Mike's Minutiae

Larry Harris is used to the confusion when he tells people he lives on Hitler Road.

The Circleville resident says after 30 years, he's used to the weird looks and questions. But the three rural roads and the cemetery that bear the Hitler name were around long before the German dictator.

Leon Askin, the actor who played Gen. Albert Burkhalter in the 1960s television comedy "Hogan's Heroes," has died, Austrian officials said Friday [6/3].

The actor was 97. Neither city officials nor the Vienna hospital where he died disclosed the cause or date of his death.

That is why I was known among my colleges and to my producers as an accent actor and I was condemned, if one could say so, to wait for roles where a Russian, French, Arabian, Rumanian or Chinese accent is expected, but no American. I never became a superstar, yet in the TV series 'Hogan's Heroes' I played the starring part of General Burghalter. I also played a very important part in the first Cinemascope film 'The Robe' with Richard Burton. I had the great chance to play in this film. I played the traitor Abidor and I also was in the 'Virgin Shot', the very first scene, of this important first Cinemascope film.

[...]

Another example how easy it was to work with great stars was Allan Ladd. One evening, after a day of shooting had come to an end, I waited in brooding heat for the company car to bring me back to the quarters. It was an extremely hot day in the desert, about 113° Fahrenheit. Suddenly Allan Ladd's car came by and he saw me and said to me: 'What the hell are you waiting around for in that heat?' And as I answered: 'I am waiting for the company car!', he said: 'Nuts, get into my Rolls, it is faster!'

[...]

The journalists in Vienna and Austria and also in Germany call me a legend. I'm a man who lived through difficult times. I'm a man who survived the monster of all times, Adolf Hitler and I'm still, at my high old age of 93, successful in my profession and that is the pride with which I live and survive.

"Beverly Hills school children would call after me, 'Klink, Klink!'" Askin wrote on his Web site. "People driving through Beverly Hills who saw these children raising their arms in the Hitler salute couldn't continue out of sheer shock and amazement and brought traffic to a standstill."

A 5-ounce gadget that attaches to the dog's collar uses global positioning system technology to track pets. Users create an invisible electronic fence - up to hundreds of miles - where the dog is free to roam.

The moment the pooch crosses the invisible boundary, a message is sent - a text message or an E-mail - with the animal's exact location.

Executives at EMI Group on Monday said they planned to begin rolling out CDs with technology designed to limit copying. The technology allows buyers to burn onto CDs only three full copies of a disc's songs, and the burned discs cannot be copied.

Sony BMG is heading even faster down the same road. About half the discs it releases in the United States today have the three-copy limit, and it plans to have a similar restriction on all its U.S. releases by the end of the year, said Thomas Hesse, president of the company's global digital music business.

The new CD technology still has some compatibility issues — most notably, the songs on the discs cannot be transferred directly to Apple Computer Inc.'s popular iPods. Such limitations are one reason that the two other major record companies, Universal Music Group and Warner Music Group Corp., have yet to make the switch to "secure" CDs.

The First4Internet CD copy protection technology destroys the registry keys (driver device names) associated with your CD-ROM devices. Then a monitoring app allows or disallows access to the device.

The monitoring app is buggy. If it stops running or loses your device references, you will have to reinstall windows to make your CD-ROM devices work again. [emphasis in original]

Much had also changed. Now there is rot, broken windows, rusting bed frames and paint falling away in great blisters and peels. And now there are tourists, participating in what may be the strangest vacation excursion available in the former Soviet space: the packaged tour of the Chernobyl exclusion zone, scene of the worst civilian disaster of the nuclear age.

Villain?

"Don't kid yourself, Jimmy. If a cow ever got the chance, he'd eat you and everyone you care about!" ~~Troy McClure. You might remember him from such educational films as "Meat and You: Partners in Freedom" on The Simpsons.

• "Sophisti-Pop" - e.g., Sade, Style Council, Everything But the Girl
  
  
• "Sadcore" - e.g., American Music Club, Red House Painters, Elliott Smith
  
  
• "Twee Pop" - e.g., Belle & Sebastian, Shonen Knife, Beat Happening

Get ready to toast your Flaming Moes to some excellent news.

The Simpsons movie is off the drawing board and in preproduction.

"You know what? We've just done the table read for The Simpsons movie, so although we've been promoting that we're going to do it, now we're actually doing it and are in production," Nancy Cartwright, who gives voice to Bart Simpson, told BBC Radio 1 this week.

The big winner, submitted by dozens and dozens of you, is Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines, which used Iggy Pop's "Lust for Life" in a series of spots. As my reader Andrei put it, "Nothing says maritime comfort like a song about shooting up junk." A sampling of other e-mails I got on this mismatch:

"Love the tune, but did the cruise folks actually think about the lyrics? 'Here comes Johnny Yen again/ With the liquor and drugs/ And a flesh machine/ He's gonna do another strip tease.' Somewhere between the drugs and the strip tease, it hits you: Yeah, this is way more than an ordinary vacation."
—Brad

[Ad agency] Wieden & Kennedy's aggressive strategy to craft "anti-commercials" reached a level of absurdity earlier this spring when the agency contacted Mark Hosler.

Hosler is the brains behind a San Francisco-based self-described "media guerrilla" music group called Negativland, known for mocking the commercialism that saturates American culture. Negativland's latest release is a single called "Truth in Advertising." It features the voices of panicky callers on a consumer hotline asking questions about impulse buying.

Asking Hosler to work on a TV commercial is like asking Andrea Dworkin to pose for Hustler, or Bill Sizemore to collect signatures for a property-tax increase. It violates the basic laws of the universe. Jeff Kling tried it anyway.

"We love you guys," Kling told Hosler over the phone after barraging him with e-mails and faxes requesting his help on the Miller campaign.

"I asked them," Hosler later told WW, "'Do you really listen to what we do? Can't you tell that we're in opposition to the world you're creating?'"

"It was depressing," Hosler says. "What we do is about tearing that world down. [Wieden & Kennedy] are the blob that we are shooting arrows into. Here they were, trying to absorb us. I was depressed that they even thought to call me."

Jeff Greenfield, executive vice president at 1st Approach, a Dover, New Hampshire-based marketing firm, has been shopping Black & Decker's new AutoTape product to TV writers. At the push of a button, the battery-driven AutoTape automatically extends and retracts a measuring tape.

"There's a comedy element to it," he said. "It could poke somebody. There could even be a sexual connotation. It's funny."