Monthly Archives: May 2020

Mel Brooks on working with Orson Welles…

One of the keys to getting through this thing is, I think, accepting acceptance. Many things I don't like are way beyond my power to fix…Donald Trump, for example. In ordinary times, I've posted links to articles and arguments of my own about what a truly dangerous, incompetent buffoon I think he is.

That is not a recently-arrived-at position, by the way. Many years ago, I spent some time around him backstage at a David Letterman taping and Trump was rude, nasty, vulgar towards women and obsessed with two things: His personal wealth and people kissing his ass. He seemed to live for telling people how much richer he was than they were.

I have not seen one moment of his "presidency" that has even suggested to me that anything has changed about the man. He doesn't even strike me as a guy who really believes he's President of the United States or has a clue what that might mean in terms of obligations to others.

But you haven't seen many postings about him here lately because I figure that even the microscopic chances I had of convincing fans of his to see him my way are now non-existent. If the way he behaves during this — the greatest crisis of most of our lifetimes — doesn't change a mind, that mind is not changeable. So let's write about silly songs and comic books and cats in my backyard!

I accept that he's there. I also accept, as way too many people haven't, that we are in utterly uncharted territory here. We do not know when it will end and things will begin veering back towards normal…and how things will be different then.

I think it will end differently for each of us because each of us has a different standard for when we'll feel safe enough to venture more readily into public places. You may decide it's okay to go out, sans mask, and mingle with other people long before I do. If I owned a business that had to close because of the lockdown order, I would not assume I can or should open it the minute my state or city said it was okay. I certainly wouldn't reopen if I felt it would not be profitable to do that right away.

How many people are going to go to shows where they'd have to sit six feet from others? How many are going to get on airplanes? How much fun can you have anywhere if you're wearing a mask and worrying about what you touch and about that guy coughing seven feet from you?

Las Vegas is itching to reopen. Hotels are taking reservations for late May or early June. They're installing plexiglass panels between slot machines and when you check in, you'll be given a little kit with masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, safety instructions, wipes, etc. The gaming tables will keep players separated from one another and every hour or so, someone will come by and sterilize all the chips that have been changing gloved hands.

At each entrance, someone will be taking your temperature and if it's over 100.4°, you don't get in. (Foolish Question: If I'm one of those "whales" — the folks who go to Vegas, lose $200,000 and say we had a great time because they comped our room, meals and hooker — am I going to be turned away if my forehead says 101.5°?)

No shows. No tourist attractions. No Elvis impersonators. And at the few buffets that will reopen, you'll point to the food you want and a masked/gloved employee will scoop some of it onto your plate and then clean the serving spoon. This does not sound like a vacation paradise to me. The only folks who'll like it are the folks who've been banned from casinos for cheating or winning and who figure they might get back in somewhere masked.

I accept I'm not going there for a long time. How long? I accept that I have no idea. No one knows. No one can know. There are no precedents. This has never happened before. I couldn't even tell you when in the future I might feel it's okay to leave my house without a mask.

Nature abhors a vacuum and when there's something we don't know, we have a tendency to want to fill that gap with an answer even if it means yanking one out of one's butt. As I've gotten older, I've stopped believing (most of the time) that a wrong answer is better than no answer. If I ask you how to get to the post office, I'd vastly prefer "I don't know" to a semi-wild guess.

I love making plans. I used to drive Carolyn nuts with my itineraries and "to do" lists and telling her we had to leave for some event by exactly 5:05 PM. But I had a lot of information to use in making up those schedules and a sense of what everyone else would do. We're all living in the moment now and I accept that. I don't like it but I accept it. If your frustrations are reaching defcon proportions, you might try my approach. There's less disappointment when things don't happen.

If you absolutely must make a plan, label it "A" and then make Plan B and Plan C and D and an E and an F…and if you run out of letters before you run out of plans, go to "AA" and "BB" and so on. Because while I'm reasonably certain this will end and life will be a lot more like it was than as it is, I have no idea when or what will change. And neither do you so you might as well accept that.

There's no comic book convention in San Diego this year — or practically anywhere else — but our good friends at the The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog aren't letting a little thing like that stop them. Tonight, they kick off Season 9 of their fun 'n' informative podcasts about Comic-Con and related events and they'll be discussing with their special guest what it's like to have no Comic-Con and why it matters.

And who is this special guest? Why, it's me, of course.

The podcast kicks off tonight (Wednesday) at 6:30 PM Pacific Time and you can watch it live over at their website or it will be live on this blog.

I really like these guys who sing four-part harmony with themselves. Here's Sgt. Sonny with his latest…

Gerard Jones wrote comic books, including some for DC. He wrote books on comic book history and on pop culture. I liked talking to Gerry on the phone or at conventions. He seemed like a nice, bright guy.

Then something happened. I'll quote Wikipedia on it…

Jones was arrested in December 2016 on charges of distributing and possessing child pornography. His lawyer first entered a plea of "not guilty," but in April 2018 Jones changed his plea to "guilty," admitting that the police had found "numerous electronic devices containing tens of thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child pornography" in his home. In August 2018, Jones was sentenced to six years in prison, followed by a five-year period of supervised release, with an unspecified amount of restitution to be paid to his victims.

Jones is presently serving time in prison and is wrestling — I'm not sure that's the proper word — with various issues of atonement and rehabilitation and introspection and addiction and overcoming that addiction…and he's doing it the way most writers would: By writing. His letters from prison are being posted on this website and the design there is a bit confusing so here's a link to his first entry.

Reading what's posted so far left me with the sense of a man who's trying real, real hard to have his life make sense and to understand why he's where he is. I don't mean he doesn't understand why he was arrested and tossed in prison. I'm impressed that he seems to understand that with crystal clarity: It was because of an addiction…a couple, actually. But he's trying to grasp the reasons for those addictions and I'd like to see him achieve that. It might be a learning experience for us all.

Here's a short piece from the Writers Guild newsletter about how some of the late night shows are being written in this Time of Crisis. When this thing hit, I suggested here that they'd try what they're doing — a pretty obvious prediction if you ask me — but I haven't been all that thrilled with the results. Most of the interviews seem disconnected and in some cases, heavily edited. Many of them seem like awkward chats about how awkward the chats are, and a few that I've seen have been reminders that when things in this country are bad, wealthy celebrities don't have it so bad.

Here's thirteen and a half minutes of S. Sondheim's show Into the Woods performed quarantine style…

I do not have any webcasts scheduled at this time. I'm going to do some more. I just don't know when yet.

When Murphy the Cat began appearing in my yard, she would patiently wait until Lydia (who's been here since George W. Bush was president…ah, those were the days) finished eating. Only when Lydia had left the supper bowl would Murphy cautiously approach it and then eat every last bit of leftover Friskies.

Since Murphy has become a regular, I decided to start setting out two bowls, side by side, to see if they would dine side by side. That did not happen. Murphy still waited until Lydia had left the buffet, then quickly ate everything remaining. The other morning, I tried placing the dishes on opposite sides of the water dish and that made a difference. As you can see above, they feasted simultaneously…

…and then when Lydia left, Murphy went back and forth between the two bowls, dining alternately until they were both licked clean.

By the way, as you may have noticed, I've decided Murphy's a she. What's more, since her ear doesn't have the notch that indicates the cat has been spayed, she's a cat who may turn up preggo one of these days, as Lydia once did. I went through a lot to catch Lydia and take her in for a spaying and a feline abortion. Murphy seems impossible to ever catch and I sure don't want a yardful of kittens who take after their mother and meow constantly for no visible reason.

Hope it doesn't come to that. Heck, for all I know, she might already be eating for two. Or more.

Several folks have sent me this and the last one suggested, "You'd better caution your readers that it contains language." Consider yourself cautioned…

My favorite singer, Audra McDonald, sings a medley from the show Carousel…

Our pal Eric Goldberg from the Disney Studio teaches you how to draw Mickey Mouse. It's pretty easy when all you have to do is copy your shirt…

I've been leaving the Fortress of Solitude a bit. Thursday afternoon, I drove an elderly neighbor to her bank. She was masked and gloved and if she wasn't in her nineties, I would have wondered if maybe she planned to rob the place and I'd been tricked into driving the getaway car.

Friday, I walked to a CVS Pharmacy for a few necessities and while I was there, stopped into a nearby restaurant for some to-go food, which of course is all they offer these days. Signs outside the place stated clearly that no one would be admitted or served without a mask and I, of course, had mine on. But as some of us in there were waiting for our orders, a man walked in without one. If he wasn't homeless, he was certainly dressed to make people think he was.

The restaurant staff was too busy to notice his masklessness as he approached the counter to order so I called their attention to it. The cashier told him he had to leave and he began arguing with her: "That's a lot of hooey and I want a meatball sandwich!"

I happen to think the "no mask, no service" policy is totally wise. But even if it's silly, he was still in the wrong to not comply with it and to think arguing would change anything.

I've seen this at banks. I've seen this at the airport and in hospitals and doctors' offices and other places. There are plenty of pointless or dumb rules in this world but it's even more pointless and dumber to debate them with someone who has no power whatsoever to change or not enforce them. Go challenge the mayor or the governor or whoever made the rule and can fire or punish underlings who don't follow orders.

The probably-homeless guy argued a bit. The mask thing is stupid because as anyone with half-a-brain knows, there is no pandemic. This whole corona thing is a hoax. No one's dying because of it. The death tolls are wild exaggerations and the people who are actually dying are just…you know, well, people die every day.

You want proof? People die every day from traffic accidents and cancer and heart disease and that most certain of deadly killers…natural causes. You're not hearing one word about that, are you? If you had a half-a-brain, you would have noticed.

That's because they need to report those deaths as "COVID-19 deaths" to prop up The Big Lie that's being swallowed whole by people with half-a-brain. If fifty people die in one city one day from those real killers, They (the ever-present, ominous "They") say it's five hundred corona deaths.

I remember saying to myself, "It's thinking like that that got that man where he is today."

He yelled and berated employees who were just doing their jobs and I somehow became the spokesperson for all those around me who wished the guy would go away. At one point, I told him in the tone you'd use to lecture a toddler, "This is not going to get you a meatball sandwich!" He went away, then came back two minutes later holding a tissue over his mouth — not even his mouth and nose — to demand his meatball sandwich.

The gent taking orders told him to get out and he finally did. A few minutes later when I left with my order, he was standing in front of the restaurant talking to himself about those "half-a-brain" people. I walked right past him with my meatball sandwich…which, by the way, was real good.

It's been a busy day here in the fortress — prepping for the Cartoon Voices Panel, doing the Cartoon Voices Panel, recovering from the Cartoon Voices Panel…

Recovering involved a long nap but it also involved a lot of nice phone calls and e-mails and texts, including a few from friends I haven't heard from in quite a while. That was an unexpected bonus. I thought it went pretty well, especially considering the inevitable last-minute tech problem. One of our five panelists, Bob Bergen, suddenly couldn't hear me. He could hear the other four panelists but not me…and how can you be on a panel if you can't hear the host?

If you watch it — and I hope you will — you'll see how we coped with it at first, then fixed it. From that point on, everyone seemed to have a pretty good time, though I came up with several thoughts about things we could do better. If and when we do more of these, we'll try to perfect the form…and it's starting to look like a when, not an if. Stay tuned for more details…and thanks to everyone who watched us in real time. It made a difference, wholly positive, to know we were doing it for a live audience, even one we couldn't see or hear.

Featuring Bob Bergen, Julie Nathanson, Fred Tatasciore, Phil LaMarr and Secunda Wood…