Number two hundred and forty-two in a series…

So just when my pal Ken Levine and I are making lunch plans, he starts blogging about his favorite hamburgers…and two of his favorites (Five Guys and Cassell's) turn out to be two of my favorites. Matter of fact, I agree with all his evaluations except…

What he says about the Apple Pan in L.A. serving a wonderful burger was true, say, twenty years ago but it wasn't quite as true my last few visits there. Not that it isn't still a place worth visiting. I suspect the folks who started the Johnny Rocket's chain went there many times to figure out how to configure their restaurants…which, by the way, are also pretty good.

I've passed on Umami Burger and Father's Office. Father's Office has this policy (a gimmick, it sounds like) that they will allow no substitutions or alterations in how they serve their burgers. You have it their way. I have oodles of food allergies and I believe every one of their hamburgers as served contains something that could kill me dead on the spot. Friends have told me the servers get real snotty with you if you even mention changing anything…so I'm not particularly eager to see if they'd make an exception for me. Every Umami Burger listed on that establishment's menu is the same way. The ingredients list on each reads to me like it says "grilled onions, gruyere cheese and cyanide." I'm told they will consider alterations but not without a lot of attitude.

There's a great way to deal with the problem Ken notes of the lethal chili on a Tommy's Burger. You have them leave the chili off. It's a much better burger without it. This is also true at Carney's and also probably at every other place in the world.

The best burger Ken says he ever had in New York was in the Parker-Meridian hotel. I've never been there but the best burger I ever had in New York (Brooklyn, to be completely accurate) was at Peter Luger's Steak House. Served only on their lunch menu and well worth the shlep.

Lastly, I'll second what Ken says about Cassell's down in Koreatown — and it too is only available for lunch as Cassell's closes at 4 PM each day. Something I learned during my few years of investment in a restaurant — a famous hamburger place not as good as the places Ken and I both now like, I sheepishly admit — was about one key element. The superior places aren't superior just because of the meat they buy or how they prepare it or what they put on it, though all of that is essential.

The thing that kicks a good place up into the strata of all-time faves is that one person on the premises who scurries around making sure everything is right. It's the guy who grabs up the phone at least three times a week, calls a supplier and yells, "Murray, what the hell are you doing to me with these crappy potatoes your guy delivered?" If he's really good, he builds up a relationship with Murray of trust or fear or both such that Murray doesn't dare send him the crappy potatoes in the first place.

The old Cassell's, back before Mr. Cassell sold it off to a Korean family then died, was the kind of restaurant you'd drag friends to. It was visually unimpressive and inconveniently located with no place to park, plus you usually had to wait in a line that snaked outside to the curb. The rest of your party would look at you like, "Why did you bring me here?" But it was worth it because they'd taste their hamburgers, "get it" and respect the heck outta you for knowing about such a great place.  And of course they'd be pondering, "Hmm…who can I bring here?"

The current Cassell's still serves a great burger — one I like with a minimum of toppings. But it's not special the way it used to be and really all that's changed is that they don't have that guy. They don't have Alvin Cassell running around, personally tasting the lemonade, making sure his customers were all happy and then phoning Murray to holler about substandard spuds. And in restaurants — in anything in life, really — you need to have that guy around.

Congrats to Tom Richmond, caricaturist extraordinaire, for taking home a Reuben Award this evening at the National Cartoonist Society shindig in Las Vegas! It's not easy to draw TV and movie parodies of MAD magazine where the bar was set by the likes of Drucker and Davis. You gotta be damn good and obviously, Tom is. I couldn't be there for the ceremony but I'll bet this award made a lot of people happy, including but not limited to Tom.

By the way: I used to say that my partner Sergio Aragonés is the only cartoonist in the world who draws himself looking uglier than he actually is. I think Tom also qualifies in that area and I can't come up with a third.

I happen to like Vice-President Joe Biden. Yes, he occasionally makes verbal gaffes — though at least half the time when I see one reported, it doesn't seem to be as big a deal as folks are making it out to be. And even if they were all foot-in-mouth moments, he averages about one every two weeks, whereas George W. Bush said something dumber in just about every speech. (I'm not sure, by the way, that Obama's recent evolution to support Gay Marriage was hurried up because Biden had said something he shouldn't have said. Seems to me it was a deliberate way of paving the way for the big announcement.)

The other day, Biden gave a moving address to an audience of folks who'd lost loved ones in military service. I don't recall ever seeing someone with a rank as high as the Vice-President ever speaking so clearly from the heart and so extemporaneously. It's about the price of war but it's also about coping with any kind of death in the family. Here it is and it runs twenty minutes…

And if you'd like to see the entire program — which includes remarks by others and runs 45 minutes — here's a link to watch it on the C-Span website. It's quite a thing to view at any time but especially on Memorial Day Weekend.

Thomas Friedman presents an interesting view of Barack Obama…as a man who is very good at being President of the United States and not so good at making people aware of his accomplishments in that job. And I'll quote one paragraph that I think is especially true…

"Obamacare is socialized medicine," says the Republican Party. No, no — excuse me — socialized medicine is what we have now! People without insurance can go to an emergency ward or throw themselves on the mercy of a doctor, and the cost of all this uncompensated care is shared by all those who have insurance, raising your rates and mine. That is socialized medicine and that is what Obamacare ends. Yet Obama — the champion of private insurance for all — has allowed himself to be painted as a health care socialist.

I think I said this in a blog post before and if I didn't, I meant to. The day this country passed a law that said that people who can't pay would be treated for free in an emergency room was the day we got Socialized Medicine. And I think it was a good and necessary thing, though not as good as a real program. Better would have been a plan that enabled those folks to go to doctors before their conditions got so grave that they had to go to an emergency room. What they get there is much more expensive and nowhere near as efficient as preventative care or early detection.

That law, in case you're interested, was the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act, passed in 1986 by a Democratic House and a Republican Senate, then signed into law by Ronald Reagan. That made it possible for someone to get free medical care which someone else would pay for. How is that not "Socialized Medicine?"

Number two hundred and forty-one in a series…

An interview with John Benson and a brief history (with great illustrations) of Squa Tront, the leading fanzine devoted to EC Comics.

Bhob Stewart has been trying to find examples from Martin Landau's career as a cartoonist.

The Comic Art Professional Society is a Los Angeles-based organization of folks who create comics. It was founded in 1977 by Don Rico, Sergio Aragonés and myself and it's still going strong. At the moment, it's having its annual auction to raise money…and the way it works is that half goes to help defray the organization's operating expenses and half goes to a worthy cause. This year, the worthy cause is to donate in honor of the late Dave Stevens (a CAPS member) and raise bucks for the Hairy Cell Leukemia Foundation. Hairy Cell Leukemia is what took our pal Dave away from us in 2008.

There are many fine pieces up for bid on May 31 — that's this coming Thursday — some of them prints of Dave's work (like the above) and some of them images of Dave's character The Rocketeer rendered by others, and there are some other goodies. Go take a look because there's probably something there you'd love to own and you can get it and give money to a good cause at the same time.  You only have a few days!

Mitt Romney's proposals for how to "repeal and replace Obamacare" are a little vague and surely deliberately so. But Jonathan Cohn has done an analysis of what is known and says that most of them point to millions of people losing coverage. He quotes David Cutler, an economist at Harvard and former consultant to President Obama: "Never before in history has a candidate run for President with the idea that too many people have insurance coverage."

I'm not back. It just looks that way. I'm still battling a deadline and you'll know when I finish because regular posting will resume. Or if you're in Southern California, maybe you'll hear me snoring.

People often ask me — in fact, I think I'm asked a version of it in the video below — how one deals with deadlines. The answer is to just do the work. Do it as quickly as you can without losing your perspective on what you're doing…and if you're a professional of any tenure, you should know how that feels. But you just have to do it and not, for example, spend a lot of time agonizing over how you can't do it or how impossible it will be to do it. If you have twelve hours to complete something, worrying for two hours is just going to leave with you ten hours to do what you feared you couldn't do in twelve.

It's also important to keep the importance in perspective: Don't trivialize it but don't overstate it, especially to yourself. My first agent used to say about almost anything I was writing, "Hey, it ain't the moon shot. Nobody dies if you screw up." That can be real comforting to remember.

But mainly, the most important thing to remember when you have an impossible deadline is that it helps to not spend time writing blog posts about how to meet deadlines. I think I'll try that.

This is the second part of my interview for the Animation Guild and it starts with a rerun of the last minute or two of the first part. I talk about all sorts of things but mostly myself…

A number of Conservative authors have been selling an odd view of the Civil Rights movement in this country, especially the gains made by blacks in the sixties. They give an awful lot of credit to Republicans for liberating minorities and saving them from those danged racist Democrats. It's true there were racist Democrats but I sure remember them as atypical…and angry at what their party did along these lines. Anyway, Jonathan Chait has a pretty scathing rebuttal to what he sees as the new revisionism. And don't miss his last paragraph.

Number two hundred and forty in a series…