Monthly Archives: October 2020

I haven't updated the meter in quite a while and it may be off by one or two. Counting has been a little tricky because a couple of folks I know came off the list. They were offensively pro-Trump for a while and then they saw the light. Alas, their spots were taken by a few acquaintances who were non-offensively pro-Trump but as the chances of a second term have declined, they've doubled or even tripled-down on how he's the savior of America, hand-picked by God Almighty to rule us forever. And in some cases, gotten as rude as he is.

I suspect few if any of the friends I've lost understand that what came between us was not that they supported Donald Trump but that they got nasty and rude and insulting about it. This is mostly a personal matter, not a political one. I may even have to have a little chart of friends I've lost because they've gotten hysterical with anti-Trump positions.

So now it's all in the final weeks. I refer you to Nate Silver's article, "8 Tips To Stay Sane In The Final 15 Days Of The Campaign." Remember that all news coverage is ClickBait in some way or other and that nothing will get you to click like a headline that claims some sudden development may decide the election or has thrown all you know into doubt.

Remain calm. It's going to be a Roller Coaster not just until Election Day but perhaps for weeks after. This is normal. We need to remind each other of that since it's becoming harder and harder to even remember what "normal" is.

Matt Shuham tells us "Here's Where The President Got His Latest Dumb Anti-Mask Talking Point."

Bob Elisberg — who blogs over here and is a good refuge when you crave anti-Trump posts and I'm not doin' em — sent me a link to this video and told me to just watch it. I give it to you with the same advice…

You might remember this from May of 2019. A crazy woman stole a motorhome and led police on a wild, destructive chase out in the San Fernando Valley. She had two dogs with her and…well, it was one of the weirdest things I ever saw.

Usually, we never hear what becomes of these people after they're arrested but here's the other end of the story: She was just sentenced to nearly nine years in state prison…

The 54-year-old Santa Clarita woman was immediately sentenced following her guilty plea Thursday to two counts each of hit-and-run driving resulting in serious injury to another person, animal cruelty and driving under the influence of a drug causing injury, along with one count each of fleeing a pursuing peace officer's motor vehicle causing serious bodily injury and assault with a deadly weapon causing great bodily injury.

I don't know if nine years is a fair sentence but I sure don't think it's too harsh.

In 1959, Hugh Hefner — publisher of the then-up-and-coming magazine Playboy — hosted a syndicated TV series from Chicago called Playboy's Penthouse. It ran for two seasons and was followed in 1969 by two seasons of Playboy After Dark, which was basically the same show except in color and produced in Los Angeles. On both shows, the premise was that you were invited to one of the famous, celebrity-filled parties at Hef's mansion and got to mingle, watch his more famous guests perform and listen in on conversations and interviews.

I had a few brief experiences with Hef's real parties — the ones at his home, not in a TV studio — and I quickly learned a few things about them. One was that everyone present felt really privileged to be there and that you had to keep saying that, especially if you at all interacted with Hef.  The biggest thing about being at a party at the Playboy Mansion was that you were at a party at the Playboy Mansion.  You felt special because of that…and often that was the only real reason to go.

I also learned that to be invited, you had to fall into one of three categories…

1. You had to be really famous or…
2. You had to be really gorgeous or…
3. You had to be a crony of Hef's whom he'd granted the special privilege of being there so you could hit on folks in Category 1 for Show Biz connections and/or Category 2 for Love Connections.

I did not fit into any of these three categories, which is probably why I did not remain on the guest list for long.  Actually, I got booted off and one of these days, I'll tell the story here of how I managed that.  By then though, I'd learned that I didn't fit in there.

I had mixed feelings about Hef's TV parties. He was an awkward host — much nicer and funnier in person than he was on the show. He had on some of the best comedians then working but they were performing for Hef's TV Party Guests — paid extras who laughed like paid extras, phonier than any prerecorded laugh track ever. You can almost feel them being directed when to laugh (often in the wrong places) and for how long.

But what intrigued me was that in the midst of all that fakery, you often got performances by artists who were rarely if ever seen on television and a lot of stimulating conversation. Here's an excerpt from this review of the video I'm introducing here…

As few people under 60 will be aware of the two politically progressive talk-and-music syndicated shows Hef produced and hosted at the beginning and end of the 1960s, Brigitte Berman's documentary will be a bit of an eye-opener, primarily due to the shows' then-unheard-of racial mix and political talk but also as a curious cultural artifact of the Swinging Sixties.

Much of what Hefner pushed in the sixties is outta-date and outgrown and much of what was on those shows now stands as camp, especially when the tuxedo-clad on-screen guests groove to songs from Woodstock. But as the review notes, "Barry Melton of Country Joe and the Fish recalls having had a booking on The Ed Sullivan Show yanked due to fear the band would perform their trademark anti-Vietnam war song 'I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag,' which was exactly what Hefner wanted them to sing."

That kind of thing alone makes Hef's two series worthy of attention…and therefore, the documentary well worth watching. You can watch it below. Thanks to ace publicist Jeff Abraham for telling me its producers had put it online…

So I just saw this headline…

More people watched Biden on ABC than Trump on NBC, MSNBC and CNBC

…and I thought, "Oh, that's gotta hurt." No doubt if the positions were reversed, Trump would claim that as an indicator that the polls were wrong; that more people love him than love Joseph R. Biden. Which, of course, it would not be just as the real news isn't proof Biden's gonna win. It's a measure of what people were watching, not how registered voters are voting.

I actually thought Trump would do better than Biden for a simple reason: His interviews are more volatile and more colorful…and a lot of Americans are waiting for him to go so full-goose-bozo in front of a camera that even Rudy Giuliani won't be able to defend it as normal. We're expecting Trump to turn into that dictator in the Woody Allen film Bananas who decrees that underwear must be worn on the outside and that all children under sixteen years old are now sixteen years old.

I caught a little of each — not a lot but enough to see Trump was sweating and wanting to strangle Savannah Guthrie for asking hardball questions and calling him out on answers that would have made Sean Hannity wet himself. Over at Biden's Town Hall, he was giving real answers, speaking mostly of policy. It may not have been Good Television but I think it was Good Campaigning. I thought this dodge by Trump would have hurt him with undecided voters if there were any…

Guthrie grilled Trump about a retweet he posted on Wednesday evening of a conspiracy theory promoted by a QAnon account. The tweet accused Biden of pulling strings to take out the group of Navy SEALs who killed Osama bin Laden — a theory refuted by the fact that every Navy SEAL involved in the bin Laden raid is in fact still alive.

Instead of even trying to defend himself, Trump suggested to Guthrie that because he read it on the internet it might be true, describing the conspiracy theory as "an opinion of somebody and that was a retweet. I'll put it out there. People can decide for themselves. I don't take a position."

It's obviously reckless and irresponsible for the president to amplify incendiary conspiracy theories that are clearly false, not to mention defend QAnon, which he did during the same town hall. And in one of the more memorable moments of the evening, Guthrie hit back, admonishing Trump, "You're the president. You're not someone's crazy uncle who can retweet whatever."

That was a quote from this article and if you read the whole thing, you'll see how this morning, Trump retweeted a story he spotted on the web that said…

In a last-ditch effort to stop negative stories about Joe Biden and his family from spreading, Twitter shut down its entire social network Thursday.

You're smart enough to know it wasn't true. It was from a website that clearly labels its stories as satire. Why wasn't Donald Trump that smart?

I'm not sure when exactly this was released but the AARP magazine has a long article by David Hochman on the confusing mess of Stan Lee's last few years on this planet. It's one of those He Said/She Said/He Said/He Said/They Said/She Said/Somebody Said stories where it's hard to figure out which version of reality to trust so you wind up trusting none of them.

I have no insights to offer about the events covered in the article. The last dozen-or-so times I saw him, he was deliriously happy to be either signing his autograph for big bucks or posing for photos with famous people and being treated as one himself. I am not suggesting this was his constant state. It's just what I saw on those occasions. I'm so glad I wasn't around for the other stuff.

Some of you are really going to thank me for this. May before last, Comedy Central debuted a new series starring Jordan Klepper called simply Klepper. And you can just imagine how many meetings it took to come up with that.

They'd canceled his previous series, The Opposition with Jordan Klepper, which I enjoyed but did not consider a great loss. I thought Mr. Klepper was brilliant on The Daily Show, especially in the Jon Stewart years when it was tough to stand out from the herd of brilliant correspondents. But on The Opposition, he tried to do to Alex Jones what Stephen Colbert had done to Bill O'Reilly and the difference wasn't different enough to make it a different show.

So they gave him Klepper and after eight episodes, they took away Klepper. I thought every one of the eight was real good and that he broke new ground as a correspondent who not only reported on social injustices but actually got involved in fighting them. For one of the stories, he even got arrested and in others, he probably put even more of himself on the line. Throughout all eight, he managed to not only be funny but also, given the gravity of some of the topics, appropriately funny.

Klepper came and went with very little notice but I saw all eight…and have been watching them again. Comedy Central has put them all on YouTube…for how long, I do not know. Below, you can watch Episode 1 and here's a link to the entire run. See if you don't enjoy them as much as I did and still do…

Nate Silver's 538 website has just flipped Georgia from being "slightly favored" to go for Trump to "slightly favored" to go for Biden. This is not a state Biden needs. Indeed, he could lose Georgia and also the "swing states" of Florida, Arizona and North Carolina — all of which have him currently leading — and still win the Electoral College. But Trump probably needs all of them and Georgia's a real tough state for a Republican to not win by a big margin. Trump carried it by five points last time and now he's approximately tied.

My Trump-opposing friends seem to be divided about this Town Hall that he's doing tonight on NBC. Roughly half seem to think it's shameful that the network is giving this man air time; that he should either do the planned Town Hall with Biden or keep the hell off their television sets. The rest seem to think that the more the public sees of him, the less likely they are to vote for the guy. One suggested Biden in his competing town hall should just keep telling viewers to switch over to NBC.

Me, I'm kind of feeling it doesn't matter; that anyone who hasn't voted yet or isn't sure how they will is going to flip a coin or vote for Howie Hawkins (he's the Green Party candidate) or not vote or something. Still, more votes for my guy is always nice.

And I think it says something that most of you don't even know who the Green Party candidate is this time and I had to go look it up. The last two times out, we all knew it was Jill Stein.

I'm not watching much of the mud-wrestling though I have to admit to a certain fascination with Trump's ranting about the Nobel Peace Prize(s) he thinks he won or deserves a few dozen of or something. Being nominated for one is absolutely meaningless since hundreds of people are nominated each year, usually by one person, and the judges who actually pick the honoree must not take even take 98% of those nominations seriously.

Trump doesn't understand that. He doesn't understand that the best anyone can possibly do there is to win one, not a shelf full. He doesn't even understand that being "nominated" doesn't mean you've got a real shot at winning. It's like buying a lottery ticket and figuring out how you're going to spend all that money.

I'd be surprised if he even knows what the Nobel Peace Prize is. He just knows he doesn't have one and he wants a few, like he wants his face on Mount Rushmore and on all the stamps and money.

So there are all these clips of him complaining that the evil news media didn't make a headline story out of his "three" nominations — which were actually two different right-wing guys with no clout nominating him for the same one award — like the evil news media did with Obama. There was actually no attention paid when Obama was nominated and not all that much when, unlike Trump, Obama won.

But it's so important to Trump to always be The Victim, unfairly denied recognition of his greatness…so important to convince people that the only news reported about him that's true is the good stuff and even that isn't good enough…

Years ago when Ross Perot took his best shot at becoming President of the United States, he went on Larry King's show and other programs just before Election Day and confidently predicted he would get all 538 Electoral Votes. He would carry every single state in a landslide. And then when the actual votes were counted, he didn't come within fifty miles of winning even one of the electoral variety. The closest he came was 30% of the popular vote in Maine.

I wondered a lot about how much Mr. Perot actually believed he was going to win at all, let alone by the biggest victory in the history of politics. Even dictators who can have you killed for not voting for them don't win like that.

And I also wondered about the simple wisdom of predicting that because I think it made him look like a nutcase to voters who decided at the last minute. He may also have convinced a few of his supporters they could stay home because their ballots weren't needed.

There's a fine but significant line between spewing bullshit and actually believing your own bullshit and I still have no idea which side of that line Perot was on. Or quite where Donald Trump — the highly-aggrieved deserving winner of multiple Nobel Peace Prizes — is.

I've been nominated for three Emmy Awards and I've won a grand total of None of Them. I can live with that. What gripes me is that the friggin' Hollywood Reporter didn't run headlines saying I won six of them. Over the years, they've announced that Commie/Liberal Ed Asner has won seven. It's not fair, I tell you. It's not fair.

Most of you know that I don't like candy corn and a few of you have somehow figured out that I don't like Donald Trump. And so far, fourteen of you have sent me this photo which you found somewhere on the Internet. Thank you and you can stop now.

A salute to George and Ira Gershwin by Michael Feinstein and friends…

Tomorrow night, there's a Town Hall with Joe Biden on ABC opposite a Town Hall with Donald Trump on NBC. We really have turned this election into a reality show. If I ran CBS, I'd schedule a Town Hall with Daffy Duck opposite them and win the time slot.

It's getting easier for me to pay very little attention to The Election. If there's an upset coming, there's zero evidence of it on the horizon. Trump's pretty much thrown everything he's got at Biden and none of it's sticking. (Even Bill Barr couldn't gin up evidence that Obama and Biden had conspired against Trump, though Barr's going to do all he can to hide the report that exonerates them.) I think a lot of people are voting early because they figure that once their ballots are in, they no longer have to listen to any of this stuff.

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Partial Change of Subject: Like you, I don't like getting Spam e-mail. I have a separate account without my name on it and I divert most of it there. My endless messages telling me Donald Trump personally is asking the whereabouts of Mark Evanier's donations are all going there along with the messages from folks who want me to help them claim their $22,000,000 windfalls which they'll share with me.

That mailbox also contains an awful lot of messages from gorgeous, lonely women who've never seen me and have no idea where I live but they're dying and ready to meet in person with me for sex. There are also messages from companies that have invented a foolproof way to enlarge the body part of your choice…which I guess I might need if I start meeting with those women who've never seen me and have no idea where I live…

What strikes me about most of this e-mail is how unbelievably stupid they must believe the recipients of these messages are. You'd have to have the brains of an unsprouted Chia Pet to fall for some of these…and I guess somewhere, someone does. "Gwen" keeps writing me of how she dreams day and night of us making "hot monkey love" and I wonder how often she wrests money from some guy who thinks that (a) there is a Gwen, (b) "she" is someone with whom one would want to have "hot monkey love" and (c) "hot monkey love" is something pleasurable. I mean, it could involve flinging your feces at each other or just working for an organ grinder.

It's always seemed to me — and I think I've said this here before — that the folks who send this stuff out kind of presume that no one with an I.Q. over the speed limit will ever fall for their scams. I never get an intelligent one of these. There probably is an intelligent appeal for money for the Trump campaign but they're not making it…or at least sending it to whatever mailing list they got my e-mail address from. It's like they know 98% of the recipients are too smart to fall for their scams so they're targeting the 2%. I wonder how much that 2% brings in for some of them.

Here's something that'll come in really handy. It's all 1004 cartoons that were made by the Warner Brothers cartoon studio — every Looney Tune, every Merrie Melody — all running at the same time. Just what we needed!

P.S. If you've never seen "Coal Black and de Sebben Dwarfs," it's the twelfth cartoon from the left in the twelfth row — and as you can see, it's a real good print of it. Enjoy!

Meal Kits seem to be very popular these days. You know those things where they sell you all the ingredients for a great meal and give you instructions on how to cook said great meal? I think the trend started well before The Pandemic but with more folks than ever cooking at home, Meal Kits are more popular than ever.

Except around here. I don't go for them for a number of reasons, one being that I'm a terrible cook. Another is that I'm an impatient cook. I don't see why I should spend a large chunk of my day making a roast chicken when with a few clicks on an app, Grubhub will deliver to me a piping-hot Zankou Chicken and a container of their Basmati Rice in about a quarter of the time it would take me to make an inferior meal…and for about the same cost. (The last time I wrote something like this on this blog, a lady wrote me to say, "I can make a much better chicken at home." Well, good for you, ma'am. I can't.)

And the biggest reason I don't like Meal Kits is because — and they'll deny this but I know it's true — every time one is designed at any Meal Kit company anywhere, someone says, "Now, make sure you put in at least one component that Mark Evanier is deathly allergic to." And then in reply, someone says, "Don't worry. I'm making sure our whole menu will kill him." Okay, I'm kidding about the plot against my life but when I look at the selections offered by Meal Kit companies, that's what I sometimes think.

Recently, I noticed that the Chick-Fil-A fast food chain is experimenting with a Chicken Parmesan Meal Kit. Not all of their outlets have it but the ones near me do.

It comes with prepared, warm chicken filets, a packet of marinara sauce, a packet of cheese, a packet of cooked pasta, a packet of Alfredo sauce, a small box of kale and cherry tomatoes and a lemon. To get what should wind up looking like the above photo, you put the filets on a baking sheet, pour on the marinara and cheese and then bake. While that's cooking, you chop up the kale and the tomatoes, mix them with the Alfredo and put it all in a skillet and then you cut the lemon and…

…and I don't care because they lost me at the baking sheet. Too much work, too much chance of me screwing up…and I can't eat kale or raw tomatoes and I don't like Alfredo so forget it. Just forget it. This is above and beyond the fact that the political end of Chick-Fil-A makes me uneasy about patronizing their business. I do sometimes because I like their sandwiches and I'm unconvinced that me boycotting them will accomplish anything or send the CEO any kind of message. But I don't give them anywhere near as much of my business as I might if I didn't have to think about this.

So though I love me a good chicken parm, all of the above combined to make me decide not to try theirs. And I haven't but earlier this evening…well, let me tell you what I did.

A lady I know was coming over to drop something off for me. She phoned rom her car and said, "I'm in the drive-thru line at Chick-Fil-A getting myself a sandwich. Would you like me to get something for you?" I said no and then I said, "Wait. Do they sell just a plain, breaded chicken filet that's not spicy?" She said they did and I had her get me one.

Soon, she dropped off the item she had for me and also my filet. It was still warm. I decided not to mess at all with the oven. I put a non-stick frying pan on the stovetop, put the filet in the pan, added a big spoonful or two of Rao's Marinara Sauce and a mound of shredded parmesan and mozzarella. I heated it until the cheese melted and that was all it took.

It was a bit small — I should have gotten two — but what there was of it was terrific. I've had way worse chicken parm in acclaimed Italian restaurants. I won't make this often but I will make it again.