Neil deGrasse Tyson explains the concept of Daylight Saving Time to comedian Chuck Nice…and in so doing, to us…

That title is probably too harsh but some jokes are so easy, you can't resist.

As recounted in this article, "Star Wars actor Adam Driver recently revealed he has no plans to attend Comic-Con International: San Diego (aka San Diego Comic-Con) again."

What were his beefs? Well, for one thing, he was placed in a hotel where he was told he couldn't get a cup of coffee in the morning.

I don't know who told him that. If it was the hotel…well, that might be a good reason not to stay at that hotel again. But wait. What kind of hotel won't furnish you with a cup of coffee during the day? Don't hotels make a nice profit selling coffee to guests? I don't drink coffee but I'll bet you an awful lot of money that the next time I stay at a hotel for Comic-Con, I can get a cup of coffee. Do I have any takers on that?

If he was told he couldn't get coffee by some handler or publicist who'd arranged his appearance at the con to promote the movie, I think someone needs to fire that person. Or Mr. Driver's agent or manager needs to say to them, "Either Adam gets full coffee privileges or he doesn't appear!"

The point of this is that the thrust of the story makes it sound like he hated Comic-Con…and Comic-Con had nothing to do with whether or not he got coffee at his hotel. Or with the fact that the folks who arranged his appearance wanted him to wear a mask if he left his hotel before his surprise appearance. Or any of this.

Yesterday, we had an obit here for Joe Siracusa, the last musician member of the Spike Jones band and a longtime film editor for TV animation. In his later day, Joe received a lot of help from the Motion Picture and Television Fund, an organization that supports working and retired members of the entertainment community with a safety net of health and social services.

Here's a short video the M.P.T.F. put out about Joe. You will especially enjoy the ending…

• Amazon has been hit with a $500,000 fine for concealing information about COVID-positive cases among their workers. You have to feel sorry for Jeff Bezos. That's like three and a half minutes income shot to Hell.

There's a new movie out adapting The Eternals, a comic Jack Kirby created, wrote and drew back in the seventies. Response to it seems to be wildly mixed if you read reviewers and online comments. It's mixed in my e-mailbox where I have several messages from folks who want me to say it's a masterpiece and Jack would have loved it, and I also have messages — at the moment, the exact same number — asking me to say it's awful and he would have hated it.

I will not do either of these things. I can't say it's good or bad because I haven't seen it…and I can't say what Jack would have thought of it because, first of all, he hasn't seen it either. He passed away in 1994 and I'm not all that skilled at posthumous mind readings. Secondly, I'm not Jack Kirby. Sadly, no one is this these days.

Once in a while, I feel confident to say how I think Jack would have felt about someone because I recall him saying I hope no one ever does so-and-so to my work and then I see someone doing so-and-so to his work. But I never heard him talk about the possibility of an Eternals movie.

I can say that he had very little problem with others building on what he'd done, especially if he was receiving proper credit for what he'd done and decent compensation for its ongoing value.   He loved it when characters he created for the Fourth World series turned up on TV cartoons and he received checks…checks he knew would continue for his family after he passed. But he was not at all like Bob Kane, who wouldn't have cared if someone turned Batman into a Nazi mongoose as long as the name of Bob Kane was displayed on the screen and also on a large check. Jack certainly cared about content…passionately.

If you forced me to take a guess at how Jack would have felt, I'd guess he'd be pleased that someone felt that his comic series would have made a great movie and had backed that feeling with however many skillions of dollars it took to make the movie. Whether he would feel a great movie had resulted, I have no idea. Like almost every other author who ever had his or her work adapted to another medium, he would not have expected the end product to be exactly what he had in mind but he would not want to see something that in no way resembled what he'd done passed off as what he'd done.

And if you've seen the film, you can take it from there. But if you hated it, don't make the mistake of assuming Jack would have hated it…or if you loved it, that that means he would have loved it. Because not only am I not Jack Kirby, I'm reasonably sure you aren't, either.

Joe Siracusa died yesterday…about ten weeks shy of what would have been his 100th birthday. His death is being reported by the eminent medical authority, Dr. Demento.

Joe had many fascinating careers but the most impressive — and the reason for the Good Doctor's interest in him — was that he was the last surviving member of the Spike Jones band. That's Spike on the left in the above photo. Joe's head is one of the two on the right. Joe was Spike's drummer — and a key contributor to the craziness of that band — from about 1946 to 1953. You had to be really, really good to play with Spike and his City Slickers in those, his peak years.

Later on, Joe was in a couple of other bands that played zany tunes but he came to realize that popular music was changing and his style was not the style of the future. He decided to put his great sense of timing to work and around 1960, he became a film editor, mostly for animation.

Among the shows he worked on over the years were — and this is very much a partial list — Rocky & Bullwinkle, The Alvin Show, the various Bugs Bunny and Road Runner shows that repackaged vintage Warner Brothers cartoons for television, the 1960 Popeye cartoons, pretty much anything the DePatie-Freleng studio did in the sixties and seventies including The Pink Panther and the 1978 Fantastic Four cartoons, various Spider-Man and Hulk cartoon shows, Muppet Babies, My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Transformers, Dungeons & Dragons…and well, you get the idea.

He not only cut film but all those years of inserting odd noises into Spike Jones arrangements made him an expert at sound effects and he worked a lot in that area, too.

I got to sit and talk with Joe on several occasions. He was a delightful, funny man.

My friend Vince Waldron — who is just the kind of person who'd know this — wrote to tell me why November 13 is the date that, on The Odd Couple, Felix Unger was asked to remove himself from his place of residence. That Odd Couple show was adapted for TV by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson. November 13th was Garry Marshall's birthday.

One sees a lot of news stories these days about inflation and about how the price of everything is soaring. And that can be absolutely true depending on what you buy. But as Kevin Drum notes, those reports focus on what has gone up a lot and they ignore the items where the price hasn't changed or has even gone down. Maybe it ain't as bad as you think.

Mel Brooks' autobiography comes out at the end of this month. I want a copy. You want a copy. I've advance-ordered mine from Amazon. Here's a link so you can order yours. If enough of you do, what I make in commissions will cover what I paid for my copy.

For some reason, the hardcover is much cheaper than the paperback, at least as I write this. The audiobook is even cheaper and it would be nice to hear Mel read it himself but I think I want to read it in text first so I ordered the Kindle version which is cheaper than the hardcover but not as cheap as the audiobook…on Amazon. They have it for eight bucks but only as part of an Audible subscription if you take it as your first selection.

If you don't want to mess with that, Google Play has it for $16.95. That ain't a bad price for fifteen hours of Mel Brooks. Even though I don't get a commission, that might be a better place to get it. And I do hope he mentions Hitler in it.

A few years ago, the gifted writer Gail Simone (Hi, Gail!) did the above Twitter poll, asking folks which of Archie's two main lady friends was more desirable.  Now, I don't put a lot of stock in online polls.  They're easy to rig and often they do not get a diverse selection of respondents.  I am quite willing to accept the results of this one though because, well…that's the obvious result.  In fact, I could have saved Gail the fifteen seconds it took to set this up.  I could have told her the outcome would be a tie well within the margin of error…

…although I hear Mike Lindell has absolute, undeniable proof that there was massive fraud by the well-monied Lodge family and that Betty really won in a landslide.

I have no idea what the appeal of the Archie comic book franchise is today.  I'm not saying there isn't one; just that the old premises — the ones I knew way back when — seem to have been abandoned. That is not necessarily a bad thing, especially if they've come up with something more modern to replace them. Not everything stays relevant forever and when I used to kinda/sorta follow those comics here and there, they were close to relevant. Now, I dunno.

Today is Felix Unger Day, referencing the character from The Odd Couple. What makes it Felix Unger Day? Well, let's watch the opening narration from the first few seasons of the TV show which went like this…

Two things about that voiceover: One is that the announcer was William Woodson, a much-heard announcer and, away from a microphone, one of the funniest people I ever knew.

Secondly, the Odd Couple TV show went on the air in 1970 so this is a reminder of how terrified TV networks were then about the subject of D-I-V-O-R-C-E. ABC bought a show about two divorced men but partway through its first season, they added this opening narration…to suggest that divorce could be just a temporary condition. The same year, CBS wouldn't allow Mary Richards to be a divorced woman on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. Things have changed.

Also, you'll note in the video a screen credit for Jerry Davis, who was the producer of The Odd Couple TV show for a while — I think this was from the second season. Jerry had a wonderful career full of many things of which he was deservedly proud. He used to say that the only thing he regretted was that he was the person who introduced Erin Fleming to Groucho Marx. He might also have tossed in that he was one of the first producers to ever hire the writing team of Mark Evanier and Dennis Palumbo.

Meanwhile, a Twitter post by my longtime pal Joe Brancatelli reminded me of something I'd told him back in the previous century and which I mentioned here back in 2009; that the Odd Couple theme, which most folks know only as an instrumental, has lyrics. They're not great lyrics, mind you, but lyrics they are. What's more, they were written by Sammy Cahn, who had 31 Academy Award nominations and four wins. Neal Hefti wrote the tune.

The song was written for the movie but the lyrics were heard only on the soundtrack album. You can hear them in the second half of this video…

From The Ed Sullivan Show for February 5, 1967, we harken back to a time when Kermit was a blonde female frog who sounded just like Rosemary Clooney. It's a classic Muppet routine…

This post was first posted here on 9/19/10. In recent years, for reasons I'm sure you understand, Costco has gone from being a place where I shop often to a place I go on rare occasions but I get a lot of deliveries from them.

Since this first appeared, the KMart near me has done what KMarts everywhere have done: Gone out of business. But that's okay because I have all the ball peen hammers anyone could ever need. I have one.

I gave up on Brita filters after deciding they were no match for the shouldn't-be-there things in our drinking water in my area and I no longer buy white vinegar. But I do buy lots of Rao's Marinara Sauce and I still feel the same way about the business establishment from which I get it…

For reasons I'm not sure I can explain, I like shopping at Costco. Well actually, I don't really like shopping anywhere but since one must at times shop, this one prefers to do it at Costco and not that many other places. Some of that is because when you shop at Costco, you go home with such large quantities that there's less need to shop again soon.

But I also like the feel of the place, the mood of the customers and employees, the little women in the hairnets dispensing free samples…and the fact that in almost every visit, I take home something that makes my life better in some way. I have been to five different Costcos in Southern California and as I'll tell you in the next installment in this series, one in Indiana. I felt very welcome in all of them.

That is not the case with other huge stores. In the last few months, I found myself in a Kmart, a Best Buy, a Target and a Walmart. I couldn't wait to get out of the Walmart. There was something tacky about the place…a joyless mood with customers afraid to make eye contact with one another. I was there because I was looking for three items I'd been unable to procure anywhere else and the Walmart website said this particular store had all three in stock. It lied. They were out of two and had never heard of the third…or so said a pale store employee who looked like one of the orphans in a bad road company of Oliver. I was almost happy to hear that they didn't have what I wanted because that meant I could leave immediately. Which I did.

The one nice thing about the store for me, though I didn't purchase anything, was that anything they seemed to have in multiple colors, they had in orange. Some Walmart exec must have ordered this because usually when you have to pick the color of something you're buying, my favorite color is not an option. I'm even surprised when you can get an orange in orange. Anyway, I got out of there fast and didn't even pause to buy something that was orange.

My assistant Darcie and I stopped into a Target a few months ago to pick up a new vacuum cleaner for my mother's house. They had about twenty sample models on display and once I'd made my selection, I had the nigh-impossible task of flagging down a store employee to fetch me a fresh one from the back. Darcie and I fanned out to scour the aisles but we could find no one. You'd have better luck trying to hail a taxicab in Times Square on New Year's Eve if you were non-white and bleeding.

Finally, one clerk apparently made a wrong turn and wandered close enough that Darcie could tackle him. He grudgingly looked up the model I wanted and told me it was out of stock. Then he looked up my second choice and told me it was out of stock. After he informed me my third choice was out of stock, I told him, "Let's do this the easy way. Tell me which of these vacuums you do have in stock." He actually said, "All of them, except for the ones we're out of."

I go occasionally and voluntarily to a Kmart near me because it's near me and sometimes, you have a sudden urgent need for a ball peen hammer. Best Buy isn't bad but for some reason, every time I find an item I want, it's the only one they have left and it's been purchased by someone else, returned and resealed. The sales people sometimes look that way, as well.

So it's Costco for me and I am well aware that it's a different kind of store from the other institutions. For one thing, at Kmart you can buy one of something. But at Costco, people look at each other like they're not ashamed to be there. Oh, one may occasionally fight over a rotisserie chicken but for the most part, it's a very friendly place.

When I take my business there, I not only come home with truckloads of toilet paper, case lots of white vinegar and enough Brita filters to purify Lake Michigan…I usually come home with an anecdote or two. I've told some of them here before and will be sharing a few more under this category heading in the next few days. You may wind up with more of them than you want but I'm afraid that's just part of The Costco Experience.

Back in 1985 — give or take a year — my buddy Mike Peters hosted a PBS series called The World of Cartooning with Mike Peters. Mike, as you may know, is an award-winning of political cartoons and also the comic strip, Mother Goose & Grimm. He is also a wonderful human being if you can forgive that he still stubbornly insists on looking just like he did back in 1985 — give or take a year.

On this series, he interviewed important cartoonists like…well, like Mort Walker in this episode…

If you've been trying to "friend" me on Facebook and I haven't responded, it's not that I don't like you. Well, it's not necessarily that I don't like you. But I'm currently at 4,937 "friends," they only allow you 5000, I have over a thousand pending requests…and lately, when I do try to accept a friend request, their software won't allow it. It tells me I'm already over the limit. But that's only sometimes and…well, the reason I haven't accepted your request may be somewhere in that conundrum.

Some of you have noticed that I'm not talking much about Donald Trump and politics on this blog lately. That's because I get into moods when I don't want to think about Donald Trump and politics. This is probably not a permanent condition but it may last a while. I do think that Joe Biden is doing a pretty good job, especially when you consider how many people in public office are dead-set determined to not let him accomplish anything, including things they'd cheer if "their side" proposed them. And that's probably as political as I'll get for the next week or two.

The other day, a friend told me we all need to boycott In-N-Out Burgers because of their refusal to obey laws relating to vaccinations. I said, "I can't boycott them since I gave them up years ago." She asked, "Did you stop buying their product because of their opposition to gay rights?" and I answered, "No, I stopped buying their product because I decided I didn't like their product." She didn't seem to think that was a valid reason.

Also the other day — a different other day — I had a long phone call with my friend Paul Dini, who is briefly hospitalized with a fairly minor, soon-to-be-gone condition. Not that hospitals need more things to think about now but I got to wondering how long it will be before every hospital bed will be equipped with a webcam and monitor so doctors could check in with patients more often, friends and loved ones could call up to entertain the patients…or bored patients could easily go online into chat rooms and invite friends to "drop by." A patient concerned with his or her appearance could do this audio-only. I would imagine that because of COVID, fewer people are going in to see hospital-confined acquaintances…and some patients can't set up laptops or other devices to receive such calls. There may be a good idea somewhere in this notion. It wouldn't surprise me if it's already being tested somewhere.

That's all for now.