For the first time since July 1, I'm taking a day or two off from blogging to attend to matters that need my attention. When I do this, I post an image of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup — an ancient Internet tradition that dates back to the year 1507 and the books produced by the celebrated printer Johann Grüninger, most notably the woodcuts by which he attempted to facilitate the identification of pious readers with the holy figures.

In them, he depicted a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup and if it's good enough for Grüninger, it's good enough for me. If you look real hard, you may be able to find something on the Internet to read. I shall return soon.

It's very hot lately here in Los Angeles. Actually, it's very hot in a lot of places and I know this because around half the people I know — and I know a lot of people — feel the need to call or write me and tell me how hot is it and how miserable they are. A lot of them act like they believe I can do something about it.

Actually, I can…a little. I told you all where to buy an inexpensive, portable fan that you can place anywhere and recharge like any battery-powered USB device. They seem to be out of the green ones with the light on them but they have the blue ones in stock.

I also have found that the heat is more endurable if you don't keep talking about it and complaining about it. At least, I can. Do what you can with fans, adjusting windows, showering, drinking lots of water…all the usual things. But talking endlessly about the temperature will not make it go down one degree, Celsius or Fahrenheit. For your own good, give it a try.

This is kind of a gang "thank you" to about a dozen of you who catch typos on this site and write to tell me. Often, I wake up in the morning and find five or six e-mails from folks who've spotted someplace where my typing fingers went clumsy on me and I correct what needs correction. Once in a while, I make a new mistake while correcting an old one…and you catch that, too.

I'd thank you all by name but a few of you sign with handles or initials so I don't know your names. I just want you to know I appreciate what you do.

And no, I don't know what I'm doing up at this hour either.

I used to love buffets, not because of the volume but because when you have as many food allergies as I do, it's wonderful to be able to examine food before you commit to eating it. I can't tell you how many times I've ordered something in a restaurant and when it comes, it has some component that wasn't divulged on the menu and wasn't mentioned when I asked the server "What's in it?" And before me, I have something I dare not put in my mouth.

A buffet lets me see that the fried shrimp has coconut on it or the dumplings come slathered in guacamole so I can make another selection. It's just a safer way to eat. But since I had my Gastric Bypass, it's not a cost-effective way to eat. On a couple visits to Vegas since then, I paid $25.00 to dine at a buffet and consumed about eight bucks worth of food. They're not priced for folks like me with micro-stomachs.

The only buffet you'll find me at now is the breakfast buffet at the hotel I stay in during Comic-Con. It's the only convenient place to eat before I begin my always-busy days of presiding over panels…and besides, someone else is usually paying. I don't recall what it costs and I see there's no price stated on the hotel's website. I have a hunch that's so they can adjust the price based on what they know of the kind of folks attending whatever convention is in town. I think this year it was about $40 plus tip. If i'd ordered everything on my plate at a Denny's, it probably would have been around ten dollars.

One year, well before the convention was held where it's now held, the hotel had an awful breakfast buffet, It cost what was then a fairly high price and I had trouble getting enough to eat. This was pre-Bypass but I still didn't want much.

It was the kind of buffet where they gave you a menu and you have the server bring you as much as you want of whatever you want — though this one had a limit on bacon, sausage and what they called breakfast steaks and what anyone else would call the kind of patty you get in the cheapest McDonald's burger. The first thing they brought me though was an unasked-for Bloody Mary.

I don't drink and I told the server I didn't order it. He said, in the kind of tone that suggested he was real used to saying this, "It's a required item." He then pointed to teensy-tiny type on the menu that said adults had to pay six dollars, above and beyond the stated price for the buffet, for a Bloody Mary.

It also said diners under 18 would be served tomato juice for the same price. I asked if I could have the tomato juice and he said I could but it would be an extra charge on top of what I was paying for the buffet and the non-returnable Bloody Mary I wasn't going to drink. I passed on that and ordered some scrambled eggs…

…and when they came, they were covered in what they called "Spanish Sauce." I told a different server I didn't ask for and didn't want Spanish Sauce. He shrugged and said — again probably for the eight-zillionth time — "That's how our chef makes scrambled eggs." Again, eggs without the sauce would be an additional charge.

I said, "I thought this was all-you-can-eat." He replied, "It is but I can't bring you more eggs until you've eaten those."

At some point, the manager tagged in for the server and we had a debate about whether "all you can eat" implies some obligation on their part to serve me something I can actually eat. It took a bit of arguing but he finally gave in and I got eggs with no Spanish Sauce, toast with nothing forbidding on it and the maximum allotment of bacon, which I believe was four see-through strips. The following year, I stayed at a different hotel where you could see and select what you wanted to eat from its buffet.

So now, for reasons stated, I rarely go to buffets. If I had a normal sized tummy, I might be tempted to sometime visit the Shady Maple Smorgasbord in East Earl, Pennsylvania. That's about 60 miles from Philadelphia but a great many people make the drive to experience what Wikipedia calls "the largest smorgasbord in the United States, featuring 200 feet of authentic Pennsylvania Dutch cooking."

It's surprisingly cheap and the subject of a vast number of YouTube videos of which the following is but one. A writer I know once decided he had to get away from his home for a few weeks to finish a novel for which his publisher was waiting. He took himself and his laptop to a hotel not far from the Shady Maple and happily dined there twice a day for a few weeks. He timed his AM visit so they still had all the breakfast food available but were starting to bring out the lunch items.

Working in that hotel still sounds like a good idea. He was isolated in an area with nothing to do but sleep, eat and write, and he said the food was outstanding. He, like me, had some food allergies so he liked seeing the chow before he decided what to ingest. Which is the way every buffet ought to be. They needn't be as huge as the Shady Maple…

The finale of the musical Annie as performed in Korea! And doesn't the man in the wheelchair look just like F.D.R.?

It is with mixed feelings that I've decided to track a little of what happens with the National Tour of Boop! The Musical. The feelings are mixed because it's a non-Equity tour and you'd like to see the producers able to draw from the talent pool that doesn't work non-Equity and you'd like to see the performers on that stage have the protections and the remuneration of an Equity tour.

But let's see how this goes.

The National Tour starts tomorrow night at the West Herr Theater in Rochester, New York. Dick Halsey, a follower of this site, has tickets to be in the sixth row and he's going to let us know what he thinks of it. He also let me know that there's this promotional magazine online with info on the show and some video clips.

Boop! will be in Rochester until October 10 and then it's on to Schenectady and from there, the rest of America. It's still set to hit Los Angeles next June so I have plenty of time to decide if I want to patronize it. I probably do.

Before he passed away last year, Tom Lehrer released all his witty songs into the public domain and told the world, "Help yourself!" That has resulted in a lot of folks putting together revues of his work. There's a group in New York doing "A Tom Lehrer Cabaret" every so often at local clubs and there are others around the country. One assumes Mr. Lehrer would be pleased.

Years ago though, when I assume he got money for it, there was a show called Tomfoolery which played here and there with various casts. It was in that "four or five performers" category of musicals like Forever Plaid, The Marvelous Wonderettes, Jacques Brel is Alive and Well and Living in Paris, Forbidden Broadway and many others. Here from 1981 is the South African cast of Tomfoolery.  I wonder how Lehrer felt about his songs being performed in South Africa.

On the Dana Gould Hour podcast, I told the story of how I discovered, long after we'd begun dating, that my girl friend was related to one of my favorite performers, Spike Jones. Here's Spike and his orchestra in the movie, Thank Your Lucky Stars.

When I worked at Hanna-Barbera in the late seventies, I enjoyed talking with a film editor there named Earl Bennett, who had once been a featured musician in Spike's band under the name "Sir Frederick Gas." One thing he talked about was how, when they did a scene like this in a movie, the audio was all pre-recorded and they had to mime playing to it. This was not an easy thing for some musicians to do but it worked because Spike had such precise timing, Watch…

I dunno how many readers of this blog will be interested in this but I figure there must be at least one…

Between 1934 and 1959, The Three Stooges made 190 short comedies for Columbia Pictures. Those were years when short comedies slowly went out of fashion in movie theaters. Laurel and Hardy, for example, stopped making them and switched over to features only in 1935 and the last short Our Gang comedy was in 1944. The Stooges kept at it by not increasing what was spent to make them. That meant they had to make them faster and cheaper each year.

One way the producers accomplished this was to reuse footage from earlier Stooges films. A lot of their shorts were simply a matter of taking an earlier film, shooting some new scenes to edit into it and giving it a new title. When I visited Larry Fine in his last years of life, I asked him a lot about this practice. He said it was made possible because "Columbia never threw anything away." They still had the old sets and the old costumes. Once in a while, they could even bring back a supporting actor from an old short to be in scenes for the new version.

In 1947, Curly Howard was replaced by his brother Shemp in the act. That made it difficult to pull footage from earlier films but it was sometimes done. Eventually, they made films with Shemp that pulled footage from earlier shorts with Shemp. For instance, Flagpole Jitters (1956) contains footage from Hokus Pokus (1949). Larry said that some of these shorts built around older films were, in effect, made in one day. That's all the time it took to film the new scenes.

If you have the slightest interest in comparing an original film with its later partial remake, I'll make it easy for you. Here's Malice in the Palace, which Larry, Moe and Shemp made in 1949…

Then in 1956, they remade it as Rumpus in the Harem.,,but there was a bit of a problem. Shemp Howard died in late 1955. When he died, the Stooges had four more films to make on their current contract. This was one of them and you'll see plenty of Shemp in the old footage. In the new footage, an actor named Joe Palma — now better known as "Fake Shemp" — stood in for him, hiding his face as much as possible.

I must admit that as a kid watching these films on TV, I didn't notice the substitutions. I recognized the reuse of old footage but didn't notice that Shemp wasn't Shemp in some scenes…

After they made the four films with Joe Palma impersonating Shemp, Columbia assessed the marketplace and decided there were still some dimes to be made with Stooge shorts. They signed Joe Besser to be the third third Stooge and made sixteen more films. Some of them reused footage from earlier shorts and if you look closely, you can get quick glimpses of Curly or Shemp in a few long shots.

The last Stooges short released — not the last one made — was Sappy Bullfighters (1959), a remake of What's the Matador? (1942). If you sit up real close to the set or monitor and turn up the volume, you can see and hear a teensy bit of Curly in it.

Seth Meyers has fun with yesterday's senate hearing…

By now, I'm sure you all know about the mess yesterday when Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, during a Senate judiciary hearing, accused former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury. Smith said he hadn't been in Atlanta on February 3, 2024 and it turned out he wasn't. Smith was in Maryland that day.

I just wanted to say here that the accusation — which Senator Schmitt still seems to be standing by — is emblematic of all the bullshit that Trump defenders have been offering up. And it has me again using this line that I use so much about people who think that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. Hey, did you know that the American economy has never been better and we've now won the Iran War like two dozen times?

And I should note here that badges for the 2027 WonderCon Anaheim are now on sale. This is kind of the junior version of Comic-Con in San Diego, run by the same folks at or around the end of March each year. If you can't score admission to Comic-Con or are just afraid of the crowds, costs and its overwhelming nature, WonderCon might be more to your liking.

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is appearing before a Senate committee and Republican members trying to put him on trial for special prosecuting you-know-who. Here's Senator Cory Booker saying that which should be said…

Here's Dora's World, a half-hour TV special from 1974. It stars Dora Hall and — in a bevy of cameos — Dave Barry, Harry Hickox, Milton Frome, Pete Barbutti, Stubby Kaye, Sid Melton, Sammy Shore, Nick Navarro, Scatman Crothers, Roy Stuart, Pat Priest, Ronald Del Barrio and Aaron Ross. If you're anywhere near my age bracket, you know who eight or nine of those people were.

But if you don't know who Dora Hall was…well, you should. I could write a long post here telling you but I'll save time and quote from a 2001 post from the popular blog, newsfromme.com…

Dora Hall was a sweet little woman who, in her seventies, starred in a flurry of syndicated TV specials in the early seventies, surrounded by guest stars.  Since I'd never heard of her, I assumed she was a British star whose fame had not previously reached this continent and that these specials were being made for, primarily, overseas consumption.  And it turned out I was wrong.  Ms. Hall was not a star in England or anywhere.  She'd had a very minor performing career in this country and had devoted most of her life to being a good wife to a man named Leo Hulseman.  Now, Mr. Hulseman, as it turned out was the President of the Solo Cup Company, maker of plastic and paper cups, and he had so much money that he figured he could buy his spouse a couple of variety shows.

And he did.  At a reported cost of $400,000 per show, Mr. Hulseman made his dear wife a TV star.  He had previously made her a recording artist.  Hundreds of thousands of Dora Hall albums and singles were recorded and given away when one purchased Solo Cups.  Now, he surrounded her with mid-range guest stars (Rich Little, Roosevelt Grier, etc.) and allowed her to be a TV star.

So here's one of those specials she starred in because her husband loved her. There have been worse reasons to be on television…

You may have seen this before but I hadn't. It's a video that takes footage from It's A Wonderful Life, Dirty Dancing, Don't Knock The Rock, Gold Diggers Of 1935, Good News, Dames, Babes On Broadway, Panama Hattie, Follow The Fleet, Bye Bye Birdie, Lady Of Burlesque, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Show Boat, I Love Melvin, Meet Me After The Show, Down To Earth, Viva Las Vegas, A Date With Judy, Footloose, Moon Over Miami, Hello Dolly, The Gold Rush, Flower Drum Song, Mary Poppins, West Side Story, The Kid From Brooklyn, Les Girls, Easter Parade, Guys & Dolls, Royal Wedding, 42nd Street, Sweet Charity, White Nights, The Affairs Of Dobie Gillis, Three Little Words, Let's Be Happy, Blue Skies, Singin' In The Rain, Lullaby Of Broadway, The Seven Little Foys, Broadway Melody Of 1940, Tea For Two, Call Me Madam, Sun Valley Serenade, Words And Music, It's Always Fair Weather, The Band Wagon, Alexander's Ragtime Band, Down Argentine Way, Les Demoiselles De Rochefort, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, On The Town, The Little Princess, Stormy Weather, Hit The Deck, Excuse My Dust, Pennies From Heaven, The Great American Broadcast, Damn Yankees, Broadway Melody Of 1938, You're My Everything, Look For The Silver Lining, Sensations Of 1945, White Christmas, Lovely To Look At, Deep In My Heart, A Damsel In Distress, There's No Business Like Show Business, You'll Never Get Rich, The Barkleys Of Broadway, Evergreen, Honolulu, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Hollywood Canteen, The Belle Of New York, Star!, Broadway Rhythm, The Gang's All Here, Anchors Aweigh, Breakin' and a few others, all set to the song, "Footloose"…