I realized that it's been far too long since I had a Mystery Guest from What's My Line?, so let me rectify that here.  Last night, I was watching part of the Best Picture-winner, Grand Hotel, that was on Turner Classic Movies.  Two of the cast members were John Barrymore and Lionel Barrymore.  And therefore the sibling who was missing was Ethel -- and that seemed as good a reason as any to have this particularly clip.

Here is the legendary Ethel Barrymore as the Mystery Guest.  Not your typical guest on a game show.  If you don't want to watch the entire show, she comes in around the 16:30 mark, so you can just jump forward to it.

It's that time again for this month's The Writers Workbench tech review column.  This time around, we look at small, portable speakers.  (One of them especially-small -- the size of your thumb, with quite respectable sound, considering the size.)

I wasn't bowled over by any of them, though one of the larger models from Divoom was pretty good.  And the only reason I downgraded that thumb-sized speaker from X-Mini is because they haven't another, almost-exact same model that includes Bluetooth and therefore can be connected wirelessly.  But the corded-model here is almost half the price of its Bluetooth cousin, so it's worth considering.

As always, because it's convoluted to re-code the article for these pages, I make things much easier on myself by linking to the column on the WGA website.  You can find it here.

I don't have anything particularly wise or insightful to say about the on-air shooting deaths yesterday of two Virginia broadcasters, nor do I know where this is going.  But I know I couldn't let it pass without mention or at least paying homage to reporter Allison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward by name.  So, bear with me, I'm just going to type.

The fact that the shooting was live on-air certainly makes it more ghastly.  But it doesn't make them any more dead.  They'd have been just as dead if the murderer had done it any other time.  Guns work that way.

And yes, clearly, I knew when I started typing that guns would have to get mentioned.  And no, it's not too early to bring it up.  That's what was used to kill them.  You can't not mention it.  And anyone who thinks it shouldn't be mentioned yet usually means that they don't want it mentioned ever.  And when they say, "It isn't the time to discuss gun control," the only proper response is the one that's always the proper response -- "You're right, the time to discuss gun control would have been before this happened.

I'm not sure how many dead people it takes to be counted as a "mass shooting."  It certainly wasn't nearly as many as the church shooting in Charleston, or Columbine, or at Sandy Hook Elementary School, or Virginia Tech, or New Orleans, or pick your mass-shooting, but two people can qualify as a mass.  I was going to include the attack at the movie theater in Nashville, but then I remembered that the man there used a hatchet and pepper spray, not a gun  So it doesn't count.  It also doesn't count because none of the intended victims were, in fact, killed.

It doesn't really matter, of course.  Because it does qualify as yet another ghastly murder. Whether one person or a mass.  Whether high-profile and attention-getting, or alone in a back alley or private home  And at some point, you just hope that the humanity of those who can act to address it will feel pummeled enough to do so.  And yes, the corporate-own NRA terrorist group, determined to frighten those susceptible to being frightened will come up with all manner of cold, heartless, unsupportable flim-flam explanations why their corporate interests should be protected and pour millions of their corporate dollars into supporting their cries of terror and fear-mongering, under the faux-banner of the 2nd Amendment which we ALL know and accept does all for limitations on weaponry.  But enough already.  Again.  Human beings are dying in ghastly, mass numbers unnecessarily -- again and again -- and Our Freedom is not being protected one iota by the corporate efforts of the NRA.  The only thing they're protecting is bloody corporate profits.

Oh, and one last thing.  If it turns out that indeed the killer was fired from his job and he was crazy angry about it -- it seems like they made the right decision.  It's just heart-sickening that it had the end result that it did.

So, I guess that's where my thoughts about this led.

I'm going to dive back to Alfred Drake for a moment.  I've posted a few things from him the last few months, in part because they're good, and in part because they're rare.  As I've mentioned, he was a huge Broadway star -- the lead in such original casts as Oklahoma!, Kismet and Kiss Me, Kate.  But he did very little television and almost fewer movies.  (I think the only film I saw him in was a tiny role in Trading Places as an official of the Stock Exchange.)

One thing he did on television was re-creating his starring role in an edited down production Kiss Me, Kate, of which I've posted a few clips.  And he was in another TV musical, this one made for television, never done on stage.  It was the show, The Adventures of Marco Polo, which aired on NBC April 14, 1956.  It had music by Clay Warnick and Mel Pahl based on themes of Rimskey-Korsakov.  I suspect that the impetus for this production came directly from the success of Kismet, which was a similar style show that used the themes of another Russian composer, Alexander Borodin (indeed a contemporary of Rimsky-Korsakov) for the musical score.  Moreover, this TV production reunited Alfred Drake with his Kismet co-star, Doretta Morrow.  (For those keeping track of such things, she had also been in the original cast of The King and I, playing the supporting role of Tuptim, who sings the wonderful, "I Have Dreamed" and "We Kiss in the Shadow.") 

The lyrics for Marco Polo were by Edgar Eager.  But perhaps the most intriguing production credit is that the book was written by William Friedberg and a fellow starting out named Neil Simon.  (The Adventures of Marco Polo was produced and directed by Max Liebman, the man behind Your Show of Shows on which Simon got his big break.)

Here's the finale from that little-known, almost unknown show.

Curt Schilling was a very successful, gritty major league baseball pitcher, who now is a popular commentator for ESPN.  

I always knew that he was right-wing conservative.  So be it, to each their own politics.  And further, I was always impressed that when his software company went belly-up a few years ago, he went out of his way to make good on all his financial commitments, which were extensive.  And I thought he’s handled his cancer admirably, which seems to be in remission.

Now though, thanks to a recent Tweet that has surfaced, it turns out he’s much more than right-wing conservative, but a far right wingnut.  The Tweet in question, which has since been deleted, compared Muslims to Nazis but, far worse, Media Matters just did a story about a whole slew of his egregious Facebook postings that have gone so far over the line that ESPN has removed him from its current Little League coverage.  As Media Matters notes -- and embeds his Facebook posts -- “Schilling has repeatedly demonized Muslims as killers, shared a picture calling Hillary Clinton a drunk murderer, and suggested civil rights leaders like Rep. John Lewis aren't patriotic.”  He's also made posts in support of the Confederate flag as honoring God in a Christian fight for liberty, had posts demeaning of women, and made comparisons of gun control to 9/11. There’s a lot more.  You can read the piece and see many of the posts here. 

But just for starters, here are three.

By the way, putting aside for the moment, the hate-filled, misogenystic, nasty sensibility of it all -- and yes, I know that that's a LOT to put aside, even for just the briefest moment, it's impossible to read all that and see (not surprisingly) how ignorantly inaccurate it.

To begin with, that isn't even, as described, the Confederate Battle Flag -- it was the Flag of the Army of Northern Virginia.  And as for all the faux-religious interpretation of the flag, consider what the  chairman of the "Committee on the Flag and Seal" that actually designed it, William Porcher Miles (aide to General Beauregard) wrote specifically about how they went out of their way to not make the flag religious, including  "'it avoided the religious objection about the cross (from the Jews and many Protestant sects), because it did not stand out so conspicuously as if the cross had been placed upright thus.' He also argued that the diagonal cross was 'more Heraldric [sic] than Ecclesiastical, it being the 'saltire' of Heraldry, and significant of strength and progress.'”

And not only, of course, did Hillary Clinton not murder anyone, but she wasn't even fired for any reasons, let alone for ethics violations.  The charge comes from a superior on the Watergate Investigation Committee for which she served, but as has been repeatedly debunked, he was on a completely different committee and wouldn't even have had authority to fire her -- which he didn't, and which she wasn't.

And of course it's sort of pathetic to have to explain that the Nazi Party was not a band of outside extremists and did not merely inflict the 6 million deaths of the Holocaust and cause all the worldwide devastation of WWII, including 24 million Russian deaths simply because it was just 7-10% of Germans, but it was the actual ruling party of the nation.

And of course, too, there's really no need to explain any details why each of these fevered rants is factually wrong.  Facts have little to do with the rants.  Anger, hatred, mean-spiritedness and ignorance are what they are about.  

But pointing them out at least make me feel better.  Because sometimes there are people reading them who aren't lost and crazed and falling off the deep end, but just don't know and think, "Well, that's sort of an interesting point."  No, it's not.  It's hate-filled, racist, misogynistic and sad.  And so, you explain reality.

ESPN has a problem.  It's one thing for a person to have their right of free speech.  And Curt Schilling does, the government is not about to arrest him for anything he's said -- and that's the point of the First Amendment, the government.  It's another thing, though, for a business to have someone as its face and one of the representative voices of the organization whose own words are so grossly anathema to it.  At the moment, ESPN's public comment is -- "Curt's tweet was completely unacceptable, and in no way represents our company’s perspective. We made that point very strongly to Curt and have removed him from his current Little League assignment pending further consideration."

Curt Schilling has every right to believe and say whatever he wants, no matter how pathetic.  And ESPN, like any business, has every right to say that they don't want small-minded spitefulness representing them as part of their brand.

We'll see what that further consideration leads to.

But one possibility is what my friend, journalist Patrick Goldstein wrote to me:  "Somehow I don't think ESPN taking him off their Little League coverage is enough punishment. I would prefer to see him sentenced to working 50 broadcasts with Chris Berman and Tony Kornheiser."