Monthly Archives: January 2019

This coming Wednesday, January 30, I'll be doing a very rare bookstore signing at Atlantis Fantasyworld in Santa Cruz, California. The shop is located at 1020 Cedar St. — in Santa Cruz (of course) and I'll be there from Noon 'til 6 PM. Come by. Make a purchase. Keep me company. I think this is the first bookstore appearance I've made in about ten years.

In March, I'll be at two conventions, both of them in Southern California. March 7-10, it's the San Diego Comic Fest, a small (by Comic-Con standards) gathering that's intimate, friendly, unjammed and always a lot of fun. Details can be found on this website.

Then later in March — March 29 thru 31, to be precise — you'll find me at WonderCon Anaheim. Details here. At both of these assemblages, I'll be hosting panels and talking to people and doing my best to avoid sitting behind a table.

And I've accepted an invite to guest at this year's Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's June 14-16 and I don't know much more about it than that right now. Their website is over here.

And as you can probably guess, I'll be at Comic-Con International in San Diego, which is July 18-21 with a Preview Night on July 17. I still don't understand why they don't just say the convention is July 17-21 but then there are many things in this world I don't understand. This will the fiftieth of these conventions, which I find amazing. Even more amazing is that it'll be the fiftieth one of these I've attended. That is not humanly possible.

Ben Sternbach sends me an awful lot of questions and this morning, I decided to respond to this one…

I'm sure you watched Bill Maher's show last night so you must have seen his New Rules rant about how comic books are infantile garbage. If you'd been a guest on that show and had thirty seconds to rebut him on air, what would you have said?

I would have said something like, "You're right that there are a lot of childish, stupid comic books out there. There are also a lot of childish, stupid stand-up comedians and even some childish, stupid TV shows where people sit around discussing politics. I wouldn't judge everything in a form of communication by its worst examples.

"As for your point about how people should outgrow that kind of thing, I kinda feel that way about smoking pot but since I've never smoked pot, I'm not really in the ideal position to judge those who do. Since you proudly have not seen the best of what's being done in comic books, maybe you don't understand what people get out of them."

And then I'd pretty much forget about his comments. People say lots of things on television which strike me as wrong or simply uninformed. If you get upset about every one of them, you'll be upset a lot over things that you can't do anything about…and which don't have any impact on the world except to get you upset.

A profile of Mr. Eric Idle…

• Oh, great. They end the shutdown "temporarily" so we get to go through this again in three weeks. Meanwhile, Bill Maher has Ann Coulter as a guest tonight so we get to hear what she thinks about all this…

As I'm sure you've heard, Trump adviser Roger Stone was arrested this morning when FBI agents went to his Florida home…FBI agents who aren't being paid, apparently. There's devotion to duty.

There's news footage of them swarming all over his property but, alas, no video of Stone being taken away. I was hoping to see someone frog-marched. I still don't know what that is and won't until I see it actually done. Please, Robert Mueller, before you file your final report and the fight starts about whether anyone will get to read it, frog-march at least one person you take into custody. I'd really like to see it done to Jerome Corsi but you can even do it to me if you have to. I just want to see what that looks like.

If you want to know what Mr. Stone did to warrant all those warrants, Andrew Prokop has a full explanation. Basically, he's guilty of associating with Donald Trump, which apparently no one can do without obstructing justice.

I'm not sure who "Mr Dooves" is other than that he's someone who does a cappella renditions of TV theme songs. I love good a cappella singing and here he provides that for the theme from a show I wrote and co-produced for seven seasons…

If you're really interested in what Trump's doing wrong when it comes to a president achieving his objectives, spend the time to read this piece by Ezra Klein.

Put simply, it's that Trump is oriented towards the "big win" in every battle. That was always the raison d'être of business dealings. He's never been as interested in the deal that's a win/win for both sides as he is in the one that's a Big Win for Donald Trump and a humiliating defeat for the other guy. (Anyone remember how loudly he bragged about getting the advantage over Merv Griffin on that casino deal? The one which eventually turned out to be a lose/lose for both men?)

Whether that works in the business world is a separate argument but as Klein notes, citing the works of author Frances Lee, it sure doesn't work for someone in the White House. Merely by being president, you become The Enemy of an opposition party whose votes you need to get anything passed these days…so they oppose your win and it doesn't happen. As Klein explains, it's a lesson Barack Obama had to learn and one which Trump, by his personalization of every issue, probably can't.

William Saletan runs down a partial list of incoherent and inconsistent things that Rudy Giuliani has said in defense of his client, Donald Trump. There are a number of these articles online and I don't see that their authors have considered the possibility that Giuliani is saying these stupid things because his client has ordered him to.

It is of critical importance that we build a wall along our Southern border because it will eliminate all crime and if we don't, rapists and murderers will keep coming across that border and will be raping and murdering. It will even stop drug trafficking into our country even though every agency that deals with the drug problem says that more than 95% of all illegal drugs that are brought into this country come in through airports.

But the wall is still of vital importance. It wasn't that important two months ago when Republicans controlled the House of Representatives and would do anything the president asked for but as soon as Democrats took control, it became an absolute necessity.

It also wasn't so important that the Trump Administration has drawn up any firm plans as to what we'd build or even what it would be made of, nor did they say who would do the actual building. I'm guessing Trump Construction and they'll do it with the same efficiency we know from Trump Airlines, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Casinos, Trump Mortgage Co., Trump Steaks and Trump Travel.

Congress must okay the building of this wall even though there's no real budget for what it will actually cost, nor any plan on how to deal with all the private property that must be acquired to build the wall or the places where the wall cannot be built because there are rivers in the way. But it will be a great wall and no one will be able to go over it or under it or even through it, even if we won't spend the money to have armed guards patrolling it 24/7.

This wall is so needed that Trump said he'd be proud to shut down the government over it and not blame Democrats and of course, it's their fault the government is shut down now. Do I have this right?

I have no particular opinions or rooting interest in the Academy Award nominations that were announced yesterday. But every year, I feel compelled to remind y'all that you can't read much into such things other than that in category, certain numbers of unidentified people cast more votes for some choices than others. You have no idea how many votes anyone got and that person you think got "snubbed" may have missed a nomination by one vote or many. And you have no idea if the folks who didn't vote for him or her even saw the film in question.

I saw several people write that since Julie Andrews won for Best Actress in the original Mary Poppins and Emily Blunt wasn't nominated for the sequel, the Academy was saying that Julie was a better Mary than Emily. I think she was but the voters didn't say any such thing. It said that in 1964, more of the people voting that year thought Ms. Andrews gave the best performance that year, as opposed to the different set of voters this year who preferred at least five other performances this year to Ms. Blunt's. Emily was competing with a different group of voters against different competition.

She was probably also competing with The Black Panther in the category of where Disney would spend its bucks to secure Oscar nominations.

And the thing to remember about "snubbed" is that the Academy has an arbitrary number of nominations in each category. In a year when there are three outstanding performances by Actors in Supporting Roles, they nominate five. And in a year when there are nine outstanding performances by Actors in Supporting Roles, they nominate five…and everyone says that four guys got "snubbed."

And some or all of those four guys might have secured Academy Award Nominations if — and they themselves have no control of this — the films they were in had been released a few weeks earlier or a few weeks later so they'd qualified in a different year. It's not just what you do in a movie, it's when that movie opens.

I won't be posting much today here. Remember that script I finished last week in Las Vegas? The one I wrote in-between eating at a White Castle and watching a Dean Martin impersonator who wouldn't fool you into thinking he was Dean Martin even if you were as drunk as Dean Martin? Well, it looks like I only thought I was finished. Today, I hope to be finished with it. But before I dive back into it, a few quick topics…

In this post, I said that the Crystal Geyser Water folks bottle their water for Southern California (and probably some outlying areas) at a bottling plant on Mt. Shasta in Olancha, CA. Well, reader-of-this-site John Schrantz informs me that "Mount Shasta is a good 500 miles away from Olancha, way up in Northern California. Olancha is a small desert town in the Owens Valley of Eastern California. The water bottled there comes from the nearby Sierra Nevada Mountains."

Darryl Musick wrote to tell me much the same thing and I guess I got confused. Crystal Geyser has two plants in California. One is at Olancha Peak in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the city of Alancha. The other is on Mt. Shasta in the city of Weed, California. I regret the error.

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I also regret eating at the White Castle that's part of the Casino Royale on the Las Vegas Strip. I liked White Castle burgers when I had them back east…but the last time was more than ten years ago, more like fifteen. They were pretty awful in Vegas. So this leaves us with three possibilities…

1. White Castle has changed the recipe.
2. They haven't but the place in Vegas doesn't make them very well or…
3. My tastes have changed over the years.

I'm going with "c" here.  Since my sweet tooth went away around 2008, I don't like a lot of foods I liked before then.  In-and-Out Burgers got very untasty to me in the same way.

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I wish I'd seen this yesterday: Dana Milbank lists the uncanny similarities between Martin Luther King and Donald John Trump. He left out the fact that these days, each man is saying about the same number of wise things.  See you tomorrow or maybe later today after the script is done…again.

Hurry back, John Oliver! We need you…

This last visit to Vegas was the first time in twenty-some-odd years I went there alone. Amber was busy with schoolwork and while it would have been nice to have her along, I was okay by myself. I'm an only child, a never-wed male and a professional writer of almost half a century….so I'm can be comfy with Alone as long as it isn't permanent. At times, I like the sheer self-indulgence of it: Eating where and when I want, sleeping where and when I want, working when I feel like working.

But I'd forgotten about playing Hooker Dodgeball. As I mentioned, I like to walk a lot when I'm in Vegas and it's not easy for an all-by-himself male to traverse The Strip without being approached by a prostitute or one of their "agents." I used to have that happen in New York, too.

The first few times it happened in Manhattan, some solicitors did not easily take "no" for an answer. One lady on whom everything was skin-tight except for her skin followed me down 44th Street for about three blocks, loudly describing her skill-set in language that would have caused Larry Flynt to say, "Have you no sense of decency?" She only gave up when we passed a Ray's Pizza and she realized she was hungry. She stopped trying to convince me I wanted a piece of…well, you finish the joke.

I later described the awkward situation to a friend who advised, "There's only one way to shoo them away. Tell them you've got a wife or girl friend back in your hotel room. That indicates to them you're not desperate for female companionship, plus they'll know you can't take them back to your room."

That made sense so the next time I was approached by a woman in "that" profession, I said, "Sorry but I have a girl friend back in my room." The hooker looked me up and down and said, "You do not have a girl friend back in your room!"

I sighed and said, "You're right."

I managed to escape her fleshy sales pitch. I managed to escape all such propositions but none of the ladies ever seemed to believe it. Every time I said it, the courtesan replied, "You do not have a girl friend back in your room!" Every damned one of them. They must have sensed I read comic books or something.

Then in May of 2013 when I was briefly separated from Carolyn, I went to Las Vegas with a woman I thought was quite adorable. When we walked down the street together, I was unapproached by hookers or their bookers. I just had to fend off the far more annoying offers to sit through a presentation about why I need to invest in a timeshare vacation home. As far as I'm concerned, selling those should be illegal and selling one's body should be legal.

That trip, my friend and I were staying at the Monte Carlo, which is no longer the Monte Carlo, and the second night of our two-night stay, we turned in around 4 AM. Less than three hours later, she woke me up and in a raspy voice moaned, "Claritin-D." Allergies had kicked in and she couldn't sleep without some of that stuff. Which meant that Mark had to get up, get dressed, go out and hike down the boulevard to the CVS.

"Hike" is the wrong word. Mark stumbled out onto The Strip where he — which is to say, I — was reminded how odd Vegas is at that hour. The sun was kinda halfway-up but they hadn't quite turned off all the nighttime neon…so it felt like the world hadn't quite decided if it wanted to wake up or not. At that hour, I always see a lot of couples who've stayed up all night returning to their hotel rooms. The guy's always staggering and holding a three-foot-long daiquiri glass with about an inch left in the bottom. The gal's always barefoot and carrying her shoes.

In the CVS, I was trying to locate Claritin-D. In the same aisle, there was a woman who could not have dressed more like a hooker if it was a sketch on The Carol Burnett Show: Tight "hot pants," leopard-print halter top, shoes that added 8" to her height and a bright orange day-glo wig that added another eight. She asked me if I knew where they kept the Maalox. I pointed it out to her. Then she asked me if I was interested in going out on a "date" and she somehow even pronounced the quotation marks around that word.

I have never in my life had the slightest desire for that kind of "date." Nope, sorry, thanks but no thanks. But I did think that if I ever did, my first would not be arranged in the antacid aisle of a drugstore at 6:45 in the morning while I had a woman I loved waiting for me in a hotel room, and it would not involve a prostitute with Acid Reflux Disease.

Not thinking too well at that hour, I gave her my standard turndown — "Sorry but I have a girl friend back in my room" — and waited for her to tell me she could tell I didn't. She looked me over and instead, she said, "Yeah, I guess you do." It was the best a person in her profession has ever made me feel but I still didn't give her any money.

Instead, I located the Claritin-D, took it back to the Monte Carlo and gave it to my friend. She responded by sleeping until we had to pack hurriedly and check out but it was still kind of a wonderful night. This was in 2013.

So last week, I'm once again walking solo down the Las Vegas Strip and, sure enough, a young woman steps into my path, tells me I'm cute and asks if I want to go out on a "date." She pronounced the word with even more unhidden hidden meaning. I knew if I said "Sorry but I have a girl friend back in my room." she'd respond with "You do not have a girl friend back in your room" but I said it anyway.

I was wrong. The script has changed.

I said, "Sorry but I have a girl friend back in my room" and she said, "You got a picture of her on your cell phone? Because if she's hot, I'll do you both for a hundred dollars." Who says you can't get a bargain in Vegas anymore?

This is from The Royal Variety Performance back in 1991. Sir David Frost introduces the fine singer Anne Howard with an aria from Madame Butterfly. But you can kinda guess where this one is going to go off the rails…

In the late eighties, I used to go to Las Vegas ten or more times a year. I was a bit obsessed with card-counting at Blackjack, not so much for the monetary benefits but truly as one of those things that you do just to see if you could do it. I did it enough to satisfy myself that I could do it, then gave it up forever. It turned out to be not as much fun as one might think: Mild rewards for a helluva lot of work.

People ask me, "Weren't you afraid of getting caught and having some goon drag you into the back room and beat the crap outta you?" Not really. If they still do that to anyone, they don't do it to anyone playing at the low levels where I kept my winning. At first — and at worst — they'd back you off, telling you to take your action elsewhere. That only happened to me once — it was at the Las Vegas Club downtown, which is no longer there — and oddly enough, I wasn't winning due to counting at that moment. I was winning just because the dealer happened to be dealing me great hands. They do that sometimes.

But I was wearing one of those big Casio watches that stored a hundred phone numbers in it and that looked more Jetson-y than it was. There was nothing on it that could aid a person in gambling but the Casino Host Guy who watched for cheating didn't know that, decided it was suspicious and excluded me.

I never played Craps. I never played Keno. I never played Roulette or Poker or Pai-Gow or most other games. I occasionally put some bucks into slot machines or, more often, Video Poker machines…but my only gambling really was Blackjack. I have not played even a hand of it this century.

Nor have I even kept up on the rule changes. A "natural" in Blackjack is when you're dealt an ace and a 10-value card (K,Q,J,10) and they traditionally pay 3-2, meaning that your bet of $20 gets you $30. A lot of casinos have switched on certain games to 6-5 payoffs which means a natural pays less. I haven't bothered to learn how that alters Basic Strategy since my Blackjack days are behind me.

How do you win in Vegas? You play until you're ahead, then give it up forever. That's the only way and it's what I did. If I'd kept playing, at some point I would have given it all back…and then some.

So I liked Blackjack there for a while. More than that, I liked the shows. They were cheap and diverse and I had a lot of "ins" to get backstage and meet the performers. In the eighties, there were still a lot of acts around who'd been working that town for a long time and I met a lot of showroom managers who had tales of Frank and Dino and Sammy and their era.

I liked the stories. I liked hanging out with comedians. I liked the feeling of pure show business. The showgirls who walked around naked backstage at some shows were not without their appeal. One of these days, I'd like to write a novel about one of those days.

I also liked the buffets. They cost a lot more now but even if they were still their old prices, they're not for me. Since my Gastric Bypass, I'm physically unable to eat enough to justify more than about a quarter of the price at the cheapest buffet. Last time I took Amber to Vegas, I took her to a buffet that was $39.95 per person and she isn't a big eater, either. I think I actually lost more at that one buffet than I ever did on slot machines.

What do I still like? The people. I enjoy being around people enjoying themselves. I like that I've gotten away from home but so many things I need are handy. In my hotel, there's a 24-hour restaurant serving quite edible pizza. I was working all night and at 4 AM one morn, I took a break, started doing a backup and virus scan on my laptop and left it running while I went down and grabbed a slice.

I like walking in Las Vegas, especially when the wind is clean and crisp and in my face. I like just studying the hotels, noting how they do what they do and why they do it.

But there is a drawback to walking on The Strip when you're a guy and you're by yourself. You get approached (sometimes, accosted) by hookers. I've never patronized one of those people but I sure get offers. I'll tell you about last week's sales pitch in the next one of these.