A few weeks ago, I changed the header picture on this blog from the one of me masked and wearing gloves back to the one of me sitting happily at my computer, working away with an unmasked face. I also stopped titling posts "Dispatches From the Fortress of Semi-Solitude." In light of the new resurgence of the Delta variant, I decided to go back to semi-isolation mode. So it's Day 496 here.

If they hadn't called it off, Day 500 of my avoidance of possible COVID contacts would have been the Friday of this year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. I recall that when they announced the con would be online instead of in-person, a lot of folks thought this was caution taken to a needless excess…and maybe it was. But it seems somewhat wiser today when the headline on this morning's Los Angeles Times is "L.A. County coronavirus spike hits alarming levels."

One hopes the reinstituted precautions are not as necessary as some say…especially if One understands that if the worst doesn't happen, that doesn't mean you were wrong to take precautionary steps. If the weather forecasting people say there's a 60% chance of rain and it doesn't rain, that doesn't mean you were foolish (or deceived) to take an umbrella.

I dunno what the chances are of us vaccinated folks getting this Delta strain — I'd imagine they're pretty low — but maybe we need to roll back that feeling of "it's over" a notch or two.

It's not so much that we're afraid of getting it. It's just that we want it to be over for everyone.

It's John Oliver again, this time with no mention of octopuses. But I'll bet you can guess what his topic is this week…

This essay/rant is about instances of commerce wherein you receive goods and/or services. I shall divide them into two groups…

Type 1 is when you merely order something and you receive it with no human interaction. I click what I have to click to get Amazon to send me a book or a piece of electronics equipment or a life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn and soon after, the book or the piece of electronics equipment or the life-size bronze statue of Gene shows up on my front porch…or doesn't.

Type 2 involves some discernible action by a representative of the company with whom I speak or whose name is given to me so I know who is doing whatever they're doing for me. Here are some examples of what I am calling Type 2 cases…

• I have to talk to someone at my cable company about why I am not getting all the channels for which I pay.
• I have to have someone from the cable company come to my home to fix the problem that the person at the cable company could not fix from there.
• A service like Grubhub or DoorDash sends someone to a restaurant to pick up an order and bring it to me.
• I go into a store and a person there waits on me or rings up my purchases.

…and you can probably imagine other examples but you can see the difference. Yes, someone in a Type 1 transaction fills my order and wraps up the statue of Gene but I don't see that person, I don't talk with that person, I don't know where that person is or who they are, etc.

These days, almost every time I have a Type 2 transaction, I get a little e-mail, often with the subject line "Tell Us How We Did," asking me to rate my experience.  But that's not really what they ask me to rate.  I'm usually being asked to rate the one person I dealt with, who is usually the last person in the whole process and often, the least important.

And in many cases, I suspect, the one being paid the least and/or the easiest one for the company to replace.

Example: The other day, I ordered some supper from a meal delivery service…and a neat thing about many of these services is that you can monitor the process on an app or your home computer screen.  I got the notice that the restaurant was starting to prepare my order.  Then I got the notice that the kid making minimum wage delivering for them was en route to the restaurant.  Then I could look online and see that he was waiting there for my order…and waiting and waiting…

The initial notice that my order was accepted said it would be here between 7:10 and 7:20.  But at 7:20, the kid was, according to the app, still waiting at the restaurant for it.  He got it at 7:25 and I received it at 7:45, which meant he came directly here as swiftly as the speed limits would allow.  Then the company sent me one of those "Tell Us How We Did" e-mails and asked me to rate only the kid.

There was no spot to complain about their app, which I found a bit confusing…no place to rate the quality of the food, which you'd think might matter somehow to someone…no place to write, "The order was 25 to 35 minutes late but that might have been the fault of the restaurant, not the delivery kid."  It could even have been the fault of the software or hardware involved in conveying my order to the restaurant.

But they were just asking me to rate the kid.  Maybe I'm assuming too much but I figure anyone doing this kind of work needs the money and there isn't much of it even with us generous tippers. They probably all have lot of things they'd rather be doing for a living but they can't get that work, maybe because of The Pandemic…

I don't want someone to say, "That's the fifth complaint about an order handled by this delivery kid.  Cut him loose!"?

I don't want to fault the delivery person when it's not his or her fault. I do sometimes want to fault the company that employs them. When I call my cable company with a problem — as I have to do, way too often — the "Tell Us How We're Doing" questionnaire I receive after we're done gives me no place to complain about the long hold time, no place to complain about my calls dropping, no place to complain about how often I find myself calling to complain. All they want to know is how was the person I spoke to? Were they polite? They're always polite.

Did they solve my problem? Often, the correct answer to that would be "No, the problem is with your equipment and even though they knew what they were doing, it wasn't within their power to fix!!!" But there's nowhere I can enter that. I have to rate the person I spoke to on a scale of 1 to 5…and that's it. I wish some company would ask me to evaluate their evaluation system. To start with, how do I explain I never got my life-size bronze statue of Gene Rayburn?

Has anyone ever told you you're funny? Well, maybe this is your chance to step up to big pay with the help of Albert Brooks' Famous School for Comedians…

As someone who used to go to Las Vegas often, I'm curious about what it's like these days when The Pandemic is over as far as some are concerned, no matter what some experts say. I have no plans to go and find out for myself and after reading T.M. Shine's report on Las Vegas, I'm more confused than ever.

In the meantime: The White House COVID team put out a list of "Select High-Burden Core-Based Statistical Areas" and Vegas was numero uno as "the nation's worst metro area with more than one million people for transmission of the coronavirus." The Las Vegas Advisor reports: "Masks are now recommended, though not mandated, for everyone in Las Vegas and several casinos, including the Venetian and Westgate, are now requiring all employees to wear masks again."

Jordan Klepper with another segment on guns…

A number of folks on Facebook and Twitter were featuring the above sign today. It strikes me as one of the few arguments I've seen that might actually prompt a few anti-vaxxers to go get the jab. A lot of them seem to have their political worldviews wrapped up in this issue. It's not so much that getting the shot or not getting the shot might affect whether or not you get a killer disease. It's that not getting the shot will certainly save the American way of life from Communist Takeover.

I am not exaggerating about some of these people. I think some of them are the same folks who insisted that legalizing Gay Marriage would completely destroy the entire institution of marriage within two years. It's now been thirteen years, two months and two days and I'm waiting.

My phone just rang. One of the umpteen filter-things I employ to weed out robocalls and frauds identified it in the Caller I.D. as "Spam Risk." On a whim, I answered anyway…

ME: Hello.

HIM: May I speak to Mark Evanier please?

ME: That's me. Who are you?

HIM: I'm calling from Quicken Loans about new opportunities to refinance your home.

ME: The caller I.D. said you were a Spam Risk.

HIM: Oh. We get that a lot. Our offers are so unbelievably good that people don't believe them and they report us.

ME: Hey, that's good. Don't call again.

And I hung up on him. But I was impressed with how fast he came up with that…or maybe remembered it.

My post about "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence" (this post) brought a lot of thoughtful e-mails and I thought I'd share a few with you. This one is from Carl Cafarelli…

My own preferred way of phrasing this is that we often attribute to a Machiavelli what is actually the work of the Three Stooges. Keep fighting the good fight.

And here's one from Tim Kinseth…

Agree completely about conspiracy theories. Some people are so paranoid and some people just have to have a bad guy. The thing with all the J.F.K. conspiracy nuts was the belief that something as monumental and earth-shattering as the death of the President of the United States could not possibly have been caused by one loser guy with a cheap rifle. It had to be some whole nation or awesome force. When I argued the matter with friends, they'd come back with the claim that the lack of evidence of a massive conspiracy proved there was a massive conspiracy because only a massive conspiracy could hide evidence that well.

And finally, here's my old pal Pat O'Neill…

Another important point to consider when dealing with conspiracy theories is summed up in "correlation is not causation." Just because two things occur together — even if that happens frequently — does not mean one caused the other. One example of this I recall from my youth was when people would claim that rockets launched from Cape Kennedy were causing the weather conditions that resulted in hurricanes making landfall in Florida.

Yeah. We see a lot of that from anti-vaxxers these days. Someone got a shot of Pfizer and died four weeks later…so naturally, it had to be the shot. At the same time, they dismiss the cause-and-effect of COVID-19 rates rising in areas with low vaccination rates. That just might be correlation equaling causation.

I think Tim above is right: Some people need bad guys. They have to blame every bad thing on someone…usually the same someone. I even have to remind fellow Trump-dislikers that you can't blame every bad thing that happens on the guy. He might not be responsible for DoorDash screwing up my order last night. Tucker Carlson might be right. It must have been Joe Biden doing that.

Thanks to all who wrote in.

Alex Duquette performs a medley of ten Hanna-Barbera theme songs in two minutes…

"Monster Mash," recorded by Bobby "Boris" Pickett and the Crypt-Kickers, came out in 1962 but it was played often enough on KHJ — probably around Halloween — that years later, it made it onto my mixtape. Mr. Pickett, who died in 2007, recorded other songs, mostly with a monster theme, but "Monster Mash" was such a smash that people cite him as an example of a "one-hit wonder."

I have a memory of sitting at a table next to Mr. Pickett at a horror convention — perhaps a two-day thing that was held at a public school in Lawndale, California one weekend in 1977. It was run by author George Clayton Johnson.  He called it ClaytonCon 1 and as I recall, the honored guests outnumbered the paying ones by a notable ratio, at least while I was there.

Maybe it wasn't that con but at some convention, I sat and chatted with "Boris" and he talked about all the things he'd done besides "Monster Mash" — a pretty impressive list, as I recall. But when people came by his table, all they wanted to talk about was "Monster Mash" and most weren't there to purchase the copies of his album and other goodies he was selling. Everyone just wanted to prove to him that they knew the song by heart and most of 'em wanted to show him their bad impression of him doing his bad impression of Karloff.

I felt sorry for the guy but then I remembered how many recording artists in this world — or wanna-be recording artists — never record anything that makes the Top 100, let alone goes to #1 as his did. One hit is infinitely better than zero hits.  So here's one the biggest novelty records of all time from American Bandstand for October 13, 1964…

And now here's a bonus — a novelty record based on a novelty record! You may remember my friends in Big Daddy, the local band that takes everything recorded after John F. Kennedy was shot and redoes it so it sounds like a record that came out before John F. Kennedy was shot. A few years ago, they took "The Music of the Night" from Phantom of the Opera and did some surgery to make it sound like "Monster Mash." I like both songs better when mashed this way…

Lately, everywhere I look, I seem to see people talking about conspiracies. "A" happens and then "B" happens and though there's no obvious connection between the two, someone finds a way to link them and to suggest that they're all a plot by Master Planner "C."

It's possible…but possible does not mean certain or even probable. It's possible that that lottery ticket you purchased will win you $50 million but it's not probable and certainly more than a bit far from certain. Things do happen all on their own. There are coincidences. And there's another factor that has a lot to do with what happens in this world…

That factor is incompetence. There's a lot of it on this planet, sometimes even from people who give every appearance of knowing what they're doing. I am a big believer in the aphorism, "Never attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence," though I more often modify it to "Don't rush to attribute to deviousness that which can be explained by incompetence."

Back in the seventies, I took a course in criminology just for the heck of it. Our instructor, a former F.B.I. official I believe, spent a lot of time telling us why Real Life was not like an Erle Stanley Gardner novel…or like the way we saw crimes in the movies or on TV. One of his main points was that you can't solve a mystery by assuming that all parties did the logical thing. Even relatively-sane people do not follow obvious rules of logic…and criminals are often far from sane.

Sometimes, you can figure out what they're thinking. Often, you can't. And often, they're not thinking at all.

Lately, I've received a lot of questions about comic book history with folks asking me why some publisher did something that now seems totally illogical. Well, maybe it didn't then. Or maybe there were other factors in play about which we know nothing…

Or maybe the person making the decision was totally illogical. And/or incompetent.

I saw someone on the web the other day trying to figure out Mike Lindell's "endgame." I wouldn't assume The Pillow Guy has one. It strikes me that when he starts a sentence, he doesn't know where he's going en route to the period. You cannot have a Master Plan if you're not to some degree a Master Planner.

And there are Master Planners in the world. I'm not saying there aren't. But there are also incompetents and I think they outnumber the Master Planners…by far.

As many of you are informing me this A.M., I seem to be a character in today's Funky Winkerbean comic strip. What a surprising thing to wake up to.

From The Ed Sullivan Show for March 28, 1965, here's my favorite non-speaking comedy stage act, George Carl…

Our great friend Steve Sherman passed away last month. I wrote about him here and here. A memorial gathering will be held on Sunday afternoon, August 8th, here in the Los Angeles area. If it would be appropriate for you to be there and you'd like to attend, drop me a note and someone will get in touch with you about the details.