What does it say about the world when the smartest political commentary online is coming from DeepFake videos that are putting words in the mouth of an A.I.-generated George Will?
And wouldn't it be wild if we found out that those phony videos are being generated by George Will? The idea here would be that he wants to speak truth to power but doesn't want the blowback that sometimes comes these days from speaking truth to power?
Hey, did you ever see Gulliver's Travels, the 1939 animated feature via which the Max Fleischer studio thought they could hold their own against Mr. Disney? Well, now you can…
My pal Joe Brancatelli sent me this link to an article about how poorly things are going, dollar-wise, in Las Vegas. Here's one excerpt…
Las Vegas drew about 3.1 million fewer visitors in 2025, a 7.5% drop — its sharpest decline outside the pandemic since record-keeping began in 1970, according to the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority.
The huge drop in the casinos' income is, of course, largely attributable to the fact that I'm not going there anymore and I'm not going there anymore because everything is so overpriced in a "make-you-feel-like-a-sucker" way. It isn't just the money. It's the insult.
There have always been scams in that city…ways of raiding your wallet dishonestly. I think about the many street "performers" in costumes who try to tempt you into taking a photo with them without agreeing in advance what you'll pay them for posing with you. They could on you being too dumb or maybe too tipsy to know that's gonna cost you more than you like. Well, the whole city seems to be run on that basis now. That hotel rate you saw advertised for $60 a night will, upon checkout, turn out to be $300 a night.
When I used to go there a lot, those surprises were few. They wanted you to spend money, of course, but they wanted you to not feel cheated because if you felt cheated, you were less likely to come back. Now, they don't care. And a lot of us don't care if we never go back.
If you must go, here's a tip: The plundering is mainly in the hotels on The Strip and to a lesser extent, Downtown. Prices and gaming rules are more predictable and fair at the casinos away from those areas that cater mainly to the folks who live in and around Vegas. "Why is this?" you may ask. It's because those places rely on repeat business.
Hey, I managed to get my backup computer online so I can now post something else here. Last night, I introduced you to Matt Forbes, a real good singer with a real good band in the Big Band tradition. Today, I got a delighted e-mail from Matt who turns out to have been a reader of this site. That earns him another video embed here. If you liked the way Nat King Cole sang this song, you'll love what Matt and his musicians do with it…
My computer is running like someone opened the back and poured in a couple bottles of Grandma’s Original Unsulphered Black Strap Molasses. I can write on it but won’t be able to do much of an Internet nature on it until my Computer Guru has time to fix whatever needs fixing. So I’m posting this via my iPad and this may be all you’ll get outta me until repairs are completed. Sorry.
Canadian Recording Artist Matt Forbes favors us with a big band rendition of a Lerner & Loewe tune from the show, Brigadoon. Very good…
When I worked on staff on TV shows, I worked in an environment where some people were getting rich and/or famous and some people were about as far down on the food chain as one could possibly imagine. The latter included unpaid interns and folks who were paid but not that much more than the unpaid interns. These were folks who could not have survived forever on those wages (or lack thereof) and were gambling that being in the office and proving themselves hard-working, smart and useful would lead to much better positions.
And sometimes, it did. Some of those folks went on to the more prestigious, better paying jobs…and some did not. One I know finally gave up all dreams of a lucrative position in Show Biz. Let's call him Paul. He was a "runner," someone to send on errands and to get lunch or deliver scripts or pick people up at the airport…stuff like that. It rarely pays well and those who do it are often treated like dogs being told to run out, catch the frisbee and bring it back.
One day, Paul had enough of the disrespect and he quit and went to work for a company that does "board-up" services. If a window in your house suddenly shatters, you call them and they send someone over to clean up the broken glass and nail plywood over the opening.
Glamorous? Exciting? Probably not. But he was glad to be freed from worrying about the rent and the grocery bills. And he's probably happiest to be out of that "rock bottom" staff job where he endured a fair amount of emotional abuse. Just as there always seemed to be people around on those shows to do menial tasks, there always seemed to be at least one well-paid, secure-in-his-or-her-position person who enjoyed treating the underlings like shit.
A lot of people seem very interested in finding out if celebrities — or really, anyone who's successful that they know of — are nice. I'm often asked this about some of the famous people I've met: "Is he nice?" And sometimes, they don't ask. They just form their own opinions based on unsourced rumors or brief encounters. Here's an exchange I've had a few times. Let's say it's about a prominent person named Harry in a creative field.
SOMEONE: I just heard someone who works with him say that Harry isn't very nice. I don't understand this. When I met him, he was perfectly nice to me. He seemed like a great guy.
ME: Uh-uh. Under what circumstances did you meet him?
SOMEONE: At an autograph show. I waited in line fifteen minutes to meet him and when I got to the head of the line, I told him how much I always enjoyed his work and he couldn't have been nicer.
Well, of course. In public…being treated like a god…perhaps earning money from his fans…even Attila the Hun could have been a helluva nice guy for five minutes. Work with Harry every day in stressful situations with a lot of money and/or power on the line…then let's see how "nice" he is.
I don't like being judgmental about people but it's sometimes unavoidable. You have to have a good sense of who to watch out for in this world, who to avoid, who to treat with the proverbial kid gloves. And if you're going to make those judgments, you need to consider how the individual conducts him or herself in two situations…
When you're telling them you love their work and asking or paying for an autograph, you are in neither position. Of course, most of them will be nice. (The ones who aren't really have problems.)
And if you're only in their presence for five or ten minutes…well, the worst human being on the planet can go five or ten minutes without showing it. Someone who works with them every day in conditions where everyone really has to deliver might be in a better position to know who and what they are. But even that might not tell you everything.
Because at one time or another, everyone is at their worst and if that's all you see of them, you might get a false or incomplete impression. There might be a good explanation for why they were rude or seemed to be rude at a given moment. Misunderstandings do happen and people do have bad days. I've seen some of the people I've admired most in this world not be at their best.
What I guess I'm getting at is: If you must judge people, don't judge them by brief, casual encounters. Or rumors. Or someone else's description of their experiences with them.
Which brings us back to Paul. You remember Paul from a number of paragraphs above. Here is what caused Paul to flee the tinsel 'n' glamour of a network television series and go off to a life of boarding up broken windows…
The boss on that series — I think his title was Supervising Producer — decided to buy beer for the entire staff one Friday afternoon. He summoned Paul and told him how much beer would be needed and then handed Paul an amount of cash with which to buy the beer. It was about half of what even the cheapest beer would cost in the required volume.
Paul said something like "I can't get that much beer for that little money" and the boss began screaming at him. Full-out. Hysterically. I even heard it in my office down the hall. Paul had forgotten a couple of very crucial rules for working with this particular boss: You never tell him no. You never tell him something he wants can't be done. And you never, ever tell him he's wrong.
No, it was not rational. Paul was right. The boss was wrong. But the boss had something in him that hated — hated! — being told he was wrong and he couldn't take that hate out on most of the people who worked on our show. But he could take it out on Paul because Paul couldn't fight back. All Paul could do was get the hell out there and he was glad he did.
But if you'd asked the stars of our show what they thought of our Supervising Producer, you know what they would have said? They would have told you he was nice. Very nice. He didn't treat them the way he treated Paul.
When I was a kid, I loved Hanna-Barbera cartoons…pretty much everything they produced until about half-past The Cattanooga Cats and I loved Little Golden Records. Little Golden Records were these yellow records for kids which their maker claimed were utterly unbreakable. Some of my friends and I proved that to be false advertising.
So I loved the Little Golden Records based on Hanna-Barbera shows but only if — and this was a very big IF for me — no one was trying to imitate the voices of the characters on TV. A lot of Little Golden Records had very mediocre and sometimes bad imitations of Daws Butler and the other great H-B actors. I could hear five seconds of some Little Golden Records and say with great outrage, "That's not Yogi Bear!"
But on a lot of them, no one tried to sound like the characters I knew and loved. On a lot of them, it was just unknown singers singing the show's theme songs with interesting arrangements and, sometimes, lots of new lyrics and bridges added. My pal Greg Ehrbar assembled a little medley of some of these songs and here it is…
I haven't done one of these for a while but that doesn't mean that Very Important People haven't been telling Very Big Lies. For example…
Trump is making a big stink about this bridge between the U.S. and Canada…and as Daniel Dale reports, saying a lot of things that aren't true about it.
At a National Prayer Breakfast, Trump took credit for the release of Mariam Ibrahim, who was imprisoned and sentenced to death in Sudan in 2014 largely for being a Christian. But as Daniel Dale (him again) points out, that happened during the Obama administration before Trump had even announced his candidacy for President. You shouldn't lie at a National Prayer Breakfast.
The Trump Administration has rolled back the power of the Environmental Protection Agency to deal with Climate Change. And of course, in so doing, they've told an awful lot of lies about an awful lot of things. The Associated Press goes through some of them.
And lastly for now and of course, Trump and his minions are wildly exaggerating every bit of good economic news. FactCheck.org brings things down to reality.
It will horrify certain of my friends but I think Steve Harvey is a terrific host for the game show, Family Feud. Now admittedly, I don't watch it often and when I do, it's usually on YouTube so I might be seeing only the best moments. But I think this long, long running game show is not a very good idea that has occasionally been made fun and watchable by only two of its ninety thousand hosts over the years — Richard Dawson and now Steve Harvey.
What I like about Mr. Harvey is that he's funny and he doesn't have a stash of rote responses to whatever happens. He bonds well with the contestants and when things don't go the way they'd like, they still seem to have a great time just being with him. So many game show hosts seem to be on auto-pilot and he's flying freely.
Here's a segment from Family Feud in Botswana. That's right: I said Botswana — that place in Africa. The contestants do about as badly as you can do and Harvey makes it entertaining and doesn't embarrass the people who screwed up their chances at Fast Money. By the way: The amount they're playing for is 50,000 pulas. In American money — I looked this up — that's about $3,814…
Here's a link to Part 1 for those of you who need a link to Part 1.
So…I'd outgrown or read all the books that interested me in the kids' section of the West L.A. Public Library and I wasn't allowed to check out books from the adult section. My parents checked some out for me but the library had a limit on how many books you could have out at one time and I was cutting into on my folks' allotments. My mother sought out the Head Librarian and asked, "Is there any way to get my son a card for the adult section?" I think I was nine or ten at the time.
The Head Librarian had heard it had been done but it hadn't been done at any library where she worked. "I don't know how to arrange that," she said. Since I was there participating in this discussion and something of a youthful smartass, I said, "Maybe there's a book here somewhere that will tell you how to do it!"
She laughed and I think that convinced her I deserved what we were asking for. She said, "I think I can arrange it if you get a letter from the principal at Mark's school."
So we got a letter from the principal at my place of learning, Westwood Elementary School. The principal was a nice lady whose name kept changing because she was getting married, then unmarried, then married again, then unmarried again and so on. I think her name at this point was Mrs. Kermoyan and she dashed off the requested letter. We took it to the Head Librarian who stared at it for a long minute or two. Then she said, "I know the process starts with a letter like this but I'm not sure what I do next."
Still the youthful smartass, I said, "Maybe you could call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do." The Head Librarian considered my idea for a second and then said, "I think I'll call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do."
She did and that Head Librarian didn't know what to do so she said, "I think I'll call the Head Librarian at some other library in the system and ask them what to do."
And that Head Librarian called some other Head Librarian and that Head Librarian called some other Head Librarian and I don't know how many Head Librarians this went through until one of them said, "Just issue the kid an adult card!" So they issued the kid (i.e., me) an adult card and the Head Librarian we started with wrote on the back of it, "O.K. to check out adult books" and signed her name.
By the way; Do I have to point out that the term "adult books" back then meant something different than it does today? It was then pretty much anything above the reading comprehension of Dr. Seuss or Freddie the Pig.
So all was fine except that every time I tried to check out books from that section, if the person at the check-out post didn't know about me and my card before, they said, "I'm sorry but you're too young to take these out." I then had to tell this person to turn the card over and sometimes, they'd go check with someone and be told that yes, it was legit.
But back to the first day I had that magical card…and it really did feel like magic. I walked proudly over to the non-kids' section. I'd been there before. No one had ever stopped me from browsing there. It was just the taking-home-a-book part that had been forbidden. I felt very powerful as I went directly to the Performing Arts section, which is where I'd done most of my browsing on that side of the library.
I noticed a book there I hadn't noticed before. It was a very old-looking one on the history of vaudeville and I opened it up, flipped to a random page and there, before my nine or ten-year-old eyes was a photo of a naked lady. An actual, black-and-white photo of a naked lady.
I'm sure these days, kids in that age range have very little problem seeing naked ladies and maybe even naked men. They now have this thing you may have heard of called The Internet and there are also things like HBO and Netflix. The last time I went to a large newsstand, it was rife with photos of naked people. You couldn't not see them. But in 1961, which is roughly the year we're talking about here, that was not so common.
I stared at this particular naked lady — she was in that book because she was something called a "stripper" — and I stared at my newly-acquired magic library card and wondered: Did this card unlock some special access to books that were invisible to anyone without such a card? Were there now other books on the shelves with photos of naked ladies in them?
A quick check of other books in that section revealed the answer to that second question was no. But I could not only still see that naked lady in that book, I could even take her and it home with me. Which I did. It turned out the book had a few other photos of other naked ladies.
In the months that followed, I occasionally found another naked lady in a book there. I also found — and this was almost as good but not quite — a couple of books that told how certain magic tricks were done.
I loved watching magic on TV and I always understood that I was seeing tricks. The magician — it was often Mark Wilson, who I got to meet many years later when I joined the Magic Castle — did not actually saw a person in half or make them disappear. I always knew they were tricks and I was dying to know how they were done and if there were any that I could do.
Occasionally on some show, I'd hear a magician talk about "The Code," about how all the magicians pledged on their honor to never, ever reveal to anyone outside the profession how tricks were done. What really puzzled me though was how it was decided that someone was enough of a magician to have access to those secrets. And while I was at it, I wondered how anyone became a magician in the first place if they were forbidden to know those secrets.
I understood: Magicians were forbidden to disclose to non-magicians how tricks were done…
…but apparently, there was no rule against them writing books that gave away many of the secrets to anyone who had an adult library card such as mine. Over the first few weeks with my new card, I checked all of them out and even mastered a few card tricks. I also checked out a few more naked ladies.
I spent a lot of time in that library for years…up until the point when I could afford to buy books instead of borrow. I began building my own library at home and it differed from that public one in two basic ways. All the books in my library were of interest to me and I didn't loan them out. Still, that library over on Santa Monica Boulevard meant a lot to me and who I became. I may remember other things about it in the future and post them here but for now, that's the end of this story.
…and he kicks off the new season with a devastating look at ICE and the Department of Homeland Security…
Boop! The Musical, which closed on Broadway after a (probably disappointing) 112 performances is beginning a national tour later this year. So far, they've announced dates in Cincinnati, Detroit, Atlanta, Houston, Kansas City and Las Vegas with more cities to be added soon. This will presumably be the same "production" (sets, costumes, arrangements, direction) as New York but with, probably, some modifications to make the show more portable. After all, they're only scheduled to be in some cities for five days.
There will also be mostly different performers. Jasmine Amy Rogers, who was Tony-nominated for the title role will probably not (alas!) be in it.
If you keep an eye on this page, you may find it'll be roaming your way so you can order tickets. I'm betting that at some point, it'll be at the Pantages Theater in Los Angeles for a week or two…but when?
A lot of folks online seem to be upset about a new commercial that I guess ran during that Super Bowl thing I didn't watch. It was William Shatner selling Kellogg's Raisin Bran. Let's take a look at it, shall we?
Some of them seem to be angry that Mr. Shatner was involved in an ad spot that made so much reference to the regularity of bowel movements even to the extent of turning his name into such a reference. Others seems to be irate that Mr. Shatner — at the age of 94 but certainly not looking it — doesn't retire when they feel he should. More than a few of these irate folks are asking some version of "Doesn't this man have enough money?"
And of course, some people are incensed both ways. Me, I don't see who he's harming and I doubt it's all about the money. I think some people when they hit a certain age feel that they just need something to do that resembles what they've done for their entire lives. It's bad for your well-being to not have a reason to get up in the morning and do something constructive.
Sitting home and watching daytime TV all day can be hazardous to your health. It's like telling The Grim Reaper, "I'm just sitting here, waiting for you. Drop by and take me when you're in the neighborhood!"
Also, I'm reminded of a story that I've posted here before and will probably post again…
Some years ago, I was at a party full of Hollywood-type people and I was introduced to Betty White. Told that I was the producer of The Garfield Show, she instantly said to me, "Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show?" I smiled and said, "Because you're on everything else!" I don't think any TV actor at whatever age she was then has ever been in more demand than Betty White was at the time.
We wound up talking about other things and parting. Then a little later, she came up to me and said, "I hope you know I was only half-serious when I asked you, 'Why haven't I been on The Garfield Show.'" I said, "I assumed as much but just out of curiosity…what about the other half? You're on like twenty-seven TV shows these days. We pay scale to all our guest stars. If I did want to hire you, are you even available? And are you available for that money?"
She thought for a second and said, "No, I guess I'm not. The money wouldn't matter all that much but I just don't really have the time." Then she asked me, "Do you have any experience with feral cats?"
I told her about the small herd of them I feed in my backyard. She said, "Well, then maybe you're aware of this. Looking for food is hardwired into most feral cats. Their lives revolve around finding the next meal so even if you feed one and she stuffs herself, a minute later, she's thinking, 'Where is food? Where do I find food?' They can't help themselves. I'm afraid most actors are like that. Even when they have a job, they're thinking, 'Where is my next one?'"
"When we were doing The Golden Girls, there was a point where we were picked-up for two more seasons and I had all these other things I was doing. I was turning down offer after offer because I just didn't have the time open. And still, there were moments when a little voice in me was wondering, 'What are you going to do when this ends?' Actors…at times, we're all like feral cats!"
Betty White was probably around 94 when we had that conversation.
Yeah, William Shatner sometimes seems like an actor who'll do anything. I'm also reminded of a televised roast once of Sammy Davis, Jr. Someone on the dais — I'm not sure who — got a tremendous, knowing laugh by saying, "Sammy…you know you're allowed to turn things down!" But I do kinda admire someone who's determined to stay active even if it sometimes can lead to bad choices.
Me, I intend to keep working until I can't work no more. Next month, I turn 74 and the only parts of me that believe that are my knees. I've been writing since I was 17 and I don't think I know how to not write. You won't catch me appearing in a commercial about staying regular but if I have no other offers, I might write one.