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…

So…Barry Manilow seems to be back performing on stage in Vegas at the Westgate. Good for him. And the comedian Carrot Top is reportedly resuming his shows at the Lexus next week. On September 18, he was hospitalized due to what the media has reported as a "suicide attempt." I don't know what happened there and I don't think I want to know.

If you want to know what the Inflation Rate currently is in this country — or certain other economic indicators — don't listen to anyone running for office or fighting for others running for office. Go read Paul Krugman. Here's an excerpt from his latest Substack — and, just in case you couldn't guess, "B.L.S." stands for "Bureau of Labor Statistics"…

…Trump's response to the dismal inflation news — even worse for him politically because of the extravagant promises he made in the past — is denial: He keeps insisting that inflation is way down. Is he deliberately lying, or does he truly not know what's going on? We shouldn't rule out the latter possibility. Bear in mind that Trump doesn't read, and he certainly doesn't read B.L.S. data releases. And while he presumably has aides who do know what the numbers say, are they willing to tell him things he doesn't want to hear? Probably not.

My guess is that Trump believes he derives his power from being able to keep a certain kind of voter angry and in total fear of what any leader not named Trump will do. So he says what he thinks will accomplish that and it really doesn't matter if it's true or not. He's like a used car salesman who believes his job is to sell you that 1998 Buick with 400,000 miles on it no matter what it takes.

I'm busy today…not quite Mushroom Soup Can busy but busy enough that there might not be much on this blog for the next day or three. This condition will not persist for long.

I just read this on Paul Krugman's Substack and I thought it might be of interest to those of you who don't follow Paul Krugman's Substack..

…the big news on U.S. foreign policy was that Trump announced that he was buying 300,000 tons of Russian diesel. He's not allowed to do this: Sanctions preventing purchase of Russian oil are law, not a choice on Trump's part. But under Trump, laws are suggestions at most, so it might happen anyway. In any case, the main lesson here, as Phillips O'Brien explains, is that Trump isn't even hiding the fact that he is supporting Putin's war of aggression against Ukraine.

But being a nerdy economist, my first printable reaction to the announcement was, 300,000 tons??? That's a bit over 2 million barrels. America consumes approximately 4 million barrels of distillates — diesel (mostly) and heating oil — every day.

So Trump is betraying an embattled democracy, demonstrating our faithlessness to the whole world, seriously damaging whatever is left of America's leadership in the world, for the sake of maybe 12 hours' worth of diesel. Really?

Of course, Trump and those around him don't care about the national interest. But I would strongly guess that they didn't do the math, that 300,000 tons sounded like a lot to them and that they had no idea that it was trivial for an economy the size of America's. I might add that this is general issue with Trump: he often touts trivial policies as major achievement, and it often seems obvious that he has no idea how big America and the world are.

Arithmetic, I guess, suffers from Trump derangement syndrome.

If I were making commercials for the Democratic Party, I think I'd do one quoting these numbers to sell a simple concept: Trump is always pretending he's solving problems when he really isn't. He's probably made most of his supporters think he repealed and replaced Obamacare, too. And no, I have no idea what I'm doing up at this hour. I'm going to bed…

For many years now, Barry Manilow has appeared at the Westgate Hotel in Las Vegas, playing to sold-out houses whenever he could. Various medical problems have kept him from doing that all the time.

Last Thursday night, he returned to the stage there after a six-week absence. Things I've read on the 'net suggest that age (he's 83) and illness have taken their toll on his stage presence. His fans are paying pretty high prices for seats if only just to be able to say they saw Barry Manilow live. They're quite forgiving that…well, let's put this as delicately as I can: He's showing that age.

I got to say I saw his show there in 1996 and as I wrote then in this article, I thought he put on a helluva good concert. But like his song says, "That was thirty years ago when they used to have a show." I have not been back to see him since because I figured he couldn't top what I saw in '96 and also because good seats nowadays run around $400 (and up) apiece.

Anyway, at last Friday night's performance, that bought you two songs. Mr. Manilow took the stage, no doubt to wild applause and love from folks who associate his song catalog with happy memories. He sang two songs — "It's a Miracle" and "I'm Your Man" — then muttered something about "Talk amongst yourselves" and staggered off stage. The orchestra played music for a while as a stunned, concerned houseful of Barry Manilow fans worried about him and maybe about what they'd paid to get in. Then a voice announced "Due to circumstances beyond our control, that will be the conclusion of tonight's show."

Here's a video posted by two folks who were in the audience and here's a cautionary note: You may find his condition sad or you may find it admirable that he's still out there, performing and trying to give his fans what they want. My reaction to this was a little of the latter but a lot of the former…

No announcement was made that evening about refunds or how he was or anything. Reportedly, Ticketmaster is now issuing refunds but if I was a big enough fan of his to pay $400+ a seat, I think I'd be wondering if I'd just been present for his last performance. Or maybe what should be his last performance.

Like I said, I view it as mostly sad. It was a sad evening for those who bought tix for it…who maybe made the trip to Vegas just to see him. I might have felt that way even if he had finished the show.

People close to Johnny Carson say that he quit when he did because he'd seen too many comedians "stay too long at the fair." That was the term for continuing to perform when you can no longer deliver what audiences expect of you and you're trampling on the memory of how good you used to be. His longtime producer Fred DeCordova told me that was always a concern of Johnny's; how he felt that men who were once his heroes — Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Groucho, Milton Berle, Red Skelton (et al) — stayed too long at the fair. Fred quoted Johnny as saying the only one of those guys who stopped performing before it got discomforting was George Burns.

In a blog post here a few years ago, I mentioned how someone in Barry's operation had offered to arrange free V.I.P. meet-and-greet passes for me and a loved one to see Barry but then never made good on that offer.  I think if I got that offer now, I'd politely decline.  That is, if there even are future performances by "The Copacabana Guy."  I'm not suggesting there should be.

You're probably familiar with the work of the great writer-cartoonist James Thurber…but have you ever seen him interviewed? I'm not sure I had before I came upon this video…

Seth Meyers is off this week. Apparently, he's trying to break Johnny Carson's old record at taking vacations. But he and his crew left us a 40-minute video to remind us what a terrible president Donald Trump has been…

My pal Gary Sassaman is back with another installment of "Tales From My Spinner Rack," a series in which he discusses the comic books he liked as a kid…and it more or less parallels the comic books I liked what I was a kid.  This time out, he wades into the impossible (I believe) question of when "The Golden Age of Comic Books" ended and then when
"The Silver Age of Comics" began.

It's an impossible task because everyone seems to have different ideas about that and there's no controlling authority that can say which designation is right.  And to complicate it more, the "Silver Age" of Superman didn't necessarily start when the "Silver Age" of Batman did and so on.  I won't even tiptoe into that mine field but I do hold, half-seriously, to the theory that the "Silver Age" ended in 1970.

Why?  Because 1970 is when I got into the comic book industry.  That's as good a marker as any.  Go see what Gary has to say…

The newest Fred Kaplan column is about how Lindsey Graham kissed a lot of Trump Butt to persuade the orange prez to aid Ukraine against Russia…and now that Graham's gone, Trump is aiding Russia against Ukraine.  Sample paragraph…

If it's possible for a dead man to roll over in his grave, Lindsey Graham must be doing just that. In the last few years of life, he sold his soul, abandoned his principles, and betrayed his best friend, all for the sake of getting close to Donald Trump and swaying him to embrace Ukraine and punish Russia. Yet now, after a few months of resting in peace, assured that the bootlicking had been worth it, he sees the president emphatically embracing Russia and punishing Ukraine, so intently that he probably had his fingers crossed all along.

And congrats to Fred for writing one of the few articles these days about Trump that held off  using some phrase about throwing someone under a bus until its second paragraph.

Here's a reminder: If you had a paid membership to Comic-Con International in San Diego this past July, you're eligible for Returning Registration for the one next July!  The scramble to get those badges takes place this coming Saturday. Find out how it works and make sure you have a Member I.D. in advance. You can find out all about this on this page.  Then let the games begin!

This blog may be offline and unreachable for short periods of time over the next few days. Someone along the path between me and you is upgrading some things and fixing others. Any outages you experience should not last long.

Randy Rainbow is back with a new musical lament and it's one of his best…