Aww…Sheriff John died. Sheriff John Rovick was a fixture of Los Angeles television from 1952 (the year of my birth) until 1970. He occasionally had other shows but most of his run was a noontime program called Sheriff John's Lunch Brigade. I am unable to explain to you the longtime success of a kids' show aired at an hour when most kids should have been off at school…but someone was watching him.

For a year or two before I began school, that roster included me…and I'd check in with him on days when there was no school. He did not run great cartoons and the ones he had, he seemed to run several times a week. Here's one I specifically remember seeing often on his program…

Others were filled with racist stereotypes and Nazis. A lot of Nazis. Mel Brooks has not put as many Nazis on screen as Sheriff John did before around 1962 or so. Somewhere around that date, perhaps inspired by other kid show hosts who were becoming socially or politically aware (or perhaps reacting to sponsors becoming concerned), the Good Sheriff demanded that his station clean up their library. I'm pretty sure, by the way, that Sheriff John's show was where I learned to draw a Swastika. I often sat in front of my cartoons with a drawing pad, racing to replicate things I saw on the screen and one day, I proudly showed my parents a whole page of Swastikas I had copied from wartime cartoons. This does not go over well in a mostly-Jewish household.

The main things most people probably recall of Sheriff John were two songs he "sang" every day. In the mid-fifties, he recorded a single record and whoever wrote the two tunes on it made a load of ASCAP money because he literally played each side each day. He would open his show by lip-syncing to "Laugh and Be Happy." Here — give a listen…

Then later in the show, he would read off the names of boys and girls who were celebrating their birthdays that day and he'd spin a prop birthday cake — the same non-edible one for decades — and he'd lip-sync the other side of his record, "The Birthday Cake Polka"…

If you grew up in Los Angeles when I grew up in Los Angeles, those songs were already embedded in your brain forever. And if they weren't before, they are now.

John Rovick went to work for KTTV Channel 11 in 1949 and stayed there for the rest of his career, retiring in 1981 and later relocating to Idaho. He was a staff announcer throughout this period and I remember recognizing his voice on and in-between other programs when he wasn't sheriffing. For a real overview of his career and life, read this obit in the L.A. Times by Dennis McLellan. Dennis, you call me for help with so many other obits, why didn't you call me for Sheriff John? I would have told you about my one (1) encounter with the man…

It was around 1977. It was in the Denny's at Sunset and Van Ness, right across the street from KTLA (where I was then working) and right across the street from KTTV (where he was then working). I recognized John Rovick strolling out as some co-workers and I were strolling in. I immediately abandoned my friends and ran over to him and said, "Mr. Rovick? May I tell you how much your show meant to me? And may I call you Sheriff?" He laughed, shook my hand and proceeded to be exactly the modest, friendly man you'd expect/want him to be. He asked about me and what I was doing…and I told him that I'd once watched Porky Pig cartoons on his show and had grown up (kinda) to write the Porky Pig comic book.  He liked that a lot.

I was writing a show for Sid and Marty Krofft at the time and one of our voice actors (putting words into the mouths of Krofft puppets) was Walker Edmiston, who had also been a star of local kids' TV for a time and had even appeared with his own puppets on Sheriff John's series. I told Mr. Rovick this and his face lit up and he told me to give his best to Walker, which I of course did. Anyway, I sensed a gleam of pride in him that a kid who'd grown up on his program was now working in television. I also sensed that being stopped like that by a grown-up former Lunch Brigader was a near-daily occurrence for the man. And that's really all there is to this story —

— except that when I went back to my friends and told them who it was I'd fled them for, the ones who didn't grow up in L.A. didn't see what the big deal was, and the ones who had were angry that they'd missed their chance to say all the same things to him. One of them became a steady patron at that Denny's after that, hoping to get his own moment with Sheriff John. Or at least I think that's why he ate there every day. It certainly wasn't because of the food.

As I've mentioned, my mother (Dorothy Evanier) worked for several years at Jurgensen's Market, a Beverly Hills establishment that sold mostly-imported foods at prices that would send Mitt Romney scurrying to Food4Less. We used to joke that each week, she could either take home her paycheck or a can of olives.

She ran the gift-wrapping department in the back and over the years, trained dozens if not hundreds of young women in that fine art. My mother could take decorative paper and ribbons and wrap a turd so you'd be thrilled to receive it. When the most important of the Really, Really Rich people ordered gifts sent from Jurgensen's, the order-taker would often write "Dorothy Wrap" on the little order-routing slip. That meant that my mother was to handle that present herself.

The teen-age (mostly) girls who worked for her loved her and twice, she picked out ones she thought I'd get along with and extolled the wonders of perhaps dating her son, the TV writer. Her efforts led to two awkward, not-to-be-repeated dinners. One of the women was really only interested in seeing if I could hurriedly arrange for my profession to also be her profession without, of course, her having to do anything. The other lost interest in me when she found out that I not only didn't like to get high but that I'd never done it and never would. Still, I appreciated my mother's advocacy and that she wasn't trying to find me a wife; just someone I'd enjoy being with.

She and the girls worked in a back room at Jurgensen's where every day, celebrities shopped. They all, my mother included, wanted to see the celebrities so a code system was instituted. In the main part of the store, there were clerks and salespersons and the folks who manned the meat counter and bakery. If a real big star was on the premises, one of the employees there would get on the P.A. system and say, "Dorothy, would you bring out a J-19?"

There was no such thing as a J-19. There were no items numbered in that form at all. "J-19" was code for "Celebrity shopping in the store." The females in the back room would hear that and everyone would peek out and ogle the star of the moment. Then it was back to the wrap session.

One time, the butcher announced, "Dorothy, would you bring out a J-20?" That code had not been arranged in advance but they all figured that it was his way of saying, "Superstar shopping in the store." Everyone spied…and sure enough, there was Barbra Streisand looking at cucumbers or squeezing cantaloupes or something.

Thereafter, there would be other J-20s along with the J-19s. Every so often, a brief argument would ensue as to whether, say, Carol Burnett was a J-19 or a J-20. The wanna-be TV writer I went out with was outraged when Burt Reynolds was identified as a J-20 because, she said, his last two pictures hadn't done much business. It's a cruel town.

Then one day, one of the wine stewards took to the public address system to ask, "Dorothy, would you bring out a J-21?"

All package-wrapping abruptly ceased. My mother and her charges all knew that meant Super-superstar on the premises…but who might that be? If Barbra Streisand was a J-20, who could possibly top her fame to be worthy of the designation of J-21? My mother told me, "We spent so much time debating who it could be that we almost missed looking to see who it was." When they did, what they saw was not a star but an overweight derelict. A homeless person — perhaps the only one in Beverly Hills — was wandering the aisles. Beverly Hills is the kind of city that would have overweight homeless people.

My mother went up to the steward and said, "Ha-ha, very funny joke." The steward asked, "What do you mean?" She said, "Playing a joke on us, telling us that hobo was a J-21." The steward suggested she take a closer look at that hobo. And just then, he walked right past them so she could. That was when my mother recognized it was Marlon Brando.

That evening, she told me the story. I asked her if everyone in the store agreed that Marlon Brando was a J-21. She said, "The older ones did. But the younger employees…I don't think any of them ever saw A Streetcar Named Desire."

From 1991: David Letterman's first appearance with Johnny Carson after it was announced that Johnny was leaving The Tonight Show and would be succeeded by someone other than David Letterman…

Dick Cavett writes about a visit to the steps in Los Feliz where Laurel and Hardy filmed The Music Box.

And to those who've asked: More photos of Stan and Ollie will appear soon on this website.

I don't have time to write what I thought about the first presidential debate but that's okay because Matt Taibbi wrote one that I can link to and say, "What he said."

For about ten years after my father retired, my mother worked part-time for a small chain called Jurgensen's Markets. Around Christmas, she worked full-time and overtime.

There were at least four Jurgensen's — one in Beverly Hills, one in Westwood, one in Hancock Park and one in either Glendale or Pasadena. Pasadena, I think. This was not a place where most of us would do our marketing. It was a rich person's market with alleged-gourmet food and sky-high pricing…in other words, not a place you went to stock up on Franco-American canned spaghetti. They didn't carry it and if they had, they would have charged you five dollars…per strand. My mother worked mainly at the one in Beverly Hills where at least half the commerce involved one person in show business ordering wine and/or a fancy gift basket delivered to some other person in show business.

She did me an enormous service there. I do not drink wine or anything alcoholic…and I never saw any non-beverage component of a Jurgensen's gift basket I'd consider eating. So if she saw one about to be delivered to me, she would intercept and re-route. She'd call and say — this was just before Christmas when there were a lot of presents flying about — "Jimmie Komack is sending you a basket of exotic cheeses and your agent is sending you a bottle of wine" and I'd say, "Great! Change the cards and send the cheeses to my agent and the wine to Jimmie."

We did this for years…as long as she worked for Jurgensen's. Sometimes, it wasn't as neatly symmetrical as that but it spared me having a lot of bottles around I didn't want. Often of course, I received wine that didn't come from Jurgensen's but we had a solution for that, too. I'd take those bottles over to my parents' house when I visited and my mother would sneak them into Jurgensen's and send them out for me via Jurgensen's delivery methods. After we did this for a while, she felt guilty so she told the manager and offered to have the costs deducted from her paycheck. The manager laughed, decided it was a great idea and he began bringing in unwanted bottles that had been delivered to his home and having them sent out to others.

My favorite moment in all this came when I was working for a producer named…well, I'd better not give his real name because he might still hire me again. I'll call him Howard Producer and tell you that he was a very important Hollywood-type person and he was also a wine snob. The one time he allowed me into his home, I was subjected to a ritual that was apparently required of all visitors — a tour of his wine cellar. It was huge and temperature-controlled and filled with bottles that he fingered like rare Ming Dynasty artifacts.

Though I tried to explain to him that I did not know one wine from another, he would cradle one and say, as if it was the most impressive thing one could possibly say, "This is a 1947 Bordeaux from the hinterlands of Greenbriar County and it was bottled on a rainy Thursday by the infamous Maria." Then he'd wait for me to adopt a jealous expression and indicate that I realized what an awesome thing that was to own. I learned to just go "Wowww" a lot. I also learned that he took his wine seriously. Didn't even snicker when I asked, "Hey, you got any Manischewitz around this dump?" and followed it up by inquiring, "What's a good year for Ripple?" Come to think of it, he didn't laugh at anything I wrote for him, either.

So, getting back to Jurgensen's: That same year, my mother called and said, "I have a bottle of wine here for you from Howard Producer. Where do you want me to send it?" I thought for a second and told her, "Send it to Howard Producer." I thought it would make a nice Christmas present…give Howard back his own wine.

It saved me shopping for something. It saved me getting it delivered and paying for it and it also saved me having to figure out what to do with that bottle of wine. But the best moment came when we went back to work after the holidays. Howard came by my desk to thank me for the wine. Then he leaned in carefully and said, "Listen, next time you send out wine to people as a gift, check with me and I'll suggest a few. It's important to make a good impression in this town and you don't want people to think you're the kind of guy who'd give out that kind of wine."

That's a photo of my mother taking a picture of me taking a picture of her. I shot it outside the Paris Hotel in Las Vegas, the last time I took her there…the last time she was able to travel. It was about twelve years ago.

That's about how long various doctors have been telling me to prepare because I wouldn't have her much longer. Her primary care physician, a wonderful man named Bruce Wasserman, didn't tell me that until a few weeks ago and that's when I started to believe it. But other doctors told me that for around a decade…including one who not only predeceased her but died two rooms down from her during one of her many hospitalizations. When I told her about him, she muttered something about outliving all of them.

There were moments when I thought she might do just that. Several times when she was hospitalized, I got a call at 4 AM or thereabout to hurry my heinie down to the hospital. Officially, I was there to perhaps make the Do Not Resuscitate decision as per her wishes…but I always assumed there was another reason I was called. Each time, a team of doctors and nurses were working feverishly to save her and I think they wanted me to see that so I'd be less likely to sue the hospital for not doing more. Once, the doctor who called me at 4 AM admitted as much. That was right after he came up to me at 9 AM and said, "When I called you, I was sure she wouldn't make it. I'm happy to say I was wrong."

I'm telling you all this as a way to tell you what an extraordinary woman my mother was. That's the best adjective I can apply to her: Extraordinary.

Dorothea Evanier was born in East Hartford, Connecticut on April 8, 1922…so she was 90 today when I lost her. She had an unremarkable childhood, though some folks reading this will be fascinated by the following. When I started getting interested in comic books, she remembered that a boy she knew back in her high school days who'd dated her best friend and had set his sights on working in the comic book industry. She dug out her yearbook and there, by God, was a little sketch of Superman done in 1940 by a then-young man named Kurt Schaffenberger. He would go on to become one of the great artists for the Man of Steel's comics.

Soon after graduation, she went to work as a secretary for the Hartford Courant, which is where she met a man named Bernard Evanier who briefly had a temp job there. They started dating but he was Jewish and she was not and neither family approved of that kind of thing. One of the reasons she supported the issue of Gay Marriage once it became an issue of note is that, as she put it, "I heard all the same arguments about how it would end society as we know it if your father and I got married."

They stopped dating. They started again. They stopped again. She married someone else. That marriage was annulled after a few weeks. She eventually got back with Bernie and they decided that if they did get married, they'd have to get as far away from Hartford as they could. They also decided that they would pretend her first marriage had never happened…and indeed, it was not until after my father died in 1991 that she told me about it.

They relocated to Los Angeles and were married on March 3, 1951 at the Desert Inn Motel (later, Hotel) in Las Vegas. I was born one year later on March 2, 1952. As a kid, whenever anyone asked me what my birthday was, I'd say, "I was born on March 2nd and my parents were married on March 3rd!" People found that hilarious and I didn't know why…but since it got a laugh, I kept it in.

As a mother, she was absolutely ideal. She was smart about most things. She was compassionate about all things. She lost her temper with me on the rarest of occasions…I would say about once a year on average. My father did her even better in that department. He yelled about as often as we hold presidential elections in this country…and he would usually apologize to me for yelling.

But this is about my mother, the woman who could heal any injury with a box of Q-Tips, a few Band-Aids and a bottle of Bactine. It's about my mother who learned to make brisket and latkes better than any other shiksa in America. It's about my mother who was such a good package gift-wrapper that if someone gave you a present wrapped by Dorothy Evanier, you'd consider not ever opening it because what was inside probably wasn't as good as what it came in. Over the next week or so here, I'll tell you some stories about her…like the time she made her T.V. debut on an episode of L.A. Law. Or how she once helped a famous TV detective find out that his servants were stealing from him. Or how people would always say to her, "You're so funny, it's clear Mark got his sense of humor from you." And she would always tell them, because it was true, "No, I got mine from him."

For now, I guess I should tell you what she died from. She died from Marlboros.

At least, if they'd let me fill out the Death Certificate, that's what I'd put on there. I haven't seen it yet but I assume it'll say something about arrhythmias and Congestive Heart Failure. Ah, but what caused the arrhythmias and Congestive Heart Failure? Marlboros.

My mother smoked for 75 years. She only stopped lighting up a few months ago after she had been hospitalized for just shy of thirty days. The day before she went home, I started talking to her about not smoking once she got there. She said to me, "I can't give it up." I told her, "You have. You haven't had a cigarette the entire time you've been in here. You've quit. The only question is whether you're going to be dumb enough to start again."

She thought for a second and said, "No, I don't think I'm that dumb." And she didn't start again.

She did not extend her quitting because she thought it would help her live longer. She did it because she thought it might reduce the number of times she had to be carted off by paramedics to the Emergency Room during what remained of her life.

Someone reading this might think, "Hey, smoking can't be that bad if Mark's mother smoked 75 years and made it to age 90." Yeah, but for about the last fifteen, she could barely walk and barely see. In the above photo, she's in a wheelchair and after that Vegas trip, she became too sick to ever travel again even with me pushing her around.  She couldn't do anything she enjoyed.

That was the tragic part of my mother's last years. She couldn't see well enough to read. I got her a huge flat-screen TV and even when she sat up close, she could only get about 10% of what was on it. She couldn't get around at all without a walker and could barely manage with one. I could take her places in the wheelchair but it was an ordeal to get her in and out of the house and she'd become abruptly exhausted.  It got so I couldn't take her anywhere unless it was close enough for her to be back home in her own bed within about twenty minutes.  She couldn't eat most of the foods she loved.  Basically, her life became a series of intermittent home stays between hospital residencies. She had six ambulance rides in 2011 and I took her in at least that many times.

She had this little button around her neck she could push to summon aid and she needed it often. But if she'd had a button she could have pushed and immediately ended her life without discomfort, she would have pushed it at least ten years ago. She told me exactly that many times and she was clear of mind and thought when she said it. "I'm so sick of myself," was something she exclaimed on way too many occasions…and what she meant was that her whole life had become about her body inconveniencing her and causing her pain. There was zero chance that her health would ever improve enough to do one thing on her "I wish I could still do that" list.

I'm writing this because, first of all, I'm thinking about her tonight. And I'm also writing this because I know she'd want to be cited not as a reason you could smoke and live 'til 90 but as an example of why that's not a good idea. Asked how she was, she'd say, "I'm still breathing but that's about it."

And I guess I'm writing it to tell my friends that she's gone and that sympathy and condolences are not necessary. I'm sure someone reading this will misunderstand but most of you will get this: I'm not grieving. I'm kinda relieved…for her and, yes, for myself. It's been so sad just watching her die over a long arc. She's been in a nursing home the last few weeks with the pretense that she might someday return to her own house. That was probably not going to happen…and if it did, it would have been a week or two (tops) before she was back in the emergency room.

Tomorrow evening, she and I were going to have a discussion about her going to an Assisted Living Facility…or as she called such establishments, "…those places you go to die." Knowing my mother, it wouldn't surprise me one bit if she had the heart failure today because she didn't want to have that discussion tomorrow.

Could someone actually do that? Could they figure out the right time to go and then go? If you think that's impossible then you didn't know my parents, especially my mother. So don't you feel sorry for me. I feel sorry for you. You would have loved her. I sure did.

As some friends who follow this here blog have figured out, the last few weeks have been insanely busy for me. That is not a complaint. I feel like I used this analogy recently here but a writer who complains about deadlines is a lot like a prizefighter who whines, "The other guy keeps hitting me!" I'm not asking for your sympathy when I tell you how weary I've been; just giving you a piece of information that's key to what I felt like writing about this time.

I spent Wednesday in a recording studio where we were doing songs for upcoming episodes of The Garfield Show. And I spent most of the days before Wednesday working way into the early morning hours to write lyrics for those songs. It's dangerous, by the way, to write lyrics when you're too tired. You find yourself thinking things like, "Well, 'whim' almost rhymes with 'thin.'" I resist that kind of cheat so it takes longer than it might.

Last night, we got done about 6:30 PM and I probably should have headed home but I didn't. I figured that try though I might to avoid it, I'd wind up watching the presidential debate and I didn't really want to do that. (Actually, it wasn't so much that I didn't want to watch the debate. I didn't want to watch the spin.) I had another, almost impulse idea of what to do.

Flashback…

One of my favorite movies — at times, my favorite — is It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. There are things not to love about this film directed by Stanley Kramer. I've never really been fond of The Comedy of Injuries and much of the film, especially the ending, of the film is that. But there is so much more I do like, especially seeing so many fine comedians interacting like that.

The movie debuted in early November of 1963 at what was then called Pacific's Cinerama Dome, up on Sunset near Vine. Now, the "Pacific's" is gone from the theater that was practically built to show this movie…and what it ran throughout November was the full, uncut version. The picture was later trimmed considerably. I'm still planning to do a big blog post one of these days on just how much it was trimmed. I believe the answer is, "Not as much as some people think." There's a lot of conflicting info around about this, which means there's a lot of erroneous info around, some of which came through me. (This is not to suggest I don't regret every trim that was made. I wish you all could see it the way I first did, which was in its full, original glory.)

My parents and I saw Mad World two or three days after John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Some wealthy friends had long before purchased tickets to a benefit screening that night. They were too depressed by the news to go so they offered us their seats. We, watching the same news, were so desperate to get away from what we were seeing on TV that we accepted. We wound up somehow in the front row, which was way too close for Panavision. From there, Jimmy Durante's nose was about the size of Kilimanjaro…and obviously more challenging to climb.

Still, it was a glorious night. The room was filled with people like us who'd fled the soul-numbing news coverage out of Dallas. Out of depression, some might have laughed at nothing. Out of desperation, some might have laughed at anything. As it turned out, most of us laughed at everything. There was a joy of discovery at that viewing since no one really knew where the film was going or who would pop up in it or when. Like when the Three Stooges pop up for a few seconds, the place exploded. (It says something that the biggest laugh those guys ever got on the screen came when they didn't do anything except just stand there.)

I'm hesitant to say that evening was life-changing but something changed for me that night. It was the first time I recall ever bonding with a movie like that. I became fascinated with it, reading all I could about the film, seeing it many times later in many versions, talking with folks who were in it or closer to it than I was. (Stanley Kramer's son Larry was in my class at school. He didn't know that much about it but he knew a few things and I even pestered him into relaying a few questions to his father.) The movie just plain makes me smile.

End of flashback, back to last night…

We got done at 6:30. The studio was a few blocks from where there was a 7 PM screening. And the screening was at the Cinerama Dome. I've seen the film many times since '63 but none of those were at the Cinerama Dome.

Go home and watch Barack Obama and Mitt Romney debate? Or go watch Phil Silvers drive his car into the Kern River? Boy, there's a toughie.

They had a relatively-new print…though not a very good one. They had a projectionist who didn't seem to grasp the concept of the curtain being closed for the overture and entr'acte, then open for the movie. But then they also had It's a Mad (etc.) World in its native habitat and an appreciative audience. I love when a new Familiar Funny Face comes on the screen and everyone emits that happy sound of recognition. (When you see this film in Southern California, you also hear that in response to certain locations that come on the screen.)

I had a great couple of hours away from reality…after which it was a lot easier to get back to work. And you know what? Once I got home, I think I got more done than if I'd gone right back to the computer and worked straight through. Even if I'd somehow managed to resist the debate. You want to know why I like It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World? It's like I said. It just makes me smile. And last night, I felt so recharged that I didn't even think of rhyming "whim" with "him."

As you may know, almost all the early, pre-1972 episodes of The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson are lost and gone forever. But one "new" one has turned up — a 16mm kinescope that was made so the show could be shown overseas to U.S. military personnel. It's been turned over to Carson Productions and if there's anything there, I bet they put it out on DVD. Or something.

Last time I wrote about this loss of the old shows, a few folks wrote in to ask me about certain classic clips — like the oft-shown one of Ed Ames teaching Johnny how to throw a tomahawk. How did they survive? Answer: They survived because they were classic clips, included in some anniversary show which survived.

It's fashionable to bash the networks that lost all those old, classic shows…and they deserve some bashing. But as a couple of exec-types have pointed out, there's at least a little culpability for folks like Johnny Carson and Steve Allen who didn't insist on their shows' preservation or even ask if that was being done. If either had made it a contractual demand, it would have been done.

Johnny Carson explains a mathematical puzzler…and doesn't do a very good job of it. Make sure you check out the links to the clips in there.

At the 1977 Academy Awards ceremony, the Best Actor award went to Peter Finch for his performance in Network. Since Mr. Finch had passed away, someone had to be designated to accept on his behalf. (They stopped doing this at some point, at least on the lesser awards. I'm not sure if they still do it on the major ones.) Anyway, the Finch family and all his friends wanted the accepter to be his widow, Eletha. The Academy said that was not possible. After 1972 when Marlon Brando dispatched Sacheen Littlefeather to accept — actually, decline — his award for The Godfather, the Academy made a rule: A substitute accepter had to be a member of the Academy. Eletha Finch was not.

So they found a way around their own rule. Paddy Chayefsky, who wrote Network and was an Academy member, was selected to accept. When Finch won, Chayefsky got to the podium and called the widow to the stage to accept the trophy. On some interview show the next day, he said, "What were they going to do? Have Security tackle her on her way to the stage and wrestle her to the ground to stop her?"

But obviously Chayefsky did not do this on his own accord. Notice how quickly the camera is on her and there's already an usher there to guide her to the stage. The director sure knew where she was sitting and had a camera ready to cut to her. (And by the way, you may notice that when she's led down the aisle, she passes our old pal, Pat McCormick and also Jack Valenti.) Here's that clip…

Okay, I'm going to try and limit posting here to one election item per day. Today's is that I had to post in its entirety, this piece by David Frum…

The income of the typical American collapsed during the Great Recession. And in the two years of recovery since 2009, median income has…declined another 4.1%.

Given such a record, how can the "out" party possibly manage to be losing in the polls? Apparently those families have decided that the out party offers them a future that looks even worse than the recent past. If so, that's a shocking indictment of GOP strategy. Would it really have been so impossible to devise a platform that offered the typical American family something beneficial from a change of administration? As is, they get only a promise that cutting the taxes of the wealthiest few will translate into opportunity for them — a promise that their own experience of the last round of tax cuts renders non-credible. In 2001 and 2003, the GOP cut taxes at the top, and incomes at the middle stagnated. Why would a voter at the middle expect anything different from another round of the same medicine? And this time, the tax cuts at the top come joined — not to an increase in Medicare spending as in the Bush years — but to a promise of dramatic Medicaid cuts straightaway, and dramatic Medicare cuts after that.

This is M.E. again. I think that's the election right there: People may think things are bad but Romney hasn't offered them anything better than "Trust me. I've run some successful businesses." They don't buy that cutting taxes for the rich will do anything except for the rich — i.e., the folks who don't need help. They may not even buy that Romney cares about doing anything except for the rich.

Here's a good oral history of the TV series, Cheers. And make sure you read what Ken Levine has to say about the piece.

Carolyn and I just received an advance copy, hot off the press I suppose, of Pogo: The Complete Daily & Sunday Comic Strips, Vol. 2: Bona Fide Balderdash. Beneath the lovely cover which she painted, we found, right where we left 'em, two more years of the superb creation of her father, Walt Kelly. Some have called Pogo the best comic strip ever and…well, if you prefer another, fine. More power to you. But Pogo is really quite wonderful. Its characters are alive and witty and everything they do is irresistible. The material in the first volume was great and in the years covered in this collection, Kelly was really beginning to be as good as he could be. Which was better than just about anybody.

There's a foreword by Stan Freberg and articles by R.C. Harvey and me…but never mind us. It's two years of Pogo, daily and Sunday — with the Sunday pages in full color. If you got Volume One, no further sales pitch is needed. (And if you didn't get Volume One, or maybe if you did, know this: You'll soon be able to buy the first two volumes in a slipcased set, and you'll also be able to buy the slipcase separately. The slipcase was expertly designed by Carolyn Kelly, as well.)

I'm not sure when Volume Two will be in stores. Amazon gives its official publication date as December 21 but we have a finished copy here so they should be available everywhere long before 12/21. You can advance-order Volume Two at this link or wait until I post a link for the slipcased set. Either way, you're gonna love this book.

In 1955, science-fantasy author Theodore Sturgeon was experiencing a severe case of Writers' Block. What did he do about it? He wrote to fellow s-f writer Robert Heinlein for advice. Immediately, Heinlein wrote back with a letter that you oughta read.