"Gary from Buffalo" wrote to ask…

You have mentioned on occasion that you were friends with Norman Maurer, son-in-law of Moe Howard. Did you ever ask Norman if he would introduce you to Moe? Seems like that would've been a great opportunity to ask for a ceremonial eye-poke. For that matter did you ever meet Larry Fine or Joe Besser/Joe DeRita?

Well, Curly died two months before I was born and Shemp died when I was three so that let them out. I met Moe on two occasions — not through Norman — but nothing that was said was any more memorable than "I've always enjoyed your films" and "Thank you." He was very nice and like all his partners, way shorter than I imagined.

I met the other three. I made two or three trips (I think two) out to the Motion Picture Country Hospital where Larry Fine was living after his stroke. However many I made, they were all pretty much carbons of each others. Larry was a sweet man who was delighted to have the company but he had about twelve anecdotes and no matter what you asked him about, you got one of the twelve. He did not remember everything about his past and if you'd pointed an AR-15–style rifle at him, he couldn't have told you what he had for breakfast that morning. But I enjoyed spending time with him.

I met Joe DeRita at a one-day comic convention down near Disneyland. He was there to sign photos for money…which is fairly common these days for famous folks but it wasn't then. Kids who wanted to meet him — most of whom didn't seem to know the difference between him and Curly Howard — were shocked that his signature was not free. After a few unpleasant encounters, Mr. DeRita decided to stop charging. Meanwhile, a few tables away from him, famed starlet Edy Williams was selling and signing posters of herself, some of which were pretty darned naked. She left that day with a nice wad o' cash. Joe DeRita looked at one of the posters and said, "Maybe I should have posed like that!"

I had a great chat with Curly Joe, much of which was about his pre-Stooges film career and his times in Vegas working in splashy, big-budget burlesque revues. But we kept getting interrupted by kids who wanted to meet "Curly," and some of them went away thinking they had.

I met Joe Besser in the waiting room at Hanna-Barbera. He was there that day to record a voice track for some cartoon show — Yogi's Space Race, I think — and I spotted him sitting on a couch and pounced. We talked about everything except his time as a Stooge…which I'd been told was not the happiest gig of his career. Someone who knew him well later told me that it bothered Joe that some people knew him from that and only that, which to him meant they were unaware of 80% of all he'd done…or just plain disinterested.

We talked about him working with Abbott and Costello (he loved them) and Joey Bishop (he didn't like the man) and so many other things. I recall an awkward moment when he asked me about my career and what I'd done and as I replied, he kept saying, "Well, if you're such a fan of mine, why didn't you hire me for that show?" I had that happen to me with Soupy Sales and a few others and there was never an easy way to respond. But I did like the guy and it was fascinating to hear him talk in his not-in-character manner…with occasional lapses into the Joe Besser I knew from TV.

So to sum up: I met two-thirds of the six men who'd been full-fledged members of the Three Stooges. I liked 'em all. I wish I'd had more time with Moe. None of them slapped me or poked me in the eyes or broke pottery over my head. If I sound like I'm bragging…well, yes, I guess I am.

And watch this…

In case you haven't guessed, I'm busy meeting a deadline so that's why all the video links. I'll be back writing more for this blog before long. Meanwhile, here's the latest installment of Everything You Need To Know About Saturday Night Live. We're up to Season 14, another really good one. I will not be saying that when we reach some higher-numbered episodes…

Yesterday as you know, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan released a slightly-redacted version of Special Counsel Jack Smith's blueprint for prosecuting the January 6th case against Donald J. Trump. It's pretty devastating — a portrait of a man who said, in effect, "I don't care if I lost the election, I'm going to be President anyway." Kim Wehle explains some of what's in it.

Steve Benen takes apart some of Trump's more insane claims about how good he was for our economy.

Here are some interesting thoughts about political candidates debating from Olufemi Taiwo.

And the best reporting on the debate we just had was done (as usual) by Triumph the Insult Comic Dog…

Here's another movie for you. It's The Three Stooges in Orbit, which is pretty much where they belonged. It was produced and partially written by an old pal of mine, the late Norman Maurer. He was the Stooges' manager and Moe's son-in-law and a very fine comic book artist. I think that's mostly his artwork in the opening titles. The narrator, by the way, was Don Lamond, who was the host of the show on Channel 11 here in Los Angeles that showed Three Stooges shorts when I was growing up. He was also Larry Fine's son-in-law. The Stooges believed in keeping things in the family.

This movie was a 1962 release and was one of the better Stooge vehicles with "Curly Joe" DeRita as the third member of the group. Or at least it was when I was ten. If you're that age chronologically or emotionally, you might enjoy it…

I read a number of e-mails and linked articles today about Pete Rose, mostly but not exclusively about good things he did on the field and bad things he did off the field and I came to a conclusion. My conclusion is that I really don't care if Pete Rose is in the Hall of Fame. A lot of folks pointed out players who are in the Hall of Fame who did bad things while out of uniform and maybe Rose was no worse than some of them but I had a brief moment of caring about this kind of thing and I got over it.

I do care about forgiveness which I think can be an important thing in this world. But to properly forgive someone, you have to know more about them than I did about Pete Rose. So just forget I said anything…or at least try to forgive me for it.

Seth Meyers does some (not all) of the kind of fact-checking that folks who are paid to report the news on CBS barely did last night…

People are sending me a lot of links to articles about reprehensible things Pete Rose did apart from wagering on baseball. I hereby withdraw my forgiveness of the man until I learn more about him. I shoulda known I might have been on the wrong side of this issue when I typed the subject line in the previous post.

I know very little about baseball. The last time I went to a Dodgers game, Sandy Koufax was on the mound. But I do know that Pete Rose had an incredible career that came to an unseemly halt in 1989 when he was found to have been wagering on games — a big no-no for professional athletes. Then two years later, he received a lifetime suspension from being considered for the Hall of Fame. (To be honest, I had to go look up the exact years but I knew the rest of what I just typed.)

I also know that he spent his remaining years apologizing and begging and doing everything he could to get into the Hall of Fame and he was repeatedly turned down. In case you're wondering, Rod Carew — whose record was such that he shared the above baseball card with Rose — was inducted in 1991.

And I know one little thing that Mr. Rose did in his later years beyond petitioning to get into the Hall of Fame.  In Las Vegas, there is or was a sports memorabilia shop located along a walkway of stores between the Luxor hotel and the Mandalay Bay hotel.  One year, a decade or three ago, I spent a lot of time in Vegas and often had to walk down that row of shops and Pete Rose always seemed to be there signing autographs for what I suspect was a substantial fee.

One day, I had some time to kill so I browsed that shop finding absolutely nothing I would ever buy but I was fascinated to eavesdrop for a while on conversations Mr. Rose was having with a rather steady line of people who came by to meet him and buy something on which he would write his name. He was very nice to those folks and why wouldn't he be? They were telling him what a great ball player he'd been and how unfair it was that he was not in the Hall of Fame. Oh — and they were paying him an awful lot of money. Godzilla would be all buddy-buddy with you if you were forking over that kind of dough for his autograph.

I'm sure there are folks in and around baseball who think he did something against the rules and needed to pay the price for that. Okay, fine. But I couldn't listen to those chats for more than a few minutes without thinking, as Mssrs. Gilbert and Sullivan put it, that the punishment did not fit the crime.

Pete Rose was found dead at his home in Clark County, Nevada last Monday. He served out his "lifetime sentence" and now that that lifetime is over, it's time to give him whatever honor he deserved. We've had the public example of paying the price for doing wrong. It might be nice to now see a public example of the power of forgiveness.

As regular followers of this blog know, I really like a cappella singing groups and one of my favorites is a pack of vocalists called Voctave. In this video, they team up with another group — The Swingles — to bring us a Jerry Herman classic from the show, La Cage Aux Folles. This is a song that really should be sung by one person but I'll forgive them the dramatic lapse in this case…

Do vice-presidential debates even matter?  I dunno.  In '88, Lloyd Bentsen slapped the shit out of Dan Quayle in theirs and Bush/Quayle still won.  Then again, the current election is not behaving much like past ones. I thought JD Vance scored some points in tonight's veep debate by not coming off as quite the crazed maniac that he's seemed like recently. Of course, he's not the one on that ticket who's running out of time to temper his image. No one who thinks Trump is a lying looney is going to think, "Hey, I'm going to vote for that guy. His running mate isn't quite as bad as I thought."

But Vance didn't do a good job back-pedaling from "They're eating the dogs! They're eating the cats!" and he looked like the biggest weasel on the planet dodging the question of whether Trump lost the last election.

And I'm probably as amazed as you are that after years and years of doing everything possible to declare Obamacare a disaster and get rid of it, Trump has now decided to claim credit for it working as well as it has. His fervent supporters — and all those red states that have never fully embraced it — have got to be pretty confused over that.

Walz wasn't as great a debater as some of us hoped he'd be. He managed to make a strong case that what Vance is wrong about Abortion but if that issue matters to you in the slightest, I think you already know what side you're on. He also came off as avuncular and honest and he had an answer to the question about Iran and Vance didn't. It wasn't a rout like Harris v. Trump but I think Vance seemed more like a human being and the folks who make up Kamala's campaign commercials got a number of juicy quotes they can use in next week's ads.

That may be the only thing that matters in a vice-presidential debate: Did someone say something that can be used against them and their ticket? Other than that, it'll all be forgotten in 48 hours.

Gary Cundall sent me this, inspired — I assume — by the photo I ran here yesterday…

Did Carl Barks and Jack Kirby know each other? If they did, were you ever around them when they were hanging out? Do you know what they thought of each other?

I just happened to be around at what I believe was the only time they met. It was at some Comic-Con International — don't ask me which one — and while Barks was not an announced guest, he and his wife showed up for a day and sat at a table where Bruce Hamilton was selling the kinds of things, including Carl's work, that Bruce used to sell. Carl was not mobbed because I don't think most people who would have killed to meet him knew he was in the hall so I was sitting there, talking with the Barkses.

Jack and Roz strolled by and I don't think I was the person who did the introductions. I think Bruce did that. Carl and Jack met and if I'd had a cell phone at the time, there would be a photo here of that moment. I would describe the interaction as cordial and mutually respectful. They were two men who wrote and drew comic books but very different comics for different publishers. They were about as far apart as two people could be and still be technically in the same profession and it wouldn't have surprised me if neither had ever read the other's work.

But they were both aware of the great reverence in which so many people held each other and that was pretty much all they had in common. So small talk was exchanged and each wished a long life and prosperity to the other and then Jack and Roz headed on to the table where Jack was stationed. That was that.

A lot of folks assume that everyone in comics knows everyone else in comics even though it's an industry where many people work alone in their own homes or studios and mail, FedEx or e-mail their work to the office. Even if they go to conventions, they don't meet everyone. At the very first meeting of C.A.P.S. in 1975, I introduced a writer and artist to each other. They'd worked "together" for 20+ years through an editor and had never actually met.

In the early days of conventions, it was customary to put all the professionals on one panel — there usually weren't that many around — and often, they were folks who'd never met or even worked for the same company. I moderated one where Gil Kane and Julius Schwartz — who had worked together a lot — got to talking about DC Comics and how it was run and such. An artist seated next to me whispered in my direction, "I have no idea what these guys are talking about." He'd drawn a lot of comics but he'd never worked for DC, didn't know anything about the people Gil and Julie were discussing. And then when I started asking him about his work for other houses, Gil and Julie were whispering to each other, total disinterested in anything he was saying.

Kirby and Barks knew of each other and each knew the other had loads of fans. That was about it between them.

Sergio Aragonés sent me this photo which we took one evening — or at least, I guess we had a waiter take it — and then I forgot all about it but Sergio had a copy. This is a dinner with, left to right, Bob Foster, Carl Barks, me, Garé Barks (Carl's wife), Sergio and Scott Shaw!  I don't know why I look so unhappy in it.  I also don't know where all that hair I had went.

Anyway, that's another look at Bob.  This was taken in a restaurant in a golf course that was the nearest decent place to eat near where the Barkses then lived in Temecula.  It was a great evening in — I'm guessing — the late eighties.  In case anyone reading this doesn't know who Carl Barks was, he was a comic book writer/artist best known for doing great stories about Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge…and he was the creator of the latter.  A lot of folks consider him the best comic book writer/artist of all time, at least when it came to the kind of comics he did.

I have a deadline that must be met before I sleep tonight so I'll just give a quick answer to a question that I got from several folks about this post which showed you an article I wrote about the Hanna-Barbera Studio when I was nine years old. Shelly Goldstein was first of about eight folks who asked some version of "Did you write that Hanna-Barbera article for any publication (or homework) or just because you wanted to write it?"

Answer: Just because I wanted to write it. I can't think of any publisher who would have printed it and even growing up in Los Angeles, teachers never assigned homework that consisted of "Write about your favorite TV show." I was reading everything I could find out about the studio that made some of my fave programs and when something's on my mind, I often like to write about it even when there's no money. This is now known as "blogging."

I'll be back as soon as I finish my current assignment.

A lot of my friends online are expressing their shock and sadness to hear that our friend Bob Foster has died at the age of 81. Bob was a cartoonist, a writer, an editor, a storyboard artist…he did just about everything in those areas. It's beyond me to list all the different places he worked and the jobs he had. He grew up in New York, then moved to Los Angeles in '61 to attend Chouinard Art School out here. As soon as he was old enough, he began working for all the major animation studios of the day — Hanna-Barbera, Filmation, Disney, DePatie-Freleng, Ruby-Spears, etc.

I couldn't keep track of all the places he worked or all the places he lived. My phone directory has contact info for him in Oregon, Salt Lake City, Denmark and a couple of different addresses in Los Angeles. Denmark was where he worked for a time as a story editor on Disney comic books for the Egmont company. He did that job at Disney in L.A., too.

During his time in Los Angeles, he wrote, drew and published a very clever underground comic called Myron Moose Funnies, Myron being a forlorn moose with a chronic sinus problem. He was also a charter member of C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society and for a time, President of the Animation Guild. I'm not sure if he ever made up a résumé of all the places he worked and the jobs he had but if he did, it was a pretty long document.  His presence in the cartooning and animation communities will be much missed.

It's him again. It's Randy Rainbow. I don't know why he's so mean to Donald Trump. Well, yes I do…