Recent Comments

1. 30 minutes ago on Dick Tracy

   Um… Yeah.

2. about 2 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   Hyperbole and a dime will get you a cup of coffee. Well, a dime used to get you a cup of coffee. Maybe it still does somewhere. Not anywhere I know. If you find a place that still serves a dime cup of coffee let me know… Although with the cost of gas it would probably just be cheaper to buy a $7 cup at any of the three StealBucks™ coffee shops on this block.

   And I’d be a little suspicious of any coffee I could buy for a dime a cup.

3. about 3 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   It’s the same old shoot-em-up and the same old rodeo.

4. about 6 hours ago on Adam@Home

   Perhaps it was rated R. Of course parents can take kids into R rated movies.

5. about 6 hours ago on Ink Pen

   CV, dedicated to setting the bar for heroics ever lower.

6. about 6 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   All this drama, and still not an ounce of evidence. Tracy was investigating a murder, then jumps to the tower being bombed. Not atom of evidence of anything, but we all know he’s right. He’s running on pure ESP here. When the bomb experts can’t find any evidence Tracy instantly knows the explosive that will be used, even though the formula was never written down and was lost 80 years ago. And everyone else believes him implicitly. No one asks, “Any evidence?” Everyone in Tracy’s world knows his ESP is always correct.

   Meanwhile, Tracy still doesn’t have enough evidence for the murder itself to get a warrant for Jr’s arrest. That won’t stop him from stopping the explosion he pulled out of thin air.

7. about 20 hours ago on Non Sequitur

   If we could trust newspaper editors to always get their facts straight that might be conclusive. Unfortunately while they are more careful than the internet they are working under deadlines and after something has been published in a couple sources you usually trust they become “common knowledge” – and a lot of common knowledge is false. (You will find fairly reputable sources claiming Pope Gregory IX declared cats agents of the devil, and as a result Europeans killed their cats the the Black Death resulted from the fleas in the rats cats would have killed. He didn’t. But if you Google his name you find dozens of sources telling the story.)

   I can imagine Polito inserting that as a real television review – writers on newspapers have slipped in any number of jokes over the decades. I can also imagine it in a humor column and other newspapers thinking it would be funnier to report it as having appeared as a real review rather than a joke.

   I’m not curious enough to see if the Marin Independent Journal is digitized and on line with a comprehensive index.

8. about 21 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   Although there was not enough evidence for conviction, or even an indictment, the fact Joe’s poetic license had been revoked, left police at the time regarding jealousy as a possible motive.

9. about 22 hours ago on Dick Tracy

   I’m assuming Samuel Keats. Sam was the great-great grandnephew of the famous Keats and worked briefly as a scriptwriter for The Honeymooners before getting drunk and falling / being pushed / or throwing himself underneath the wheels of a Greyhound bus. Although his good bud, Joe Longfellow, swears Keats was depressed and killed himself the LA police have it as an open file in their cold cases.

10. 1 day ago on Non Sequitur

    My initial post credited Polito and gave the date of writing. My question was whether it had appeared as a real blurb for a TCM broadcast of the movie or in a humor column. The newspapers which commented on it at the time recognized it as a piece of satire. However, their finding it a humorous satirical description doesn’t establish whether the original publication was presented as a humor piece or Polito was able, from his position with the paper, to insert it into the real television listings for the paper.