According to this piece in the LA Times, the affliction of Hollywood aspiration now has a clinical term:  “Hollywood NOS,” where “patients suffer from the mistaken assumption that…  showbiz glory will somehow insulate them from emptiness or the mundane hardships of day-to-day life.”

Favorite excerpt:

One psychiatrist, who would only speak anonymously because of his high-profile patients, described a session with a moderately well-known actress whose career was fading as she hit her 40s. The doctor told her that the “magic” part of her work life probably was over and that she would need to adjust. His patient looked out the window onto the flat white stucco building outside and said dully, “You see the way the sun is shining on the building? When I hear what you’re saying and see the flatness there, I want to kill myself. The mundane life, I don’t want any part of it. The work of it. The adversity of it, the lack of fame and specialness. I’d rather be dead.”

Sadly, this piece of reporting isn’t from The Onion. Everyone who lives around here has seen it in person all too many times.

Albert Brooks on mainstream media response to Barack Obama, one year later. (And “mainstream” means Fox.)

This amuses me greatly.

Evidently it was played during some game over the weekend.

My seven-year-old boy Dietrich amuses me to no end. He’s fond of spontaneously hitting people with odd quizzes and math problems of his own invention. (Although it’s not always amusing when it’s, say, 7 at night and all you want to do is drink your wine and mind your business and you’re suddenly expected to calculate eleventy billion divided by infinity.)

Here’s the latest quiz he just told me he used on another boy today on the school yard:

Dietrich: Dude, would you rather  have a good family, or a bag of Flaming Hot Cheetos?

Other Boy:  The Flaming Hot Cheetos.

I realize this isn’t a scientific survey, but still, the result should give us all pause.

On Wall Street, nothing quite equals success like enormous, obvious failure.

Par example, witness the resurrection of detested Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain, a man who held Bank of America hostage in its forced acquisition of his company — so that he could pay out $5.8 billion (that’s with a “b”) in bonuses to the people who’d led it to failure. His latest coup? He’s going to lead CIT Group, which has the distinction of being “the first company in which the government realized a loss under its $700 billion federal bailout program.” My kids ran their lemonade stand better than anything Thain has done lately, and for less money, although his new pay package is a mere $500,000 a year, plus $5.5 million in stock. But then, my kids’ business actually made money.

Read more here and feel your blood boil all over again. And remember:  One way or another, you and I are paying for all of it.

Yesterday during the Superbowl, Oprah helped Dave and Jay reach a detente of sorts, leaving all of us to hope that the long national nightmare of warring talk shows and network ineptitude is finally behind us. I was beginning to worry someone was going to send Jimmy Carter in to alienate everyone further.

I’d like to offer another sort of late-night bridge building. Seventeen years later, I think it’s time we finally forgave and forgot “The Chevy Chase Show.”

I was among those who tuned in on that first night in 1993 and couldn’t quite believe what I was seeing:  a talented comic actor who was used to working live, bombing utterly before a national audience. At the time I thought he was arrogant and over-reaching, and I’m not proud to admit that I enjoyed his flameout as much as everyone else seemed to. But recently I saw Chase on “This Emotional Life,” and was struck by his honesty and his hard-worn grace.  At one point he said — and I’m paraphrasing — “Do I have a lot of friends? Oh, sure, I’ve got a lot of friends.” And he mimed counting on his fingers and concluded:  “Three. I’ve got three friends.” That was brave, especially in Hollywood. So was talking about his extended depression — and how the debacle of “The Chevy Chase Show” sent him into a years-long tailspin.

Now I look at the debut of that ill-fated show a little differently. I still don’t think Chevy should have been there. He’s not well-suited to hosting a talk show, but I now wonder:  Who could have known that in advance?  He’s obviously nervous and, worse, he seems tonally wrong:  soft-spoken and earnest, when high-energy and sarcastic were the order of the day. His timing is also off — a little slow, and too extended. Again, surprising, given how good his timing had been earlier on “Saturday Night Live” (although — that had been 17 years earlier). This opening shows only a hint of how bad it would get — I remember tuning in a few nights later and seeing Chevy nervously sweating and casting about for something to say. Take a look for yourself at the clip below and let me know what you think.

But also, think about this: Isn’t it time to let this go? Time heals all wounds — except when your wound is on YouTube. Search “Chevy Chase” on YouTube and you get “spectacularly bad talk show” as a result. How did I come across it myself? Because I Googled the term “bad talk show” — and guess what came up. Conan O’Brien will be back (as will Jay Leno), and even Marion Barry got re-elected after the drug bust(s), and lately I’ve seen Eliot Spitzer as an “expert commentator.” Perhaps we can forgive and forget the worst celebrity talk show in network history.

The main challenge in making a good movie about Captain America has to be suit.

Case in point, from the 1970’s TV movie that so agitated me as a kid:

Think you hate looking at it? Imagine how that guy feels wearing it. I doubt it struck fear into the heart of the Red Skull, unless he was terrified of rejects from auditions for the Village People.

Here’s the archetypal costume, courtesy of Jack Kirby:

No matter whom you cast or how you sew it, that’s not a costume that will translate well into a live-action movie.

So how does the director plan to get around it?

By putting Cap in the USO.

That’s right:  It’s a costume fit for show tunes.

Today I attended a friend’s funeral, it poured rain, and then I went to a political event. The only thing missing was a root canal.

That’s a semi-joke I put on my Facebook page.

The viewing and funeral were obviously no fun — although I did meet a very interesting man with one fascinating story after another from his family history. Each one of them makes for a strange combination of a Dickens novel and “Jonah Hex” comics, complete with orphans, shootouts, Indians, Mexicans, poverty, conniving small-town Mayors, and family reunions decades later.  I was glad to hear them because they kept me distracted, and by this point in the viewing I was cried out anyway. Even seeing my friend in the casket didn’t convince me he was dead. I still feel unconvinced.

After the viewing I went to the Mass and sat down next to a dear, longtime friend I was glad to see there. I told her that I assumed when the Mass started I would leave. As a Lutheran (lapsed), I have no idea how  Catholic Masses work, so I thought my absence would be required. It wasn’t. I just followed along — getting up, and sitting down, and getting up, and sitting down, on command — leaving out the religiously obedient parts. I was struck by how similar it was to a Lutheran service — and then realized, of course, given the origins of Lutheranism, that what I was raised in was the Catholic Mass without the showy bits. The Lutheran service is like that breakfast cereal made out of tree bark. The Catholic Mass has Crunch Berries.

After that, and the waving of some incense and the scattering of holy water from what looked like the little plastic bottles that Holiday Inns put shampoo into, we went outside for the funeral. This was when it started to pour. My friend, who was Air Force reserve, got a military service with folding of the flag and salute. The flag was presented to his husband, who was his partner of 21 years and is now his widower because for a brief window here in California it was legal for all consenting adults to get married, irrespective of long-held bigotry and prejudice. Then it was all over and we headed for our cars, making our way carefully on the slick stone.

I intended to go home to see my kids, because they’d been entertaining themselves all day while I was out grieving and my wife was sleeping. (She works nights.) But I called first and my wife was already up and had gotten hoodwinked yet again into taking our daughter to the art supply store for supplies allowing the creation of more art. So instead I went to my office and then I went to a house party for a political candidate. I had said I was going, so I went.

For the second time that day, I found myself in a small gathering meeting new people and hearing interesting new stories. Early in the event, another guest sat on and broke a Civil War-era hardback rocker. The guest was mortified, and the hostess said, “Oh, don’t worry. It’s old. It’s from 1865!” I said, “I don’t think you’re making her feel better.” The candidate came on and made his remarks and the very first note he struck resonated with me, just as my private dinner with him had three months ago, so I wrote him a check and signed the endorsement form.

When I got home after missing dinner, my son proudly recounted all his adventures in “Oblivion,” which we’re each playing on the Xbox, and I realized the worst had come to pass. “You’ve joined the Thieves Guild!” I said. He had, and he was excited about it. They had given him a secret ring that made him invisible and now he could go anywhere with aplomb. Moreover, he now has a redoubt stocked with mystic weapons, and I will never be able to find it because it’s hidden somewhere in the code of the game in a place that only members of the Thieves Guild can go. I looked at his glee and listened to how easily they’d lured him into their dark embrace and I thought, This is how it starts. And I told him that if my character ever ran into him in the game, I would bring him to justice.

Then I cooked a steak for myself and poured a glass of wine and got an orange and a Choco Liebniz and watched a movie on HBO because I just didn’t feel that I had any feelings to feel or judgments to make left for the day.

I just noticed that the iCal icon on my dock automatically updates to show the month and date. So today’s icon reads “Feb 4” because it’s February 4. (The one on the left reads “Jul 4” not because you’ve lost track of time. It’s because that’s the image I could find on the internet.)

It’s understandable why I never noticed this before. I’ve only been running this program since 2002.

Here’s the LA Times obit for my friend Lars Hansen (showing him in a way I’d never seen him — with a beard and some hair).

I’m still working on my own remembrance for this site. Part of me just doesn’t want to write it because that means he’s truly gone. I just assumed we’d reconnect.