Monthly Archives: October 2020

I really like Julien Neel's barbershop quartet even though all four members of it are him. He he (they?) favor (favors) us with a song that would be appropriate for Halloween if this was really Halloween…

It's Halloween…at least on the calendar. I won't repost my annual "I've never liked Halloween" post (it's here if you must read it) but I'm fine without that holiday in my year. I've had no trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood for over a decade and would expect zero tonight even if Halloween hadn't been more or less called-off.

And I have nothing to say about the late Sean Connery that a zillion other folks aren't saying on the web today. Loved the James Bond movies he was in…liked a few of his other screen appearances. Lost a lot of respect for him when he began talking about how women should be slapped around. That's about it.

The election projections over at The Economist have been fluctuating between Trump having a 4% chance of winning and then for about half a day, a 7% chance. When he hit 7, of course I thought, "Oh no! He's gaining a point a day! By Tuesday, he might be up to 11%!" Nate Silver's site had him at 11% for a long time and currently has him down to 10. The Economist currently has him back down to 4%. (These are the odds of him winning, not the percentage of the vote he'll get.)

Can he still win? Sure. But right now Joe Biden's in about as good a position as you could hope your guy would be in the Saturday before Election Day.

As I understand it, the legal theory Trump and his crew are going to push on Election Day is that in each state, they should count ballots until such time as Trump is ahead and then stop counting, disqualify the rest and then award him the state.

Rudy Giuliani is running around screaming (literally) that the press is covering for Joe Biden by not reporting on the "new" Hunter Biden revelations but as Kevin Drum notes, the press has been trying to and has been blocked by, among other obstacles, Rudy Giuliani. He's not letting them look too closely at what he claims to have unearthed. Reporters simply cannot see enough of the so-called evidence to determine if there's any "there" there…and at worst, none of it seems to implicate the person actually running for president. It's kind of a non-smoking smoking gun loaded with blanks and pointed at the wrong target.

The other night, CBS aired prime-time episodes of The Price is Right and Let's Make a Deal, both recorded recently and with all sorts of adjustments for social-distancing and no real studio audience. I couldn't make it through Let's Make a Deal but then I've never really been able to enjoy that show — not with Monty in the first place, not with anyone else who's hosted it since. And if I can't like it with Wayne Brady, who I think is one of the great talents of television…

The Price is Right, which I sometimes like to watch was…odd. They piped in a low-level audience presence sound which made it spooky, like ghosts were filling the seats we didn't see out there. The contestants were, like on Let's Make a Deal, essential workers who deserve lots of rewards for the job they've been doing but not a lot of them won anything, and everyone stayed six-feet apart.

They were playing traditional Price is Right games, many of which are routinely won on the regular show because the studio audience is shouting out numbers. One contestant once even won both showcases with an on-the-nose bid which came from someone in the audience. Here, there was no audience helping the guy who didn't know the price of a blender or whatever it was…so less wins than usual. And the pre-selected contestants were obviously chosen for and coached to be super-enthusiastic. They all came on dancing and one even did a cartwheel.

It felt fake and forced and at one point, I got to wondering if everyone had been tested. If they had, there wouldn't have been as much need for the six-foot separations…but then I realized: Without them, it wouldn't have been as good an ad for enforcing social-distancing and other precautions. So I give them an "A" for effort. It didn't work that well as a game show but unlike certain rallies I could mention, it was a nice example to put before America.

One minute before 4 PM, I was with a friend of mine who's visiting and we heard a couple of those chilling THUMPs of cars hitting cars. Worried that one of those cars might have been my friend's parked out front, we sprinted outside. My friend's car was fine but three cars in the intersection outside my house weren't fine, nor were all their occupants. Medical attention was needed but it didn't appear anyone was seriously hurt.

Neighbors were spilling out to see and the folks in the cars were tending to cuts and starting to exchange info. My friend asked, "What do you think happened?" and I replied, "I don't know but I might have it on video." One of my security cameras captures the front of my house and also a nice chunk of the street outside. Sure enough, it had captured the accident. I pulled it up on my iPad and moved the video to where it would be playable (and e-mailable) through my Photo app. Then I ran back out.

By now, the street outside was filling up with tow trucks, emergency vehicles and one police car, all of which arrived a lot quicker than I would have expected. Two police officers — a mixed-race, mixed-gender combo — were taking down info and conflicting statements. I watched them for a while and was impressed by their efficiency, courtesy and command of the entire situation.

I waited until one of the officers had a moment, pointed to my house and told him, "The security camera on my house captured the whole thing." His face lit up like I'd given him a lovely gift. He said, "Can you wait 'til we finish with all the paperwork?" I said sure…and I watched him, as well as his partner, finish handling everything precisely the way a situation like this should be handled.

I should mention that that has been true of every single encounter I have ever had with police officers. I know there are bad ones out there. We often see the damage they do. But every policeman or woman I've ever met had been just what you want police officers to be.

As the tow trucks began hauling the battered cars away and the paramedics departed, the female officer came over to me, watched the short video on my iPad and said, "You got it, clear as could be." I didn't do anything, of course. The camera got it and it wouldn't have gotten it if the collisions had happened about three feet to the left. Just luck.

The male officer came over to see it and the female officer told him, "I wish we had this for every accident." I gave him my contact info, we did an AirDrop transfer of the video from my iPad to his iPhone and the officers thanked me and started to head for their car.

A woman who'd been in one of the injured cars figured out what we were doing, came over to me and asked, "Can I see that?" I asked the officers, "Any problem with me giving her a copy of it?" The male officer said, "It's your video. Do whatever you want with it." I showed it to the woman then AirDropped it to her cell phone and she excitedly waved over her husband, who had been in the car with her and showed him what I'd given her. They were very pleased. It showed pretty clearly who was at fault and it wasn't whichever one of them had been driving.

Where this goes from here, I have no idea. One of the officers said there was a slim chance I might be called as a witness but it was unlikely. I also gave my contact info to the couple but I forgot to say, "When this is all resolved, give me a call and tell me how it was all resolved." Maybe they will anyway.

No one said this but I got the feeling that the police collected the accounts of the folks in the cars, they did not match up…but the video will settle the question of what actually happened. I wonder how often that happens now in the era of security cameras and cell phones.

And here we have what I assume will be Randy Rainbow's closing argument for this election…

Nate Silver's 538 website has been busy predicting who'll win what races in the upcoming election but now they're also predicting when each state will finalize its vote-counting. It may not take us as long as their charts would indicate. For instance, they put California and Utah in the category of "Only some of the vote will be counted on Election Night" but I think we all know where those two states' electoral votes for president are going.

Then again, there's going to be human error and ballot-counting machines are going to fail and there will be places where they keep the polls open all night because there's still a long, long line of folks who've waited hours to cast their ballots.

They think Florida will be completely counted on Election Night. Well, maybe. If it is and Biden wins that count, that probably means Biden wins the White House. The converse is not true. Florida is only one of many "must win" states for Trump. There are a lot of 'em…especially Pennsylvania, which 538 thinks won't report for a day or three. Just be prepared for anything. And we have no idea where or how Trump may be mounting legal challenges and if they'll go anywhere.

The best list I've found of which states are in play and how many of 'em Trump has to take if he's going to pull off a surprise win is on Charlie Cook's site in this PDF file. And you might want to read this essay by Mr. Cook about what has gone wrong for Mr. Trump in a electoral sense.

The subject line above should be sung to the tune of "Hello, Dolly!" We're bidding a fond farewell to Jerry's Deli, a favorite place to dine out in Studio City. It's closing today after 42 or 43 years, depending on which news story about it you read.

If you live (as I do) in L.A. proper and want to meet for a meal with someone who lives in The Valley, Jerry's was a good place to meet. It was not only well situated as a middlepoint, it had a big menu, decent food, decent prices, decent parking…and if you had the urge to knock down some ten-pins, there was a bowling alley in the back.

I'm sitting here, thinking of lots and lots of lunches — business and social — I had there as well as a few Power Breakfasts, some dinners and a lot of late night dining. But I have to admit those were all quite some time ago. I gave up on the place at least five years ago as a result of too many poor meals with poorer service.

The whole Jerry's chain — which once included something like eight or ten locations — had shrunk to just the one. The closing of this one is being attributed to the decline in business because of COVID-19…and I'm sure there's a lot of truth to that. But Jerry's Delis have been closing all over the Southland for many years now. I think there was something else going wrong there.

But I do remember a lot of great sandwiches and great times at the Studio City location and also at other Jerry's Delis.  The one other unpleasant experience I had there was because of a very rude bus boy who was screwing up everyone's orders and staging little hissy-fits over polite complaints. It was Andy Kaufman, who for some reason enjoyed working there and at another restaurant I went to — the Posh Bagel — long after he was recognizable from television.

As a bus boy, he was a real dick and please note that I am not saying he was a funny real dick. He was just a real dick. It apparently amused him greatly but I can't say it amused anyone else, at least the times I saw him do it at the two restaurants.

Sad to say, he's gone and when it closes this evening, Jerry's will be gone as well. True, I hadn't been there in years but I kept thinking of going back, hoping it would be the way it used to be. Because when it was good, it was real good. Unless your table was being bused by Andy Kaufman.

A whole bunch of Broadway performers, some of whom I know, got together and made this great pro-Biden video set to songs from Bye Bye Birdie and The King and I. Again, I'm not out to sway anyone's vote at this point. I just think it's real entertaining.

Which causes me to ask this musical question: Have you seen any real clever, funny, well-performed videos on behalf of Donald Trump? There are a lot of them for Biden. You all know my line about how writing comedy from a Conservative point-of-view is like writing a Marx Brothers movie and trying to make Margaret Dumont the funny one. But there are some right-wing comedians and musical comedy performers. Have any of them produced anything I should post here?

I woke up this morning and as I often do, I picked up my iPhone from the bedside table to scroll through the news headlines. The first one was a report on how hospital beds in Wisconsin are in short supply due to a record number of people there coming down with COVID-19. The second news story was a clip of Trump speaking in Wisconsin a day or three ago saying the virus has been beaten, the Pandemic is over and his Administration is to be congratulated for the great job it did.

And my thought after seeing those items in succession was: Wow. There's the election right there.

Those of us who want Trump out can name a hundred reasons having to do with incompetence, dishonesty and just plain being a horrible, horrible human being. Put all those aside and what you have is a guy thinking he doesn't have to actually deal with real problems if he can convince his supporters he has.

I dunno how much of it is cluelessness and how much is just his natural proclivity to fling bullshit and it almost doesn't matter. It's just not leadership and if a Democratic president had done that, every Republican now backing Trump would be saying, "I don't care that he'll be out of office any day now. We need to impeach that monster today!"

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Ed Kilgore has a should-read article about how and when the presidential race may be called on Election Day. Or more likely, a few days after Election Day.

Matt Yglesias has the comforting explanation to give to someone who says the polls were wrong in 2016 so who's to say they won't be wrong this time? (Short Explanation: Biden's lead is larger and has been more stable and most pollsters have learned from their mistakes last time.)

And Michelle Goldberg on how much Trump has occupied our minds the last four years. When I get rid of him in mine, I'm going to rent out the empty space for a boat show.

What we have here is a nice profile/interview of John Cleese which I should have linked to yesterday on his birthday. Mr. Cleese identifies his favorite joke ever in all of Monty Python and I am pleased to see it's my favorite joke in all of Monty Python…

Just to remind you: I'll be discussing Jack Kirby's Fourth World comics with Pop Culture Man Arlen Schumer in just a little while. The audio podcast commences at 8 PM Eastern Time (5 PM where I am) and can be heard by clicking here.

The other day here, I noted that The Economist, which is one of the three Poll Aggregator/Analysis sites I follow, had Trump's chances of winning the Electoral College down to 4%. I said I didn't believe they were that low. Nate Silver's 538 had him down to 12%. Today, The Economist has him at 3% and 538 has him at 11%.

These drops are probably because this morning's ABC News/The Washington Post gives Biden a 17 point lead in Wisconsin. There are always outlier polls that report numbers way outta line with the others but this one's more credible than some because it's a well-respected poll and the other polls all show Biden ahead, though not that far ahead. It also gets a bit of credibility because Trump was just in Milwaukee giving his current "We defeated the Pandemic" speeches in a state where record numbers of new coronavirus cases are now being reported.

More amazing, the third Poll Aggregating Site I consult — The Cook Political Report — has now reclassified Texas from Leans Republican to Toss-Up. That one's neck-and-neck and it won't surprise me if Trump wins it by a comfy margin but…still. For Texas to even be in play as a swing state is amazing.

Trump's Closing Argument keeps shifting. Today, it still seems to be something like "Pay no attention to those rising COVID reports. My administration has handled it brilliantly and it's all but defeated!" I don't get why they think that's a winner. The polls say that 58% of the country thinks Trump and his crew have done a poor job of handling COVID-19 while 40% approves. And that 40% is probably the 40% incapable of disapproving of anything he does. He's got their votes and desperately needs some of that 58%.

History may show that Trump's marathon rallies these days are doing a great job of exciting the kind of people who would risk disease to turn out for a Trump Rally…but very few who wouldn't.

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Facebook puts a limit of 5000 on how many "Friends" you can have and I'm currently at 4950. Once I passed around 4800, it would sometimes tell me I couldn't accept a new friend until I deleted an old one. I think a few of the new ones it did let me accept were because old "Friends" had left Facebook and therefore my list. Oh — and I un"friended" one "friend" because he kept sending me messages that there was solid proof Joe Biden was the head of that Pedophilia Ring that the Democratic party operates.

Anyway, I now have around 780 unanswered Friend Requests so obviously, most of those folks aren't getting onto my "Friends" list. I apologize to everyone who's on that list but I don't know what else to do.

The seventh volume of Pogo: The Complete Syndicated Comic Strips is a'comin'. Printed copies exist.

It's called Pockets Full of Pie…and how could you not love a book called Pockets Full of Pie? I like that title so much that at this very moment, the pockets in the pants I'm wearing are indeed full of pie. The right one has Chocolate Cream, the left one has French Apple, two back pockets have Lemon Custard and I just paid my cleaning lady Dora with money that was covered in meringue.

The book — which contains no actual pie, its foolish publishers having rejected my brilliant suggestion for an "extra" — will be out around November 10. We actually got this one to press well before the deadline. The first four, for reasons everyone following the series knows, were all late — in some cases, very late. Volumes 5 and 6 went to press on or about the deadline.

This one got in early and then along comes Trump's foreign import tariffs and then there was that Pandemic Thing you may have heard a little something about, screwing up both the printing and importing businesses. But Volume 7 should be shipping from Amazon by 11/10.

Rather than me, the co-editor, telling you how great this series is, I thought I'd enlist the aid of whoever wrote the longest review of the previous volume on Amazon. Well, I didn't really enlist their aid. I'm just stealing (without their permission) their review and reproducing it here. This is by someone named "Newsboy" and I swear it isn't me, nor do I know who that is. He's reviewing Vol. 6: Clean as a Weasel, which you can order here…

The Pogo collections from Fantagraphics Books continue to be the gold standard for comic strip collections. It's an incredible presentation for what many (me among them) consider one of the greatest comic strips ever. Pogo may never have inspired multiple cartoon series, it didn't have the merchandising success of Peanuts, Garfield, Bloom County or some other strips, but it had as big an impact — arguably bigger — than many strips that are more well known today.

Political humor. Funny animal humor. Jokes about the human condition (in a comic with no humans). This comic had it all. Bottom line: These comics are funny. Walt Kelly was not just a great artist. He was an incredible wordsmith, who used dialect, puns and even playing around with the font in the word balloons to make the joke work. In a review of a previous volume I compared Kelly to Mark Twain for his use of language. Honestly, that's not hyperbole.

Fantagraphics has set a standard with these books that will be hard for any publisher of classic strip collections to meet, let alone beat. The comics are reprinted at a size that never strains the eyes. The colors on the Sunday strips is perfect. The binding on the books is exactly what you want — it lays flat and no art is lost in gutter.

But what really sets this collection apart are the little things. They've included an index in every volume. There's a great introduction by a famous person who is a Pogo fan (this one is by Garfield creator Jim Davis). Each volume includes an introduction with some background on the time period and Kelly. And there is also a section, Swamp Talk, that helps explain some of the historical references (this volume wraps up a couple years before I was born, so these sections are always welcome). Beneath the pretty book jacket is an embossed cover. There's nothing they haven't thought of — even the color of each volume is a nice pastel that is different from its predecessors. On a bookshelf, it's just a good looking set of books.

If you've never read Pogo, do yourself a favor and order this volume. It's a great place to start.

Actually, I think they're all great places to start because no matter which one you pick, you're going to rush to order all the rest. You could also pre-order Pockets Full of Pie, which features a foreword by Sergio Aragonés…which shows you how hard I work to find foreword writers. Just when I needed to find one, he was sitting in my office. If he hadn't been here, I could have gone to Dora.

It also features two years of what the noted critic Newsboy considers "…one of the greatest comic strips ever." This series is just about the only thing I hard-sell on this blog and that's because I know you'll love it. And you won't love it because of anything I did except maybe to nudge you into buying it.

Nothing on this blog from now on is intended to get you to vote the way I want you to vote…and I think it's actually been that way for some time. I'm not sure any blog ever really moves people to do that but if this one could, it is long past the time to do that. I don't believe you haven't made up your mind by now and I think that if you want to vote in this election, you've either done so or made real firm plans to do so.

That said, I can still post things that I believe are interesting. Here's author and übernlogger John Green with why he's for Biden. It's not an argument I've heard stated quite this way before but I think it's quite valid…

Two questions from Ben Sternbach, the first of which is…

On your blog, you mentioned that you left your job with Jack Kirby just before they started putting Assistant Editor credits into his comics. I did a search and it looks like that happened as of Kamandi #4. Is that right and why'd you leave?

That's about right. I worked a little on the first issue of Kamandi, did nothing whatsoever on #2 or #3 and left while #3 was in production. The whole premise of having Steve Sherman and myself helping Jack out was that he had all sorts of expansion plans where he'd edit comics he didn't write or draw. He also wanted to launch comics in new forms, some of which would require a staff that could do editorial and production work under his supervision. Those projects would have required assistants.

But by the time we got to Kamandi, it had become obvious that DC was never going to really allow a comic to be edited outside their New York offices. They didn't even like the fact that someone in Southern California was lettering and inking Jack's books. They grew to like Mike Royer for his talent and, as I've mentioned many times, his uncanny professionalism. The man was never late with anything. But they really didn't like the fact that he lived out here and turned his work in to Jack and not them.

I'd been thinking that Jack barely needed one assistant, let alone two, and I was uncomfortable that he kept forcing money on us when we really weren't doing that much. If it had been DC's money, that might have been different but it was Jack's. At about the same time, I was getting real busy. I had gone from writing comics to be published overseas for the Disney Publications Department on the lot to writing Disney comics for Western Publishing (i.e., Gold Key) to be published in this country.

One day, my editor there — a very wonderful man named Chase Craig — said to me, "Y'know, if you could write more scripts for us, I could probably use everything you could produce." And he dangled a couple of tempting books at me like Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck. So the decision was easy. I still saw a lot of Jack and Roz; just not every week.

Ben's other question:

You implied that the decision by DC to redraw Jack's main characters on the Jimmy Olsen comic was done behind his back. I read an interview with Dick Giordano, who was an editor there at the time, and he said Jack was informed of it and agreed. Which of you is right?

I am (mostly) and Dick agreed with me about this when we discussed it on a panel at…a Mid-Ohio Con, I believe. Some convention. Jack was told that they wanted to make "minor adjustments" on the way he drew Superman. He said fine. The folks who inked Jack's works were always making little adjustments on characters' costumes when he was inconsistent or forgot some detail. But he was not told that they were having other artists redraw the faces and sometimes body parts, as well; that the Superman in the book would be an Al Plastino Superman or a Murphy Anderson Superman instead of the Jack Kirby Superman that readers were expecting in a comic sold with his name on it. Steve and I told him that after we read it in a fanzine.

The thing is: Jack wanted to be a good soldier for his new employer and he kept thinking they were about to take him off that comic anyway because he'd never wanted to do it in the first place. He thought all those other projects pending…the ones that, when it became clear they were never going to happen, caused me to quietly withdraw.

So he went along and didn't object much. Maybe he was a good enough sport that he convinced some folks at DC he was fine with it. Or maybe someone fibbed to Dick, who had no direct contact with Jack during that period. But come on! How could any artist with any pride not be pissed to have that done automatically to his work issue after issue?

Retouching artists' work was pretty common back then and Jack never had a problem when Stan Lee would have someone in the office (usually, John Romita) retouch a few faces here and there if he didn't like the way the main artist drew them. Jack even did some redraws on other artists' work there before Marvel had John Romita on staff. But imagine, Ben, if you were hired to draw…let's say Batman. And the editor decided, "I want to keep Sternbach on the book but I hate the way he draws Batman…so every time he hands in an issue, have somebody redraw all the Batman drawings in it."

For more on this topic, read this article I wrote some time ago.