The other night on his show, Stephen Colbert reopened the occasional debate one sees on the Internet — and Thank God we don't have anything more important than this to argue about these days — as to whether a hot dog is a sandwich. I do not know why some people are willing — nay, eager — to die on the hill of insisting it isn't.

A sandwich is something you eat that consists of just about anything (meat, fish, poultry, peanut butter, jam, vegetables, et al) between two pieces of bread. If you put a blob of Worcestershire Sauce between two slices of bread, it's a Worcestershire Sauce sandwich. And come to think of it, you don't even need two slices of bread as proven by the many open-face sandwiches that are served in this great land of ours. Why do we need a more complicated definition than something edible on bread?

But Mr. Colbert, when asked what makes a hot dog not a sandwich, answered — I'm quoting now — "The fact that the two pieces of bread do not separate." He did not specify, and I'm guessing has no idea, who made that rule and how it was that they had the legal or even the moral authority to make a rule which all of us should respect.

Which brings me to Exhibit A and Only: Let us pause and look upon one of the most frequently-made and eaten sandwiches in the world today. I am speaking (of course) of the Subway® sandwich…

According to this page — and if it isn't right, I'll bet it's close — the Subway chain serves 5,300 sandwiches every 60 seconds, which is roughly 320,000 sandwiches every hour. That's zillions a year and that isn't even counting the ones made by Togo's and Jersey Mike's and dozens of other chains and hundreds of thousands of business establishments around the world that make things we all call "sandwiches" in this format.

I believe that if you examine any one of these "food items" (yes, I'm being a little loose with the language), you will see that the bread on top and the bread on the bottom are no more separable than the bread on the top and bottom of a hot dog. So if a hot dog is not a sandwich, neither are millions of "food items" we eat each day and refer to as "sandwiches." I rest my case.

And now that that's settled, let's get on to a more pressing matter — like does a drinking straw have one hole or two?  Or if as most say, a tomato is a fruit, does that mean ketchup is a form of jam?

We mentioned Larry Kert here the other day. Here he is with Carol Lawrence on The Ed Sullivan Show for November 2, 1958 singing a song they were then performing eight times a week at the Winter Garden Theatre in New York (where The Music Man with Hugh Jackman is now playing). Ms. Lawrence was obviously quite Puerto Rican so she was ideal to star in the original production of West Side Story…

Several folks including Douglass Abramson have informed me that some CBS stations (including the one in L.A.) are running The Tony Awards live at 5 PM and then the 8 PM telecast is a repeat. Remember the old days when the show was two hours and forbidden to go even a minute over? Now it's three and they're airing it twice.

It almost got by me but The 75th Annual Tony Awards will be televised tomorrow evening. The first hour commencing at 7 PM Eastern Time will apparently only be available on Paramount-Plus and I dunno what'll be in it but one assumes they'll save the major awards and musical performances for the CBS telecast.

The CBS broadcast is live at 8 PM if you're in the proper time zone or if you have Paramount-Plus anywhere. The rest of us will be watching the delayed rebroadcast at 8 PM Pacific Time. Ariana DeBose is the host and one of the themes will be to salute the understudies and swings who have performed so heroically on Broadway stages during The Pandemic. If I were producing the ceremony, I'd have an announcement at the beginning that Ms. DeBose has taken ill and then I'd have the first ten minutes hosted by a standby.

I have seen absolutely nothing on Broadway for 2+ years so my opinions are even more worthless than usual. But the folks who go to everything and predict seem to think that A Strange Loop (a show about which I know nothing) will win for Best Musical and The Lehman Trilogy will win for Best Play. In the category of Best Revival of a Musical, everyone expects Company to beat out The Music Man and for Patti LuPone's performance in Company to win her the Tony for Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical.

I don't see anyone predicting any wins for the two shows we've been keeping an eye on from afar — The Music Man and Mr. Saturday Night. Neither Hugh Jackman nor Billy Crystal are on the list of the presenters but it does include non-nominees Lin-Manual Miranda, Nathan Lane, Bryan Cranston, Samuel L. Jackson, Bernadette Peters, Billy Porter, Sarah Silverman, Chita Rivera and RuPaul. For some reason, these people will all be wearing the same outfit. There will be musical performances from all the nominated musicals except Caroline, or Change, which has closed. I've set my TiVo.

Many a blogger (for example) is lamenting the closure of the last Howard Johnson's restaurant. There are still motels that bear the once-ubiquitous name of Mr. Johnson but no more eateries. To some, it feels like it will feel for a kid of today to hear that the last Burger King has shuttered some day in the future. The food was not good but it was there…and you can probably recall some happy memory that took place at one.

Howard Johnsons' used to be everywhere…except near where I grew up. I don't recall one within twenty-five miles when I was a kid but when we made vacation car trips — up to Monterey or down to San Diego — we passed a bunch of them. I don't recall we ever stopped. I do recall that some of their advertising promised "28 flavors of ice cream," to which I sniffed, "Big deal. Baskin-Robbins has 31." (And being a kid who didn't like trying new foods, I don't think I tried more than about six.)

But I was aware that people loved Howard Johnson's. And (again) being the kind of kid who didn't like trying new foods, I could understand why: Dependability. If you went to one, you knew what you were going to get.

So there was the conundrum that doomed Howard Johnson's. You went to one because it was familiar. But if the one near you closed, a Howard Johnson's was no longer familiar…so you didn't go to one when you were traveling. And with less travelers going to them, that caused more and more of them to close…so they were no longer familiar to the non-travelers who went to them and that caused those non-travelers, when they became travelers to not go to them and…

You figure out what I just wrote. I sure can't.

The only one I ever went to was out in Thousand Oaks near where Jack Kirby lived in the early seventies. When my friend Steve Sherman and I worked for him, usually on the weekends, we usually wound up going out to dinner with the Kirby family and those dinners were often at the Howard Johnson's. I had the same thing every time: A hot turkey sandwich and a dish of orange sherbet with a cookie stuck in it.

And the dinner I most remember there — the only one I remember there of all the times we went — was one in which Jack sat quietly while the rest of us talked. Jack, though seated at the table throughout, was somewhere else entirely. DC Comics had asked him to come up with a new comic in the weird/monster vein and as the rest of us talked, Jack just sat there and created in his head. When our meals arrived and we stopped talking, Jack started.

He told us the idea for the new comic he'd just created. It was called The Demon and he'd worked out everything about it — who The Demon was, who the other characters were, how they interacted, a couple of plots for stories, etc. — before the server arrived with our entrees. He'd even figured out what everyone looked like and was eager to get back to the drawing board and putting those ideas on paper. I ate my sherbet and the cookie stuck into it in a hurry.

That's my only Howard Johnson's story but it's a good one. I hope the rumors about the Applebee's chain closing down aren't true, not because I especially like eating at them but because I don't have a story about anything interesting that happened while I was at one.

From The Daily Show with Trevor Noah…

Fred Kaplan watched the hearings and, like me, couldn't help but compare them to the Watergate proceedings.

One key difference for me is that I think a lot of people watched the Watergate hearings because they wanted the answer to the question, "Is our President a crook?" I tend to think most people who are capable of having a firm opinion about Donald Trump on that question have already answered it and a pretty large percentage of them are prepared to live forever with that answer. In some cases, it's "Yeah, he's a crook and I'm fine with that."

One of my closest friends before Watergate got increasingly less close as the scandal traipsed onward. He had sided with Nixon and was never going to say, "I was wrong about the man." I was reminded of that intransigence when I heard Trump brag about how he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.

But my friend was capable of deciding eventually that Nixon was damaged goods; that he could no longer govern effectively and would just bring down his party and lead to increasing Democratic rule so he had to go. This friend told me that in the next presidential election, he did not vote for Gerald Ford. He wrote in "Richard Nixon" as a kind of self-satisfying protest vote. He's probably still writing him in.

No, I didn't watch the hearings live last evening but I'm watching replays and online clips and I've probably seen…well, as much as I could take. Maybe two-thirds of it. I'll probably eventually see it all but in small doses. It's pretty grim stuff and I'm sure at times, my face looked like I was seated in the audience for the opening number of Springtime for Hitler. That show turned out to be funny but this can never be.

We wish the folks who run the Cinerama Dome in Hollywood would reopen that fine movie theater and we further wish they would resume their occasional screenings there of my favorite movie, It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That theater was literally built to show that film and seeing it there is the best way to see it.

There is no news about the Dome reopening…just a few rumors that aren't worth raising one's hopes for. But it is a fact that the Aero Theater in Santa Monica is showing my fave film in 70mm on Saturday, July 30 at 7:30 PM. Details and tickets are here. I have not been in a theater of any sort since The Pandemic descended upon us. This may be when I break my fast.

This will interest a few folks I know who read this site…folks who are fascinated with the original Broadway production of the show Company. As the tale is told, it opened with Dean Jones in the role of Bobby. Everyone was very happy with the role except Mr. Jones who, owing to some personal matters in his life, was uncomfortable with the theme of the show or his role…or something.

His unhappiness had been evident to others in the company of Company during rehearsals and tryouts. Not long before they opened, Hal Prince (who directed, among his other duties) went to Jones and promised to replace him soon after they opened. That lifted a personal burden off the star who managed to get through opening night, which was on April 26, 1970. One month later — on May 29 — Larry Kert officially took over the role. The press was told that Jones left because of Hepatitis but in later years, he was quite candid about the real reasons.

The video below in the episode of What's My Line? for December 30, 1970 and the Mystery Guest is Larry Kert. Kinda interesting to hear him tell the "official" version of how he replaced Dean Jones in the show. It may or may not at odds with what is in the above paragraph. I've configured the video clip so that it should start playing at the Mystery Guest segment. If it starts at the beginning of the episode and you don't want to watch the whole show, zip ahead to 20:49…

A little while ago, Breitbart News tweeted…

Matthew McConaughey, who delivered a passionate plea for new gun control legislation in an address at the White House briefing room on Tuesday, has used 19 guns in 11 movies over 25 years, according to the Internet Movie Firearms Database.

Shortly after that, Lynda Carter — yes, the lady who played Wonder Woman — tweeted…

Yes, and I flew an invisible plane on screen but still support abiding by the laws of air traffic (and physics). Do people really not understand reality vs. fiction?

A couple of different folks, starting with Scott Marinoff, have suggested I alert you that the full video record of the Watergate Hearings can be enjoyed (that may not be the right word) at this link. I watched them at the time with way too much fascination.

I couldn't help but thinking as I watched that if I were a Republican serving on that committee, I would have had three conflicting thoughts throughout…

• Nixon and his cronies definitely did some very unethical and illegal things, many of which were also pretty damned foolish…
• If a Democratic administration had done these things, I would be eager to use this opportunity to oust many of them from office and send some of them to prison but…
• A lot of voters in my district want Nixon to remain in office, even if he is a crook. Some love him. Some don't but they don't want the Democrats to have a "win." So I have to defend him at all costs or I will have a primary challenger who will seriously threaten my chances of getting re-elected or ever having a role in my party. I could also lose vital financial support from a lot of wealthy donors who love the guy.

Eventually, the steady drip-drip-drip of revelations of wrongdoing budged Nixon's poll numbers with his supporters…and I like to think that if I were one of those G.O.P. Congressfolks who finally switched and voted against Nixon, it would have been because he was guilty and not just because his popularity was dropping and I felt it was safe to do the right thing.

I have no idea if that will happen this year. Maybe it's no longer possible. All I know is I'm not going to pay as much attention to these hearings as I did to the Watergate ones. I didn't have better things to do with my life in 1973 but I'd like to think I do now.

This is for my friend Shelly Goldstein. Shelly, here is what I'm sure you will decide is your all-time favorite video clip ever. And as you may remember, I have an entire suit made out of the same material as the boy singers' pants. This is, as you might imagine, from The Red Skelton Show…

Brian Dreger sends me a lot of interesting questions. Here's one…

I've been meaning to ask this for quite some time, and I apologize if it is rude or unprofessional, or something "that is just not done!"

When you're writing things that prevent you from blogging because of a looming deadline, is there some reason why you never — after the fact — mention what it is you've been working on? Is it contractually not allowed? Or for writers is it considered a "jinx move" that might put "the whammy" on the project? Just curious…

I think I have mentioned what I was working on occasionally but I don't do it often. There are a few reasons and the first one that comes to mind is that I think the Internet has too much self-promotion on it with people trying to sell you their current projects. If I have genuine news about something coming out and people are asking me about it, I'll address it here. But really, I like blogging better when I don't feel it's heavily-linked to my current income. I like this to be a place where I get away from that.

Also, writing is for me a very solitary experience and I like to keep it that way. I rarely discuss the content of what I'm writing with friends because I really don't want their input. If I do, I ask for it…but I rarely ask for it.

And I guess the main thing is that a lot of things I write — including some for which I am paid — never come out. I wrote a spec TV pilot which has been optioned twice now and may get a third "buy"…but I don't want to spend the rest of my life answering questions about what's up with it and what happened with it. When it's not an active project for me, I put it out of my mind and I don't want others putting it back in there.

And of course, I have a story. When do I not have a story?

Back in the seventies, a syndicated comic strip artist asked me to write gags for a new newspaper strip he wanted to do. This was in addition to the one he already had running in newspapers across the land. I wrote a batch and he decided I should not only be the sole writer of this new strip he'd conceived but also have my name on it. Well, that was nice. I wrote and he and his assistant drew about eight weeks of it and he sent those weeks to his syndicate, where it got a highly favorable response.

Note that I did not say they agreed to syndicate it. I just said that it got a highly favorable response. They loved the premise and they loved the name…but apparently not enough to immediately draw up a contract.

I was relatively new at the writing game and I made what turned out to be a mistake. I told my father about it and showed him the eight weeks. Perhaps in your life you have had a moment where a parent or someone else close to you way overreacted positively to something you did. When I was about eight, I could do a couple of celebrity impressions that probably weren't even good for a kid that age but my Aunt Dot thought I was ready for The Ed Sullivan Show and inevitable stardom.

Anyway, my father thought the eight weeks of this strip were genius, brilliant, fabulous…insert the synonym of your choice. Any day now, he was sure, newspapers would be axing Charlie Brown and that mutt of his to make room for our new strip, and my father could see my name (our name) every time he opened the L.A. Times.

For at least six months, he asked me every day if I had any news on the strip's certain sale and success. The truth was that the syndicate waffled and balked and at one point, a guy there who'd said "This is perfect just the way it is" sent us a passel of notes, asking us to redo the eight weeks and take out this character and change that character and add a new kind of character.

They wanted to change the whole premise (i.e., the premise they'd loved) and finally, they said the name of the strip — the one they'd loved — "has to go." And there was still no indication that they were serious about actually trying to sell it to client newspapers.

By that time, the cartoonist had decided he really didn't need the hassles of a second strip; not even if his assistant and I did 90% of the work on it. I had plenty of other things to do then so we jointly decided to just drop the project…and no, I will not run any samples here nor I will I divulge the name of the cartoonist. (But it was not Jim Davis. This was more than a decade before I met Jim.)

In the writing game, you have to do that all the time. You work on a lot of different projects. Some go forward, some don't…and sometimes, the ones that don't will disappear for reasons that have nothing to do with the merits of the material. An amazing number of projects vanish because there's some shakeup in a company's hierarchy and the new folks in charge reflexively don't want to go where their predecessors were heading.

You have to just file that one away and work on one of the others you have on your plate. I generally don't find that difficult to do…

…but with that proposed newspaper strip, it was tough. My father kept asking me about it and asking me about it and asking me about it…and I don't mean for weeks. I mean for years. No matter what else I accomplished, no matter how busy I got, he kept telling me, "You've gotta take that strip and send it around to newspapers. I'm sure they'd all start bidding for it!"

My father was a very nice man without a speck of malice, especially towards me. He was giving me what he thought was good advice…and he had his heart set on opening the paper every morning and being reassured that his kid had a job. But he just wouldn't listen to me explaining I was no longer interested in it…or that I didn't own the strip and the guy who did didn't want to pursue it any longer.

I never — well, rarely — made that mistake again. When I teamed up with Dennis Palumbo and we began selling scripts and ideas to television, our first few sales did not get made. We got paid but our scripts were not produced. I didn't tell my parents I was writing for TV until I could also tell them that a show I worked on, which would have my name in the credits, was on TV the following Wednesday. And by a fluke of timing, Dennis and I would get getting our second screen credit on a show that aired the day after. My father was real happy that week.

What I was writing the last few days here which distracted me from blogging was an assignment that may never go the distance. We all work on things like that. I have a friend who has made a very good living writing screenplays for which he is paid handsomely but which, for one reason or another, never get in front of a camera. I think he's done at least twelve of them. He doesn't tell people about them because he doesn't want people to keep asking him about each of them…or thinking he's a failure because for reasons that had nothing to do with the quality of what he wrote, they didn't get made. I think that's a very wise way to operate.

From the musical Sunset Boulevard, Glenn Close performs "With One Look." I saw this show twice — once in L.A. and then a few months later in New York. I wasn't fond of the show itself — nor am I of the movie on which it was based — but her performance gave you chills…of the good kind…