Can any state become un~united from the United States? Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone says no and here's his explanation why…

Brian Dreger wrote to ask…

Being that you've been around magicians a lot, I'm wondering if you ever met Kreskin a.k.a. The Amazing Kreskin. But if you haven't met him, what did you think of him as a performer? I really liked the guy, although I sometimes thought he over-explained the set up to a trick.

You can like many aspects of what a magician does beyond the ingenuity of his or her tricks. One of my favorite magicians was a gent named Don Alan whose magic was not that amazing but whose ability to be funny throughout the entire presentation was unmatched. You can like a magician's style or his/her showmanship (Is there a gender-neutral synonym for "showmanship?") You can like the manual/physical dexterity. There are all sorts of things.

No, I never met Kreskin. Never saw him in person either, though once I was in Laughlin, Nevada for a few days and he was playing at the hotel right across the street. I saw an ad — I think tickets to his show were $9.95 or even lower — and there was a number to call for reservations. I thought, "Reservations? If Kreskin's any good, he oughta just know I'm coming and save a seat for me!"

But I never got over there. I'd have liked to see him because I liked his style and patter, especially when he was guesting on someone else's show and had time restraints put on him. He had his own show for a while and I recall that he would take a solid three-minute trick and stretch it out to what felt like ten.

But! In the last decade or two I developed an aversion to magicians who pass perfectly simple magic tricks off as genuine psychic power or telepathy. I'm one of those people who believes — no, knows that there ain't no such thing as genuine psychic power. I could tolerate and even appreciate it with someone like my pal, the late Max Maven. Max did it with style and in a manner that…well, you'd have to be really, really dimwitted to think it was anything but a trick.

But I have seen magicians who felt that a vital part of their act was convincing the audience that their "psychic powers" were bona fide. I have to wonder how many of them acted as a kind of gateway drug for the kind of people who fall prey to the Sylvia Brownes of the world. I'm talking about connivers who feign such powers to bilk the bilkable.

At the Magic Castle, I have occasionally seen audience members who forgot that the building they were in had the word "Magic" in its name. They didn't think that a magician actually sawed the lady in half but they seemed to think that the only conceivable way a different magician could have known the spectator picked the three of diamonds was if he had genuine supernatural powers.

In fact, at the Castle, you will often see a magician have an audience member pick a card, show it to everyone except the magician, then return it to the deck. The deck is then shuffled yet somehow the magician locates and identifies the card. That happens all the time and if it's in the context of doing card tricks, no one thinks the magician has done something unearthly…unless he or she claims psychic powers. If he or she acts like he or she does, someone in the audience may come away thinking that is so.

I have highly-mixed feelings about feeding that kind of gullibility. So I have slightly-mixed feelings about Kreskin, especially now that he's marketing a pendulum that you get when you sign up for one of his Zoom lectures. What's the deal with this pendulum? Here's part of the sales spiel reachable through his website…

Have questions, quandaries, or issues you can't quite figure out? In less than 5 minutes, Kreskin's Pendulum technique can help you tap into your unconscious mind and provide a second opinion.

I think that's crossing the line, working the same side of the street as those folks who charge you loads o' cash to think you're communicating with your dead relatives.

So I liked Kreskin the Magician but I'm not fond of Kreskin the Psychic. That's a long answer to a short question. If you knew I was going to do that, it doesn't mean you have psychic abilities.

Yes, it"s another fine day to not be Donald Trump. And if you think today's $83M judgement against him is bad, wait'll you see what the next court orders him to cough up.

I wish the news media would rerun that clip of Trump promising his followers that he would loosen libel laws so they could sue people who lie and therefore make "lots of money." He seemed very fond of libel suits then and didn't regard them as violations of the First Amendment.

Hey, wanna watch an entire Three Stooges movie? This is the 1962 film, The Three Stooges Meet Hercules. I recall liking it when I saw it at the Bruin Theater near UCLA in Westwood. Of course, I was ten at the time. That might have had something to do with it…

UPDATE: I can't seem to get the embed to work so here's a link to watch it over on YouTube. And note that the poster there shows Larry, Moe and Curly Howard, not Curly Joe DeRita.

Steve Thomas sent me a question that I could probably answer in one sentence but you know me. I'm going to tell a long story…

Were you ever invited to write for the Oscars? If so, what was it like; if not, have you ever been interested?

Sort of but not really. When I was writing a lot of variety shows, I got two or three invites not to write for the Academy Awards show but to go in and talk to whoever was going to hire the writing staff — to interview for the job, basically. And I never went in. The invites always coincided with when I was not available because of something else I was writing. After a while, I stopped getting those invites.

There are some writers I know — no names — who in this situation would say, "Yeah, they kept coming after me to write the Oscars but I kept turning them down," implying they turned down actual, firm offers. I think it's important to be extremely honest about this kind of thing, not just because it's bad to mislead others but because it's dangerous to mislead yourself.

Now, at some point my agent retired from the business and I haven't really had an agent since. When I get the kind of job that involves negotiations and complex contracts, my lawyer handles that for me. Once in a while since then, I've talked with agents about representation but I've never met one I really "clicked" with.

One day, I got a call asking me to come in and meet with a rather important producer who was about to undertake what would be his first animated movie. Someone had recommended he talk to me and so with no advance knowledge of what the movie was, I went to his office in a big motion picture studio office building. We made the usual small talk and we got along well…and then he told me what the project is. They wanted to do an animated feature about Barbie. The doll.

I thought about it for two seconds and then I set some sort of world's record for talking yourself out of a job. I said, "Really? Don't you want to have it written by some lady who played with Barbie dolls when she was younger and loved them?"

And this producer thought for two seconds and said, "Hmm…maybe I do."

So suddenly there was no job there for Mark. I gave him the names of a couple of very good writers I knew who fit what I'd described and as far as I know, he never called any of them. Nor did he ever make an animated Barbie anything. Deals fall through all the time in this business and I guess that happened here. Not the least bit unusual.

But getting back to that meeting: He now had forty minutes or so until his next meeting and I think he felt bad about ending ours so abruptly after I'd schlepped all the way in. So we sat and talked, mostly about movies he'd produced which I'd liked. There were several posters on his office wall plus one for the most recent Academy Awards ceremony for which he'd also been a producer. I thought it was one of the better ones in recent memory and I told him so.

We talked for a while about what I'd liked about it and what I hadn't liked about it and he told me some things he hadn't liked about it. We must have discussed past Oscar telecasts for fifteen minutes when he said, "They've asked me to produce the one for next year and I'm thinking about it. Depending on how some of my other projects shake down in the next few weeks, I may or may not do it. If I do, could I hire you as one of the writers?" I told him he could and we left it at that.

A week or three later, he called me to say he was turning down the Oscars but that he'd given my name to…someone…with the recommendation that I have my agent give them a call. That was very nice of him. The trouble was I didn't have an agent. I also didn't know who "them" was to have somebody call. My lawyer said he'd make the call if I could figure out to whom it should be placed.

I called the Motion Picture Academy and…well, that's now a real smart, efficient organization but at the time, if you'd called up and asked them for their address, I'm not sure anyone there would have been able to tell you. I couldn't find anyone to tell me who was in charge of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast. It had not yet been announced.

I went back to my lawyer and he said, "You really do need an agent not just for this but for everything. I know a number of them. I'm going to set up some appointments for you to meet some of the best ones" and fortunately, I had one of those rare attorneys who always does what he says he's going to do. Within a few days, I had three appointments with three (apparently) very good agents.

It had been a few years since I'd talked to any agents about representation and I guess the ground rules had shifted a bit. They were all enthused about representing not only me but comic book properties I'd worked on like Groo, The DNAgents, Space Circus and Crossfire. Each of those agents told me how we'd sell some network on a package: me and him as Executive Producers, me as showrunner, his agency representing the whole thing…

"And taking a packaging fee on the whole project?" I asked.

To which each agent answered with some version of "Well, of course. That's how it's done these days,"

I asked each agent, "Are you interested in representing me as a writer?" I told them about the Academy Awards thing and asked, "Would you track down the right person to submit me to and make that call?"

One of them said, "Why would I do that?" The other two said, "Mark, this agency doesn't do those kinds of deals."

And that's pretty much the end of this story. No one ever called to try and get me a job on the Academy Awards and I only talked with one other agent since about representation. He wanted me but the folks above him wouldn't take me in because one of their *star* clients wanted the movie rights to one of the properties mentioned above and I wouldn't/couldn't let him have them. I seem to get along fine these days without an agent. And without working on the Academy Awards…which I no longer would be willing to watch, let alone work on.

Some time ago here, I told you about a documentary called Stu's Show all about my buddy Stu Shostak who hosts the podcast Stu's Show. It's about two things, one being how Stu went from being an avid fan of classic television to being a curator, broadcaster and friend to folks who worked in classic television. I'm talking about people like Lucille Ball and Dick Van Dyke. It doesn't get more classic than those two.

That's one part of the documentary. The other is how Stu met this lovely lady who was the perfect match for him because she loved classic teevee and they got involved and things were copacetic until one day, completely out of the blue, she had a brain aneurysm. The story of what Stu did to keep her alive will warm whatever size heart you have. It's really quite an extraordinary tale filled with stars of vintage TV shows — and (fair warning) me.

You may not have viewed this when I first talked about it because it cost money to do that. Well, now it's free on a great many Roku stations and online. Right here would be a good place to view it. You'll be glad you did.

My longtime pal Jim Brochu was friends with Zero Mostel and starred in and wrote Zero Hour, a one-man show in which he played the great Mostel. I wrote about it here many times and even provided this link where you can still view this fine production in full.

But first, here's Jim biddi-biddi-bumming for us, re-creating one of Zero's most famous numbers…

I'm no less busy than I was yesterday but I wanted to share my delight that Jon Stewart is returning to The Daily Show even if it's just for one day per week. I suspect it's because he likes the challenge of broadcasting Fake News that's more outrageous than the real stuff these days.

Donald What'shisname used to brag that he hired "All The Best People." That has become demonstrably false. All the good people he hired now either are working against him winning another term or they're under indictment…or both. All the bad ones are on his legal team and you can see how well that's turning out for him. Wow.

One of these days, I may or may not tell you what I'm doing today but trust me: You'd forgive me for neglecting you, Dear Blog Readers. There will be little or no posting, which is what that silly soup can indicates. Thank you for understanding that which at the moment, you do not understand.

As I've said many times in many places, Soupy Sales was a boyhood hero of mine. From 1960 (when I was eight) until early '62, he hosted a usually-live, very funny TV show on KABC, Channel 7 here

in Los Angeles. It was one of those shows like Time for Beany or the various Rocky & Bullwinkle programs that were intended for kids but irresistible to a surprising number of adults. I almost never missed it and was real unhappy on the rare occasions when I did.

Soupy experimented briefly with having a live studio audience but he usually just had the stage crew as his audience. You could often hear them laughing and years later, Clyde Adler — who played White Fang, Black Tooth, Pookie, Hippie and just about everyone who came to Soupy's door — told me that they usually had a microphone open in the studio just to catch the crew laughing. I wished I could have been there with them and in the late seventies, I was.

It happened when Soupy did a new and syndicated version of his old show and it was taped on the KTLA lot in Hollywood.  I was fortunately working on variety shows there for Sid and Marty Krofft's company and I often played hooky from my job to hang out on Soupy's set.  I got to talk with him and became friends with Clyde Adler. In addition to his duties as Soupy's cast, Clyde was also the chief hurler-of-pies into the face of the star of the show and Clyde once paid me the honor of putting one of those shaving cream pies in my hand and "spotting" me as I lobbed it into the puss of Mr. Sales.

There were a number of local Soupy fans who were allowed/welcomed to hang out on the set during tapings supplementing the crew laughter. One of them was a fellow named Earl Kress and another was a fellow named Stu Shostak. I didn't know either of them at the time but both later became good friends, often mentioned on this blog.

Soupy's career followed a strange path before and after that series — game shows, radio, guest starring on every kind of show there was — and then there came tragedy. He has a ghastly accident that involved falling down a flight of stairs. He was never the same after that but he still had legions of loyal fans.

One Sunday some time ago, Soupy was a guest at the Hollywood Collectors Show held at the Beverly Garland Hotel out in the valley. He was mostly signing photos and copies of his book. A number of people you've heard of were there and most of them stopped by his table to say hello. Here's a little less than two minutes of video from that event. See how many people you can recognize in it…

Okay, you certainly spotted Buddy Hackett and Ed Asner…but there's someone else in the video you might (might!) spot.  I wouldn't fault you if you didn't but here, look at this screen grab I made…

That's me at right in the blue shirt weighing about ninety pounds more than I do today.  The lady in the green jacket next to me is my dear friend Carolyn Kelly.  If  you watch the video again, you may be able to also catch us walking out behind Soupy.

And I watched this video a couple of times before I noticed that the gent in the red-striped shirt behind me is not Waldo.  It's voice actor Wally Wingert, who years later I directed when he did the voice of Jon on The Garfield Show, and who became a very good friend.  I didn't know him at the time just as I didn't know Earl or Stu when I was standing with them on the set of Soupy's show.

Before this video was shot, I spent some time with Soupy and he signed a book to me.  He seemed a little overwhelmed at the attention he was getting there.  I don't think he had very many moments when there wasn't a line of folks waiting to meet him, buy his signature and tell him how much his work had meant to them.  I saw him again a year or two later at a comic convention in New York and the line was even longer. Before he left us a few years later, I hope he had an accurate sense of how beloved and appreciated he was.

Here's a piece John Oliver did a year or so ago for Stephen Colbert's show, explaining and in some cases defending British cuisine…

So Ron DeSantis is "suspending" his campaign for the G.O.P. nomination.  Obviously, his showing in the Iowa caucus and some sort of internal polling have a lot to do with that but I wonder: Is it that some big donor said, "I ain't giving you another nickel"?  A lot of presidential campaigns peter out when the money does.  Or is it that to stay in, DeSantis would have to get much rougher on Trump, which is what Nikki Haley is doing this weekend…and that could end any chance DeSantis might have had of being Donald's running mate. Or did he and Trump make a deal?

I dunno.  I'm just curious how these decisions get made.  It seems to me it's been a long time since DeSantis had even a scintilla of a chance of landing the nomination.  What happened to get him out now?

Maybe some of the answers are in this article by Jill Lawrence.  It was written a few days ago but all they'd have to do is change a few present-tense words to past-tense and it would be topical.

I have a batch of e-mails asking me to comment on the crashing and burning of Sports Illustrated, a magazine I believe I have opened exactly once in my life. That was around 1968 or so when someone made a remark on some TV show that some lady who was either a gymnast or a surfing champ was "almost naked" in the current issue.

Well, that I had to see and I was disappointed in the definition of "almost naked." The lady who delivered my groceries from Ralphs Market yesterday was wearing less clothing and this was in the rain.

I don't think I've looked at an issue since; not even the annual Swimsuit Issue which offers much the same thing. There's no need to see it there because we now have an Internet and at the moment it seems like every young, attractive woman in the world with a large chest has opened a Facebook account, an Instagram account and I suspect they're about to do a hostile takeover of The Los Angeles Times Sudoku page.

It's odd how all these women are opening sites with all the same photos of themselves and each other and how they all say the same things asking you to click to see their expertly-Photoshopped pictures. It makes you suspect one person or firm is posting them all. Never mind Hunter Biden. The United States House Committee on Oversight and Reform should be looking into this.

So what's happened to Sports Illustrated? The same thing that has happened to darn near every magazine. And if you don't know what that is, I'll let Kevin Drum tell you.

As everyone knows, the character of Spider-Man debuted in the fifteenth and final issue of Amazing Fantasy, which reached newsstands on or about June 5, 1962. Amazing Fantasy was only Amazing Fantasy for that one issue. Before that, it was called Amazing Adventures for a while and then it was called Amazing Adult Fantasy. The change of titles and formats were (obviously) because it didn't sell all that well.

Stan Lee used to always say that since his publisher, Martin Goodman, had decided #15 would be the last issue, he and artist Steve Ditko decided to get a little experimental. With the attitude of "What do we have to lose?" they gave the first half of #15 over to this new character called Spider-Man. They did that one story and when the issue got the reaction it got, the publisher was willing to launch the character in his own comic book. Amazing Spider-Man #1 came out on or about December 12 of 1962.

That's how the story is always told and I tend not to believe it. There is evidence supporting the theory that when Lee and Ditko did that first story, they had no idea that that would be the last issue of Amazing Fantasy; that that decision had not been made yet. There is, in fact, a blurb in that issue urging you to purchase the next issue. I believe the decision to terminate the title was made not only after they'd finished the story in #15 but after they'd finished a Spider-Man story for #16 and done at least some work on one for #17. When Spider-Man got his own comic, those stories appeared in that book.

The reasons some of us historian-types believe this will be discussed at some later date. It is a fact though that Amazing Spider-Man #1 came out around 12/12/62 and that Amazing Spider-Man #2 followed on (approximately) 2/12/63. Here are the covers of those issues. See if you can notice the big change between #1 and #2. Go on. I'll bet you can find it…

You see it? Starting with #2, the comic — in fact, every comic published by Marvel — featured a little box in the upper left-hand corner with an image of the star(s) of the comic and the word "Marvel," which was not seen on their comics until then.

(Oh — and before we leave that first issue, let me point something out. See where it says "2 Great Feature-Length Spider-Man Thrillers"?  Well, in case anyone asks you, "feature-length" at Marvel in those days was 10-14 pages.)

Moving on: Those corner boxes were important in establishing Marvel as a brand.  Before they came along, if you liked the comics they put out, you didn't really know what company it was that had put them out.  They had a little "MC" on the cover but you had no idea what that meant.  If you looked inside the comic in the little legal stuff text, it only told you which of Goodman's many shell companies the comic was officially being published through. There was some sort of legal and/or tax advantage to doing it that way.

So Amazing Spider-Man #1 was officially published by Non-Pareil Publishing Corp. while the same month's issue of Fantastic Four — which obviously was published by the same firm — was officially from Canam Publishers Sales Corp. Meanwhile, The Incredible Hulk was published by Zenith Publishing Corp. and that comic with Thor in it was published by Atlas Magazines, Inc. and that same month, the Hulk was guest-starring in the Fantastic Four comic and all those books seemed to be from the same folks and they all cross-plugged each other and…

This kind of thing can be very confusing when you're ten years old. Especially since I liked to file my comic book collection: The DCs in this pile, the Dells in that one, the Archies in that one…

Stan Lee once said that the idea for the corner boxes came from artist Steve Ditko and that once they adopted them, it caused sales to soar. Ditko, it is said, got the idea when he went to his local newsstand in New York to buy comics and found it difficult to find the ones he wanted on those racks. Most racks did not display the full cover of each comic. A lot of them only showed you the top left corner of the comic.

So the story is that Mr. Ditko thought something like, "Hey, we should put a little picture of Spider-Man in that space on the Amazing Spider-Man comic and a little picture of Thor on the comic he's in…" and I think I know where he got that idea. If he was browsing newsstands for comics, he would have seen such pictures on comics from the Harvey Comics Group. In 1962, they'd been doing this for about eight years. Look at this…

And while you're at it, look at this…

Beginning around 1954, Harvey put those little "stamp" images on all their comics that featured recurring characters. A few years later when they began marketing cartoons of some of those characters on television, the stamps changed into little TV screens but the principle was the same: Put a picture of the character(s) in the upper left hand corner to attract potential buyers.

Ditko couldn't helped but see this and he also would have seen Gold Key Comics and Charlton Comics and maybe a few others putting the name of the comic in the upper left hand corner. He especially couldn't have missed Charlton doing it because he was drawing for that line and even drawing a lot of their covers.

And were those little pictures then the key to Marvel's sudden spurt in sales? I suspect not…and I base that suspecting-not on the fact that other companies did not race to do likewise. The industry since Day One had been a place where publishers looked at what was selling for their competitors and shamelessly aped what seemed to be selling. Everyone had easy access to other companies' sales figures and DC especially would have noticed a sudden spurt in Marvel's sales because DC was then Marvel's distributor. But DC didn't try anything of the sort on their covers until 1970 and they gave it up after less than a year.

No, I think three things began steadily raising sales at Martin Goodman's company around the time of Amazing Spider-Man #2. I think it was the quality of their comics, the sense that that line was expanding (which was kind of exciting) and, most of all, that they finally put a name on that line. Suddenly, us kids buying them could say, "Hey, have you seen the new Marvels?" It was Basic Branding 101. If you have a product people want, give them a name by which they can ask for it.

They say that one picture is worth a thousand words…and maybe some pictures are. But in this case, I think one word was worth a thousand pictures. And an awful lot of money.

There was a period there where any "name" comedic actor who could conceivably have played Oscar Madison and/or Felix Unger took a shot at The Odd Couple. Some played both roles at times. Here's a review of a production which starred Tom Poston and Tim Conway…and you'll notice that Mr. Conway added some physical comedy to the festivities…