Factcheck.org takes a look at some of the recent statements by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. about health and human services. And what they see is that he's still dispensing uninformed, unqualified medical advice and that when he does get it right, it usually involves contradicting something he's said in the past. By now if you follow this blog, you know what I think about people who never graduated medical school advising on matters of health and medicine.

If you don't count five days at Comic-Con last July, last night was the first time I've left my house for non-medicinal reasons since I busted my ankle in January of 2024. I'm not 100% back to how I was pre-break but I'm close enough that I thought it was time for an outing. Amber was unable to go with me so I asked my friend Gabriella Muttone to accompany me…and also to drive. Gabriella is an award-winning photographer and designer…and I thought she would appreciate the event — which she did.

Well, she appreciated the first half of it but we'll get to that.

The event was at the Hammer Museum in Westwood — a program (which I mentioned back here) called "The Genius of Jay Ward: Rocky, Bullwinkle, Rarities and More." Judging from the turnout last night and the applause of the audience, there are a lot of people who recognize that genius and not just Jay's. Brilliant work was done at his studio despite cost restrictions that made some of those shows look like they were animated at a Dollar Tree store while it was having its annual going-out-of-business sale.

In the fifties, Jay was the other major guy inventing reinventing animation to suit the budgets and schedules of television — "other" besides Bill Hanna and Joe Barbera. They all attempted to use clever scripts and excellent voice work to compensate for animation that had to be done on the cheap and in maybe a tenth of the time that theatrical animation was produced. The earliest episodes of Rocky and Bullwinkle looked (but did not sound) slapdash and crude on our 19" Zenith TV in 1959 and they looked even worse on the big screen last night…but we loved them, then and now nonetheless.

And like I said, it wasn't just Jay. He assembled a fine crew of artists and writers, most of them veterans of the U.P.A. Studio. The key one — and a very brilliant gent I brag about knowing and working with a little — was Bill Scott. When you merged Jay's sense of humor with Bill's, you got cleverer and more memorable cartoons than most of what Bill and Joe were then producing. I loved Yogi Bear and Huckleberry Hound but I didn't laugh out loud at them the way I did at the Ward Studio's output in '59 when I was seven and last night when I was seventy-three.

I'd never set foot in the Hammer Museum before. It's a lovely place that, thanks to one or more benefactors, offers art and film history at little or no cost to those who visit. Gabriella and I arrived early and actually ran into Tiffany Ward (daughter of Jay) and her husband in the elevator up to the on-the-premises restaurant, Lulu. We dined and then leisurely strolled — well, she strolled while I hobbled — over to the Billy Wilder Theater there. Long line to get in.

Tiffany spoke. Our pal Jerry Beck spoke. Films were shown, starting with newsreel-type footage of when Ward's people actually got the city to let them block off all but one lane of traffic on Sunset Boulevard for the unveiling of the famous Rocky and Bullwinkle statue. There were signs that said something like "Watch the Bullwinkle Show or we'll close off this lane, too!"

That line struck me as a great yardage marker of one of the things that made the Jay Ward output different from all other cartoons of the day: You got the sense there were some wild maniacs behind their cartoons…folks unafraid to not only break but break down the fourth wall and anything else that got in the way of a laugh. There were always enough of them to appease the kiddies but plenty there for any parents who peeked in. The first half of the show included those early Moose-and-Squirrel episodes, a Super Chicken (the one about the monster toupee), a Fractured Fairy Tale (Rapunzel), a Peabody's Improbable History (Napoleon), some bridges, Bullwinkle's Corners, commercials and a strange unsold pilot that most in the audience had never seen, The Watts Gnu Show.

Apart from a few seconds of animation and a few more of old stock live-action footage, The Watts Gnu Show was all puppets voiced by Bill Scott, Paul Frees, June Foray and other members of the Ward Stock Company. It was a half-hour that was pretty darned insane and way ahead of its time, its time probably being when The Muppet Show was the most popular show on this planet. Watching it, my thought was that it didn't sell because the puppets were chintzy and ugly and didn't move around much so you just kept looking at how cheap and ugly they were.

Keith Scott's book, which is pretty definitive as a history of the Jay Ward Studio, said it had offers but Jay would have had to share ownership with other parties and he refused to do so. It was pretty strange but admirable in that sense. They showed it in full last night, then paused for an intermission.

The second half of the show was…without us present.

We left. The Billy Wilder Theater is a lovely construction — everything in the Hammer is quite splendid — but whoever configured the seating obviously had a hate on for anyone over about six feet tall. I'm 6'3" and I found my seat so unbelievably cramped that I was seriously worried about reinjuring my almost-healed left leg. Maybe if I still had the flexibility I had back when I hit fifty, it wouldn't have been so bad but I had to turn to Gabriella and say, "Do you mind if we leave?"

This morning, I had e-mails from folks who were there asking if I found something objectionable or hated the show or something. No, no, a thousand times no. I just couldn't deal with the seat and the lack of legroom. After an hour or so sitting there in increasing pain, I could barely make it to Gabriella's car but once we were outta there, I got better. Wish I'd been able to stay because most of me had a very good time.

A bald eagle nest in Big Bear, California…

The folks over at Snopes correct a load of misinformation about the personal wealth of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. He doesn't have most of that stuff some claim he owns and may not even have a double-Y in his last name.

What was I doing on March 25, 1961? I was almost certainly watching this show…

On the recent mysterious deaths of Gene Hackman, his wife and one dog, there was some new information released today. It came from — and I'll put this in all caps because it's important to keep this in mind — DOCTORS AND PROFESSIONAL INVESTIGATORS WHO ACTUALLY EXAMINED THE BODIES AND THE HACKMAN HOME. Since this story hit the web, we've been bombarded with endless theories from people who aren't doctors, aren't professional investigators, didn't examine the bodies, didn't visit the home, etc. And the info released today indicates that all the past theories were wrong.

So now, I'm seeing a whole new round of speculation and theories from the folks who aren't doctors, aren't professional investigators, didn't examine the bodies, didn't visit the home, etc., on the premise (I guess) of "Why be wrong only once when you can be wrong twice or maybe even more times than that?" Me, I'm going to wait and see what else the professionals with actual evidence come up with. That's kind of why we have experts.

Mark Bosselman writes…

I know how much you enjoy Four Mad World but are there any films that tried to replicate Mad World that you kinda of enjoyed?

Depends on what you mean by "replicate." There have been a couple of movies that "borrowed" the idea from It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World of someone setting a mob off on a grand chase and then that mob — full of familiar faces and growing — goes off on a big find-the-treasure hunt. The only one of those I've seen was The Million Dollar Mystery from 1987…

…and I didn't like it very much, though I have trouble really disliking any film with Eddie Deezen in it. One friend of mine was one of its screenwriters and another guy I knew died doing stuntwork on the film. I don't think either one of them liked it very much either. The film ran a contest with a million-dollar prize and it was won by a 14-year-old girl from Bakersfield. I would imagine she thought it was the greatest movie ever made.

If you're talking about all-star "gang" comedies, there were a few that seem to have been green-lit by studios because they wanted to replicate the success (not the plot) of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. I liked The Great Race and I liked Who's Minding the Mint? and I sorta liked Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines but I don't see any of them as being on the same tier as Mad World. I suspect that the main element of Mad World that was most imitated was hiring Jack Davis to draw a big crowd scene for the poster.

Fred Kaplan debunks many of the things people have said about the War in Ukraine, dating back to during the election when Trump said that if he won, he would end the war in 24 hours, maybe even before he took office.  Yeah, right.

In 1949, for promotional purposes (I guess), MGM Studios held a big luncheon for all their stars and made some kind of newsreel about it. They were celebrating the studio's twenty-fifth anniversary. And twenty-five years later — in 1974 — they did the same thing for their fiftieth. Here's a video that shows footage from both celebrations. It's not the best video quality but it'll have to do until we find something better…

I told part of this before once but I didn't do it justice and need to expand on it…

When I was working on the Garfield and Friends show, I became close friends with a brilliant, out-of-his-mind-in-a-good-way actor/comic and performer of cartoon voices named Howard Morris. We really liked each other and through Howie, I met Aaron Ruben and his wife, the actress Maureen Arthur. Aaron was, as explained in this post, a writer for Caesar's Hour — a show that featured not only Sid Caesar but also Howie. He went on from it to a stellar career in television, producing The Andy Griffith Show and Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C. and many more.

Aaron and I did not become close friends but we exchanged a few phone calls and letters, and I ran into him at various gatherings. He was a smart, funny man and I liked him a lot.

The last time I saw him was at the Memorial Service for Howie in May of 2005. A lot of great comedians and TV stars were there but folks couldn't help but notice the absence of two gentlemen who'd worked an awful lot with Howard Morris: Sid Caesar and Mel Brooks. It was whispered around the gathering that Mr. Brooks was not present because his wife Anne Bancroft was very ill…and, of course, everyone understood.

After the ceremony, I was standing with Betty Lynn and Andy Griffith, and Aaron came up and said sadly, "We're going to be doing this for Sid any day now." He said he'd seen Mr. Caesar a few days earlier and the man was in such bad shape that — and this is a near-exact quote — "I'll be surprised if he lasts two weeks." Andy bowed his head a bit and said something about how sad it was. We all did.

Well, Sid Caesar lived for more than two more weeks. This was in May of 2005 and he outlived Aaron Ruben, who passed away in November of 2010. He also outlived Andy Griffith, who left us in July of 2012. Sid Caesar finally died on February 12, 2014. That was just short of eight years and nine months since Aaron Ruben said Sid couldn't possibly last two more weeks.

I've had this experience on any number of occasions. I knew two comic book fans, both in their fifties, who asked me for Carl Barks's phone number because, as one so delicately put it, "We wanna go meet him before he croaks." Both of those fans died before Carl did. Carl was about 80 when they said that and he made it to 99. That was not a very good prediction.

There was a very wonderful comedy writer named Pat McCormick who spent his last years in the Motion Picture Country Hospital, unable to speak. But if you went to see him, Pat would motion to a guest book he had and insist you sign it. The last time I visited him, I signed it right below his two previous visitors, who I believe had come at different times — Johnny Carson and Buddy Hackett. I'm sure they both assumed it was the last time they'd ever see Pat…and it was. But he outlived both of them.

I'm not telling these stories to be morbid…quite the opposite. My experience is that when non-doctors assume someone's soon to die — including themselves — they're wrong an awful lot of the time. I can't say it's most of the time but it's often enough that they shouldn't make or believe those predictions….not without the say-so of a doctor who's actually examined the person in question. Fate has this strange way of surprising us.

In his Not-the-State-of-the-Union address, Trump said something about how Stacey Abrams — a lady he does not like — "somehow got her hands on nearly $2 billion" that was part of an energy initiative. This, of course, is not true as Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post explains. I suspect everyone of any prominence who has ever opposed Trump on anything will eventually be at least vaguely accused of some heinous crime.

Dale Herbest asked me this question which a lot of people have sent me…

Even just from brief snippets, did you watch enough of the Oscars to be able to judge Conan as host?

I would never presume to judge anyone from "brief snippets," especially hosting a show that I really don't like much, no matter who hosts it.

My ideal Oscar host would be someone who came out with all the envelopes and said, "All right…tonight, no monologue, no presenter speeches, no musical numbers. I'm going to open all the envelopes in rapid succession and if you win, run up here to thank whoever you want to thank but keep it under ninety seconds. Someplace in there, we'll stop and run the "In Memoriam" reel, which we're going to make three minutes longer so we can honor thirty more people than usual. Then we'll open the rest of the envelopes and be out of here in ninety minutes! The first award is for Best Supporting Actor and the nominees are…"

But of course, that's not what anyone wants. The network wants a long show so they can sell a lot of expensive commercials. The studios want clips and a lot of talk about the product they sell. The stars want hours of attention on them and a lot of endless praise for themselves and their profession. The current way of doing it services all those wants and I still don't think it matters much who the host is.

Sorry there wasn't more on this page yesterday. My power went out for several hours and when it returned, there were more pressing things that needed to be written. I'll make it up to you in the coming days. Personally, I think it was all Trump's doing.

And it's about time Randy Rainbow posted another video…

In addition to the Fact Check that CNN posted last night on Trump's speech to Congress, we have FactCheck.org fact-checking the speech, Politifact fact-checking the speech, The Washington Post fact-checking the speech, The Associated Press fact-checking the speech, N.P.R. fact-checking the speech, The New York Times fact-checking the speech, The B.B.C. fact-checking the speech, NBC News fact-checking the speech, ABC News fact-checking the speech, CBS News fact-checking the speech, Steve Benen over at The Maddow Blog fact-checking the speech, The Guardian fact-checking the speech, Al Jazeera fact-checking the speech…and there are probably a few others I missed.

Interesting how much these different journalists agreed upon, how many some of them missed that others caught…and how little truth matters to low-income people who think President Trump is going to make their lives better.