• Lindsey Graham said, "I'm being killed financially. This money is 'cuz they hate my guts." Which is ridiculous because Lindsey Graham has proven time and again that he doesn't have any guts.

Sometimes, they just get by you. When Phil Hahn passed away last November, it was apparently covered in many newspapers and online Hollywood sites but I somehow missed it. It wasn't until I saw him in the "In Memoriam" reel on the Creative Arts Emmys, which I watched on YouTube, that I found out. Phil was one of the best comedy writers it was ever my pleasure to be around.

He hailed from Kansas and got his first real writing job there working for Hallmark Cards. True Story: In 1983, Phil and I were on staff working on a show for Dick Clark Productions. One day, my friend Russell Myers — who was then drawing the newspaper strip Broom-Hilda and still is — was in town so he came by the office to visit and to go out to lunch. We were heading out and we passed Phil's office where Phil was sitting, working.

Russell walked a few steps by Phil's door, then stopped and said, "I recognize that man!" He walked back into Phil's office and said, "Excuse me, sir, but I have the feeling I know you." Phil looked at Russell and said, "I think I know you, too." It took about two minutes before they figured out that they'd both been on staff at the same time at Hallmark back in Kansas City, MO. Phil wrote gags for cards. Russell did the artwork for many of them. But they'd never met or been introduced there; just seen each other in the halls. They didn't actually meet until years later in Dick Clark's building in Burbank.

Phil sold a lot of funny articles to MAD magazine and also recommended one of the best artists he worked with at Hallmark. And that's how Paul Coker Jr. joined the Usual Gang of Idiots at MAD. Together, they did a recurring feature called "Horrifying Clichés."  On a lot of his MAD work, he collaborated with Jack Hanrahan, who became his writing partner when Phil moved to Hollywood.  Together, they wrote for dozens of shows including Get Smart and The Sonny & Cher Show,  and they put in a stint at Hanna-Barbera writing The Banana Splits and about half the episodes of H-B's 1967 Fantastic Four series.  But their biggest credit was several seasons on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In for which they each earned an Emmy.

In the early seventies, the team split up and what became of Jack Hanrahan was not a happy story.  But Phil continued working on popular shows including Donny and Marie and Dolly Parton's 1987 variety series and a whole lot of specials.  He eventually retired to Coos Bay, Oregon where he was happily retired with his family, and where he died of lung cancer last November at the age 0f 87.  A nice man.  A funny man.  I wish I'd known about his passing and was able to note it last year.

I used to love watching Jackie Vernon on The Ed Sullivan Show. Best deadpan delivery in the business…

This is not for me. It's for something I'm working with. They're looking for someone who has an unslabbed copy of Fantastic Four #1 — an original one, not a reprint — who will make it available to them for scanning…and yes, this is all approved by Marvel. It's for a forthcoming fancy book and they will pay a fee and give you credit and some free copies and take very good care of it. In fact, they may even be able to come to you and you can take it out of its Mylar® sleeve or whatever it's in and handle it. They just need to scan it for this big, impressive book.

Someone who is located in the Eastern Tri-State area would be ideal but they may be willing to settle for anywhere. Drop me a note if you've got one and are willing to share it with the world. I will pass you on to folks I trust.

I had a great time last night interviewing my buddy Ron Friedman…though I think I could have saved some time by listing the TV shows he hasn't worked on. You can still watch the whole conversation here and if you crave more of Ron's great stories, there's an awful lot of them in his autobiography. We plugged it during the show but neglected to tell you where you can get a copy. Here's where you can get a copy.

For some reason, a number of folks lately have written to ask me various versions of the question, "Do you believe in psychics?" Here's my simple answer: I believe there are people who claim to be psychics and I believe these people can be divided into two groups: Those who deceive others into thinking they have psychic powers and those who deceive themselves. The latter group includes the many people who say things like, "I'm not saying I have psychic powers but there are times when I just seem to know something before someone tells me or before it happens and I can't explain how I know."

I also have a few messages lately from someone who doesn't have the e-mail address of someone they wish to write to but knows that I do and believes that kind of thing should be open knowledge and I must hand it over. Years ago, someone demanded a certain phone number I had and accused me of interfering with their Freedom of Speech by not furnishing it. They sent me this long, incoherent message about how they had a God-given right to talk to anyone they wanted to talk to. I wrote back that they should ask God to give them the number.

No Trump item today here. If you're dying to read about him, I suspect you can find one or two other websites where he's mentioned. Bye for now.

101. In the previous century, the decisions about who would write, pencil, letter, ink or color a comic book usually had a lot more to do with "Who's available?" and/or "Who needs work at the moment?" than with "Who would be the best person for this job?"
102. And some assignments — not a majority but some — were assigned according to who was kissing up to the assigner or maybe to what he or she could do for that assigner in other areas.
103. If you work in comics for an extended period, look over the books published by the company or companies that buy your work and ask yourself, "What comic am I totally unqualified and ill-suited to work on?" Then prepare for the call where they say, "We discussed it here in the office a lot and decided you're the perfect person for this job!" It will be that comic.
104. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was not a good comic.
105. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean it was given enough time to find an audience.
106. The fact that a comic book didn't sell well does not mean that a better marketing division could not have caused it to sell better.
107. The fact that a comic book was canceled does not mean that it didn't sell well. Companies have been known to cancel books based on incomplete or even misread sales figures.
108. It may even have been a matter of the guy with the power to cancel a comic making a political move against someone else in or around the company.
109. If an inker cannot capture all that the pencil artist put into the faces, it's bad inking no matter what the rest of it looks like.
110. Most tricks involving fancy lettering styles in word balloons have not worked unless they were in a comic strip done by Walt Kelly.
111. Most tricks involving Wally Wood-style lighting have not worked unless they were in a comic book done by Wally Wood.
112. When you eliminate "thought balloons" as a tool for the writer to use, you usually wind up with too much exposition in the captions and a lot of your characters talking aloud to themselves in unnatural ways that are really "thought balloons" disguised as "word balloons."
113. Having to write real short stories (six pages and under) is a very good training ground for comic book writers and many who've never done it could benefit from doing it.
114. Sleeping with someone who works in the same office or on comics that have something to do with yours will almost always lead to problems of some kind.
115. Writing and sending off to press a "next issue" blurb when you really aren't sure what's in the next issue can easily lead to you writing a story of which you are seriously not proud.
116. A one-issue "fill in" story on a comic produced by temp talent will almost always read like a one-issue "fill-in" story produced by temp talent.
117. If the hero in the comic you're writing has a secret identity, you should not do a story in which that secret is threatened or apparently revealed less than twelve years after the previous story in which that hero's secret identity was threatened or apparently revealed. Fifteen is better.
118. If you come up with a story idea for a long-running comic book and you think, "I can't believe no one else has ever thought of this," the odds are that everyone has thought of it…and that's the reason they never did it.
119. If there's an excess of expository dialogue and captions on the last few pages of a story, the writer either didn't pace out the story properly or the plot was too complicated for the confines of the page count. If the comic was done "Marvel method" (dialogue after pencil art), that might mean that the artist didn't pace the story out properly.
120. Never mind that you can put out a real slick black line with your digital or real brush. It's where you put that line that matters.
121. Editors would get more work delivered to them on time if they were more honest with the freelancers as to when it's really needed.
122. You know that trick where you hand in the work deliberately late thinking "They won't have time to screw around with it?" That trick never works the way you hope it will.
123. Some comic book companies used to pay writers more for stories that were supposed to be funny because they recognized that funny is harder to achieve than serious.
124. If you draw Superman or Batman or some other character who's been around for decades, you should not draw that character exactly the way someone else did and you should not draw that character completely unlike the way anyone else did. Somewhere in-between is where you want to be.
125. A professional who seems like a helluva nice guy when you meet him at a convention and tell him you love his work and want his autograph can be an extremely non-nice guy when you deal with him in a work capacity, especially if he rightly or wrongly perceives you as a threat to him.

More of these will follow over the next few weeks.

Yes, I'm interviewing Ron Friedman at 7 PM tonight Pacific Time. You can watch it live or you can watch the endless on-demand replays but if you liked any of the zillion TV shows Ron worked on, you'll want to watch it. I may get him to tell stories about his friend and writing partner, Pat McCormick. I may even get him to tell of his experiences as a "play doctor" trying to fix the original production of Minnie's Boys on Broadway. And remember…this is the man who killed Optimus Prime.

I could interview Ron night and day for a week and not get through all he's done. Let's see how far we get.

No Trump item today. I either read about him or I get work done and I've decided to get work done. Besides, this week's outrage is just this week's outrage. We still have next week's outrage to get to and the one the following week and so on.

An acquaintance who I once thought was sane is now posting messages about how the whole COVID-19 thing is a hoax. No one has gotten sick or died from it. The small number of folks who have actually suffered or left us is the number who ordinarily get that way from the regular, non-pandemic flu. All the doctors and hospitals and nurses and I guess family members of folks falsely reported as dying are part of the conspiracy. It tops one particular conspiracy theory I recall about the Kennedy Assassination that involved — literally — about 25% of the U.S. population being in on it.

Lastly: Didn't see the Emmys. Didn't care about the Emmys. Hell, I didn't even care that much about them when I was nominated. A lot of folks online are complaining that most of the trophies went to shows they'd never heard of…and that's not really a complaint about the awards. If anything, it's a complaint about how so little of the television industry is about CBS, NBC, ABC and Fox. And I'm not sure that's anything to complain about.

According to this site, the Sizzler USA restaurant chain has declared bankruptcy and the future of its 107 outlets is in serious question. This is not surprising in a time when all restaurants have been hit hard and the buffet-oriented ones (like Sizzler) have been hit the hardest.

But though The Pandemic obviously has a lot to do with it, that may not the the only reason. Note that in the linked article, they say this…

Sizzler USA has been in decline in recent years. Its unit count declined 6.9% last year, according to data from Restaurant Business sister company Technomic, and the number of locations it operates now is 15 fewer than it operated at the end of 2019. System sales have averaged a 2.5% decline the past five years, including a 3.8% decline in 2019, according to Technomic. Franchisees operate all but 14 of the company's locations.

Now, this is just anecdotal based on my experiences but during those last five years, I probably dined in four different Sizzlers in the greater Los Angeles area. I used to really like them as a place to pop in and get a quick meal that was fast but not fast food. I gave them up because in all four instances, I thought the food was not what it used to be. The steaks were tougher and less flavorful. The goodies in the all-you-can-eat-bar tasted older and/more sprinkled with preservatives. I felt like I was in a Sizzler knock-off that was trying to imitate Sizzler for less money.

The Pandemic has forced the closure of a lot of good, quality business establishments. No question. But it's also hastened the demise of a lot of not-great-even-if-they-once-were stores and eateries that were already on the downslope. If these places want to crawl back to viability, they might have to do more than blame COVID-19 and make everyone shop or dine six feet apart.

My old pal Pat O'Neill wrote me with this…

After your comment about actresses playing Dolly when they're too young, I wondered: Just how old do you think Dolly is supposed to be?

For the record, Carol Channing was 43 when she played Dolly for the first time in 1964. Mary Martin was 52 when she starred in the London production the next year. Pearl Bailey was 57 when she was in the all-black cast in '75. Tovah Feldshuh was 54 when she did it in 2006. Bette Midler was 66 when she did it in 2017. Betty Buckley was 70 during the national tour in 2018. The casting for the role has gotten consistently older over the past 50 years.

In 1955, in the original run of The Matchmaker by Thornton Wilder, Dolly was played by Ruth Gordon, who was then 59. Shirley Booth starred in the film version at the age of 60. I've always thought of her as being young middle-aged, 45-60 at most. Someday I want to direct a community theater production of Wilder's play.

As I recall when this question was raised years ago on some theater chatboard, the answers went like this: "Well, I loved Barbra Streisand in the movie so Dolly should be whatever age Barbra was when the film was made." Or "Well, I loved Carol Channing on the stage so Dolly should be whatever age Carol was when I saw it," etc. Keying it to when you saw Carol do it would give you a wide range of ages spanning several decades because I think she played the role here and there for something like forty years.

And I would imagine the answer, if you asked anyone who was producing a production of it, would be: "Dolly should be the age of the actress I can hire who is most likely to sell tickets." And it just dawned on me I should have started this post with one of these…

If you want to just look at the story, Thornton Wilder in the script of The Matchmaker said that Dolly was of "uncertain age," which might mean Wilder wanted her to be of the age where women don't like their ages divulged…or he could have been thinking like a producer: Who's Box Office? But 59-60 (Ruth Gordon and Shirley Booth) seem about right to me. Of course, we're talking about if the actress is believable on stage or screen playing someone that age, not how old the actress really was at the time.

I don't think Barbra played someone who was over fifty when she made Hello, Dolly. She could do it now but I don't think anyone's going to go to the trouble of having her redo her scenes today in front of a green screen and editing the present-day Barbra into it.

I also don't think it hurt that movie as much as the overblown production values, the lack of any rapport between her and Walter Matthau or the fact that it's really a very small, silly story. (I dunno if I ever mentioned it here but the one time I got to spend some time with Gene Kelly, who directed the film, I asked him what the most difficult part of it was. He replied, in a manner that suggested he'd used this line many times before, "Deciding whether to strangle Barbra Streisand and then Walter Matthau or Matthau first and then Streisand.")

But if you look at the script itself — what she says and what she does and what others say about her — there are two indicators. One is that the most important moment in the whole show is the musical number when she returns after a long absence to the Harmonia Gardens and the staff is so excited to have her back where she belongs.

Harmonia Gardens is not the kind of place where kids go so she had to have at least been in her twenties when she frequented the place. And her absence has to have been long enough that it's an event that has the waiters doing somersaults and backflips that she's returned. So that would suggest she's in her thirties or forties.

Meanwhile, the main story point about Dolly Levi is that she was married for a long enough time that she felt married forever. Then when her husband died, she had a hard time rejoining the world and opening herself up to the concept that her life was not over and that she might ever love again. That sounds to me older than her thirties and probably older than her forties. Many of the on-stage Dollies I've seen did not strike me as looking that age even if they were.

So that's my view. Oddly enough, I once discussed the casting of Streisand not only with Gene Kelly but with Ernie Lehman, who produced the movie, wrote the screenplay and who was the person who actually decided on Barbra. He said he thought picking her was a mistake on his part not because of her age but because of that lack of Chemistry with Horace Vandergelder (Matthau) that I mentioned and mainly for this reason: Streisand was and is the kind of performer who is always the lead in everything she does.

She is not a supporting player and in Hello, Dolly — despite the name of the play/movie — Dolly is almost a supporting role. The story spends at least as much time on those childish ribbon clerk characters. If you were a Barbra Streisand fan going to see a Barbra Streisand movie, you could feel very cheated by having to sit through all those scenes that she isn't in. I mentioned this once to a friend who loves Barbra and the film and he agreed but said he just fast-forwards through all of that. I don't think you can do that when you're watching with a crowd in a movie theater…though I wouldn't be surprised if the AMC chain is working on making that happen.

And I put the Trivia Warning Banner up because I'm well aware how unimportant all of this is…and it's Hello, Dolly we're talking about which is full of plot inconsistencies and illogical actions. It's not supposed to make strict sense. It's just something to get your mind off the real world for a while…and these days, we need all of that we can get.

I don't know why I didn't mention it at the time but back in 2016, my friend Valerie Perri was starring in a production of Hello, Dolly! down in Redondo Beach. Valerie is this wonderful lady I've known a long time who stars in musical comedies and concerts and has a wonderful voice and of course I'd go see her in anything.

I took Amber and I think also my friend John and we went down there and had dinner and saw Valerie give a great performance…and she won't mind this one criticism: She's not old enough for the part. Many a lady who plays Dolly — from Ms. Streisand on down — is not old enough to play Dolly Levi. Valerie probably won't be old enough in twenty years either because she seems to be able to do anything except age.

But it was a really fine production of a show that I've seen an amazing number of times considering that I'm not the biggest fan of it. But I am of Valerie. Here she is doing her part of the title number…and she's wearing Carol Channing's original headpiece! That's pretty impressive as is this video, though I recall better audio in the theater than you'll get here. Thanks to Shelly Goldstein for telling me this was on YouTube…

I spent a couple of hours yesterday upgrading my iPhone and iPad to the new iOS 14.0 software. Then I read many an online article about what my phone and tablet can now do that they couldn't do before and trying out some of the new features. In the end, I decided that very few of the improvements were of any use to me and I wound up putting most everything back the way it was. I'm on 14.0 but things look and function pretty much as they did a few days ago.

I am not turning on my TV. If I do, it will be to watch Turner Classic Movies or some DVD from my library. I need my Sunday away from the news and even if John Oliver had a new show tonight, I think I'd let it sit and marinate on my TiVo until tomorrow before I watched it. Mr. Oliver will be back next Sunday night.

The original production of Fiddler on the Roof ran on Broadway from September 22, 1964 until July 2, 1972. It was then revived in 1976, again in 1981, again in 1990, again in 2004 and again in 2015. Another revival was in the works before The Pandemic put a halt to everything that was in the works.

Here, folks involved onstage and off in the revival before the last one gather together via the extremely Kosher Internet to wish you a joyous 5781…

Last night's earthquake in L.A. felt…oddly appropriate. After the day some of us had — mine was rough in ways unrelated to politics — you just know lots of people were sitting, looking through the news and wondering, "How could things be worse?" And then came the tremor. No reports of damage and certainly none here but if ever there was a time we didn't need those moments of anxiety…

Seems to me this whole Supreme Court thing could go many ways. If just a few more Senate Republicans refuse to go along with it, it goes one way. If Biden says that if elected, he'll expand the court and appoint X number of new justices, it might go another. If Trump nominates his son Eric or maybe even a dachshund puppy…or if Dems can stall, stall, stall…

But in the end, it all comes down to Abortion…and when does it not in this country? It's the biggest One Issue for One Issue Voters and one where some voters who accept they're in the minority feel they're enforcing God's Will so it's perfectly fine to cheat to win. I think a certain amount of Trump's appeal to some voters is that they think he will cheat to win and that's fine with them.

And I'm going to try to not think about all this or post about it over this weekend.

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To answer a question that several folks have asked in e-mails: I do not know if Janet Waldo's voice tracks as Judy for The Jetsons: The Movie still exist or if anyone knows where they are. There's an awful lot of stuff in Hanna-Barbera history which was lost for years and years before someone stumbled across it in some warehouse…and there's plenty that remains unfound. I also don't know if Tiffany's contract creates legal problems with putting Janet's voice back where it belonged or if anyone would think to check to see if it did.

Every time I get a delivery from a restaurant or a market, some app asks me to rate the delivery person. It often seems unfair to me because, for example, if the order came egregiously late, I don't know if the delivery guy or gal was the reason. Maybe my pizza was delayed because the pizza-maker was way behind or outside smoking. Maybe my groceries were tardy because the dispatcher was late in dispatching. And often, my complaint is clearly not with the deliverer but with the company. But the people who run the company rarely ask you to rate the company…just the minimum-wage, easily-replaceable worker.

Have a good weekend, people. I'm sure gonna try.

You'll probably see this clip elsewhere and often…