For those of you unfamiliar with this ancient custom I invented, I put up a picture of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup when I figure on being too busy to post much here for a while. In this case, it's busy plus dealing with a computer crash. I'm coming to you from my backup computer while I deal with repairing my main one. I'll be back when I'm back, which I trust will not be long.

Bill Boggs has been interviewing people all over television for decades, often without proper notice. This video is a rather serious conversation he had with Neil Simon just before Simon's Chapter Two opened on Broadway. That would place this chat in late 1977.

If you watch it, you might keep in mind that Simon's marriage to actress Marsha Mason, which was the subtext of Chapter Two, had about three years left in it before they divorced. He also makes reference to the efforts for peace between Anwar Sadat and Menachem Begin which at the time of this interview looked like they were going to work out, too.

Here's Gene Autry with one of my favorite Christmas songs…

I'm not going to post a lot more about Gun Control because like I said, I don't think this is going anywhere. But Alan Jacobs makes two good points over at The American Conservative. If we do institute any sort of Gun Control in this country, the problem we should be trying to solve is not the Newtown tragedies so much as it is the many shootings that happen on an individual basis every day.

And before I leave this topic — and leave it, I will — the dumbest idea I've heard is the notion that we should arm teachers. If an Adam Lanza had burst into any of my classrooms with guns blazing…well, I can't think of a single teacher I ever had who would instantly turn into the Clint Eastwood of the movies and be able to expertly pick him off without shooting more of the pupils than he did. I'll admit I don't know as much about guns as some people but I do know they ain't as easy to grab, ready and fire as the cop shows make them out to be. It's hard enough to find good teachers these days and if we add into the requirements that they have to learn how to shoot and also be ready to serve as armed security guards…

One of the best teachers I had in high school was a man named Mr. Miller who taught Science the way every teacher should teach Science…but that was all he could do. On rainy days, he had to put on a slicker and go out to the parking lot and direct traffic, and this invariably led to him directing one car to back into another. He could teach you Newton's Third Law of Motion but not understand how it might apply to a Buick. Put a pistol in his hands and you'd have dead students everywhere without even the need for a crazed loner with assault weapons.

Jonathan Chait is just as pessimistic as I am about meaningful Gun Control and does a better job of explaining why.

I would like to slightly amend my previous pessimism that we're ever going the change gun laws in this country. I said there that the only thing I could imagine that might spur some action would be the emergence of some brave, charismatic leader to champion Gun Control…and by the way, I don't think that person could be Barack Obama or anyone thought of as a liberal partisan. It would have to be someone who could "win" without it being a "win" for the Democrats.

But it occurs to me there's a more likely (sadly) scenario that could get a Gun Control bill passed: More shootings.

Let's say the tragedy in Newtown now has 75% of the country thinking something needs to be done. That's probably high but let's say it's that. A week after all the funerals, it'll be 65% and a month later, 55%. 55% ain't gonna do it. It would take a steadier stream to the point where people were genuinely worried that sooner or later, someone would go crazy with an AK-47 in their vicinity.

Even then — here comes more pessimism — what law would they pass? It would be a token effort…something about more background checks and about how you can't buy a clip that holds 100 rounds of ammo. You'd have to buy two fifties. New York Mayor Bloomberg is in favor of Gun Control. He's the guy who thought he was making a dent in the problem of people drinking too much Pepsi by making them buy two Mediums instead of one Large.

Right now, the folks calling for Gun Control strike me as being not unlike the folks yelling to "repeal and replace" Obamacare. Okay, so show us the proposal. Draw up a rough summary of what you would do, get some experts to sign off on it and put it online as a PDF for much of the country to read and rally behind. That would be a starting point for a real change as opposed to something cosmetic. But I don't even expect that to happen. Not even if we have one Newtown a month.

A few minutes with Carl Reiner on a 1967 episode of The Merv Griffin Show. The lady is Genevieve, a French singer and actress who did very little singing or acting, at least in this country. Jack Paar found her charming in a ditsy way and would have her on often, usually to make fun of her English and her unawareness of certain American customs. When Paar left the airwaves, Merv inherited her and she was frequently in his guest chair. This was back when people went on talk shows when they weren't plugging anything.

We get confused here once in a while. A week or so ago, I posted Tales of My Mother #8 here. This morning, I opened up the folder in which I keep drafts of postings I'm working on, saw it there and forgot I'd already posted it. So I did a bit of a rewrite and expanded it somewhat, then posted it here. Informed of this by many of you, I've gone back and deleted the earlier version. The ninth installment will follow soon…for the first time.

My mother was a very intelligent woman and until about the last six weeks of her life, she was in possession of darn near all her mental faculties. As I've mentioned here, I spent much of the last decade hearing many of her many doctors hint or even state that she wouldn't be around much longer. She outlived all those predictions and even outlived one of those doctors.

In the last few months, two things made me realize they were the last few months. One was her primary care physician Dr. Wasserman changing his tone. He never said "Your mother's going to die soon" but he didn't have to. To be a good doctor, you obviously have to know a lot about how the human body works and what kind of pill or procedure fixes this or that. You also have to know how to talk to patients and their loved ones; how not to exaggerate or underplay what you know with reasonable certainty. I once asked my own doctor if in Medical School, he had to attend classes called "Breaking Bad News." He said yes, sort of. They weren't called that and there weren't enough of them…but it was a skill he had to learn just as sure as he had to learn how to stop bleeding or cure migraines or write illegible prescriptions.

Dr. Wasserman is real good at speaking between the lines. What he said and what he didn't say made me realize that the end was near for my mother.

The other indicator was that she was starting to get confused about things that had never confused her before. What day of the week it was. Names of people she'd known for years. I had long since taken over all her finances and bill-paying but about two months before she passed, she wanted to sign a certain check herself. And when she couldn't figure out where to sign, that was a bad indicator.

Before that, I used to tell friends, "She's a smart lady but when she gets sick, she gets stupid." That was why she needed me around. When she was well, she was fine at running her life and getting things done. She might need me or one of her endless stream of caregivers to drive her somewhere and then push her about in a wheelchair but she always knew where she was going and what to do when she got there. It was mainly her eyesight, not any mental deterioration, that prompted me to assume checkbook duties. When alert, she could take care of herself…and did.

She insisted on living alone after my father died. Other arrangements were proposed and rejected. Throughout four decades of married life, she'd lived by his timetable — and for a long part of that, mine. She got up when it was time to get him off to work and/or me off to school. She ate when we ate…and between his food preferences and my food allergies, it was usually a matter of eating what we would/could eat. When there was but one TV in our house, it was usually set to what he or I wanted to watch. Later, when I got a set for my room, the one in the living room was sometimes tuned to what he wanted to watch but not always.

Shortly after we lost him, I sat her down and told her I wanted her to be self-indulgent; to make wishes that I could make come true. She no longer had to cater at least in part to his needs and since I was living elsewhere, mine were of near-zero concern. It was time, I told her, to reorient her thinking to what she wanted and only what she wanted. She said, "Let me think about this for a few days." A few days later, she told me, "I've decided I want to live on my own schedule. I want to eat when I want to eat, sleep when I want to sleep, watch what I want to watch. Would that be okay with you?"

It was, of course, okay with me. How could that not be okay with anyone? So to the extent her eyesight, limited ability to walk and a few doctor's orders would permit, that was how she lived…and in the same house, with my old room converted to a den where she could smoke and watch TV at any hour.

She couldn't get out of things like having to go to the hospital at a certain time for a doctor's appointment but to the extent she could, she eschewed all demands to do anything when she didn't want. It was understood that when we had a date for me to take her out to dinner, she might just call me at the last minute and say, "I don't feel like it tonight."

For years, she'd loved Cirque du Soleil and I took her to see it whenever one of its traveling companies ventured near. One time, I called her and mentioned that a new Cirque show would be in Santa Monica in a few months and I was going to order tickets. "Don't get one for me," she said — to my great surprise. I was expecting joyous anticipation and when I didn't get it, I asked how come…

"Because the night your tickets are for, I might not feel like going. If you buy me a ticket, then I have to go." She still loved Cirque but she loved even more having no demands on her time.

That was why she recoiled in horror whenever I mentioned the dread words, "assisted living." She accepted the need to have a caregiver around a few hours a day, though she resented having to get up at a specified hour to let one in. She hated the idea of having one on the premises full-time and would often send one home early. The idea of relocating to an Assisted Living Home was even more dreaded. "I'll die before I let that happen," she'll said…and I knew she would. It was bad enough that she had to spend as much time as she did in the hospital with all those strangers around telling her when and what to eat.

Those who observe the time stamps on these postings note that I keep odd hours. In her final decade, my mother's were odder. She was as likely to be up watching TV at 4 AM as at 4 PM. She ate meals so irregularly that she couldn't classify them as breakfast, lunch or dinner. They were just meals.

I arranged with two nearby restaurants to deliver to her and to charge everything — the meal, the delivery fee, the tip — to my credit card. She just had to call one and say, "I'd like chicken tonight" (or shrimp or beef or…) and within the half-hour, a man would bring a freshly-prepared, low-sodium dinner to her door. The problem with this system? She might not feel like waiting the half-hour. Or she might not get the craving 'til after 10 PM when both restaurants closed. So she'd pop a Stouffer's frozen entree into the microwave and that would be dinner…or maybe breakfast.

MSNBC used to air three hours of Don Imus from 3 AM to 6 AM on this coast. Who would be up watching at that hour? Often, my mother. She didn't like Mr. Imus but she liked the lively discussions on his program and enjoyed, she said, when his guests often put him properly in his place. In 2007, he got himself fired because of one particular remark that many took as racially-offensive. My mother was disappointed to lose her middle-o'-the-night entertainment and a bit bewildered. As far as she was concerned, this was like firing Don Rickles for calling someone a hockey puck. Imus, she felt, said something stupid and insensitive about as often as he threw to commercial. Why did that offensive remark doom him when the eighteen the day before hadn't? Or the 143 the previous week?

She never warmed to his replacement, Joe Scarborough. She thought he was just as miserable a human being as Imus but Imus at least didn't pretend to be anything else. Imus also didn't talk so much about the boring minutiae of Congress and he gave his guests a fair shot at telling him he was full of crap. She found her way to other 3 AM programming (often QVC or some other channel via which she squandered my inheritance) and when I later told her Imus was back on another channel, it was like, "I'm over that." In my ongoing monitoring of my mother's mental state, I thought that was a good sign.

How can you tell when it's getting close to Christmas? When Evanier posts this…

There are 87,482 new articles on the Internet today about what to do about the utter availability of guns in this country. The smartest one I've come across is this one by Joshua Holland.

The article might give hope to some that there's a way to pass sane Gun Control legislation that would even be backed by a majority of firearms owners. I don't think so. When you come across a stat like one Mr. Holland cites about how Americans favor banning 100-round magazines by a margin of 63-34, you might think such a law is possible. I don't for two reasons. One is that the 34 are louder and more adamant than the 63 and our elected leaders are just plain more afraid of the smaller group. Before most representatives would support such a law, they'd have to see some recurring evidence that you can get turned out of office for not supporting something like this. The 34% are fierce enough on Gun Control issues that they will expend the funds and energy to defeat their political foes. The 63% are not.

And I also suspect it's not really as lopsided as that; that some in the 63% are in favor of the other guy not being able to buy such ammo and that they assume they'll find some way to get theirs and outgun him. I also think that the 63-34 margin exists in a world where the 63 assumes it's never really going to happen and that if it ever came down to an actual vote, a lot of them would be persuaded by the argument that, you know, this is just opening the door for all those people in the government you don't trust to confiscate and ban all your ammunition.

I would love to be proven wrong about this but on the topic of Gun Control, I think anything short of total pessimism is overly optimistic. Still, read Holland's article. The only thing I could imagine that might turn all that sanity into passable legislation is if someone prominent — as famous and charismatic a gun owner as Charlton Heston — emerged as a spokesperson for responsible gun owners. There are plenty of wise, sane pistol-packers out there but they have no rallying point, no leader, no spokesmale. That's what it would take and even that would only cut my cynicism about this by about a third.