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Last Notes

2026-11-04 21:13:55 GMT

Tuesday Evening
Now I'm not going to get my $5,000 check from Donald Trump. Damn.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/11/03/tuesday-evening-34/
#donaldtrump #damn
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2026-11-04 20:33:12 GMT

Just Wow!
I made that WOW! graphic up a few years ago and was waiting for an appropriate post to use it. Last night, things couldn't have gone much better for the Democratic Party and, I'd like to think, America.
I was channel-hopping all last night until about half past Abdul El-Sayed winning in Michigan…and maybe I just missed it but as newsfolks, talking heads, pundits and winning candidates groped for the right things to say, there was much that I didn't hear. Maybe someone said it on channels I wasn't watching when they said it but I didn't hear anyone say "impeachment" or "Jeffrey Epstein" or even "insider trading."
I didn't hear anyone say that any votes were rigged or miscalled. As so many expected.
I have one friend who was dead certain that if that Blue Tsunami seemed to be forming, Trump would do something like declaring Martial Law and calling out the National Guard to stop the counting and impound all the voting machines. Not a peep about that kind of thing.
I did hear that guy who kept saying "Vote like I'm on the ballot" quoted as reminding people that he wasn't on the ballot. And I heard people say that the Republican party now has to turn itself into something that isn't The Party of Donald Trump. That would be nice. And I heard a lot of people say "Wow!" That's putting it mildly.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/11/04/just-wow/
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#wow #party #jeffreyepstein #democraticparty #trump #donaldtrump #bluetsunami #martiallaw #nationalguard #maybe
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2026-11-02 18:31:06 GMT

Why I Gave Up Drawing – Part 8
The start of this long, wandering essay cab be found right here. I'm still not sure where and when the end will be.
As I've mentioned often here, I can't recall a time in my childhood when I didn't have comic books. My parents couldn't, either. They were buying them for me before I could read what was in them. In fact, I believe i learned to read in large part because of them.
It was Dell Comics at first, particularly Dell Comics that featured cartoon characters I knew from TV — Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, etc. — all characters with tails except Elmer Fudd. I collected them, read them and tried to draw the characters I saw in them. Much inspiration came from drawing lessons that Walter Lantz gave between cartoons on The Woody Woodpecker Show and from a book called Easy Way To Draw which I wrote about here and other places on this blog.
One day in early 1959, I began adding super-hero and adventure comics to the mix. I started with comics featuring Superman, a character who I, of course, knew from TV. The George Reeves TV series was on several times a day in Los Angeles and Engineer Bill, a local kids show host, showed the Fleischer/Paramount Superman cartoons again and again and again. There were only seventeen of them.
I loved Superman with this reservation: I was able to draw the funny animal characters fairly well for a kid my age. But no matter how I tried — and I tried and I tried — I wasn't able to draw what I considered a decent Superman. The best I could so was to draw his chest insignia. That, I mastered pretty well by the age of eight. Ten years later, I worked for a man named Jack Kirby who, largely against his will, was drawing the Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic book and Jack would sometimes have me draw or redrawn Superman's chest insignia.
Buying Superman comics in '59 quickly led to Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and others. And then, shortly after Christmas of that year, I found a comic on the newsstands that excited me in a way no comic book ever had or has since. It was The Brave and the Bold #28 and it introduced The Justice League of America. It featured Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, John Jones (aka J'onn J'onzz, aka The Manhunter From Mars) and maddeningly brief cameos of Superman and Batman.
Even the cover thrilled me. I still don't know what the hell Wonder Woman was doing with her golden lasso connecting to nothing but I will always love that cover…
Ganging up characters like that is pretty common now. In fact, these days readers complain if any two characters don't appear together now and then. But when I was seven years old, as I was in '59, that was something special…something very special.
The Brave and the Bold had become a "tryout" comic and that issue was the tryout for the Justice League to see if readers would buy enough copies to warrant a regular J.L.A. comic. I don't see why they needed a tryout. Of course, it was going to sell. But there were two more issues of the J.L.A. in The Brave and the Bold. One came out the following March 1 and the next came out a bit less than two months later. Then in August, they brought out Justice League of America #1 as a bi-monthly. DC was ridiculously cautious then about starting new comics.
It was edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox. It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky doing what I later heard some of his fellow artists describe as The Hardest Job in All of Comics. To draw all those characters and to sometimes fit all of them into one panel along with Fox's often-excessive captions and dialogue? One of those fellow artists, Gil Kane, one told me, "It's not that I couldn't have drawn that comic as well as Mike Sekowsky. I couldn't have drawn it at all."
The Schwartz-Fox-Sekowsky issues of that book became my favorite comic of the day and I think it's still one of the two best "team" comics ever done. The other, which came along two years later, was the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four. In the next part of this, I'll tell you how I came to know and work with Mike Sekowsky and I may finally get to the part where knowing him convinced me to give up drawing.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/11/02/why-i-gave-up-drawing-part-8/
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2026-11-02 02:22:12 GMT

A Preview of This Week?
Allan J. Lichtman believes that Donald Trump's major accomplishment will forever be that "He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly." And he points out that this is in spite of the fact that — and I quote — "Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he [has] failed to document a single illegal vote."
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/11/01/a-preview-of-this-week/
#donaldtrump #american #six
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2026-11-01 15:33:57 GMT

Mid-Term Crisis
Some recent stories from The Daily Show…
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/11/01/mid-term-crisis/
#dailyshow
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2026-10-31 01:53:22 GMT

It Gets Better…
I was a big fan of a sitcom called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis which ran four seasons on CBS — from 1959 to 1963. When I found the first episode (i.e., the pilot) online, I decided to post it here so maybe some of you would watch it, like it and seek out other episodes. Then I watched it and had second thoughts because I realized I was a big fan of what it became after the early episodes.
The first episode doesn't have the crisp, fast-and-funny dialog style that the show developed. It doesn't have some of the great supporting characters of later episodes like the ones played by Steve Franken, Sheila James and the youthful Warren Beatty. It does have Bob Denver as TV's idea of a beatnik in 1959, Maynard G. Krebs. Denver became a wonderful part of the show but not so much in the first episode.
And in that pilot, Dobie is a pretty whiny, obnoxious guy with a pathetic attitude about finding a girl friend. The one he lusts after in the first episode was Thalia Meninger, played by the lovely Tuesday Weld, who for some reason is seen in softer focus in her close-ups. I decided the first episode didn't at all represent what I liked about the show and I shouldn't post it here…
…and then I decided to post it with the above disclaimers. You still might enjoy it. And it contains a few folks you saw often on sixties' TV like Herbert Anderson, who went on to play the father of Dennis the Menace, and Stanley Adams who somehow got cast in at least one episode of every show, it seemed. (He played the realtor who sold Rob and Laura Petrie their New Rochelle home in the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show that I saw filmed.)
So here it is, complete with plugs for Shout Factory, which released the whole series on DVD. I got and watched some of them and saw the show get real good throughout the first season, then fall apart in the fourth and final. In my opinion…
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/10/30/it-gets-better/
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#show #dobiegillis #sheilajames #stevefranken #warrenbeatty #denver #thaliameninger #tuesdayweld
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2026-10-30 04:56:43 GMT

Ask ME: Copying Voices
Micki Dee St. James writes to ask…
You may well have answered this before but my memory is not what it once was. Seems to me voice actors are scrupulous about claiming they never steal someone else's voice completely — that would be theft. They always introduce subtle differences.
So Yogi Bear does not have the same voice as Art Carney (I couldn't tell you what the difference is) and Fred Flintstone dies not have the same voice as Jackie Gleason (these do sound audibly distinct to me). Kermit's had several voices, all sort of the same but noticeably different from Jim Henson. He got to use his own voice which seems only fair.
Could you comment on some of the differences between a cartoon voice and the voice it's stealing borrowing and how voice actors fashion these differences?
Well, you're talking about a couple of different situations here. Jim Henson owned Kermit. In fact, he owned the whole danged company before it was sold to Disney. He could and did dictate the terms of what would happen to Kermit after there was no more Jim Henson to perform him. As far as I know, that was done as he directed with others hired to play the character and do their best Jim Henson imitations. There's no ethical squabble there. There have been disputes over who was doing the imitation but there's no argument that it's wrong to imitate Jim Henson.
I don't know that any recording exists of it but Daws Butler used to demonstrate the difference between Yogi Bear's voice and Art Carney's, Hokey Wolf's and Phil Silvers', the voice of Snagglepuss and Bert Lahr and so on. There were definite differences. The cartoon characters' voices were inspired by the celebrities', not copied.
Bert Lahr did sue but that was because of the commercials Snagglepuss appeared in for Kellogg's Cocoa Krispies. Lahr's line of work then was doing commercials for Lay's Potato Chips and other products and he didn't like that people thought he was selling Cocoa Krispies. As I understand it, the suit was settled with some money changing hands and the addition of a screen credit for Daws Butler on those spots. You can see it at the end of this example if you look fast…
When a voice actor says "I would never steal someone else's voice," what he or she probably means is that they wouldn't steal a job by imitating someone. When Lorenzo Music was alive and voicing Garfield, he was very well-paid and we got offers from guys who claimed they could and would imitate Lorenzo for less money. That's the kind of thing no self-respecting voice actor would do.
There are grey areas…cases where it's arguable that someone has a proprietary claim on some voice. Two or three times now I've been asked to weigh in on a specific case. In one matter, the studio decided — as they have the right to — that they wanted a different actor in a role and the new person sounded a little like the old person. It can then be argued as to whether the second actor is imitating the first. But basically, if someone originated a unique voice — or in the instance of Lorenzo, was using his or her natural voice — it's wrong to imitate them as long as they're still around to provide it.
One time, I was walking into a restaurant with a veteran voice actor and I spotted another veteran voice actor also waiting to be seated. Wrongly assuming they had to be friends, I pointed the second guy out to the first guy and some yelling ensued. #1 had been holding out for higher pay on a job and #2 had stepped in and taken the gig and done an imitation of #1. Both men have passed away but to their dying days, you couldn't have them in the same room.
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/10/29/ask-me-copying-voices/
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2026-10-28 23:39:48 GMT

At Long Last…
Some of you probably check in with this blog several times a day, waiting for me to feature a group of ukulele players performing the song, "Build Me Up, Buttercup." I never want to disappoint my readers so…
https://www.newsfromme.com/2026/10/28/at-long-last-2/
#buttercup #build
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