This Date in History - December 3

 

I always try to use a photo of somebody that's alive and celebrating a birthday.   Today is Brendan Fraser.  When I say "alive," I mean his career....an Oscar winner.

915:  POPE JOHN X CROWNED BERENGAR I OF ITALY AS HOLY ROMAN EMPEROR.

Back when, there was no separation between government and religion.

1800:  FRENCH GENERAL MOREAU DECISIVELY DEFEATS THE AUSTRIAN ARCHDUKE JOHN NEAR MUNICH. 

Who?  What?  Do you care?

1818:  ILLINOIS BECOMES THE 21ST STATE.

And the last to have nighttime baseball.

1834:  THE GERMAN CUSTOMS UNION BEGINS THE FIRST REGULAR CENSUS IN GERMANY.

Eine, zwei....

1894:  AUTHOR ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON DIES.

Dirtnapped.

1898:  THE DUQUESNE COUNTRY AND ATHLETIC CLUB DEFEATED AN ALL STAR COLLECTION OF EARLY FOOTBALL GAMES WHICH IS CONSIDERED THE VERY FIRST ALL-STAR GAME FOR PRO FOOTBALL.

Over 100 years later, still nobody cares.

1901:  IN A STATE OF THE UNION MESSAGE, US PRESIDENT TEDDY ROOSEVELT ASKS CONGRESS TO CURB THE POWER OF TRUSTS WITHIN REASONABLE LIMITS.

His wife was a whole lot prettier than Franklin's.  But, of course, that was Teddy's niece.  Creepy.

1910:  MODERN NEON LIGHTING IS FIRST DEMONSTRATED AT THE PARIS MOTOR SHOW.

For the most annoying use of it, please go visit Times Square.

1919:  AFTER NEARLY 20 YEARS OF PLANNING AND CONSTRUCTION, INCLUDING TWO COLLAPSES, THE QUEBEC BRIDGE OPENS TO TRAFFIC.

That would have to be some darn good concrete to get me on that bridge.

1925:  THE FINAL LOCARNO TREAT IS SIGNED IN LONDON, ESTABLISHING POST WW1 TERRITORIAL SETTLEMENTS.

This is mine.  This is yours.  Done.

1927:  PUTTING PANTS ON PHILIP, THE FIRST LAUREL AND HARDY FILM, IS RELEASED.

And that's why December 3 should be a national holiday.

1927:  SINGER ANDY WILLIAMS IS BORN.

Just in time for Christmas.

1948:  ROCK STAR OZZY OSBOURNE IS BORN.

Not a good day if you're a rat.

1959:  THE CURRENT FLAG OF SINGAPORE IS ADOPTED. 

I don't even know what the original flag of Singapore looked like.

1960:  ACTRESS JULIANNE MOORE IS BORN.

Hmmm.  Older than I thought.

1960:  THE MUSICAL CAMELOT DEBUTS ON BROADWAY.

Two house seats, please.  Name?  Kennedy.

1964:  POLICE ARREST OVER 800 STUDNETS AT THE UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA AT BERKELEY FOLLOWING THEIR SIT-IN.

What were they protesting about?   Could have been anything from the Vietnam War to the price of gum.  These assholes never are satisfied.

1967:  IN SOUTH AFRICA, A TRANSPLANT TEAM HEADED BY CHRISTIAN BERNARD CARRIES OUT THE FIRST HEART TRANSPLANT.

Nowadays, you can get this done at Costco.

1968:  ACTOR BRENDAN FRASER IS BORN.

Rode an elevator with him once.  Beyond that, I have nothing.

1976:  AN ASSASSINATION ATTEMPT IS MADE ON BOB MARLEY.  HE IS SHOT TWICE, BUT WILL PLAY A CONCERT ONLY TWO DAYS LATER.

If the bullet landed in his hair, it's no wonder he survived.

1979:  IN CINCINNATI, OHIO, 11 FANS ARE SUFFOCATED IN A CRUSH FOR SEATS AT A WHO CONCERT.

Who becomes why and how.

1979:  AYATOLLAH KHOMEINI BECOMES THE FIRST SUPREME LEADER OF IRAN.

And that's a quick way to justify your hostages.

1981:  FARMER WALTER KNOTT DIES.

Knott's Bury Farm.

1989:  IN A MEETING IN MALTA, US PRESIDENT GEORGE H.W. BUSH AND SOVIET LEADER MIKHAIL GORBACHEV RELEASE STATEMENTS THAT THE COLD WAR IS OVER.

Putin on the Ritz.

1992:  A TEST ENGINEER FOR SEMA GROUP USES A PERSONAL COMPUTER TO SEND THE FIRST TEXT MESSAGE VIA PHONE.

I don't know if we should thank him or punch him in the face.

1999: NASA LOSES RADIO CONTACT WITH THE MARS POLAR LANDER MOMENTS BEFORE IT ENTERS THE MARTIAN ATMOSPHERE.

Uncle Martin?

1999:  ACTRESS MADELINE KAHN DIES.

A major loss.  Genius.

Dinner last night:  Salisbury steak.

To Hell and Back (?)

 

I guess that's what it looks like at 666 Hell Drive.  For me this past week, it was my second apartment home in Yonkers.  Oh, nothing is wrong with the place.   The problem is...welp...me.

It was just supposed to be my new traditional Thanksgiving trip east to see friends and have a few meals.  I had not been in my NY abode since May, given my recent left hip replacement and all.   But that, combined with the two knee replacements previously, had been in better shape for this trip than in the past.

Not that my body didn't try to warn me that this travel might be too much.

Two weeks before departure, I started to have infrequent but noticeable lower back twinges.   The occasional stabbing pain.   Luckily, I had an appointment with my fabulous physical therapist and he looked at the problem.  Given the hip surgery had created uneven leg lengths and subsequent shoe lifts, my PT said my body was still learning how to walk with its new gait.   And certain muscles needed to be re-educated with some exercises.  Armed with all that intel, I was still good to go to the Big Apple.

One five hour flight East and it was all over.   My back spasms were constant and I was Charles Laughton at Notre Dame.  How I got to Yonkers from JFK I will never know.

So, my first two days in NY were spent in my NY bed of pain as I alternated between ice packs and a heating pad that used to be my mother's forty years ago.  I envisioned an apartment fire from it, but the damn thing was working fine.   I called my internist in Los Angeles who prescribed for me a muscle relaxer, which helped but also did the usual side effect that kind of medication does.

Constipation.

The fun never stops.

I got through Thanksgiving Day okay, but all that fun activity seized up my back on Friday.   I was so desperate by the end of the day that I hit up Google.   Find me a chiropractor in Yonkers.   Not the perfect way to find medical assistance but any port in my storm would do.

Amazingly, I found a guy nearby who was open till 8PM.  The office staff worked hard to squeeze me in.   They were on the third floor of a building with no elevator which I thought was an odd spot to have an office with immobile patients.   Meanwhile, the doctor was spot on.  So good and thorough that I wanted him cloned and installed in a Westwood strip mall.  

Dr, Rodriguez confirmed everything my PT said with one added diagnosis he made after a "single finger" test.  My sacroiliac joint and surrounding muscles are super angry and really want nothing to do with my new gait.   The plane trip and subsequent dehydration messed me up royally.

The guy gave me some stimulus therapy, a massage, and a couple of joint "re-adjustments."   It helped for a while, but, by Sunday, I was hunched over again.

Now my internist has prescribed a week of steroids.   Meanwhile,  I look forward with dread next Wednesday.

My scheduled flight home.

Dinner last night:  Leftover chicken salad.

Monday Morning Video Laugh - December 1, 2025

 Her nuts are not cracking.

Dinner last night:  Chicken salad.

The Sunday Memory Drawer - My Bi-coastal Office

 

I'm spending a week in New York and, for some mystical reason, I was calling up memories in my apartment there on the Hastings-Yonkers border.  I got to stand on my balcony and shoot some video of a powerful storm blowing through last Tuesday.  Nature's fury was grand.  As I looked out at the nature preserve my apartment building is nestled in, I could hear the sound of trees snapping all around.  I lamented that I never really used that terrace while I was living there full time.  Memories made and memories never realized.

That said, my very favorite room of my apartment is quite small.  Right off the galley kitchen, it was serving as a baby's room when I bought it.  Those sellers were a bit deceitful at the time.

"This is really a second bedroom."

Umm, no, it's not.  There's no closet and, as soon as the kid is over six months old, the room is way too crowded.  It really makes the adjoining living room smaller and it is essentially created with a fake wall.  But, when I bought the unit, I opted to utilize it as an office temporarily.

Almost twenty years later, it's still an office.  And the place I spend the most time in whenever I am there.  That's where my laptop gets parked on the desk I bought in 1990.  On the walls of the rather claustrophobic enclosure are memories of my pre-Los Angeles life.  College diploma.  Family photos.  A painting of a White Castle, gifted to me by my writing partner after I mentioned that my last good memory of my father was eating lunch with him at a White Castle.  A terrific Lucy poster of the Vitameatavegamin episode and an artist rendering of the opening credits to "The Honeymooners."

There's a bookcase loaded with works that I read perhaps twenty or thirty years ago.  White pages that are now brown and a little dusty.  There's a floor fan that certainly comes in handy during the summer when the heat of the laptop makes it toasty in there.  In another corner is a cabinet full of laser discs.  What the hell are they?  Well, back when, I was one of the original collectors of this once-pristine way to show a movie on home video.  It was that brief period in between VHS and DVD.  Yes, the letters were LD and I have a bunch of them.  In my New York abode, the original laser disc player has been disconnected in favor of a Sony Blu-Ray player.  Life, technology and time moves on.

Meanwhile, in the corner you see above, there stands a file cabinet.  Unfortunately, there is no way to romanticize this hunk of steel.  It's a file cabinet.  Clunky and certainly no work of art.  And it's jammed full of Pendaflex folders.  

An alphabetized edition of my life.

A few of the drawers hold personal artifacts and papers.  Death certificates of both parents and my paternal grandparents.  Tax returns of my dad and myself back in the day when there was a Reagan in the White House.  Head shots of a past love.  A copy of my will which is being rewritten shortly.  And all the papers from the US War Department regarding the death of my dad's brother, the guy I was named after, who was killed in World War II action.

On the aforementioned weatherful  afternoon, I was looking for an old baseball scorebook.  I was searching for a notation I made during the 1988 National League Championship between the Mets and the Dodgers.  A friend is writing a book about the 1988 World Champion Los Angeles Dodgers and he might want to use a photo of that notation in his work.  Well, I found that pretty quickly.  A five minute hunt.

But I then opened the drawer above it.  And sat there poring through its contents for the next four hours.  Poring while it was pouring. Thunder, lightning, and wind were outside.  I was inside, remembering a part of a life. 

Mine.

Indeed, this time around, I was dealing with a Saturday Memory Drawer.

This one particular drawer is filled with writing.  Lots and lots and lots and lots of writing. 

Careers once pursued.  Careers never abandoned.  Trying and trying and trying.  And writing and writing and writing.  Authoring with partners past and partners current.  I couldn't help myself.  I had to look.

I found the original contractual agreement with my former writing partner, the erstwhile Djinn from the Bronx.  I dug up the original contractual agreement with my more recent writing partner.  I noticed that the language was identical.  Obviously the former had acted as the prototype for the current.

This cabinet was full of spec scripts, which fledgling writers do in order to gain the attention of anybody.  These files offered a virtual potpourri of television history.  Yes, I was doing it for that long.

Our very first spec script for "Rhoda."  Remember that old chesthut?  Loaded with typos but that was usually what happened when the Correct-O-Type ran out on my old Smith Corona electric typewriter.

A very engaging letter from my writing friend "Joe" who I profiled here several months ago.  He really loved the "Rhoda" and thought our prospects were good.

Yeah, right.

More TV history poured out.  A spec script for "Taxi."  Yes, that "Taxi."  I looked at the title page with the cast list.  Two of those folks are already dead. 

I went through my spec "One Day at a Time" phase primarily because I was going through my Valerie Bertinelli phase.  Oh, wait, that never really ended.  Meanwhile, I read through the first ten pages and started to scream.

"Get to the plot already!!!"

I noticed how much page space I wasted with needless dialogue as characters entered a room.

Hi, Ann.  Hi, Barbara.  Hi, Julie.  Hi, Schneider.

Shut up, Len!

There were some pilot scripts concocted for original ideas back in the day when some goofy mail room clerk from the William Morris Agency wanted to be our agent.  A show about the maintenance staff at a luxury Manhattan condominium.  It was such a rip-off of "Taxi."  What was I thinking???

And then we had tried to adapt the radio situation comedy I had produced for WFUV at Fordham University.  "Diploma City" on TV??  Really, really, really???  I read the first scene and my gag reflex was officially activated.  Again, did I really waste this much screen time with banal banter.

Hi, Allen.  Hi, Steve.  Hi, Milton.

The most interesting spec script I found was one I had done for "Lou Grant."  It was the only time we had ventured out of the three-camera live audience sitcom format.  As I read, this one drew me in.  I haven't seen the show for some time, but the characters came back to me in a heartbeat.  Wow, Len, this was a good one.  What the hell happened?

I know there was a time gap where I didn't write, but you can't tell in my file cabinet.  The folders continue with the only difference being the last name of the writing partner I was working with.  Years later, I started to notice a vast improvement.  No longer did every character feel the compulsion to say "hi" when they entered a scene.

I found our first spec script...or my first with the new partner.  A "Murphy Brown" which had me laughing out loud.  The same was true for a hilarious "Golden Girls."  Boy, were we busy when we first teamed up.  We tried them all.

"Home Improvement."

"Mad About You."

"Frasier."

"Designing Women."

"The Wonder Years."  This one got us into a NYC writing workshop and I was particularly proud because it was all about my grandmother.

I found a folder full of sitcom ideas we had pitched to Suzanne Pleshette.  The concepts were quite good and still could live on.  The actress and star, however, would not.

Several Pendaflex folders are devoted to the kids sitcom we created for and with Linda Ellerbee.  This one kicked around for a few years and got us some decent coin.  It never got on the air, but the characters did live on in some paperback books allegedly authored by Linda.  For that, there would be no coin.

I find the last version of the pilot script for this middle-school variation on "Murphy Brown."  I flashback to the day where we had to fix the last scene
overnight.  Nickelodeon was expecting it the next morning.  It was summer and hot and muggy.  The A/C in the living room didn't exactly cool the home office.  But, there we were.  Me in the cushioned office chair.  My partner lying across the floor next to the fan.  We came up with gold.

But, ultimately, no real nuggets of such.  Yet, to this day, I will tell you that script was very, very good.

In our pre-LA days, we had developed a friendship through correspondence with the "I Love Lucy" co-creator, Madelyn Pugh Davis.  I've written here before of how that began.  I had forgotten, however, how many letters we did exchange.  The file cabinet reminded me of that.  There were almost two dozen letters over a two-year period.  I reread each one of them.  Sometimes, it was advice.  In one, she really had nothing to say, except she felt a need to check in with us.  Who writes letters anymore?  Well, we did.

I find the one letter where we make plans to meet on an upcoming trip to California.  She mentions lunch and that, given there would be food involved, her partner Bob Carroll Jr. would likely join us.  She signed off the letter with the following wish.

"I hope your trip to Hollywood goes a lot better than the one the Ricardos and the Mertzes had."

I read another letter where we get notes on a pilot script that is still, sixteen years later, alive as a viable body of work.

I close the file cabinet as the rain stops. 

Memories then.  And still memories now.  I keep on writing.  What else can I do?

When I had my NY apartment renovated, I discussed with my superlative contractor whether it was time to tear down the fake wall and make the living room larger.  His response was surprising.

"These days, a great selling point of an apartment is the presence of a home office."

Indeed.  As I grapple with perhaps selling my apartment in 2026, let's see how much value that home office is.

Dinner last night:  BLT at New Rochelle Diner.

Classic Musical Comedy Production Number of the Month - November 2025

Woo hoo.  A five Saturday month gives us the opportunity to enjoy a classic musical comedy number from stage and screen.   Here's the wonderful number from the recent revival of "Merrily We Roll Along."  I got to see it on Broadway and next month the filmed version of that production will be released to movie theaters.  Woo hoo again! 

Dinner last night:  Sausage and peppers at Carlo's.

Your Black Friday Mall Alternative

 My annual gift to you on this, the manic shopping day known as Black Friday.  If you're out in the malls today, you are no friend of mine.   So, instead of fighting with some slob over a sweater, let me help you with these gift ideas straight out of Amazon.

For that cousin you know belongs in Cirque du Soleil.

 Your goldfish should not have more square footage than you do.

 Let's make it easier for Lucky to go piss on the sofa.

 If you could seal up the end and toss it around the house, I might be a buyer.

Unless the name is interchangeable, this T-shirt has a very limited market.

This device can replace your barber.  Until, of course, you need to call him to repair the damage you did.

 Orthopedic surgeon is optional.

You have to be pretty lazy if you need a vacuum to get the lint out of your dryer.

 Wonder why the back of your seat keeps bumping you?

Designed to improve circulation.   But, as soon as you put this contraption on, you know the doorbell will ring.

 For the pervert in your family.

The woman and batteries are extra.

Dinner last night:  Turkey dinner at the home of Bob and Ellen.

Our Thanksgiving Day Tradition

 Another rendition of "Turkey Lurkey Time" from "Promises, Promises."  We still miss Burt Bacharach.

Dinner last night:  Eggplant parm at Gianna's.