Monthly Archives: February 2020

That's part of the Pogo newspaper strip that ran on February 29, 1952.  The morning that appeared all across the nation, Bernard and Dorothy Evanier were expecting to become parents any minute.  Dorothy was pregnant and that was the day I was due.  But somehow, no one had bothered to tell me.

If I'd been born that day as per the schedule, I would today be celebrating my seventeenth birthday.  I did not emerge into the world on 2/29/52 and I also did not make my much-anticipated debut on 3/1/52.  The day after that, some impatient doctor — probably sick of waiting and eager to get out on the golf course — made the decision to go in and get me.  I was removed from my mom's innards, that impatient doctor guy slapped me and, as I tell everyone to this day, I dropped whatever comic book I was reading at the time.

If they'd waited one day longer to send in the S.W.A.T. team, I could have been born on my parents' first anniversary.  When I was a tot and people asked me — as people often ask small children — "When's your birthday?", I would answer, "I was born on March second. My parents were married on March third."

That always got a laugh. I didn't know why but it got a laugh so I kept saying it despite my mother's embarrassed plea to not do that or to at least include the years.

I was my parents' first and only child. An interesting thing that happened on the day I was finally born was that the doctors who delivered me told my mother not to do that again. That is not a joke. When they opened her up to spring me, they noticed loads of scar tissue and apparently what had delayed my roll-out was that I was, as I remain to this day, in an unnatural position.

Once outside her, I was reportedly lying on her stomach when they told her not to risk having any more children. Being about fifteen minutes old at the time, I somehow have no memory of this. I do remember being around twelve years of age when my folks decided I was old enough to hear and understand the story of why I had no brothers or sisters — a lack that has never bothered me for one second. I had my own room. I got 100% of my parents' attention. No one touched my comic book collection but me.

And I was spared the problem I witnessed in my pre-teen years at the home of every single friend of mine who did not have the great fortune to be an only child: Brothers and sisters fighting and screaming at each other all the time. Most often, the screaming was of the phrase, "Keep your hands off my stuff!"

You may think I'm exaggerating but I am not. I don't think I knew a single kid my age who did not let me in on their occasional private fantasies of seeing a little sister or older brother (or vice-versa) die an agonizing death. Sometimes, they told me how much they envied me my lack of siblings.

The only brothers or sisters I met who were happy to have one another around were identical twins. They shared the special bond that when they conspired, they could confuse the hell out of everyone else. A couple times when I was asked if I didn't wish I had a brother, I think I actually answered, "Only if he looks exactly like me." This was obviously after 1961 when I saw Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.

Upon reflection, I'm glad I didn't have another me around. I don't think I could have handled even a duplicate of myself pawing through my comic books and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to share a room with a brother, no matter how handsome he was. No one else was needed in our family. I had a great relationship with my parents until the day each of them passed away.

And I escaped having February 29 as my birthday. I know that may sound kind of special and, yes, I know that in the Superman mythos, that's the date they say the Man of Steel was born. Someone once told me maybe being born on 2/29 would be good luck like it was for Superman. I responded, "What good luck? A couple days after you're born, your entire planet explodes!"

If I had been born on Leap Year Day, I think I would have taken the position that you can't sing "Happy Birthday" to me unless the calendar says it's February 29. I've never really liked that custom and it would be nice to have it happen one-fourth as often. Unfortunately then, people would have taken the position that they only had to give me gifts when the calendar said it was February 29…

One of my favorite comedians is Lewis Black, who spends much of the year criss-crossing the nation with his monologues…which come with a little bonus. Black has an opening act and then he comes out and does the kind of set you'd expect from a performer of his stature. And then, he does a little segment called The Rant is Due which is 15-30 minutes of him reading questions and comments from the audience and responding to them. This segment is webcast each night. You can watch it live if you know when to tune in on your computer or you can watch it later if you know where to find it on the web.

In the past, the place to find them live or archived was Black's website but just, like a day or two ago, his company began streaming them on YouTube, which means I can embed them here on my site. This is the show from last night when Mr. Black and his opener — currently, Jeff Stilson — were in Charlottesville, VA. That's Stilson you'll see introducing Lewis on this, the 415th of these Black has done. I've managed to catch at least half of them and even be in the audience for two or three.

This one runs 23 minutes and the video starts after about 40 seconds of dead air through which you can fast-forward. It's not his best and not his worst but even the weak ones are interesting to me at a time when so much comedy we see on TV is tightly scripted and edited. This is just Lewis Black working without a script and without a safety net…

• I once somehow got involved in some sort of silly chain letter deal that caused me to get 185 pieces of unwanted mail in a single week. At the moment, Mike Bloomberg is on pace to beat that record.

This year's Tony Awards telecast is Sunday, June 7, which is 100 days from today. This press release says the show will come from Radio City Music Hall and it'll be produced and directed by the same guys who've done it for a long, long time. But something is missing…who's going to host it? Shouldn't they have someone by now?

It may have been my favorite show of the year when Neil Patrick Harris hosted, and James Corden is proving himself just as good. Come on, Broadway League, American Theatre Wing and CBS. Get together and sign one of those guys.

Paul Krugman has a tough-but-accurate (I think) overview of how the Trump Administration is dealing with the coronavirus. They're not treating it as a threat which could kill thousands of people. They're treating it as a threat to the two things Donald Trump cares about: The stock market and his personal popularity. Here's a selected paragraph…

So the Trumpian response to crisis is completely self-centered, entirely focused on making Trump look good rather than protecting America. If the facts don't make Trump look good, he and his allies attack the messengers, blaming the news media and the Democrats — while trying to prevent scientists from keeping us informed. And in choosing people to deal with a real crisis, Trump prizes loyalty rather than competence.

And of course, there's a problem with Trump's definition of "loyalty." It has to be to him not, say, to the Constitution or The Rule of Law. I'm wondering whether Roger Stone gets his Presidential Medal of Freedom before or after the pardon.

Cookie Monster breaks the Internet…

It seems to be all over the Internet that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending that men shave their beards to protect against the coronavirus. According to Politifact, which is as reliable a fact-checking site as you can find, this is not true. The C.D.C. is not actually recommending this. So if you have a friend with a beard, tell him he doesn't have to shave it off…

…unless your friend is David Letterman. Please don't tell him he doesn't have to get rid of his.

Like every single person on this planet — including it would seem, people who are supposed to be experts at this kind of thing — I have no idea how bad or threatening the coronavirus is or may be. It's one of those times when in my head, I hear the Mel Brooks song, "Hope for the Best, Expect the Worst."

What we need of course is for science to save us, primarily doctor-type folks who are even now figuring out how to handle this pandemic. At any time, this would be a scary thing but it's scarier because we have leaders now who don't believe in science and who have slashed funding for exactly the kind of response we now need. Laurie Garrett, a former senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations, lays it all out in this article and I'll quote just this much of it…

For the United States, the answers are especially worrying because the government has intentionally rendered itself incapable. In 2018, the Trump administration fired the government's entire pandemic response chain of command, including the White House management infrastructure. In numerous phone calls and emails with key agencies across the U.S. government, the only consistent response I encountered was distressed confusion. If the United States still has a clear chain of command for pandemic response, the White House urgently needs to clarify what it is.

That was written almost a month ago and it still applies. Trump has put Mike Pence in charge of coordinating the White House efforts, which sure suggests he's treating this as a political problem and a threat to his own popularity, not as a medical problem and a threat to human lives. We've been saying on this blog for months now that the 2020 Presidential Election would be about all sorts of scandals and issues that were not yet on our radar. Here's one that nobody was mentioning a few weeks ago.

Have you watched Desus & Mero on their Showtime series? It's a talk show but with an energy quite unlike talk shows we've seen before. I don't watch it all the time because I don't know who the hell some of their guests are, even after I see them interviewed…but I know who David Letterman is and he was a guest on a recent show. (And if you're going to watch it, watch it here instead of Showtime because this version is a few minutes longer.)

You know what talk show I haven't been watching? Letterman's. And it's not just that I'm disinterested in his guests. He rarely makes me feel like he's interested in his guests. He just recorded a show for next season — a whole hour with Kim Kardashian and you just know he was dying to have her on. Here's what I think they oughta do with that series: Bring in a different guest host each week to interview Dave. He's more interesting than anyone he's had on with the possible exception of Barack Obama.

So here he is with Desus & Mero. They fawn a little too much but that's kind of required on talk shows these days. The big thing is that they keep things moving and don't ask the same old questions, thereby prompting the same old responses. Make sure you stick around for the Quentin Tarantino story…

I watched as much of the South Carolina debate as I could take, which was a little more than half. The "talking over" one another was not conducive to understanding anyone's positions and they often seemed to be forgetting that they have a common enemy and it isn't each other.

I'm sure that four years ago or eight or twelve, I must have written how I think the wrong way to approach these debates is to try and determine who "won." It ain't like a baseball game where you can look at a scoreboard and see how many runs one side scored. The goal is to improve one's standing with the voters and that's not something that's easily measurable, nor is it something that only one person can do. The main poll I saw after the Las Vegas debate indicated that both Sanders and Warren were up two points, Biden stayed the same, Buttigieg and Klobuchar each lost one and Bloomberg lost three.

You could say, I suppose, that Sanders and Warren tied in that meet-up. You could also say that Warren "won" in that she needed the boost more and may have saved her entire candidacy by reminding the voters who liked her why they liked her. But then you look and see that that poll had a two-point margin of error so maybe in reality, it was closer to a five-way tie with Bloomberg only slightly behind the pack. Hell, you could even argue that considering how many shots to the head Bloomberg received in that wrestling match, he "won" by not being knocked out.

I didn't think anyone last night markedly improved their position or harmed it. I would have loved it if someone had because I'm still wrestling with my decision on who to vote for. My reservations about Sanders flow from reading too many articles about why he can't win in November and might even hurt Democratic chances in the House and Senate — even with the all-important Dick Van Dyke endorsement. Some of those articles are hard to dismiss and nothing I heard in last night's debate changed that. I may have to write-in Fred.

Dick Van Dyke endorses Bernie Sanders. If Bernie's the nominee and Dick keeps campaigning for him, we're going to hear Trump say that Dick Van Dyke is a loser who never did anything anyone cares about and his English accent in Mary Poppins was terrible and he couldn't even enter a room without tripping over a footstool…

…but I'm going to defend Donald Trump about something…

Donald Trump and his entourage reportedly failed to eat a single item of a special vegetarian feast prepared for him during his trip to India. The American president and his wife, Melania, were presented with the menu during their visit to Gandhi Ashram in Ahmedabad, one of the former homes of the Indian independence hero.

In an effort to please the famously carnivorous tastes of the president, the chef — a well-known award-winning chef called Suresh Khanna — adapted a number of famous Indian delicacies to make them more recognizable for their guests and even included more familiar items such as chocolate-chip cookies and apple pie. But neither Mr. Trump nor the First Lady touched anything from the special high tea menu.

The article goes on to say that many people were outraged that they didn't eat what was served while others were outraged at the selections offered to them. The menu can be read at that link and there's not one thing on it that I would have (or could have or should have) eaten.

Having many food allergies — and having occasionally suffered greatly when I ate something I sensed I shouldn't — I am quite militant on this point: No one should ever be pressured even socially to eat what they think is wrong for them, nor should they be criticized for their decisions. The fact that the Trumps may not have any food allergies does not change that. It's your body and you need to be the sole arbiter of what goes into it. "I don't think I'd like it" is a perfectly valid reason.

In Trump's position, I would have refrained. I might even have been a little ticked-off at my staff people for not anticipating this problem and preparing for it. There are vegetables I can eat and someone could have arranged something. But Trump did the right thing…for once.

It's 148 days until Comic-Con International in San Diego but it's only 45 days until this year's WonderCon in Anaheim. WonderCon is run by the same folks. It's their "smaller" convention since it "only" has a turnout of 66,000 or so people. If you're new to convention-going and the prospect of attending the monster in San Diego is intimidating, you might be comfortable "breaking in" at WonderCon. It's also humanly possible to get admission badges for WonderCon.

I will be at both and at WonderCon, I'll be hosting six panels which I'll tell you about after March 20, which is when the complete programming schedule will be posted on the convention website. (Hint: My schedule for the 2020 WonderCon will look a lot like my schedule for the 2019 WonderCon.)

WonderCon is April 10-12 and this may or may not be a drawback: Attending WonderCon on Easter Weekend means you'll be going very close to "The Happiest Place on Earth," aka Disneyland. This website tracks and predicts when Disneyland is most crowded and it says "Yup, it's packed" to April 10 and 11 but "Hey It's Alright" to April 12.

You might figure that into your travel plans. Also, a mere sixty miles south of Anaheim, my friend Frank Ferrante is performing his much-lauded An Evening With Groucho on the evenings of April 13 and 14. That's at the Northeast Repertory Theatre in Solana Beach, California and you can get info and tickets here. This will probably be the only time this year in this state you'll be able to see this guy do his uncanny facsimile of Julius "Groucho" Marx.

You'd have a great time seeing Frank. You'd have a great time at WonderCon. And hey, you might even have a great time at Disneyland if you bring lots of money, real comfortable shoes, either a child or the mind of one and the good sense not to go there on Friday or Saturday. You can probably get on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride late the afternoon of Saturday, April 11 if you get in line sometime this week.

And here we have Lou Christie's 1965 hit "Lightnin' Strikes" as performed the right way by Klaus Nomi…

Sitting here watching coverage of the verdict in the Harvey Weinstein case…or maybe I should say "the first Harvey Weinstein case." He's got sentencing, appeals, appeals of the appeals, the other charges in California, civil cases and many other courtroom visits ahead of him. Above and beyond whatever time he spends in cells, the guy may have a lifetime sentence as a prisoner of the legal system…and the ongoing, unceasing "fine" of paying legal fees. This is all probably a good thing.

Hearing the talk, my mind goes to two kinds of people. One is women I've known — actresses, mostly — who endured the kind of deeds for which Weinstein is now paying a price. In most cases with my friends, they were unsuccessful attempts at those deeds but they were still chilling and upsetting and injurious to the career of those who fought off a predator. I'm thinking of one lady in particular who was constantly propositioned, groped, flashed, chased around desks, fired or "not cast" because she refused to "play along." She's not here today to see the Weinsteins and Cosbys brought somewhere close to justice…but boy, would she have been happy.

And I'm also thinking of all the men who did these kind of things and got away with them…so far, at least. Some of them, maybe all of them have to be terrified, as they were when Cosby was led away in manacles. Most of 'em have to be cleaning up their acts and sweating about things they did back when powerful and/or wealthy men thought the rules could never apply to guys like them them. Making it clear that those rules do apply…well, that's a good thing too.