I haven't used that logo here since 2017 and don't you think it's about time? The International House of Pancakes up on Santa Monica Boulevard in West Hollywood closed its doors on New Year's Day — and as it was usually a 24-hour diner, those doors that had not closed much since the place opened in…well, that's a good question. The online articles give various dates ranging back as far as to say "over sixty years."

I think that's about right. Online sources tell me that the first IHOP opened in Burbank in 1958, followed by one in Panorama City and another in Baldwin Hills. I believe the one in Hollywood was open by the summer of 1961 because that's when the following story began. Reading about the closure made me think about it…

The Dick Van Dyke Show had not yet debuted on television but its earliest episodes were then being filmed. An episode was coming up which would be mostly a flashback to when Rob Petrie (Dick) met the woman who would be his wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore). For it, they'd need an actor to play Rob's army buddy who showrunner Carl Reiner had named Sol Pomeroy. One evening Reiner and the show's Executive Producer Sheldon Leonard, went to see a play that featured an actor they were considering for the role. After the play, they went to that IHOP for a late supper.

A completely-unknown actor-comic named Marty Ingels was at that IHOP when they walked in. Ingels — who at that point in his life had appeared in practically nothing — was there because his current girl friend was a waitress at that IHOP. He was sitting there drinking coffee, waiting for her shift to end so they could go home together.

When he saw Leonard and Reiner walk in, he instantly recognized them. He also knew about the show they were doing because he'd been scouring every inch of the Hollywood trade papers, Hollywood Reporter and Variety, looking for anything that could lead him to be cast in anything. So what did he do? He went to his lady friend and talked her into letting him dress in a waiter uniform and serve Mr. Leonard and Mr. Reiner.

And so Marty Ingels waited on their table and managed to be funny enough that Leonard and Reiner decided to bring him in for an audition…and yes, he he won the role of Sol Pomeroy. That was for Show #5 — "Oh, How We Met the Night That We Danced," which was filmed on July 18, 1961. Three months later, they had Ingels back and on October 17, they filmed "Sol and the Sponsor" in which he appeared again as Sol Pomeroy.

The first Sol Pomeroy episode turned out great. The second one didn't. Reiner and Leonard decided to bury it at the end of the season. They also decided it was the last time they'd hire Marty Ingels…and his performance in that second episode was only part of the reason.

Mr. Ingels had, to put it mildly, come on too strong. I once asked Rose Marie about it and she said, "He came in, acting like he was now a regular on the series and pitching ideas for his next appearance and the one after that and the one after that…" He was also doing a massive publicity putsch, giving press interviews about his new job.

(Years later, I had a not-dissimilar experience when I worked on the TV series, Welcome Back, Kotter. An actor who had one line in one episode — one line! — talked his way into a local Christmas parade where he rode in an open convertible with a banner on it proclaiming him as one of the stars of Welcome Back, Kotter.)

"And then," Rose said as we talked about Marty Ingels, "there was the matter of the coffee cart."

Ingels had gone to a carpenter and at great expense, had a gift made for the entire cast — a decorative cart that could be wheeled onto the stage and hold the large coffee urn that otherwise resided on a table, there for the benefit of anyone needing a cup of joe. The rack had handpainted coffee mugs each bearing the name of one of the stars of the show: Dick, Mary, Rose, Morey, Richard, Carl, etc.  And of course, there was one for Marty.

It made everyone uncomfortable. Everything about Marty was making everyone uncomfortable.

His debut in Show #5 aired on October 31, and Ingels, blithely unaware he had filmed his last Dick Van Dyke Show, took out full-page ads in those Hollywood trade papers showing him with Dick. Worth mentioning for reasons that will become obvious in the next paragraph is that the following week, Show #6 featured character actor Allan Melvin as a man named Harrison B. Harding who was another army buddy of Rob's.

"Sol and the Sponsor" didn't air until April 11 of the following year where it was Show #29 of the thirty Dick Van Dyke Shows made for that first season. By then, Marty Ingels had probably figured out he was no longer part of the series. And if he didn't know it then, he sure knew it by Show #17 of the second season. It was another flashback to Rob's army days and in it, his best pal was Sam Pomerantz (Sam, not Sol and Pomerantz, not Pomeroy) and he was played by Allan Melvin.

And then less than two months later in Show #24, Sam Pomerantz was back again…only this time, he was played by Henry Calvin. Melvin returned for two episodes as Sol Pomerantz (Sol, not Sam) in Season Five and he also played a few other roles on the series.

Ingels might not have been too upset about losing the job because by the time The Dick Van Dyke Show was filming its second season, he was filming the first season of I'm Dickens, He's Fenster, a show on which he was a co-star and in every episode.  It only lasted one season and in his autobiography, Ingels admitted that by the end of filming, most of the cast and crew steered clear of him, in part because at Christmas time, he came on too strong, showering them with expensive gifts.

His career went up and down thereafter and reportedly, he would occasionally go back to that IHOP on Santa Monica Boulevard.  He'd sit there eating pancakes and wondering how it had all been like a roller coaster since the night there when he pretended to be a waiter serving Sheldon Leonard and Carl Reiner. That's the story I couldn't help thinking about when I read that the place had closed.

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My thanks to good buddy Vince Waldron, author of the highly-recommended volume, The Official Dick Van Dyke Show Book, for helping me get some of the facts straight.

Daphne Pollard was one of the funnier women appearing in comedies of the thirties and forties. She was "discovered" by Mack Sennett in the latter days of silent films and appeared in dozens of talkies including several Laurel & Hardy films as Mr. Hardy's wife. Briefly, Vitaphone teamed her with Shemp Howard and here's one of the films they made together…

It's "Legal Eagle" time, folks! Here, Devin Stone discusses the legal basis for Donald Trump being booted from ballots in a couple of states with (perhaps) more to come.

Y'know: I think a pretty strong case can be made that the Fourteenth Amendment says that Mr. Trump is disqualified as a candidate. I also think that a pretty strong argument can be made that it would be better for our democracy if/when Donald Trump loses the election, he and his supporters couldn't say it was because of this. I also think it's bad for our democracy to ignore what a bona fide constitutional amendment says.

Since it's unlikely that I'm going to be appointed to any high court in the next few months, I don't have to cast a vote on this one…

Here's a whole movie…The Outlaws is Coming! starring The Three Stooges and Adam West. I wasn't fond of most of the features that the Stooges made late in their career and I don't think, as some people insist, Joe DeRita was the problem. The problem in most was the films themselves as well as the Stooges' ages. This was the last feature they made and, I think, the best from that period.

It was written and directed by Norman Maurer, a clever gent I had the pleasure of working with a few times. Norman was a comic book writer and artist…the partner of another great comic book creator, Joe Kubert. Maurer at one point did the Three Stooges comic book and he married Moe's daughter and wound up managing the Stooges' careers.

He made The Outlaws is Coming! in 1965 and in the cast, you'll also find Emil Sitka, who turned up in almost everything the Stooges did in their later years. Also, you'll find Henry Gibson plus a whole bunch of folks who were hosting Three Stooges films on TV stations all over the country.

Give it a try when you have a spare hour and 29 minutes…

In the previous item here, I made the simple, non-arguable statement that some people think Duck Soup is the best of the Marx Brothers movies and I stand by that: Some people do think that. You may think they are brain-dead morons who should be put up against a wall and executed for heresy but some people do think that.

Nevertheless, two separate e-mailers messaged me to express their outrage that I said "some" and not "all." The rhetoric of their missives would suggest to me that for these people, there are three incontrovertible, indisputable truths in the world and they are, not necessarily in the order of importance…

1. 2 + 2 = 4
2. The sun rises in the east and sets in the west
3. Duck Soup is the best Marx Brothers movie

One of them wrote me in an outrage a few months ago when I posted the following graphic even though I said "that any film on this list could easily swap positions with the one over it or the one under it."

This correspondent, ignoring the very real difference between "best" and "favorite" was upset on two fronts: (1) That I ranked one of the Marx Boys' M.G.M. films above any of the films they made for Paramount and (2) that I made the egregious factual error of not placing Duck Soup in its rightful unanimously-agreed-upon-except-for-stupid-me position of Number Uno. If we've learned nothing else from the Internet, it's that some people can be real dicks if you dare like something that they don't and vice-versa.

I also received a couple of messages insisting that Love Happy should not be consider a Marx Brothers Movie. Look: It's got Groucho in it, it's got Harpo in it, it's got Chico in it and the opening titles say "Starring the Marx Brothers." That oughta hold up in any court in this great land of ours.

But some people really love the five films the Brothers made for Paramount and abhor all the others. I love those first five but cannot discount the first two from M.G.M. and selected scenes from others that followed. While I loved the Marx Brothers from the time I was first aware of them, I didn't really love them until an evening in July of 1972.

My friend Rob and I attended and shared a room at Westercon 25, a science-fiction convention that was held June 30–July 4, 1972, at the Edgewater Hyatt House in Long Beach, CA. Like most of the s-f cons I attended, the proceedings had very little to do with science-fiction. I assume others do but the ones I went to were just multiple-day parties with sorta-like-minded people getting together at some unfortunate-to-have-us-there hotel. One evening, Rob and I played hooky from the con and drove just a few miles to the State Theater, located not far from Nu-Pike, a famous-then/gone-now amusement park in Long Beach.

They were showing a double-feature of those first two films that Groucho, Harpo and Chico made, sans Zeppo, for M.G.M.

In '72, long before the advent of home video and Turner Classic Movies, it was not easy to see those movies at all, let alone the right way. The right way was not watching them alone or with a couple of folks in your den. It was watching them with a big, raucous crowd on a big movie screen. This was the first time I saw those movies that way…and Rob, I and a maybe a thousand strangers laughed ourselves silly.

From start to finish. Every minute Allan Jones wasn't singing and even now and then when he was.

We laughed through the intermission too and there was a strong feeling in the place that went roughly like this: Where have these films been all our lives? Or maybe with some it was: Why doesn't some theater show them every week like this?

I cannot tell you how much love and laughter there was in the State that night. And even admitting the things that were right about the Paramount Marx Bros. movies and wrong about the M.G.M.s, I can't not love A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races. The love for the former is greater than the love for the latter but I always think of them as one movie in two parts. Because of that evening.

Like Nu-Pike, the State Theater ain't there no more. It opened in 1920 as Loew's State Theatre and closed in the eighties. You can read the entire history of the place at this webpage and there are plenty of photos but I'll also offer you this one…

It's part of a frame grab from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. Portions of the big chase scene near the end were shot in the streets of Long Beach and at one point, they go past the State and also past Nu-Pike. And you may not be able to make it out in this photo but one of the movies on the State's marquee is the version of Cape Fear which came out in 1962, the same year Mad World was shot. One of the stars of Cape Fear was Barrie Chase who, of course, was also one of the stars of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. In fact, she's the last surviving cast member of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.

And here's one last little trivia point which intrigues me…

The first Marx film for M.G.M., A Night at the Opera, was shepherded by Irving Thalberg, an uncredited but powerful producer for M.G.M. Thalberg was the man Groucho called "The only authentic genius I ever met in Hollywood." A Night at the Opera deviated from the template of the Paramount Marx films in several ways, most of them dictated by Thalberg.

There are many stories about a sneak preview that was held of the finished or nearly-finished film at a movie theater. If you read every book about the Marx Brothers and read all the relevant interviews, as I think I have, you'll find that accounts of that preview vary but most go something like this: The audience sat, not laughing much, throughout a screening at a theater in Long Beach. Their tepid reaction panicked some or all of those who worked on the film but Thalberg kept a cool head.

Then, depending on which account you read, he either (a) arranged for the film to be shown that same night at another nearby theater where it got a much better reaction or (b) arranged for another preview a few nights later, perhaps after some edits had been made…and got a much better reaction. Either way, the movie went on to be a huge hit.

That night Rob and I saw it and the follow-up film at the State, a person of indeterminate expertise gave it a brief intro in which he said that A Night at the Opera had first played at that theater. Did he mean that was where the supposedly-disastrous preview took place? Or the more successful preview either that night or later? Or maybe it was where the film debuted locally when it went into general release? Or did that person even know what he was talking about?

Beats the heck outta me. All I know is that the State was probably the largest, most important theater in Long Beach in 1935 so it might seem like a good place to hold a preview. And I know that I love the idea that we had that wonderful evening in a theater that was important to the history of that movie.

And if it was the theater in which the audience failed to laugh, that would be fine. Because that night in July of '72, we sure made up for them.

Here's the trailer for what some people think is the best of the Marx Brothers movies…

Two matters before we plunge into the second part of our tale of the Ivar Theater in Hollywood. One is this link to Part One just in case you didn't read it or need a brief refresher.

Secondly, a reader of this site wrote to ask if the man who built the theater, Yegishe Harout, was of Arabic extraction and if he named the theater in honor of someone named Ravi, spelling it backwards. Pretty much all I know about Mr. Harout is contained in this paragraph that I found online…

A stage actor in Armenia during the 1920s, Harout toured Russia, the Balkans, France, England, Belgium, Egypt and finally the U.S., ending up in Hollywood. He built the Ivar Theatre and Har-Omar Restaurant, located on Ivar Street and Sunset Blvd. in Hollywood, that he managed for twenty-seven years. Once a week, Harout would present a half hour of Armenian and Middle Eastern classical and Folk music on a local radio station.

So I'll take a wild stab and guess that he named his theater The Ivar because it was on Ivar Street. Exhaustive research (i.e., a little Googling) shows that Ivar Street was named Ivar Street many years earlier in recognition of a Danish immigrant named Ivar Weid who owned much real estate in the area.

I also found out that Mr. Harout died in 1974. The cause of death is not given but you may suspect it had something to do with what happened to his beloved theater.

What happened to it was that around 1972, it became a porn-and-stripper place. I believe the last legit theatrical production there was Godspell, which had transferred from a successful run at the Mark Taper Forum, one of the more upscale theaters in town. Not long after that, the Ivar, for what I suppose were financial reasons, went over to the dark side.

This was a trend in Los Angeles theaters in the early seventies. Currently, a lot of prestigious shows play, usually for one night, at a theater on La Cienega Boulevard called the Largo at the Coronet. Marc Maron, Sarah Silverman and other name comedians play there regularly…and back in the sixties and before, it was just plain The Coronet…a movie theater that played classic motion pictures. Buster Keaton famously showed up there one night in the late fifties and bought a ticket to see The General, a film masterpiece he made in 1926.

But for a few years in the seventies, the place showed porno movies and in-between the films, women would come out onto its stage and remove their garments to music. Fortunately, the theater got better. By the close of that decade, it was back to clothed presentations. I went to some very good plays there and even worked on one.  Backstage, I came across an old advertising sign from its burlesque days.

Much the same thing happened on about the same timetable with the Beverly Cinema on Beverly Boulevard. In the sixties, my friend Steve Hopkins and I were obsessed with silent movies. You could find us most weekends at the Silent Movie Theater on Fairfax but one week, we went to the Beverly Cinema to take in a double-bill of Mr. Chaplin's masterpiece, The Gold Rush (1925) and Jacques Tati's more recent Mr. Hulot's Holiday (1953).

That was the kind of thing they showed in the sixties.  Then for a while in the early seventies, the Beverly was given over to porn-and-strippers.  Then it went back to classic cinema. It is now, as you may know, a revival film palace run by Quentin Tarantino.

The Ivar did not make such a speedy recovery. It turned into a pretty sleazy place — one that seemed somehow sleazier by comparison to what was next door: The Hollywood branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. Los Angeles then had several newspapers and I think every one of them sent a reporter to write about the Ivar, its new format and sometimes its headliner stripper for a while…a self-described "porn princess" named René Bond.

I can't give you an exact timetable but around 1975 — that's a guess — a bunch of my friends and I, instead of playing poker one night and talking about comic books, made a field trip to the Ivar. I'm saying '75 because that was the year the Barbra Streisand movie Funny Lady came out. Ms. Bond began her act by coming out in an evening gown with satin on her shoulder and kind of half-lip-syncing Barbra's recording of "How Lucky Can You Get?" from that film.

It was very bizarre.  Not sexy.  Bizarre.

I shall attempt to describe the whole experience and count how many times I feel the ideal word choice is some form of the word, "sleaze." It was applicable to everything — the sleazy signs outside (that's 1), the sleazy box office (2), my sleazy change (3), the sleazy lobby(4), the sleazy seats (5), every single one of the other sleazy patrons (6), the sleazy men's room — especially that sleazy men's room (7 and 8)…and of course, René's sleazy performance (9) even before she had removed a single garment.

I suspect my pals and I looked like we were auditioning to play the audience watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler.  Some of the other patrons looked like they weren't there for the onstage presentation.  They looked like they just wanted to spend some time in a building with a roof on it.  There was even one guy who was sound asleep as René/Barbra  belted out, "How Lucky Can You Get?"

In case you're not familiar with the song, you can listen to it here . Ms. Bond did the whole thing including the part where the record gets stuck and Barbra sings the last part in a rage.  Weirdest lip-sync you ever saw.  And then they played another inappropriate song and René took off all her clothes.

And I'm sitting there thinking, "The last time I was here, they were doing You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown on that stage."

I don't think I'd have felt so uneasy if I hadn't "known" the Ivar before this. It was like finding out your old high school sweetheart was…well, dancing at the Ivar. Everything felt not only sleazy (10) but horribly wrong.

It's possible I have not conveyed how dirty and grungy and smelly and dilapidated and sleazy (11) the Ivar had become in just a few years. It looked like sometime since my prior visit, the owners had burned the place down for the insurance money, collected and then not spent a dime on restoration. It was just awful. And in that environment, neither René nor any of the other ladies who took the stage were the least bit sexy.  It was just sleazy, sleazy, sleazy (12, 13, 14).

Porn movies followed the live show and one member of our group wanted to stay for them, not so much because he wanted to watch them but because they were included in the admission price and he felt cheated to not receive everything for which he'd paid. The admission price, by the way, was $3.50. But the rest of us wanted to get the hell outta there and since he hadn't driven, he was forced to leave with us.

We did stop briefly in the lobby where Ms. Bond was selling autographed photos which we didn't buy. We also all declined her offer to join her in a bar next door for a drink before the next show. I think she was doing something like ten a day and had three more to go that evening.

The way she invited us made me suspect she was selling something more than photos over there. But we spoke with her for a few minutes and she seemed very happy and proud to be doing what she was doing there so I decided not to feel too sorry for her. I have not set foot in the Ivar since that night but every so often, I've driven by it. This is how it looked a few years later…

The painting of the lady at upper right, accompanied by lettering by someone who didn't know how to spell "totally," is more or less of René Bond.  It stayed on the front of the Ivar long after she'd left its stage and even long after she'd passed away, which Wikipedia tells me was in 1996. The other painted lady is probably a later headliner who was in residence for a while there.

It made me sad to see the Ivar looking so sleazy (15) but I did enjoy that beneath the likeness of Ms. Bond, they left up a quote from the prominent New York drama critic Douglas Watt — "You'd be crazy to miss it!"  I suspect Mr. Watt said that about the original Broadway production of Godspell…not even the production of it that had preceded the strippers into the Ivar. And he certainly wasn't recommending the show that strippers were putting on there for many years.

That was how the Ivar was for a long time…even through news reports of one or more fires (real ones) and at least one murder on the premises. I had a few friends who went there and from their reports, the place kept trying to outsleaze itself (16). One of those friends was the fine artist Dave Stevens who made a joke about it for the cover of The Comics Journal…

The story of the Ivar finally had a happy ending — and not the kind René Bond once offered. It was closed for a long time and sold and revamped and remodeled and turned back into a place that puts on plays. These days, it looks like this…

…except that I've been told that it may have made a brief trip back in time a few years ago. When the above-mentioned Mr. Tarantino was shooting his movie Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, he re-created 1969 Hollywood by having his crew temporarily remodel a number of businesses into the way they looked back then. This is from Wikipedia…

To film at the Pussycat Theater, production designer Barbara Ling and her team covered the building's LED signage and reattached the theater's iconic logo, rebuilding the letters and neon. Ling said the lettering on every marquee in the film is historically accurate. To restore Larry Edmunds Bookshop, she reproduced the original storefront sign and tracked down period-appropriate merchandise, even recreating book covers. Her team restored the Bruin and Fox Village theaters, including their marquees, and the storefronts around them. Stan's Donuts, across the street from the Bruin, got a complete makeover.

Several people have told me that the Ivar was regressed to its "burlesk" days for a few shots but that the footage never made it into the movie. I have seen no evidence of this and it might not be so…and You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown was playing the Ivar at the time Tarantino's film takes place. If anyone knows for sure about this, let me know. I was pleased that a brief image of our local horror movie host from that period, Seymour, was seen in the film and I'm curious if an image of René Bond almost made it in…

And I'm also curious as to why if Tarantino did think of having a shot of a now-legit theater back in its sleazy (17) porn-and-stripper days, he didn't use his own place.

A high-speed chase just went by my house.  A black car driving so fast I couldn't tell the make or model from my window vantage point was followed by about five police cars, all blaring an unusual siren…not the same one I hear when one cop car is rushing past to get somewhere.  A minute later, I heard what sounded like one or more helicopters zooming overhead.  At the moment, most of the local stations have on 11 AM newscasts but none of them are covering it.

I see these things on TV and on YouTube all the time and you don't realize how noisy they are.

This one's a bit of a mystery and here's everything I know about it: In 1962, a deal was made to produce a pilot for a Marx Brothers TV show. Screen Gems, which was the television arm of Columbia Pictures, put up the dough and the show was done in what we would now call "Claymation."

Some folks have said that the animation was the work of Louis Bunin, an artist and puppeteer who made a number of films not unlike this one. I have no idea how true that may be.

Some folks have also theorized that Groucho's voice was done by Groucho himself or Dayton Allen or Pat Harrington, Jr., the latter two being comedians who occasionally replicated Groucho's voice for commercials or cartoons. I don't think it sounds like any of the three and Chico's doesn't even sound to me like a professional actor.

"Don M. Yowp" — whoever it is who hides behind that name and runs this fine, well-researched blog on Hanna-Barbera history — dug up his item from Variety for October 18, 1961…

Chico Marx, the man who never really retired, in a sense will still be "in the show," despite his sudden passing Oct. 11 in his Beverly Hills home of a heart attack, The 70-year-old comedian, eldest of the Marx Bros, and known to millions as piano-playing, Italian-dialect member of the brothers act, will appear with Groucho and Harpo as a life-like figure in an animation comedy teleseries Screen Gems is prepping.

It was Chico's third attack in the last two years, and like the others it came almost on the eve of his getting back into his "Italian" character and making with the laughs again. The figure of Chico in a special tri-cinemation—and secret—process was completed only a few weeks ago. Series will be made up largely of earlier comedy routines when the Marxes appeared together, according to studio, which will bring the Marx Bros, to fresh audiences as well as those who followed them on the Broadway stage and later in motion pictures.

Here is the video which was restored by the folks at Thunderbean Animation. It apparently did not succeed in convincing anyone back in '62 that there should be more of this…and you now know at least as much about it as I do. If you know more, share it with me and I'll share it here…

Here's where most of us are glad we weren't at Midnight East Coast Time: Times Square…

From 12/30/94 (not New Year's Eve, please note), here's a bit from David Letterman's show for which they got Dick Clark to go up on a rooftop a day or two before his annual broadcast from Times Square. There's a joke in there about Jocelyn Elders and in case you don't remember who she was: She was briefly the Surgeon General of the United States. Not long before this video, she had been pressured into resigning because some folks didn't like her remarks — honest though they were — about topics like drug use or masturbation.

I worked for Dick Clark in the early eighties and could have been on that rooftop in New York with him one New Year's Eve to do the live inserts on that year's episode of Dick Clark's New Year's Rockin' Eve. Here's a repost of something I had up here in 2011…

There are a couple of job offers in my past I turned down or had to turn down and now sorta regret. One was to write on the Jerry Lewis Telethon. I was busy that year, figured it would probably be offered again…and it wasn't. Another was to go to Vegas on New Year's Eve and help produce a live telecast, competitive with Mr. Clark's, that would emanate from there. That particular setup just sounded like a nightmare of crowds and logistic problems…and when I later talked to the guy who accepted the job I passed on, I learned I was right. That one I don't regret skipping but one year, Dick (with whom I'd worked, both as a writer for his shows and as a producer on a show where we hired him) asked me to get involved with his New Year's broadcast.

It meant working on the music segments that were all pre-taped in October — when the acts were available and not charging what they charge to perform on New Year's Eve — with the hosts saying, "And now, let's cut to Dick Clark in Times Square and see what's happening there. Dick, what's the mood like in New York tonight?" And while this was being taped in L.A., Dick was just off-camera. Then 12/31, Dick and I would fly to New York at the last possible minute, do the live remote from the rooftop, then fly back almost immediately.

I remember being amazed at how close he cut it, given that he had to be on the air live at a specific time…and it was not a time when travel in and out of the Times Square area was likely to be a breeze. If I absolutely had to be on a rooftop there at the moment the new year commenced, I think I'd have flown to New York a few days before, checked into that hotel and not left it until the telecast…then flown home a few days later.

Dick's itinerary that year called for getting to his N.Y. hotel (a few blocks from where the chosen rooftop was located) around 4 PM on the last day of the year, making his way to the building somewhat later, then getting back to his hotel after the broadcast and flying home first thing the morning of January 1. I think it was like an 8 AM flight. Thinking back, it now sounds like it might have been a fun adventure but when it was offered, I somehow didn't imagine it that way.

Again, I was busy at the time and I figured (wrongly), "They'll ask me again some other year." No, sometimes they don't. Always a good thing to remember.

Here's Dave and Dick…

Dubai always puts on a great firework show on New Year's Eve. Let's see what they did for this new year…

Here's a nice segment from CBS News on some of the more famous folks we lost this year. You'd think that Shecky Greene — who like all great comedians had great timing — would have died a few days earlier so he could have been in this…

Here's one of my favorite magicians, Daniel Roy. At the end of this video, he insists that he does all these feats without trick photography or editing and that you'd see the same thing if you saw him perform live. Well, I did — one time at the Magic Castle, sitting about three feet from the guy. Very impressive…

I meant to include this on our Christmas countdown but, hey, Christmas lasts twelve days of servants and poultry, right? Here's Pentatonix with a holiday tune I always liked. If you don't want to think of this as six days late, just think of it as 357 days early…