My buddy Tom Brevoort sent me a question that a number of other folks sent me…

Your post today about the best and worst episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show immediately made me wonder the obvious question: if you'd rank "The Twizzle" about ten spots from the bottom, what do you consider to be the worst episode of the series?

I'm not sure I'd say "worst" so much as "weakest" because I don't really dislike any of them. Even the weakest episodes have moments when it's fun to watch that wonderful cast doing what they do. But if I had to list the nine weakest episodes in my opinion at this moment, I think they'd be — in no particular order — "The Bad Old Days," "You Ought to Be in Pictures," "Viva Petrie," "Uncle George," "The Square Triangle," "Happy Birthday and Too Many More," "The Lady and the Babysitter," "Like a Sister" and "The Lady and the Tiger and the Lawyer."

I don't care for most of the episodes that are about jealousy, especially ones where Rob or Laura thinks the other would be happier with someone else. The Petrie marriage always seemed so ideal that it couldn't be shaken by something as trivial and contrived as someone at work flirting with Rob or an old boy friend of Laura's showing up. I'm not saying there can't be jealousy in a marriage; just that in this show about this marriage, that kind of problem pops up out of nowhere and then it gets resolved ten minutes later by one or both suddenly remembering that they love each other.

Here's one of Woody Allen's best movies, Hannah and Her Sisters from 1986…

And here's an even better Woody Allen movie, Annie Hall from 1977…

The California Secretary of State, writing on behalf of Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters, sent me this message…

Hello MARK EVANIER,

This is a message from the California Secretary of State on behalf of Los Angeles County Registrar of Voters. The US Postal Service has collected your ballot for the upcoming November 5, 2024, General Election and will deliver it to us soon.

Questions? Call (800) 815-2666 or email votebymail@rrcc.lacounty.gov. Visit https://lavote.gov for election information.

Thank you, California Secretary of State. It's nice of you to keep me informed like this. Now, could you possibly inform all the people and agencies who e-mail me, robocall me or send me text messages trying to influence my votes that I have marked my ballot and sent it off and that there's no point in them pestering me? I would be most appreciative.

The other day here, I listed My 25 Favorite Episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show. A couple of folks wrote to ask me where they can be seen…and the answer is "All over YouTube and almost any streaming channel that carries vintage television programming." But to save you the hunt, I made up this page where I countdown my ten favorites. Happy viewing.

We have two more feature films for you today…

This is American Graffiti from 1973…

And here's (arguably) the best movie Jerry Lewis was ever in, The King of Comedy from 1983…

With rare exceptions, comic books are printed on presses that handle "signatures" of eight pages — so the insides of a comic book usually must be a multiple of eight pages.  The way some printers' presses worked, they had to be multiples of sixteen pages.

These days, those "insides" are on pretty good paper stock but for its first four or so decades, the industry put those insides on the cheapest paper available. Then they'd print a four page signature on a different, more expensive press with more expensive paper and that would form the cover, the inside front cover, the inside back cover and the back cover.

Bind it all together and you had yourself a comic book.

As an example, let's take a long-running book like Action Comics. Action Comics #1 came out on May 3, 1938 and it featured the debut of some obscure character named Superman. The issue contained…

• Superman (pg. 1–13) by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster
• Chuck Dawson (pgs. 14–19) by H. Fleming
• Zatara, Master Magician (pgs. 20–31) by Fred Guardineer
• "South Sea Strategy" (text feature, pgs. 32–33) by Captain Frank Thomas
• Sticky-Mitt Stimson (pgs. 34–37) by Alger
• The Adventures of Marco Polo (pgs. 38–41) by Sven Elven
• Pep Morgan (pgs. 42–45) by Fred Guardineer
• Scoop Scanlon (pgs. 46–51) by Will Ely
• Tex Thomson (pgs. 52–63) by Bernard Baily
• Stardust (pg. 64) by "The Star-Gazer"

There was also a front cover, an inside front cover telling us about the comic, an inside back cover ("Odds 'N Ends" by Sheldon Moldoff) and an ad on the back cover.  For the purposes of this article, we shall henceforth ignore covers and all page counts will be referring to the interiors.  So Action Comics #1 had 64 pages…and it cost a dime.

That was how big an issue of Action Comics was for a while but as we know, prices go up.  They go up on printing and they also go up on what writers and artists have to spend each week on food and rent…so what they were paid had to go up.  Furthermore, as World War II wound down, paper costs soared and it became apparent to all funnybook publishers that they either had to raise prices or decrease page count.  As far as I know, there was no consultation among the many houses that put out comics.  They all just kind of decided that "kids" (which is how they referred to their customers) would object to paying more and it was preferable to give them less.

So as of #61, which came out in April of 1943, Action Comics lost eight pages, slimming down to 56 pages.  That size didn't last long.  It was more efficient to print 16-page signatures so a little more than a year after going from 64 to 56, Action Comics (and most others) went to 48 pages. Action Comics #75 was the first Action Comics of this thickness.

A few publishers had longer-term contracts with their printers or other arrangements that kept costs down but the whole industry pretty much moved to 48 pages…

…until 1951 when another downsizing of the package seemed necessary.  Action Comics #162, which came out in September of that year, was 40 pages.

And then in 1954, DC faced a moment of truth.  They either had to go to 32 pages or raise the cover price from ten cents.

Other companies had already made that decision.  Martin Goodman's company — the firm we now know as Marvel — had been offering 32 pages for a dime for over a year. Fawcett — the output publishing Captain Marvel (the one in the red suit who said "Shazam!" a lot) had been selling 32 pages for ten cents since about the time DC went to 40 pages.  Other companies bounced around.  Dell for quite some time put out some 32-page comics for ten cents and some 48 page ones for the same price.

But in '54, DC had to decide what to do.  32 pages for ten cents or raise the cover price?  I once asked Whitney Ellsworth, who had the title of Editor-in-Chief at DC then and he muttered something I didn't quite understand.  Mr. Ellsworth was one of the most nervous, terrified-of-saying-the-wrong-thing human beings I have ever encountered and I think (italicized for emphasis) that what he said was something like, "We looked at the sales of other companies and it didn't seem like going to 32 pages had hurt sales."

And I'm pretty sure he said — and this is a paraphrase but it's close — "We knew that if we raised the price and anyone else stayed at a dime, we'd get murdered."  So DC went to 32 pages for ten cents and pretty soon, that became the standard for any comic book that wasn't so thick that it felt like a special.  The first 32 page issue of Action Comics was #197 which hit the newsstands in August of 1954.

You really couldn't make a comic book any thinner than that…so the next time costs went up for the publishers, they were going to have to do something they dreaded, something they feared greatly.  They were going to have to raise the price.

I'll continue this in Part 2 in a few days.

The beginning of the COVID Lockdown feels like it happened decades ago but it was actually March of 2020.  Just before things started closing left and right, Lewis Black did this comedy special. Watching it the other night was for me a well-spent hour…

The Walgreens chain has announced its plan to close 1,200 stores…which they could probably do by cutting back to one store per block in New York City. They currently have them all strategically placed to snag any customer who doesn't feel like walking up to 10 yards to the nearest Duane Reade.

As I've mentioned here, I keep getting spam calls from people claiming to work for Walgreens, trying to find out my private medical information. It occurs to me that with the actual Walgreens closing so many stores, a lot of real Walgreens employees are going to be unemployed and some will probably get jobs making those spam calls to me claiming to be Walgreens employees.

An awful lot of full movies are being uploaded, apparently quite legally, to YouTube.  So for a while here, I'm going to link you to two of them each day. Let's start with a little Mel Brooks Film Festival, shall we?

Here's Spaceballs from 1987…

…and Life Stinks from 1991…

I don't have time today — or for that matter, the stomach — to write a long post about politics and the election. But go read Fred Kaplan and his summary of the new Bob Woodward book. The stuff about Trump's relationship with Putin is chilling.

Here's a link to someone's ranking of the 25 best episodes of my favorite TV program, The Dick Van Dyke Show. I agree with a lot of it but not all…so here's my list, going from my 25th favorite to my favorite.  I'm sure your list is different from mine, which is okay except that mine is right…

1. The Sam Pomerantz Scandals
2. Bupkis
3. Brother, Can You Spare $2500?
4. I Was A Teenage Head Writer
5. My Mother Can Beat Up My Father
6. All About Eavesdropping
7. It Wouldn't Hurt Them To Give Us A Raise
8. See Rob Write, Write Rob Write
9. Buddy Sorrell, Man And Boy
10. The Masterpiece
11. The Gunslinger
12. My Husband Is Not A Drunk
13. The Great Petrie Fortune
14. Three Letters From One Wife
15. October Eve
16. The Attempted Marriage
17. One Hundred Terrible Hours
18. Buddy, Can You Spare A Job?
19. Obnoxious, Offensive, Egomaniac, Etc.
20. Talk To The Snail
21. The Bottom of Mel Cooley's Heart
22. The Impractical Joke
23. It May Look Like A Walnut
24. That's My Boy??
25. Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth

You will notice that my list contains no episodes that are essentially about jealousy endangering the Petrie marriage, no episodes with auditions in the Petrie living room, no episodes with Jerry Van Dyke or Marty Ingels, no episodes about Sally's desperation to be married and most episodes that include Alan Brady telling Mel to shut up. And unlike a lot of people, I don't think The Twizzle is the worst episode ever. If I extended this list to cover every episode, The Twizzle would be about ten from the bottom.

Back in this post, I highly recommended the latest episode of American Masters on PBS, which was a look at the life and work of writer-director Blake Edwards. If you haven't seen it, you can see it here. And if you want to see it here, see it soon because I don't think it'll be online for very long…

I want to speak for a moment about Occam's Razor. In case you don't know what that is, I cribbed this explanation off some website…

Occam's Razor is a principle of theory construction or evaluation according to which, other things equal, explanations that posit fewer entities, or fewer kinds of entities, are to be preferred to explanations that posit more.

Or to put it in simpler terms: The answer to most questions may well be the simplest one. This is not an "always" thing. Some answers are complicated and require a lot of research and explaining but one should not overlook the simplest answer. And why I'm bringing this up is that this morning, as I browsed the websites and forums I usually browse, I saw some examples where I think this applies.  One was on a comic book forum where they were discussing, as comic book forums often do, which artist did the best job of inking Jack Kirby's artwork.

(For those of you who don't know what this means: Before digital technology offered several alternatives, comics were drawn in a two-stage process. An artist would draw the page in pencil. Then an artist — who might be the same artist but often was not — would finish the art in ink, tracing the pencil lines for the most part but also interpreting and adding things. So if one guy penciled and one guy inked, the finished product would be an amalgam. Some inkers weren't as good as others. Some also weren't as compatible with the pencilers they inked. So a lot of people might feel that Inker A enhanced Jack's work whereas Inker B butchered it…and there's a lot (a lot!) of debating as to which inkers did it well and which ones didn't.)

I saw a couple of folks asking — and I'll leave actual names out of this — "Why oh why did they assign Inker Q to Jack's work instead of Inker X, Inker Y or Inker Z? It's obvious Inker Q sucked!"

And they discount the simplest — and in this case, most frequent — answer. The editor who made the assignment thought Inker Q did a great job.

There could be other reasons. Inker Q might have been the only option available at that moment. Inker Q could have been the cheapest option and there were budget problems. Those are also pretty simple…but since the person asking that question hates Inker Q's work so much, he rules out those easy explanations. In his mind, it had to be something like "Inker Q had blackmail photos of the editor" or "Inker Q bribed the editor" or something like that. But the true answer more often involves one or more of those simple reasions.

And the most likely is that the editor liked Inker Q's work just like I like some movie that you don't or you love some musical group that I think blows or you don't recognize the utter awfulness of cole slaw that is so inarguable to me. I have my blind spots. I can't fathom anyone eating that stuff except maybe at gunpoint. Maybe delicatessen owners who have a surplus of that noxious concoction are sending out armed mercenaries to force the consumption of it.  Yeah, that makes more sense to me than people actually liking it.

The other argument I saw today where I think Occam's Razor is likely is, of course, about Donald Trump. Most arguments in this country these days are about Donald Trump.  The best reason I see for his defeat is that even though it will probably prompt more arguments about Donald Trump for a while, eventually they will abate, whereas if he wins, we'll be arguing about him for the rest of whatever's left of our lives.

His horribleness is so evident to some of us that we forget that some people have simple reasons for liking him. An acquaintance of mine who has probably already marked his ballot for Trump and mailed it off explained his thinking to me thusly. His number one issue is Abortion and he says,"For years, I've heard Republican candidates promise to do something about Abortion — Reagan, Romney, McCain, Dole, a couple of Bushes — and even the ones who got elected didn't do much. Trump actually did something."

You may not feel that's a good thing and I sure don't but it matters so much to this guy that he'll overlook the felonies, the lying, the graft, etc. It probably helps him ignore those things that he also believes that every single person who ever has or ever will run for President commits felonies, lies, takes graft, etc.

So the simple explanation is that he thinks Trump will give him things on his wishlist and Harris won't. He's also terrified of immigrants.

I'm not suggesting this is how everyone thinks. There certainly are more complex explanations out there that are valid for some people. I'm just saying that sometimes — maybe even most of the time — the real explanations are right there in front of us and we overlook them in search of something more complex. Then again, I guess I can understand that some people would rather consume cole slaw than have their brains blown out by a 9mm cartridge. But that's just about the only way I can imagine anyone eating that stuff.

My all-time favorite entertainers, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy, made a lot of great films but they never made a better one than The Music Box, It came out in 1932 and actually won an Academy Award for Best Short Subject.  It also got Stan's endorsement as the best thing they ever did and while I might place many other Laurel and Hardy shorts on the same level, I wouldn't want to argue with Stan.

One of the things that makes us Laurel and Hardy fans love it so much is that it's possible — and we've all done it — to visit the famous steps you'll see in this film.  They're right there in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles (here's a map) and the city has even marked them with the above street sign.

I don't think I've mentioned this before here but during the last year of life for my wonderful friend/companion Carolyn, she was in a nursing home that was about a five-minute drive from the steps. When I ran errands for her, I'd sometimes plot a course that would take me by the Music Box Steps and I'd just idle for a brief pause there. It had a strange calming effect on me, especially when I saw others who were coming to see where Stan and Ollie had once walked.

And fallen. And struggled. And fallen again. And struggled some more…

I also don't think I've mentioned it here but the very first night I ever visited the Silent Movie Theater here in Los Angeles, one of the films they were showing was a 1926 comedy from the Mack Sennett Studio called Ice Cold Cocos. It starred Billy Bevan and Andy Clyde as two guys engaged in what once was a thriving business in this country — delivering ice. That job has now, of course, joined the list of vanished or vanishing professions like operating a telegraph, setting up bowling pins or publishing comic books.

In Ice Cold Cocos, Mr. Bevan and Mr. Clyde delivered ice up the same stairs that Mr. Laurel and Mr. Hardy climbed to deliver a piano. Here's that film with a new musical track and re-created title cards. It's a good example of what second-tier comedians did on film in the twenties and what real icemen did back when that was a thing…

I just want to point something out. I've been saying for months now that when one looks at polls, one should remember that a lot of possibly game-changing things would happen before the election that could not be predicted. That was my response to people telling me months ago that Trump was certain to win or that Trump was certain to lose. A month ago here, I said…

It's gonna be up and down, up and down, up and down…with many moments which will, at least at first, feel like game-changers. We've already had plenty of these. Trump getting shot at was one. Biden doing so poorly in the debate was one. Biden dropping out was a big one. Trump getting convicted of 34 felonies was one. The big Supreme Court ruling was one. There will be more.

Since then, we've had another possible assassination attempt, the Harris/Trump debate, the Walz/Vance debate, the whole "they're eating the dogs" thing, Hurricane Helene and the government response to it, Hurricane Milton and the government response to it, some revelations from the new Bob Woodward book and some other possible game-changers that no one could have predicted when I typed the above. There's still time for more.