Andy Huggins is pretty darned funny — but I don't know what to make of the fact that a guy delivering those jokes is only a year older than I am…

I continue to get an indecent number of Spam calls — strangers calling me, trying to get me to buy some product, hire them for some service or just give them cash for their "worthy" (and maybe it is) cause. I have a strict policy of saying no to all of them without exception but I'm on enough lists that the calls, they keep on comin'.

A few are almost pleasant, especially after I say — as I do to the more polite ones — "I'm going to do you a favor. There's no way I'm buying what you're selling. There's no need to go through the whole sales pitch." The ones that annoy me most are the ones who act like we have some pre-existing relationship and they've called me because of it. One such call might go like this…

"Mark, it's Harold Shmeckel with Shmeckel Construction. We spoke a couple months ago and you said that around the beginning of June, you'd be ready to do some upgrades of your property. My company's lead estimator will be in your area next Tuesday and I wanted to schedule him to drop by so you could discuss those improvements we talked about."

They only protest a little when I tell them we've never talked before and sometimes, I tell them, "Since you started this call by lying to me, I certainly can't trust you to do any construction work for me." Or sometimes, I play along and ask them something like, "Did we talk about refinishing my tennis court?" The caller will invariably reply that, yes, we talked about that and he assured me his company was highly experienced in refinishing tennis courts, whereupon…well, you can guess how that exchange ends.

Since I turned seventy, fewer of these calls come from contractors and more come from firms that want to arrange for my "final expenses," which means prepaying for my funeral and whatever the hell is going to be done with my body. I'm thinking of having it cryogenically frozen and then every July, they'll thaw me out for four days to host panels at Comic-Con.

The last time I got one of those "final expenses" calls, a day or three ago, I told the caller, "Sorry but there's every indication I'm going to be around a lot longer than your crummy fly-by-night company." The caller sadly muttered "Probably" and then hung up.

Lately, I get some of those "We spoke last year" calls that claim they spoke with Dorothea. Dorothea was my mother who died in 2012. For some reason, her name is still on a lot of the lists that are sold to cold-callers and my phone number is attached. I've had several solicitors call and tell me that she spoke to them that not long before, she asked them to call about cleaning out her gutters. My mother donated to a number of charities and most of them have called to remind her she hasn't made her usual donation lately.

Almost in the same category as strangers who pretend my mother and/or I spoke to them before are people who fit the following description: We spoke or met briefly way in the past…and then they call me, don't identify themselves and start a conversation based on the assumption that I will instantly recognize their voices. I had a guy do that the other day. We met ever-so-briefly at a Comic-Con years ago and I'm pretty sure we never spoke on the phone. He, like all those sales persons, wasn't showing me Caller I.D.

Still, he started right in with "How are things going?" and "What are you up to these days?" and there I was without the foggiest clue who I was talking to. He wasn't calling to try and sell me anything or to try and refinish that tennis court which I don't have…but he was still kind of annoying. I wish people wouldn't do any of this.

Glenn Kessler of The Washington Post catches House Speaker Mike Johnson misrepresenting a past budget projection by the Congressional Budget Office. As Kessler notes, "Lawmakers love to cite [a C.B.O. analysis] when it gives them a number they like (as Johnson did only a few days before this interview) and attack it when the number causes political problems."

The Associated Press says that Trump's claims about remedial math at Harvard University don't add up. When have any numbers cited by Donald Trump ever added up?

The New York Times says Trump and "his allies" are straight-out lying about what his "Big, Beautiful Bill" will do to healthcare in this country. Steve Benen of The Maddow Blog has more to say about this.

And lastly for now: This article at the Times notes how many bogus numbers were cited in Elon Musk's "send-off" as the guy doing whatever the hell he was doing. It's starting to look like this man cost this country a lot more money than he saved.

Lin-Manuel Miranda teaches us some of the slang terms used on Broadway. One he left out is "hot bodies," which refers to audience members who actually paid to get in…

I embed a lot of video links on this blog. If at any point, some video seems to be in the wrong window, that almost certainly is a problem on your end, not mine. It means the cache on your web browser has too much stuff in it and it's getting confused. What you need to do is to flush (i.e., clean out) your browser cache. If you don't know how to do this, this page should tell you.

I haven't written anything about the passing of actress Loretta Swit because I never met her and know nothing about her that any other M*A*S*H watcher doesn't already know. She was very good on a very good TV show…and you don't need me to tell you that. But you might need me to tell you that my pal Paul Harris did a real good interview with her back in 2004 and you can hear it on Paul's website.

Patti LuPone is a big star on Broadway. I've only seen her once on stage there or anywhere. It was the 2008 revival of Gypsy and I thought she did a great job of capturing the nastiness of Mama Rose and a poor job of speaking or singing the words of the play in a manner than most people could understand. My friend Carolyn, who'd never seen the show before, kept whispering "What did she say?" to me and we had very good seats.

So I guess I'd say I'm not a fan but I could be if I saw her in something where I could make out most of what she was saying or singing. I also understand why some people love her.

But some people are not loving her a lot these days as this headline makes clear: Over 500 Broadway Artists Release Open Letter Reprimanding Patti LuPone. She said some things in this recent interview that were pretty nasty towards other performers and there was some arguably-racist stuff in there. They were the kind of comments that make people lose a whole lot of respect for the commenter even when there isn't a somewhat-organized protest as there has been in this case.

Ms. LuPone has issued an apology that is pretty damned thorough and it sounds sincere. We've all seen apologies that try to dodge responsibility with phrases like "I'm sorry if anyone was offended" but this one was pretty thorough. I gather that some people in the theatrical community are willing to accept it and let that be the end of it but some think more outrage is warranted. Looking at this from afar, I'd say it's now a matter of personal reconciliation with those she attacked.

She made a number of mistakes but a big one was saying those things in print instead of in a video interview. If we all saw her say them, we wouldn't have understood half of what she was talking about.

I didn't see Disney's recent live-action remake of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and…well, I was going to say, "And neither did anyone else I know" but I realized my pal Leonard Maltin probably did. Or maybe he didn't. We haven't discussed it.

But this video is 100% of what I've seen of the film and you can surmise my reaction by noting that I'm writing this instead of dashing out to find a theater playing it. I'm not sure there is one.

You can't/shouldn't judge a movie by one scene but I would think that if they couldn't make this particular scene sparkle, it doesn't bode well for the rest of the picture. The mostly-CGI dwarfs look more freakish than endearing to me and I don't know why they transformed Dopey into Alfred E. Neuman. But you make up your own mind…and I'm kinda curious if an audience unfamiliar with the animated original would find this enchanting. I am not ruling out that that's possible.

Meanwhile, I should mention that the aforementioned Mr. Maltin and I will be doing a panel at Comic-Con International in San Diego. It's called "Great Cartoonists and Comedians We Have Known" and we're just going to sit there and tell stories about — you guessed it — great cartoonists and comedians we have known. If you aren't tempted by that panel, I have fifteen more you may enjoy…

Back in this post, I wrote about folks on the Internet who tell you what is good for you to eat and what is bad. There's been a recent explosion of them, inspired (I suspect) by the fact that a gent named Bobby Parrish, who I wrote about then, and a few others seem to be making very tidy livings with such videos. It feels to me like there are thousands of them now and that at least 95% of them don't know what the hell they're talking about. It also feels to me like I haven't the time or knowledge to winnow out the 5% who might.

Some of them imply or outright claim to be doctors…and who knows? A few of them might actually be real ones. It almost doesn't matter because you have one guy explaining how seed oils will kill you and a lady telling you seed oils are great for you and someone of indeterminate gender telling you that seed oils won't have any effect on you, good or bad, until you've consumed enough to fill an Olympics-size swimming pool. As a person with numerous food allergies, I have never believed in one-size-fits-all advice on what I should or shouldn't eat. That's one of the gripes I have with online medical and food recommendations — that myopic attitude of "This is good for me so of course it'll be good for you!"

I haven't been in a Costco lately but from the looks of some of my Instagram browsing, their stores are all filled with people making little videos telling you what to buy, what to eat, what not to put in your mouth, etc. Most of them seem unaware that there's a pretty good chance that what's sold in their neighborhood Costco might not be sold in everyone's neighborhood Costco…so even their reports on what's new or available aren't very useful to me. And a lot of them seem to think that they're the only human beings smart enough to read the label on something.

I've started skipping these videos and whenever possible, I click whatever I can click to try and be shown less of them…but it's difficult. To give health advice on the Internet, you don't have to know anything about medicine or nutrition or the contents of our food. You just have to know how to upload. I'm fully expecting Trump to appoint one of them to oversee our nation's health…because you just know whoever's next in that job will know even less than Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Obit for Peter David by Gavin Edwards in The New York Times. There will be a gathering to remember Peter at Comic-Con International in San Diego this year.

When I was a kid, we had no home video: No Betamax, no VHS, no Laserdiscs, no DVD, no Blu ray, etc. The only way most of us could watch a movie in our homes was to buy 8mm movies like those offered by a company called Castle Films. They weren't cheap if you were a kid. They also weren't very long. Castle Films took many of the great Universal monster movies and released them as one-reel movies of approximately 10-15 minutes. They even cut some of them down to four minutes!

The first time I saw the 1943 classic Frankenstein Meets the Wolfman, it was a Castle Film that a friend of mine had purchased. Castle took the movie — which was an hour and fourteen minutes in its original release — and hacked it down to a little over four minutes. Later, I got to see it in full and I realized that with the Castle Films version, I really wasn't missing much, plus I saved seventy minutes!

Everyone who wants to cut funding for anyone's health care claims they're only cutting waste and fraud…but the statistics they're citing don't seem to support that insistence. Glenn Kessler looks at the numbers that House Speaker Mike Johnson is citing and finds them lacking in this thing called accuracy.

Speaking of health care: To the surprise of (I would think) no one, Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr is justifying much of what he's doing with faulty reports. They cite studies which either never existed or which drastically misrepresent what the studiers reported. ABC News (and just about every other news source) has the details.

And — surprise, surprise! — He also has some really unsubstantiated views on vaccinations for COVID. Or so Politifact is reporting. Putting this man in charge of our nation's health was like entrusting the nuclear codes to Gomer Pyle. Which, for all we know, Trump has also done.

Sonny and Cher starred in a rather popular show — The Sonny & Cher Comedy Hour — on CBS from 1971 to 1974. Then they got divorced and each one starred in their own series. The Sonny Comedy Revue went on the air for ABC on September 22 of '74 and didn't do too well. It was pretty much the same show, sans Cher, but that seems to have made a big difference.

Its last episode aired December 29, 1974. If it had stayed on another six weeks or so, it would have been on opposite Cher's new show which had its first airing on February 12, 1975. Hers did a little better, perhaps in part because of better guest star bookings. It lasted until January 4, 1976, after which time the two of them reconciled and did a new Sonny & Cher Show which ran a year and a half.

This is the first episode of Cher's series with guest stars Bette Midler, Elton John and Flip Wilson. It got pretty good reviews at the time, more for the musical spots than for the comedy material. Personally, I never thought I'd see a TV show and think, "This needs Sonny Bono!"

Is there a single thing Marco Rubio has said lately that is not the direct opposite of something Marco Rubio said a few years ago? Glenn Kessler tackles some of Rubio's latest twistings of realities.

I keep reading posts online that say that Trump's "Big, Beautiful Bill" contains provisions that would allow him to cancel or delay elections. But Snopes says this is not so.

But Snopes does verify that Donald Jr. really did write that stupid thing about how a visit to Arlington National Cemetery reminded him of family's sacrifices. Whatever Senior may have lost by running for President, I suspect he's getting it back many times over these days accepting bribes.

"Seth" — who I assume has a last name but he didn't tell me what it is — wrote to ask…

I also watched the Pee-wee documentary this weekend, and reading your thoughts got me thinking about two questions for you:

1) The recollections on the doc about how Saturday mornings were the "wild west" and that they could get away with so much material seem very different from your own battles with Standards and Practices. Any thoughts about why the Playhouse team had such a different experience?

2) Thinking about Gary Panter and the 80's-90's underground comics (comix?) movement, that isn't an area that you write a whole lot about. Were you interested in those books at all? Any favorites? Anything you currently read?

Pee-wee's Playhouse was on CBS for 45 episodes that aired between September of 1986 and November of 1990. Overlapping those years, I wrote, voice-directed and co-produced 121 half-hours of Garfield and Friends for the same folks at the same network. I had — and I am stating this clearly and with no ambiguity — absolutely no real problems with the network or the Broadcast Standards 'n' Practices people. I heard from the BS&P department maybe twice a season, always about something minor, always about something that was fixable in two or three minutes of unheated discussion.

For example, I once had a joke about a character eating something doused in Tabasco Sauce and the Standards guy called up and said, "That's a brand name. Could you change it to 'hot sauce?'" Fine. I changed it. I know writers who feel compelled to die on every hill for every battle but my attitude is "Save your ammo for when it really matters" and that never became necessary on that show.

The changes they requested were few, far-between and no more injurious than that. Once in a while, there was a problem because a storyboard artist would put in something as a joke to amuse others in the office. He knew it would be cut out but the crew at BS&P called to make sure. (And I know this will sound like a George Carlin joke but I kept thinking that "BS&P" were two things you couldn't have characters doing on a show for kids.)

So the answer to your question is that the people in charge at CBS then were smart and reasonable and courageous and I'd like to think that had a lot to do with some very high ratings for most of their programming then.

I did have problems galore with the "standards" people at NBC and ABC. I think I've told some tales here about a lady at ABC who felt it was her mission in life to remove everything funny and the whole concept of kids thinking for themselves from Children's Programming. I also came to realize that some of the hassles I was having on shows were the fault of the animation studios that employed me.

They were often too quick to give in to network demands. At one point, I was simultaneously story-editing an ABC Saturday morning series and writing for an ABC prime time series. On the latter, when BS&P demanded changes, I could usually talk them out of 90% of those demands. I could talk them out of their demands on the cartoon show too but then I'd discover that a producer who shall remain nameless (it was Bill Hanna) had already made the cuts and changes for which they'd asked.

That did not happen on any show I did for CBS after around 1983. It didn't happen with Dungeons & Dragons. It didn't happen with The Wuzzles. It didn't happen with Mother Goose & Grimm. It didn't happen with Pryor's Place or all those CBS Storybreaks or a few other shows I worked on for CBS. So there's your answer: Smart people at the network. I know it sometimes may not seem like there are such human beings but there are. Sometimes.

As for underground comix: I have crates of 'em from back when they started. Liked some, didn't like others…which, of course, was just about everyone's reaction. A lot of them, I think were very much products of the time in which they were done, which is not a real negative. I just haven't been tempted to reopen those crates for a couple o' decades.

I don't know that the term "underground" applies today because we no longer have the situation where a couple of publishers — DC, Marvel, Harvey, etc. — have the stranglehold those firms then had on the marketplace. Nowadays, there are countless publishers putting out graphic novels and comics that present individual, personal statements by individual writers and artists…and to me, that's all underground comics ever were: A marketplace via which people could write and draw freely without conforming to someone else's idea of what they should write and how they should draw — and they could even retain some or all ownership of their work. And today, I like some and don't like others…which is how it always works.