Here’s the headline I just came across:  “Mega-shrew shot venom through red teeth.” I was surprised to learn it’s about an extinct mammal, because I was sure it was about someone I know. Science believes it’s extinct, but I’m sure she’s still out there.

Forget ADD — which as a culture we also have. The real menace is American Impatience Disorder.

On February 9th, Barack Obama promised the people of Elkart, Indiana that he was working on fixing the economy, and that meant jobs. Now it’s all of three months later and MSNBC.com says they’ve “given up on him.” It took 30 years of bank deregulation to get us here, but somehow he was supposed to undo it all in three months. And, I suppose, feed the town with loaves and fishes.

Back here I wrote about the countless parodies people are making of the now-famous scene in “Downfall” where Hitler chews out his senior staff for their incompetence.

Here’s the latest version, and it’s one of the best. For all you theatre people out there who’ve ever been upset they didn’t win an award, here’s Hitler’s reaction when he learns he isn’t eligible for a Tony. I’ve seen this very reaction in many a dressing room.

The irony does not escape me that my good friend Mr. Hackney, who (in)famously divested himself of all books for a Kindle and who was discussing this transmogrification with me a mere two weeks ago, has now bought me a book and sent it to me through traditional methods. (Also known as “the mail.”) I suspect, though, that the irony eluded Doug. Further irony:  I already have this book, meaning I now have two copies of it. This is the second time in two weeks that I’ve discovered that I have two copies (different editions) of the same book, both related somehow to comics.  No, Fates, I do not wish to open a comic-book store.

Doug,

Today in a little keyed box down the steps from my office I received a strange object enclosed in a larger, white, sleeve of sorts made out of some mulched tree product (is this paper?). Not knowing with surety what to do with that papery thing, I finally tugged on one end and it opened up. Inside was the other object (image imported on the left), made of a similar substance to the sleeve, except what I take to be the front of it has a wild array of colors. The interior is completely filled with black impressions — words, but they’re not on a screen. And on the first inside paper screen, it looks like your avatar script, but I get the sense that you somehow did this by hand:  “Lee, saw this and thought of you. Enjoy! Doug.” Am I right that this is only on this version of this object? So it’s mass-produced, but individualized, like the inscribed iPods from some years ago? How did you do this? Can you please tell me what tool you used? I would be curious to know.

In any event, what I really want to know is how to use this object.

I don’t see any way to turn it on. I know you’re probably laughing at me now, but I can’t find a slider or depressor anywhere. Knowing you, I thought maybe it was one of the first generation Wavio transmitters the Greater Harmony of Koreachina is developing, but when I waved my hand in front of it it still didn’t turn on. Is this the Kindle Kindle Kindle Spindle I’ve heard about? Again, it’s been long rumored (the thing has been in development for like 12 days now!), and if you’ve actually gotten hold of a K3M, I’m impressed. Whatever it is, how do I turn this on? I’m not worried about the power — because I don’t see any photoelectric cells, I’m assuming like everything else it recharges from background radiation. But I don’t know how to use it. And the colors on the front have really piqued my interest.

I feel honestly dumb to ask these things. And I’m sure the answer is right in front of me. Thank you for sending it to me — but how do I use this thing?

Best,

Lee

p.s. My elderly aunt says it’s a “book.” What is that?

Did I call Deadpool an obscure Marvel character?

That was before his closeup.

They sentenced the man who set the Griffith Park fires last summer when I was training for a marathon and snuffling up burnt forest fumes every Sunday.

He got a 16-year term. I hope security is tighter than the last time they had him.

Last month I was among the countless Californians outraged that the leaders of the California Assembly had decided to give a raise to some legislative aides at the same time the state is sliding into a fiscal abyss. The hue and cry was so great that within a day Speaker Karen Bass reversed herself.

Now the state faces what the Governator is estimating as a $21.3 billion budget gap if the May 19th budget propositions don’t pass (which they won’t). And here’s Karen Bass in today’s LA Times, still not getting why nobody people were outraged by pay hikes for staff aides:

She expressed frustration over the criticism she drew during last month’s salary-hike flap, which would have boosted the wages of about 10% of the Assembly’s more than 1,000 employees at a total cost of about $500,000.

“I regret the timing,” she said of the wage increases. But, she added, “I felt after cutting $15 million … spending $500,000 was a reasonable approach.”

I’ve met Ms. Bass and I like her, and I know this is a difficult job she’s got. But how one can rise this far in politics this quickly (she was first elected to her seat only five years ago) and not understand that this is no climate for bureaucratic pay raises is beyond me.

Twenty minutes ago I was helping my 6-year-old son Dietrich get ready for bed. On his way upstairs, he stopped in the guest room to bid good night to his 17-year-old brother, who is recuperating downstairs with a broken leg that leaves him unable to get up to his bedroom. Playing on the television was an episode of “Family Guy” that featured a disembodied head sitting on a chair. It made me think of a comic book I’d read a couple hours earlier where the zombified head of Deadpool that was still biting people from inside a birdcage. Nobody else had read this comic, so I didn’t say anything.

As we started walking into the kitchen to get water for his bedside,  Dietrich started talking to me about Deadpool. In other words, about what I had just been thinking about.

“What made you think about that?” I asked him.

He couldn’t say. It just came to his mind.

Now, Deadpool is a relatively obscure character. Still, I started wracking my brain for where else the kid could have gotten the idea of bringing this up. I wasn’t sure that he’d seen the image on television that I had, and I knew he hadn’t read that comic. We did watch a cartoon where Deadpool’s arm got cut off and he just stuck it back on, but that was weeks ago and it was an arm, not a head. This was the head of an old man sitting on a lawn chair. Associating that with Deadpool seemed like an awful stretch — except that I had just made that precise same stretch.

Then slightly later  I remembered there’s a scene late in the Wolverine movie where Deadpool’s head is cut off.

So:

Both of us making the same connection:  coincidence? Or Extra Sensory Perception? (Some form of which my wife and some close friends have said for years I have.) Am I “sending out” thought waves and my son’s picking them up?

Picking up on something I saw on Mark Evanier’s blog about Dom DeLuise:

In 2002, I was executive producer of the Ovation Awards here in Los Angeles. The director of the show suggested we invite Dom DeLuise to be one of the presenters. I loved Dom DeLuise’s work, but I had concerns. As delicately as I could ask (and I’m sure I could have been more tactful), I wanted to know how he was going to be able to get on and off the stage. The man was massive. He could barely walk. How was his health? And how was the audience going to feel about this? These were real concerns, no matter how harshly the director looked at me. He promised he’d figure it out, and he did — in the best manner of stage misdirection, he drew our attention elsewhere while Mr. DeLuise was helped into his position in the dark. The light came onto him and he was absolutely wonderful. He got huge laughs, and I was glad we all had him for the event.

This was the second time I met Dom DeLuise.

The first time had been seven years prior, when  I went to Buster Keaton’s 100th birthday at The Silent Movie theatre in Hollywood. Buster wasn’t there, having died almost 30 years prior, but Eleanor Keaton was (I sat next to her and spent much of the time talking to her), and so were Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and their good friend… Dom DeLuise.  The three of them were big Keaton fans, and at that time, I was well-versed in every aspect of Buster Keaton minutia, so they kept calling on me for answers to various questions about Buster. (Now much of that information has been replaced in my head by, well, certainly nothing as important.) When everyone went to sit, Mr. DeLuise was so large that he couldn’t fit into any of the theatre seats. The proprietor of the movie  house found an extra wide stacking chair, the sort one sees in conference centers in Wisconsin or at garden parties populated by immense people wearing muu-muus, and plopped it against the wall in the left aisle. He then took the stage with microphone in hand and acknowledged the celebrities in the house, landing finally on Dom DeLuise poured into this chair on the aisle, and paid what was intended as a warm tribute, ending it by saying with a glow, “The last person we had sitting in that special chair in the aisle was John Candy.” John Candy had died the previous year from a heart attack at age 43. A connection that every one of us made when we looked over at Dom DeLuise sitting in that chair.