Donald Trump cheering on the Vivek Ramaswamy ad. I can’t wait to see what The Daily Show will make of this, probably tonight.

I’ve been posting links to some videos featuring great (I think) show tunes penned by Alan Jay Lerner and Fritz Loewe. Here’s a few minutes of those two gents telling — well, it’s either Will Jordan or Ed Sullivan — how they wrote My Fair Lady…

I hoped Vivek Ramaswamy would lose the upcoming election for the same reason I hope all the Trump supporters/enablers will lose.  But now I’m especially hoping Ramaswamy will lose and people will say “It was because of that dirty, misleading attack ad he hurled at his opponent” and that will make future elections a bit cleaner. It’s a lot to hope for, I suppose.  But elections in this country have become a festival of sliming and misrepresenting your opponent and anything that could tone that down would be a good thing.  When the current Republican governor of Ohio condemns an ad by someone running to be the new Ohio governor, that’s proof the guy who wants to be elected the new governor shouldn’t be.

I never thought Donald Trump’s approval rating could sink this low.  It’s down around the national approval rating for Painful Rectal Itch and the way he’s acting these days, it wouldn’t surprise me if it sank lower.  Even people who approve of the man’s political agenda have to be concluding he’s outta his freakin’ mind.

Are the polls wrong?  Any individual pollster can be and some certainly have been.  But almost all of them?  Including Fox News and others that have kissed this man’s keester?  I don’t think so.

What made me think he’d never lose this much of his base is a couple of encounters with now-former friends I thought wouldn’t abandon him if he gift-wrapped the nuclear codes and presented them to Putin for his birthday.  But I see on Facebook that at least one of those ex-acquaintances is praying  for a sky-colored tsunami.  I’m guessing it was the cost of a full tank for his Hummer that did it. 

I try not to be dangerously optimistic but the polls make that difficult — especially the ones that say around 66% of Americans think Trump is using his position for monetary gain.  I haven’t seen him asked about that but I assume he’d say that as the only good president this nation has ever had, he deserves every cent he’s made plus his name and/or face on everything he wants it on.  It’s going to be an interesting Election Night.  I can’t wait to see him simultaneously claim the vote was rigged and that every single thing that’s gone wrong is all Joe Biden’s fault.

It’s been a while since The Daily Show had this much of the kind of news that makes for great Daily Show segments…

In my folder of questions submitted for me to answer under this heading, I have a number asking me to name the folks I think are the ten — or twenty or some other number — all-time Best Comic Book Artists. I see such lists all over the Internet and most of them strike me as having been made up by folks who think "comic books" are only super-hero and adventure in nature and who couldn't properly place the great illustrators of Disney or "funny animal" comics on such a list because they've never heard of any of them except (maybe) Carl Barks and (even less likely) Warren Kremer. Some of them don't even seem to think that Archie Comics or Harvey Comics or Dell Comics about ducks even qualify as "comic books."

I'll grant you that some of the artists who I think are being overlooked did their best work in comics that didn't have credits. The late Harvey Eisenberg was as good at drawing Tom & Jerry or Hanna-Barbera comics (or others) as John Buscema was at drawing Conan or Gil Kane was at drawing the eighty zillion different comics Gil Kane drew. But an awful lot of people reading this don't know who Harvey Eisenberg was.

Or Pete Alvarado or Kay Wright or Owen Fitzgerald or Jack Manning or Howie Post or Dan DeCarlo or Marty Taras or John Carey or…well, it's a long list.

I'm not saying you have to know all those names but don't pretend you're an expert on comics when you're only an expert on some kinds of them. Imagine someone compiling their list of "The Fifty Greatest Sports Athletes of All Time" and it's only baseball players.

The term "comic books" includes books that are comical. When E.C. Comics was at its peak, one Dell comic book — Walt Disney's Comics and Stories — was outselling all the E.C. Comics collectively published in a month and I think there was greatness in its pages.

I have some serialized topics I'm behind on. When I finish them, I'm going to start spotlighting some of those writers and artists on this blog. I know there are a lot of folks out there who feel the same way I do; that you don't have to draw super-heroes to be a great comic book artist. I may invite some of you to assist me.

For years now, The Lincoln Project has produced powerful anti-Trump commercials. This new one strikes me as one of the most powerful ones they've done…

So here’s what Fred Kaplan has to say today…

Russian President Vladimir Putin has thrown Donald Trump a bone that’s so big and juicy, Trump must feel sorely tempted to chase it —- but it’s laced with so much poison that even Trump might calm himself and resist.

The bone, according to the Wall Street Journal, is the proposal of a tripartite summit — just Putin, Trump, and Chinese President Xi Jinping — to plot in an ending to the Russia–Ukraine war.

And Fred goes on to say that the ending they'd be plotting would be victory for Putin and surrender by Ukraine. For which, I'm thinking, Trump would immediately demand several Nobel Peace Prizes. There's a terrible deal.

Micki Dee St. James wrote to ask me…

Do you think it’s better for a writer to be interested in almost everything or should they try to specialize in some area?

Hmm…I think a writer should be interested in whatever he or she is interested in. There are a zillion things that don't interest me in the slightest and anything I'd write about them would almost certainly be pretty worthless. If I write about the things that do interest me, there's at least a chance that I'd say something interesting or enlightening about them.

A writer should let their areas of interest expand organically.

One of the things I enjoy about doing this blog is that it's all about things that interest me. It's the same reason I host a lot of panels at Comic-Con. There are hundreds of panels on that convention's schedule that don't interest me in the slightest. The sixteen panels I hosted this year or participated in were all panels that interested me.

I could diversify my areas of interest (I suppose) but I don't think that would make me a better writer. You kind of have to let your passions lead you. Does that answer your question?

Saturday was "Returning Registration" day for Comic-Con International 2027 — the day when folks who had paid admissions to Comic-Con 2026 could compete online to be there in San Diego next year.  The sale didn't last long.  The competition started at 9:00 AM and at 9:34, all the badges for Preview Night were sold out.

All the available badges for Saturday were gone by 10:02 and six minutes later, Friday was gone.  Thursday sold out at 10:21 and five minutes later, Sunday was done and it was all over.

"Open Registration" — when anyone can vie for prizes — is November 14 and the badges will probably sell out with the same speed.  I don't think it's the number of people online that determines the pace.  I think it has more to do with how the software operates, which seems to be like the "Randomizer" on the game show, The Floor.  Either way, there will be no point in doing what someone wrote me they did, which was to get around to logging in around 11 AM.

I wonder how many badges they could sell if that convention center and the infrastructure of San Diego tourism could accommodate everyone who wants in.  When I was in the hospital last year, I had some of my gear in a bag the convention gave me with its name and logo on the outside.  Every doctor, nurse, orderly, food deliverer or person who dropped by to stab me for blood who noticed the bag said something like, "You got into Comic-Con?  Oh, wow — I hear it's great and I'd love to go sometime but I hear it's impossible to get in!"

If everyone who wants to could, it might be in the millions.  But then I also wonder if the fact that it's so hard to get in is one of the main things that makes some people want to.

Some time ago on this blog, I wrote about Resort Fees at hotels, especially in Las Vegas. It was kind of a warning. You see them advertise hotel rooms for $39 a night and you think, "Wow! That's cheap! Let's book a trip to Vegas, Gertrude!" And you don't realize that $39 figure doesn't include tax — and more importantly, it doesn't include a mandatory $55 "Resort Fee" that gives you two free bottles of water, free wi-fi, use of the gymnasium and a couple of other amenities and those are worth way less than $55 to you. Your $39-a-night room will actually run you over a hundred bucks a night.

And the latest news out of Vegas is that the Resort Fees and some other hidden costs have hurt business enough that some hotels are starting to get rid of them. That sounds great but not all hotels and not all the time.

And that probably won't change because Vegas is becoming less and less competitive, hotel-wise. Over half of the 32 strip casinos are owned by just two companies — MGM Resorts and Caesar's Entertainment Corp. So the doing-away with Resort Fees is at best temporary and more likely just another desert mirage.

Did I ever explain here why they tack on Resort Fees instead of just raising the rates? Well, first of all, it's to trick you into thinking your $39 room is going to cost you $39 but there's another reason. It's because a lot of rooms are booked through third-party agencies like hotels.com or Kayak. Those agencies get a cut of the room rates but they don't get a cut of the Resort Fees. If the room rate is $100 a night, the outside agency gets a percentage of that hundred bucks. But if the same room is $40 plus a $60 resort fee, the outside agency only gets its cut of the $40.

Cute, huh?

Most of Vegas is still way overpriced. There are some sporadic bargains because traffic is still down a lot because of what some call "The Gouge."  It's called that because they're gouging their guests. So they're offering bargains that, upon closer inspection, aren't really bargains. Or if they are, they have some way of gouging you from another direction. If an offer looks to be too good to be true, it's probably one of those.

This morning was Returning Registration for Comic-Con 2027, meaning that folks who had paid memberships for 2026 could participate in a lottery for badges for next year. Naturally, the available badges quickly sold out. Naturally, some people didn't get what they wanted. And naturally, some people are really, really mad about this. I saw one online complainer who thinks Trump is on to something with his talk about nuking San Diego.

I understand the anger/frustration/helplessness/etc. But it's a simple matter of math: The convention center can only hold X number of attendees and 3X or 4X — or probably more — would like to attend. Not everyone who wants to attend Super Bowl can get seats either.

(Fun Fact: Tickets for Comic-Con run $29 to $79 per day.  Tickets for the Super Bowl are $5,200 and up.  The cheapest tickets for a day at Disneyland are $104.  If you cuss at Comic-Con, you could at least acknowledge that they'd still sell out if they hiked prices to the stratosphere…but they don't.)

I don't have any ideas how they could make the process fairer and neither do folks who are a lot smarter than I am.  I can remind you that tickets are available for WonderCon Anaheim in late March.  It's the "little sister" con run by the same people.  I can also point out that if Comic-Con could somehow magically arrange for twice as many people to get into that convention center, they'd (a) still be turning thousands away and (b) also have to magically double or even triple the number of hotel rooms, parking spaces, access roads, etc.

It's just one of those unsolvable problems.  If you got shut out, try try again.  Open Registration — where anyone, not just returning attendees can try for badges — is on November 14.

Someone — in this case, a writer named Dave Abramson — has finally written a book about Sammy Petrillo. And it's not just a book. It's a meticulously researched work that tells you just about every film the man made, every night club he worked, every partner with whom he teamed. He teamed with a lot of people but most notably, a gent named Duke Mitchell. Together, Mitchell and Petrillo starred in a movie with the irresistible title of Bela Lugosi Meets a Brooklyn Gorilla.

Did you ever see it? It's one of those movies where the enjoyment is trying to figure out what the people who made it were thinking. That is apart from the fact that in 1952, it might be lucrative to make a Martin and Lewis movie without stupid old Martin and Lewis.

That was possible because Sammy Petrillo, especially at that age, bore an uncanny resemblance to Jerry Lewis. Duke Mitchell didn't look that much like Dean Martin but he could sing and sort of replicate Dean's sheer presence. And besides, no one was really watching him. They were all staring at Sammy and thinking, "My God! That guy looks just like Jerry Lewis!"

Even Jerry Lewis thought so. He hired Sammy a couple times to be in sketches and later — it is alleged — took some steps to subvert Sammy's career. Mr. Abramson's book has a lot in it about what Jerry was doing while Sammy was trying to eke out a living as a performer, mostly in night clubs and the ass end of show business.

It is not a wonderful movie but it's an interesting movie. A few years ago, my pal Leonard Maltin had a film festival at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. The idea was to showcase interesting movies that weren't seen in theaters often enough. One evening, they showed Absolute Beginners, a 1986 British film that I liked and which a lady friend of mine wanted to see.

Absolute Beginners was followed by the showing of a pristine, never-saw-it-look-this-good print of You-Know-Who Meets You-Know-What and I asked her if she'd mind if we stayed for at least a little of it. She graciously indulged me and then as we watched the film, she whispered "Can we go now?" to me about every 120 seconds. We left maybe fifteen minutes into it. If I'd kept her there any longer, she'd have bolted for the door, called an Uber and never spoken to me again.

That may or may not be your reaction to it. Here's an embed of the entire film and if it doesn't play, just go to Google and do a search for one of several dozen other copies of it on the Internet. Alas, none of them are made from that pristine, never-saw-it-look-this-good print. Some look like the film was transferred to flammable nitrate stock, set ablaze and then digitized for home viewing…

He sure looks and even sounds like Jerry, doesn't he?

This is a real good book for anyone with the slightest interest in Sammy, Jerry, Bela, low-budget filmmaking, the night club circuit in the fifties and after or just what some performers have to do for money at times. And like all good books these days about show biz, it has a superb cover by Drew Friedman. You can order a copy from Amazon at this link.

The other day here, I posted a video made by some folks in the audience when Barry Manilow abruptly walked off stage at the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas and the rest of his show was cancelled.  Last night, those folks went back to see him return to that stage and here's a video they made…

The Daily Show recaps where we were with the Iran War when it started leading up to where we are now…