Last Saturday, there was a protest rally over at Pan Pacific Park, which is located near CBS Television City, Farmers Market, The Grove and other notable locations here in Los Angeles. I've spoken to several folks who were at the protest and they all said it was peaceful and inspiring and exactly what something like that should be…

…until they showed up, "they" being a contingent of people who were intent on causing destruction and looting. Things got very ugly and not far from where I live, there were clashes with police, broken windows, a few cars and buildings set on fire, some injuries and a lot of anger. Some of it found its way to nearby commercial areas and it was a very horrible, unsettling day here in my city.

Similar unsettlement happened elsewhere, all around the country…and I don't want to make this all about Trump but you sure got the feeling that he looked at all the civil unrest and thought, "I must stop this from hurting my re-election chances" and that was the only thing he thought.

The looters and rioters have been scary…though maybe not as scary as some of the forces put out on the streets to control them. What happened outside the White House when Trump decided a photo op outside a nearby church would help his poll numbers was the kind of thing we point to in news footage from countries ruled by dictators and say, "Thank God that could never happen here."

I try not to be distracted by all this. Really, I try but it's difficult. One moment when my face must have looked like the Edvard Munch painting "The Scream" came when I saw — as we all saw — protesters fleeing from projectiles and gas…and why? Because Trump wanted his photo so he could look "tough." People who do things to look "tough" are almost by definition not "tough," especially when they need to have an army clear the way so they can do them.

And then we have this week's Presidential Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany insisting no tear gas was used and demanding that the Fake News retract reports that it was. The explanation is that they used Pepper Balls (a form of tear gas) instead of other kinds of tear gas. It reminds me of the scene in The Odd Couple where Oscar tells Felix to get his spaghetti off the poker table and Felix laughs and says, "It's not spaghetti, it's linguini!"

I know I shouldn't feel sorry for Presidential Press Secretaries. Their boss orders them to go out and lie and they have to stand there and lie, no matter what the reporters offer as proof that it's a lie. It reminds me of something I once heard someone say about porn stars: "It's a great job for people who will do absolutely anything for money." I guess it also applies to people who'll do absolutely anything to get in front of a camera, too.

Anyway, today I was over in the area near me where a lot of the looting and destruction occurred — not the worst of it perhaps but some. I was impressed with how close to normal it all seems. A lot of storefronts are still covered in plywood. Most of the graffiti is covered up, some of it with crude temporary paint jobs but the whole outside of Farmers Market looks like it was completely repainted in the last few days. Parts of it look better than it ever has.

With some of the crude temporary paint-overs, the painters added new, benevolent graffiti affirming that BLACK LIVES MATTER and added words like "love" and "peace." And on one corner, I saw two National Guardsmen in their scary combat gear…but folks in civilian garb were talking and laughing with them.

For the most part, it was business as usual…or as usual as business can be when people are wearing masks and maneuvering to stay six feet apart. You find yourself redirecting your attention from one crisis to another but I did feel that the rioting/looting in my neighborhood was history.

Then again, history can repeat itself and there is a peaceful protest scheduled for tomorrow at Pan Pacific Park. I sure hope it stays a peaceful protest. They seem to be accomplishing things.

Almost forgot to mention that Volume 6 of The Complete Pogo was just nominated for an Eisner Award in the category, "Best Archival Collection/Project — Strips." I believe this is the third nomination for the series with one previous win and one loss. The traditional awards ceremony cannot, of course, take place this year but there will be something online to replace it. Our thanks to the judges. You can order a copy of this book here…and yes, Volume 7 is still on schedule for its release in October.

From April of 2015, back when Jon Stewart hosted The Daily Show, here's a segment with a lot to say about these days…

It was announced this morning that DC Comics is severing its longtime relationship with Diamond Comic Distributors.  I have an e-mailbox full of questions asking me what this means and if I have a good idea and if I can be quoted or interviewed for news coverage.

Here is my answer: I have no idea.  Honest.  I didn't even fully understand the distribution business when I was writing and editing for DC and the business has changed a lot since then.  My opinion on this is almost as worthless as Donald Trump's thoughts on how happy George Floyd would be if he'd lived to see today's jobs report.  Ask someone who knows something.

Looking for something non-political to post here, I thought, "Let's see if the Voctave folks have a video out I haven't noticed yet." They do…a nice rendition of a song for which the eminent Charles Chaplin wrote the music. A lot of people assume he wrote the lyrics but those were actually by John Turner and Geoffrey Parsons.

In fact, Chaplin wrote it as an instrumental for his film Modern Times in 1936 which, of course, can in no way now be considered "modern times." The two gents wrote the lyrics in 1954, Nat King Cole recorded it and a standard was born. Anyway, here are the Voctave vocalists vocalizing (well, lipsyncing to their own voices) from their homes. There seem to have been some changes of personnel in the group but they still sound great…

About an hour ago, I saw something I've never seen before driving past my house. I live on a fairly well-traveled residential street and it's even more-traveled when certain nearby commercial streets are closed, as they may be today. Honking horns prompted me to look out a window and I saw what I guess you'd call a Troop Truck driving by — a truck with about a dozen soldier-types seated in back wearing camouflage-type outfits and helmets…and not looking all that comfy in them. (It's 84 degrees out.)

I dunno if the troop truck was honking or if folks in cars were but attention seemed to be the point of it. Those men could have been transported in a bus but that wouldn't have projected the same "ready for battle" image as looking like World War II infantry being shuttled to the front lines. Presumably, they were National Guardsmen being driven somewhere to protect something, possibly in the Hollywood area. Then again, maybe the idea was to just drive them around and scare troublemakers.

I don't know how I feel about what I saw but it sure didn't look like any America I've ever been born in.

People keep saying how divided the nation is and I think we all agree, at least, on that. We also would probably agree with a sentence like, "This is not how we want the United States to be." It's when we get to (a) how we want things to be and (b) who's responsible for them not being like that that we get into — shall we say? — Areas of Disagreement.

Short of that, we're all unhappy with what the pandemic has done to us and the economy and we're pretty unhappy with the racial unrest and the looting unless we got a new Samsung 65" Class 4K UHD LED LCD TV out of the deal. We're unhappy that our political party (whichever one it is) doesn't have a lock on the November election and that we don't know when the virus thing will end and what will and won't be there after it does. Oh — and in the next few weeks, we're likely to be pretty unhappy with what an active hurricane season will do to parts of this country that didn't need any more misery.

But we will get through it. And the silver lining of adversity is that it teaches you lessons in coping with adversity. For instance, the next time I have a disaster and I have absolutely no idea what to do, I know what to do: I'll have someone clear the street by firing rubber bullets and tear gas (and denying they used those things) and then I'll march down to some building I've barely been in and hold up some book I've never read and try to look real, real tough for any cameras that may be around.

And then I'll scurry home to change my underwear.

There is now an official Groucho Marx website run by the folks who control the licensing of Groucho's likeness and various identifying Marx and scars. You may have no occasion to make a deal with them but you don't have to in order to enjoy some rare video clips, photos and other goodies. It is, of course, at www.grouchomarx.com. And tell 'em a DeSoto dealer sent you!

Sad to hear of the passing of one of my favorite writers, Bruce Jay Friedman. Obits like this one celebrate him for his screenplays and novels, and they're wonderful, but I think of his as one of our great playwrights. In my library, I have all my Bruce Jay Friedman books with the plays, not the movie books or novels. He had a dark, irresistible sense of humor.

I never got to meet the man. I know one of his sons — the fine caricaturist Drew Friedman — but I never got to meet Bruce Jay and I'm sorry. I would have liked to tell him how much his work has meant to me. I hope he's enjoying his time in the steambath right about now.

Recently when I did a couple of webcasts about Groucho Marx, a question came up on them and in e-mails: If someone has never seen a Marx Brothers movie, what's the best one to show them as an introduction to those zany boys? For a long time, my answer to that has been: "Whichever one is being shown at a theater near you where you can take the person to see them on a big screen with a big audience." Sometimes, I would add, "…just as long as what they're showing isn't The Big Store, Love Happy, A Night in Casablanca or The Story of Mankind." And I might even exclude The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers because the crude cinematography — and often, terrible prints — detract a bit from the other glories of those films.

My feeling is that if you see A Night at the Opera or Horse Feathers or one of a couple of others in optimum conditions and don't fall in love with the Marxes, there's no point in watching a second Marx Brothers movie. You either get them or you don't.

I'm a big believer in seeing certain kinds of movies — comedies but also certain kinds of pictures — in theaters with crowds as opposed to your den with 0-4 other people present. When I started seeing my lovely friend Amber, I discovered she'd never seen a lot of movies I knew she'd like. Some of them — like The Princess Bride and And Justice For All, I decided would be fine in my den…but, for instance, I didn't show her The French Connection there.

When they showed it at the Motion Picture Academy with a great print on a big screen and with its director appearing, I took her to that and she loved it. She would have probably loved it in my den but not, I think, as much. I have not shown her It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World or any Marx Brothers films or big musicals in my den.

Going to the movies is not possible to do, of course, during the pandemic. Given some of the current financial news about the big theater chains, it may not be as possible as it was once the virus is no longer holding us as prisoners. So you may have to settle for watching these films on the TV in your den.

If I were to pick a Marx Brothers movie to show to Amber or any newcomer, this would be my order of preference: A Night at the Opera, Horse Feathers, A Day at the Races, Monkey Business, Go West, Duck Soup, At The Circus…and after that, I don't think it matters. Don't write me in horror thinking I consider At The Circus a better film than Animal Crackers because I don't. If you think that, you aren't understanding what I'm saying here. Duck Soup is better than any of the MGM films but it wouldn't be my first or second pick as an introduction to Groucho, Harpo, Chico and that other brother.

Which brings me to the main point of this post, which is to let you know that on Friday evening, Turner Classic Movies is running Monkey Business, Horse Feathers, Animal Crackers and Duck Soup in that order. The first one starts at 8 PM on my cable feed. If you miss Duck Soup, don't worry. TCM shows it a lot. In fact, I think this is the second time they've run it in the past week.

Sixteen singers — who I guess sing in groups of four as the Dapper Dans at Disneyland — vocalize from their homes…

• Watching the news. Does anyone know if that pandemic thing is still on?

One of the things I don't like about Donald Trump — apart from being a pathologically-lying sociopath who doesn't care how much damage he does in his desperate need to feel like a "winner" — is how hard he is to ignore. I just know that he has someone check my site every day or so and if they come back and say, "Evanier's not writing about you," he thinks up some attention-grabbing outrage to simultaneously make you pay attention to him and distract you from other, more ghastly things he's done.

I actually had a dream recently where there's some generic Democrat and some generic Republican arguing. The Democrat says "Trump is shredding the social safety net for the poor and elderly, inflaming racial hatred with his embrace of white supremacists, responsible for a bad response to a pandemic that has killed 100,000+ Americans and left millions more confined to their home…" And that list goes on and on and on. And then the Republican says, "Hey, both sides do bad things. What about Obama wearing that tan suit?"

At least it went something like that. Anyway, just in case I have to state the obvious, my heart is with the protesters as is some of my money. (I thought about where to put it and decided that if anyone can use the courts to right some of the wrongs done to them and the massive one to George Floyd, it'll be the A.C.L.U.)

And I'd just like to remind everyone that a point I keep making is that between now and the time Donald J. Trump is out of office, "what this election is about" is going to keep changing and shifting and growing ever more unpredictable. Not all that long ago, it looked like it was going to be about whether Trump had tried extorting a foreign nation to either dig up dirt on Hunter Biden or make it look like there just have been some because they were investigating.

Nobody thought it would be about a global pandemic that killed so many people, harmed the lives of others and tanked our economy. Nobody thought it would be about a black guy in Minneapolis who was executed without a trial for suspicion of passing a bogus $20 bill. Nobody thought it would be about whatever it's going to be about next month and the month after and every minute until November…and even probably after that as Trump and his minions deny the validity of every vote he doesn't get.

No one has ever been able to determine with any credibility, who it was who first said, "May you live in interesting times." Whoever it was, he or she is probably long dead, which is a shame. Because if that person was alive, I'd like to find them and beat the crap outta them as they yelled, "I didn't mean this interesting!"

Here's "You Can't Stop the Beat" in Japanese…

• Remember when all the folks now supporting Trump were complaining about what a divisive president Barack Obama was? And how Saddam Hussein was evil because he gassed his own people?

I've read a lot about the protests and destruction in my city and spoken to a few folks who were out there protesting but not at all destructing. I've come to the conclusion that we're looking at two wildly-different groups with wildly-different goals and morals. The protests — at least the ones my friends attended — were exactly what we have in mind when we talk of "peaceful protests."

Others came along to cause trouble and while I usually have great praise 'n' respect for the police in my city, it sure looks like they didn't understand that they were dealing with two different groups. The news coverage of what went down in Santa Monica last night would make you think they were more concerned with the folks standing in front of government building calmly holding signs that said "LOVE" and "JUSTICE" than the ones smashing in the front windows of the Apple Store and grabbing up iPhones.

I'm sure within each of those two groups there were a lot of disparate thoughts and motives but there was obviously that sharp dividing line there and a lot of the local news reporters noticed it. I don't get why the officials deploying law enforcement didn't.

We have another curfew tonight. That means that those of us who have been staying in our homes for 82 days and not going out will be not going out. Sure hope things quiet down because…well, just because. That's reason enough right there.

I just removed a paragraph here asking folks to help me with a webcast test this evening. The news is getting too hairy so I'm postponing it. Thanks to all who volunteered. Maybe later this week if/when things quiet down.