We love it when a big, symphony-style orchestra plays music from cartoon shows…

For months — maybe years now — people have talked to me about the price of gas as if I have some power to bring it down. To me, it's one of those things like the weather that you can't do much about except decide when to leave your house and when to stay home. And I usually don't think you can blame high prices on whoever's in the White House at the moment. The current spike may be an exception to that…and it's an issue that will probably register with Trump's base, not in a way that's favorable to him.

I never knew much about how it works but I learned a lot reading this Substack by the famed economist Paul Krugman. If you want to know more, it may enlighten you. Warning: You may have to give Substack your e-mail address to read all of it…or at least, an e-mail address. I have a couple that I use when I need to give out an e-mail address to some site and I don't want what they send me to intermingle with the mail I care about. It's easy to get one at GMail. All you have to do is think up something to put before the "@" sign that isn't already taken.

TCM is showing Bells Are Ringing tomorrow afternoon — at 12:15 PM on my TV. This is the 1960 film with Dean Martin and Judy Holliday based on the Broadway show by Betty Comden, Adolph Green and Jule Styne. If you've never seen it, it's worth watching just to see Judy Holliday, a wonderful actress who died way too young.

And if you're a fan of great cartoon voice actors, see if you can spot all the times in which Paul Frees and June Foray are heard in the film. They're most of the voices heard on the phone and they redubbed a couple of actors singing in the "Drop That Name" number. Also, the opening narration was done by Shep Menken, a very fine voicer of cartoons who was, among other roles, Clyde Crashcup on The Alvin Show and the bird in the Western Airlines commercial who popularized the phrase, "It's the only way to fly."

By the way: I no longer use a TiVo and from what I can tell, not many people do. I mourn its obsolescence so when I recommend TV programs here, I'm going to continue to use the subject line, "Set the TiVo!" You don't have to actually set a TiVo and as time goes by, fewer and fewer of you will. But mine served me well.

Jon Stewart again tackles his most controversial issue: Where to get good pizza…

Speaking of stage plays as we sometimes do on this site, we've occasionally made mention of understudies, standby performers, alternates and swings. They're all terms for performers who go on in place of other performers who are on vacation or unable to perform at some performance…but what's the difference between those titles? Often, they're used interchangeably but there are differing definitions. This article will try to explain it for you.

Continuing this series. You can read the first part here and the second part here.

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Bob Kane, obviously with a lot of help from others, drew the earliest Batman stories. Soon though, he was easing into a life he'd read about and dreamed of…the life of a syndicated cartoonist. He wasn't one then but he'd read the success stories and it sounded like a great thing to be. It was what almost all the men who got involved in the earliest days of the comic book industry dreamed of.

One example of many was Bud Fisher, the creator of one of the most popular comic strips of its day, Mutt and Jeff.

Harry Conway "Bud" Fisher was a sports cartoonist who segued into drawing a daily newspaper strip. At first, it was called A. Mutt and it featured Augustus Mutt, a lanky racetrack frequenter who'd popped up in Fisher's sports cartoons. In fact, it debuted on the sports page of The San Francisco Chronicle on November 15, 1907. Four months later, the Jeff character turned up in the strip and stayed forever. And then a few months later, the strip began national syndication and became a huge hit.

There were articles and radio shows that talked about Bud Fisher…about the (then) astronomical sums of money he was making…his penthouse apartment…his cars and limos and the fancy restaurants at which he dined. He was a true celebrity of his day. If you were a kid living in near poverty but able to draw a little, how could you not fantasize about that as your life's work? What else could you aspire to that could be better?

Breaking into and succeeding in the world of syndicated newspaper strips was and still is very, very difficult. It's almost like saying, "You know what I've decided to do with my life? I've decided to win the lottery!" But there was a time in the late nineteen-thirties when comic books (as opposed to strips) came along and publishers needed pages filled. It wasn't that hard to get work doing that. You might be inking backgrounds or lettering but there were jobs there and doing them felt kinda like doing what Bud Fisher did. It just didn't pay as well…yet.

Bob Kane wasn't Bob Kane at the time. He was Bob Kahn, a guy who could draw a little. Over the years, I asked a number of men who worked with him — men like Jerry Robinson and Sheldon Moldoff — if Kane had any real native talent for drawing. Or was it a matter of him never doing enough of it to improve much? Both of those former assistants said it was both. And both said that if Bob had any ability at the drawing board, it was for more humorous material. But DC was looking for a new strip like Superman so Bob Kahn, who'd started signing his work "Bob Kane," whipped up, with the help of a friend, that kind of strip.

That wasn't so unusual. You go where the work is and you try to do it the way the folks with hiring power want it done. I have a theory that an awful lot of guys who could have been different kinds of artists with unique styles didn't because they spent way too much of their lives drawing the way DC or Marvel or some company wanted. Kane went where the work was and hired assistants to help because he didn't draw that kind of material particularly well and also maybe because he was lazy.

So Kane did hire assistants the same way Bud Fisher — and about 80% of all the successful syndicated cartoonists — hired assistants. Actually, Fisher didn't even do that sometimes, leaving it to his syndicate to recruit artists to work on Mutt and Jeff. They included Ed Mack, Ken Kling, Bill Liverpool, George Herriman and Maurice Sendak. Yes, that's the same George Herriman who went on to create Krazy Kat and yes, that's the same Maurice Sendak who went on to create Where the Wild Things Are and other wonderful non-wild things.

There are two guys who created their own, unique (and wonderful) work.  That was because they didn't spend their lives trying to draw what someone else wanted them to draw in the style of someone else.

Meanwhile, the guy who assisted the longest was a gent named Al Smith and come to think of it, Smith really wasn't an assistant. A better job description of what he did would be Ghost. Al Smith ghosted the Mutt and Jeff strip for 48 years. That is not a typo. He began in or around late 1932 and before long, he was writing and drawing the strip himself and Fisher was doing none of it. The only drawing Fisher would do would be when he made personal appearances or when a pretty lady would approach him in some swank restaurant and ask for a quick sketch. Smith did the whole strip including the part where he signed each one "Bud Fisher."

Smith even signed "Bud Fisher" on the strip for a few months after Bud Fisher died in September of 1954. It finally said "Al Smith" on it as of December 7, 1954 and Smith continued to draw it until 1980.

Why am I spending so much of this piece on Mutt and Jeff? Because the life of Bud Fisher was what Bob Kane and — let's face it, other guys who got into comic books in the first decade or two of the medium — wanted. The second time I met Kane, I had what was, for a kid my age, a surreal experience. I spent maybe ninety minutes with him in his apartment on Wilshire Boulevard in West Los Angeles, watching him consume vodka and listening to him ramble on about his life and the comic book industry…and yes, he did mention how much he wanted to grow up and be Bud Fisher.

And he talked about his "assistants" — that's what he called them. My first visit with him was a week or two earlier and I'd taken along the then-current, just-published issue of Batman without realizing the significance it had in his life. It was the first issue where the art, done by others as it had been for decades, was not credited spuriously to Bob Kane.

I've written before here about those visits and a few other encounters I had with the man and I've been asked a lot of questions about him. I feel like I oughta go into greater depths about what I learned and I will in the next few parts of this series. And we'll even get to the part about a man I also met, albeit ever so briefly, that friend who helped him create Batman.

We lost an hour of sleep last night because we had to set our clocks ahead. But did we really lose an hour of sleep? Me, I slept the same number of hours that I usually sleep. It was just an hour later on my clock when I got up. If I had to leave my house and go to work at a specified hour, I might have slept less but we freelancers who work at home are largely impervious to the downsides of setting your clock back an hour, setting it ahead an hour, setting it back an hour, etc.

Some of you who don't have the luxury of not having a clock tell you when it's time to do something may hate Daylight Saving Time. But Mark Joseph Stern would argue that what you hate is not Daylight Saving Time. What you hate, he argues, is Standard Time…and he may be right.

Comic book artist Tatjana Wood died February 27 at the age of 99. She was primarily a colorist, though she had assisted her then-husband Wally Wood with some of the drawing. Colorists are often the unsung heroes of a comic book and she certainly made lackluster work look good and good work look even better. George Gene Gustines wrote a good, informative obit on her for The New York Times. I suggest you go read it.

This is a biggie: A deal was in place, shepherded by Barack Obama, that stopped Iran from developing nuclear weapons. That deal was concluded and signed in 2015 and then voided in 2018 by Trump who said (and still says) "It gave Iran the right to have top-of-the-line nuclear weapons." But according to Politifact, a lot of people who've looked at it say no, it didn't. So then why are we at war to stop Iran from having top-of-the-line nuclear weapons? Did Trump really pull of out of the deal just because it was Obama's?

FactCheck.org takes a good, hard look at the legalities and illegalities of what Trump is doing Over There and so does The New York Times.

Meanwhile, Kristi Noem denies she said that Alex Pretti was "a domestic terrorist" and Marco Rubio denies he said that the United States attacked Iran because Israel was planning to attack Iran, But CNN says it can prove that both of them said what they said they never said. Apparently, some people are unaware of this thing called "recording."

What are Trump and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu trying to accomplish right now in Iran? Fred Kaplan thinks he knows. Of course, he's assuming that any actual thinking is going into this effort.

What's the view in the U.K. of our current "military action" with Iran? For that answer, we have to check in with our British correspondent, Jonathan Pie…

My pal Gary Sassaman owns up to a secret vice: The collecting of James Bond books for their covers…

That Trump guy is typing, "There will be no deal with Iran except UNCONDITIONAL SURRENDER," adding the U.S. would oversee the selection of "a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader." That makes me wonder if it's a bargaining position to try to scare Iran into a negotiation or if his primary goal is to impress certain folks in this country who want a tough, ruthless leader that he's that. This is to make up for the fact that many of them voted for him because of his "No New Wars" platform.

It might well be both. I also wonder if his idea of "a GREAT & ACCEPTABLE Leader" is someone who'll make deals and concessions that will enrich the Trump family.

In any case, I've long had a belief that people who talk tough usually aren't tough…or if they are, it's in lieu of being smart. I have the feeling that the result of all this will be a lot of bloodshed and fear and lives lost on both sides, followed by Iran signing pretty much the same pact as the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that Obama got us into and Trump canceled. And, of course, Donald will claim he brought Iran to its knees and got a much better deal so it was worth all those people dying.

Paul Krugman on the cost of Donald Trump's war Targeted Military Strikes in Iran and what else we could be doing with the money.

Here's another performance of the best song from Hamilton done without music. Pretty good, I'd say…