• I haven't seen the daily public apology from Joe Rogan so far this morning but it's only 10 AM. He still has plenty of time.

Cartoonist Sergio Aragonés has been my best friend (Male Division) for many decades and we collaborate on a whole mess of things including but not limited to Groo the Wanderer comic books. A great many people seem to be under the impression that I am his agent or secretary or that I have nothing better to do in life than forward messages to him.

A large percentage of these e-mails to me are from folks who want to pay him money to do drawings that they can frame and treasure forever. In the past, the answer to such inquiries was "Sorry but he only does sketches at conventions" but for reasons you just might be able to guess, he's not going to conventions these days.

To make up for this and not disappoint those who are craving a piece of Sergio art, he is now taking commissions via e-mail. To contact his representative, check out this Facebook page. And don't pester me.

I'm fascinated by the inner workings of Costco. If you are too, you might like this article about the history of the Kirkland brand.

For a couple of years a long, long time ago, I wrote a weekly column for a newspaper called The Comics Buyer's Guide. Quite a few of those columns appear elsewhere (like, here) on this site but a lot don't. This is part of a column that doesn't. It appeared in that paper on 3/23/01…

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When I was going to University High, an annual event was a morning of sexually-segregated assemblies.  All the girls would file into the school auditorium while all the boys went out and filled the bleachers of the football field.  In each locale, there would be a guest speaker holding forth on a topic that was notionally of interest only to that gender.

I'm not certain what transpired in the girls' assemblies.  We heard they were all about cooking and sewing, but we guys had our suspicions.  There was one year there, I was sure they were all voting to not go out with me —

"Okay, Becky, you'll lead him on…make him think there's a chance.  Then, just when his hopes are up, you dump him and take up with the dorkiest guy you can find…

"Sandra, you sit in front of him in Algebra, right?  Okay, so you wear that real tight little skirt — the blue one — and when he asks you for a date, you don't say anything.  Just giggle a lot, whisper to your friends and point at him…"

My first year at Uni — 1967 — the Boys League assembly featured a talk by one of the gents who had designed the Ford Mustang. For about an hour, he told us that the only car in the world worth owning was the Ford Mustang.  Not only that but the only job in the world worth holding was designing and/or selling Ford Mustangs.  His message to the Youth of America was that if we wanted to amount to anything in our lives, we should all buy Ford Mustangs and then work for the Ford company for whatever wages they deigned to pay us.

My last year there, the guest speaker was professional wrestler Freddie Blassie — and in calling him a speaker, I'm being a little loose with the language. So was Mr. Blassie, who spent the hour trying, without a whole lot of success, to formulate complete sentences. Still, he made a lot more sense than the guy from Ford.

For the assembly in-between, we had an actual professional baseball player…though not a particularly exciting one. He was a pitcher who had only been in the majors for a year or two, and I believe he'd sat out most of the previous season with an injury. He was with the New York Mets and he was in-town to throw against the Dodgers. Given his then-current earned run average, the odds favored him losing.

I recall that the crowd liked him a lot. He was charming and funny and obviously quite serious about The Game.  But he wasn't Sandy Koufax or Don Drysdale, the recent superstars of Dodger pitching.  He wasn't even Ron Perranoski, who was the guy they usually sent in for the ninth inning to save Sandy and Don when they got weary.  Our guest speaker was just an undistinguished Met.  That made it somewhat absurd when, during the Q-and-A segment, a member of the audience asked him: "Who's the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game today?"

And the undistinguished Met didn't ponder his choices for even a moment.  He said, "I am."

Everyone laughed at the sheer audacity of the statement.  Had a Sandy Koufax said it, we might have cheered in agreement but for this unknown…this Nolan Ryan kid to claim to be the hardest-throwing pitcher in the game?  Ha!  What an ego!  What a pretentious, outlandish claim!

Flash-forward just five years: The Guinness Book of World Records certifies Nolan Ryan — now a California Angel — as the hardest-throwing pitcher in recorded Major League Baseball history.  On August 20, 1974, he is pitching against the Chicago White Sox.  There's a three-and-two count against the batter in the ninth inning and Ryan fires one across the plate at 100.9 miles an hour.

Hmm…that claim of his don't seem so outrageous now, does it?

And just so we all have some idea of how fast that is: 100.9 miles per hour is the wind velocity of a moderate-level tornado.  It's also about the speed Californians slow to in a School Zone, especially when driving Ford Mustangs.  Then let's flash-forward to the end of his twenty-seventh season…

That's right: 27.  A seven with a two in front of it.

Nolan Ryan is now the holder of 53 Major League Baseball records.  He has thrown 5,714 strikeouts and won 324 games, including 7 no-hitters.  Most pitchers go their whole careers and don't come within a spitball of a no-hitter.  Ryan threw seven.  (Actually, just lasting 27 seasons in professional baseball is a stunning accomplishment, in and of itself.)

Mr. Ryan, if you're reading this — and I know you aren't — I'd like to apologize on behalf of all the male students who attended University High in 1968.  We all thought you were…well, let's be polite and say "exaggerating."

Oh, hell, let's be accurate and say "full of crap."  In hindsight, it doesn't seem like such an outrageous claim to make.  If he wasn't the hardest-throwing pitcher in all of baseball when he said it, he was darned close.

I awoke this morning to e-mails from several folks asking me to tell them more about Erin Fleming, the controversial lady who managed and stage-managed the last years of Groucho Marx. I was only in the same room with her twice — once on the stage of a TV show and once in Groucho's home — and in both instances, we didn't talk much and she had reasons aplenty to be on her best behavior.

Want to know what it was really like in that house? Read my pal Steve's book. I would imagine you could also wait for the movie based on it but that won't be at the Cineplex for some time and I'm sure won't go into as much depth. I saw enough of Ms. Fleming — and heard things from others I trusted — that I had no problem believing every word of Raised Eyebrows when I first read it…and that was some time before I even knew Steve Stoliar.

The basic answer is that she did some good things and she did some bad things…and you have to wonder what would have happened to Groucho if she hadn't been there to do the good things. That, I can't tell you.

And if you want to get a look at Ms. Fleming, there is video around of her. Here she is being a guest on The Dick Cavett Show who Mr. Cavett clearly could not wait to stop talking with…

• So now what happened in D.C. on 1/6/21 is to be considered "legitimate political discourse?"

Congrats to my good buddy Steve Stoliar. Steve's the fellow who worked as Groucho Marx's assistant in the last few years of the great comedian's life. This placed Steve in the midst of the squabbles and controversy about Erin Fleming, whose role in Groucho's life is hard to explain and harder to assess. Steve wrote a book about those years and it is, as the saying goes, Soon To Be A Major Motion Picture.

Geoffrey Rush will play Groucho, Sienna Miller will play Erin, Charlie Plummer will play Steve and a good third of the Internet is already reviewing it, even though not a frame of film has yet been shot. Give it a break, people. More details here…and if you haven't read Steve's book, you should. Order a copy here.

The Joe Rogan controversy has forced me to have some sort of opinion of Joe Rogan. I saw Mr. Rogan doing stand-up comedy twice, I think, and I was pretty unimpressed both times. Then again, the first two times I saw Richard Pryor doing stand-up, he wasn't very good…so maybe two sets at The Comedy Store is not always a fair sampling.

Before he became the Reigning Podcast King, I think the only place I'd seen Joe Rogan was when I tried watching Fear Factor. I thought it was a pretty ugly, unwatchable program…but nothing I couldn't just ignore and go on with my life. People should probably do that more often with things they dislike but which do them no harm.

Perhaps I've mentioned this before but I know a guy who produces "Reality Shows" and he once asked me if I had any ideas for one. I told him that wasn't my kind of program and he told me, "Okay…but if you ever do come up with one, bring it to me and remember the core principle behind Reality Shows. There is nothing you can think of that someone won't do to be on television."

I suspect the guy was right. That is the core principle of Reality Shows…and also, pornography.

Yes, I've listened to The Joe Rogan Experience a few times, nearly always because he was chatting with comedians I liked. If he stuck to that, he'd have me listening more often.  He'd also probably have a lot fewer listeners overall so he's not going to do that.

I'm one of those folks who think it's brain-dead stupid to take serious medical advice from someone who hasn't graduated medical school. There have been people I knew, including a few I've loved, who I'm convinced literally died from amateur/voodoo medical advice. This is not to say Real Doctors are all worthy of the title but I feel fairly sure the failure rate is far greater with those who got their diplomas, if any, at the 99 Cents Only Store.

Rogan does have qualified doctors on his podcasts and he's probably right that the parts of those shows that anger some are in brief clips that do not reflect the interviews as a whole. He's also right that he does present opposing views to what's in those brief clips The problem is…well, there are a couple of problems there, one being that even bad medical advice in a brief clip can do a lot of damage.

And another problem might be solved if those qualified experts were being interviewed by someone who knows a lot more about medicine than Joe Rogan.  And that Joe's audience is listening more to him telling what he thinks he's learned from them.

A lot of people these days seem to have a real problem with experts. They don't like that experts sometimes tell them what they don't want to hear. It makes some people uncomfortable the way certain details of American History make them uncomfortable so they want to change those details.

Lately, I see people say, about topics like COVID, "I've done my own research." They make it sound like they went into a lab and with no knowledge whatsoever of the science involved, performed meaningful testing. What "my own research" usually means is that they did some searching of the Internet and found one site or one message somewhere from someone who told them what they wanted to hear.

I don't think the problem here is Joe Rogan. I think the problem here is people who don't put much value in someone actually knowing what they're talking about.

This is one I can't embed here but I'll give you a link to where you can go and view it, should you be so inclined.

Back in 1983 in the early days of cable TV, one of the best things I saw was a series called Likely Stories. For not-enough episodes, clever filmmakers got together with clever people and had a lot of freedom to produce clever short films. Most of what they did could not have appeared on mainstream television at the time.

The producer of the series was a gent named David Jablin who later became a friend of mine and one of the best of the many good things that appeared on his show was this: A 25-minute ersatz documentary about an ersatz film director named Seymour Z. Fishko who was played brilliantly by the (now, sadly) late Howard Hesseman. It was written by two of the best comedy writers around then or now, Michael Barrie and Jim Mulholland.

David tells me that he sent the script to Hesseman who loved it, agreed to do it and recommended his old friend Peter Bonerz to direct. You may remember that in my obit on Hesseman, I mentioned that he was a member of the innovative improv troupe, The Committee. Well, so was Peter Bonerz, who some of you may also know from The Bob Newhart Show.

The casting of the French reporter who is making this bogus film about Mr. Fishko was even easier. It turned out that Hesseman's lady friend at the time was Caroline DuCroq, who was a fine actress and by a neat coincidence, French. A few years after this film was made, she and Howard married and stayed that way for the rest of his life. She is now an important director and acting coach.

Also in the cast was my dear friend Angela Aames, who we lost at the way-too-young age of 32…and I still haven't quite gotten over that. Angela was a very good actress who in this film did a very good job of playing a not-very-good actress.

We have since seen a lot of what some call "mockumentaries" — emphasis on the "mock" — but this was made just before the most famous of them, This is Spinal Tap. Which come to think of it, also had Howard Hesseman in it.

David wrote me this morning to say that with the recent passing of its star, he's been getting a lot of inquiries about where one could see Focus on Fishko. That prompted him to put a copy online and he sent me the link in case I thought newsfromme readers would enjoy seeing it. I think newsfromme readers — especially those who appreciate mildly "adult" subject matter, would enjoy it so here's that link. I dunno how long he'll leave it there so if you want to see it, don't delay.

• Rudy Giuliani performing on The Masked Singer. Lately, every bit of political news sounds like a cold opening for Saturday Night Live.

For an awful long time now, Robb Milne and Bryan Stratton have been delving into the history of Marvel Comics with their fine podcast, Marvel by the Month. This month, they have a guest who goes on and on and on about Jack Kirby.  You can listen to the show right here or if you become a Patreon supporter, you can hear a slightly-longer version of their conversation with Yours Truly…

I need a day or two away from this blog…from the entire Internet, actually. It's nothing serious. I just won't be as "here" as I usually am for a little while. You won't notice because I'll send you to something else online that is far more entertaining than anything you'll find here.

YouTube now has a Letterman Channel filled with authorized (it appears) clips from past David Letterman shows. What's more, they seem to all be from back when Dave was really, really good. Here's one of my favorite Top Ten lists which Dave presented with an assist from Mr. Top Ten himself, Casey Kasem…

You may disagree — in fact, I know folks who disagree — but I found Dave increasingly less fun to watch during his last decade or so on CBS. There were golden moments, sure, but I switched from TiVoing him each and every night to watching the best clips that showed up on YouTube. I also lost a lot of respect for the man for some of the things he did to his staff and his competition.

Never lost my respect for all the innovation and refurbishment he brought to the talk show format. Never lost my respect for his writers who I thought were some of the best to ever work in television. I know someone who dearly wants to believe that David Letterman ad-libbed every single thing he said on television for thirty-three years, even when he was reading it off cue cards. No, I don't think so.

But there was a point when I couldn't watch him every night any longer; when it felt like he didn't even want to be there. So it's nice to have this new channel, along with the many, many, Dave clips all over YouTube to remind us that when he was good, he was very, very good. I will embed more videos from that channel, I am sure, but you might want to go over there and browse all of what's there now. Back soon.

This article first appeared here on July 14, 2013. I've been waiting in vain for someone to offer me a bribe to run it again…

My father was a very honest man. Absolutely, utterly honest. Once, he found a wallet in the street with a few hundred dollars in it. He took it home, looked up the number of the person it belonged to and arranged to return it to them…with every buck still in it. He did things like that all the time. All the time.

In his role as an officer for the Internal Revenue Service, he was occasionally — very occasionally — offered bribes. The offerers of those bribes were foolish to try this. My father was not the kind of guy to go along with something like that…and even if he had been, there was very little he could do to "help" the offerer. He didn't have the power to tear up your tax bill or waive penalties or anything. About all he could do was to try extra-hard to not have his supervisors be too rough on you…and he did that anyway for most people.

There were, he heard, other I.R.S. agents who occasionally took bribes anyway. They'd grab the cash or, more often, some item of considerable value and tell the briber, "No promises but I'll see what I can do." And then they wouldn't do anything because, at least for those at or around my father's level in the operation, they couldn't do anything.

Once, a fellow who owed the Internal Revenue a few hundred thousand bucks offered my father a new car. It was not stated overtly as a quid pro quo. My father didn't have to do anything to get this new car but accept. Then, if he wanted to, (ahem!) he could maybe do whatever seemed appropriate to aid the fellow with his tax dilemma. Nudge, nudge.

My father said no. Even if there were no strings attached, he could not and would not accept anything of value from someone he had a case against. When the man tried to force the gift on him, my father reported it to his superiors and they took the appropriate action. This kind of thing happened three or four times in his career with the I.R.S. and he was not unique. No one in his office had ever been accused of accepting a bribe. Until one day, he was.

It came out of nowhere. He'd had a case against some guy who'd swindled the government out of millions. My father took it as far as he could, then it was reassigned to lawyers (my father was not a lawyer) higher-up in the I.R.S. to handle. At some point, the deadbeat began throwing out allegations that several I.R.S. agents, my father among them, had accepted large sums of cash or merchandise. I guess the premise here was that he'd drag the department through the mud until they agreed to drop the charges against him…or something.

My father was shocked, angered and even a bit worried. He knew he'd done no such thing but until it could be verified, he didn't sleep too well.

Vindication took about two months. A special investigator was appointed and he went through all my father's finances — checking account, bank account, etc. It was a much more thorough audit than the I.R.S. ever performed on a civilian and it even extended to me. To make sure that no bribe money had been paid to him via his spouse or son, they had us turn over all of our records, as well. A forensic accountant (I think that's what he called himself) at an outside agency received the data, then phoned me up several times to ask questions like, "What was this $300 you earned the first week of August for?" I told him in that instance, "That was for an issue I wrote of the Daffy Duck comic book." He was amused by my sources of income but it all checked out.

All of the accused Internal Revenue employees were cleared and their accuser wound up doing hard time. The matter was over but my father had a hard time letting it be over.

A few weeks later, he was talking about having some work done on his car and he said, "Guess I'll have to postpone it until I have the dough." Making a joke I immediately wished I could take back, I said, "Hey, why don't you use some of that bribe money you have stashed away?" He gave me a look that clearly indicated he didn't find that funny. I apologized and never made reference to it again.

But he'd bring the matter up every so often. He had been totally cleared but somehow, that wasn't enough. I think he wanted the investigators to do more than say, "There is no evidence that Bernard Evanier ever accepted cash or any item of value from his accuser." He wanted them to issue a statement that said something like, "Not only didn't Bernie Evanier take a bribe but our investigation has determined he is the most honest I.R.S. agent ever and anyone who thinks he'd do something like that is out of their friggin' mind!" I'm not sure even that would have gotten him to stop talking about it.

I don't mean he spoke of it all the time but it had a way of coming up, even after he retired from the agency. He'd be discussing the Lakers and what a lousy season they were having and suddenly, out of nowhere, he'd make some odd connection like, "People keep accusing Kareem Abdul-Jabbar of not doing more on defense. That's as ridiculous as that guy accusing me of taking a bribe."

My father's best friend in that I.R.S. office was a fellow named Howard…a real nice man, I thought. They had lunch almost every day when my father worked in the office and they switched to every Wednesday after he retired. Howard, who still worked there, would come by and pick him up and off they'd go to some deli or sometimes for Chinese. Howard would report on the latest doings in the office and my father would mutter something about that crook who'd accused several of them. Howard, who had not been among those accused, would tell him to drop it, forget it, get over it. This went on through years and years of Wednesday lunches.

Then one Wednesday, Howard didn't show up for their usual date: No Howard. No call. No nothing. I had moved out of the family home by then but I happened to be there visiting. I asked him, "Are you sure he didn't tell you he had to skip this week for some reason?"

"No, no," my father said. "Last Wednesday when he dropped me off, I distinctly remember him saying, 'See you next week!'" I suggested he call the office and he did. He called and reached a secretary there he knew very well, then asked if Howard had come into work that morning.

"Didn't he tell you?" she asked. "Didn't anyone tell you?"

"Tell me what?"

She said, "Howard was fired after he was convicted last year of taking a bribe. We heard he surrendered on Monday and began serving his prison sentence."

"Stunned" does not begin to describe my father's reaction. He practically went into a sensory coma. Howard had been indicted almost two years before and placed on suspension. He'd been through a trial where he was found guilty, then been through a few unsuccessful appeals before giving up and telling people, "Yeah, I did it."

For the last few months, he'd been well aware of the date when he would be tossed in the slammer for two-to-five years. And still, every Wednesday, he came by, took my father to lunch and told him what was up with the folks at the office where he actually hadn't worked in over a year. Not a word about being on trial, being convicted, being sentenced to prison…any of it. They just sat at Nate n' Al's Delicatessen and talked about the Lakers.

We found out Howard was doing his stretch in the California Institute for Men in Chino. That's about an hour's drive east of Los Angeles. I told my father that if he wanted to go visit Howard, I'd drive him out there some day, maybe even a Wednesday. He thought about it for a second and then said, "No…I'm not sure I could look him in the face. And with my luck, he's probably sharing a cell with that prick who accused me of taking a bribe!"

I'm receiving quite a few answers to my question about the financing of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. No two estimates are the same which apparently has much to do with the fact that the value of Pounds Sterling fluctuated a lot in 1975. So how much it cost then has a lot to do with when in 1975 the money was spent.

But all the estimates so far are between 1.8 and 2.1 million dollars. That's close enough for me, thanks.

From The Ed Sullivan Show for February 26, 1956, Bob Fosse (yes, Bob Fosse) performs with Carol Haney. At the time, she was appearing in the original Broadway production of The Pajama Game which he had choreographed…