and 63.1 million, respectively, according to Omniture.

And according to comScore, the site’s traffic rose 19 percent in November compared with October, making Examiner.com the No. 83 domain in the United States and No. 7 in the general news subcategory, ahead of brands including Fox News, BBC News, USA Today, and NBC Local Media.

I've noticed the site has had a makeover in the past few days, which gives it a cleaner look that seems easier to navigate.

Blogging is fine, in its way, and it allows me a more personal take on culture and current affairs, as well as a wide berth in terms of topics and voice.  Examiner.com requires more discipline and a more narrow focus, both of which I can appreciate.

We'll see if, by April 6 of next year, whether that results in more page views and lots of "likes."

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Remembering Ernest W. Lefever

My habit of waiting until the late hours of the evening to read the early morning newspaper sometimes serves me poorly.

One such occasion was last night (about 3:00 a.m., actually), when I turned to the obituary pages of Thursday's Washington Post to discover that my mentor and first professional employer, Ernest W. Lefever, had passed away.

According to the Post's Adam Bernstein:

Ernest W. Lefever, 89, who founded a conservative public policy organization in Washington and was an embattled nominee for a State Department human rights job under President Ronald Reagan, died July 29 at a Church of the Brethren nursing home in New Oxford, Pa. He had Lewy Body dementia, a progressive brain disorder.

Dr. Lefever, a Chevy Chase resident, was an international affairs specialist with the National Council of Churches, a staff consultant on foreign affairs to then-Sen. Hubert H. Humphrey (D-Minn.) and a senior researcher at the Brookings Institution before starting the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1976. The center studies the link between Judeo-Christian morality and national and foreign policy.

Bernstein's review of the life of Ernest Lefever focuses, as one might have expected, on one of those episodes that could be categorized as either a high or a low in one's life, depending on your perspective.

That would be Dr. Lefever's nomination by President Ronald Reagan to serve as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Dr. Lefever eventually asked the President to withdraw his nomination after it had been entwined in controversy (much of it, in my opinion, manufactured) and political opposition. The chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator Charles Percy (R-Ill.) was unhelpful in pressing the confirmation forward, to say the least.

Although Dr. Lefever's views on foreign policy (and particularly how human rights issues should be treated) were virtually identical to those of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who had been easily confirmed as the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, he met a roadblock thrown up by those who differed with those views.

To summarize those views, at the risk of oversimplifying: The United States should treat authoritarian and totalitarian states differently, because authoritarian states -- such as, in those days, Chile and Argentina -- are more likely to be reformed from within and become liberal democracies than totalitarian states (such as the Soviet Union).

Indeed, in the years that followed, Chile and Argentina, as well as South Korea and Taiwan, did reform themselves and became model democracies. Greece, Spain, and Portugal are also examples of reform from within, which were fresh in the minds of Lefever and Kirkpatrick as they were making their arguments in the late 1970s.

It was much more difficult to dislodge totalitarian dictatorships because they controlled civil society (or an ersatz civil society) as well as politics and the economy. In authoritarian states, there were usually autonomous sources of moral and civil authority -- such as the Catholic Church -- that were lacking in totalitarian countries.

In any case, Lefever's views were shaped by decades of experience, not of the ivory tower, but of on-the-ground research around the world.

As the Washington Post article notes, Lefever served in Europe after World War II repatriating prisoners of war and other refugees, working under the auspices of the YMCA. It does not note that he worked in the concentration camps set up by the Roosevelt administration for Japanese-Americans during the war, helping to comfort them in their time of distress.

Lefever often told the story of how his pacifist views changed to more realist views when, somewhere in what later became East Germany, he saw a graffito that showed a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle with an equals sign between them. He realized through his work in Europe that Nazism and Communism were equally oppressive.

Beyond his humanitarian work in war-torn Europe, Dr. Lefever was widely traveled throughout his life. I would guess that he visited nearly every country in sub-Saharan Africa, the major countries of South and Southeast Asia (including Vietnam), and much of East Asia, as well. The results of his travels and research can be seen in the 20+ books and countless articles he wrote for policy journals and academic publications.

The Post notes Lefever's association with Hubert Humphrey. It doesn't specify that Lefever was the principal drafter of the Democratic Party's platform plank on Vietnam during the 1968 Chicago Convention.

During the 1970s, Lefever became associated with a group of disaffected liberal Democrats -- he was one of them -- who became known as "neo-conservatives." Sometimes known as "Scoop Jackson Democrats," many of them came out of a New York-based social democratic tradition that insisted on opposing Stalinism and, later, Soviet expansionism and adventurism. They generally maintained, at least for a while, that the welfare state was generally a good thing, and they supported the Lyndon Johnson's Great Society.

Among the prominent neo-conservatives of those days -- a time, as George F. Will recently put it, "when that designation was more relevant to domestic than foreign policy" -- were Irving Kristol (father of Bill), Midge Decter (mother of John Podhoretz), Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Max Kampelman, and others who ended up either serving in the Reagan administration or supporting its policies in the pages of Commentary, The Public Interest, and similar publications. Ernest W. Lefever was one of these intellectuals.

As an outgrowth of his policy activism, Lefever in 1976 founded the Ethics and Public Policy Center, initially as a part of Georgetown University and later an independent think tank.

It was shortly after the EPPC's founding that I met Dr. Lefever and joined the Center's staff. I was a junior at Georgetown, needing a work-study job and late in finding one.

On a bulletin board in the financial aid office was an index card advertising a part-time position for a research assistant at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, which was completely unknown to me. Needing the job and with few other alternatives listed on that bulletin board, I called the number and set up an appointment. (In those days, "bulletin boards" were made of cork and hung on walls.)

Dr. Lefever interviewed me. I was unshaped politically at that time, as likely to follow Richard McSorley and the Berrigan brothers as anyone else. He asked me for writing samples; all I had to offer were press releases I had drafted for my community theatre earlier that summer (1979; the year of Fiddler on the Roof).

He took a chance with me, put me under his wing, and taught me more than I can estimate.

Through his example, he showed me how to write clearly and effectively. He would say, of course, that such teaching would have no impact on someone who did not already think clearly and write plainly, but I must demur. Whether he knew it or not, he drilled me on composition, from word choice to sentence shape to paragraph size. (His influence affected me quickly. Within a few months of my beginning my part-time tenure at EPPC, one of my professors gave me a lower grade on a paper than he otherwise would have, telling me "You write too clearly" -- like a journalist rather than like an academic. I took his criticism as a badge of honor, and shared a chuckle with Dr. Lefever over it.) The Lefever standard for good writing on public policy? "If an interested and motivated person who reads at an eighth-grade level can understand it, you've done your job well."

Two years after I was hired, when my first op-ed was published in the Washington Star, Dr. Lefever congratulated me and said that he could tell from the way I formulated my arguments that I had been a high school debater. Then he chided me -- as he should have -- for identifying myself with the Center when I submitted the article, without clearing it with him first.

Over the seven or eight years that I was employed by EPPC (I took one year off to pursue my master's degree), Dr. Lefever and I worked closely together. My desk was immediately outside his office. He had a secretary, too, but I was his "special assistant to the president for research." I watched closely as he drafted articles; I often typed them for him through numerous iterations.

When, in 1984, a manuscript on investment in South Africa had gone through three different authors and at least four different versions (all rejected), he turned to me and asked me to write a publishable book. I did, and it became my first -- The Politics of Sentiment: Churches and Foreign Investment in South Africa. Much of the shape of the book is actually his. It would have been fair for him to list me as co-author with him, but he generously gave me sole author credit.

Two years later, after we had hosted a conference about the Strategic Defense Initiative, he asked our colleague, Pete Wehner, and me to compile the papers and other articles into an anthology. He suggested that we seek out Zbigniew Brzezinski as a co-editor, so we could have "name" on the cover.

I bet him $5 that Brzezinski would turn down the invitation. I lost. My second book, Promise or Peril: The Strategic Defense Initiative, has four co-editors: myself, Wehner, Brzezinski, and Marin Strmecki (at that time Zbig's research assistant).

After I left the Ethics and Public Policy Center in 1988, I temporarily lost touch with Dr. Lefever. He called me about 10 years ago or so, however, and asked me to help him learn how to use a computer for writing. He had a Macintosh and I spent several hours with him, showing him how to create document files, how to edit them, how to save them. (Throughout his highly productive life, Dr. Lefever typed rapidly with just two fingers, and until the 1990s he used a manual typewriter -- not even an electric one -- for drafting his articles and book manuscripts.)

EWL also liked working with his hands. He was an accomplished cabinet maker. (He learned that trade as a teenager.) I remember spending weekends at the office with him, reinforcing the massive table in our conference room. It was hard work, especially for someone like me who is generally all-thumbs when it comes to carpentry or home maintenance.

Dr. Lefever was not afraid of technology or technological progress. His first published piece of writing, at the age of 13, was a story about a boy who makes a trip to the moon. (This was in about 1931, of course.) He was an early media critic in the sense of finding ways to analyze the way the broadcast networks reported the news so that their bias (if it was there) could be measured. As late as five days before his death, Dr. Lefever's 1974 book about CBS News was cited in an article by Cliff Kincaid.

Forgotten in the Post's coverage is the singular achievement in which Dr. Lefever brought together Edward Teller, the father of the (American) hydrogen bomb and Andrei Sakharov, the father of the (Soviet) hydrogen bomb. The two scientists had never met (largely because Sakharov was forced into internal exile in the Soviet Union as a consequence of his human-rights activism) but, at Dr. Lefever's invitation, Sakharov was an honored guest at the dinner at which Teller received the Shelby Cullom Davis Award for Integrity and Courage in Public Life. (I have to admit that, as one of only three or four people in the room when Teller and Sakharov first shook hands privately, this is an occasion that I shall never forget.)

The Post's obituary also leaves out Dr. Lefever's impish side. His last book, published in 2006, was called Liberating the Limerick: 230 Irresistible Classics. For most of his life, EWL was an inveterate collector -- and composer -- of limericks and other light verse. Here's an example, from the book:

Without being oratorical,
Consider Kant's categorical
Should one treat one's friends
As means or as ends?
Or is the query rhetorical?

Maybe that's not the best. Here's a second, about another noteworthy who recently passed away:

The CBS newsman Cronkite
Claimed ten million viewers each night.
He slanted the news
To fit his own views.
He knew in "his heart he was right."

I last saw Dr. Lefever about two and a half years ago. He asked me to visit him at his Chevy Chase home so that we could discuss possible collaboration on a book that he had in mind. He took me to lunch at a local Chinese restaurant and we had a pleasant conversation. The project never developed, but I was flattered that he would think of me as a collaborator and impressed that, at 87 years of age, that he was still so active and ready to stay in the arena. (Had the book been written, it would have been hotly controversial.)

Since then, we exchanged a few emails, but my last one to him (sent in May) received no reply. Now I know why.

I have quite a few photographs of Ernest W. Lefever from over the years. Here are some of the memorable ones.

Here are the two of us, after one of the Ethics and Public Policy Center's formal dinners.

Ernest W. Lefever, Jack Kemp, and Shelby Cullom Davis

New York Mayor Edward I. Koch and Ernest W. Lefever

EWL leads Jeane J. Kirkpatrick to the podium
(This photo was taken at the same event featured in the video, below.)

EWL opens the luncheon that launched my first book, The Politics of Sentiment

The staff of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in the summer of 1981:
Back row, left to right: Steve (now Stephanie) Mayerhofer, Marion Frayman, Raymond English, Ernest W. Lefever, (unidentified), Rick Sincere, (unidentified), Mary Ellen Pohl (now Bork), Carol Griffith
Front row, left to right: Betty Marshall, Tom Tunney

EWL striking a goofy pose at an office picnic

EWL being playful during an EPPC staff meeting

EWL hosting the annual EPPC staff Christmas party at the Lefever home, early 1980s

Ambassador Margaret Heckler (former HHS Secretary) with Dr. Lefever at a June 2006 book signing for Liberating the Limerick

Margaret and Ernest Lefever in Arlington, Virginia, June 2006

One of the last photographs I took of Dr. Lefever, in June 2006, at a book party for Liberating the Limerick

Finally, you can see Ernest W. Lefever in action, in this promotional video for the Ethics and Public Policy Center that was released in 1985. (Apologies for the fuzzy and staticky conditions in parts of it; it was a copy of a copy before I digitized it.)

In addition to Dr. Lefever, speakers in this video include Jeane Kirkpatrick, Yonas Deressa, Senator Orrin Hatch, Linda Chavez, William Bennett, Ronald Reagan, Chester Finn, Robert Royal, Caspar Weinberger, and myself.

Ernest W. Lefever, rest in peace.

Besides the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times has published an obituary. The current president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, Edward Whelan, has a remembrance on NRO's The Corner. EPPC has posted an official obituary here, accompanied by the most familiar formal portrait of EWL. (I have not yet seen a notice about a funeral or memorial service.)

Updates, August 5: The New York Times has an obituary, by Douglas Martin, in yesterday's editions. The EPPC web site announces there will be a memorial service for Dr. Lefever on August 22 in Washington. It also features a remembrance by George Weigel, who was the second president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

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'It Was a Dark and Stormy ...'

Snoopy is not the only imitator of Paul Clifford, the novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton with the much-mocked opening sentence that begins, "It was a dark and stormy night..."

For 27 years, San Jose State University in California has sponsored the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, which aims to inspire bad writing (in the form of opening sentences) from contestants who enter from around the globe.

This year's winner is David McKenzie of Washington state. UPI notes his winning sentence:

"Folks say that if you listen real close at the height of the full moon, when the wind is blowin' off Nantucket Sound from the nor' east and the dogs are howlin' for no earthly reason, you can hear the awful screams of the crew of the Ellie May, a sturdy whaler captained by John McTavish; for it was on just such a night when the rum was flowin' and, Davey Jones be damned, big John brought his men on deck for the first of several screaming contests."

The San Jose Mercury News explains:

"The judges liked his sentence because of the way it pulls the rug from under the reader. You compose yourself to hear about another wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald, then find that it's just about some drunks having a screaming contest," said Scott Rice, who began the contest 26 years ago.

For the record, the sentence that began it all reads like this:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Those who like this sort of thing (and I am one of them) can entertain themselves with several volumes of bad writing compiled by Scott Rice, including the original It Was a Dark and Stormy Night and its sequels, including Bride of Dark and Stormy: Yet More of the Best (?) From the Bulwer-Lytton Contest and Dark and Stormy Rides Again.

UPDATE: NPR interviews winner David McKenzie about his 87-word sentence on "All Things Considered."


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Mary Lou Forbes, RIP

Sad news from the Washington Times: Longtime Commentary editor Mary Lou Forbes died over the weekend, just a few days past her 83rd birthday and not even two weeks after her retirement.

Mrs. Forbes had a journalism career that spanned six decades and two centuries. She became the Times' Commentary editor in 1984 and served in that role for 25 years. Earlier, as a reporter for the Washington Star, she had won a Pulitzer Prize for her coverage of Virginia's shameful battle against the desegregation of its government schools.

Although I never had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Forbes, she was an early encourager of my work as an opinon writer. During the 1980s, when I was just getting started as an independent (for lack of a better word) pundit, she published dozens of articles that I submitted to the Commentary pages of the Washington Times. Together with the Times' late book editor, Colin Walters -- who often challenged me to review books that I otherwise never would have read, much less written about -- she gave me the boost I needed to know that my writing was worth reading, at a critical point in my nascent career.

Seeing the remembrances of Mary Lou Forbes by other writers in today's Times, I now realize I was not the only neophyte opinion columnist whom she nurtured. Cal Thomas, for instance, who is perhaps the most widely syndicated commentator today, writes:

Next to my mother, Mary Lou Forbes was my biggest cheerleader. She would call or e-mail about something I had written and praise it as if it were really that good. She persuaded me to submit some of my columns for Pulitzer Prize consideration. I told her there was no way I would ever win that prize, even if I was good enough because of the liberal tilt of the selection committee. She persisted, and just because it was her, I submitted an entry. I told her I was so confident I wouldn't even make the finals that if I did, I would make her house payments for one year. She laughed. I never had to pay up.

Mary Lou had talent and class. She was a lady in a day when that meant something. Every female becomes a woman because of time and biology. Not every woman becomes a lady. That comes about because a woman develops the inner qualities of character, virtue and modesty. Mary Lou had those in abundance.

It is a cliche to say a person who has died will be missed. It's true of Mary Lou Forbes. I shall miss her. Our profession will miss her because they don't make many real journalists like her anymore. All who knew her can say "amen."

The Times' current senior opinion editor, Franklin Perley, lists some of the other writers who benefited from Mrs. Forbes' nurturing:

As Commentary and Opinion editor, she said it important to provide a counterweight to the prevailing liberal perspective of the dominant media culture. In the early 1980s, when The Times was struggling to establish itself, that was no easy task. "Back then, we had to beg writers to submit their material to us," she said recently. "Now we're inundated."

By providing them exposure in the nation's capital, she played a vital role in the career success of more than a few media luminaries, including syndicated columnists Cal Thomas and Austin Bay, and syndicated artist Bruce Tinsley, creator of the "Mallard Fillmore" comic strip. One of the early resources she developed was the late, great economics columnist Warren Brookes.

Still, her conservative inclinations were not doctrinaire. She said that it was important to give the other side a chance to make their case. Among liberal columnists she published regularly were Clarence Page and Donna Brazile, and she often carried columns from the Brookings Institution's Michael O'Hanlon.

The contributions of Mary Lou Forbes to the world of journalism were remarkable. Given the torrent of comments in today's Washington Times, it is clear she left her mark on her colleagues and friends.



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Sad News: George Furth Dead at 75

Earlier today, I received an email from a correspondent who told me he had heard that George Furth had died yesterday. I was unable to confirm the news through regular media sources, so I chose to forestall blogging about it until now, when I could, in fact, confirm it.

TheaterMania has posted an obituary confirming that Furth, who collaborated with Stephen Sondheim on both Company (which started off as a night of unrelated playlets about marriage by Furth before Sondheim joined the project) and Merrily We Roll Along.

Brian Scott Lipton writes on TheaterMania:

George Furth, who won the Tony Award for writing the book to the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, died on August 11 at age 75 in Santa Monica, California, according to published reports. No cause of death has been announced.

A graduate of Northwestern University, Furth began his career as a performer, appearing on Broadway in A Cook for Mr. General and Hot Spot, and appeared in numerous films and television shows for over 35 years, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Blazing Saddles, and Murder, She Wrote.

Furth originally wrote Company as a series of one-act plays. He later collaborated with Sondheim on Merrily We Roll Along, which was adapted from a play by George S. Kaufmann and Moss Hart, and the thriller Getting Away With Murder.

As a character actor, Furth's face was familiar to television audiences for his appearances on Batman, That Girl, The Odd Couple, and Happy Days, among many other shows. (IMDB lists 86 separate television or film credits for Furth as a performer.) According to IBDB, Furth had credits as a performer in two short-lived Broadway plays (the above-named A Cook for Mr. General and Hot Spot) before he became an award-winning playwright.

Furth also collaborated with John Kander and Fred Ebb on the Liza Minnelli vehicle, The Act, in 1977.

While George Furth will no doubt be missed deeply by his friends and family, he left behind a durable legacy that will be enjoyed by theatre audiences for many decades to come.

Last-Minute Christmas Shopping Ideas

The busy folks at Amazon.com took the time to send me an email reminder about last-minute Christmas shopping, saying

Order now and have your packages shipped fast.
For Two-Day Shipping, order as late as
3 p.m. PST (time varies by item) on Thursday, December 20.

For One-Day Shipping, order as late as
1 p.m. PST (time varies by item) on Saturday, December 22.

Taking a cue from that, I thought I might revisit some of the books that I have discussed here over the past year or so, since blog readers tend to be readers first and surfers second.

For example, in June, under the heading "Scenes from a Debate Season," I quoted a long passage from Gary Alan Fine's book, Gifted Tongues: High School Debate and Adolescent Culture -- which might make a nice gift for anyone who enjoys the new Golden Globe-nominated film, The Great Debaters, starring (and directed by) Oscar-winner Denzel Washington.

Also in June, in a post called "Judy Garland and Homosexual Identity," I highlighted what I called "a darling coffee table book," When I Knew, edited by Robert Trachtenberg and illustrated by Tom Bachtell, saying:

When I Knew is a compilation of memories from gay men and lesbians from all walks of life (though a disproportionate number of them, it seems, are somehow connected to the entertainment industry), with a specific reference to the identifiable moment of their discoveries of being gay. It's a quick read, with only a handful of entries longer than a page. Many of the authors are well-known as adults and their childhood memories are sweet, bittersweet, sometime campy, sometimes wry, and always illustrative of what it is like to grow up gay in a straight world.

In March, I reported on two events featuring authors. The first, at the Cato Institute,

Brian Doherty summarized, in about ten minutes, his 800-page retrospective, Radicals for Capitalism: A Freewheeling History of the Modern American Libertarian Movement.

At the other, in Charlottesville,

syndicated radio talk-show host Neal Boortz spoke to about 200 fans and signed copies of his new book, Somebody's Gotta Say It.

(Boortz is also co-author of the best-selling The Fair Tax Book.)

In April, under the headline, "The Pope's Medieval Economics," I wrote:

Pope Benedict XVI, in a new book scheduled to be published next month, condemns the West for exploiting the Third World. News reports about the book -- called Jesus of Nazareth and excerpted earlier this week in the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera (which happens to be owned by Rizzoli, the publishers of the book) -- do not indicate whether the pontiff similarly condemns the rulers of Third World countries for their kleptocratic practices that serve to keep their subjects in poverty while the government elites party like the wealthy title character in the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.

Somehow I doubt he does, since -- whatever the Pope's merits as a theologian and rhetorician, which are considerable -- he lacks an understanding of basic economics.

I followed that up the next month with a post entitled "Jesus, the Pope, and a Rabbi," noting:

Rabbi Jacob Neusner, a professor of the history and theology of Judaism at Bard College, explains how a 14-year-old book of his ended up playing a central role in a new book by Pope Benedict XVI called Jesus of Nazareth.

Rabbi Neusner writes:

In my 1993 book “A Rabbi Talks With Jesus,” I imagined being present at the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus taught Torah like Moses on Sinai. I explained why, for good and substantial reasons based in the Torah, I would not have followed Jesus but would have remained true to God’s teaching to Moses. Much to my surprise, Pope Benedict XVI, in his new book “Jesus of Nazareth,” devotes much of his chapter on the Sermon on the Mount to discussing my book.

“More than other interpretations known to me, this respectful and frank dispute between a believing Jew and Jesus, the son of Abraham, has opened my eyes to the greatness of Jesus’ words and to the choice that the gospel places before us,” the pope writes.

He ties this exchange of ideas to a lamentably lost tradition of disputation between religions, a tradition that was lively in the Middle Ages but began to decline during the Renaissance and nearly disappeared during and after the Enlightenment, when theories of religious tolerance gained ground (a good thing in comparison to the persecutions and pogroms that preceded it).

When discussing books, it simply is not possible to avoid the topic of Harry Potter. In a post called "Harry Potter: Economic Dynamo," I quoted extensively from a report about the business generated by the Harry Potter empire. The quotation said in part:

Here is a unique look at the Harry Potter effect.

— Book sales (Nielsen BookScan) - Since 1998, when Nielsen began measuring book sales in the United Kingdom, the six Harry Potter books have sold more than 22.5 million copies in the UK alone. In the United States, the Harry Potter titles published after 2001 have sold more than 27.7 million copies.

— Box Office sales (Nielsen EDI) - Combined, the first four Harry Potter films have grossed more than $3.5 billion worldwide. The first film, “Harry Potter and The Sorcerer’s Stone,” is the fourth all-time highest grossing film worldwide.

— Advertising (Nielsen Monitor-Plus) - In the U.S., ad spend for all Harry Potter branded merchandise (including books, movies, DVDs and other promotional products) totals $269.1 million from 1998 to date. Outside of the U.S. from 2000 to date, $119.3 million was spent on total advertising for all Harry Potter branded merchandise in Canada, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, South Africa, Switzerland, and the U.K.

The Harry Potter phenomenon now consists of seven books, five movies, and countless spin-off products, among them:


Changing directions completely, one cannot forget "Mormon Beefcake," sparked by a Washington Post story about a new 2008 calendar featuring hunky (male) Mormon missionaries. The 2008 Men on a Mission Calendar generated a lot of buzz and has turned into a best-seller. Whether it is an effective proselytizing tool remains to be seen.


Last month, in "Geography and Literature for $400, Alex," I noted how the books of Kurt Vonnegut are still selling well, months after the author's death and often decades after they were first published, and selling much better than books by his contemporaries, Norman Mailer and William Styron. I cited an AP story that reported:

While Mr. Vonnegut's death in April led to a significant jump in sales for his books, the change was far smaller for the works of Mr. Mailer and Mr. Styron, both of whom, unlike Mr. Vonnegut, won Pulitzer Prizes. Books by all three writers are still used in classrooms, but Mr. Vonnegut's are read more both on and off campus.

"I think it has something to do with the fact that Vonnegut has more of a word-of-mouth following. He's a little more pulpy and countercultural," says Keith McEvoy, general manager of Shakespeare & Co. Booksellers in downtown Manhattan. "We had a huge spike after Vonnegut died, but I didn't see anything like that for Mailer or Styron."

Other books by Mr. Vonnegut are also strongly outselling his contemporaries. "Cat's Cradle" has sold nearly 130,000 copies since 2006, according to Nielsen BookScan, and "Breakfast of Champions" totals 74,000. Meanwhile, Mr. Styron's "The Confessions of Nat Turner," winner of the Pulitzer in 1968, has sold less than 2,000 since 2006, while Mr. Mailer's "The Armies of the Night," a Pulitzer winner in 1969, sold just 3,000.

In one of my several vblog-posts (vblog = video blog) about the Virginia Film Festival, I reported about screenwriter Stewart Stern's lifelong love for Peter Pan in all its incarnations -- book, play, movie, musical, and more. Stern's uncle was Adolph Zukor, who produced the first film (silent) version of the classic children's story, and his remembrances were charming. (One might say as enchanting as fairy dust.)


There are plenty more books (including plays) that I discussed this past year that are not mentioned here. To my surprise, this has turned into a retrospective of this year's blogging, although it may seem a bit mercenary. Really, I will not complain in the least if, while reading this, you choose to buy something from one of my advertisers -- if not Amazon.com, then TLA Video's online store (see "Christmas Shopping List"). Or, if you're really pleased, there's always the tip jar.

Green Chri$tma$, indeed -- but a merry one, too, followed by a happy new year!

Nostalgia and the Writers' Strike

The film and television industry's writers' strike must really be taking its toll on producers and programmers.

This evening's Tonight Show with Jay Leno was not, as one would expect, a recent rerun. Rather, it turned out to be a repeat from an episode of June 29, 1992. The featured guests were Tom Hanks, promoting his "new" movie, A League of Their Own; Brian Ross of NBC News (long before he broke the Mark Foley story for ABC News -- any word on whether Ross is digging up anything on Trent Lott's sudden resignation?); and musician Delbert McClinton. The Tonight Show's band was still conducted by Branford Marsalis in those early days.

Because the show is more than 15 years old -- and looks it -- it is rather jarring to hear monologue jokes about "President Bush." And not a word about a randy (former) president who questions what the meaning of "is" is.

It is interesting to see how the show has developed over the years. Leno is clearly more comfortable in his role now than he was then. This is demonstrated best by the "Headlines" segment, which is much smoother today than it was in the summer of '92, even though Jay had been performing it for some time before that. The set looks clunky; it does not seem that different from the set Johnny Carson presided over in the 1970s. And, at this point, Jay had not yet developed the confidence to go out into the audience to shake hands and greet people at the top of the show.

Why this particular artifact was chosen to be aired tonight, out of the hundreds of shows produced over the past 15 years, I don't know. Has anyone heard a rationale?

Truly Bad Dialogue

Sometimes, if you belong to a Yahoogroups discussion and announcement list long enough, you find a nugget impossible to pass up.

I learned about some truly awful playwriting on one of those groups. Unfortunately, the announcement came from the playwright himself. Either he's steeped himself in Brecht's theatre of alienation or his model for dialogue composition is cross-dressing schlock-film director Ed Wood.

It shouldn't be any surprise that the play (excerpted below -- I've snipped a lot to be kind to my readers) is published by a vanity press. It comes from a volume entitled Making Progress: America's Queer History in 12 Plays by Michael D. Jackson, who is otherwise unknown to me.

Here are just a few lines to entice you -- or not:

RYAN: Do you know that the Oriental custom is for men to kiss and embrace each other when they are good friends?

ROB: Isn’t that the way with most cultures?

RYAN: It’s not intimate in other cultures.

ROB: I suppose not.

RYAN: They are uninhibited and free from worry about it. And no one thinks twice if they see two men kissing out in public.

ROB: Maybe I should move there.

RYAN: You don’t know the language.

ROB: As fascinating as you are, I’ve got to go. It’s getting late, and I have a test.

RYAN: You aren’t going to stay over tonight?

ROB: No. I’d never get anything done. (He suddenly decides to kiss RYAN) Have I shocked you again?

RYAN: Uh...

ROB: Oriental custom. (He exits)

**********

RYAN: (To audience) No one but Rob Luke has ever been able to shock me. But I must confess, I like the Oriental custom of men embracing and kissing each other if they are indeed good friends. Last night, when we went to bed, Rob put his arms around me and lay his head down on my right shoulder in the most loving way. Then I put my arms around his neck, and thus clasped in each other’s arms, we talked for a long time ‘til we were ready to go to sleep. And then we separated as I cannot sleep well with anyone near me, not even a woman. Now in all this, I am certain there is no sexual sentiment on the part of either of us. But although the thought of the least demonstration of homosexual passion is revolting to me, I do love him. I love to hug him, and now I think I don’t mind kissing him either. I have never felt such a tenderness of the human spirit as I felt when Rob kissed me. Christ kissed and embraced those whom he loved, I believe. Why shall I fear to do the same?

Is it just me, or does that sound like the basis for an old Monty Python sketch called "Monstrously Bad Theatre"?

If this is an excerpt from a cycle of plays that purports to tell the history of the gay rights movement, it's likely to set that movement back several generations.

August Wilson has nothing to fear from competitors in the epic play-cycle department.



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