Jimmy Kimmel ran this the other night…

We're 101 days from this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. For the purposes of this post, I'm being optimistic and assuming some unexpected variant of you-know-what won't force a cancellation of this year's event which I sure hope to attend.

And yes, I know that could mean battling crowds…and not just crowds of people dressed like Klingons and The Joker and characters out of the summer's big "tentpole" movies. According to many reports from San Diego, it could mean navigating around or otherwise dealing with a rising homeless population.

Here's a report on them with emphasis on the folks with nowhere to go who've elected to camp out near Petco Park. And let me remind you that Petco Park is right next to the convention center where Comic-Con takes place. I really hope someone does something for homeless people — not just in San Diego but everywhere…

• Every so often, I get a craving for Chick-Fil-A. Fortunately, it only happens on Sundays.

I have these friends — Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun — and I've written about them here before. Stu is a longtime expert and preservationist of classic television shows, and he's worked as a warm-up guy on TV shows and he had a much-envied job as Lucille Ball's assistant and archivist. Many of you follow an online program he does every other week. I don't know if you'd call it a podcast or a TV series or what but we have long been plugging Stu's Show on this blog.

If you've never seen it, go over to his website, click the Archives link and take a gander at the famous people who have appeared on the 612 episodes of Stu's Show. To steal the joke that Neil Simon admitted he stole from fellow comedy writer Gary Belkin, I'm the only one there I've never heard of.

Stu's career in warm-ups and working for Lucy make him interesting. So does his history of preserving and honoring TV programs of the past. So does the online shows he's been doing since December of 2006. I was his guest on Stu's Show #1 and I plugged it here. Back then, it was not on TV (as it is now) and it was part of a whole network of shows about old television.

So that's all interesting and so is the fact that Stu met this lady named Jeanine through their mutual love of old TV programs (Lucy's, especially) and they became a couple. And a little while after that, something happened which I wrote about here and will quote here…

Less than a year ago, our friend Jeanine Kasun suffered a completely unexpected brain aneurysm. She was alone in her mountain home at the time and if she hadn't been on the phone with her friend (in the romantic sense) Stu Shostak at the time, I would have had one more obit to write that month. Fortunately, she was talking to him when it happened. He was at their home in Chatsworth and he quickly called for help and emergency services were dispatched.

Jeanine was in a coma for many weeks. When she woke up, she couldn't talk, she couldn't walk, she couldn't make any part of her body do what she wanted it to do. She had no memory and no ability to retain information. Eventually — thanks to good doctoring, therapy, surgery and sheer determination, some of that started to come back. All of that was made possible by the heroic and selfless efforts of Stu Shostak. If you ever had a medical emergency like that, you couldn't do better than have someone like Stu as your advocate and protector.

I helped him out a few times but it was 99% Stu arguing with doctors, double and triple-checking hospital arrangements, dealing with the insurance companies, being at her bedside and watching her back.

She got better. They got married. And it all makes for not one interesting story but many: Stu's warm-up career, his hobby preserving old TV, his career with Lucy, meeting Jeanine, hooking up with Jeanine, saving Jeanine, doing 600+ shows with guests like Dick Van Dyke, Ed Asner, Shelley Berman, Jonathan Winters, etc., etc. Sounds like a movie, doesn't it? Well, it is.

Documentarian C.J. Wallis and his able crew have made Stu's Show, a film about Stu, his life, his love, his saving his love's life, his friendship with Lucy…there's an awful lot to tell here and C.J. packs it in well. The story is told by Stu, Jeanine, a bevy of former Stu's Show guests and TV stars, and even me. It will be available on all major streaming services and pay-per-view points on May 2nd. Here's the trailer…

We all have little terms we don't understand at first. Not being all that savvy about baseball, when I saw YouTube videos talking about "walk-off home runs," I somehow thought that meant the batter came up to the plate and hit the first pitch clear out of the park. I don't know why I thought that but I did.

It turns out a "walk-off home run" is any home run that a batter hits that wins the game for his team and therefore causes the opposing team to have to walk off the field in defeat. I would imagine it is a powerful fantasy of every ball player to do this, especially in the World Series.

Fifteen men have hit walk-off home runs in World Series games, sometimes even in the game that clinched the trophy. Here are the fifteen in chronological order…

It's hard to believe it's been five years this evening since my lovely, loving friend Carolyn Kelly left this sphere of existence. The last few months of battling cancer were gruesome, sad, maddening…I could go on and on listing synonyms. Her doctors knew it was a lost cause, I knew it and she pretty much knew it, certainly by the last month or so. Still, she still battled until she lapsed into a long sleep from which she never awoke. One of the fine hospice nurses who sat with her in the final weeks said to me, "People keep fighting because they don't know what else to do." I absolutely understand that.

Carolyn was in my life for about twenty years. We broke up. We got back together. We broke up. We got back together. That happened several times. It was hard, as they say, to quit her. She was so delightful and so sparkling when she was happy. Moments when I thought we could never be together again were followed shortly by moments when I felt we could never be apart. Then fate settled that conundrum.

Her famous father loomed large in our relationship. A lot of people would rank Walt Kelly as among the greatest cartoonists of the previous century. Woody Allen, no matter what else you may think of him, knew great humorists and he once named the ones he most admired as Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, Elaine May and S.J. Perelman. He then added, "Oh, and don't forget Pogo. Walt Kelly's comic strip was touched by genius." A pretty good endorsement, I'd say.

Carolyn was also a cartoonist and if people hadn't kept comparing what she did to her father's work, I think she'd have done more of it. Once when our friend Stan Freberg was talking about his friend, Frank Sinatra Jr. and his struggles, she said, "I know what he feels like." But I thought her drawings were wonderful and I wish she'd done more of them. Here's a little one she did as a birthday gift for a friend. I think it's charming…

I inherited from her the job (make that "honor") of co-editing the reprint volumes of the Pogo strip now being issued by Fantagraphics. Volume 8 has been delayed, like everything else in the world, by COVID — extremely bad in all the countries where we can print stuff like this. But the set will be finished as Carolyn had wished. Amazon for some reason gives the Reading Level as Age 9-12 and the Grade Level as "4 and up." I think you need to be a lot older and wiser to understand 90% of it.

I don't want to turn this into a commercial because it's about Carolyn. I want you to know how terrific she was, how much I loved her and how much I miss her. In a sense, she is still with me because I also inherited crates and crates of drawings, writings and documents from the life of both her and her father. I'm still going through them all and every week or two, I come across another wonderful "message," be it a letter or drawing, that was either done by her or very meaningful to her.

She wanted me to share her father's work with the world and I want to share hers. A few weeks ago here, I shared a wonderful article she wrote. This time, I'm sharing a beloved drawing that her father did for her.

Her childhood nickname was "Tony Bug" and she said she wasn't sure why. You will occasionally find "Tony" or "Tony Bug" turning up in a Pogo strip and that's a reference to Carolyn. One day — I don't know if it was a birthday or Christmas or if there even had to be a reason but her father offered to do a drawing for her to fit a sadly-empty space on her bedroom wall. He asked, "What would you like?" and she said, "Two dogs and a mouse." Her father was good at drawing everything but he particularly excelled at dogs and mice.

It must have been wonderful to have a father who could do that. If my father had tried to fill an empty space on my wall, the only thing he could have put up there was an income tax form.

I'm about to give you a link to view this drawing but I want you all to promise me not to post it on Facebook or Twitter or anywhere else and do not give others the direct link. Instead, give any Walt Kelly admirers this link so they have to come to this site and read what I wrote about Carolyn. And if you came here for that reason, also please read this piece that I published here five years ago about Carolyn.

Do I have your word you won't post it anywhere else on the Internet? Good. I knew I could count on you. Here's the link to see the drawing. Isn't it beautiful? His daughter was too…in every way. If I could draw like that, I'd have sent her one every day when we were together…and maybe even when we were apart.

Were it not for cigarettes and all the damage they can do to a human body, my mother might have been 100 years old today — emphasis on the word "might." So many things were wrong with her when she died at the age of 90 that the doctor who made out the death certificate told me he was trying to decide between about eight different causes he could put in the appropriate space. I suggested "Marlboros" and he gave a grim chuckle, told me that probably covered all eight…and then wrote down "Cardiopulmonary Arrest." Fine. Whatever.

My mother did not want to live to be a hundred; not in the condition she was in those final years. She was unable to walk without great effort, a walker and a constant fear of falling. She was unable to travel. She was unable to eat any of the foods she liked. She would half-jokingly ask me to bring her a platter of chili dogs because that was the way she wanted to go: Assisted Suicide by Chili Dog. I did not do this though I was aware she was at least a little bit serious about it.

And she could barely see. Couldn't read, couldn't see the TV screen no matter how close she sat to it. Six more months and she would have been totally unable to see, a prospect that horrified her. I genuinely think that if/when she realized she was minutes from death, she thought something like, "Good. I should have done this months ago."

She was all a person could ask for in a mother: Sweet, smart, good sense of humor, willing to do absolutely anything for her husband and kid. Like my father, who passed a little more than 21 years before her, she almost never scolded or raised her voice. I was the kind of son who never gave either a lot of reason to but they still didn't yell when another father or mother might have.

I have lots of stories on this blog about my mother but I don't believe I ever told this one…

The last two decades of her life, she spent a lot of time in hospitals and hospital emergency rooms. A lot. There was a lockbox on the back door with a house key in it and when paramedics (or usually, firemen) were summoned to her home, either I or the dispatcher would supply the combination via phone so her rescuers could get inside and take care of her. Eventually, if it was the fire department, we didn't need to tell them the combination. The lead fireman remembered it.

When he told me that, I said, "You must have written it down." He said no, they never did that — and it might have been some department policy. But they were there so often and they liked my mother so much that at least this one man remembered it.

But that's not the story I was going to tell here. One time in the middle of the night — maybe three or four in the morning — I was in the emergency room with my mother and she was in tremendous pain. The attending doctor gave her a shot that, he said, would put her to sleep but before it did, it might make her incoherent for a few minutes. "Don't be surprised if she starts babbling nonsense before the drug fully kicks in," he told me and then he left the room.

I was there with my mother…and she did indeed start babbling nonsense. Weird nonsense. Strange nonsense. It was like she'd been possessed by evil demons or something and it scared the heck outta me. I knew it was just the drug but I stepped out into the hall and stopped a passing nurse. Remember this is like 4 A.M. and I'd gone to bed at 2 and been summoned at 3. I was not at my sanest which, as followers of this blog know, is not that sane.

I told the nurse what the doctor had said about how she'd start babbling and I asked, "Could you just listen to a little of this and tell me if this is normal?" She said "Certainly" and stepped into the room, listened to twenty seconds of my mother's ravings and said, "Perfectly normal. She'll be asleep any second now."

The nurse left and my mother — still sounding like she was auditioning for a role in The Exorcist, said to me, "That's a very pretty nurse."

I said, "Yes, she is."

To which my mother replied — using a word I'd rarely heard from her and never in a sexual context — "Do you think you could fuck her?"

And then she fell fast asleep.

The next day, when I told her what she'd said, she had no memory of it…but she thought it was hilarious. In her own way, she always was…that and wonderful and perfect and gee, I was lucky. Oh so lucky.

Tomorrow on this blog, I'll be remembering someone else I was fortunate to have in my life.

Here's yet another clip of Allan Sherman performing on The Ed Sullivan Show, this time the telecast for April 24, 1966.

The song is "Second Hand Nose," a parody of "Second Hand Rose," a popular tune from 1921 which Barbra Streisand was performing in '66 wherever she performed. The original recording of it was by Fanny Brice, the personality Ms. Streisand portrayed in Funny Girl, the Broadway show from '64. It was probably just too tempting for Sherman, doing a "nose" song associated with Barbra.

A couple of interesting points about it here: Sherman himself had had a nose job when he was much younger and at time of this show, he was doing everything he could to alter his current appearance — losing weight, swapping glasses for contacts, letting his hair grow out, etc.

Also, he changed some lyrics. In "Second Hand Nose" as it appeared on his then-current album, in the part about him going to the plastic surgeon, he sang, "I've been to this office once or twice and / All his patients look like Barbra Streisand." Here, he sings — and he stumbles a bit on the words as if they're new to him — "He said if I can handle the finances / My nose will be the same as Cary Grant's is."

Near the end on the record, when he's singing about sitting with girls in his car, the line goes, "We'll sit there sniffing glue." Here, it's "They'll meet their Waterloo."

One suspects Mr. Sullivan demanded the changes…

Rene Lavand was an Argentinian magician specializing in close-up magic. His skills amazed others in his profession because he invented all the moves and sleights he did himself. He had to. There were no magic books for magicians with one hand. Here he is on The Ed Sullivan Show for December 29, 1963…

Sorry for the sparse posting today. Something I ate, like your average Trump supporter, did not agree with me. It ain't serious — and it ain't mushroom soup — but it kept me away from the computer most of the day. I will make it up to you in the coming days. I owe that to you, just as I owe my ability to post this much to whoever invented Pepto-Bismol. At some point this afternoon, I decided it was a greater scientific breakthrough than nuclear energy, flight or fire.

• Since I turned 70, nothing has made me feel older than not being able to recognize more than half the songs in a Disney Medley.

Someone named Mike wrote to ask…

First of all, I'm a big fan of your blog. Your recent post about voice actors that you wanted to have guest star on productions got me wondering… what voice actors auditioned to lend their voices to the Garfield projects you worked on? Were there auditions for Jon, Roy and Binky before Thom Huge decided to voice those characters? Were there any voice actors who auditioned for characters, didn't get the roles, but still wound up guest-starring on Garfield and Friends? Were there auditions at all, or did the crew just call up various actors they liked and offer them the roles?

Well, the first Garfield project with which I was involved was the Saturday morning series, Garfield and Friends. Jim Davis, the cat's creator, selected the voices before I came along. Garfield's first voice was, briefly, a radio personality named Scott Beach and you can read about him here. He did the voice for a short segment in a 1980 CBS special called The Fantastic Funnies.

That segment more or less served as the pilot for a series of prime-time animated Garfield specials, kicking off with Here Comes Garfield!, which aired in October of 1982. For that special and all that followed, Jim decided Garfield needed a different voice and the answer to the question, "Who did they audition?" would be "Who didn't they audition?" Just about every voice actor in L.A. read for the part and some of them read several times before Lorenzo Music tried out and got it. (Lorenzo, by the way, redubbed the Fantastic Funnies clip for when it was later shown here and there.)

One of the people who auditioned for the role of Garfield was Gregg Berger. Jim liked Gregg tremendously and while he felt Gregg was wrong for the cat, he found out Gregg could make dog sounds and awarded him the role of Odie. To this day, Gregg has been Odie in every case where Odie has had a voice.

Sandy Kenyon (you can read about him here) was the voice of Jon in that first special. With the second special, Garfield on the Town, Jim decided to give the role of Jon to a friend of his who'd been working for his company and had a background in radio and voice work. That was when Thom Huge became Jon…and he also picked up other roles, including Binky. For that special, Jim also selected Julie Payne to voice Jon's lady friend, Liz. As far as I know, Liz was the last role for which auditions were done. In other specials, Jim just cast actors he'd heard of or who had auditioned for other roles.

When Garfield and Friends started, Jim was originally the Voice Director but I took over casting new roles and eventually took over the voice direction when Jim got too busy to fly out here and do it. Thom Huge, who lived back in Indiana and worked for Jim there, flew out for voice sessions so we ganged-up recording dates so Thom could do several shows while he was out here. He turned out to be quite versatile so he did a lot of other roles in the show, plus he played Roy in the U.S. Acres segments. Gregg Berger also turned out to have an endless supply of other voices.

To cast the other regular characters in U.S. Acres, we did the only other auditions ever done for the Garfield and Friends series. We decided that since they were already part of the show, we'd have Julie Payne voice the character of Lanolin, and we'd assign Gregg one of the male roles and I brought in about eight of my favorite voice actors to audition. I directed the auditions, Jim listened to the tapes and he picked Gregg to be Orson, Howie Morris to be Wade Duck, and Frank Welker to play Bo, Booker and Sheldon.

And that was that. Thereafter, when we needed a new voice for a recurring or one-shot character, I might be able to have Gregg, Thom, Howie, Julie or Frank — or even Lorenzo, once or twice — do it but otherwise, I'd just hire someone I knew could give me what I wanted. A few of the actors who auditioned for U.S. Acres, like Chuck McCann and Lennie Weinrib, wound up doing guest voices.

Over the 121 half-hours we did of that series, we hired a lot of people who were new to the voice business. We also hired a lot of actors who'd voiced cartoons I'd loved as a child including Stan Freberg, June Foray, Larry Storch, Don Messick, Gary Owens, Dick Beals, Shep Menken, Paul Winchell, Julie Bennett, Marvin Kaplan and Arnold Stang. I certainly didn't need to audition any of those people.

I don't have a lot of respect for most of the pundits and "talking heads" one sees on cable news and allied websites.  Even a lot of the ones uttering thoughts with which I agree strike me as saying what they say mainly because it gets them (a) on TV and (b) some attention.  But you've seen me link to a lot of Eric Boehlert's articles because I thought they were honestly well thought-out, lacking in needless dramatics and, as hindsight has shown, usually correct.

Mr. Boehlert was killed in a bicycling accident today.  He was 57 years old.  That's a shame for all sorts of reasons, not the least of which is that we need more journalists like that man.

Here's a link to what I believe is the last article he published.  It's headlined, "Why is the press rooting against Biden?" Before any of you scoff that it isn't, read what Boehlert had to say. He was very good at making whatever case he made with solid examples and references.

• Pedophilia is a serious matter…too serious to be turned into an insult you hurl at political opponents with no evidence merely because it's the worst thing you can come up with to accuse them of.

Hey, let's watch a famous sketch from the famous TV series, Your Show of Shows. Here are Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howie Morris…