It's very hot lately here in Los Angeles. Actually, it's very hot in a lot of places and I know this because around half the people I know — and I know a lot of people — feel the need to call or write me and tell me how hot is it and how miserable [...] Read More... from Weather Report

This is kind of a gang "thank you" to about a dozen of you who catch typos on this site and write to tell me. Often, I wake up in the morning and find five or six e-mails from folks who've spotted someplace where my typing fingers went clumsy on me and I correct what [...] Read More... from Good Blogkeeping

I used to love buffets, not because of the volume but because when you have as many food allergies as I do, it's wonderful to be able to examine food before you commit to eating it. I can't tell you how many times I've ordered something in a restaurant and when it comes, it has [...] Read More... from The Biggest Buffet

The finale of the musical Annie as performed in Korea! And doesn't the man in the wheelchair look just like F.D.R.? [...] Read More... from A Musical Moment

It is with mixed feelings that I've decided to track a little of what happens with the National Tour of Boop! The Musical. The feelings are mixed because it's a non-Equity tour and you'd like to see the producers able to draw from the talent pool that doesn't work non-Equity and you'd like to see [...] Read More... from Opening Night (Tomorrow)

Before he passed away last year, Tom Lehrer released all his witty songs into the public domain and told the world, "Help yourself!" That has resulted in a lot of folks putting together revues of his work. There's a group in New York doing "A Tom Lehrer Cabaret" every so often at local clubs and [...] Read More... from Who's Next?

On the Dana Gould Hour podcast, I told the story of how I discovered, long after we'd begun dating, that my girl friend was related to one of my favorite performers, Spike Jones. Here's Spike and his orchestra in the movie, Thank Your Lucky Stars. When I worked at Hanna-Barbera in the late seventies, I [...] Read More... from Spiked!

I dunno how many readers of this blog will be interested in this but I figure there must be at least one… Between 1934 and 1959, The Three Stooges made 190 short comedies for Columbia Pictures. Those were years when short comedies slowly went out of fashion in movie theaters. Laurel and Hardy, for example, [...] Read More... from How To Make Movies For 25 Years

Seth Meyers has fun with yesterday's senate hearing… [...] Read More... from Not a Perry Mason Moment

By now, I'm sure you all know about the mess yesterday when Missouri Senator Eric Schmitt, during a Senate judiciary hearing, accused former special counsel Jack Smith of perjury for saying he hadn't been in Atlanta on February 3, 2024 and it turned out that Smith was in Maryland that day. I just wanted to [...] Read More... from The Whole Truth…

And I should note here that badges for the 2027 WonderCon Anaheim are now on sale. This is kind of the junior version of Comic-Con in San Diego, run by the same folks at or around the end of March each year. If you can't score admission to Comic-Con or are just afraid of the [...] Read More... from WonderFul WonderCon

Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is appearing before a Senate committee and Republican members trying to put him on trial for special prosecuting you-know-who. Here's Senator Cory Booker saying that which should be said… [...] Read More... from This Just In…

Here's Dora's World, a half-hour TV special from 1974. It stars Dora Hall and — in a bevy of cameos — Dave Barry, Harry Hickox, Milton Frome, Pete Barbutti, Stubby Kaye, Sid Melton, Sammy Shore, Nick Navarro, Scatman Crothers, Roy Stuart, Pat Priest, Ronald Del Barrio and Aaron Ross. If you're anywhere near my age [...] Read More... from Dora, Not the Explorer

You may have seen this before but I hadn't. It's a video that takes footage from It's A Wonderful Life, Dirty Dancing, Don't Knock The Rock, Gold Diggers Of 1935, Good News, Dames, Babes On Broadway, Panama Hattie, Follow The Fleet, Bye Bye Birdie, Lady Of Burlesque, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Show Boat, I Love Melvin, [...] Read More... from Lotsa Stars Dancing

Damn Yankees is coming back to Broadway next year, considerably rethought and rewritten. It's one of those shows that seems to invite not doing it the way it was originally done. I saw the 1994 revival — which changed a lot — especially after Jerry Lewis joined the cast — several times. I don't recall [...] Read More... from Goodbye, Old Girl

Robert Rowe wants to know — hey, that rhymes — "Following up on your MAD magazine post, were economics the main reason the magazine had machine lettering instead of hiring letterers?" My answer? Nope. In fact, typeset lettering then was much more expensive than paying a hand-letterer and required a lot more effort by the [...] Read More... from ASK me: Lettering in MAD

In the last year or so, I've become buddies with one of my favorite stand-up comedians, Dana Gould. If you're not a huge fan of this man, go watch this hour of him performing and you'll become one. Among the many things he does is a bi-monthly podcast, The Dana Gould Hour, which never runs [...] Read More... from me on radio

Just in case the latest Randy Rainbow video made you eager to see an unparodied version of the musical Oklahoma!, here's the 1999 London West End production of Rodgers & Hammerstein's Oklahoma! starring Wolverine Hugh Jackman… [...] Read More... from Chicks and Ducks and Geese Better Scurry…

Fred Kaplan summarizes what is known about Trump's little party for Chinese President Xi Jinping. I'll summarize what Fred says: Very little of substance was achieved. Here's the most interesting (to me) part of the article… Trump thinks he can gain favors by tapping personal friendships, then compounds the mistake by believing that certain leaders [...] Read More... from Fred Sez

In the sixties, one of my heroes — Stan Freberg — masterminded a big advertising campaign for Chun King Chow Mein. Here's a little promo they made to alert retailers it was on the way… [...] Read More... from Freberg Flashback

If you want to start at the beginning of this long, meandering memory piece, click here. As I've mentioned, I used to be real good at forgery…imitating the handwriting and occasionally the drawing of others. There are a number of skills I've lost and not just because of age. In 1979 or thereabouts, I switched [...] Read More... from Why I Gave Up Drawing – Part 6

Time for another Randy Rainbow video complete with a commercial for his sponsor, Ground News. I subscribed to that service and it seems to me to be exactly as advertised and very useful. Use Randy's link if you want to give it try… [...] Read More... from Handy Randy

The Stratford Festival in Stratford, Ontario (that's in Canada) puts on a lot of musicals that, if their YouTube videos are representative, are pretty damned expert. They're currently doing one of my favorite shows, Something Rotten. I won't be attending because I can't there and if I could, I'd have to spend all my time [...] Read More... from Something That's Not Rotten to Watch

Hey, it's another installment of "Tales From My Spinner Rack!" In this one, my buddy Gary Sassaman focuses on DC Comics' romance comics of the sixties with special attention to the fine work done in them by John Romita, Sr. I've long thought that one of the weaknesses in the pre-1968 DC line was that [...] Read More... from Spinning Wheel

It's kinda fun to wake up each morning and see which judge — including many that Trump appointed — is ruling against Trump today. The nab seems to think that laws don't apply when he has something he wants to do and that he should be allowed to do it, whatever it is, just because [...] Read More... from Wednesday Morning

Tonight on TCM, they're saluting Chuck Jones, the director of many a great animated cartoon. That's not a photo of Chuck above. That's my pal Jerry Beck and he's co-hosting tonight's salute which includes a number of great short cartoons Mr. Jones directed along with features Gay Purr-ee and The Phantom Tollbooth. It all kicks [...] Read More... from Jonesing for Good Cartoons

Let's get off the subject of Trump and back to comics and other fun topics. Let's remind you that if you had a paid admission to Comic-Con International this year, you're eligible for Returning Registration for next year but you'll have to act soon. Our friends over at the San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog — [...] Read More... from Stuff Not About Trump

Did you watch Trump's speech before the United Nations. It had all the reps of the member nations looking like the audience watching the opening number of Springtime for Hitler. Here's what Fred Kaplan had to say about it. Here's a taste… He began with boasts that seemed meant for a domestic audience — and [...] Read More... from Fred Sez

I have this feeling that everyone reading this blog understands that Donald Trump's whining about "Fake News" is just an attack on those who correct his lies and report on facts he'd rather deny. What's more, I think most of his supporters who parrot his claims about "Fake News" kinda understand that you don't get [...] Read More... from The News About Fake News

You've probably seen the footage today of Trump giving a speech at the dedication of the new White House heliport. Because he banned CNN and two other news gatherers from the White House, there was no audio there…no microphones. CNN was supposed to be the pool news source that would cover the ceremony and share [...] Read More... from Today's Political Comment

The other day here, we heard — or at least, you heard if you clicked in the right places — four songs that remind me of my mother. Here's another hunk of memory with a song attached that will forever remind me of my father… I was ten years old and I had recently discovered [...] Read More... from Tales of My Childhood #30

They're about to revive Annie again on Broadway for the jillion-and-a-halfth time. Well, it's actually the fourth but it feels like a jillion and a half. It's also been filmed three times…four if you count the live TV version they did on NBC in 2021. Every time it's done, the press refers to it as [...] Read More... from Annie Again

In his last years, Orson Welles did a lot of things for money that you might have thought were beneath a gentleman of his stature. In 1978. he starred in this video for the folks at Caesars Palace teaching folks how to gamble…sort of. If all you knew about the games was what you could [...] Read More... from A Vegas Video

Here are four videos of rather old records. I'm going to embed them here and you can listen to them and then I'll explain what they have in common. Or you can scroll down and read the explanation first. Your call. The first of these is "A Horse in Striped Pyjamas" performed by Eddie Arnold [...] Read More... from Tales of My Childhood #29

John Oliver returns to the air tomorrow night. Here's Devin "Legal Eagle" Stone discussing the many lawsuits in which Mr. Oliver has been involved or still could be… [...] Read More... from Lawyer Stuff

I'm kinda losing track. Off the top of my head, I recall Trump starting The Iran War to distract people from focusing on The Epstein Files…and then we had this big matter about The Reflecting Pool so we and the news media would be talking about that instead of talking about The Iran War. Or [...] Read More... from Today's Political Post

This weekend marks thirty-eight years since the debut of what may turn out to be the best job I ever had in my life…and it sure doesn't feel like thirty-eight years. That feels about as true as any given Donald Trump promise but in this case, it's true. The Garfield and Friends cartoon show debuted [...] Read More... from Thirty-Eight Years??? Thirty-Eight Years???

For anyone young enough to be puzzled by a recent reference to a "typewriter" on this site, here's a demonstration of what that machine was like — and here's the only use they seem to have today… [...] Read More... from Study Guide

Here's the latest Fred Kaplan column. I don't know what to make of all this and apparently no one does… Secretary of the Air Force Troy Meink declared this week that the United States has weapons orbiting in outer space. It was the first time a U.S. official has publicly acknowledged this fact. The questions, [...] Read More... from Fred Sez

The men of Lemon Squeezy favor us with a selection from Hamilton… [...] Read More... from Something To Listen To…

Gary Cundall sent me a question from his iPhone. It goes, "Did you ever write something that Jack Kirby penciled?" Well, sort of. My partner of the time, Steve Sherman, and I plotted some sequences for Jimmy Olsen and other books Jack was doing then. I wrote up the "pitch" and a plot outline for [...] Read More... from ASK me: Writing for Jack

Another right-on-target rant from our man in the U.K., Jonathan Pie… [...] Read More... from A Piece o' Pie

Concerned that our government is either doing too little to deal with the challenge of Artificial Intelligence or too much? Then go read what Robert Reich has to say about it. Then go read what Paul Krugman has to say about what Robert Reich had to say about it. [...] Read More... from Intelligence — Artificial and Otherwise

Last night, Stephen Colbert guested on Jimmy Kimmel's show and presented him with a gift. On the set of his show, Colbert had a Captain America shield which was presented to him by Joe Quesada back when Joe was the head honcho at Marvel. Colbert said it had been hanging on a wall in the [...] Read More... from Shield Law

Netflix is now streaming all six seasons (135 episodes) of SCTV. I remember that show as being very. very good, especially in seasons two through five…but even those first and last ones always had a segment or two that was worth tuning in for… [...] Read More... from Stay Tuned!

COVID changed the world a lot and one thing it did was to create new uses for the Internet and programs like Zoom. I kinda liked the collaborations that emerged with a large band playing together with each of the musicians playing separately in their own homes. I posted a lot of them here but [...] Read More... from Isolation Orchestras

From October 25, 1993 — MTV takes a chance on a new talk program, The Jon Stewart Show. The series was produced by Madeleine Smithberg (creator of The Daily Show) and Lorne Michaels was among its executive producers. Stewart now talks about it as if it was a fsat failure but it was on for [...] Read More... from Earlier Jon

Someone who signs this name "Roger" sent me the following… My gal and I very much enjoyed Comic-Con this past July, in part because we for the most part avoided the trading floor and spent our time upstairs attending panels and presentations. A lot of the panels we attended were hosted and hosted quite well [...] Read More... from ASK me: Questions From the Floor

In the previous post, autocorrect autocorrected the word “folks” to “fools.” I have corrected the autocorrection. Thanks to all the fools — I mean folks — who follow figured it out and wrote to tell me. [...] Read More... from Fools Rush In

I'm not watching the Emmy Awards tonight and, as tomorrow's ratings will probably prove, I'm not alone in skipping this kind of show. The only thing that's usually of interest to me is that each year when these awards are being bestowed, the Academy posts on its website a list of every danged person they [...] Read More... from In Passing