A few hours ago, I was wondering why so many Uber drivers these days were driving Teslas. Then I took Ubers to and from my physical therapy session and I got one Tesla on the way there and a different Tesla on the way back. I've redacted their license plate numbers but here's what these two gents were driving…

And I asked both of them about the mystery and I got roughly the same answer twice: Do the math. It seems there's some sort of alliance between Uber, Tesla and Hertz Rent-a-Car. Hertz bought a whole mess of Teslas — that's probably how Elon Musk got the dough which he blew to buy Twitter — and they rent them to Uber drivers on surprisingly favorable terms.

Both drivers ticked off the math to me. I didn't take notes but they were roughly the same. Fuel for a Tesla costs almost nothing. Fuel for a Prius cost one of those drivers a fortune even though it was a hybrid. Hertz pays most maintenance charges. The guy who drove me home ended up buying his. The guy who took me there has another car (not a Tesla) for his everyday activities and only drives the Tesla for Uber missions. And they both said they really like driving a Tesla.

I shoulda known. I'm a big believer in the principle of "Follow the Money." It's the answer to more questions than we might imagine.

I've been having a problem with my right knee lately. That's the one I had replaced in September of 2015 and while I can walk okay much of the time, it's rough for a minute or so after I get up from a seated position. I also have a problem on stairs and I've temporarily stopped driving. I have trouble controlling the pressure with which I depress the gas pedal or the brake.

It's something my orthopedist is certain will be remedied via physical therapy so twice a week, I take an Uber over to a wonderful place to which I'd walk if my knee was in better shape. There, some nice people put me through exercises to improve flexibility and strength, and I can already feel some improvement.

An odd thing: In three of the last five Uber trips I've taken, I've been transported by a different guy driving a Tesla…and when I complimented one of those drivers on how nice his car looked, he said, "You should see the other Tesla I have at home." I don't think he was joking. And I don't know why a person who owns one Tesla, let alone two, is driving for Uber, nor can I think of a nice way to ask any of them about this. If I had one of them conveyances, I don't think I'd let a steady succession of strangers ride in it.

Not being able to drive is not a huge problem since there aren't that many places I want to go these days and almost none of them are far. Driving down to Comic-Con in San Diego last July was one of the few times in the last few years I've ventured into a non-adjacent zip code. The Pandemic got me hooked on having Instacart bring me my groceries and to have Grubhub and DoorDash bring me meals.

A lot of meetings to which I would previously have had to drive are now taking place on Zoom or sometimes Skype and I like that a lot. Last week, I had a meeting which once-upon-a-time would have meant a drive to Burbank. That's thirty minutes each way when there's light traffic and it could be more than an hour when it's heavy out there. The meeting lasted twenty minutes on Zoom and that's all the time of mine it took.

Driving to and fro might have been four times that. And if I'd had to take an Uber there…well, right this minute, Uber says "It's busy, fares are higher," and they want $36.93 one way. Maybe that's how Uber drivers can afford Teslas.

None of this should be taken as complaining, not even the part about my knee. It's still causing me less pain and trouble than if I hadn't had it swapped out for a metal one. People continue to ask me, "Are you glad you had it done?" as if the alternative was having my original one functioning like it did when I was a teenager.

That didn't seem to be an option just as it won't be if/when the left one needs replacing. I still don't know why it didn't reach its expiration date the same time my right one did. I got them both at the same time in the same place and since I don't do a lot of hopping, they've taken almost exactly the same number of steps.

A turtle — or maybe it's a tortoise — eating things. This is pretty much the way I ate until about the age of 40…

I see people out there already handicapping the 2024 Biden-Trump rematch as if nothing that could possibly happen between now and then — including the economy, the War in Ukraine, a dozen-or-so Trump trials, the health of either man, Biden deciding not to run, various scandals, more or fewer random shootings, debates, weather catastrophes, etc. — could possibly affect the outcome of that election. I'll bet something within thirty days makes a big difference.

A friend of mine who'd vote for a cockroach before he'd vote for a Republican is delighted Donald is running. He thinks it means utter chaos and bloody infighting for the G.O.P. and there seem to be folks in that party who feel the same way. I think we're in truly uncharted territory as to what will happen…and I don't want to hear predictions until at least there's some solid polling on who'll be the nominee. I wouldn't even assume either of those guys will be on the ticket.

Right now, I have more important things to think about…like I'm realizing that the most exercise I will ever get out of my old stationary bike — the one that no longer works — is getting it down the stairs and off to some sort of dump or recycling center, and then getting the new one upstairs and assembled.

I reminded you yesterday that badges for WonderCon are now on sale. I should have also reminded you that your badges will cost you less bucks if you buy them by January 8, 2023. And there's a big hint there that they're not going to sell out soon…but they will probably sell out. If you wanna go, don't wait too long.

One of my favorite people was the late Daws Butler, voice of Yogi Bear, Huckleberry Hound and so many more great animated characters. Just a lovely, lovely talented man. We have here seven commercials for Snowdrift shortening…and I believe Daws did more than voices for these. I think he was involved in the writing of these commercials. He isn't even heard in the last one. I think the voice of the wolf in that one is Herschel Bernardi. Daws did do the voice of the rich guy in the first six…

Here in Los Angeles, we still don't know who our new mayor will be. As of earlier today, Karen Bass has 52.15% of the vote and Rick Caruso has 47.85% — but whatever news media might make a projection and "call the race" hasn't done so yet, perhaps for good reason.

For what it's worth, I voted for Bass but this is not a race I care about as much as some others. The mayor of Los Angeles, whoever it is, doesn't have enough power to drastically change things…at least not as much as mayors of other big cities have. And we'll probably never know this but I am curious though to what extent people did or did not vote for Mr. Caruso, a very wealthy real estate developer, because his profession made them think he might be kinda like Donald Trump.

Anyway, the L.A. Times just ran this explainer about why the vote is taking so long to count. It might be of interest to folks who think there's cheating afoot whenever Candidate A takes an early lead in the counting and then suddenly, in the wee small hours of the morning, Candidate B overtakes Candidate A.

Steve Bacher had this question for me…

I was perusing old MAD magazine issues from the 1980s and I have been wondering about the time that Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder returned to illustrate numerous articles. What I'm curious about is why the art was credited to both together (and signed "WEHK"). I know that in the original comic book days, Kurtzman did the writing and I guess story layouts and Elder/Davis/Wood/Severin did the actual drawing, but in the 80s the writers are all from the Usual Gang of Idiots. So did WE and HK split duties? Did Harvey do the basic layouts and Will the rest? (A few articles have artwork credited to Kurtzman alone, in his distinctive style; the joint works are all in the Elder style.) Or did Elder do all the work but agree to share credit for whatever reason?

I put this very question to Nick Meglin, who was co-editor of MAD back then. His answer was kinda what I expected: "Harvey and Will figure out between them who'll do what and they do it and turn it in to us."

The assembly line method by which most comic books have been produced has convinced a lot of people that if two artists work on a story, one did all the art in pencil and then the other went over the pages and finished the art in ink. That's one way to do it but it's not the only way to do it. In newspaper strips especially, one sees many different divisions of labor…different ways in which the lead artist might employ assistants.

Al Capp sometimes laid-out Li'l Abner, sometimes he had assistants do it, sometimes they penciled, sometimes they inked. Often, Capp would ink the characters' heads (especially the ladies) and maybe the hands. Then again, I have an original Li'l Abner Sunday page which I think is pure Capp.

The later years of Steve Canyon, Milton Caniff sometimes penciled but often Dick Rockwell penciled and usually, Rockwell inked. Sometimes, Rockwell inked everything. Sometimes, he inked everything but the faces of recurring characters, including Steve. And sometimes, Caniff did some strips by himself.

Every Buick that comes down the conveyor belt on a given day may have had fifty people work on it and each one did the exact same thing on each Buick. Comics don't work like that, especially when artists work together, as opposed to collaborating through an editor. Harvey and Will were very close and their collaborations on Little Annie Fanny were done all different ways with many others participating, "who did what" often varying from panel to panel. In most of their jobs together, I would imagine that Kurtzman did most of the layouts and some of the penciling and Elder did the rest…but it wasn't necessarily the same split on every job.

And you can get yours here. The convention is Friday-thru-Sunday from March 24 to 26 at the Anaheim Convention Center. 412,000 square feet of comic book convention…and this one usually has a lot of comic books!

We haven't had a song here in a while from the a cappella group, Voctave. Here they are with a favorite from The Music Man…

NOTE: The following article was posted earlier today but since then, I've received some additional information so I've revised it a bit.

In what I wrote about Budd here the other day, I mentioned the firebombing of his club, The Improv. On the club's website, there's this history of the place that's worth your time and it includes the following paragraph…

In 1979, a talent strike was organized against Mitzi Shore and her Comedy Store for failing to pay non-headlining comedians. The Improv was set to reap the benefits of the influx of comedians working only our stage until a massive fire nearly burned the entire building down. Arson was the cause and rumors ran rampant, from a competitor of Budd's (there was only one) to a disgruntled comedian who bombed on stage. The mystery was never solved, but the fire did close the showroom. To help Budd quickly rebuild, Improv favorites Robin Williams and Andy Kaufman organized fundraising shows, just one of many examples of legendary comedians showing their support throughout the years to the place that started their careers.

Two slight corrections to that. First: The fire didn't burn the entire building down…more like half. I walked up there a day or so after the blaze to see if I could volunteer some manpower or help organize the benefits I already heard were being assembled. There turned out to be nothing I could contribute but I saw the place. The showroom looked like it had been charbroiled on a big Hibachi but the restaurant and bar in the front were fine. So was the kitchen. So were the bathrooms.

And workers — some of whom I recognized as comics I'd seen on the Improv stage — were putting up temp walls to section off the rear and to convert the restaurant into a small performing area. Within a day or two, comics would actually be performing there again to bring in money.

It was a contrast that has stayed with me to this day: There was that lovely little showroom where so many careers had already been made and so many people had been so entertained. It was very, very sad. But then there were all these volunteers up front working like mad to save the business and to get it up and functioning. The new stage was partially-erected and Robin Williams jumped up on it and yelled, like he was in a Civil War drama, "The Mouth shall rise again!"

And I think, something like 48 hours later, he was on that stage, performing for as many people as could be crammed into the new, smaller temporary Improv. Something very inspirational there.

Second correction: The part about "The mystery was never solved" was probably true as far as Budd was concerned when that website went up but as of a few years ago, he considered the whodunnit at least half-solved. Here's a quote from this book I highly recommend on the history of The Improv. It included interviews of many of the performers who worked there and it also included this from Budd himself…

…even after the fire marshal ruled later that day that the cause had been arson — and that the blaze had originated in the rear of the building, where our alley's easy access and quick escape was practically an open invitation for anyone to strike a match — none of us, the more we all thought about it, believed that Mitzi could be that vindictive when it came right down to it. We were a lot less confident when it came to two wannabe comics who were among her biggest supporters, Biff Maynard and Ollie Joe Prater, each of whom had well-known substance abuse problems and were just unstable and impressionable enough to maybe do it. We wouldn't know for certain until 2014, nearly thirty years after the incident, when Ollie Joe confessed to setting the fire on his deathbed in a Los Angeles hospital. But, of course, nobody could prove anything definitively at the time.

For years, I heard rumors that Biff Manard and Ollie Joe Prater had been the firebombers. William Knoedelseder even suggested them by name as the culprits in his fine 2010 book on the Comedy Store strike, I'm Dying Up Here: Heartbreak and High Times in Standup Comedy's Golden Age.  Ollie Joe Prater died in 1991, which is when he presumably made his deathbed confession but Manard was still alive when Knoedelseder's book was published and I wondered how the publisher's lawyers, who presumably vetted the text before publication, had allowed that in.

And now that I think of it, how did Budd not hear about Prater's "confession" until 2014?  2014 was when Biff Manard died.  (And by the way, no one is misspelling his last name.  He spelled it both ways.)

The rumors that Biff and Ollie Joe dunnit never included any actual information about how anyone knew that for sure. It sounded like a lot of people had just asked themselves, "Who might have thought they could benefit from the Improv going away and was a low-enough creature to do such a thing?" Manard and Prater seemed to be the most obvious answers to that question but that wasn't proof.

I did not know Ollie but I sure knew Biff. He was one of the writers on that variety show I worked on, Pink Lady. Among the eight thousand things that went wrong on that show was Biff. He didn't contribute much because he was too busy trying to knife everyone else in the spinal cord.

I have sometimes been accused of being too nice on this blog to certain people who did not deserve kindness or even the benefit of any doubts. In fact, one comedian friend called over the weekend to scold me for not writing about what a horrible person Gallagher was…and it's true that late in life, Gallagher turned into a pretty hateful onstage presence, bashing every minority group in sight and every comedian who was more successful at the moment than he was. But I was writing about the earlier Gallagher, the one who I felt hadn't received his due as a good comic…which he was then.

Still, if you waterboarded me, I couldn't think of anything good to say about Biff Manard or Maynard or whatever he was calling himself.  And apparently, he died with no deathbed confession to having co-firebombed with his pal Ollie Joe. I asked Budd if Prater had implicated Manard in the crime and Budd's reply was, "I'm not sure but if one of those guys did it, the other one did it." Again, not hard evidence.  The more I think about it, the more I'm not sure what to think.

There will be at least one other post about Budd here today. In this one, I wanted to post the following, which was written by the fine comedy writer Arnie Kogen…

So sorry to hear about Budd. In 1981 I was fortunate enough to write for Evening at the Improv. One of the best experiences of my life. Budd Friedman, the host, would intro a celebrity guest host — a Phil Silvers, Shelley Winters, Tony Curtis, Franken & Davis — who would then intro "young" comics like Richard Lewis, Jerry Seinfeld, Rita Rudner, David Spade, Paul Reiser, Andy Kaufman and Stephen Wright to dazzle Improv audiences with their stand up. At one point we had host Lou Gossett Jr open the show with a hilarious monologue about the "Roots" of Budd Friedman. The guy could take a joke. It was a joy to work with Budd and to know him these past four decades. The man was a comedy legend. We will all miss him.

I have not heard anything yet about a memorial service for Budd. I hope though that whoever plans it has it start late with everyone sitting at a tiny cramped table and paying a two-drink minimum.

I've been around professional magicians for much of my life. I don't do much magic these days for the same reason that after I started being around people like Jack Kirby and Sergio Aragonés, I stopped doing a lot of drawing. Why do something like that if the person next to you can do it a thousand times better? But I love magic and I know an awful lot about it.

Every so often, I've found myself in a roomful of magicians when one person was performing. Magicians love watching other magicians even though, 95% of the time, they know how it's done. They love seeing how well someone else does it. They love the unique twists and turns another magician may put on an old trick or how they apply well-known (among magicians) principles in another context.

Sometimes, a trick is even more amazing when you know how it's done because you know how difficult a certain move is to do. It's like how a baseball pitcher might watch another pitcher and really appreciate how that guy puts a certain spin on the ball.

And every so often, magicians love when they don't know how it's done. Magicians love being fooled more than any non-magicians do…because it's such a rare occurrence. 5% may be high.

Our clip today is from a recent Penn & Teller's Fool Us — a show that is somewhat controversial among professional magicians. Some love the attention it brings to the art form…and it has certainly boosted the careers of those who've gone on and done well on the program. And by "done well," I don't necessarily mean they fooled Penn and Teller. They may just have been so interesting and appealing (and maybe funny) that they gained fans and followers.

But other magicians think the show places too much emphasis on how tricks are done, reducing them to puzzles to be solved and inviting YouTube "reveals" and such. Not being a professional magician, I have no real opinion on that. If I was one, my feeling about it might have something to do with whether I could get on the show and, if so, how well it went. I think though that all magicians are excited when they see someone do a trick they can't figure out.

The magician in this clip is Dani DaOrtiz. He's from Spain, he's very famous for card magic…and he's amazing. On a few magician forums I'm on, seasoned pros are admitting they're watching the video over and over and asking, "How the hell did he do that?" Like me, they can figure out some of what he did but not all of what he did. They're all reacting like Teller does here, clearly baffled. And Teller's a hard guy to baffle…

Obviously as a Liberal Democrat, I was pleased by the news that my party will retain control of The Senate. As I write this, I haven't seen Trump weighing in yet on this development but I assume it'll be more of the "We won, they cheated" b.s. from the man who wouldn't admit it if he lost a game of tic-tac-toe.

Of course he's going to announce soon he's running for president again. He's addicted to being the center of attention. He loves speaking before rallies of cheering Trumpsters who think he's either God or His authorized representative. He loves having those people send him "campaign contributions" (which I put in quotes because he so rarely uses them for campaigning) and he wants to be able to explain all indictments and investigations as part of the massive plot to keep him from his rightful place in the White House.

Why would he not run? Because he might lose? He never loses…even when he comes in second.

A large percentage of folks who've made their living as comedians over the last several decades owe an immense debt to Budd Friedman. Budd was the head honcho and chief owner of the Improv, first in New York and then out here in Hollywood. As such, he was part of a rare breed: People who have run successful comedy clubs. He was one of the first and one of the best.

Like most who succeeded, he knew a lot about how to run that kind of business…and a little (less than he thought) about comedy. And like too many, he couldn't resist taking the stage himself — sometimes, several times an evening — to introduce comics and to do what everyone behind his back called "the warm-down." At his funniest, he wasn't someone Budd Friedman would have ever let on his stage. But he knew when the audiences were laughing and who they were laughing at…and he gave the good ones ample opportunity to showcase for friends, family and (most importantly) people who could hire them.

Andy Kaufman might never happened if not for Budd Friedman. And folks like Rodney Dangerfield, Richard Lewis, Robert Klein, Jay Leno, Freddie Prinze, Steve Landesberg, Jimmie Walker and Bette Midler might not have become stars as soon as they did. I remember seeing Leno there — and Bill Maher and Ellen DeGeneres and Kevin Meaney and Jerry Seinfeld and Norm Macdonald and…well, it's a very long list.

I saw Budd almost every time I was there. He was brusque and unfriendly to all but the famous and important…and I didn't particularly like him. Later, I got to know him when he was largely retired and he was much friendlier and quite eager to talk about all the stars he'd helped. Just a fascinating man.

The stars had helped him, too. In 1979 during the infamous Comedy Store strike, the Improv was firebombed and half the club was destroyed. Comedians from all over pitched in, not just to do benefits but to literally rebuild the place — hammers, nails, lumber, the works. The Improv survived and Budd showed his gratitude in many ways. I'm sure in the next few days, you'll be seeing a lot of them speak well of the man. He was 90 years old.