I'm not really following the Canadian Truckers' strike/gridlock/whatever it is. But Jordan Klepper is…

• Any time Caller ID shows me an incoming call is from a strange name in Montebello, CA, I know it's spam. There is no one in Montebello I want to hear from and I doubt there ever will be. I wish my phone had the ability to block all calls from Montebello.

I just came across this graphic on my harddisk. I downloaded it somewhere on the 'net years ago and meant to write a post here about it. In the late sixties and early seventies, various projects caused me to deal with a lot of print shops. Every one I went into had some variation of this sign. Some just said, "Speed, quality, value…pick any two."  I thought about putting it on my business card but I realized it wouldn't register or matter with the folks hiring me to write things for them. Every one of them demanded all three.

"Good" or "quality" was the tricky one because it was so subjective. You could measure the other two with numbers. Three days is faster than six days, no argument. $500 is definitely cheaper than $1000 and always will be. But the quality of the work — how good it is — is much more arguable.

I don't know how many times I'd find myself in this situation, especially in the TV business: I'd be writing a script for a project where several folks had supervisory roles. I'd be getting "notes" (criticisms) from more than one person, often a whole committee. At Disney, it sometimes felt that I got notes from everyone who'd been to the Magic Kingdom in the past month.

Wherever it was, I'd go in for a meeting where all of them would gather to give me their comments —

— and they didn't agree. It was like they'd all read a different script, not the one (1) I'd handed in. One of them loved the character of Myron and wanted him to have more lines. One of them hated Myron and wanted him to have less, perhaps none. And there'd often be a person in the meeting who'd say something like, "I feel something is missing with the character Myron but I can't put my finger on what it is…"

There's a really helpful comment.

What I'd do in those situations is to just sit there quietly and let them duke it out. Sometimes, they'd all cancel each other out and I'd wind up making no changes. More often, I'd make one or two token changes for each…cut Myron back in some scenes; give him more than others. At a TV network meeting, I'd usually sense that for the people giving me the notes, it was not as important for them to win a discussion as it was to not lose or be ignored.

They just had to be able to feel and/or say they'd made some contribution. Sometimes, that meant rewriting every word and changing everything…but once, this happened:  I wrote a pilot for what turned out to be an unsold cartoon show once and when I handed in my first draft, the lady at the studio said, "Can we change the name of this character from Barbara to something else?  When I was going to school, there was a girl named Barbara I really hated."

I asked, "Did you go to school with any Brendas you hated?"  She said no so for the second draft, I changed Barbara to Brenda and that was it. This was back in the days of typing on paper so I had to retype a number of pages and then call a messenger service to come pick up the script and deliver it. In the computer era, I could have made the change and e-mailed the script to the producer in under five minutes.

The first draft had been delivered on the required date and the second draft was there the same day I got the "note"…so I guess the script was fast. I felt I should have been paid more for it so I guess it was cheap. And the buyer couldn't find anything but the name "Barbara" she wanted changed so I'll say it was good, at least up until the point where the network decided not to pick up the series.

In that case, I don't think it was because of the writing. The networks then developed a lot of shows they probably weren't going to buy. One then developed "one-to-ten," meaning that if they were looking for three new shows, they made thirty development deals and tried to do at least one or two with each studio they considered a major supplier. And in this case, the network then had another studio hire me to rewrite a pilot script that they did want to pick up from another company.

So I'd like to think that in that case, I did achieve Cheap, Good and Fast. There were other scripts where I managed two out of three. I was almost always on-time, no matter how tight the deadline was…and I usually felt I'd been underpaid so Cheap was usually achieved. It was that third one, Good, that like I said, was always tricky.

Continuing our parade of comedy teams on The Ed Sullivan Show, here — from July 10, 1960 — are Dan Rowan and Dick Martin. I thought they were a cut above most of the other teams around then but only a small cut. Later on, they got better…mostly because Dick Martin was a very funny man and they started building the act around him and his personality. Before that, as with this example, they were doing material that any two guys could do. In fact, not that long before they got popular enough to get on a show like this, it was Martin playing straight for Rowan. It worked better the other way around…

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver returns this Sunday so Mr. Oliver's on with Colbert tonight to promote that fact. [CORRECTION: I'm told it was last night. It's waiting on my TiVo.]

My favorite pizza place, Vito's, didn't reopen in time for Super Bowl Sunday and it apparently remains closed. Apparently, the fire was worse than some of us thought.

Amazon is now saying that the next volume of The Complete Pogo will be released in October. I think this is just them picking an arbitrary placeholder date. Because of that COVID thing you might have heard about, a lot of publishers are having a lot of trouble getting printers to commit to when they can get books printed and bound, and we are having that problem. But present indicators are that it'll be a lot sooner than October.

My iPhone has decided to get very selective about which text messages it delivers to me and which ones it doesn't. If you send me a text, do not assume I received it. I think I'm due for a new phone but I also think I'm too busy to deal with that right now.

Puppet Up! — the "for adults" puppet show about which I have raved here — is performing for three nights in Hollywood — March 4, 5 and 6 — and tickets still seem to be available. These are the same nights my pal Frank Ferrante is doing his Groucho show in Sierra Madre. I just checked and Google Maps says these two shows are 45 minutes apart so it may be possible to work a double feature. If you want to attend either or both, click for ticket info on Puppet Up! and/or Frank Ferrante's Groucho.

Comic book/strip/animation artist Mel Keefer has passed at the age of 95. Explaining to you who he was and what he did is going to be difficult because for more than sixty years, he was one of the busiest artists in the business, often called in as a replacement for other artists who had to be replaced for one reason or another. He was super-reliable and very, very good at what he did. When Roy Lichtenstein was swiping comic book panels and selling his copies as fine art, one of the artists whose work he copied was Mel.

No one is quite sure how many newspaper strips he worked on but I know of these: Perry Mason, Dragnet, Gene Autry, Mac Divot, Thorne McBride, Willis Barton M.D. and Rick O'Shay. His longest run was with Mac Divot, which ran from 1955 to 1977. A lot of comic strip fans didn't follow it because it was about golf and newspapers often ran it in the sports section. He ghosted on at least a half-dozen others but the most notable was Bash Brannigan, the strip drawn by "Stanley Ford" (Jack Lemmon) in the movie, How to Murder Your Wife. Mel did all the comic art in the film and when you thought you were seeing a close-up of Lemmon's hand drawing his character, that was Mel's hand you were seeing.

For that job, he replaced the great Alex Toth who had a tendency to quit jobs, often right in the middle. One time, Mel told an interviewer, "All the years that I have known of him, I have hardly said two words to him or he to me except once when I thanked him for affording me a nice living by accepting jobs that he walked out on. He didn't take too kindly to that."

Among many examples, Mel replaced Alex as artist of the Dell Zorro comic book and did piles of design work for Hanna-Barbera, often taking over design work on shows for which Toth was given sole credit. (Mel's first H-B job, on which he didn't replace Toth, was the original Jonny Quest.) Mel also did long stints working for Filmation on their adventure cartoon shows (from the Batman/Superman Hour in 1968 up to and including He-Man in 1985) and on the Marvel Super-Heroes cartoons produced in the sixties and on later shows produced by Marvel's animation studio.

And we haven't even discussed his illustrations for children's books (many) and all the comic books he worked on. The latter included comics for Toby Press, Charlton, Fawcett and a lot more than just Zorro for Dell/Gold Key. This obit could go on for days. He was also one of the comic book artists who appeared in the episode of Bob (Bob Newhart's short-lived sitcom about a comic book artist) in the episode about an awards show for that industry.

I knew Mel briefly and interviewed him at one Comic-Con in San Diego. Very nice man. Very serious about doing good work…and he did a lot of it. Sorry to hear he's gone but boy, did he have a great, prolific career.

I love these videos of old Los Angeles even though they've been colorized and had sound effects added. This one is from 1952, which is the year I "arrived" (was born) here.

We're driving down Sunset Boulevard heading west from around Cahuenga Boulevard. Sunset and Vine is a few blocks back and in the distance, there's a TV tower that I assume is on the lot that became KTLA in 1958. I think Paramount owned it then, having acquired it from Warner Brothers but I'm a little murky on the history there.

As we cruise along, very little is familiar to me. Some of the buildings are, though not the businesses in them. At one point, we pass the Oriental Theatre, which was located at 7425 Sunset Blvd. and was then playing Singin' in the Rain. That movie came out in March of 1952, just like me. The theater closed down in the early eighties and The Guitar Center is now located there.

Not much else is identifiable, though as we approach Crescent Heights Boulevard, we get a glimpse of Greenblatt's Delicatessen in its old location on the corner of Sunset and Laurel. The deli opened in that building in 1926, then moved a few doors west into larger quarters in 1979. It closed last August. The old building has been The Laugh Factory for many years and if you glance to the other side of the street, you'll see the famous Schwab's Drugstore. It closed in 1983 and a few years later, the whole corner there was turned into a big, hulking shopping center.

Shortly after that, we pass the Chateau Marmont, which is just about the only thing in the whole video that looks roughly the same to me. And just before the video comes to an end, we see Ciro's Nightclub, which was one of great nightspots…and in a way, still is since it became The Comedy Store. Enjoy the ride and all the Studebakers…

I see a lot of people online wondering about their safety regarding COVID by looking at national data. Seems to me they should be looking at the numbers where they live. At any given time, the numbers are going to be up in one county, down in another…and it's going to be that way for quite a while. I don't check it often because day-to-day movement is kind of meaningless but when I do want to see the trend for Los Angeles, I look here.

Currently, reports of people testing positive, people being admitted to hospitals and people dying from this &@#%!!! virus are on a steady downslope…but as you can see, they've done that before. How will I decide it's over? Probably when my primary care physician tells me it is. As I've probably said before, he doesn't know everything but he knows a helluva lot more about this kind of thing than I do.

I'm trying not to think about this a lot. I'm trying to spend less time thinking about things I can't do anything about. The other day here, I linked to a pretty good "explainer" about what's going on with Russia and The Ukraine. Parts of that piece may be outta-date by now and more will be tomorrow…but one thing will remain true: There's nothing I can do about it. So I don't really need an opinion about it.

It's still Valentine's Day so there's still time for me to feature this romantic music video starring the lovely Arlene Silver and the singing group, The Vantastix — Eric Bradley, Bryan Chadima and Mike Mendyke. There's also a surprise appearance by Arlene's husband who has been known to perform with The Vantastix…

Coming soon to a PBS station near you — but not too soon…

I've devoted a lot of this blog to telling folks about my pal Frank Ferrante's wonderful one-man-plus-a-pianist show, An Evening With Groucho, which he performs all over the world. What do I get for this? A lot of e-mails from people saying, "I saw your friend Frank and you were right about him!"

Not long ago, the show was captured for posterity and for PBS and I've seen the video. It was directed masterfully by Dreya Weber and it'll begin airing at various times on various stations but not until April. It's the next best thing to seeing it in person…which if you're anywhere near Sierra Madre, California, you can do March 4-6. He's also doing it in Philadelphia on March 12 and in other cities throughout the year. Check this page for more information.

My pal Vinnie Favale says it's Johnny Haymer in this very famous commercial and I think he's right.  I'm not sure why but I'm very pleased that everyone else in this world right now is talking about the Super Bowl…and we're here discussing the career of Johnny Haymer.  In this world, one needs to have priorities.

I assume that's not Mr. Haymer's singing voice but he does a neat job delivering his two lines…

Right after I posted the previous item, I got another ten e-mails saying it was Johnny Haymer and one from someone who thought it might have been Hamilton Camp. I knew Hamilton Camp and it wasn't him…though it wouldn't have surprised me if Hamilton could have equaled or even bettered what Howie Morris did.

Jay Thurber hit some online newspaper archives and found that The Philadelphia Inquirer, reviewing the show on Dec. 7, said it was Johnny Haymer. Meanwhile, The Vancouver, B.C. Sun on 12/5 called the actor "unidentified" and lamented the absence of Howard Morris. I lament the absence of Howard Morris every day since we lost him.

Jay also notes, "In the New York Daily News, Hedda Hopper was reporting that Howard Morris was writing a play about Sid Caesar, but wouldn't admit it — which is probably a big reason why Caesar didn't do the bit with Morris in the first place." Sid and Howie had a very strange on-again/off-again relationship. Each thought the other was utterly brilliant as a comic actor. Each found it financially advantageous to work together now and then.

But there was "bad blood" there now and then as well, a lot of it having to do with the division of whatever money was earned by the rerunning or reuse of material from Your Show of Shows and other programs they did together. Others who worked on those shows like Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks chose to not make an issue of it but they were very wealthy and also didn't have as many ex-wives (and therefore, alimony payments) as Howie. Howie also felt that Imogene Coca and some others involved in those shows were owed money and I have no idea how true that may have been.

Howie was nursing that play about Caesar for many years and when he and I became close friends in the mid-eighties, he asked me to collaborate with him and help him complete it. I declined and he eventually found someone else to help him. They did a staged reading of it at a little theater on Ventura Boulevard and it did not present a flattering portrait of "Eddie Romaine," as the Caesar-like character was called.

But sitting there, I thought it wasn't a bad play; just one that needed a lot of work, as most do after a first reading. It was though mistimed, as Howie soon heard that Neil Simon was writing a play that would be called Laughter on the 23rd Floor — his version of working for and with Sid Caesar. I think Howie then figured, "Well, what's the point now?" because I never heard him mention his play again.

And — oh, hey — I just got an e-mail from Rus Wornom telling me that last night, MeTV ran the episode of the original Star Trek series, "All Our Yesterdays" which included a role played by Johnny Haymer! I told you the guy worked all the time.

I have about 40 e-mails this morning from folks trying to identify the fellow in the sketch with Sid Caesar that I posted here last night. One person thinks it might be Gabe Dell. One person who has apparently never seen Sid Gould thinks it might be Sid Gould. And everyone else either thinks it might be Johnny Haymer or is absolutely certain and willing to bet their life that it's Johnny Haymer. So I'm going to go with Johnny Haymer.

Johnny Haymer (1920-1989) was one of those actors who worked all the time but never had that one signature part that makes him easily identifiable. If I said to you, "The guy who played Archie Bunker," you'd probably know I was talking about Carroll O'Connor. If I said to you, "The guy who played Mel Cooley," you'd probably go, "Oh, Richard Deacon!" But if Jamie Farr had never landed the role of Klinger on M*A*S*H, it would be difficult to tell you who I had in mind even though Jamie Farr was in dozens and dozens of TV shows and movies.

Johnny Haymer had a recurring role on M*A*S*H. He played Sgt. Zale (photo above), the supply sergeant who always seemed to be unwilling or unable to get whatever the unit needed. His movie credits included Annie Hall (where he played a bad comedian), Real Life and …And Justice for All — three of my favorite films. He also did voices for cartoons including The Transformers, G.I. Joe and a couple of shows I worked on but our paths never crossed.

The IMDB has a pretty long listing for him and it includes a 1959 episode of The Ed Sullivan Show, though not the one with Sid Caesar. The Internet Broadway Database tells us he was also in the Broadway revue, New Faces of 1956 so it's likely he was in a lot of sketches in New York-based variety programs of the day. It wouldn't surprise me if he was on one of Mr. Caesar's shows now and then. In fact, he looks to have been pretty bi-coastal for a lot of his career with a lot of gigs in Los Angeles and a lot in New York.

Thanks to all who wrote in — including two more since I started writing this — to tell me it was Johnny Haymer. I think you're all correct.

One of the greatest variety shows of all time — some would say the greatest — was Your Show of Shows starring Sid Caesar, Imogene Coca, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris. And a lot of them would tell you that one of the funniest sketches on Your Show of Shows was the one about the German general…and they'd be wrong.

Not that it wasn't funny. It was hilarious. It just wasn't on Your Show of Shows, despite its inclusion on that "best of" film they released in 1973, Ten From Your Show of Shows. That series was replaced in 1954 by a new series called Caesar's Hour and the German general sketch was performed on that show. In fact, it was on the first episode of Caesar's Hour in September of 1954. Here it is as performed there by Sid Caesar and Howard Morris…

Funny, right? Well, any student of comedy might learn something from watching this next version of the sketch, performed December 3, 1961 on The Ed Sullivan Show by Mr. Caesar and an actor I can't identify. The gent, as you'll see, does a decent job but he's not Howie Morris…

I knew Howie pretty well and I remember him being pretty angry that Sid had done this but I never saw the Sullivan performance until recently. I don't recall if he was asked or not. This was about the time Howie moved out to Hollywood and made the movie Boys' Night Out with Kim Novak and began directing TV shows and doing cartoon voices. So he may not have been in New York when Sid wanted to do the sketch on Ed's show.

Nevertheless, decades later he was still angry that Sid did a sketch that, Howie claimed, the two of them largely wrote together…and which was obviously staged by having the new actor carefully study a kinescope of the original. It sure looked like they also showed it to the set designer for the Sullivan program and probably the wardrobe person and the director…and they even use the same music. Howie said he never was paid for it and was pretty sure the official writers of Caesar's Hour weren't paid either.

The second version is funny too but there's just something missing in it…and it's not just Howie Morris, though that's a large part of it. And does anyone have any idea who his replacement was? The guy looks familiar.

Frontier Airlines (which you fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights) is merging with Spirit Airlines (which you fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights) to create a new airline you can fly because it's cheap and you don't mind cramped seats and late or canceled flights.

Frontier and Spirit, the two largest ultra-low-cost domestic airlines, are merging. The $6.6 billion deal will create the U.S.'s fifth-largest airline. Apparently, there's some dispute about the name of the newly-formed company and I wonder if anyone's thought to just call it "Frontier Spirit." I could think of other names, of course…but none of them would be flattering.