Year: 2007

Another Morty Gunty Writer Speaks

I was very fortunate a few months ago to have comedy writer Arnie Kogen, of TV and MAD Magazine fame, visit this blog and relieve my concern that I may have played a role in the demise of comedian Morty Gunty’s NY TV show for kids back in 1965. Gunty was the first comic who Kogen wrote for, and later the same was true for writer Alan Zweibel, best known for his stint on the original writing team of Saturday Night Live. He helped develop the characters Roseanne Roseannadanna and Emily Litella for the late Gilda Radner.

It all started when Alan Zweibel’s mother chatted up a comedian she saw open for Engelbert Humperdinck. Zweibel laughs at the thought of it. “She just went up and approached him, and said, ‘My son can write jokes.’ And pretty soon I was writing for $7 a gag for a comic named Morty Gunty.”

Alan Zweibel: The History of Me is a one-man show Zweibel has been performing at various venues throughout this year. Friday night he was in South Orange New Jersey, as featured in this newspaper article.

I’d like to embed a video excerpt of Zweibel doing The History of Me, but YouTube says it can’t be embedded. So instead here’s a picture of Zweibel you can click to take you to YouTube.

Alan Zweibel

Boston Common For Non-Commoners

I don’t subscribe to Boston Common magazine, but it comes in the mail anyway. I think I’m on the mailing list because of my American Express Gold Card.

The magazine is named after a park in Boston, and it’s intended for the young, beautiful, fashionable and rich of greater Boston, although the old, fashionable and rich are also featured prominently. I’m flipping through it now, and I see an ad for Stella Artois lager beer, recently featured here on DogRat.com. There’s also a must-see ad for clothier Blue Fly. My son is almost sixteen, so I see no harm in letting this one through. Click to enlarge. I can’t find this picture at Blue Fly online, but it’s in Boston Common magazine.

Oh, the expansive and expensive suburban homes! The in-town luxury condos! The cars and the fashions and the restaurants, and Harvard, and everything else that goes with being so fabulously well off. I refer you to the video in a previous post about Hyannis Homeys. How many people truly can afford to live this way? The Natick Mall, west of Boston, is now called The Natick Collection, and I’m curious to know how well Neiman-Marcus and Nordstrums, and Tiffany’s, and the new condos catering to the customers of those stores, will do.

Dena Halverson Schulz, 1893-1943

Dena Schulz and her son Charles, 1941

As posted previously, Charles and Joyce Schulz claimed a false date of marriage, in order to maintain the appearance that Meredith is his biological daughter. The document at that link shows 1949 as the wedding date, when in fact it was 1951.

Another date deception had been carried out by Charles Schulz’s mother Dena, except she moved a date forward. Dena always gave her year of birth as 1895, when in fact it was 1893.

As my buddy D.F. Rogers likes to say, “let’s look at the record!” And he has provided that record in the form of the 1930 census from Needles, California. Dena’s age is falsely listed as 32, the same as her husband Carl, when in fact even her claimed birth year of 1895 would have made her 34 years old at the time of the census. Curious.

Other interesting items in the census are that the Schulz family did not live on a farm, they paid $28/month in rent, and Carl came to the United States from Germany in 1897, the year he was born. Click the picture and see for yourself, but beware — it’s a B-I-G image.

1930 Census, Needles, CA

Stella Artois Lager — .8 oz. Less Filling

A while back I recommended a lovely little movie from Norway called Buddy. It was in the modest selection of free, on-demand movies offered with Verizon FiOS TV, on the Film Fest Channel, sponsored by Stella Artois, a lager beer from Belgium. Here’s the commercial that runs before the Film Fest movies.
[flv:http://www.dograt.com/Video/OCT07/StellaArtois.flv 448 336]

When we ate at a TGI Friday’s I noticed Stella Artois on the menu and I ordered one and had my first taste. I’ve had many Belgian ales, but no lagers that I could recall. It’s a nice, light beer, with a lot more flavor than mass-produced American beers, and less bitter than a Heineken, a pilsener that borders on being skunky. (Marston’s Pedigree Bitters is an ale that is my idea of a truly great dry beer.) Later, I spotted a six pack of Stella Artois at a local store, and in further appreciation for the movie, I bought it.

The bottles are only 11.2 ounces! I’m sorry, but I don’t care how good the beer is. If the guy pouring Stella Artois in the commercial is going to be picky, then so am I — twelve ounces, and no less! Until then Stella Artois has lost me as a customer.