I'm sure a lot of you have been waiting for me to come across a rendition of "Bohemian Rhapsody" played by 28 trombonists. Well, wait no longer — and thank Bill Lentz for telling me about this one…

This is the final part of my flashback to 2006 when I underwent Gastric Bypass Surgery. Before you dive into what follows, make sure you've read Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6 and Part 7. And if you've stuck with me this long, thanks for the sticking.

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So I began losing weight at a brisk clip — brisker than I'd imagined possible. Carolyn would look at me in bed and ask, "Where's Mark? What have you done with Mark?"

For at least ten days after the surgery — maybe a little longer — I had absolutely no appetite.  None.  Couldn't have downed a Hershey's Kiss if you'd demanded at gunpoint that I do so.  I didn't feel the least bit hungry, not even when folks around me were wolfing down chow that I once loved.  It wasn't so much that I was repulsed by food as that I just felt utterly indifferent to the concept of eating. Eventually, I did some nibbling, then some snacking…then finally, some actual, smaller-than-before meals.

I did, of course, hop on a bathroom scale at least once a day and notate how much less of me there was.  I can no longer find the little chart I kept but I recall it worked out to 65 pounds in the first 65 days and almost 75 in the first 75. The losses slowed but when I attended Comic-Con that year, I was a good fifty pounds under my weight on Gastric Bypass Day.  A lot of people commented on how much slimmer and healthier I looked.  A number of folks didn't seem to notice or care.

A few months after Comic-Con, Carolyn and I attended a play and we found ourselves seated next to an actress I knew well but hadn't seen in a year or two.  By this point, I was almost a hundred pounds below what I'd weighed the last time she saw me and we both waited for her to say something — anything! — that indicated she'd noticed but there was nothing.  Not a word.  Before the play started, we talked for a good twenty minutes and she didn't seem aware than I had lost almost as much as she probably weighed.

At Intermission, we all visited our respective rest rooms and when the actress returned to her seat next to me, she was over-the-top in telling me how great I looked, how wonderful it was that I'd dropped so much tummy, etc., all preceded by a "I was so happy to see you, I forgot to mention…"  It sounded clumsy and later, Carolyn confessed to me, "I couldn't stand her not noticing it any longer so I pointed it out to her when we were in the Ladies Room."

Getting back to that Comic-Con — actually, getting back to a time before the surgery — my splendid Dr. Preston had told me something that he felt I should know.  "Mark," he said, "you're going to lose at least a hundred pounds in the coming months.  There will be a major change in your appearance and while many people you know will cheer and congratulate you, you need to be prepared for something.  At least one person in your life — and it may be more than one or two — will hate you for it."

At some length — I can't re-create the whole speech here — he went on about how all people who have a wide circle of friends and acquaintances have within that circle, at least a few people who mask their own resentments and jealousy in order to "get along."  But sometimes when someone scores a big success or improves themselves the way I was (hopefully) about to improve me, the resentments and jealousies come bursting out.

I had never known Doc Preston to be wrong but I was still surprised by how right he was.  A couple of folks said pretty bitchy things, the worst coming from a writer I knew.  He stopped me, made mention of how many pounds I lost but said I'd pay the ultimate price for it.  Having read a few articles somewhere and thus becoming an expert, he said the surgery was a dangerous fad and I'd certainly die within a few years.  He could not conceal a suggestion in his smirk that it would serve me right for whatever I'd done he didn't like.  I think it was getting more work than he was getting just then.

The punchline to this story is, of course, that I am still here and this guy died in 2019.

One odd thing which happened to me — and doctors I've discussed this with have been at a loss to explain it — was that my sweet tooth went away.  I'd already given up  Coca-Cola and other soft drinks, and I never liked coffee or tea.  I tried fruit juices but increasingly, I found them too sweet.  For a while, I tried watering down orange juice but it got to the point where I decided to drop the O.J. and just drink only water. To this day, that's about all I drink.

Then around a year after the surgery, I was in Downtown Las Vegas and in need of lunch.  This is 2007, remember.  Buffets were no longer cost-effective for me — I couldn't eat enough to justify the price of the upscale ones but I liked making a selection of food before my eyes. When you have as many food allergies as I do, it's great to inspect something before you commit to its consumption. The Plaza Hotel was offering what they called their 7-7-7 Buffet for $7.77 and that seemed downscale enough for me.  I went in, paid and started with a not-huge plate of baked chicken, rice and carrots. I also ended with that one plate.

The lady who took away the dirty dishes took mine and said, "Time for seconds!"  I thought for a second, realized I was full and told her, "No, I don't think I'll be having seconds. Or thirds or fourths or even tenths."  She looked at me strangely and said, "I've been bussing dishes in buffets for twenty years and I've never seen anyone not go back for at least a second plate.  I've seen people do seven or eight but never one."

I said, "There's a first time for everything" and she said, "Well, then head over to the dessert table and help yourself there!"

I walked over to a spread that included several different kinds of cake slices, several different cuts of pie, dishes of chocolate pudding, tapioca pudding, bread pudding, butterscotch pudding, eclairs, custards, flan, cannoli, tiramisù, donuts, chocolate chip cookies, oatmeal cookies, about six flavors of cupcakes and a whole area where you could make your own sundae with about twenty toppings and a machine that output soft-serv ice cream in vanilla, chocolate or both in a swirl.  I stared at it for a moment and the dish-removal lady walked by saying, "Don't you want to eat just everything there?"

And I replied, amazing myself as much as it amazed her, "No."

Then and there, I realized I'd been eating such things lately not out of cravings but out of habit. Nothing within me cared about them. This was in 2007 and I haven't eaten anything like that since then with the following exception. Every week or so, I down one of these teensy cups…

But that's it and since I used to eat a lot of Orange Jell-O when I was a kid, I think I'm eating them now for the nostalgia, not the sugar. As I said, no doctor has ever been able to explain how G.B.S. took away my taste for sweet treats but I don't miss them…or other things (like sodas) I thought I couldn't give up.

My weight has gone up and down since then but it's down now and I'm going to do my darnedest to keep it down…and that's the end of my Gastric Bypass Story. But it's not the end of this article because I still need to tell you about Anna.

Anna was the lady I met in the hospital just before our respective surgical procedures. After we were each prepped for surgery, we were lying on adjoining gurneys for maybe twenty minutes talking — mainly about how she hoped to drop enough bulk quickly and find a second husband. Afterwards, we had adjoining rooms in the post-surgical wing and she was part of the little expeditions I led of very large (still) patients hiking around the floor our rooms were on. Most of us exchanged phone numbers and e-mail addresses but Anna was the only one with whom I had any communication after we both left the hospital.

It turned out, she left but had to go back a few times due to little post-surgical complications. I didn't but she did, the difference probably having something to do with her being older than I was but not as tall. She was simply not in as good shape when she had her G.B.S. than I was when I had mine. Yes, she lost weight and yes, she found a guy interested in marrying her. She wrote me that she looked wonderful and he was wonderful and life was wonderful and they were talking about adopting a wonderful child or two after they were wed…

…and that's what was in the last e-mail I ever received from her. She never replied to my replies and I'd like to think that was because she was too busy being with her new hubby and maybe that kid or two. There are other possibilities but I hope you'll join me in wanting to think that's why I never heard from her again.

In the 1920's, Buster Keaton made some of the most brilliant, innovative comedy movies anyone ever made. Then there was a crash and he made a lot of movies that were nowhere near as good and his career — and in some ways, his life — just went down, down, down for the rest of his life.

Film scholars debate just wha' happened. There's general agreement that he was harmed by — in no particular order — the coming of sound, the loss of control over his career and films, his marriage and personal life, changing tastes in film, alcohol and a few other factors. There is not general agreement as to which did him the most damage, how much of that damage was self-inflicted and how much of it was preventable. Here's a short video that offers some views of the downfall of one of the movie industry's greatest talents…

Several folks have written to ask me to post Woody Allen's tribute to Diane Keaton and a couple sent me copies of it, all formatted to fit on this blog.  But it doesn't belong to me and I respect Mr. Allen's right to control where his work appears…so no.  There are a number of news stories like this one and this one and this one (that last one may be paywalled) that excerpt from it and I suspect anyone can find the full, non-paywalled text with enough Googling.  But I ain't posting it here, thank you.

…to those who wanted to read the article to which I linked in the previous item but ran smack-dab, Wile E. Coyote style, into a paywall.  I somehow didn't hit it and had no way of knowing others would.  I also didn't realize Woody Allen had chosen to give it to a politically-controversial website…in fact, one that John Oliver eviscerated on his show last night.  I'll leave the link up but if anyone finds a non-paywalled source, lemme know.  I assume Mr. Allen just wanted it out there for people to read and didn't know enough about the Internet to know so many would have to subscribe or sign up for access.

As I'm sure you know by now, Diane Keaton died a few days ago. I have nothing but the obvious to say about her — great actress, lovely screen presence, was in some wonderful movies, etc. — but Woody Allen has plenty to say about her.

I'm not entirely sure what this is except that it's the theme song to one of my favorite cartoon shows…

Pat Kelly wrote to ask…

I saw a partial reprint of the DC First Issue Special where Jack Kirby created the new Manhunter. It had a very intriguing all-text last panel: "Want to see the clash between Manhunter and The Hog? If so, write and tell us! MANHUNTER / P.O. Box 336 / Newbury Park, Calif. 91320."

The California address makes me think this was Jack's own mailbox. Is that correct? Were you working with The King when he produced Manhunter? Do you recall what kind of response this got, why he wanted these sent to him directly instead of DC (I can guess that part) and what response if any Kirby made?

I was not actually working with Jack when he did that Manhunter story though I was visiting the Kirby home often and being of whatever help I could be to Jack and Roz. As I recall, the issues of First Issue Special where Jack introduced this version of Manhunter and another creation named Atlas received virtually no reaction at all.

Both were "pilot" issues Jack did at the request of then-publisher Carmine Infantino. DC was looking to expand their line to compete with Marvel's concurrent expansion so they had a lot of people doing pilot stories for potential new comics but they weren't willing to gamble on starting many of those proposals as new ongoing titles. A few of those pilots were launched as new comics. A few wound up as one-shot issues of First Issue Special. A few weren't printed then but they found places for the material later. A few wound up in two very-limited-edition books DC put together called Cancelled Comics Cavalcade. A few were never printed (or finished) at all.

That was Jack's P.O. Box number and I'm fairly sure it's no longer active. He got it — well, he had Roz rent it — because when he first arrived at DC, the company intended to keep the fan mail away from him. They didn't want it going to California where he was. They didn't want the letter pages in his books to be assembled by his assistants (i.e., my pal Steve Sherman and me). In fact, Steve and I wrote text pages for the first issues of New Gods, Forever People and Mister Miracle and without telling Jack, the New York office discarded what we wrote and had Marv Wolfman write a substitute. Jack, who was supposed to be the editor of those comics, didn't find out until those first issues were on sale.

Jack fought a lot of battles with DC and lost some pretty important ones. Getting control of the letter pages in his comics — though not Jimmy Olsen — was one of the less-important ones he won. When he did, he had Roz rent the P.O. Box and it was also used when Jack went back to Marvel and had a battle with certain folks in the editorial division about what went into the letter columns of the books he did for them there.

I don't know what Trump's so upset about. I didn't win the Nobel Peace Prize either and I've never bombed anyone or sent armed troops into American cities. If you want to know why he's claiming what he's claiming, Mark Hertling explains what happened with those seven wars and why the seven "peaces" of which Donald is so proud of still has people trying to kill other people.

Hertling's article was published a few weeks ago and is out of date on the supposed eighth war — the Israel/Gaza mess. Fred Kaplan updates us on that one and allows as how there has been some impressive progress in dialing that one down but they've got a long, long way to go.

The folks who make TiVos have announced they are no longer making TiVos. There are articles all over the 'net (like this one) that try to explain wha' happened to their marketplace but it seems to me they were done in by two factors. One was that almost every cable company in the world decided to offer its subscribers a proprietary digital video recorder and to make it difficult, if not impossible, to record and watch programs on anything else.

Over the years, I got my television programming from a number of different cable or satellite sources and any time anything wasn't working properly, the suppliers' first response was to junk my TiVos and use their devices. Once, more than fifteen years ago, a service technician on the phone for one provider told me his company had just purchased the TiVo company and was shutting it down. Even people working for Trump never lied so baldly.

I always refused to abandon TiVo. I checked out a number of cable-provider-supplied DVRs and every single one was grossly inferior to whatever the TiVo people were offering at the time. On several occasions, I'd tell a service person I didn't want the DVR they offered and they'd ship me one anyway and add it to my monthly bill. It was a battle I won several times in the short run but couldn't help but lose eventually. The other thing that did TiVo in was the shift to streaming services that required no hardware except for a "Smart" TV.

I was a TiVo user from the start. I remember demonstrating my first one for friends who dropped by, none of whom had heard of such a thing…but immediately wanted one. Before that first TiVo, if you wanted to record a TV show in order to time-shift your viewing, you had to do it with Betamax or VHS cassettes that were never easy to program or even to keep up with what was where on which tape. TiVo was just easier in every way. But now that's over and the TiVo company — whatever's left of it and whoever owns it this week — will focus on streaming protocols and other projects, no longer leading an industry or even being particularly prominent in one.

I had to toss in the towel and go to streaming a few years ago but I still have about eight different TiVos in my house or garage. I tell myself I'm keeping them around for when I have time to plug them in again and dub off the programs I still have stored on their hard disks. But I think the truth is that I have trouble throwing away an old friend…especially one who served me so well.

Here's one of my favorite Monty Python bits. I seem to be the only person on this planet who remembers that once — a long time ago, before most of America knew of Python — this video was used on The Dean Martin Show. As I recall it — and it's been a long time — Dean introduced it on-camera and then the video played with his voice replacing John Cleese's.

Martin's producer Greg Garrison worked a number of deals with British television, some of them involving Marty Feldman and using BBC video of him on American television programs. This bit was funnier with Cleese than it was with Dino…

Once upon a time, the Republican Party branded a man named Al Gore a "congenital liar" and therefore unfit to be President because he claimed that the main characters in the book Love Story were based on himself and his wife. And it didn't matter one bit that the truth was that (a) Gore hadn't claimed that; he'd claimed correctly that some reporters had said that and (b) the author Erich Segal said that the characters were partially based on the Gores. Today, many who call themselves Republicans are perfectly satisfied with a Chief Exec who claims that…

• Babies are given 82 vaccines in a single shot, the doses are the size of two glasses of water, Amish people don't need vaccines and other false "facts" about vaccinations.
• Every single "Venezuelan drug boat" that he bombs would have killed 25,000 Americans.
• He's settled seven wars — or eight if you count the Gaza one which seems far from being actually settled.
• "We're going to be reducing the costs of medicines by 100%, 200, 300, 500% and even more than that."
• The Big, Beautiful Bill he signed into law earlier this year ensures no tax on Social Security.
• Joe Biden never ever said the U.S. had the strongest military in the world, tried to get rid of "Space Force" and gave $350 billion in aid to Ukraine.
• He [Trump] raised what member nations contribute to support NATO,
• 25 million migrants entered the country under Biden.
• He [Trump] authored a book in 2000 that predicted what Osama Bin Laden was going to do.

…and many more. Above fact checks can be found here, here and here.

This is the seventh (!) in a series of what I can now say with some (but not total) certainty will be an eight-part recounting of the gastric bypass operation that I underwent in 2006. I suggest reading the earlier chapters before you read this one: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5 and Part 6.

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This installment starts with me waiting in a waiting room for the moment they would begin prepping me for Gastric Bypass Surgery. I was waiting there for a long time.

And I just realized I misspelled a word there. I meant to put about twenty-seven Ns in the word "long."  It sure felt like forever but finally my name was called — mispronounced but called. I was led to a room where I took off my clothes and put on the first hospital gown I'd worn in many years that was not way too small on me. The Gastric Bypass Division knew their customers.

A few feet from me, being prepped for the same procedure, was a lady we'll call Anna who weighed about the same as I did but she was a foot shorter and ten years older.  After being separately gowned, we wound up spending some time on adjoining gurneys — instant friends because of all we had in common.  Her end of the conversation called to mind what my Dr. Preston had said about folks who have this kind of operation expecting it will change every single thing in their lives they could hope would change.  What Anna hoped would change — immediately, if not sooner — was her marital status.

She wanted it to move A.S.A.P. from Divorced to Wed and I got the feeling one of the reasons she was talking to me was to see if I could be the reason for the changeover.  Her divorce, she told me as she seemed to be telling everyone, had been because she'd "let herself go." If she'd kept herself at or about the poundage when she and Bill were married, there'd still be a Bill in her life.

Was all that true?  Beats me.  But she seemed charming and, particularly if she dropped 100+ pounds, probably a good catch for anyone seeking a mate in her age range.  I tend to think that relationships rarely end for only one reason…unless, of course, they only happened for one reason in the first place.  I hoped for her sake that Husband #2 came along as swiftly as she seemed to expect.

Our chat was interrupted by hospital officials sweeping in and out with forms we had to sign before we went under our respective knives…though mine and probably hers wouldn't employ knives.  It was to be was laparoscopic surgery — tiny, quickly-disappearing scars, not huge forever ones.  We did though have to consent to our procedures switching to the old-fashioned, filet-you-open method should our presiding surgeons suddenly deem it a necessity.  I heard that when a patient awakens after the surgery, the first thing most of them ask is, "Were they able to do it laparoscopically?"

That's not what I asked. A nurse in the recovery room told me I asked, "Can we send out for pizza?" That sounds like me and I'm sure I meant it as a joke.

What happened from the moment I awoke in that room to the moment I left the hospital is blurry now and it was blurry then. I recall being transported to a wing of the hospital where patients who'd had done what I'd had done stayed, post-bypass, for a few days. Anna was across the hall from me and there were other rooms with oversized patients who'd probably be dwindling in girth in the months that followed.

We were encouraged to get up and walk as soon as we could and it somehow fell to me to be the drill sergeant for this activity. Every ninety minutes or so, I'd go door-to-door in that wing and round up a gang to go hike around our floor. All the other G.B.S. patients there at the time were women, all (still) very large and we were all wearing these huge, unsightly paisley gowns. We must have looked like quite the sideshow, marching about like that. Every time we passed a nurses' station, I'd announce something like, "We're going to all get into one elevator and see if we can make it buzz!" Or "We're making a break for Jerry's Deli across the street!"

Sunday morning, I was told to go home though some in our wing who'd been there as long or longer were not. Anna, for instance, was staying. Phone numbers and e-mail addresses were exchanged but I didn't stay in touch with anyone except Anna. My lovely friend Carolyn picked me up in a taxicab — remember taxicabs — and we drove not to my house but to my mother's.

My mother then was 84 years old, somewhat frail and was hospitalized for one thing or another about every four months. I had made the decision not to tell her of my elective surgery, though I did tell her personal physician. I figured it would just worry her so I made my usual daily phone calls to her every day and didn't mention that I was phoning from a hospital bed. Now that it was over, Carolyn and I went to tell her and she got a little emotional but thanked me for not telling her until I'd been discharged. She asked if there was any way she could help me and I said, "Yes!"

We had a little ritual. Every time I took her home from the hospital, she wouldn't consider herself officially "Home" until I'd cut the hospital's wristband off her wrist. Now, I pulled up my shirt cuff to expose mine, handed her the scissors I always used and asked her to cut mine off me. She laughed and cried and it was the moment I think I remember most vividly from the whole experience.

What I remember second-most-vividly was the weight loss. I'll tell you how that went in what will be our final chapter in this whole saga…unless it isn't.

Most folks know of Rocky and Bullwinkle but are unaware that the show on which Moose and Squirrel were first featured was called Rocky and His Friends. It's the form in which I first discovered those characters and the wonderful world of Jay Ward and Bill Scott. The video below is a complete half-hour episode (including commercials) the way the show was when I became an avid watcher.

It went on the air on ABC as of November 19, 1959, airing at 4:30 in the afternoon two days a week. In September of 1961, it made the jump to fringe prime time on NBC, Sunday evenings at 7 PM and this is when Dudley Do-Right became a part of the proceedings. Later on, it was syndicated in several different packages, a few of which incorporated elements of shows produced by a company called Total Television. The Total Television material (like The World of Commander McBragg) was animated by the same animation company in Mexico that animated most of the Ward product. This has caused some confusion in the marketplace as to which were Jay Ward cartoons and which were Total — but this half-hour is all Jay Ward.

You may notice in the end voice credits, there's no mention of Daws Butler. Daws was heard in the Fractured Fairy Tale and also in a commercial that used characters from Ward's Aesop & Son cartoons. Ordinarily, Charles Ruggles supplied the voice of Aesop while Daws did the Son and other roles but in this commercial, he imitated Ruggles and did both parts. At the time, Daws was voicing so many shows for Hanna-Barbera that he decided to have them leave his name off the second season of Rocky and His Friends.

Anyway, here's the format in which I first met some of my favorite characters in my favorite cartoons…

I may put a few of these up today to make up for a paucity of them here recently.   This is the episode of the game show I've Got a  Secret for March 25, 1963 which someone just posted to YouTube — and by "just," I mean less than a half-hour before I noticed it there. I have not seen this since — and these are real numbers — it aired 62 years, 6 months and 14 days ago when I was 11 years and 23 days old.

Nevertheless, the moment I saw that composer Meredith Willson was the celebrity guest, I instantly remembered what his "secret" was and I remembered the name of Mr. Somerstein who played such an important role in it. I also remembered that Mssrs. Willson and Somerstein came back on a later episode and did a kind of sequel to the stunt on this one.

I enjoy a lot of the reruns of this series, probably to a large part because I recall them as a kid. Garry Moore was a great host and the panelists were all terrific, especially Bill Cullen, who they usually had go last because he so often guessed the secret. In fact, I've seen episodes where I believe Cullen figured out the secret-to-be-guessed right away but played dumb so as to get some laughs and/or not ruin the playing of the game or have the show, which was broadcast live, run short. If you watch the whole episode, you'll see him guess the second secret the minute it's his turn.

If you do want to watch the whole episode, either click here and it will play on your screen or watch the embed below which I've configured to start with the Meredith Willson spot late in the show, then move the slider back to the beginning. There's nothing earth-shattering here; just a good example of a kind of game show that they don't make any more, where you were watching people being playful and clever instead of watching someone try to win a million dollars and a Porsche…