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Okay, I promised to go over the California ballot propositions and here they are:

Prop. 73: Waiting Period and Parental Notification For Abortions For Minors: Oh, geez, do we have to go through this now? If I were a parent, I'd want to know if my daughter was having ANY medical procedure, much less this one. But I'm not a parent, so it's hard to get too worked up over this one. Can I skip it? Yes? Good.

Prop. 74: Increases time before tenure for teachers from 2 to 5 years: Yes. My dad was a teacher and principal, and he used to explain to me the importance of tenure to protect teachers from political pressure and other stuff that all sounded like, well, we want to be protected from the scrutiny everyone else gets on every other job. Why teachers should be insulated from that, I have no idea. Let them find out how everyone else lives. I'd vote yes to eliminate tenure, but at least this is a good start. Nobody should be guaranteed a job for life- not that they should be unfairly fired, but the rest of us aren't guaranteed anything.

Prop. 75: This is the one that stops unions from taking part of the union dues for political use without the member's assent. I understand the idea behind the union putting money into campaigns for candidates they perceive as pro-labor, but I'm sympathetic to those who want to opt out, because I've seen unions that are run primarily for the leadership's benefit, and I'd hate to have part of my paycheck be funneled to candidates I didn't want to support because the union heads are taking care of someone who took care of them. Guess that's a "yes."

Prop. 76: Limit on school spending. Governor can cut some budget appropriations unilaterally. Qualified yes- school spending in some districts is out of control, and isn't ever reaching the classroom. It gets eaten up by administration and buried in questionable programs. Time to put a stop to that.

Prop. 77: Redistricting. Incumbents hate this, because the current gerrymandered districts mean perpetuation of party rule in some areas- they'll always be safe Democratic or Republican seats. Let 'em squirm. And the ads being run by the anti forces show elderly white judges as the evil enemy that will decide on the districts, as if judges aren't qualified to do it. It's a yes.

Prop. 78: Prescription drug program for low and moderate income residents. Rebates and stuff.
Prop. 79: Prescription drug program for low and moderate income residents. Rebates and stuff.
Apparently, there are differences between these two, but I'll b e damned if I can figure them out yet. I still have to look at these. Make 'em undecided until then.

Prop. 80: Electricity re-regulation. Regulates industry and rates, restricts your ability to switch providers. We can switch providers? To whom? My current choices are Southern California Edison and... er, that's it. Right now, we pay astronomical rates for shaky service. With re-regulation, we'll pay astronomical rates for shaky service. Flip a coin.

The election's November 8. I can't wait.

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At Fran's urging, I tried a piece of red velvet cake tonight.

I'm pretty sure my internal organs are now an unnatural shade of crimson.

Next time, I stick to chocolate. You can never go wrong with chocolate.

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In which I return to the recurring theme of how fleeting fame can be:

The arrival of the new Looney Tunes Golden Collection Vol. 3- yes, I'm an adult with no kids and I still buy cartoon DVDs- was a welcome note in a busy day, especially because one of the DVDs collects those cartoons with all the bad Hollywood caricatures. You know the ones if you, like I did, grew up on the Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies diet of TV watching. I think I learned a lot about the celebrities of my grandfather's day from those cartoons, but today they're kinda sad, because if you show a kid any of them, they won't have much of an idea what's going on. A good example is this one:

"The Coo Coo Nut Grove" was a plotless 1936 Friz Freleng cartoon with a series of lame gags, some of which played on the celebrities (and the audience's familiarity with them) and some which came out of nowhere. Adding to the confusion, some were drawn as animals and birds, some as humans. Here, the non-human (inhuman?) depictions of bandleader Ben Bernie and gossipista Walter Winchell:

Bernie was the guy best known for interjecting a mournful "yowsah, yowsah" in his stage patter, a tic later appearing in the dance marathon episode of "Happy Days," spoken by a very non-Ben-Bernie-like Richie Cunningham. Bernie's completely forgotten now, while Winchell at least was the subject of that HBO movie a few years ago with Stanley Tucci ("The Untouchables" doesn't play on TV enough to count anymore). But this guy was once the most feared man in America. Now, his name evokes almost no reaction.

This guy wasn't even a big star in 1936:

He was a contract player named Hugh Herbert, nicknamed "Woo Woo" for his trademark catchphrase. A version of him was seen in a lot of Warners cartoons, as was this individual:

Edna May Oliver. Played lots of spinster and crazy aunt roles, and had that face, easily cariacatured. Also parodied in a lot of cartoons of the era. She was an Oscar nominee for "Drums Along the Mohawk" in 1939 but died three years later. Now, other than the cartoons, there's practically no trace of her.

Same for this guy:

Ned Sparks, famous in the 30s as the guy who never smiled and had a distinctively crabby voice. Warners and Disney both used Ned Sparks voice parodies in many cartoons. Unknown today.

In 1936, these kids were a household word:

The Dionne Quintuplets. The first surviving identical quints. Their lives were made into a sideshow with tragic results- it wasn't happy. The story's easy to find, but most people will draw a blank on them.

Think anyone other than the cinema buffs knows who the Great Profile was?

Oh, there are some people who remain familiar to more than the movie-obsessed, like these:

W.C. Fields is easy. The horse- real nice, those Boys From Termite Terrace were- is supposed to be Katherine Hepburn. You'll recognize these icons:

And this sorta freaky image:

A Harpo bird, in a running gag, chases a woman with a big hat and her face away from the camera, which turns out to be Groucho in drag for no apparent reason other than maybe the animators and writers had a thing for moustachioed comedians in women's clothing.

This dance card is half-famous today:

Mae West, who still has some fame several years after her passing. She's dancing with a turtle who's supposed to be George Arliss- the monocle's the tipoff. He has a star on the Walk of Fame, but I imagine most tourists dodging the beggars and prostitutes on Hollywood Boulevard have no idea he was a big star, an Oscar winner for his celebrated portrayal of Benjamin Disraeli.

"Gone With the Wind" keeps this guy familiar:

But the cartoon ends with a sequence that seems very odd indeed if you don't know that this person...

... was a very famous singer, Helen Morgan, the original torch singer who would make tough guys weep as she sang about being done wrong and twisted her trademark napkin. She was in the midst of a brief comeback in 1936, a triumphant appearance in the movie version of "Show Boat." But she was a drinker, and she died a few years later, her liver shot to hell. She was famous enough in 1957 to warrant a big biopic, "The Helen Morgan Story." She's not famous enough now for anyone to remember her. But remembering her explains why forgotten movie tough guy Wallace Beery:

... and less-forgotten tough guys Edward G. Robinson and George Raft...

... are crying here. And they cry so much that everyone in the Coo Coo Nut Grove floats away on a sea of tears, leading to...

The cartoon, frankly, is awful- not funny, bad caricatures, bad voices, no plot. But it should be required viewing to the ego cases of today, the actors and musicians and rappers and athletes. Hey, Paris Hilton, ever heard of Ned Sparks or Wallace Beery or George Arliss? No? Good. Enjoy fame while you still can.Someday, you'll be completely irrelevant.

Oh, wait, you already are.

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I wrote a whole piece on the Mary Mapes Vanity Fair excerpt. I finished it- tons of quotes, lots of opinion- and then I read it and I realized that I don't care.

I don't care. There, I said it.

I don't care because I spent an entire day dealing with technical difficulties that knocked All Access out for a while, spent hours catching up, spent a lot of energy on all of this and I'm tired, so tired, and when I saw the Mapes piece I'd written late last night I thought, well, this is all pretty good but it doesn't reflect anything in which I'm interested.

That's something that talk radio has to deal with, too. The core listeners- the "P1s," in the parlance of the industry- want to hear every twist and turn of the Plame/Wilson/Libby thing. Most other people have other things about which to worry. Me, too. I have my opinions, but I'd be lying if I tried to pass them off as the stuff I'm into at the moment. I'm not into it. I'm into getting through the workday. I'm into the new basketball season, into HDTV, into lots of things but not politics at the moment. The bite-sized items at All Access are about as much as I can muster at the moment.

THis can al change tomorrow. Probably will. But I just deleted an entire column, flushed it down the digital drain, and I'm feeling pretty good about that.

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Late night of work tonight. More tomorrow- in the meantime, got to say hi to some friends last night, so go buy their book. Thanks.

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Not again. Not another late night and no time to write.

Yeah, again. And it was World Usability Day, too. Believe it or not, I have something to write about that. It'll have to wait until tomorrow. And because we're expecting a repairman here to deal with that usability issue, that's fitting.

See, there's always a silver lining...

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Yesterday was, as I noted, World Usability Day, dedicated to scolding those nasty manufacturers and software programmers and engineers for making things so complicated. And the truth is that most things generally aren't all that complicated.

Except for TV. Shouldn't be, but is.

We've been through this before.

1970: Buy set, pull out antenna, plug in, turn channel.

1980: Buy set, attach cable to box, attach box to set, plug in, turn channel.

1990: Buy set, attach cable to set, plug in, hit channel-up or channel-down on remote.

2005: Go to store. Decide among CRT, LCD, plasma, LCD projection, DLP projection. Decide among 1080i, 720p, 480i native resolution. Haul set home. Attach cable. Wince, because you're not getting HDTV- you're watching stretched standard-def TV. Go get cable box from cable company, plug it in, attach. Try to set TV and cable to proper resolution. Try to figure out where all the buttons are on the remote, which has several for features you don't get. Find guide button, find program, select, read message on screen insisting you aren't subscribed to the channel, call cable company, curse.

At this very moment, I'm waiting for a Cox Cable guy to come see why our state-of-the-art Motorola HD DVR is screwing up. If you turn it off, it unilaterally decides you aren't subscribed to any digital channels and therefore won't record any shows you've selected. And when you turn it on and note that your shows didn't record, you change the channel and it asks you to call to subscribe, then, seconds later, thinks "oh, he IS subscribed" and turns on the channel. But you lose the ability to record shows by scheduling them in advance, which is what I pay six bucks to do.

And then there's the stutter. Randomly, the video will drop frames, meaning that when there's any motion, the picture has a slight, barely noticeable but definitely annoying hesitation, the picture losing and then sharpening definition every two or three seconds.

But that's not a usability problem. The scheduling thing is. So is the Mystery Message. A red light keeps flashing, warning us that we have a message to read. But there's nothing in the menus about messages. You hit the Menu button, a menu for the Pioneer Passport Echo DVR software pops up. Messages? Nothing. So you hit the button for "more options" and get the Motorola box menu. Messages? Nope. Somewhere, urgent messages are trying vainly to reach us. Someday, they'll break through whatever time-space wall is blocking them and burst into this dimension, advising me that I can buy "Jerry Springer's Greatest Transsexual Fights" or "WWE Extremely Raw With Bacteria Crawling All Over It XVIII" on pay-per-view.

Hey, the cable guy's here. Let's see what he says...

...Okay, I'm back. He has no idea why there's a problem. If refreshing the box tonight doesn't work, we'll have to swap the box out. I STILL don't know why it's not working, and I bet the replacement does the same thing. We'll see, but the most telling thing about the usability, or lack thereof, of this box is that I've read the manual backwards and forwards and STILL don't know how to get it to do certain things. And the TV's the same- the manual's no help.

I'll admit, the HD picture IS astounding. When it works.

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Today's mystery:

Here's a typical construction warning sign posted on Palos Verdes Drive West, just south of the PVE/RPV border. It's been there for a few weeks:

Let's take a closer look. Scrawled over the tape is this:

And at the bottom is this:

"Rod Steiger, Construction Ahead Director"?

Baffling.

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Cable guy never called back. Un-subscription problem still there. Stuttering worse- InHD 1 and 2 nearly unwatchable, college football on InHD 1 was herky-jerky and weird, like a bad video game, TNT, Discovery, and KCET bad, too (KCET showed "A Prairie Home Companion" in HD today, and between the weird frame-dropping and the artifacts and the disturbing Garrison Keillor croaking along with horrible bluegrass/folk ditties, I can't imagine anyone sitting through it. Why the hell LIKES that stuff?)

Called Cox Cable. Very nice and apologetic CSR is sending another tech tomorrow to swap the box. It had better work this time.

Oh, and I was told the answer to Friday's mystery: the messages that set off the red light flashing on the cable box aren't for me. Yes, the light says "Message" and it's flashing, but it doesn't mean anything.

Ah. I see. So, if the light is signaling something like a lost signal and it's not for me, who is it for? Someone who can't see it?

Am I the last sane person left in the world?

Don't answer that, please.

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