Monthly Archives: June 2021

• Little Known Fact: Champion Gymnast Simone Biles is 4'8" tall and weighs over 250 pounds. Of course, most of that is medals.

So what's going on with the Pacific Theater chain, the Arclight Cinema business and — of greatest interest to some of us — the Cinerama Dome Theater up on Sunset here in Hollywood? Friends close to that industry keep telling me the Cinerama Dome will reopen and thrive and it will someday show the movie it was built to house — It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World — again. But when? How? Who? Why?

Here's an article by Gene Maddaus about why it closed and what's going on with it. It left me more confused than before.

From James Corden's show last night: Corden, Marissa Jaret Winokur and Ariana Grande perform a Hairspray parody to celebrate the end of lockdowns. I don't watch this show very often. I think James Corden is brilliantly talented and able to do just about anything except interview guests without fawning all over them.

But I do love these little musical segments when he does them — though I can't help but wonder if his predecessor Craig Ferguson is watching and thinking, "How come he has twenty times the budget they gave me?"

I love Simone Biles. What she does is just magic and she got where she is the old-fashioned way: By being better at what she does than anyone else is or (maybe) has even been. Most sports bore me but I could watch this lady doing gymnastics forever…and I even like hearing her talk. Here she is debunking a lot of things that people believe about folks in her profession…

So I went to my 4:15 doctor's appointment (a very minor matter) in a medical building in Beverly Hills. Everyone I saw on the street on my way there was wearing a mask. Everyone in the building was wearing a mask. A sign on my doctor's door said masks were mandatory and indeed, everyone inside was wearing a mask.

On my way out, I passed another office in the building and there was a hysterical, furious person outside the door in the hall. She was unmasked and insisting that California was "open" and mask-wearing could no longer be required in any way.

The door to that office had the same sign my doctor had saying that you couldn't come in without one. She went in anyway and was told to get out and not to come back without a mask. She had exited angrily and was now out in the corridor, arguing with two nurses who had come out to explain the rules to her. Either on her way in or out, she had ripped most of the sign off the door.

For emphasis: This was a doctor's office. The doctor to whom she had come for medical care had put the sign up or approved having that sign up. And I don't think it would be a bad idea to wear a mask in any doctor's office, virus or no virus. There could be sick people in that office. That's where they tend to congregate.

The nurses kept saying, "The doctor can set the rules for his office" and the Very Loud Lady kept saying, "No, no! He's not allowed to require that anymore! No one is!" I don't know what medical condition the V.L.L. was there for but it was apparently much less important than winning that argument.

Finally, just after I got in the elevator to go down, she gave up and got in the elevator with me. Whereupon I got out and let it go down without me. Just before it did, I heard her say, "It's safe to ride with me!" I thought of saying, "According to C.D.C. guidelines, Stupid is still contagious." But I couldn't get it out before the doors closed.

California is "fully open" as of today. I'm not sure what that means. People are still catching the evil virus and even dying from it but I guess the rates are slow enough where someone decided that what being "closed" was doing to the economy was the greater menace. I don't see that the "open" sign is going to change my life in any meaningful way, at least for the near future. I have a doctor appointment in Beverly Hills at 4:15 and I'll bet every single person I see on the way there, there and on the way back to my car will be masked. I know I will be for most of that.

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Many folks are writing me to say that a Golden Corral or some clone of Hometown Buffet is still open and operating near them. On the 'net, they've found, as I did, conflicting info as to whether the parent company that runs Hometown Buffet (and other brand names) is gone for good or merely hibernating. I wonder if that company knows.

With Broadway shuttered during The Pandemic, we've had a lot of amazing videos of folks who might otherwise be on stages but have to settle for singing show tunes on the web. Here's a great collection of folks including Gavin Creel, Nikki Renée Daniels, Norm Lewis, Amanda Castro, Jenn Gambatese, Jo Lampert, and Heath Saunders performing tunes from recent and classic musicals…

As you may have seen the other day, I tweeted "I will not feel the Pandemic is truly over until I feel safe going into a Hometown Buffet." It got a lot of forwards but it also got a response from my friend Marv Wolfman who tweeted — and others retweeted — "There never was a time when going to a Hometown Buffet was safe." I have several things to say to that…

First: Marv, you and I have eaten together in restaurants way less safe than Hometown Buffet. Secondly: It's a joke. "Hometown Buffet" fits into the joke. Certain proper names fit into certain jokes better than others.

I actually didn't mind Hometown Buffets that much…though I must admit to not being in one for well over fifteen years. A long time ago, I felt safer in a buffet — any buffet — than I did in many order-off-a-menu restaurants. When you have as many food allergies as I do, you like seeing your food before you commit to it.

It's one of the things I used to like about Vegas…though I liked the buffets there more before '06 when I had my gastric bypass. Back then, you could stuff yourself and feel you were getting closer to "even" with the casino. After the surgery though, I couldn't eat enough to make most buffets cost-effective and a year or so later, my sweet tooth disappeared and I gave up pies, cakes, cookies, cute little creme puffs, ice cream, etc., further limiting my consumption.

So I largely gave up buffets because I didn't want to pay $40 for the eight bucks worth of food I could consume. But before that, a Hometown Buffet was fine for my purposes, especially if they had someone carving a freshly-roasted turkey. Yeah, most of the vegetables were canned and the fried shrimp were frozen and tasted like they were 90% breading wrapped around one stale Goldfish cracker. Yes, some of the food in the steam tables seemed to have been there since the invention of the steamship.

But if you find yourself dining in cheapo restaurants due to lack of funds or options, you learn there are some things they just can't ruin. Working on studio lots that sometimes had no commissary (or one as bad as some of them are), I learned that the catering truck could usually make a decent grilled cheese sandwich. So that and a bag o' chips was an acceptable lunch. And if a buffet was carving a freshly-roasted turkey and they had mashed potatoes, I was fine. I'm not saying no one ever ruined those items but it's not easy.

So that's my admittedly-feeble defense of Hometown Buffets or places like Hometown Buffets. And it brings me to the other thing that I heard in response on Twitter and in my e-mails: Is the Hometown Buffet chain — which includes brand names like Old Country Buffet and others — still in business?

I dunno. And after about twenty minutes today searching the Internet, I'm still not sure. They don't seem to have a website, they did declare bankruptcy and a lot of their outlets closed on account of The Pandemic. But a lot of chains have gone through bankruptcy — and were doing so before the lockdowns — and there's a difference between closing for the duration and closing forever. A lot of the former are now reopening.

Are those kinds of buffets gone for good? A lot of the ones in Vegas — more than were expected — are reopening. What's more they're raising the prices because people seem willing to pay it. And they're going back to the serve-yourself model where you walk up, pick up the same spoon fifty customers before you used and put pasta from a large serving tray onto your plate.

But I'm not sure about Hometown Buffets and Golden Corrals and their clones. If you find out for-certain, lemme know and I'll pass it on. I just wanted to say that if Hometown Buffet is gone for good, it wasn't as bad as some folks who pounced on my Tweet said it was. And if such places do come back, you probably won't see me in them unless I'm stranded where that's my only option and they carve real turkey.

Yesterday, I recorded the last of the three panels I'm contributing to this year's Comic-Con@Home. It will be online along with many other panels during Comic-Con@Home, which runs July 23-25. I did three of these for last year's Comic-Con@Home and three more earlier this year for WonderCon@Home.  I'm hoping that will be the end of panels having to be done online because we can't do them at an actual convention in a building full of live human beings.

This panel I did yesterday was Cartoon Voices with four of the best voice performers in the field: Candi Milo, Wally Wingert, Jenny Yokobori and Zeno Robinson. Those were great picks if I do say so myself and I was real happy with how this one came out.

Actually, I've been real happy with all of these, some of which I did on my own and some in conjunction with WonderCon or Comic-Con. If you haven't checked them out, there are seven of them over in this section…and some fun videos not about Cartoon Voices, as well.

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Around the same dates at Comic-Con@Home, the first issue of the Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series will be out. I'm going to ask if some of you will help me with something that may seem trivial to you but it matters to me.

The correct credits on this series for writing and drawing go like this: Written by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier; Illustrated by Sergio Aragonés and Thomas Yeates. I'm seeing a lot of folks online saying I wrote it and that it was drawn by Sergio and Thomas. That's right about the drawing, wrong about the writing. If you see such an error someplace, please tell the appropriate person to fix it.

Also, if you see someone say that Groo the Wanderer was created by Sergio Aragonés and Mark Evanier, please tell them that it was just Sergio Aragonés. I understand this is an innocent mistake and I don't think it bothers Sergio. But it bothers me. I have lost vast amounts of respect for people in "The Arts" (TV, movies, comics, etc.) because they either took credit for something they didn't do or didn't correct someone who unknowingly gave them credit for the work of someone else. I don't want to do that to someone else even if I didn't do it. Thanks.

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Columnist William Saletan gets linked-to here often because he comes up with novel "I never thought of it that way" ways to look at current problems. Click on his name and read the novel way he has of looking at the decision not to get vaccinated against COVID-19.

I'm not saying you'll agree. I'm not even saying I agree. But sometimes, considering something from a different vantage point gives you some iota of an inkling of a smidgen of new perspective on the matter. Sometimes.

Meanwhile, a lady named Eve Peyser wrote an article that confirms my decision to avoid Las Vegas. She was uncomfortable, while there's still a Pandemic in this country, moving through a crowd of drunken partiers. So am I — and I was, even before any of us heard the word "coronavirus."

By the way: I'll bet the unidentified spot where she encountered that mob was on the south side of Harrah's and the place she describes as "one of the Strip's seedier casinos" was Casino Royale. Been there, done that. And I don't think I'll be in that vicinity again for a long time. We're probably talking years here, people.

This is about the perfect time of year for this one. The Happenings were a group that mainly took songs that had been recorded by others and put their own spin and harmony on them. "See You in September" was recorded by The Tempos back in 1959. Bob Miranda, who seems to have been the most prominent member of The Happenings described it as "a great song and kind of a bad record." So they did their version in 1966 and it quickly went to Number One on the charts. KHJ played it an awful lot, especially in the Summer…

And in case you're interested, here's the version recorded by The Tempos. Yeah, good song…kind of a bad record…

And if you're really interested, there are other versions of the song online by artists including Julie Budd, Terry Robins and the Playboys, The Symbols, The Chiffons, Gerry and the Pacemakers, Shelley Fabares, Mike Clifford, The Lettermen, The Mike Curb Congregation, The Quotations, Dino Villanueva, Debby Boone, Santo & Johnny and Billy K. and the Seamen.

The Happenings' version is the best in my opinion, followed closely by the recording by The Lettermen which sounds almost identical. The most energetic is probably the one by The Quotations. Do not try to listen to all of them or you'll be begging me to post more versions of the Flintstones theme.

• I will not feel the Pandemic is truly over until I feel safe going into a Hometown Buffet.

As with recent Comic-Con Internationals and WonderCons, they're not having Comic-Con International this July in San Diego. Whatever they do have will be online and as usual, I'm preparing three online panels that will be on the convention website on the days when Comic-Con would have happened…July 23-25. In fact, I'm recording the third of three today.

There's a panel with Sergio Aragonés, Thomas Yeates and myself discussing the new Groo Meets Tarzan mini-series that will be coming out about the same time that Comic-Con@Home occurs. There's a Jack Kirby Tribute Panel with Paul Levitz and Walt Simonson. And there's a Cartoon Voices Panel that I'll tell you about later because I have to get ready to record it in an hour.

The Jack Kirby Panel has already been recorded and it will be of great interest to Kirby fans 'n' scholars. It focuses mainly on Jack's New Gods series for DC and we discuss what actually happened there and how the series actually sold. Some of what you may have heard — or thought you heard — about those comics is not true. It'll be online in about six weeks.

The Comic-Con Special Edition announced for Thanksgiving Weekend looks increasingly certain to take place but they still have a helluva lot of planning work to do on it. I'll tell you more about it as soon as I know more about it. I don't know much more than is in this paragraph.

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As long as COVID-19 has been in the news, there has been this "lab-leak" theory making the rounds. It says that the virus originated in a lab in Wuhan and that it was accidentally or perhaps deliberately allowed to escape into the wild. We're hearing a lot more lately about this interesting theory and we ought to know if it's true or not — and if it isn't, then just where did this damned thing come from?

But as Kevin Drum reminds us, there was absolutely no evidence to support this theory when it was first suggested…and there's still absolutely no evidence. That doesn't mean there isn't any truth to it but we oughta remember that there's zero evidence.

If you follow John Oliver's online and on-HBO exploits, watch this…

Magician Curt Miller does a card trick for…well, just about every role John Cleese ever played on television or in a movie…

• Shocking to hear that fully-vaccinated Californians can get a free seasoned beef Nacho Cheese Doritos Locos Taco at participating Taco Bell locations on Tuesday. Those people should be rewarded. Why are they trying to kill them off like that?