When people asked Johnny Carson who his favorite guests were, he almost always mentioned Carl Reiner…and Mr. Reiner claimed (and he was almost certainly right about this) that he was the only person who guested with every host of The Tonight Show during his lifetime. Here from January 3, 1964 is his first appearance with Johnny.

In it, they discuss the fact that Carl has five Emmy Awards. He eventually won eleven. Carson says he's never won one and Reiner predicts Johnny will win one of these days — and Johnny did but not until 1977 when they finally did what he and Carl discuss in this segment. They rewrote the categories so Johnny and his program were a little more likely to win…

If you attended Comic-Con International in San Diego this past July…or you attended Comic-Con Special Edition last Thanksgiving…or you attended both…and you wish to attend Comic-Con International in San Diego next July…read this. Returning registration opens eleven days from now…on Saturday, October 15.

Yesterday, Donald Trump filed a lawsuit accusing CNN of defamation and he says he's seeking $475 million in punitive damages. This article will tell you how ridiculous this suit is but I wanted to highlight one paragraph from it…

Barb McQuade, a former U.S. attorney and University of Michigan law professor, also chimed in on Twitter saying that the "lawsuit is a naked publicity stunt that Trump knows will be dismissed before discovery. It will never reach deposition stage. He will make more money off of fundraising over this legally baseless lawsuit than he will pay the court in sanctions. Winning!"

More and more, that's what everything Trump does is about: Gin up outrages that will cause his loyal followers to donate money. His whole run for the presidency in the first place may have been nothing more than that. It's kind of like putting on a play you know will flop so you can keep the backers' investment money.

Donald Trump: The Max Bialystock of Politics.

This year, MAD magazine and I both celebrate our 70th anniversaries. I was born on March 2, 1952 and the first issue of MAD, which was then a ten-cent comic book, reached newsstands on July 10, 1952…and on 3/2/52, a brilliant gent named Harvey Kurtzman was probably writing that first issue. I'm technically a few months older and, I'd like to think, a few months wiser.

MAD was a newsprint four-color comic book for its first 23 issues, edited and mostly written by Kurtzman. The first few issues didn't sell all that well because, one suspects, there'd never been anything quite like it on those newsstands and the kind of people who might like such a publication weren't yet looking there for one. Also, though it was a parody comic, it took a few issues before they figured out just what they should be parodying. The comic took off when Kurtzman realized it should be movies, TV shows and (especially) other comic books. Sales began to rise and the publication started being noticed in higher-brow publishing circles.

But it was still a comic book and Kurtzman was embarrassed by the comic book industry. In 1952, there was a lot there to be embarrassed by and he was even uncomfy with other comic books from the publisher who published MAD, filled as they were with horror and violence. He may have even been more down on the package. Comics were a dime and they were printed on the cheapest-possible paper.

He wanted to be part of a "real magazine" printed on better paper. William M. Gaines, the publisher of MAD (and all those comics filled with horror and violence) believed MAD could not survive without Kurtzman so when Harvey got an offer to go work for what seemed to him like a "real magazine," Gaines agreed to make MAD into a magazine printed on better paper.

The first magazine issue of MAD, #24, came out in May of 1955. Kurtzman left it a few issues later for what he thought (wrongly) was a better opportunity but MAD kept on a-going, becoming bigger and better and more influential. A man named Al Feldstein took over as editor and assembled a team of some of the best cartoonists and comedy writers ever…and sales just went up and up and up.

The magazine has declined in the last decades — as have just about all magazines — but it's still going. It's been almost all reprint for a while now but its 70th Anniversary Issue (featuring more new material than usual) is due out any day now.

I remember exactly where I purchased my first issue of MAD. It was issue #70 and I bought it in early February of 1962 at the long-gone Westward Ho market on Westwood Boulevard in West Los Angeles. The cover depicted Alfred E. Neuman ice-skating, happily leaping over a number of barrels and blissfully unaware he was about to collide with another skater leaping over those barrels from the opposite direction. I did not realize at the time how now important this magazine would be to my life.

Well, maybe in a teensy way, I did. But I didn't dream that, for example, I would get to know most of the people who worked for it in its glory days — one of them is my best friend — and write a book about it and an article or two for it. More important to my life has been that it's one of the reasons I became a writer of comedy.

That issue #70 started it. I immediately began hitting second-hand bookstores around Los Angeles searching for back issues. I think I said here once that my mission was so successful that by the time #71 hit the newsstands, I had a complete collection. That, I later realized, wasn't quite true. By the time that next issue came out, I owned copies of #28 and #30-69. Soon after, I found #24-27 and #29. It took longer to get my hands on the first 23 issues because I didn't know they were comic books…and even if I had, they were difficult to locate. I have not missed an issue since.

Also before #71, I found and purchased copies of all twelve MAD paperbacks that had been issued: The MAD Reader, MAD Strikes Back, Inside MAD, Utterly MAD, the Brothers MAD, The Bedside MAD, Son of MAD, The Organization MAD, Like MAD, The Ides of MAD, Fighting MAD and The MAD Frontier. They all contained reprints of material from the magazine but the next one to come out — Don Martin Steps Out — was the first to feature all-new material and it was very wonderful. So were a lot of subsequent MAD paperbacks by Mr. Martin and other MAD contributors. I don't think the original MAD paperbacks have gotten the attention they deserve, nor are any of them in print now.

I'd better wrap this up soon because I could write about MAD so long and so much that it would make my recent Blackhawk series look like a Tweet. I could write about its glories and I could write about the occasional periods when, as is inevitable over seventy years, it didn't meet its own standards. I just wanted to remind you that it's still being published and tell you that I just got my copy of that new celebratory issue in the mail and that its best years deserve way more attention and respect than they've received. Even if the magazine was produced by The Usual Gang of Idiots.

Yes, this is the final installment of this series of articles. In case you're just jumping in now, go back and read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10 and Part 11.

It's not so bad these days but during my first two or three decades in the comic book business, I often witnessed an unfortunate tendency in the comic book field to wholly blame the talent if a book doesn't sell well. If it does great…well, the writer and artist obviously had something to do with that but so did the publisher's overall success and the brand loyalty of those who buy their other books and the skill of their marketing and promotional people and whatever editorial or creative input came from the folks in the office. But if they decided (rightly or wrongly) to cancel your comic, the reason was simple: You didn't do your job well.

I encountered that policy a lot in the TV business. It always seemed to be either "Our show is a hit" or "Your show bombed."

In the eighties, I was briefly an investor in a restaurant in Hollywood and I learned a little about that business. Sales were good for a year or two, then they started a downward spiral and it soon became a better financial option to close the eatery and sell the land to a company that wanted to build a mini-mall in its place. Which is how I got out of the restaurant business, probably forever.

One of the other partners had way more experience in this field than I did. I asked him what he thought had gone wrong and he said, "When a restaurant closes, you always blame the chef."

I didn't quite grasp what he was telling me so I asked, "But the chef didn't change…and how come some branches of Olive Garden or Denny's succeed and others don't? The food is exactly the same at all of them."

He said, approximately: "In reality, restaurants succeed or fail for a million different reasons — location, what kind of competition is nearby, how much advertising they do, how effective that advertising is, not keeping up with changing tastes and trends, letting the restaurant itself get run down or uncomfortable, ease of parking, the courtesy and efficiency of your wait staff, the quality of the meat and produce your suppliers deliver to you…" He listed about fifteen more and then he summarized: "Bad food is definitely a big reason but when a restaurant goes under, everyone who was in charge of those other things just blames the chef!"

And I thought, "Gee, that's a lot like every other business I've ever been in."

I do not have a high opinion of the management at DC Comics between, say, 1968 and 1976, in part because of this attitude and it certainly applies to certain periods at Marvel, as well. I also thought the folks running DC then were way too quick to cancel books before they had a chance to catch on, and I'm not just talking about Jack Kirby's.

When I was named editor of Blackhawk, I reported mainly to Dick Giordano, who now held the titles of Vice-President and Executive Editor. But I didn't report much to him and when I complained (always nicely) about something, he usually fixed things. When he didn't, he had this amazing way of telling me — this was the gist of it, not the precise words he used — "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change" and then he'd take the time to explain why. I still liked and respected him. Sometimes, honesty trumps the little song-and-dance when they promise you things will change, knowing full well they won't.

Dick and I did not talk much. As I've said, DC left me surprisingly alone on this comic. But he'd occasionally call and tell me he loved something we'd done. I liked to think it was earnestly meant and maybe it was but it was always followed by "I'm sorry I have to tell you that sales are down another notch." On the plus side, when we stopped doing Blackhawk, he did offer other books to Dan and to me, and he personally hired Dan to ghost-pencil a few comics that were officially drawn by Dick Giordano.

I called Dick once to complain that DC's Production Department was insisting I replace the colorist that Dan and I wanted. Dick's response was basically "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." I called him a couple of times to complain about the overt lack of promotion I felt the comic was getting. Dick's response was another variation of "You're right, we're wrong but it's not going to change." But again, he explained why it was the way it was, which had to do with the over-all health of the company. I understood. There was some justification for channeling promotional efforts towards certain books and not others.

The problem with the colorist was solved via a compromise. The problem with the promotion was not solved. One aspect of it was that each month, I'd send in a description of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk that dealers would be ordering. It did not seem to be the fault of anyone in particular but somehow, the description would not get to the proper folks at the proper time and when the solicitations went out, it would just say of the next issue of Blackhawk, "No information available at press time." I don't know how much that hurt us but it sure didn't help.

I had this friend named Bill Liebowitz, who owned and operated the Golden Apple bookstore here in Los Angeles. It was then the place to go if you collected comics and a lot of folks would have told you Bill was the wisest retailer, if not in the country than certainly in our half of the state. I asked Bill over and over what I could do…and I wasn't asking how to make it a top seller. I just thought if we could get sales up a skosh, Dan and I could get to do the comic a little longer.

Bill was a pretty straightforward guy about this kind of thing. He said, "There's really nothing you can do. DC is not behind this book." He told me that when he mentioned to some DC rep that he might have Dan Spiegle and me in the store for a signing, the rep told him not to waste the energy. He quoted the guy as saying, "I can see if we can get Marv Wolfman and George Perez to come by and sign Teen Titans. Now, that's a hot book these days."

"But don't take my word for it," Bill also said. He invited me to a meeting of a little group he convened now and then — maybe a dozen guys who operated comic book shops in Southern California. I drove with him down to the meeting, which was held in the back room of one of their stores and I answered their questions about the business for half an hour. Then Bill said, "Okay, now let's flip the script. Does anyone have any advice for Mark on how to boost the sales of Blackhawk?"

There were no suggestions.

They all told me stories not unlike Bill's about DC reps urging the promotion of other DC books. And by the way, when I say there were no suggestions, I'm not counting the guy who said it might help if the book was instead written or drawn by someone "hotter" than Dan or me. He emphasized that he was not saying "better." Just "hotter." He mentioned an artist whose work, he said, was very popular with his customers but "personally, I think his comics suck."

I was not angry at anyone, not even the DC reps. In their position, I might have advised the same thing. I think it's important to be realistic about these things; to realize that the buyers are going to buy what the buyers want to buy. You can nudge them and call things to their attention and dress the product up to look more attractive and some of that may work. But if they don't want to see a movie, all the powers of Hollywood and the zillions they can spend on promotion cannot stampede ticket buyers to the Cineplex. Usually.

A few days after that meeting with the local dealers, Dick called. DC had raised their cover price from 60 cents to 75 and they were now looking at sales figures impacted by that change. As might be expected, everything was down a little bit. That little bit didn't matter much to a top-selling book but it mattered to one like ours.

Then soon after, someone else in the office called to tell me that the company that bought the rights to republish DC comics in Germany had decided to stop taking the ones set in World War II. I wasn't surprised by that. I was actually surprised that they'd ever been interested in publishing comics that were basically all about killing Germans. But they had been and weren't anymore so DC war titles became less lucrative…for DC.

Dan Spiegle lived near Santa Barbara. I lived (and still live) in Los Angeles. It's a distance of about 85 miles and we'd decided that Thousand Oaks was about the midway point. Every so often, we'd meet there for lunch at a delicatessen to which I also sometimes took Jack and Roz Kirby, who lived nearby. The day I heard about Germany canceling, I called Dan and asked him to meet me for lunch the next day.

Over burgers in Thousand Oaks, I told him, "Blackhawk as we know it is not long for this world. They'll probably cut us to bi-monthly any day now. That's the best case scenario. They may just cancel it or decide to see if some other writer and artist can turn it around. But I have an idea of something else we could do."

I was concurrently doing The DNAgents for Eclipse with Will Meugniot and there was an obvious, crying-out-to-be-done spin-off called Crossfire there. Dan had drawn some sequences of the character in DNAgents and was the perfect artist for an ongoing series if we wanted to ongo. Before I could lay out several possible scenarios for us, he said that whenever Blackhawk went away, he'd be delighted to do a Crossfire book with me for Eclipse.  When I got home, I called Dean Mullaney, who was running Eclipse, and he said, "Great. Whenever you want to start." I started writing the first issue that evening.

Not long after that, Mr. Giordano called and said they were going to have to cut Blackhawk to bi-monthly. I said, "In that case, Dan and I would like to leave at whatever time will not cause you any problems." Dick replied — and these were his exact words — "I'm not surprised and I don't blame you. You two gave us a much better book than we expected and we didn't treat it very well."

I have been in and around the comic book business since 1969. I cannot tell you how rare it is for someone in Dick's position to say something like that and he even phoned Dan and repeated it. Others then running the company said similar things to me.  DC was a very creative-friendly company in those years under the management of Jenette Kahn, Paul Levitz and Dick.

We soon decided to end with Blackhawk #273, which I think came out around the same time as Crossfire #6. Somehow, descriptions of what would be in the next issue of Blackhawk were still not getting into the dealer solicitations and instead, it often said "No information available at press time"…so I decided to entitle our last story, "No Information Available at Press Time." One or two people at DC were miffed or didn't see the humor but most told me it was a funny idea.

To my surprise, DC decided they would try to keep the Blackhawk comic going after we left. The book was assigned to a different writer-artist team and they began doing their first issues while Dan and I were still doing our last ones. The writer worked at Marvel's animation studio in North Hollywood and one day when I was out there for meetings on a project, I ran into him in the men's room. He told me that my Blackhawk work was a "nice try"…

…but he was doing it so right that DC was going to put it back to monthly and promote the hell out of it.  Not only that but Steven Spielberg was hiring him to write the screenplay for that big Blackhawk movie.  I have the vague feeling that neither DC Comics nor Mr. Spielberg ever knew any of this.  I do know DC didn't even publish the issues he did. Once someone in upper management saw what they were doing, it was decided to terminate the Blackhawk comic with the last issue by Dan and me.

Not all that long after though, someone with a lot more talent than that writer-artist team produced a three-issue Blackhawk mini-series. That was Howard Chaykin, who took things, probably wisely, in a different direction. That led to a couple of other revivals, including a series in Action Comics, a new Blackhawk comic that got a #1 (I'm jealous) and a special. Some aspects of the property have popped up in other DC Comics as well but I haven't followed any of this closely enough to write about it here. It does look like the franchise has generally been in good hands.

Dan Spiegle and I did Crossfire in various forms for a few years and we were both very happy.  I miss doing a monthly comic book and I miss Dan.  And whenever I think about either book, as I did a lot while writing this overlong article, I miss him even more.  I don't like to re-read old comics I wrote but often at a convention, when someone brings me a copy of anything I did with Dan to sign, I flip through the pages and think just how fortunate I was to know and work with that man.

A certain person who follows this blog will enjoy singing along with this number from the musical of Hairspray…

Here's a message from Robert Rose which reminds me of a story I don't think I've told much…

With respect to the DC Comics Presents title, and how it (and the similar The Brave and the Bold title, featuring team-ups with Batman) often featured some pretty obscure characters: I wondered if one of the purposes of the title was to give the company a chance to keep such characters in a kind of "active" status, for copyright/trademark purposes. (Which of course wouldn't have been necessary for Blackhawk at the time since it had its own title running.) Is that a correct impression?

Yes. The editors of those two team-up comics would sometimes be informed by someone down the hall that they wanted a certain property in print again and not just for copyright or trademark reasons. Sometimes, it was just to test the waters of interest out there and I think occasionally, it was to show someone who might be interested in an old DC property for new merchandising reasons that the company considered it current.

I mentioned that Julius Schwartz asked me to write a Superman-Kamandi crossover for DC Comics Presents. I should have mentioned that he told me he "had to" do one and that I suspected he'd never read the comic and was counting on me to know it well enough so that he wouldn't have to. And the funny thing about that is that I didn't know the property that well…then.

When I was working for Jack Kirby, I did a lot of work on Kamandi #1. The ideas in that comic were almost all his but he had to go through some outlines and presentations to "sell" DC on the book…which at that point, he thought/hoped would be a comic he'd edit, supervising another writer and another artist, hopefully both local. The writer probably would have been me and the artist we had in mind was Dan Spiegle, who at that point, I had neither met nor worked with. But I suggested him — he was close to "local" — and Mike Royer got us his phone number. Jack called him and one day when I was not there, Dan came to Jack's home and they really hit it off.

At the time, Dan was the guy who drew Korak, Son of Tarzan and Space Family Robinson for Gold Key Comics…and when you think about it, Kamandi was kind of like those two comics put together, though Jack had never seen either of them when he came up with it. Dan never drew anything to show how he'd handle the new comic but when he showed Jack those books that day, Jack loved what he saw.

So I wrote up those "selling" pages and Jack did some presentation art, some of which I haven't seen since back then. Carmine Infantino at DC loved the concept, though they spent a little time going back and forth with Carmine throwing in what we all thought were bad ideas. I think the only one that got in was to prominently display a semi-destroyed Statue of Liberty in the first issue to somehow make it more like Planet of the Apes. Jack wound up doing the first issue of The Demon before he wrote and drew the first issue of Kamandi.

Infantino vetoed Spiegle with kind of an "Well, I've never heard of him so he can't be very good" attitude. At that point, he wanted each book, after Jack drew the first few of each, to be drawn by one of the Filipino artists who were just beginning to work for DC. Then after Jack actually did those first few, Carmine decided he wanted to "suspend" (cancel) New Gods and Forever People so Jack could stay on the new books. Jack was devastated by this decision but he complied.

I left Jack's employ about the time he was finishing the third issue of Kamandi and I didn't read the comic — or The Demon for that matter. Purchased them all but never got around to reading them. The concepts just didn't appeal to me at the time and I guess it felt wrong to me that Jack was doing those rather than the books they displaced on his schedule.

Before someone asks: I stopped working with Jack because it had become obvious that he didn't need me; not that he ever really had. But he kept thinking DC was going to allow him to edit books he didn't write or draw and he might have had some use for me if that had happened. Since it clearly wasn't going to, and since Gold Key was offering me as much work as I could handle, I quietly absented myself from Jack's employ but not his life. And soon after, my editor at Gold Key asked me if I'd like to write the Scooby Doo comic book, which was drawn by Dan Spiegle. So that's how that relationship started.

Ten years later when Julius Schwartz asked me to write a Superman-Kamandi story, I said yes because…well, it was Julie asking and because I thought, "Hey, maybe this would be a good time to read all those Kamandi comics I have." So I devoured Jack's entire run over about three days and really, really enjoyed it. I understood why some people still think that was one of the best things he ever did and I later understood that about The Demon when I finally read those. I guess enough time had passed since they replaced The Fourth World that I didn't resent them as I once had.

Al Kilgore (1927-1983) was a great cartoonist who is well known to fans of vintage movies for his caricatures of stars, and for his co-founding of the Laurel & Hardy appreciation society, The Sons of the Desert. He also drew the Rocky & Bullwinkle newspaper strip that ran from 1962 to 1965 in not-nearly-enough newspapers. Most fans of Moose and Squirrel agree that it did a superb job of capturing the spirit and humor of the TV cartoons. It has been hard however to locate samples of this strip…

…until now. Someone — I know not who — has assembled what appears to be a complete collection of the daily strip (there was never a Sunday page) and has published them in two paperback volumes which are now available for purchase on Amazon.

Some of the strips in the book have been printed off scans of original art, probably mostly scans that Heritage Auctions did recently when they sold a whole lotta Kilgore art. Some have been printed from newspapers and in some cases, they have been restored adequately with touch-ups. The fellow (I'm assuming it's a fellow) who put the books together made a font of Kilgore's distinctive lettering in order to reletter strips where the lettering was in need of repair. He also wrote a personal essay about the strip and his love for it.

In fact, he put in everything but his name. There's a copyright notice but it doesn't say who is claiming that copyright…which makes one wonder how legitimate this whole enterprise is. I might not have been so quick to order these volumes if I'd known this…and I should also say that I think the books are way overpriced for what you get. So I'm not telling you to buy them, just that they're there and that the strip was wonderful. Because I feel a little weird about these books, I've configured the following Amazon links so I don't get a cut if you order Volume 1 or Volume 2 through this site.

While we're on the subject of Al Kilgore, I want to clear up something that probably bugs me more than it should. A number of Rocky & Bullwinkle comic books were published in the sixties by Western Publishing Company, appearing at first under the Dell logo and later under the Gold Key colophon. (If you don't understand what happened there, read this.)

None of this work was signed or credited and a lot of folks — including some selling the old comics or the art from them — are crediting it to Al Kilgore when, in fact, he did very little of it. Take a look at this little graphic I assembled. The drawing of Bullwinkle on the right was inarguably drawn and inked by Al Kilgore…

The other four drawings were lifted from issues of Dell and Gold Key comics which some credit to Kilgore.  Just look at Bullwinkle's head shape and the design of his antlers.  Does anyone think those were drawn by the same person?  This is, as Alex Jones would put it, my Perry Mason Moment.

Kilgore drew some promotional comics of Jay Ward characters (including our old pals Quisp and Quake) that came with cereal or were for other purposes.  But for the Dell and Gold Key comic books, I only see Kilgore in the first issue of Rocky and His Fiendish Friends (October, 1962) — a comic I remember very fondly from my childhood. It may or may not have been the first comic Western put out with the Gold Key logo, but it was the first I saw on a rack of the new comics…and of course, avidly purchased.

It has an inside front cover by Kilgore and then there's a Rocky & Bullwinkle story serialized throughout the issue that I'm fairly sure he penciled but did not ink.  He did not draw the other stories in that issue or the ones that followed and I doubt he did any covers.

And there's no evidence that he did or didn't write anything in these comics. Alter Ego magazine recently ran an interview with one of the editors at Western in those days and he got all sorts of things wrong and on this topic, he said Kilgore wrote and drew most of those books.  As you can see above, he definitely did not draw most or even much. The editor also said Kilgore did their Hoppity Hooper comic book. I guess it's possible Kilgore wrote and/or drew one that wound up on a shelf somewhere but Western never published a Hoppity Hooper comic book.

Some have speculated that those Dell and Gold Key comics were done by others who worked for Jay Ward then. I sure doubt it. A few of the writers who worked for Jay Ward did work for Western Publishing, especially Lloyd Turner and (briefly) Bill Scott but both did all their work for Western's Los Angeles office which had nothing to do with the the comics in question. They were done out of Western's office in New York City, far from the Jay Ward Studios.

I believe all the comics we're talking about here were done by East Coast talent. Al Kilgore lived and worked in New York as did Mel Crawford, who drew some covers and maybe some insides. So did Fred Fredericks, who was best known for drawing the Mandrake the Magician newspaper strip. Also, Dave Berg (yes, the guy from MAD) said he wrote a few stories but I don't know which ones. The only crossover would be Jack Mendelsohn, who lived in New York and worked for Western on all sorts of comics, including Rocky and His Fiendish Friends and Bullwinkle, before moving out to L.A. He worked for Ward on the George of the Jungle show and then for a lot of other TV producers.

For years now, folks who don't know who drew certain Disney, Warner Brothers or other funny animal comics from Western have just automatically credited the art to Pete Alvarado. Occasionally, they're right because Pete was very prolific but there were more than forty other guys drawing those comics. And once in a rare while, art for a Rocky & Bullwinkle comic credited to Al Kilgore was actually drawn by Al Kilgore. But that happened rarely, not most of the time as too many people insist.

Well, actually he's in the Washington Post today. Big article on my co-conspirator. And don't miss reading the comments section. Whole lotta love there.

In the seventies, ladies who were foolish enough to go out with me would often be treated to a repast at Madame Wu's Garden, a lovely place to dine on Wilshire Boulevard in Santa Monica. It closed down in 1998 and there's now a Whole Foods Market where it used to be. Eventually, something owned by Jeff Bezos will replace everything in our world.

There were cheaper places to get good Chinese Food but the ambience was nice, the staff was oh-so-courteous and friendly, and Madame Sylvia Wu herself might just stop by your table and make you feel especially welcome. She was famous for her cookbooks and was delighted one time when I ordered a copy of one "to go," autographed to my mother. My mother loved going there too and at her request, I took her there for a last Madame Wu meal just before the place closed in '98. (Madame Wu later opened another restaurant but it never caught on.)

Her Garden was a lovely place with a celebrity clientele and food which must have been healthier than I imagined. Because Madame Wu just died this past Thursday at the age of 106.

Here's another batch of cereal commercials produced for the Quaker Oats company by Jay Ward's company.  Most are for Quisp and Quake but there are two in there for another cereal, King Vitaman, and the king's voice is Joe Flynn, best known as Captain Binghamton on the McHale's Navy TV show.  Also in these, you'll meet Quake's arch-enemy, Simon LeGreedy, whose voice was supplied by Hans Conried.

Daws Butler is Quisp and a few supporting characters.  William Conrad is Quake, who is remodeled into a slimmer character in these spots.  June Foray is all the ladies and the little boy.  Bill Scott and Paul Frees handle the other roles. Once again, they hired more actors than they absolutely had to…

Several of you have called to my attention the fact that Samantha Bee's show on TBS has been canceled.  I missed the news.  Thank you, Roger Green, for that link.  Does this mean she's in the running for the host job on The Daily Show?  I dunno.  Except in the news business, TV networks don't usually like to pick up a show or star that's just been dropped by the competition but there have been exceptions.  Will Ms. Bee be one?  I have no idea.  I also wasn't predicting that it will be Jordan Klepper.  I just think it should be.

Remember that no one predicted Trevor Noah to succeed Jon Stewart just as no one predicted James Corden to replace Craig Ferguson…or Craig Ferguson to replace Craig Kilborn…or Conan O'Brien to replace David Letterman or Jimmy Fallon to replace Conan O'Brien…

The last part of the Blackhawk article will probably be up here on Monday.  Spoiler Alert: The book gets canceled.

My wise pal Paul Harris tells a story that illustrates a principle that I wish I'd learned earlier in life: There's very little point in arguing over some policy or rule with people who do not have the power to change that policy or rule. Paul's tale is about a poker player at a casino who was outraged by a casino policy…and, of course, argued about it with someone who had zero power to change it.

It's fine, and perhaps even a good idea, to register your displeasure with something. If enough people do, their collective disapproval might (might!) lead to the policy or rule being changed by those with the power to do so.  And I've found that being reasonable and polite is way more effective than having the kind of tantrum that causes a cell phone video of you to be uploaded to YouTube with "Karen" in the title.  Don't berate the employee who's just doing what their employer ordered them to…or in some cases, what the law tells them to do.

Paul's post reminded me of the story of the Superstar Performer who was once playing Blackjack in Las Vegas. Because he was so famous, a crowd gathered to watch him play…which in this case meant watching him lose hand after hand after hand. It was apparently entertaining to see the headliner forfeiting large chunks of the money he was making by performing in the casino's showroom. Losing streaks happen to even the best players but not only was he dropping thousands of bucks on each hand but — worse — he felt he was being humiliated. Lots of folks were watching which meant lots o' stories would get around.

The dealer, a young woman, was dealing the cards out of a six-deck shoe. Dealers are supposed to be like friendly robots. They make no decisions. They just deal the cards and enforce the rules they did not make. And in case you don't know what a "shoe" is in this context, they look like this — though the ones in casinos are rarely, if ever, transparent…

That was how it was done at every Blackjack table in this casino and most tables in the state of Nevada. Desperate for something to change his luck — like this would make any sort of difference — the Superstar Performer told the dealer to take the cards out of the shoe and deal the next hand by hand. She said something like, "I'm sorry, Mr. Superstar Performer. We're not allowed to do that."

That should have been the end of it but…well, there are people in this world who go through life with the attitude of "The rules don't apply to me."  They like the idea of norms being waived for them and that when they yell, others will do anything to appease them.  There's a technical term for such people and I believe it starts with "ass" and ends with "hole."

The Superstar Performer used one or two misogynistic terms and told the dealer, "I said 'Take the cards out of the shoe and deal them by hand.'"  There was an "…or else" clearly implied in his tone.

As the story is told, the dealer began to cry…and why wouldn't she cry?  She was in big trouble no matter what she did.  If she did as ordered, she would be fired and might even lose her license to deal Blackjack; i.e., her entire livelihood.  If she didn't…well, she knew the casino couldn't afford to piss off the Superstar Performer who packed their showroom every night with high-rolling, big-betting customers. She would be a small, acceptable sacrifice to placate him.

All dealers in a casino are supervised by suit-wearing staffers called Casino Hosts or sometimes, Pit Bosses. They have no power to change the rules either but they can give out comps and settle disputes between the player and the dealer when any arise. The one for this table stepped in and tried to pacify the Superstar Performer.

This mostly consisted of fawning over him and trying to divert S.P.'s rage away from the trembling dealer. A Casino Host once told me — while telling me this story, in fact — "What I usually try to do, what most of us would do, is get the angry customer to direct that anger at us instead of at the dealer. We're better equipped to deal with it." The Casino Host trying to placate the S.P. sent the dealer to the equivalent of the Dealers' Locker Room and called for a replacement. Once she was gone, he promised the Superstar Performer that she'd be fired for disobedience or rudeness or not properly kissing the butt of a Superstar Performer…or something.

The cards were not removed from the shoe and dealt by hand. That might even have endangered the casino's gaming license. But the Superstar Performer could walk away from the table acting like he'd won. And the fired dealer was not exactly fired. They just felt it would be bad if the S.P. ever saw her dealing Blackjack there again so they transferred her to a different casino owned by the same corporation.

That's that story and I should mention one more thing about it: I have no idea if it's true or not. It sounds true to me but so do a lot of things, like certain friends who are definitely going to pay back the money you owe me but never quite do. I heard the story about the Superstar Performer in my earlier days of hanging out with Vegas people. I met a lot of them backstage or in other informal settings.

As I said, a Casino Host told it to me. This was at the Imperial Palace. One of the longtime hosts at the Flamingo told it to me. A comedian who performed in the lounge at The Mint told it to me. An off-duty Casino Host at Caesars told it to me. The straight man in the Minsky's Burlesque Revue at the Hacienda told it to me. I probably heard it from a dozen Vegas-based people and while the identity of the Superstar Performer rotated between three men, all deceased, the details and reported assholishness did not.

Paul's story reminded me of it and so did scenes I witnessed a few years ago when I was spending a lot of time at hospitals because my mother, and later my lady friend, were patients. I was there to make sure my loved one was receiving proper care and I saw a lot of other people who were there to help out their loved ones.

There always seemed to be someone screaming at one or more nurses because of a hospital policy or even an actual law. They were screaming despite the fact that the target of their fury — and I don't mean to raise my voice here but I must put this in boldface — did not make the rule and did not have the power to change or ignore it.

Pardon me for yelling there but they were yelling then. Often, it was because their loved one was in pain and the nurse was not allowed to give them medication for that pain. I think I did my best for my mother and for Carolyn by understanding what the nurses could and could not do and occasionally saying to them — in a peaceful and understanding way, I hoped — something like, "I understand you're not allowed to do what she needs but can you point me towards the person who can solve this problem?"

And one time, I said to a guy who was screaming at a nurse, "If you're not going to stop yelling at her because you're waking up all these patients who need their sleep, how about not yelling at someone who's just doing her job because it isn't going to do any good?"

"It doesn't work" is an excellent reason to not do something. Yelling at the dealer in that club in Vegas did not stop the Superstar Performer from losing all that money in front of onlookers. It didn't even stop them all from telling stories, which are repeated to this day, about what a jerk he was.

• I don't know if there's an afterlife but if there is, mine will still include daily, unstoppable text messages from my local CVS Pharmacy offering to refill my prescription for that drug I stopped taking three years ago.

I grew up — to the extent I grew up at all — in West Los Angeles, a few blocks west of the sprawling Twentieth-Century Fox studio. In their golden era, that lot covered an awful lot of real estate but in the early sixties, the movie biz was so screwy and unpredictable, that Fox sold off 180 acres to developers. The result was an also-sprawling area called Century City that was eventually filled with — among other landmarks — office buildings, a huge hotel, a huge entertainment center, a Playboy Club and a big, fancy mostly-outdoor mall. The office buildings and the mall are still there.

They started building it around 1963 and my father decided that all those towering office buildings were part of a deliberate plot to ruin our TV reception. On some channels, we got so much of a double image that whenever the Smothers Brothers appeared, there were four of them.

In spite of that, I came to like Century City in all its incarnations. Since then, they've always seemed to be tearing a building down, putting one up and remodeling all the ones that remain. The mall is still mostly outdoors but it's so oddly-designed now that it reminds me of one of those "escape rooms" that are like a puzzle to find your way out…or in this case, to an escalator down to anywhere near where you left your car.

Alison Martino, who covers the changing face of Los Angeles, assembled a great collection of photos of Century City in past years. It was fun to scroll through it and see so many places where I used to go.