Hello. I'm just barely awake enough to write something here, not awake enough to make it semi-entertaining.

I see where a new study has debunked with some authority the claim that COVID-19 was created in a lab either by accident or, as some insist, a deliberate scheme to infect and enslave us all. The study says it originated naturally — the word "naturally" being the scariest part of this — at an open-air seafood market in Wuhan.

This explanation will be accepted by everyone right after we all agree on who killed John F. Kennedy, if Neil Armstrong really walked on the moon and where to get the best pizza. Folks tend to believe whatever will best serve their immediate domestic political agendas. If pinning COVID-19 on one's opponents will bludgeon those opponents, that has to be the truth.

I'm paying very little attention to the Ukraine situation…just enough to recognize who the bad guys are, who the victims are and how bravely many (perhaps most) of the victims are fighting back. I have friends who are watching this with the same intensity they'd give to it if it was occurring in their own zip codes…and I don't doubt that it is serious and world-changing. But at times in my life, I skew towards the philosophy that I've probably quoted here from Jim Henson…

At some point in my life I decided, rightly or wrongly, that there are many situations in this life that I can't do much about — acts of terrorism, feelings of nationalistic prejudice, Cold War, etc. — so what I should do is concentrate on the situations my energy can affect.

I have come across quotes from Mr. Henson that one could interpret as rebuttals to that quote but it's like the theories of how COVID-19 started. Most of us will believe in the one that best serves our current needs. So I'm not going to give too much of my attention to the Ukraine matter with its acts of terrorism, feelings of nationalistic prejudice, Hot War, etc. If I did, I'll bet the online articles by my man Fred Kaplan would have a lot of valuable insight but I'm not even reading all of them.

This afternoon and into the evening, there's an outdoor memorial service celebrating the life of my good buddy Will Ryan.

I will be speaking briefly at or around 5 PM, probably following Leonard Maltin. The event is being live-streamed between 3 PM and 6 PM on the Celebworks Facebook page for those who can't attend but want to be there in spirit.  Those are West Coast times.  If you can't make it either way, just know that it'll consist of a lot of music with periodic speeches by those of us who were privileged to know this lovely, talented man.

• Today's potatoes are from Keith Wilcox & Sons in Rexburg, ID.

Here's one of my favorite stand-up comics, Jackie Vernon, on The Ed Sullivan Show for October 22, 1967. I think his material here is funnier than the audience did that night. Sullivan's show was live. If it had been done on tape, the producers would probably have dubbed in a lot of faux laughter…

This blog, like many others you visit, runs on a program called WordPress. Like all software, WordPress is constantly being updated and I just updated from version 5.9 to version 5.9.1.

When I did this, the new version did some odd things to the spacing in my page layout, at least in some browsers. Everything still seems readable but in some spots, there's more space between certain elements than I like or less. I would call the guy who designed this site and tell him to fix it but unfortunately, the guy who designed this blog was me. And I designed it in a designer program that no longer plays well with WordPress…and I don't remember a lot about the various files and templates and how to modify them anyway. It's been quite a while.

So while I figure out what to do, the spacing of some elements here may be a little weird. I'll fix it once I have some idea how to fix it or find somebody who can.

My piece on auditioning brought this from Brian12. I don't know who he is. Just Brian 12…

Have you ever had auditioning actors suggest a different interpretation in a polite, professional manner? And did you ever like the suggestion? E.G. after following the audition directions, "Could I present something different for your consideration?" I've seen stories about actors on the set asking a friendly director to try it a different way, but never at an audition.

You always let an auditioning actor do whatever he or she wants for their audition. Where you have to draw the line is when they're miles away from the character you're trying to cast. Suppose you were trying to cast Henry Higgins for a production of My Fair Lady. The character has to speak impeccable English because he's an expert in that field and a teacher of it. He has to be somewhat arrogant and, until near the end of the play, not particularly interested in having a woman in his life. And he has to be someone with whom Eliza could conceivably fall in love.

There are a number of ways to convey all that and the gent I saw in the recent Broadway revival achieved all that in ways quite different from what Rex Harrison did in the film and probably on stage. So you'd let auditioning performs offer different approaches and you might find one that gave you a valid Henry Higgins in a way you hadn't expected.

But where you have to cut it off would be if the actor said, "Could I present something different for your consideration?" and then he tried a Higgins with a thick Cockney accent who was always lusting after the ladies and coming off like a slovenly boor. The actor has been brought in to try out for a role, not to rewrite the play.

In the case of the actor I wrote about who started ad-libbing all over the room, he was not auditioning for the show we were doing. He didn't know the show we were doing because he hadn't read the script…just an audition scene I wrote to showcase one particular character. And he wasn't even trying to be that character.

He was trying (I guess) to do something so different and wild that I'd say, "My God! We should throw out the series idea we spent months developing and which the network bought and do something totally different!" The analogy in the My Fair Lady example would be if he came in and began doing Tevye in the hope I'd say, "That's brilliant! How could I be so foolish? We shouldn't be doing My Fair Lady! We should be doing Fiddler on the Roof!" And then I call the office and tell them to stop making the sets and designing costumes for My Fair Lady and start building Anatevka.

Don't count on that happening. I'm not saying it never does but don't count on it.

If an actor wants to do something with a scene or a line that you didn't anticipate, sure. By all means, let him or her do that. Often, I hear a "read" I never imagined and it's better than anything I imagined. Happens all the time. But it has to fit the purpose. As Stephen Sondheim once said about musicals, "The important thing is to make sure everyone's doing the same show!"

John Oliver discusses British Food…

Here's a strange piece of video. It's an "industrial" film about Dodge trucks for 1965. It runs a hair over 16 minutes and it stars Don Knotts. Industrial films are not made for the general public. This was almost certainly made to be shown to people involved in the marketing and maybe even the manufacture of Dodge trucks, and it may have been shown at some big convention of those folks and nowhere else.

The cast is full of people who were probably working a lot as day players in TV shows and movies at the time but the only one I can name is the gent with the mustache. That's Dick Wilson, who was better known later on as Mr. Whipple in the commercials for Charmin bath tissue. There are no credits so we have no idea who wrote it, directed it, produced it, etc. Howard Morris directed a number of films of this kind but this doesn't feel like his work…and if he'd done it, the cast would have been filled with his friends and I'd recognize a lot of them.

The style and humor are very dated and it's an example of the way women were often depicted at the time. If you can put that aside, you might be impressed by how much Don Knotts was able to do with a script like this. He really was one of the greatest comic actors of all time…

• Next time, a MAGA person tells you that Trump really beat Biden in 2020, remind them they have exactly as much proof of that as you have that Hillary beat Trump in 2016.

I have too much to do today and nothing to say about current events except how bad I feel for the people of Ukraine. So today's one of those days when I put up one of my colorful soup can graphics and caution you that there may not be much on this blog today. See you later.

My mother saw a lot of great shows on Broadway I wish I'd seen, including the original Oklahoma! and South Pacific. She lived in Hartford but every few months, she and a friend would take the train into Manhattan and see a show or two.

I once asked her what was the single most memorable moment of any show she saw on Broadway and she said, sans hesitation, "Stubby Kaye singing 'Sit Down, You're Rockin' the Boat' in Guys and Dolls. She also said it was the best show she ever saw there and the last. Less than a month later, she moved to Los Angeles and married Bernie Evanier and, a year later, they had me. But never mind that. The point is that she always remembered the Stubby One stopping the show with that number.

And she said, "It wasn't the same in the movie." Probably very little was. But what she said made me very much aware of Mr. Kaye and I watched for him in everything he did, including a few movies I did like — Li'l Abner, Cat Ballou, Sweet Charity and a couple others.

I could have liked him in the film version of The Music Man. That's who the folks who made that movie wanted for the role of Marcellus Washburn. But that was before the agent who represented Buddy Hackett leveraged him into the role by threatening to withhold some other client they wanted for some other film unless Hackett got the part. Wouldn't you rather have had Stubby Kaye there singing "Shipoopi?"

Stubby Kaye was born Bernard Solomon Kotzin — a name he managed to keep mostly-secret from everyone until after his death in 1997. He had a great career performing in vaudeville where he was often billed as an "Extra Padded Attraction." He worked on Broadway a lot. He did quite a few movies. And he appeared on a lot of TV shows including Shenanigans, which is the subject of this video link. Shenanigans was a Saturday morning kid show on ABC.

It was sponsored, as they reminded you every two minutes, by the Milton Bradley company, maker of fine games. It was produced by Merrill Heater and Bob Quigley, whose production company later had a mega-hit with Hollywood Squares. At the time, their biggest success was a game show called Video Village, which ran on CBS from 1960 to 1962 in a daytime version, a short-lived nighttime version and a Saturday morn version for children called either Video Village Jr. or Kideo Village at different times.

In 1964, they worked a deal with Milton Bradley to revamp the kids' version into Shenanigans with Stubby as its host and Ken Williams as his announcer-sidekick. Kenny Williams was the announcer on darn near every game show the Heatter-Quigley company produced. Wikipedia informs me that Shenanigans aired on ABC Saturday mornings from September 26, 1964 to March 20, 1965, and again from September 25 to December 18, 1965.

They made 39 episodes but as far as I know, only two have survived, making the rounds of the collectors' market in very bad, grainy prints. Long ago on this blog, I linked to some fuzzy excerpts but now we have a complete show here in watchable shape, not that I expect most of you to make it through the whole thing. But the opening with Stubby singing the theme song is kinda fun. Watch at least that much of it…

Vanity Fair has up a piece about Jerry Lewis using his fame and power to mistreat women. I was initially leery of it because its authors include the folks who did that one-sided (and to my mind, wrong-sided) Allen v. Farrow documentary for HBO but this new article rings true.  Part of that is because they interviewed multiple women who told of Jerry's horrendous behavior. And also, Lewis did a lot of shameful and arrogant things not involving women. Judge for yourself.

Much fuss is being made about the announcement that the Academy Awards will drop a number of categories from the live, on-air telecast and present them at the ceremony but not on the air. The categories they will present before the world are Actor in a Leading Role, Actor in a Supporting Role, Actress in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Animated Feature Film, Cinematography, Costume Design, Directing, Documentary (Feature), International Feature Film, Music (Original Song), Visual Effects, Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Writing (Original Screenplay) and Best Picture.

First off, I think marginalizing the other categories is a mistake. When you see someone win for Film Editing or Makeup and Hairstyling, you're probably seeing the high point in that person's life and maybe even a moment that will change their career for the better. When you see Spielberg win for Best Director, it's just another award for a guy who's already got a lot of them.

But forget about that. Why does anyone who isn't nominated and/or stands to profit from an award even care about that ceremony? Clearly, every year, fewer people do. No one thinks the statues always wind up on the right mantles and many folks are just tired of seeing rich and famous people honor each other. The Academy Awards have long been a dysfunctional institution but somehow, people who think that keep being disappointed by it. Just take a cue from the 2013 winner for Best Original Song: "Let it Go!'

Here's another article about how the current Broadway revival of The Music Man has been drained of much of its meaning by being drained of anything to which someone in 2022 might object. Having not seen the show, I resist the trap of assuming these articles are all correct…but I'm beginning to feel like the main reason I'd like to see it is to find out if these articles are right.

From what I hear, mixed reviews and high ticket prices aren't keeping audiences away from this show. High ticket prices don't seem to be keeping people away from a lot of shows of different kinds. The comedian Kevin Hart just announced four performances — two each night on July 2 and 3 — at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Ticket prices start (start!) at $300 each for the worst seats and go up to $1,250 and they're just about sold out. This is for 90-120 minutes of one person standing on a stage talking.

People everywhere are complaining about The Price of Everything going up and I think they're sometimes too quick to blame Inflation or government actions or international money fluctuations or things like that. Sometimes, the price of something goes up solely because the people offering it simply thought they could get more money for it…and they're sometimes right.

I don't know why people like this pastor in Arkansas don't know better than to talk to Jordan Klepper…

And if we go by the 24-hour clock, it is now 22:22 on 2/22/22 in Los Angeles. I will be doing this again in March of 2033.

I mentioned here the other day that I was getting used to a new keyboard on my P.C. Quite a few of you wrote to ask what I was using and how I liked it so here we go. I prefer the kind that clicks and you feel like you're working on the keys of an old electric typewriter. A friend who's well-versed in computer stuff recommended one of these…

It's the Redragon K580 VATA RGB LED Backlit Mechanical Gaming Keyboard with Macro Keys, Dedicated Media Controls, Onboard Macro Recording and to match my eyes, Blue Switches. Yes, it's a gaming keyboard but so far, it works just fine for my purposes…which do not include gaming of any sort.

The keys light up — which I like — but the default is a series of rainbow colors that display in different patterns — which I don't like. It was however an easy matter to find the code to switch them to all-white and unchanging, thus eliminating that drawback. Otherwise, I like the "touch" and I'm quickly getting used to its slightly-different layout from what I had for the last few decades.

Amazon has them for, at the moment, $73. I'm sure it'll be wrong for some people, especially those who prefer quiet keyboards with a feathertop sensibility but so far, it's working for me.