The Un-Illustrated "MAD"

© EC Publications

We have a wonderful 16-year-old sweetheart living with us. One of her few failings is her inability to hold or read a book, so all reading material must be read to her. We have enrolled her in our state's Talking Library program. We have been provided with a slow-speed 4-track cassette player and tapes. Often, we receive magazines on tape, usually once a month. For some reason, this month one of the magazines was MAD.

So I sat and thought, "How does a comic book like MAD translate to the spoken word?" Well, for starters, the really bizarre stuff is left out. This includes, oddly enough, most of the works of Sergio Aragones. His marginal cartoons and a fullsize feature were left out of the recorded version, as well as "Spy Vs. Spy".

Some of the rest of the stuff translates quite nicely to spoken word, such as Dick DeBartolo's satire of "Signs" and a narrative detailing what Martha Stewart might be writing into her datebook these days. Even Al Jaffee's Fold-In is described in its folded state and a Duck Edwing punchline is described in detail. However, some of the newer humor by MAD's cadre of young turk writers puts me off my feed, and there's a Frank Jacobs "All Purpose Do It Yourself..." deal (you fill in each of a number of blanks with items from a pre-defined list) that doesn't go over. Letters page consisted mostly of an identifier of roughly 100 artists and writers whose pictures appeared in a previous issue marking MAD's 50th anniversary.

She seemed to like it, laughing appropriately in spots, but fell asleep near the end. (I'm sure that MAD would love to hear about that one!)

Now, all I need to satisfy my curiosity on such matters: how do they do Playboy for books-on-tape?

Why Dave Frishberg Rocks

One of my favorite singer/songwriters is a guy most of you have heard, but never heard of. You've seen his name on my Schoolhouse Rock pages, as author of such songs as "I'm Just A Bill", "Hardware", "Number Cruncher", "Dollars And Sense", "$7.50 Once A Week" and "Walking On Wall Street", the latter two of which he sung.

But Dave Frishberg is more than just those songs. He has an entire catalogue of quirky songs with names like "My Attorney, Bernie", "Blizzard Of Lies" (a tune inspired by wife Samantha who collected lots of "yeah, right" type epithets like "The check is in the mail", "Your secret's safe with me", "I am not a crook", etc.), and some songs that have actually become standards like "Do You Miss New York" and "Let's Eat Home" (both recorded by Rosemary Clooney, a fervent promoter of Frishberg's work who also covered "Sweet Kentucky Ham"). He's collaborated with the likes of Bob Dorough (a Schoolhouse Rock colleague on a tune called "I'm Hip") and Alan Broadbent ("Marilyn Monroe").

But Frishberg is probably best known for a song whose lyrics entirely consist of the names of baseball players - "Van Lingle Mungo", named for a pitcher for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants from 1931-1945. Frishberg noted that growing up in pre-Twins Minnesota, baseball players were nothing more than names in newspaper boxscores.

This page documents one baseball card collector's quest to obtain one card from each of the players mentioned in the song "Van Lingle Mungo". Some of the more prolific players mentioned in the song include Johnny Mize, Roy Campanella and Early Wynn; the obscure, rare ones who only played a few years and don't have many cards include Pinky May, Augie Bergamo, and a player who shares his name with one of my nephews, Danny Gardella. Frishberg followed up "Van Lingle Mungo" with a slightly similar, but more coherent tune called "Dodger Blue" which was premiered at a Dodgers old-timers day game.

Frishberg is like another of my jazz favorites, the beautiful and talented Diana Krall, in that they both have voices that you wouldn't associate with a singer. Frishberg has a very nasal, pinched tone. But their delivery is first rate and their piano playing is impeccable. Catch Frishberg if he ever shows up in your area (he does a great live show), and go find his CD's on Amazon, CD Now, or eBay.

Merry Christmas

Happy December 24th, everyone. At this Holiday season, when my brain goes into neutral for a few weeks before I must return to the classroom, I will tell you that after a number of years with HostCentric, it is finally time to change web hosting providers. I have not yet chosen a new provider, but hope to do so by the end of the year. HostCentric is a good company, but I feel as a legacy customer from an acquired operation, I got a little lost in the shuffle and was allowed to flounder for too long under an outdated web hosting package.

So www.davemackey.com will soon be parked elsewhere. There may be further changes to the site, so stay tuned. None of the URL's are expected to change, so the only things you see will be cosmetic and philosophical changes.

Thank you and Merry Christmas.

How To Get Me To Delete Your E-Mail (Revised And Updated)

• Subject line of merely "Hi" or "Hello" - this ain't Jerry Maguire. You won't have ME at Hello.
• Advertise printer cartridges or the X-10 camera
• Anything having to do with being single - I am married, thank you
• I like my "equipment" the size it is, thank you
• That damn Wealth Builder guy!
• Mini RC Racers
• Anything with a vague attachment
• A funny website
• You're the first player

Grambling-Southern Rivalry On NBC

In much the same way that the Daytona 500 is just another NASCAR race, the annual football game between two of America's Historically Black Colleges, Grambling State and Southern University, is just another football game... that happens to have a wild halftime show wrapped around it, featuring both schools' marching bands. (It's officially known as the 29th Annual State Farm Bayou Classic.)

The bands' primary showcase has actually become the Friday evening performances (with a Greek stepping show added) in the New Orleans Superdome. The Grambling Marching Tigers and the Southern Human Jukebox are arguably the two best college marching bands in America, bar none. Combining the traditional marching band stylings with equal does of soul, funk and even hip-hop, both schools arduously prepare and drill to put on the best show they can. This is not to say that the halftime show during the actual Saturday game takes a back seat. The formation to watch for at this game every year is Southern's band spelling out the game's halftime score on the field. No matter the score, the drill is always perfect and I've never seen them flub it up. The weekend also features a Saturday evening concert, a Friday afternoon job fair, and a fan fest that runs all day Saturday.

The game this year is expected to be a one-sided affair, with Grambling (10-1) winning all but their first game this season and Southern eking out a 5-6 record. With Eddie Robinson's retirement some years ago, Grambling's program is now under the helm of former Tiger QB Doug Williams, who went on to a successful NFL career that saw him earn Super Bowl MVP honors.

The game - and those bands - will air Saturday, November 30 beginning at 2:00 p.m. on NBC.

That Other Dave Mackey

How do you like this? I've got competition!

I have found out there is a davemackey.net, and it's not me. It's another guy named Dave Mackey, from the great Midwest. He registered the domain name on March 17, 2001, but hasn't put anything up on his page just yet.

Listen To This!

This is the first album from the Brass Tacks, "Live & Kickin'". Please visit the Music Page for all pertinent details.

Joe Dante Doesn't Read My Website

From a print interview with "Looney Tunes: Back In Action" director Joe Dante:

Most of the humor in the original Looney Tunes cartoons was for adults; it's only in recent years that cartoon characters were juvenilized. My 10-year-old niece can watch one of Tex Avery's Bugs cartoons from 1943 and still laugh.

I'm laughing too, because Dante is blissfully unaware that by 1943, Avery had been shipped out of Termite Terrace and was over in Culver City making cartoons for M-G-M.

Disney Wants To Monopolize Your Kids' Entertainment Options

This LA Times article notes that the current #1 song on Radio Disney is a sprightly little tune called "I Can't Wait", by that well known songstress, Hillary Duff.

What? Who?

Turns out that Hillary Duff is the actress that plays Lizzie McGuire on the Disney Channel TV show aimed toward adolescent teens. And it also turns out that no other radio stations in the country are playing this song, only the 56 Radio Disney stations nationwide.

What gave me a real laugh in the article is that the director of programming for Radio Disney says, "Now, it's Hilary Duff that kids want to hear. It doesn't matter that she's signed to Disney. We don't need to disclose it."

That's where you're wrong, lady. On two counts.

1. Kids don't want to hear Hillary Duff. If kids wanted to hear Hillary Duff, every other radio PD and MD in the country would have run with this record. Nobody bit.

2. It does matter that she's signed to Disney. Radio Disney plays what it wants to force on its young, impressionable listeners, and it is always product that the company itself can profit from in other ways. If you watch enough of the Disney Channel on television, you will find the same attitude there - its marketing strategies almost always exclude entertainment options from other companies (i.e. Nickelodeon, Warner Bros., Universal, etc.) Try watching their "Movie Surfers" interstitials for info on the upcoming Harry Potter movie. Since it is not a Disney product, it does not exist in the Disney empire. This is dangerous and is possibly in violation of anti-trust statutes.

I have never allowed Radio Disney to be on my car stereo, because they have in the past censored or re-recorded versions of hit songs to "sanitize" them for the young audience. Now I have even more ammunition to say no.

An Angel Of A Man

Best shot of the post-World Series festivities: not the shot of manager Dusty Baker carrying his crying child out of the dugout, but a glimpse of the man who was the soul of the Angels for many years, former owner, the late Gene Autry.

Who says a cowboy's work is never done?

Website Updates

I am attempting to update some of the files in the Bus Gallery but am having a good deal of trouble with Comcast's proprietary publisher. Hopefully we can get these issues resolved soon.

10/24/2002) We have reuploaded a lot of the Bus Gallery files to include serial number information for a lot of the buses, plus to just plain fix some of the pictures. There have been problems with Front Page and my graphics program not agreeing on whether file names for pictures should be in ALL CAPS or no caps. This is causing some of the pictures to show up with the little red X's. Everything has been fixed.

New SNL Book Gives The Band Short Shrift

For possibly the first time ever, I was in absentia for a Saturday Night Live season premiere. Therefore, there will be no updates to the SNL Band pages until next week. I have been told there is a new image of the band in the main titles, and we usually update that as well as going through and changing the hard date references as far as certain musicians' longevity.

BTW, I did purchase Tom Shales' and James Andrew Miller's "Live From New York: An Uncensored History Of Saturday Night Live" (Little, Brown & Company; $25.95 list). Had I read the caveat early in the acknowledgements regarding the decision to concentrate on the comedy element of the show and leave reportage of the music of the show, house and otherwise, to others, then I probably would have waited for paperback. Which is a shame because the book nicely fills in the gaps since the last major treatise on the show's behind-the-scenes history was published back in 1985, giving us coverage of such show landmarks as the ascent of Jon Lovitz and Phil Hartman, the Andrew Dice Clay and Sinead O'Connor incidents, and the tragic deaths of Gilda Radner, Hartman and Chris Farley.

The only music department employees to speak on the record are the show's inaugural music director, Howard Shore (who has more of an influence on what kind of show SNL was conceived as than some may think), and musician-turned-actor Paul Shaffer. Shore had some revealing thoughts on the types of musicians that populated the early SNL band, and we learn that the band actually scored some coke on air during a commercial break once, but that's about it. Cheryl Hardwick is mentioned only sporadically, and then mostly in the context of being Mrs. Michael O'Donoghue, although Victoria Jackson remembers her input on the "I Am Not A Bimbo" song. Shore and Dan Aykroyd also speak on the formation of the Blues Brothers Band with most of the musicians being procured through Tom Malone.

A major work, to be sure, but if the band and the music is your thing, skip it.

"From New York, The Greatest City In The World..."

 
Tonight's "Late Show With David Letterman" Top Ten, postponed from last night, will feature ten high school principals. Two of them are from the Toms River school district - Maureen Madden, from High School East, and John Coleman, from High School North. You can see the results above.

He Is Outta There!

Don't let the door hit your butt on the way out, Valentine.

Can't wait for the 2003 season!

$15,633,171

Warner Bros. should be sticking HIM up for the balance!

Happy Birthday John

Happy birthday to the man whose face beams with pride near the bottom of the right sidebar out the driver's side window of his 1996 Corvette, my brother John Mackey.

The Corvette Challenge pages, webmastered by Edgar Perez, detail John's involvement with a Corvette race series held at intervals throughout the year at Raceway Park in Englishtown, NJ. Known to drag race fans as E-Town, Raceway Park is one of the top drag tracks in the country. If you've got a Vette and can cough up the modest entry fee, come out and race with John and his friends. (Be sure to show up on the right day, however, or you might find yourself tyring to outpace, f'rinstance, Angelle Savoie, the fastest woman on two wheels in the world!)

ATTENTION NEWSMEDIA

Please stop overplaying newstape of such "caught on tape" news stories as the mother beating up on her kid and the baseball coach being assaulted by fans. Replaying more than a few times renders their newsworthiness into ratings-grabbing sensationalism. Please stop. That means you, CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, and ESPN's family of channels.

Great Radio Talkers

Here's one to start some debate at the dinner table. A radio industry trade paper listed the top 25 radio talk hosts of all time. Their list:

1. Rush Limbaugh
2. Howard Stern
3. Don Imus
4. Larry King
5. Sally Jessy Raphael
6. Bruce Williams
7. Laura Schlessinger
8. Barry Gray
9. Barry Farber
10. Joy Browne
11. Michael Jackson
12. Art Bell
13. Ronn Owens
14. Jerry Williams
15. Neil Rogers
16. Bob Grant
17. Long John Nebel
18. David Brudnoy
19. Arthur Godfrey
20. Bill Ballance
21. Neal Boortz
22. J.P. McCarthy
23. Jean Shepherd
24. Gene Burns
25. G. Gordon Liddy

Granted, comparing a Howard Stern to the likes of Barry Gray and Long John Nebel - radio talkers from a generation long departed - is apples and oranges. The real shock is why Dr. Laura, sex-obsessed sensationalist, is so high on the list, and Jean Shepherd, humorist and storyteller, is so low.

And where's Brad Crandall?

Well, at least some personal faves made the list, like Don Imus (whom I first listened to as a kid in the 70's despite the well-meaning resistance of my mother) and Barry Gray. And aforementioned Long John Nebel, who was actually said to invent the radio call-in format, and, from what I always heard, may have developed one of the first delay devices by moving a playback head on a tape machine way ahead of the record head - the birth of the Seven Second Delay! The website Radio Free New York has a page full of Long John Nebel/Candy Jones prank phone calls in RealAudio from WMCA's days as a talk station, before they reverted to a Christian format.

Eddie Murphy Update

Eddie Murphy is still in the hole to the tune of $15,683,242, finishing on the box office chart just ahead of a reissue of "The Producers". Thought you'd like to know....

CURSE YOU VILE MOUSE!

Today I am the Mouse Terminator! I was running the work vac around the basement and there he was, the little bastard I've heard scrabbling around the ceiling tiles above and to the right of my desk. Instinctively, I sucked up Mr. Mouse and ran the shop vac out to the street. The critter was already dead, so we held a brief service before setting him adrift in the depths of the Robo-Can.

Boy, are my Sundays exciting.