I haven't quoted it lately but I used to often quote the late newsman Jack Germond who once said — approximately — "The trouble with news reporting is that we aren't paid to say 'I don't know.' So we have to say things when we don't know."

I was reminded of that by a brief scan just now of the news channels and sites. Everyone is eager to tell us how the vote is going and they're not letting not knowing anything stop them. So we're getting a lot of meaningless "facts" which will eventually be replaced by real information. I think I'll wait until they are to start paying attention.

Like most of you, I'm eager to see what our democracy (assuming we still have one) looks like when all the votes are counted tonight…and they probably won't all be counted tonight. Here's a handy guide to when the polls close in the key races. When they close may have little to do with when we know who's won what…and we can probably expect some challenges and screams of rigging and one or more premature assertions of victory. My only prediction is that it won't be over as soon as we'd like it to be over.

Jimmy Fallon and Seth Meyers are not doing shows tonight. Jimmy Kimmel and The Daily Show are but neither show will be live so don't look to them for indications of how the vote is going. I'll be flipping channels, including a couple that are online like The MeidasTouch Network. And I'll be trying to remember the lyrics to the song, "It's Not Where You Start, It's Where You Finish."

From The Ed Sullivan Show for April 30, 1961, here's one of the funniest human beings it was ever my honor to know and work with — The Amazing Ballantine…

The start of this long, wandering essay can be found right here. I'm still not sure where and when the end will be.

As I've mentioned often here, I can't recall a time in my childhood when I didn't have comic books. My parents couldn't, either. They were buying them for me before I could read what was in them. In fact, I believe i learned to read in large part because of them.

It was Dell Comics at first, particularly Dell Comics that featured cartoon characters I knew from TV — Donald Duck, Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Porky Pig, Woody Woodpecker, etc.  — all characters with tails except Elmer Fudd.  I collected them, read them and tried to draw the characters I saw in them.  Much inspiration came from drawing lessons that Walter Lantz gave between cartoons on The Woody Woodpecker Show and from a book called Easy Way To Draw which I wrote about here and other places on this blog.

One day in early 1959, I began adding super-hero and adventure comics to the mix. I started with comics featuring Superman, a character who I, of course, knew from TV. The George Reeves TV series was on several times a day in Los Angeles and Engineer Bill, a local kids show host, showed the Fleischer/Paramount Superman cartoons again and again and again. There were only seventeen of them.

I loved Superman with this reservation: I was able to draw the funny animal characters fairly well for a kid my age.  But no matter how I tried — and I tried and I tried —  I wasn't able to draw what I considered a decent Superman.  The best I could so was to draw his chest insignia.  That, I mastered pretty well by the age of eight.  Ten years later, I worked for a man named Jack Kirby who, largely against his will, was drawing the Superman's Pal, Jimmy Olsen comic book and Jack would sometimes have me draw or redraw Superman's chest insignia.

Buying Superman comics in '59 quickly led to Batman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern and others. And then, shortly after Christmas of that year, I found a comic on the newsstands that excited me in a way no comic book ever had or has since. It was The Brave and the Bold #28 and it introduced The Justice League of America. It featured Aquaman, The Flash, Wonder Woman, Green Lantern, John Jones (aka J'onn J'onzz, aka The Manhunter From Mars) and maddeningly brief cameos of Superman and Batman.

Even the cover thrilled me.  I still don't know what the hell Wonder Woman was doing with her golden lasso connecting to nothing but I will always love that cover…

Ganging up characters like that is pretty common now. In fact, these days readers complain if any two characters don't appear together now and then. But when I was seven years old, as I was in '59, that was something special…something very special.

The Brave and the Bold had become a "tryout" comic and that issue was the tryout for the Justice League to see if readers would buy enough copies to warrant a regular J.L.A. comic. I don't see why they needed a tryout. Of course, it was going to sell. But there were two more issues of the J.L.A. in The Brave and the Bold. One came out the following March 1 and the next came out a bit less than two months later.   Then in August, they brought out Justice League of America #1 as a bi-monthly. DC was ridiculously cautious then about starting new comics.

It was edited by Julius Schwartz and written by Gardner Fox.  It was drawn by Mike Sekowsky doing what I later heard some of his fellow artists describe as The Hardest Job in All of Comics.  To draw all those characters and to sometimes fit all of them into one panel along with Fox's often-excessive captions and dialogue?  One of those fellow artists, Gil Kane, once told me, "It's not that I couldn't have drawn that comic as well as Mike Sekowsky.  I couldn't have drawn it at all."

The Schwartz-Fox-Sekowsky issues of that book became my favorite comic of the day and I think it's still one of the two best "team" comics ever done.  The other, which came along two years later, was the Lee-Kirby Fantastic Four.  In the next part of this, I'll tell you how I came to know and work with Mike Sekowsky and I may finally get to the part where knowing him convinced me to give up drawing.

Allan J. Lichtman believes that Donald Trump's major accomplishment will forever be that "He has done more than any American in history to convince his fellow citizens that their votes are not counted honestly."  And he points out that this is in spite of the fact that — and I quote — "Six years after Trump claimed that millions of illegal votes were cast against him in 2020, he [has] failed to document a single illegal vote."

Some recent stories from The Daily Show…

The very first cartoon show Hanna-Barbera produced for television was The Ruff & Reddy Show which went on the air in 1957.  It was followed by The Huckleberry Hound Show (1958), The Quick Draw McGraw Show (1959), The Flintstones (1960), The Yogi Bear Show (1961) and Top Cat (also 1961).  In 1962, they gave us The Jetsons and also a strange packet made up of five-minute cartoons that were distributed and aired together but not marketed as one new series.

Over a year or three, they made 52 episodes of Wally Gator, 52 episodes of Lippy the Lion and Hardy-Har-Har and 52 episodes of Touché Turtle.  The package was called The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series or sometimes, The New Hanna-Barbera Cartoon Series. Neither title ever appeared on the air.  I never heard either of those names at the time.  They were only used when advertising the package to local channels.

Local channels that purchased it would program them every which way, usually with a local host between the different segments. In Los Angeles, the local host was Beachcomber Bill on Channel 13.

I thought the first six or seven H-B series were pretty good — especially Quick Draw McGraw, which has just been released on a Blu-ray you can purchase here. The trio of cartoons that formed The Hanna-Barbera New Cartoon Series was where I felt the studio beginning to downslide. The cartoons were obviously rushed and way lower in budget. They were clearly not the studio's "A" production at the time.

And what we have below is a whole bunch of Wally Gator cartoons. Daws Butler provided the voice of Wally, Don Messick was Mr. Twiddle and both doubled and tripled as other characters. You'll also hear Jean Vander Pyl doing all the female roles and Bill Thompson — who also voiced Touché Turtle — in a couple of guest roles. I don't think these are great cartoons but they're better than a lot of stuff the studio did in the years that followed…

Here's this again…

At the risk of coming off like the Ebenezer Scrooge of a different holiday, I have to say: I've never liked Halloween. For one thing, I'm not a big fan of horror movies or of people making themselves up to look disfigured or like rotting corpses. One time when I was in the company of Ray Bradbury at a convention, someone shambled past us looking like they just rose up from a grave and Ray said something about how people parade about like that to celebrate life by mocking death. Maybe to some folks it's a celebration of life but to me, it's just ugly.

I've also never been comfy with the idea of kids going door-to-door to take candy from strangers. Hey, what could possibly go wrong with that? I did it a few years when I was but a child, not so much because I wanted to but because it seemed to be expected of me. I felt silly in the costume and when we went to neighbors' homes and they remarked how cute we were…well, I never liked to be cute in that way. People talk to you like you're a puppy dog. The man two houses down…before he gave me my treat, I thought he was going to tell me to roll over and beg for it.

When I got home, I had a bag of "goodies" I didn't want to eat. In my neighborhood, you got a lot of licorice and Mounds bars and Jordan Almonds, none of which I liked even before I found out I was allergic to them. I would say that a good two-thirds of the candy I hauled home on a Halloween Eve went right into the trash can and I felt bad about that. Some nice neighbor had paid good money for it, after all.

And some of it, of course, was candy corn — the cole slaw of sugary treats. Absolutely no one likes candy corn. Don't write to me and tell me you do because I'll just have to write back and call you a liar. No one likes candy corn. No one, do you hear me?

I wonder if anyone's ever done any polling to find out what percentage of Halloween candy that is purchased and handed-out is ever eaten. And I wonder how many kids would rather not dress up or disfigure themselves for an evening if anyone told them they had a choice. Where I live, they seem to have decided against trick-or-treating. In earlier versions of this essay, I used to say, "Each year, I stock up and no one comes. For a while there, I wound up eating a couple big sacks of leftover candy myself every year." But I haven't had anyone at my door for three or four years now so I don't bother.

So I didn't like the dress-up part and I didn't like the trick-or-treating part. There were guys in my class at school who invited me to go along on Halloween when they threw eggs at people and overturned folks' trash cans and redecorated homes with toilet paper…and I never much liked pranks. One year the day after Thanksgiving, two friends of mine were laughing and bragging how they'd trashed some old lady's yard and I thought, "That's not funny. It's just being an a-hole."

Over the years, as I've told friends how I feel, I've been amazed how many agree with me. In a world where people now feel more free to say that which does not seem "politically correct," I feel less afraid to own up to my dislike of Halloween. About the only thing I ever liked about it was the second-best Charlie Brown special.

So that's why I'll be home for Halloween and not up in West Hollywood wearing my Mike Johnson costume. I'm fine with every other holiday. Just not this one. I do not believe there is a War on Christmas in this country. That's just something the Fox News folks dreamed up because they believe their audience needs to be kept in a perpetual state of outrage about something. But if there's ever a War on Halloween, I'm enlisting. And bringing the eggs.

Desi Lydic "Foxsplains" Obama's Cheesecake Factory joke. As the clips in this video show, no one on the Trump side seems to understand what it meant but they know Obama said it so they have to come up with some sort of outrage…

I was a big fan of a sitcom called The Many Loves of Dobie Gillis which ran four seasons on CBS — from 1959 to 1963. When I found the first episode (i.e., the pilot) online, I decided to post it here so maybe some of you would watch it, like it and seek out other episodes. Then I watched it and had second thoughts because I realized I was a big fan of what it became after the early episodes.

The first episode doesn't have the crisp, fast-and-funny dialog style that the show developed. It doesn't have some of the great supporting characters of later episodes like the ones played by Steve Franken, Sheila James and the youthful Warren Beatty. It does have Bob Denver as TV's idea of a beatnik in 1959, Maynard G. Krebs. Denver became a wonderful part of the show but not so much in the first episode.

And in that pilot, Dobie is a pretty whiny, obnoxious guy with a pathetic attitude about finding a girl friend. The one he lusts after in the first episode was Thalia Meninger, played by the lovely Tuesday Weld, who for some reason is seen in softer focus in her close-ups. I decided the first episode didn't at all represent what I liked about the show and I shouldn't post it here…

…and then I decided to post it with the above disclaimers. You still might enjoy it. And it contains a few folks you saw often on sixties' TV like Herbert Anderson, who went on to play the father of Dennis the Menace, and Stanley Adams who somehow got cast in at least one episode of every show, it seemed. (He played the realtor who sold Rob and Laura Petrie their New Rochelle home in the episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show that I saw filmed.)

So here it is, complete with plugs for Shout Factory, which released the whole series on DVD. I got and watched some of them and saw the show get real good throughout the first season, then fall apart in the fourth and final. In my opinion…

So…let's forget about the election in this country for a moment and focus on the recent one in Israel, which could have more than a little impact on this nation. Here's what Fred Kaplan has to say about it…

Israel's election this week was so close that neither of the contending coalitions — Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's or the opposition, led by former military chief Gadi Eisenkot — may emerge with the majority needed to govern. The question now is this: Does it matter which side ultimately wins?

It depends on the subject. When it comes to whether Israel resumes its war against Iran, the election's outcome will make some difference. As for curbing the violence of Jewish settlers in the West Bank, it might have a little bit of impact. On the war in Gaza, there is no daylight between the coalitions. And on the prospect of settling the broad conflict between Jews and Palestinians, the election uncloaked an aspect of Israeli politics that will likely worsen tensions, regardless of the final vote count.

Read the whole thing. It'll convince you that there won't be peace there for a long time. Unfortunately.

Micki Dee St. James writes to ask…

You may well have answered this before but my memory is not what it once was. Seems to me voice actors are scrupulous about claiming they never steal someone else's voice completely — that would be theft. They always introduce subtle differences.

So Yogi Bear does not have the same voice as Art Carney (I couldn't tell you what the difference is) and Fred Flintstone dies not have the same voice as Jackie Gleason (these do sound audibly distinct to me). Kermit's had several voices, all sort of the same but noticeably different from Jim Henson. He got to use his own voice which seems only fair.

Could you comment on some of the differences between a cartoon voice and the voice it's stealing borrowing and how voice actors fashion these differences?

Well, you're talking about a couple of different situations here. Jim Henson owned Kermit. In fact, he owned the whole danged company before it was sold to Disney. He could and did dictate the terms of what would happen to Kermit after there was no more Jim Henson to perform him. As far as I know, that was done as he directed with others hired to play the character and do their best Jim Henson imitations. There's no ethical squabble there.  There have been disputes over who was doing the imitation but there's no argument that it's wrong to imitate Jim Henson.

I don't know that any recording exists of it but Daws Butler used to demonstrate the difference between Yogi Bear's voice and Art Carney's, Hokey Wolf's and Phil Silvers', the voice of Snagglepuss and Bert Lahr and so on. There were definite differences. The cartoon characters' voices were inspired by the celebrities', not copied.

Bert Lahr did sue but that was because of the commercials Snagglepuss appeared in for Kellogg's Cocoa Krispies.  Lahr's line of work then was doing commercials for Lay's Potato Chips and other products and he didn't like that people thought he was selling Cocoa Krispies. As I understand it, the suit was settled with some money changing hands and the addition of a screen credit for Daws Butler on those spots.  You can see it at the end of this example if you look fast…

When a voice actor says "I would never steal someone else's voice," what he or she probably means is that they wouldn't steal a job by imitating someone. When Lorenzo Music was alive and voicing Garfield, he was very well-paid and we got offers from guys who claimed they could and would imitate Lorenzo for less money. That's the kind of thing no self-respecting voice actor would do.

There are grey areas…cases where it's arguable that someone has a proprietary claim on some voice. Two or three times now I've been asked to weigh in on a specific case. In one matter, the studio decided — as they have the right to — that they wanted a different actor in a role and the new person sounded a little like the old person. It can then be argued as to whether the second actor is imitating the first. But basically, if someone originated a unique voice — or in the instance of Lorenzo, was using his or her natural voice — it's wrong to imitate them as long as they're still around to provide it.

One time, I was walking into a restaurant with a veteran voice actor and I spotted another veteran voice actor also waiting to be seated. Wrongly assuming they had to be friends, I pointed the second guy out to the first guy and some yelling ensued. #1 had been holding out for higher pay on a job and #2 had stepped in and taken the gig and done an imitation of #1. Both men have passed away but to their dying days, you couldn't have them in the same room.

Fred Kaplan says that the biggest loser in next week's election could be…wait for it…Elon Musk. Here's an excerpt from Fred's article…

This is a crucial election for millions of Americans, whether they realize it or not. Elon Musk understands his own stake in the outcome very deeply. It amounts to billions of dollars of his personal wealth and his continued ability to shape government policy, which could boost his fortunes by tens of billions more. That's why he's spending hundreds of millions of dollars. If the Democrats take back Congress, they should also start thinking seriously about whether anyone should be allowed to do this.

One thing I'll never understand — and there are many — is why someone with that kind of money doesn't think, "I can spend half my money on genuine humanitarian causes and go down in history as a Saint while still having every bit of luxury I could ever crave for the rest of my life!" Some rich folks seem almost eager to go down in history as super-villains.

Some of you probably check in with this blog several times a day, waiting for me to feature a group of ukulele players performing the song, "Build Me Up, Buttercup." I never want to disappoint my readers so…

I've become a fan of the Jimmy Awards and you're probably wondering what those are and who the hell is Jimmy? Well, the Jimmy Awards are The National High School Musical Theatre Awards and they've been doled since 2009. The goal is to elevate theatre arts education in schools and reward excellence in student performance. So every year, they put on this one-performance show honoring and showcasing performers from high school productions. A great many of those on that stage soon wind up on Broadway stages.

In these annual shows, they do a lot of medleys where a number of kids perform songs from different shows. The numbers don't fit together and that's kind of the point. Here's an example and I'll link you to some others in the coming days. And, oh yes! You probably want to know who Jimmy is or was. It's a "was." It was James M. Nederlander of the Nederlander Theatrical Company that owns nine Broadway houses and many theaters around the country…