We haven't had one of these Barbershop Quartet Mob videos here for a while so here they are — The Ambassadors of Harmony from 2015. This is the way the Broadway musical of Hairspray should have ended…

Sorry if posting here is a bit erratic. I fixed the problem with posting yesterday but I can't seem to fix the odd sleep patterns I've fallen into lately. I am however awake enough to thank all those who've donated to our little online telethon here. We're not yet to our goal, which is the amount of loot it takes to keep this site online and free-to-all for a year but we're closing in on it. Whatever you can spare will be mightily appreciated.

You can find polls that show Kamala/Walz ahead of Trump/Vance by 2-3 points with a margin of error of 2-3 points. You can find polls that show a closer race. You can even find right-wing polls (like Rasmussen) that will show the right-wing candidate(s) ahead by serious margins…and they'll continue to do that until a few days before the actual election when they'll start acting like real polls so they won't be way off. Polls are never proven wrong until Election Day. A poll today can say that the write-in ticket of you and I — me at the top of the ticket, of course — will sweep the election. They won't be provably wrong unless they keep saying that until there are actual results.

I think it's always safer to assume that your candidate or ticket is even or perhaps a little behind. If you think they're too far ahead, you may get complacent and not do everything you need to win. If you think they're too far behind, you may figure the cause is lost and not bother doing everything you need to win.

My confidence that Trump will lose is not really poll-based. It's based on watching him do things like his recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery…

"Participants in the August 26th ceremony and the subsequent Section 60 visit were made aware of federal laws, Army regulations and DoD policies, which clearly prohibit political activities on cemetery grounds. An ANC employee who attempted to ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside," the Army spokesperson said in the statement on Thursday. Section 60 is an area in the cemetery largely reserved for the graves of those who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And it wasn't just that Trump and his Public Relations goons came in with that "The rules never apply to us" attitude that they always have. It's the photo of him standing among the graves of fallen soldiers, grinning and giving "thumbs up" like he just won the lottery. He does one of these clueless attention-getting stunts almost every day and I think they're costing him support. And will continue to do so.

Here are two vintage commercials, the first of which is for a toy that I can't imagine anyone selling today. It's from Mattel's Zero M line which allowed kids to pretend they were secret agents with various items that transformed into cap pistols so you could pretend to shoot your parents and playmates dead. The kid in the commercial would seem to be a very young Kurt Russell.

The second one is for Tootsie Rolls and I'm pretty sure the actor in it is Bill McCutcheon, who did an awful lot of commercials and guest roles on TV shows and was featured for a time on Sesame Street, plus he was in movies as varied as Steel Magnolias and Santa Claus Conquers the Martians. He also had a pretty good stage career. He was in the revue New Faces of 1956 and later, among other plays, the eighties revivals on Broadway of The Man Who Came to Dinner, You Can't Take It With You, The Front Page and Anything Goes. He even won a Tony award for the last of these — just one of those actors who spent his entire career working in something without becoming a household name…

A tech problem is preventing me from writing anything new here tonight but I tricked it so I could write this message and post another link asking for money to keep this blog afloat and free. Now I'll post an already-prepped video link and hope things will be more functional in the morning.

In case you're worried about the big auction being staged by Cartoonists for Kamala, fear not. The date is not until September 15 and I'll post info on how to participate well before then.

The Cook Political Report — which analyzes elections and is very careful about saying someone is ahead in a state — has shifted North Carolina from "Leans Republican" to toss-up and has moved Minnesota and New Hampshire to "Likely Democrat." This is still a close, either-person-could-win race. Ed Kilgore has a good article up about how not to read the polls.

And here's Mark A. Caputo with an interesting piece of how Trump is attempting to tiptoe through the minefield that is the Abortion issue. Personally, I think anyone who thinks that Trump has a moral position on the matter — or if elected, will do what he said before the election — is kidding themselves. I think he's a one-issue candidate and that one issue is him getting back into the White House.

So the Trump and Harris campaigns have agreed that the candidates will debate on ABC on September 10th, right? Well, maybe. As Steve Benen explains, that's not as much of a done deal as some news sources are suggesting. It's sounding more and more like Trump is afraid to debate her but doesn't want to be accused of being afraid to debate her. Stay tuned.

Jack Kirby would have been 107 years old today but if he isn't with us, his influence still is. It's not just that characters he created or co-created are continued in comics and expanded into TV shows and movies. It isn't even that darn near everything he wrote and/or drew in comics keeps being reprinted, often in expensive editions which lovers of his work snatch up. It's that everywhere I look — and not just at comic conventions — I see his influence.

For years after he left us in 1994, I would say, "If he wasn't your favorite artist, he was probably your favorite artist's favorite artist." I should probably add another generation in there and say, "He was your favorite artist's favorite artist's favorite artist." And I should probably also point out that the writing was, to Jack, always vastly more important than the drawing. I have never met anyone who had so many ideas, let alone so many good ideas.

You can see how good he was in all those comics, all those reprints. What you may not see — though maybe you can — is what a wonderful human being he was. He was nice to almost everyone, even a few people he probably should have crushed like the bloodsucking mosquitoes they were. Everyone who was fortunate enough to meet him has a story of how approachable he was, how he always made time for others, how if you showed the slightest smidgen of creative ability, he would encourage you.

I love most of the people I've known in comics but Jack was in a class all by himself. That's me in the Red Skull mask in his studio in 1969. I was learning a lot from that man then and I knew it but it was a decade or two later than I began to realize that it was a lot more than I realized at the time.

From Jeremy Hall…

You mentioned the other day that you were once going to write an animated Mr. Magoo feature. Can you tell us anything about it? How did you get the job? I understand that it didn't go forward because the producer died but was anything done on it before that happened?

Taking the last part first: Not really. I wrote up a one-page "pitch" and…well, maybe I should tell the story from the start. I had a friend named Greg Burson who was a terrific cartoon voice actor. He was especially good at reproducing voices done by actors who had passed away. He did the voices of several of Mel Blanc's characters including Bugs Bunny, and several of Daws Butler's characters including Yogi Bear. After Jim Backus passed away, Greg did Magoo for some commercials and a few other projects.

Henry Saperstein, who owned (or at least controlled) Quincy Magoo, told Greg he was looking for an idea for a Magoo feature. As I understand it, he'd involved several writers and whatever they came up with did not enthuse Mr. Saperstein to the point of going forward with any of it. Greg suggested he meet with me.

The three of us had lunch one day at the Smoke House, a fine restaurant in Burbank across the street from the big movie studio sometimes known as Warner Brothers. More importantly, the restaurant was next door to an office building that held the U.P.A. studio — and therefore, Mr. Saperstein's office.

Quick aside: For a long time, whenever they were recording Magoo cartoons, they did it in those offices and it was the job of the voice director, Jerry Hausner, to take Mr. Backus to the bar at the Smoke House and fill him full of alcoholic beverages until Mr. Magoo "arrived." After the second or third drink, Hausner would reportedly ask Backus, "Is Magoo here yet?" And Backus would reportedly say something like, "He'll be here after one more Manhattan."

(Or whatever the drink was. I certainly hope he was drinking Old Fashioneds because, you know, what can happen to an Old Fashioned?)

Anyway: Greg, Mr. Saperstein and I had a non-alcoholic "get acquainted" lunch and then we hiked over to the U.P.A. offices and he showed me some of the things they had in work for the Nearsighted One. Finally, he asked me if I had an idea for a Magoo feature. I said, "Yes. You get the rights to remake Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and then I write a movie, which may or may not follow the original too closely, called Mr. Magoo Goes to Washington."

Mr. Saperstein did a "take" not unlike a wolf in a Tex Avery cartoon ogling Red Riding Hood and said, "We'll do it, we'll do it!" Fastest sale I ever made — or it would have been if the project had ever gone forward. As I recall, he spent a few weeks dealing with whoever he had to deal with to get the rights to the Frank Capra movie. He also asked to read something I'd written so my agent sent him a script of mine and he called to say he liked it and would trust me to write the script.

At at one point, he called me to say his lawyers had told him that he might not have to purchase the rights. We could call it what I wanted to call it if we treated it as a parody of the classic movie and didn't use too much of its plot. I have no idea how legally-sound that might have been. His lawyers also talked to my agent and discussed a range of compensation for me which struck me as the low end of Acceptable.

In this business, you often find yourself accepting the low end of Acceptable but I don't think we ever got a written contract. I wrote up that one-page "pitch" for him, which I probably shouldn't have done without a firm deal, but that was all I wrote. There was never a decision as to how much of the plot of the movie I'd be able to use and I never heard what, if anything, he had worked out with whoever owned the original. I'm guessing nothing.

Saperstein called me from time to time to tell me he was working on the deal but the calls got farther and farther apart. It has been my experience — in TV, movies, comic books…just about everything I've ever done — that this often happens: They say yes, "We're definitely doing this" but then no one takes the steps necessary to make it happen. They may keep saying yes. No one may ever say no. But the project just fades away without anyone ever officially declaring it inert.

By the time I read that Mr. Saperstein had died, I had long since stopped thinking Quincy Magoo was ever going to get to Washington. This kind of thing happens so often that I long ago learned to not start celebrating when they say yes. Someone still has to take a firm step, usually one that involves writing a check. Even Magoo should be able to see that.

Matthew Wecksell turned me on to this. It's an episode of Hot Ones, the series where host Sean Evans interviews celebrities while they munch on increasingly-lethal chicken wings slathered in hot sauce. Sean's guest on the latest edition is — and I didn't believe this until I saw it — Donald Duck…

Donald was animated by, the press releases say, the Walt Disney Animation Studios team, led by legendary animator Eric Goldberg. Donald's voice was done by Tony Anselmo while Mickey Mouse (in a brief appearance) was voiced by Bret Iwan. A fine job by all.

Ms. Harris and Mr. Walz are up a teensy bit more today in most polls. The single exception seems to be the Rasmussen Poll and in March of the last presidential election, I wrote this here…

The Rasmussen Poll usually favors Republicans and it's now saying Trump's popularity is fairly high. No doubt he thinks that's the only one that matters…and will until it tells him something he doesn't like.

There are all these "aggregator pollsters" out there that don't actually poll voters. Instead, they take polls by the folks who do and weight them and average them together to arrive at numbers that are theoretically more on-target than any one of the polls they're aggregating. I think if you were to do an aggregate of all the aggregate pollsters, you'd find that Harris/Walz is around three points ahead of Trump/Vance and is either ahead of Trump or quite competitive in the swing states that will decide this thing.

The Trump campaign is pouring a lot of time and money into those swing states but they're putting the most of those two assets trying to lasso Pennsylvania's 19 electoral votes. There are a number of different paths to 270 for Harris/Walz but the likeliest of these require Pennsylvania. I am kinda glad I don't live in a swing state.

Meanwhile, a group called Cartoonists for Kamala is arranging a big fund-raising drive and my partner Sergio Aragonés has done this drawing. I'll let you know where and when you can bid on it and other goodies.

Click on the pic to make it larger.

Finally for now: It intrigues me that they're spending money on ads to run on TV stations viewable in Palm Beach County, Florida — where Trump's Mar-a-Lago resort is. Florida might (slight might) become a competitive state but right now, Trump's ad buyers have more urgent places to spend their money. Apparently, these ads are because Trump, when he's in town, wants to be able to see his ads when he turns on the TV and there are also wealthy Trump donors in that area who might be inspired to donate more if they see such ads.

Maybe. I have to wonder how much this had to do with the fact that George Conway's Anti-Psychopath PAC is running commercials in that area saying that Trump is mentally unbalanced. Conway's goal is to drive Trump even further over the edge and you have to wonder if the Trump commercial buy in that market isn't evidence that it's working.

Advice from Jon Stewart…

As a wee lad — and yes, looking at me today you'd never imagine I was ever wee — I attended what is now called Westwood Charter Elementary School in West Los Angeles. While I was there, it was just Westwood Elementary and from what I can tell when I now drive by the place, almost nothing still stands from when I was a pupil.

Every once in a while, some class I was in would get loaded into a bus and taken somewhere for a field trip…going somewhere to learn something about someplace. I believe I once wrote here about a time we went to the Helms Bakery in Culver City to see them make bread and cookies and all sorts of things that smelled heavenly. Hold on…let me check.

Okay, I'm back. I did a search and I was right. I wrote about visiting the Helms Bakery here. As I said, it was just about the best-smelling place I've ever been in my life. This article is about a field trip to what was certainly the worst.

We were told that on a certain day, we were to all bring sack lunches from home because the students who ate at the school cafeteria would not be able to go to lunch there. For much of that day, we'd be touring a dairy to see where milk comes from.

Even at the age of eight or nine, I knew the answer to that: From cows, you big silly. But there was apparently more than that to be learned so we were to be bussed to the dairy responsible for a certain brand of milk sold in Southern California stores. At lunchtime there, we'd eat our sack lunches and wash the food down with free samples of the milk — which was not a brand sold at any market at which my mother shopped and that turned out to be a good thing.

On that certain day, we were informed that the trip was off — no reason given. We plunged into the usual curriculum of spelling and arithmetic and the like and then, mysteriously, the school principal came in and whispered something to our teacher. Our teacher then informed us that the field trip to the dairy was back on. Not only that but the bus that would take us there was waiting outside at that very moment. There was a lot of scurrying and rearrangement but we all grabbed up our sack lunches and within minutes, we were on the bus heading for this dairy which was, as I recall, about an hour drive from the school. It was in Torrance or Carson or Gardena or one of those cities south of Los Angeles.

When we got there and disembarked from the bus, we got our first whiff of a foul, nauseating aroma. It came from several hundred bales of hay that were in a pen surrounded by chicken wire. The hay was infected with some kind of fungus and it was baking in the hot California sun. The smell was horrible. Absolutely horrible.

To get us away from that foul odor, our Tour Guide Lady herded us like cows into the first of a series of nearby barns but in there, the smell was far worse. The barns were full of cows that I guess had been eating that hay. We never got an explanation but all the cows had — to use a term that was not in my vocabulary at that age — explosive diarrhea. It made the aroma of the desiccating hay smell like a fine perfume by comparison. The Tour Guide Lady then hustled us from that barn to next one where, she hoped, the air would be a lot more breathable.

It wasn't. I think we went through three or four but in every barn, the cows were expelling the foulest-possible feces as men wearing hankies over their noses and mouths tried to shovel the output away faster than the cows could make more. It was truly a lost cause and I remember many of my classmates vomiting and I sure felt like joining them. Through it all, the Tour Guide Lady kept telling us over and over that though the cows were ill, their milk would be perfectly drinkable by the time it reached the refrigerator section of our local market. There was no way any of us were about to believe that.

Our teacher was getting pretty sick too and she finally called a halt to the whole field trip. She told us all to get back on the bus and those of us who could still walk ran as fast as we could. The rest staggered in after us and then our teacher did a fast head count which was interrupted as The Tour Guide Lady ran up. She reminded our teacher that she had individual cartons of milk for us all, whereupon out teacher turned to the driver and said, "Get us as far from this place as you can — NOW!"

The driver, who looked sicker than any of us, was only happy to comply. The Tour Guide Lady was ordered off the bus, its engine roared and we heard its tires make a noise I have only heard since in real bad movie car chases.

Once we were out of smelling range of the dairy, all of us — my classmates, my teacher and your truly — crowded around open windows, breathing hard like we'd just come up from a near-death underwater experience and were gasping oxygen to save our lives. The driver was doing seventy-plus on the freeway and he had the front door to the bus open so that a welcome tornado of air filled its center aisle.

No one — need I add? — felt like eating their sack lunches.

When we got back to our classroom, our teacher didn't try to teach. We just sat around recovering from our ordeal. The principal came by and said that the head of the dairy had phoned to apologize and to make it up to us, he wanted to send everyone a free half gallon of their milk and a gallon of ice cream and I think other products from that dairy. One of the students — and I'm fairly certain it was me — yelled out, "Tell him we never want anything that comes out of a cow again!" The other students laughed and agreed and then we all tried to put the whole experience out of our minds and noses.

But I still think about it now and then, usually when there's a Breaking News story on TV that some armed criminals holed up in a building somewhere and the S.W.A.T. Team has them surrounded. I think, "They don't need men with high-powered rifles. They just need to send in those cows. The criminals would instantly surrender." I told that to someone once and they said, "That would be cruel and unusual punishment!" I said, "No, it would be extremely cruel and extremely unusual punishment! But I guarantee you it would work!"

It's Randy Rainbow's latest and it might give you the idea that he doesn't care for Trump's V.P. pick…

Regular followers of this site — I believe I have some — may notice that it is online well over 99% of the time and it loads pretty fast. This is because after misadventures with several other hosting companies, I finally sprung for one of the top grade ones which, of course, is not cheap. Every year about this time, I pay them thousands of dollars for another year of hosting this site. It's about the same amount that Johnny Carson got for hosting The Tonight Show…or at least, it feels like it.

Since I do next-to-nothing to "monetize" (hate that word) this site — no paid ads, no paywall, no Patreon account, no subscription fee — once a year, I ask my readers to chip in for the cost of keeping newsfromme online and totally available. The way it works is that I put up little banners like this one —

— and if you're so inclined, you click on one and use PayPal to send me whatever you can easily afford to send me. When I get enough to cover my annual expenses for this site, the banners will stop appearing.

And if you sent some bucks, you can continue to read this weblog with a clear conscience and the proud feeling that you did the right thing. If you don't donate, you can still read just as much of this site as the donors but you won't feel very good about it. As Felix Unger once said to Oscar Madison, "Let it be on your head!"