For the new pope, tell your cardinal to vote for Chuck Lorre (pass it on!)

Chuck 'n' Charlie: Not to worry -- given the current state of relations between them, it seems highly unlikely that Charlie would be popping in at the Vatican (with or without "goddesses") to visit Pope Chuck.

"[D]on't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled 'Pope Chuck, P.I.' (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!)"

- from Chuck Lorre's vanity card (#409) proposing
himself as an "outside the box" candidate for pope

by Ken

I was turning over ideas to maybe kick off a weekly series of musings on TV tonight when I got derailed.

As to the TV musings, I haven't done much writing about TV lately, I think because I've been feeling less and less confident that what I'm looking at (let alone looking for) has any relevance to anybody else. I'm not sure why I should be the only person in the world who seems to pay attention to this factor, but it's made it tough.

But for tonight I had this idea of writing about the purge I just did on my DVR "Series Manager," finally freeing myself from shows I've stopped watching anyway and finally got tired of deleting every week. (It can be really tough with the cable shows, because if you delete one "scheduled recording," the device will attempt -- helpfully, it thinks -- to substitute another showing of the same damned episode, and will keep doing it as long as there are other showings to schedule-and-delete.) So I wouldn't be so much "reviewing" these shows as explaining the decision to sever those DVR ties.

Meanwhile, while I was turning these ideas over, I was watching this week's Big Bang Theory, reflecting that you could take any two minutes at random from the show's entire run to date and that would represent a vastly greater achievement in terms of creativity, character insight, human empathy, intellectual seriousness, and entertainment value than the entire bloated corpus of these HBO and Showtime shows I've finally flushed. And then came the vanity card came on, and I realized I had to stop the presses, or whatever the blog equivalent of stopping the presses is, to spread the word about this bold proposal from the show's runner.

I myself have made my own suggestion for a new pope: one of those pesky nuns who have been causing such agita to outgoing Pope Cardinal Ratguts and the rest of his cadre of deviant sociopathic Church overlords. Of course I have no standing in matters papal, but surely it has occurred to you faithful Catholics that neither do you! You're just going to let the old cardinals bicker and come up with some other repellent scumbag and you can all pretend that this dingbat too is infallible.

(I was delighted, by the way, to see that my idea of one of those pesky nuns for pope also occurred to E. J. Dionne Jr. Sorry I can't find a link, but that piece seemed to me at the time to disappear when E.J.'s studiously fair-minded appraisal of Ratguts appeared.)

Anyway, I think it's time for you Catholics to start kicking up a fuss to make sure your cardinal knows that you're an interested party. (That's assuming you have a cardinal. As I understand it, you aren't automatically entitled to one. You get a bishop and very likely arching over him an archbishop, you lucky devils, but only the pope can determine if and when your archbishop is entitled to a cardinal's beanie. You folks in the L.A. area, for example, are still having to make do with just an archbishop. He will no doubt be elevated by the next pope, since it's unimaginable that L.A. won't have a cardinal. But for now, remember that you still have a conclave-eligible cardinal in the person of your former "ecclesiastical prince," that douchebag Mahony. So e-mail him; I'm sure he'll be interested in your views, just as he always was.)

Now Chuck L may indeed be an, um, unexpected candidate for Bishop of Rome. But I can pretty well guarantee you that he's a better prospect than any of the slugs who'll be handicapped as potential candidates between now and the day the white smoke blows.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #409

I'm a big believer in the old maxim, "If you don't ask, you don't get." With that in mind, I'd like to throw caution to the wind and ask the Vatican's College of Cardinals to consider me for the job opening that recently became available. Now, before you say anything, let me be the first to point out the many reasons "why not." I'm Jewish. I've never understood the hoopla over the Old Testament, with all the smiting and begetting. I'm a twice- divorced sitcom writer with a shady past. And perhaps most importantly, I look silly in a hat. No argument, the cons are plentiful. But let's take a moment to examine the pros. First, I am completely untouched by the abuse scandal that is currently engulfing the church. I can stand on the balcony that overlooks St. Peter's Square and say to the adoring masses, with a straight, albeit Semitic face, "Folks, I've never even met an altar boy." With me as your pontiff you buy yourself some serious deniability. Next, believe it or not, I happen to be a very spiritually inclined guy. I would love a job where my primary thrust was encouraging prayer, meditation and acts of loving kindness. (Although in the interest of full disclosure, we would have to negotiate some common sense middle ground for any other thrusting I might want to do. It'd be a shame to waste adoring masses as long as they consist entirely of consenting adults.) And finally, there's the issue of my name. How can a billion true believers not smile and breathe a sigh of relief when the white smoke coming from the chimney is to announce the investiture of Pope Chuck? Cardinals, I want to assure you that while my papacy is a little "outside the box," you can rest assured that I would passionately carry the good word to all the poor and the downtrodden, beginning with a holy visit to Saint-Tropez, or maybe the Bahamas or Turks & Caicos. And just think of the marketing opportunities! How is "Pope Chuck" not the name of the next Adam Sandler movie? What's to stop me from busting a move on the balcony and starting a dance craze called "Pope Chuckin'"? And don't get me started on the demographic potential of a TV show entitled "Pope Chuck, P.I." (Kiss the ring, or get punched by it!) Yes, this transition represents an incredible opportunity for the church to be reborn. And at the end of the day, isn't that the name of the game?

Are you going to tell me Chuck L wouldn't look better than Pope Cardinal Ratguts in this new-style pope hat? I'm not saying he'd look great in this monstrosity, but he could hardly help looking better, no?

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Frontiers of shamelessness: Chuck Lorre hawks his book-form collection of his vanity cards

You know the old saying, "Shameless is as shameless does." Okay, maybe it's not an old saying, and maybe I'm not even sure what it would mean if it were. But somehow it seems pertinent to Chuck Lorre's collection of his celebrated end-of-show vanity cards -- with, he promises, some new material added.

by Ken

So here I was just this week bragging about how I was on top of my new-season televiewing. It shouldn't be that tough, really, since it's pretty much all old and returning shows. (I'm casting a wary eye on CBS's Partners, though I missed the pilot, and the show is apparently too fancy for On Demand. There's sort of something going on there, nothing much is grabbing me except Brandon Routh, whom I don't think I've seen before, as "the other" gay guy.) Then I ran into the usual Sunday-night jam-up, which isn't so easy to clear if you aren't doing due DVR diligence, which for various reasons I wasn't this week -- and then I discovered I've got a Thursday-night mini-jam-up.

Which is a long-way-round way of saying that I only just caught up on Thursday night's Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men. And naturally at the end of the very lovely Big Bang Theory episode, naturally I paused the machine to read producer Chuck Lorre's vanity card. Which looked something like this:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #393

I'm reluctant to use my vanity cards to plug the sale of my vanity card book. That doesn't mean I won't do it, I'm just reluctant. Or perhaps the better word is ambivalent - of two minds. On the one hand it seems a bit shameless to ask people to spend money on a beautifully bound, giant coffee table book filled with amusing stories and biting witticisms, each high-gloss page handsomely illustrated and ready for framing. On the other, it sure would make a dandy holiday gift for that special someone in your life who already has an iPod Nano. Of course, the fact that the book contains some original material which is sure to stir up some old controversies is by no means reason to buy it. Then again, how can you miss out on owning something that is so perfectly suited for toilet reading? The answer is, you can't. Take it from me, don't suffer from ambivalence. Enjoy the clarity of thought and purpose that comes from being of one mind - a mind that says, "I'm gonna go online right now and order me a copy of 'What Doesn't Kill Us Makes Us Bitter.'"

Okay, so I'm shameless, sue me. Oh wait, that's already been done.

Having written here before about some of Chuck's notable vanity cards (it was, in fact, a DWT reader who clued me in via a comment that you can find them all online), I decided on the spot that I was prepared to shamelessly promote his shameless self-promotion. As indeed I'm doing.

The only thing was, not being exactly a ball of fire today, I didn't head straight for the computer to do the deed, but instead dawdled in front of the TV and, as already noted, caught up on Thursday's Two and a Half Men, also a Chuck Lorre show, and what did I see at the end but -- you guessed it -- good old card #393! My immediate thought was that that may be just one tiny shameless step too far. But that, I decided on second thought, is a subject for another post.

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Serious funnyfolks: Bob Mankoff's update of "I say it's spinach," Lee Lorenz on banksters, and Chuck Lorre on, well, life

"I say it's government-mandated broccoli, and I say the hell with it."

by Ken

How audacious of our friend Bob Mankoff, not only the The New Yorker's cartoon editor but one of the magazine's elite cartoonists, to offer the above cartoon this week! What's audacious is that, while it's pretty funny in its own right, it really counts on the reader recognizing it as an hommage to one of the magazine's most famous cartoons, drawn by Carl Rose in 1928 with the caption provided by E. B. White.

"It's broccoli, dear."
"I say it's spinach, and I say the hell with it."

I should add that it was a common cartoon practice in those days, to have captions provided by gag-writers to fit drawings -- or vice versa. Not that I mean to reduce E. B. White to the status of a "gag-writer," but in this case that's what his function was.

If the Rose-White cartoon looks familiar, well, there are lots of places you could have seen it, but one of them is one of the posts I did after attending the Thurber tribute ringmastered by Thurber aficionado extraordinaire Keith Olbermann last June at New York's 92nd Street Y: "Bob Mankoff pays tribute to James Thurber's decisive role 'in shaping the modern New Yorker cartoon.'" Bob had been one of the panelists at the 92nd Street Y shindig, and he reconfigured the presentation he gave that night into one of his wonderful weekly newsletters-blogposts, "James Thurber's Giant Swoop."

No, it's not a Thurber cartoon. Bob was using it as an illustration of the state of cartooning that Thurber broke through. "In the early twentieth century," he explained, "cartoons were illustrated anecdotes," and "the same style was found in the early days of The New Yorker. This was all illustrated with select examples, on up to "this refreshingly less stilted and beloved cartoon from 1928," which he said "comes from the same template."

For Bob's description of how Thurber broke the cartoon mold, and how subsequent cartoonists have taken advantage of it, check out either Bob's own blog presentation or my hashed version of it. My immediate point is that he has established himself pretty well as custodian of New Yorker cartoon history, to the point of now offering this charming takeoff on the Rose-White cartoon. (Note, by the way, that he has eliminated the anecdotal "dialogue" format of the original.)


BY COINCIDENCE OR NOT, THIS WEEK'S NEW YORKER
ALSO INCLUDES A POLITICAL-THEMED CARTOON BY LEE LORENZ

Lee was Bob's predecessor as cartoon editor of The New Yorker (from 1993 to 1997; for 20 years before that he was the magazine's art editor).


Lee Lorenz's name comes up frequently in Bob's blogposts, not least in the series (which I wrote about most recently in a post called "You'll never guess who drew tonight's first cartoon -- but you can't possibly miss the second") he's been doing on the first New Yorker cartoons of the now-veteran group of cartoonists Lee brought into the fold in the '70s, including Jack Ziegler, Mick Stevens, Michael Maslin, and Roz Chast. (Bob himself is part of that group, and had already written about the first cartoon of his that Lee bought.)

By the way, I stumbled across a terrific, wide-ranging interview with Lee Lorenz, done by Richard Gehr for The Comics Journal last August. In case you were wondering, Lee (who turns 80 this October) is still very much with us and still working. He talks freely about his non-cartooning interests (he's both a Pratt Institute-trained artist and a rabid jazz enthusiast and practitioner, on the trumpet), and fills in all kinds of background about the inner workings, editorial and political, of The New Yorker over the decades since he first glimpsed those insides, in the 1950s. He reveals, for one thing, that when he became art editor in 1973, the job had first been offered to New Yorker insider Roger Angell (the son of longtime fiction editor Katharine S. White and stepson of E. B. White).

[E]vidently they couldn’t come to terms on the money. The New Yorker was making all kinds of money, but they were very cheap. In fact, when they offered me the job, the lawyer who was supposed to negotiate the contract suggested that whatever I made as a cartoonist be deducted from my salary as an editor!

Richard Gehr offers this observation about Lee's cartooning style:

hese days, Lorenz’s brush strokes provide rich visual contrast to the pen-preferring cartoonists who dominate The New Yorker. Like the abstract expressionists he studied at Carnegie and Pratt, Lee’s lines radiate a lively in-the-moment quality. He often captures characters in motion who just happen to make you laugh out loud. And there’s an improvised aspect to his work that echoes both his own abstract-expressionist paintings and the jazz he began devoting himself to as a teenager.

If you're at all curious about any of these subjects, I can heartily recommend the Gehr interview.


SPEAKING OF PROFESSIONAL FUNNYFOLKS WHO TAKE
ON WEIGHTY LIFE SUBJECTS, HERE'S CHUCK LORRE

If you watch any of the sitcoms that Chuck produces (the current list is Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, and Mike and Molly), you know that at the end of each episode a vanity card is flashed, featuring whatever happens to be on his mind, subject to occasional network censorship. As a DWT reader once pointed out to me, the texts of the vanity cards are also archived online, at www.chucklorre.com.

I really loved the card from last night's new Big Bang Theory episode, and even though the power center he's obsessing over here is "the television business," what he writes seems to me eerily applicable to the broccoli-bullying Supreme Court justices, and predatory bankster elites, and really most everything we write about of a political nature here at DWT. I should warn you that Chuck was clearly not in a sunny frame of mind when he wrote this.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #383

For me, the epiphany came in my second season on Roseanne. At thirty-nine years old I finally woke up to the fact that the principles I was taught as a child, like fairness and justice, have no place in the world of power and money. The rules of the sandbox, strictly enforced by a wise and compassionate adult, are laughable when the sandbox is the television business and there are Mercedes and Bentleys parked alongside it. What's odd is that twenty years later, despite my belated awakening to the reality of amorality, that old schoolyard programming continues to insist on its rightness. Ideas like "play nice," "share your toys," "no name-calling," "take turns" and "misbehaving gets punished" still resonate inside me as if they were some sort of fundamental truths. Of course, I now know that they are not. At best, they're ideals. Lofty goals to aspire to. The truisms of the real world are more along the lines of, "my ball, my bat, my rules" and "money talks, bull$#*! walks." Which brings me to our impending presidential election. A classic showdown between the lessons we all learned as children and, well... reality. Further complicating the situation is our collective, unconscious desire to be supervised by that wise and compassionate adult. But there is no such adult. The truth is, we are alone in the sandbox. The game we play, seemingly forever, is called "Ideals vs. Money and Bats." For what it's worth, I'm betting on the latter, but there's a little boy in me who insists on voting for the former.

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Sure, Charlie Sheen is an easy target, but consider how well he's been rewarded for flaunting his lack of talent

The first of four of his own cartoons that The New Yorker's Bob Mankoff has personally charliesheenified

by Ken

Okay, it may be going too far to declare Charlie Sheen talentless.* Perhaps it would be more judicious to refer to the absence, in any of his work I've seen, of any talent beyond total lack of inhibition about self-exhibition. (If you're inclined to minimize this, think what it must be to be so shameless about exhibiting that particular self.) I confess that I've actually attended to some of his more astonishing remarks in this latest self-induced orgy of public scrutiny, possibly because -- another confession -- I actually watch Two and a Half Men (I sort of developed the habit a few seasons into the run).

FOOTNOTE: *I'm unequipped to account for Charlie's talent, or whatever it is, that seems to make him irresistible to large numbers of women. There may, of course, be talents known only to the parties of the first and second part, or possibly this can be accounted for by a surprisingly large number of women who do it, directly or indirectly, for pay (remember that his TV alter-ego, Charlie Harper, not only is unapologetic about his regular employment of hookers but seems to consider them one of life's most basic necessities), or appreciate Charlie's apparent willingness to spare no expense "to show a girl (and himself, of course) a good time."

Let's come back to that, though. Despite my own morbid curiosity, I doubt that I would have troubled to blog about Charlie except for this batch of self-mashed-up cartoons The New Yorker's Bob Mankoff has just unleashed on us. I've had previous occasion to peek at the blog of the magazine's cartoon editor (who of course is himself a longtime New Yorker cartoonist), but I have to say, I love what he's done this week.

March 3, 2011
CHARLIE SHEEN’S NEW GIG
Posted by Robert Mankoff

There’s a lot to be said for Charlie Sheen. Really. And by God, he’s saying it. But it got my own “tiger blood” up when I found out that the “pure gold” of his quotes were being mashed up with New Yorker cartoons in a way that was too random for my effete sensibility.

So I decided to put my tiger blood to good use. I figured, as Charlie is presently not working anywhere, he might as well appear in a few of my cartoons. And since, given his present state, he might have trouble learning my captions, I thought I’d let him speak in his own voice.

In fact, checking out that first link, I think what Matt Stopera has done at BuzzFeed, tacking Charlie Sheen quotes onto old New Yorker cartoons, is quite wonderful. But there's something special about having the actual cartoon auteur charliesheenify some of his own work, with the following results:


TO FINISH UP ON CHARLIE

In Charlie's story, every time you think, "There must be a limit," you're proved wrong. This week on network TV -- a network other than CBS, notably -- he introduced a stunned world to his "Angels," who are apparently all that remains of the "family" he's been claiming so vehemently to be protecting, now that his twin sons, not yet two years old, have been safely removed from his custody.

There's some sort of grim fascination, a fascination I can't begin to explain, in the worthlessness of Charlie Sheen's Two and a Half Men character Charlie Harper, who manages at the same time to be no more awful than his mooching brother Alan (Jon Cryer). I could fall back on the invariable delight of watching the amazing Holland Taylor (I don't know whether it's her skill as an actress or her ability to home in on scripts that she can dazzle in, but at this point in her career I would watch her do just about anything) as the mother whom both brothers tend to blame for everything, but she doesn't appear in anywhere near enough episodes to furnish much of an alibi. And while Conchata Ferrell is similarly wonderful as Charlie's housekeeper Berta, and is in most every episode, I can't imagine watching the show just for her.

Even as CBS and producer Chuck Lorre appear close to have reached the end of their rope with Charlie -- perhaps even have taken to fantasizing about seeing Charlie at the end of a rope -- it's also true that in his monomaniacal blitherings he's entirely correct when he claims to have made vast quantities of money for other people, including his network and his producer. Of course he's nuts if he thinks he has done or does that causes people to watch him, beyond just "putting it out there"; if it weren't for the people who created and continue to produce and write the show, nobody would watch Charlie. At the same time, without Charlie nobody would watch the show either.

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"Two brudders inherit a midget"--now there's a sitcom premise! Writer-producer Chuck Lorre channels the spirit of the great Sheldon Leonard

from the trailer for the Thin Man sequel
After the Thin Man (1939), as seen on Wikipedia

Well, I took my own advice last night and watched the repeat of the Big Bang Theory episode in which Laurie Metcalf did her transcendent guest-star turn as genius-geek Sheldon's country-Christian mama, summoned by roommate Leonard to bring Sheldon out of his manic meltdown after being fired by the new boss he has tactfully called an "idiot." Whew! It--meaning both the episode and Laurie M--is maybe better than I remembered.

I already realized that, in running down the premise, I had neglected to include a reference I'd planned to the dubious "coincidentality" of the genius roommates' names' obvious evocation of the legendary Sheldon Leoanrd (1907-1997), the tough-guy actor wid da Brooklyn accent (you can see him in the film version of Guys and Dolls) turned TV producer (The Danny Thomas Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, I Spy). Somehow I totally forgot the end card for this very episode of The Big Bang Theory (laboriously reproduced below).

Lorre has been doing these end cards for all the sitcoms he's produced--flashed on-screen for the briefest of moments at the end of the show--going back to the days when hardly anyone could have read them. Even if you had a VCR that enabled you to freeze-frame the end card, it was unlikely that the video quality would be good enough to enable you to read the thing. Of course digital TV and DVRs (not to mention DVDs, for the patient) have changed all that. And as long as I remember to set the DVR to record his shows, I sometimes find the end card more entertaining than the half-hour that preceded it.

Rereading that end card tonight, I realize that of course I read it when the episode was first shown in the fall. And I can't resist sharing it with you, going so far as to scribble it all down in the living room, where the DVR is, and then type the whole damned thing in the bedroom, where the computer is.

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #187
Awright, shut up, siddown and listen. I am da immortal spirit Sheldon Leonard and for da last few years I've been using da body of Chuck Lorre to channel my ideas for new sitcoms. For da record, he's a stinkin' lousy channel and my ideas are much better than what he's puttin' on television. Dis is why I am breaking my anonymity. No matter how specifical I tell da kid what to write, he still manages to cock it up. Dharma and Greg? What da hell was dat? I specifically said "do a show about a queeer guy who loves a straight chick and she loves him back, but they can't, you know, bump uglies." But does Lorre listen? No way Jose. The putz turns it inside out, winds up with hippie chick loves uptight lawyer and then wonders why he can't buy an Emmy. (I did find a writing team to act as a channel for dat pitch, which worked out pretty good, Emmy and cash-wise.) Anyway, back to Lorre. Couple years later while he' sleepin', I whisper to him, "Two brudders inherit a midget." Funny, right? What's Lorre do? You got it. Two and a Half Men. Gimme a break! Anyway, I decide to give the mook one last chance. While he's under da gas at the dentist, I tell him to do a show about four wise guys and a sexy dame what knows da score. So what does the knucklehead do? Scientists and a waitress! It just breaks my heart. But at least the dope managed to slip my nam in dis one. Now if you'll excuse me, I gotta schlep over to Milton Berle's crypt for a little pinochle with the boys.

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Quote of the day: Chuck Lorre bares the painful history of the miraculous, revolutionary invention by that perfidious genius, Schlomo Tivowitz

Jim Parsons, Kaley Cuoco, and Johnny Galecki in The Big Bang Theory

"Thankfully, it isn't my nature to be bitter. But there are times in my life when I feel a little used."
--TV producer-writer Chuck Lorre, in the end card from the premiere episode of his new CBS sitcom, The Big Bang Theory, reliving his brush with the infamous Schlomo T.

As many of you are aware, at the end of each episode of each show that Chuck Lorre [right] produces, buried after the end credits is a card densely packed with musings on some subject or other which readers gradually come to realize are mused by the master himself. Monday night CBS debuted Chuck's latest creation, an inauspicious-looking shebang called The Big Bang Theory, about a pair of to-the-nth-degree-super-nerd roommates who have a Super-Hot Chick move in across the hall in their dilapidated L.A. apartment building, the gimmick being that one of the nerds is conscious of his nerddom and has--obviously comical--aspirations to be, you know, a real boy. Ha ha.

I must have made my first stab at watching the thing as early as late Monday night, but the first five minutes or so was so discouraging that I postponed further investigation. I finally got back to it today, if only to be able to erase the damned thing--the hard drive of my (non-Tivo) DVR has limited storage capacity--and by episode's end felt ever so slightly more hopeful about the show's prospects.

But the real reward was this dramatic end card:

CHUCK LORRE PRODUCTIONS, #182

Back when I was writing and producing Dharma and Greg the only way to read my cards was to record each episode on a VCR and hit the "pause" button. This was not an easy task. The image wobbled like crazy making the tiny words of my weekly tomes very had to see. Then it hit me. What about building a device that records images digitally? Wouldn't this make for a much more precise "pause" function? I took my little notion to an impoverished computer whiz by the name of Schlomo Tivowitz. At the time of our meeting Schlomo was feverishly trying to invent an improved version of the George Foreman Grill. Schlomo's grill would contain a hard drive that remembered all the details of your last barbecue as well as an address book. I didn't really see the point of it, but not being a tech guy, I held my tongue and presented him with my idea. I will never forget his reaction. With hamburger-flecked spittle flying from his blubbery lips, he laughed, called me some very unkind names and demanded that I leave his mother's basement immediately. My hopes dashed, I went back to work on Dharma and forgot about my silly idea. Well, I'm sure you can figure out what happened next. The fact that you're reading this card right now should tell you. Thankfully, it isn't my nature to be bitter. But there are times in my life when I feel a little used -- usually when I've forgotten how to effectively grill a fatty piece of chicken.

(LOW-)TECHNICAL FOOTNOTE

For the benefit of nitpickers who may check and find deviations between the above transcription and the actual end card, a few words: C'mon, gimme a break. Probably Schlomo could invent a better system, but--as longtime readers may recall--my crack TV transciption system consists of a cumbersome process necessitated by the fact that the TV with the DVR is in a different room from the computer. So the process is, approximately:

(1) laboriously hand-scribble a draft transcription, usually on the back of an envelope or newspaper or the like;

(2) locate the particular envelope or newspaper or whatever that happens to contain the desired draft transcription (I can't tell you how often, between steps 1 and 2, it turns out that, for the first time in weeks, I've bundled up and disposed of the accumulation of newspapers, including the one that presumably contained the transcription in question);

(3) at the computer, attempt to decipher the scribbling of the draft transcription (having learned the hard way to eschew shorthand-style abbreviations, even for the most common words, on the ground that the best clue to the identity of a hard-to-decipher word is often the shape of the mystery scribble);

(4) return wearily to the DVR-equipped TV and attempt to plug the gaps in the draft transcription; and finally--

(4) keyboard the fully (or as fully as it's going to get) deciphered version of the draft transcription, taking care to introduce some strategic "errors" (or "typos"), to give the end result a more "human" look.

Probably there are already screen grabs and more efficiently produced transcriptions of CLP card #182 all over the Internet. But ask yourself: Did any of them require this amount of gratuitous and utterly pointless drudgery? I've thought of putting out a "TIPS" jar to allow readers to show their appreciation, but so far the exceedingly low volume of street traffic passing my computer has discouraged me.