Sorry to hear that Billy Joel is having medical issues and has had to cancel all future live appearances. I've always liked his music and also what I've seen of him when he was just talking, not performing. He's widely loved and I'm sure not the only person hoping he has a full recovery, safe and soon.

I don't know if I have a favorite Billy Joel song but in the Top Ten, I'd surely place "For the Longest Time," which he first recorded back in 1983. Here's the official music video he made of it…

It's Father's Day so I've decided to rerun this column which will tell you what kind of father I had. As you'll see, I was very, very fortunate in that department…

I've been posting stories here for some months now about my mother. It's Father's Day so I've decided to write about my father.

My father, as I've mentioned here many times, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. It was a lousy job he took on a "just for now" basis while he looked for something better to do…and he wound up staying with the I.R.S. until he retired. He simply did not have any particular skill that would have allowed him to pursue any of his fantasies: Opera singer, baseball player, newspaper reporter or comedy writer. He was about as proud as a human being could be that I wound up realizing one of his dreams.

And he'd never pushed me in that direction, not one bit. Matter of fact, he tried several times to warn me away from the profession for two reasons. One was that the one time he'd made a serious attempt at it, things had not gone well. This was back in Hartford in the early forties, not long after the military had rejected him for most of the same reasons he never became a baseball player. He had a friend who had an "in" to someone at a local radio station. My father and the friend wrote up several pages of comedy material, took it to the guy at the radio station…and received a devastating turndown. It was so insensitive and heartbreaking, he said, that he never tried again. Many a time, he cautioned me how writing could break your heart.

So that was one reason he was wary of me doing what I've now been doing for 44 years. Another was that as a Revenue Officer, every professional writer he ever met was in deep financial trouble. This included some "name" authors and prolific screenwriters you'd think would have had a buck or two. That they rarely did made him worry when I went that route. It was important to him that I do something I loved but being a Depression-era kid, it was also important to him that I be able to make a real living at it.

He had a little trouble with the way I was paid in my profession: Nothing for weeks and then a big check, then nothing or a month or three. It didn't bother me but it bothered him. After I moved out of the family home and into my own apartment, he'd come by to visit me once or twice a week — he was joyously retired from the I.R.S. by then — and he'd say, trying to be casual about it, "So…any checks lately?" That was his way of saying, "Please…reassure me you're doing okay." That was especially important any week in which my name didn't appear onscreen on a TV show.

He died when I was 39 and right to the end, he was a world-class worrier. He worried about the oddest, most unlikely things — and never about himself; only about other people. If I was due at the house around 5 PM, he'd start worrying at 5:02 that maybe I'd been in a terrible auto accident. Once, I walked in at 5 on the dot and he said, "Oh, thank God. I was worried you'd had an accident or something." I pointed out that I was right on time. He said, "I know. But I had the feeling you were going to be early."

Usually, people like that tend to shout a lot and lose their tempers. Not my father. He almost never got at mad at me or anyone. He just plain didn't see the point of it. When I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Rick. When I went over to Rick's house for the day, I would literally hear Rick's father yell at him more than I heard my own father yell at me in those 39 years. I could probably list every time he raised his voice at me during those 39 years in about three Twitter messages.

I'll tell you one story right now. At what was for him enormous expense, my father arranged for me to get braces when I was thirteen. The orthodontist was a colorful man named Dr. Nathan M. Seltzer who was based in Beverly Hills and who did a lot of work on kids who went into show business. You've seen many a Dr. Seltzer smile on TV and movie stars who are roughly my age. At one point, I was supposed to wear this ghastly retainer at night — a terrible contraption that Josef Mengele would have condemned as cruel and unusual punishment. If Dick Cheney had known of these, he would have done away with Waterboarding and threatened prisoners with Dr. Seltzer Night Retainers. And believe me, those guys wouldn't have just talked. They'd have yodeled.

One morning, I awoke with bleeding gums. My mother and I phoned Dr. Seltzer and he said, "Stop wearing it until your appointment next week and I'll adjust it." So I didn't wear it the next night. Somehow, we neglected to tell my father about this.

The next morning, he casually asked me if wearing the retainer had interfered with my sleep last night. I told him I hadn't worn it — and before I could tell him why, he exploded. He was paying a lot of money for that orthodonture and I damn well was going to wear it. I don't think I ever saw him as furious as he was at that moment and it was a long time before I could get a word in, not even edgewise but between his sentences, to tell him about what Doc Seltzer had said. When I did, he said he didn't believe me. He was even angrier at me for concocting such a feeble lie. Then he stormed out of the house to go pick up my mother at the market. Shortly after that, Rick arrived.

Thirty minutes later, Rick and I were playing croquet in the backyard when my father came out of the house in tears, hugged me and apologized about eighty times. My mother had told him what Dr. Seltzer had said. I was crying, too…and I remember thinking it was embarrassing that Rick was seeing my father and me crying. But as my father headed back into the house and I turned towards Rick, I saw that he was crying more than either of us. I asked him why. He said, "My father isn't always right but he would kill himself before he'd apologize to me for anything."

I'd seen Rick's father in action and he was right. It was one of those moments when I realized how very special my father was.

Another came a few years later. It was my father's unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that's not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.

Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he'd walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.

My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He'd be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he'd be real lucky if his boss didn't call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn't afford to feed.

The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it. She had six kids who were all running around her little dilapidated home barefoot.

My father had a thing about "barefoot." No matter who the person was, if they didn't have shoes on and weren't on the beach or en route to a swimming pool, he felt sorry for them. It was from his upbringing, I guess, that he associated shoelessness with stark, life-threatening poverty. After I was six or seven years old, I was discouraged from it.

We used to get a lot of these mailings that asked us to "adopt" an orphaned child in some third world country — one of those deals where you send the kid five bucks and he can somehow eat for nine months. They would include what looked like trading cards of these impoverished children and ask you to select one or two and send money for them. My father would always send money for any child who was barefoot. If a kid had shoes on or if the photo didn't show his or her feet, no bucks…but he was very generous with the others.

He asked the woman in Venice why the kids who were old enough to be in school weren't there. She had a chilling answer: "The school won't let them attend without shoes and I can't afford to buy shoes for them." This was the person my father had been ordered to get thousands of dollars out of.

For days after his first meeting with the woman, my father was haunted by the image of those kids scurrying about sans footwear, unable to go to school and better themselves. Finally, one night about 3 AM, he woke my mother up and said, "I need to do something I probably shouldn't do but I have to do it." My mother knew what he was thinking and she said, "Do what you have to do," kissed him and rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next day, my father went to a Stride-Rite shoe store in Santa Monica and made arrangements with the manager. The woman would bring in the six kids and he would pay for one pair of shoes for each. Children's shoes cost a lot of money and working for the I.R.S. didn't pay well so it was a big, significant expenditure…but he had to do it. I think that year we didn't go on summer vacation because of it but I sure didn't mind. I did ask if I could somehow get the free March of Comics comic books that Stride-Rite gave out when you purchased shoes at their stores.

He also went to bat for the woman with his superiors, finally getting them to settle her case for considerably less than the full amount. She was so grateful for that and for the shoes, she found out who my father's boss was and wrote him a letter, praising Bernie Evanier for his kindness. She meant well by it but my father was scolded. People were supposed to be afraid of an I.R.S. man, he was reminded. They were not supposed to think he'd tear up most of their bill and buy their kids shoes. Not unless they were a pal of Nixon's, at least.

He was still glad he'd done it. He did things like that all his life, often anonymously. I think I need to write more about my father here…and not so much for your benefit as for mine.

Yesterday as I'm sure you know, the top Democrat in the Minnesota House, Melissa Hortman, and her husband were shot dead in what's being described as a "politically motivated assassination" and Democratic State Senator John Hoffman and his wife were shot by, they're saying, the same person. This is a dreadful thing which ought to horrify even human beings who oppose Democrats. Ordinarily, we don't bother with fact-checks of posts on "X" but there was an instant flurry of them trying to pin this on Governor Tim Walz and Politifact is telling us why that's insane.

The New York Times — which doesn't do fact-checks as often as The New York Times should — goes through some of the nonsense the guy in the White House is spewing about the protests in Los Angeles.

And Senator Tim Scott (R-South Carolina) has been accusing the Congressional Budget Office of being wrong all the time and he cites bad predictions they made in the 1930s and the 1960s. Steve Benen points out how wrong Scott is when he cites what he claims are correct numbers. He also notes that the Congressional Budget Office can't have been wrong with projections in the thirties and sixties since it was founded in 1974. The Washington Post has more on this amazing feat of time travel.

Well, a lotta folks online seem to be very happy that (a) the "No Kings" protests yesterday were wildly successful and (b) that Donald Trump's military parade and birthday celebration was not.  We're just starting to see the revisionism that these two things were not as they appeared but that's just denial of reality.  It's just like when any Trump staffer is asked "Why did this endeavor of yours fail?", the only answer they're allowed to give is "It didn't fail."  But we (and they) know what really happened.

My buddy Gary Sassaman is back with another video about comics he loved as a kid. This one is about his favorite Superman artists and I'm linking you to it even though Gary and I differ on a few folks in that category. I first knew Superman as…well, I first knew him as George Reeves and then I knew him as a cartoon character in those Fleischer/Paramount cartoons. But my first Superman in comics was the one drawn by Wayne Boring and I still associate him and his style with most of my favorite Superman stories of the fifties and sixties.

Don't get me wrong: I love Curt Swan and have on one of my walls, a big still-in-pencil drawing he did for me of Superman flying over the Daily Planet building as Lois waves to him. But I felt Swan did the best Superman on covers and pin-up style drawings and Boring did the best Superman dramas. Your mileage, depending a lot on when you started reading those comics, is likely to vary.

(Actually: I think Mr. Swan was one of those artists who was probably better than we knew.  I think his work was seriously reduced by most of those who inked his penciled artwork and it was further harmed by editors urging him to try to be "more dynamic" with his page layouts.  This is a conclusion I reached after a devoted Swan collector showed me a number of never-inked Swan pages — stats and originals — dating back to the sixties and seeing how much better his compositions were when he didn't try squeezing them into oddly-shaped panels and stuck with squares.  Just my opinion.)

Also, one of my favorite Superman artists of the later period — unmentioned by Gary in this video — was Ross Andru. I didn't always love the stories he drew but that wasn't his fault. He drew what was for me the Superman of that period who most looked like he could lift up a car or break through a brick wall. But Gary and I agree on some others, especially Kurt Schaffenberger. Did I ever tell you that when my mother was going to high school in Hartford, Connecticut, her best friend was dating a kid who went to a nearby school…a kid who wanted to grow up to draw comic books and, according to my mother, drew Superman on everyone's book covers? And yes, that was Kurt Schaffenberger who did indeed grow up to draw comic books…and very well.

Anyway, here's what Gary has to say on the subject…

Wow! Millions of people are turning out for "No Kings" protest rallies all across the nation. This must be costing those unknown parties who hire all these paid protestors a fortune!

My foot is forbidding me to go out and join the mass protests today but I can put up a banner on my blog and leave it up all weekend. This may fall into the category of The Least I Could Do but it's something. I can also express my open-mouthed astonishment that we even have to do this; that there are people in this country who don't see what this man is doing to this country.

Jim Henson died on May 16, 1990 and a lot of people cried…including a lot of people who never got to actually meet this extraordinary man but felt like they had. I did once — I'm sure I've told that story before on this blog — and he was just as nice and smart a person as you would have thought from his many television appearances.

A few months after we lost him, all of his associates pooled their talents to create a special called The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson. It aired on CBS on November 21, 1990 and I thought they did a great job…and one that couldn't have been easy, especially for those closest to the man. Here's the whole special. It's difficult to watch the last ten minutes with dry eyes…

I used to occasionally do a post on this blog where I'd identify a "Person I'm Glad I'm Not Today" or words to that effect. Then I'd name someone who was in a whole lot of trouble with no chance of belief in sight. Well, for the record, a person I'm glad I have never been and never will be because he has nothing but misery and financial ruin ahead is Mike Lindell.

Study this man. He's showing you every single thing not to do when you're being sued for defamation including being unable to even pronounce to word "defamation." I'm also glad I'm not one of his lawyers.

Here's someone who's not Glenn Kessler at the Washington Post fact-checking a lot of the things Trump and his mob have been claiming about California. I'll quote this one paragraph…

In California, violent crime is down, and the unemployment rate is close to the national average. The state recently overtook Japan as the world’s fourth-largest economy. It has the highest number of immigrants — both legal, most of them citizens, and undocumented. But in recent years, the state has lost hundreds of thousands of undocumented immigrants to their homelands or to more-affordable states. Unauthorized immigrants in California remain well below the peak of nearly 3 million more than a decade ago for reasons that often have little to do with enforcement — or Trump.

.

Fact-Check.org debunks the claim that protestors are paid and notes that Trump is now citing murder statistics he used to insist were "Fake News." Also, there's a graphic making the rounds of the Internet that fibs about what's in the so-called "Big, Beautiful Bill."

You can also find an awful lot of videos on YouTube where Congressfolks are arguing with members of the Trump team over what's in the bill…and the Trumpers' responses are pretty unconvincing. It's like even they don't believe what they've been told to say. This has become the norm since Trump was sworn in by placing his hand on that book he's never opened except to autograph copies for sale.

Hey, could someone who knows how to correct Wikipedia make a fix on this page about the San Diego Comic Convention? People keep writing to me to point out that it says that in 1992, there was a celebration of Jack Kirby's 75th birthday and that Phil Foglio was the host. That wasn't Phil Foglio. That was me. [UPDATE: Thanks to whoever fixed it.]

Some folks affiliated with the Peacock Network were producing these "Everything You Need to Know About Saturday Night Live" videos which take a look at each season and the backstage details — who hosted, who was fired, how the show changed, etc. They mysteriously stopped with Season 20 back in January of this year but now here's Season 21, which I remember as a season I don't much remember because my interest in the show hit a new low. Maybe you were a steady viewer this year but I wasn't…

Michael Grabowski wrote to ask me this question about Mae Questel, who did loads of cartoon voices in her day…and commercials such as for the product she's clutching in a photo below. She voiced a lot of popular characters but the two biggies would be Betty Boop and Olive Oyl. In fact, she even voiced Popeye in one short…

All your talk about Boop! lately got me wondering if you ever had the chance to direct, work with, or otherwise encounter Mae Questel. Tangentially related, can you say anything about what it's like to get voice actors to sing in character when there are musical bits? I'm thinking of the typical voice actor, such as Ms. Questel, Mel Blanc, or Dan Castellaneta, rather than professional singers hired just for the musical parts.

Nope. Never met or had any contact with Ms. Questel. When I was voice-directing and casting the Garfield and Friends cartoon show, I indulged my inner child — who usually is not that "inner" — and hired a lot of veteran voiceover specialists including Shep Menkin, Marvin Kaplan, Dick Beals, Dick Tufeld, Bill Woodson, Stan Freberg, Julie Bennett, Don Messick, Larry Storch and others. Our producer Lee Mendelson was nice enough to pick up the considerably-added expense of me going to New York to record a couple of cartoons with New York based talent including Arnold Stang and Eddie Lawrence and I tried to book Mae Questel but she was unavailable — for what reason I do not know.

Since she was based in N.Y., I didn't have much opportunity to cross paths with her. When Hanna-Barbera out here did a new Popeye show in 1978, I did get to briefly meet Jack Mercer, who voiced the sailor-man for many decades. He flew in from the East Coast several times to record shows and I think he also did some from New York. I didn't get to meet Mae Questel who reportedly auditioned to play Olive but didn't get the job. The rumor in the H-B halls was that the studio didn't want to pay the cost of dealing with (and sometimes, flying in) more than one actor who lived that far away.

Even then, Ms. Questel was pretty busy for most of her long career. She was really good at what she did, which was acting on-camera and off.

As for having voice actors sing…it's just like anything else we might ask them to do. Some of them do it real well, some don't. When a voice actor isn't an A+ singer, studios often bring in someone to be the singing voice of, for example, Yogi Bear in Hey There, It's Yogi Bear…and I always think that's a mistake. I've never had any trouble getting an acceptable singing performance out of any voice actor. Even if the voice actor isn't the greatest singer, he or she can always at least sound like the character and that's what matters.

It's been a while since I posted a video from the "Legal Eagle" but here he is, discussing the case against Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, the Maryland immigrant who was deported to El Salvador last March and has now been brought back to the U.S. to have the trial he should have before his deportation.  Devin Stone has an awful lot to say about this matter which may now seem like Old News because so much has happened since March — but it's still pretty important…

In my piece about the ABC's Wide World of Entertainment program, I meant to mention the two times they aired Monty Python material and wound up in court because of it. This Wikipedia page explains the matter in rather simple terms but to make it even simpler: ABC got hold of the last six episodes of Monty Python's Flying Circus, edited them badly, broadcast them and then lost a lawsuit. If you went to delve deeper into the matter and can understand lawspeak, here's the history of the case as written up for a law journal.

There were other interesting shows on ABC's Wide World of Entertainment. I remember one in which Dick Van Dyke visited the estate of Harold Lloyd and introduced a lot of clips from that great comedian's work. I remember one that was kind of a Battle of the Network Stars with two or more teams of quasi-celebrities competing in a treasure hunt contest. There was a special covering the premiere of the movie, Tommy. And there was this salute to Walt Disney hosted by Julie Andrews with contributions by Dean Jones, Fred MacMurray, Buddy Ebsen, Annette Funicello and others…

There was also this wonky TV adaptation of the short-lived-on-Broadway play, It's a Bird, It's a Plane, It's Superman…

ABC News was then trying a series of programs they called At Ease which covered the lighter side of covering the news. ABC's Wide World of Entertainment featured at least one of them…

There was a roast of Howard Cosell with Merlin Olsen, Muhammad Ali, Bill Russell, Alex Karras, Don Adams, Redd Foxx, Ted Knight, Steve Allen, Slappy White, Don Meredith and (of course) Don Rickles among the roasters, with David Steinberg as Roast Host…

There was Vincent Price hosting The Horror Hall of Fame with, among others, John Carradine, John Astin and others. Forrest Ackerman is mentioned and also listed as a technical advisor…

And there were other shows on ABC's Late Night array of just about everything but those are all I could find on YouTube…more than enough for now. If you see any more of these posted in full online, lemme know,