My favorite movie — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — debuted at the Cinerama Dome Theater in Hollywood on November 7, 1963 so today is its birthday. I guess. I saw it on November 23, the day after President John F. Kennedy was murdered, at that theater. My parents and I joined a roomful of people who'd been off-and-on glued to their TV sets long enough to be in desperate need of a diversion, preferably a funny one. It was the right movie at the right time.

As you may have heard, the Cinerama Dome theater is being refurbished and will be reopened (they say) on some unspecified date in 2028. I hope they show Mad World, if not as their first film upon reopening, then soon after. The theater was built to show that movie so it would be appropriate. It's also the best possible place to see that movie. Once they announce they're showing it, hurry and get in line behind me.

If you have a subscription to The Wall Street Journal or feel like signing up for one of their free subscriptions that permit very limited access, you might want to read their article called "How Trump Lost the Midterms." It contains a lot of reasons, all of them probably valid to some extent.

I could add on a dozen more, mostly about Trump increasingly coming off as unstable and so untruthful as to raise doubts among even some of his most devoted supporters. Most of the reasons the article gives fall into the general category of Refusing To Listen To People Who Knew Better, especially about Iran.

For some time now, I've been sleeping odd hours, often wide awake at the computer in what to anyone else is the middle of the night. A few hours ago, lying in bed, I watched the weekly summary that The Daily Show posts most Fridays of its Monday-Thursday headline stories. Even though I watched that material when it was first telecast, it was interesting to me to see it in hindsight and condensed down into one 48 minute reprise.

I'm always impressed with the caliber of the writing on that program, especially when one considers how swiftly much of it needs to be created. An awful lot of it takes on extra meaning when watched later so I thought I'd link you to it. Jon Stewart's rant about pollsters was dead-on even though in this instance, the pollsters were pretty much on-target.

If you can spare the forty-eight minutes, it might give you an insightful perspective on the Election Day we all just experienced. If not, try watching it at four in the morning…

Avi Green wrote me to ask…

Hello, I'm a Pennsylvania native who now lives in Jerusalem, Israel, and I've looked at your site once in a while. I watched Garfield and Friends in my childhood, and I know about your Judeo-Christian background, which is why I decided now to ask for your "Ask Me Anything" category: have you ever visited Israel, and ever wanted to familiarize yourself with your heritage connections?

Come to think of it, have you ever wanted to visit Armenia as well? On the former country, where I live today, there are plenty of great sites you might want to visit, like Jerusalem itself and the Old City, Hebron's Cave of Patriarchs, the Galon Fortress, which was recently renovated, and even the Israel Museum in Jerusalem as well as the National Library. Why, come to think of it, if you ever decide to visit Jerusalem, you might even want to try riding the light railway system that's been in operation for 15 years now. And if you visit Holon, they have a cartooning museum located there that can be worth checking out as part of your own career in animation and comics.

So, have you ever paid Israel a visit, or would you want to for as long as it's possible?

Never visited any of those places, nor had any interest in that kind of travel. I could give you a whole list of reasons starting with my food allergies and my dislike of sitting in an airplane for more than a few hours at a time, as well as my complete inability to learn more than a few words of any foreign language. But really, I've just never had much interest in sightseeing or going to places I've never been just because I've never been there.

I keep getting and declining invites to comic conventions in the United Kingdom or South America and, once in a while, Asia. No, thank you. Not interested, especially now that I'm having trouble walking. I used to love going to Las Vegas and now I don't have the slightest urge to go there…and I don't see that changing.  But thanks for asking.

Fred Kaplan has an article up with the startling headline, "In a Shocking Update, Netanyahu's Main Opponent Is Joining With Two Arab Parties to Make a Government." Here's an excerpt…

Fast on the heels of Tuesday's mind-blowing American midterm elections, Israelis are forming a new government that seems hardly less astonishing — a ruling body for the Jewish state that includes Israeli Arabs.

Israel held its own national election last week, but it resulted in a stalemate. Neither of the two main coalitions — one helmed by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the other by opposition leader Gadi Eisenkot — on a majority of seats in the parliament. Thus, neither could form a government. But there was one intriguing outcome in the vote count: Two Arab parties together won 19 seats — almost twice as many as the 10 seats they won in the previous election. If either Netanyahu or Eisenkot invited the Arabs to join his coalition, he would have enough seats to win.

Kaplan doesn't foresee a long life for any new government who might emerge from this marriage…but it oughta really shake things up while it survives. And might cause the end of Benjamin Netanyahu's time in power.

Sorry to hear that the online magazine Salon is shutting down. I've linked to many articles there and found many more that I enjoyed. They're apparently keeping the archives online indefinitely so you can still read what's there, at least for a while. Enjoy it while you can.

It's been many moons since I posted one of these and I'm going to try to get to the end of the series soon. This entry was another "oldie" when I made my mixtape in 1972.  "Have I the Right?" was eight years old then…the creation of a British group called The Honeycombs. They were kind of one-hit wonders. This one topped the charts but nothing else they were recorded did. I liked it at the time; not so much now when I just heard it again for the first time in many a year.

Here's a video of them lipsyncing to the record and pretending to be playing their instruments, years before musical groups would be playing on wireless electric guitars. So they didn't even try to pretend they were actually playing…

My friends Brendan Foley and Shelly Goldstein (Man and Wife) have a genuine hit show in Sherlock & Daughter. It's been a big hit throughout most of the world for the last eighteen months but now it's finally (finally!) debuting in the United Kingdom — today, I think.  If you haven't seen it, see it.  And don't take my word for it.  Here's a small bit of a review in the current issue of Good Housekeeping…

The upcoming series, which is arriving on our screens imminently, will transport us to 1896 — a period in time when Sherlock Holmes (now played by David Thewlis) is in serious trouble. He's caught up in a conspiracy and, instead of cracking the case, he ends up getting his friends kidnapped and making the whole situation worse. And it seems there's only one person who can help him — Amelia (Blu Hunt), whose mother has been murdered and who believes Sherlock is her long, lost father. But is he really?

Speaking to Variety about creating a new iteration of Arthur Conan Doyle's character, creator and writer Brendan Foley explained that this Sherlock is a "classic Sherlock," but with a twist. "He's a lion in winter. He's older, grumpier, and then we're able to play with the other side," he said. "Amelia lands like a spunky meteorite, right into poor old Holmes' tidy little world. He's a big experimenter, so is it possible that just once in his life he might have thought: 'What’s all this human emotion stuff about? I'd better try it.' And what if that went as badly as possible on that one occasion? Everyone has emotions. It may be hidden, but it's there. We dig it out."

And you don't have to go to England to watch it. Not if you get the CW Network on your telly here. Give it a peek.

And now we have Fred Kaplan weighing in on how the elections yesterday may impact the U.S. Military. Among other things, he says…

Conventional wisdom holds that foreign policy doesn't affect the outcome of American elections, but it cratered President Donald Trump's party in this one, at least indirectly. High prices, which swelled the magnitude of the "blue tsunami," were clearly the result of Trump's tariffs and his war on Iran.

One question now is whether the Democrats will be able to use their overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate to push back on those policies. Trump will probably resist the effort, claiming his powers, under Article 2 of the Constitution, as the armed forces' commander in chief. He also threatened to veto bills that he considers "insane," a term he applies to anything that challenges his prerogatives and priorities.

And then Fred goes on to discuss different scenarios. Give it a read if you can. It might turn out to be the most significant result of what happened in this country yesterday.

I was just watching some leading and/or newly-elected Democrats on the news. They were talking about ending the war, bringing down the cost of food and gas, making sure people have healthcare, holding lawbreakers accountable…topics like that.

Then I changed to another channel and there, live, was Donald Trump giving America a report on how construction of the ballroom is going.

I made that WOW! graphic up a few years ago and was waiting for an appropriate post to use it. Last night, things couldn't have gone much better for the Democratic Party and, I'd like to think, America.

I was channel-hopping all last night until about half past Abdul El-Sayed winning in Michigan…and maybe I just missed it but as newsfolks, talking heads, pundits and winning candidates groped for the right things to say, there was much that I didn't hear. Maybe someone said it on channels I wasn't watching when they said it but I didn't hear anyone say "impeachment" or "Jeffrey Epstein" or even "insider trading."

I didn't hear anyone say that any votes were rigged or miscalled. As so many expected.

I have one friend who was dead certain that if that Blue Tsunami seemed to be forming, Trump would do something like declaring Martial Law and calling out the National Guard to stop the counting and impound all the voting machines. Not a peep about that kind of thing.

I did hear that guy who kept saying "Vote like I'm on the ballot" quoted as reminding people that he wasn't on the ballot. And I heard people say that the Republican party now has to turn itself into something that isn't The Party of Donald Trump. That would be nice. And I heard a lot of people say "Wow!" That's putting it mildly.

Now I'm not going to get my $5,000 check from Donald Trump. Damn.

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…