A person who has been sending me anti-vaxx propaganda throughout The Pandemic sent me an utterly unsourced claim that Britain's Queen Elizabeth II died because she was given a COVID vaccination. Yes, because why else would a 96-year-old woman die? I mean, it's not like anyone else of advanced age has died from getting the disease.

I have no idea if she even got a shot but it seems to me that it might be a good idea for anyone of any age whose job description basically was to go around and meet people.

And the eight minutes I spent reading his message, thinking about it and writing this may be the longest span of my life I've spent thinking about royalty in this modern era. I don't get why it exists apart from sheer tradition. I don't get why Brits go along with it or keep the custom afloat. I understand that is possible to have respect and affection for certain people but I felt that way about my grandmother.

The Internet Era has created people who were famous for being famous. It's also created people who were famous for being famous for being famous and even a few who were famous for being famous for being famous for being famous for…well, I've lost track. The point is there are human beings who are celebrities because someone just decided they'd be regarded as celebrities. And in these times, that's all "royalty" is.

I wish no one ill. I cheer no one's passing. I just don't get why this exists in the world today.

Yesterday, I mentioned the now-defunct Hughes Market chain in Southern California and I thought you might like to hear the story of how it was founded…

In 1948, Aviation Mogul Howard Hughes took control of RKO Studios. He was interested in making movies but he was more interested in making money…and he was especially interested in making starlets. Within a few years, he had a number of them being "kept" in scattered apartments in the West Hollywood area, each waiting for whenever the Bashful Billionaire craved the pleasure of her company.

Hughes paid their rent and the ladies would often hit him up — with greater and greater frequency and for larger and larger amounts — for "grocery money." Hughes began to suspect that the money was being spent on things other than trips to the market. Some of them might even have been spending it on male friends, he feared. He decided he had to do something about it.

Mr. Hughes was the kind of guy who never bought a nineteen-cent fly swatter when he could have acquired or opened a multi-million-dollar extermination company. His solution to the problem of escalating demands for grocery money was to open a market which, of course, he named Hughes Market. His various mistresses had unlimited charge accounts there but he would no longer give them cash.

That solved that problem but there was an unexpected bonus for Howard R. Hughes. The market was very profitable so he opened another and another…and soon there were Hughes Markets all over Southern California until the nineties. Then through a complex series of acquisitions and mergers, the stores all closed or turned into Ralphs Markets.

Isn't that a great story? There's not a shred of truth in it but isn't it a great story?

The Hughes Market chain was actually started by a man named Joseph Hughes — no relation to Howard. It was later run by members of his family, not one of whom was even distantly related to Howard. That's the actual story but for years, I heard the bogus one about Howard Hughes starting the chain. Yes, even before the Internet became a part of all our lives, there were phony stories and bad information in this world.

Here's another true story involving a Hughes Market. As I've said here, I used to like to shop at the one at Beverly and Doheny at 1 or 2:00 in the morning or even later. There's now a Ralphs there and it closes at 1 AM and it's no fun. It's just a place to buy Minute Rice. But the old Hughes there was open all night and there was a bit of a party atmosphere after about 2 AM.

They had a crew of workers who'd start around that hour, restocking all the shelves and cleaning and neatening things up for next day shoppers. The usual sedate music that was played over the market's speakers would be turned off and someone had a huge portable radio that would be blasting rock music you could hear throughout the store. Everyone who worked there was very friendly and happy and those of us who stopped in to buy groceries would get into the spirit. You even saw shoppers dancing in the aisles. I liked doing my marketing there then.

One morning — it may have been around 3 AM — I was in there putting cans in my cart and there were two amazing young ladies shopping as well. They were loud and laughing and more than a little drunk and they were stunningly gorgeous due to hair (probably wigs) and make-up (a lot of it) and tight dresses that, as they say, left little to the imagination. And they both had matching bodies that had to have been surgically enhanced to a ridiculous degree.  They looked like blow-up sex dolls come to life.

Easy assumption: They were strippers, probably from that strip club a few blocks away on La Cienega. You didn't have to be named Sherlock to arrive at that deduction. Oh — and each had a huge, bulging handbag. Remember that fact.

Not my type. I like real and I don't like drunk. In fact, there are very few things I find less attractive in this world than drunk. But it was hard not to pay attention to them and what they were doing. Each had a shopping cart and it almost looked like they were having a contest: Which of them could cram more of the store into their cart?

It was like they were buying out the place. I don't know if I heard one of them say this — like I said, they were very loud — or if I imagined it…but the scenario seemed to be that they were moving into a new apartment together and they were stocking it with everything they might want to eat during the next twenty years or so.

Their carts were so full of groceries and piled so high that items kept spilling out and they'd pick them up and squeeze them back in. I watched a little of this with some amusement until an urgent thought hit me: I must get to the checkout counter before them.

At this hour, there was only one and it was only open when someone wanted to check out. One of the folks stocking shelves would stop stocking to man the checkout counter for as long as necessary. Judging by the ladies' carts, a solid half-hour would be necessary. At least.

I stopped watching the ladies and I began rushing about, grabbing the last few items I needed and heading for the checkout…

…and I got there seconds too late. With audible gasps of effort, they were shoving those overstuffed shopping carts up to the open cash register. I asked if it was possible to open another and the guy who was starting on their carts said, "Sorry! I'm the only one here tonight who's allowed to work the register and only one is operating." So I'd have to wait.

And wait. And wait. And wait some more.

The two giggling drunk ladies looked less and less attractive as I waited with my twelve items while they were checked out with maybe a hundred each. This was in days before the automatic scanners we have these days. These days, the checker just passes an item over a glass and something goes boop and the price registers on the register.  Sometimes, it's even the right price.

But this checker had to enter each purchase by hand and often, he had to stop and look up a price or yell something like, "Harry!  Go find out what the 14 ounce box of Froot Loops costs!"  Those ladies did like their Froot Loops.

Don't start feeling as impatient as I did that morning, standing there and waiting.  We're almost to the punchline.

Finally, the contents of both carts had been checked through and a guy who came over to bag everything was almost finished stuffing it all into grocery bags filling what were now five or six carts.  The total on the register was close to a thousand dollars.  This was in the mid-eighties.  It would be way more than twice that today.

Ah, I foolishly thought.  They just have to pay so I should be out of here in three minutes…

And then the ladies dashed my hopes of getting home before dawn and they also confirmed my hunch that they were strippers.  They opened those huge purses of theirs and began hauling out and counting out their money.  They were paying in slightly-damp one-dollar bills.

Our friend Jimmy Brogan dropped me a note that he was pleased I'd featured that clip of him performing here so here's another. Again, there's no date on the video but someone in the audience mentions managing the Stage Deli in Century City. That place opened there around 1988 and didn't last for very long so the video is of that time period.

Once again, you'll see how Jimmy always has a joke no matter how the folks in his audience respond to his questions. I've probably seen this guy perform three dozen times and I've never seen him at a loss for words.

Quick story: Years ago, I liked to do my grocery shopping around 1 AM at an Open-All-Night Hughes Market at Doheny and Beverly, right across from Chasen's Restaurant. Chasen's is gone and so are all the Hughes Markets but I'd sometimes run into Jimmy Brogan there. He was always on his way to Jay Leno's house because Jay liked to gather some writers at that hour and work on monologue material.  Wanna guess why Jimmy was stopping in at the market on his way to work?

Because as he mentions in this video, he's a vegetarian.  And a guy who only eats vegetables could starve to death in Jay's house, that's why…

Several perceptive readers of this site have deduced that the Jimmy Brogan video I posted last night (this one) must be from around 1981. The clue I missed was that someone in the audience mentioned attending a test screening of the TV series, Mr. Merlin. Mr. Merlin was on in 1981.

Several others wrote to say words to the effect of: "If you're going to mention long-running Broadway shows, you should at least give a nod to The Fantasticks, which was an Off-Broadway show that ran a brief 42 years and had 17,162 performances." Consider The Fantasticks nodded.

Sticking with the post about long-running shows, a few folks wrote to ask how many of the Top 20 I saw. Well, I saw the revival of Chicago on Broadway. Even sat next to Julie Newmar who happened to be seeing it that night. I also saw The Lion King there (as you know) and Beauty and the Beast and Rent and Miss Saigon (twice!) and 42nd Street, all the original productions on Broadway. I saw national touring companies of the following shows out here: Wicked, A Chorus Line and Jersey Boys. And I've seen a couple of the other shows (like Mamma Mia!) in productions that were probably not close replicas of what played on Broadway.

I was momentarily puzzled on this list when I came to Grease because I have seen Grease in a Broadway theater, as well as a number of far-removed-from-Broadway productions. But Grease has been mounted for Broadway three times — 1972, 1994 and 2007 — and I didn't know which one of the three was the one that holds down Spot #16 on the list of longest-running shows. Turns out it was the first one…which I didn't see. The original production of 42nd Street was the first Broadway musical I saw at a Broadway theater.

Revivals do sometimes run longer than the originals, the best example being Chicago. The original production was a hit running 936 performances. The current revival opened in 1996 and is still running with more than ten times as many performances. Since The Phantom of the Opera is considered a British production, the revival of Chicago is therefore the longest-running American musical in Broadway history. Which proves all you have to do in life is give 'em the old razzle-dazzle.

Along with Harry O, which I've written more than enough about here, another crime-type TV show I liked was Police Story, which went on NBC in 1973. It stayed on for a number of years, sometimes as a weekly series and sometimes as specials. It was an anthology with a few recurring characters. Basically, it was a different story every week about a different police officer of some kind working in Los Angeles.

It was, as the titles told us, "Created by Joseph Wambaugh," Mr. Wambaugh was a former police officer who became a best-selling author of books about his profession, both fiction and non-fiction. I remember wondering back in '73 just what he had "created" in creating this show.  Do you get a creator credit for saying, "Hey, let's do a series that's about a different cop every week"? I guess you do — and as I got more into the TV business and understood more about writing for the medium, I realized Wambaugh probably had a lot to do with setting the tone of the show and its commitment to not sensationalize and to depict police work with a then-unprecedented level of accuracy.

And there was another credit I wondered about. There was an episode that starred Hugh O'Brian and Sue Ane Langdon. I was, then as now, a careful watcher of credits but back then, I wasn't watching on a VCR or TiVo. I couldn't freeze-frame or rewind…and in that episode's opening credits, I saw something for two seconds which seemed odd to me. But I couldn't go back and I failed to catch the episode in reruns so I just forgot about it.

Well, I just stumbled across it on YouTube. Here is a screengrab of that odd title card that caught my eye when as a mere lad of 21 in 1973, I noticed this…

How the heck did that get on the air?

Back here, I linked you to an article by Joe Conason explaining that in The Great Hillary Clinton E-Mail Scandal, the total number of e-mails that turned out to be marked "classified" was zero. So I feel I should also link you to a fact-check by Glenn Kessler who goes into great detail on the matter. The bottom line seems to be that she did things wrong but they turned out to be minor whereas he did some things wrong that sound pretty major. (Actually, the bottom lines seem to be to be that she cooperated fully with the investigation and that the Trump Administration could not muster up enough of a case to formally charge her. But read it for yourself.)

Some nice, efficient people with PayPal were nice and efficient enough to lift the hold on my account with them in record time. It is once again possible for you to donate bucks towards both the short and long term health of this blog.

And again, my thanks to those of you who've already sent money. When I see a name I recognize, I smile because…well, it's because I know that person, at least somewhat, and it makes me happy they think this blog is of value to them. And when I see a name I don't recognize, I smile because I have — I can only assume — pleased a total stranger. There are more in the second category than I expected.

To anyone who can't spare the dough right now: It's okay. Keep on reading. Donate later if/when you can…or don't. I'd hate to think anyone is sending money they can't afford.

I have no date on this but I'll guess late seventies/early eighties. It's my pal Jimmy Brogan doing a set at the Improv comedy club for the TV series, Evening at the Improv. When comedians start chatting from the stage with the audience, it's called Crowd Work and a lot of comics do way too much of it and often not all that well.

But Jimmy's a master of the form and often, he gets through a whole routine at a club without doing a single pre-written line. I think you can see him these days at the Comedy and Magic Club in Hermosa Beach where he opens for Jay Leno. Jimmy was one of the main writers on Jay's Tonight Show for much of its run and was often in sketches and bits.

What caught my eye in this video was one particular member of the audience. There's a gentleman who, when asked his occupation by Jimmy, points to the woman he's with and says, "I'm her husband." And by so doing — by not telling Jimmy what he does for a living — he avoids engaging in banter with the man on the stage. "Her husband" is Lorne Frohman, a very fine comedy writer who I worked with on most of the shows I did for Sid and Marty Krofft. Smart guy, that Lorne.

From Mark Bosselman, I have this question about Red Skelton…

Thanks for the nice story about Red. He seemed like a performer who enjoyed his life. However, and this may seem like a big however, he didn't like to credit or thank his writers for his material. As a writer yourself, what did you make of that and were you aware of this?

No, Red reportedly did not acknowledge his writers much…and it's said he almost never spoke to them.  His writing staff had a pool. Every day, each of them would put in a buck or two and the next time Red said anything to any of them besides the head writer, that writer would get all the money in the pool. Sometimes, it was a lot of bucks.

And there's also the story that an interviewer once asked Red how he managed to be so funny on stage and Skelton replied, "I just go out there and God tells me what to do." At the read-through of the script for his next show, Red was reportedly handled a pile of blank paper with a note from his writers that said, "Dear Red — Please have God fill in the pages."

Things like what he allegedly said are quite insulting to the men who played such a large role in his show's success…so no, I don't like that. Then again, thanks to industry custom (and Writers Guild rules) his writers did get the usual credits on the show and nice salaries. And I doubt anyone whose opinion mattered thought Red was ad-libbing that hour every week.

I am (of course) for writers being credited for their work but there are exceptions. When I wrote for stand-up comedians, they didn't stop in the middle of their routines and say, "By the way, that last joke was written by Mark Evanier." I ghosted gags for newspaper strips and didn't expect credit. I could probably think of a dozen other examples. There are times when it is not inappropriate.

The problem is not giving credit where it is appropriate and another problem is denial and/or lying. I've gotten offers where someone wanted me to write something and wanted me to sign something where I agreed to never claim credit and to back him up if he said he wrote it. I suppose I can imagine an offer so lucrative that I might agree to that but I've never gotten one. I do know writers who've felt forced, due to economic necessity into deals of the sort that didn't pay so well.

The thing is that credit is not just a matter of bragging rights. In most corners of the writing world, credits lead to continued employment and higher compensation. There are people in the comic book world who, I feel, did not receive proper deals and payments because while some fans may have understood what they contributed, the folks with hiring and deal-making powers did not.  Or could get away with pretending they did not.

I don't think that applied to Skelton's writers. They got the usual credits. They were nominated for and even won Emmys and other awards. And like I said, it was no secret in the industry that Red was not the easiest guy to work for.

Thinking back, I only recall meeting one member of Skelton's writing staff — a gent named Martin A. Ragaway who was with him for eight or nine years. He's the one who told me about the "pool." He had many other stories about the star being a problem but at times, dealing with those problems is part of the job description…as anyone who ever watched The Dick Van Dyke Show can attest.

It was a lot of steady employment and it wasn't so overwhelming that Mr. Ragaway couldn't write for other shows on the side. He was a very good writer who could easily have gone elsewhere if he felt mistreated…and he chose not to. What does that tell you?

I very much appreciate the donations I've been receiving the last few days but if you try to give now, you'll see something like the above graphic.  For silly (I think) reasons, PayPal has put a freeze on you giving me money.  It's too complicated to explain but basically, they asked me to send them some proof of something and I did but they couldn't read it on their end so they've frozen everything until some Special Master (like whoever looks over Trump's documents, I guess) can have a look at it, at which time the hold should be lifted.

If you sent me something, I either got it or your revenue source was not charged.  I'll let you know when the freeze is lifted…which, they say, may be in "a few days."  No matter what, I'm very grateful to you all for helping me keep this blog up and running.

Every so often, I find it interesting to take a look at the list of the longest-running Broadway shows.  Here's the Top 20 as of a day or so ago and the first thing I always think of when I look at these is that no show is likely to steal the #1 spot from Phantom of the Opera in our lifetime.  It still shows no sign of closing and it's still 3,643 performances ahead of its nearest challenger.

Broadway shows generally do eight shows a week times 52 weeks a year so that's 416 a year.  So if Phantom ever closes (which is quite an "if"), and if the revival of Chicago is still running then (bigger "if"), Chicago would have to keep running close to nine more years to be Numero Uno.

There are other intriguing facts that jump out at me but first, let's all read the list.  The shows in boldface are still up and running..

1. The Phantom of the Opera – 13,725 performances
2. Chicago (1996 Revival) – 10,082 performances
3. The Lion King – 9,699 performances
4. Cats – 7,485 performances
5. Wicked – 7,235 performances
6. Les Misérables – 6,680 performances
7. A Chorus Line – 6,137 performances
8. Oh! Calcutta! (1976 Revival) – 5,959 performances
9. Mamma Mia! – 5,758 performances
10. Beauty and the Beast – 5,461 performances
11. Rent – 5,123 performances
12. Jersey Boys – 4,642 performances
13. The Book of Mormon – 4,095 performances
14. Miss Saigon – 4,092 performances
15. 42nd Street 3,486 performances
16. Grease – 3,388 performances
17. Fiddler on the Roof – 3,242 performances
18. Life with Father – 3,224 performances
19. Tobacco Road – 3,182 performances
20. Aladdin – 2,866 performances

Like me, you may have noticed a certain absence of shows written by the big names of Broadway. Unless you count the uncredited punch-up he did on A Chorus Line, Neil Simon is nowhere on the Top 20. His longest-running show, Barefoot in the Park, ran 1,530 and comes in on this chart at #61.

The longest-running show that Stephen Sondheim had anything to do with was the original production of A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, which ran 964 performances. It doesn't even make the Top 100 and it's easily beaten out by all three separate productions of Grease.  (I am not for a moment suggesting that this is any measure of Mr. Sondheim's success or influence, nor Mr. Simon's, either.  It's just surprising that the two men most honored for the kind of work they do for Broadway haven't had long-running shows there.  Both would do way better in a list of the number of productions around the world.)

The longest-running show by Rodgers and Hammerstein was the original Oklahoma!, which ran 2,212 performances placing at #35. Not far below it is the original South Pacific coming in at #37 with 1,925.

If I went past the Top 20, you'd find the longest-running Jerry Herman show (Hello, Dolly!) at #21 with 2,844 performances and the longest-running show by Lerner and Loewe (My Fair Lady) at #22 with 2,717.

Disney has three shows in the Top 20 with Mary Poppins not far behind at #24.

In the Top 20, we have 18 musicals and two shows — Life with Father and Tobacco Road — without music, both near the bottom of that 20. The next non-musical on the list is Abie's Irish Rose at #33 and in a week or two, it will lose that spot to Hamilton.

And you may notice other things on the list including the fact that hit shows are running longer and longer these days. Four of the top five are still open…and we'll soon have the Top Four all running when Wicked overtakes Cats in about 32 weeks.  There was a time when a lot of people felt that no show would ever run longer than the original A Chorus Line but Phantom has more than doubled its run and seems unstoppable.

Finally for now: Situated in the Top 10, and likely to be there for a long time, is that 1976 revival of Oh! Calcutta! which played the Edison Theater until 1989.  It didn't matter that it had no stars because it had no clothes…at least in some scenes.  It was a low-budget production to begin with and I'm surprised no one has revived it since because I suspect there would still be an audience for it.  Even the fact that it was never a very good show in the first place didn't seem to matter.

If you're a fan of Red Skelton — and I kinda/sorta was and am — you might want to know that the Red Skelton Museum has uploaded an awful lot of his work to YouTube including many, many episodes of his weekly hour show that ran on CBS from 1953 to 1970. It then switched to a rather sad half-hour on NBC for its final year. But I may be more fascinated by the making of the show and Red's (shall we say?) "eccentricities" than I am by the actual content of the programs.

As I wrote here, I used to run into Mr. Skelton a lot in Westwood Village when I was attending U.C.L.A. about the time his show ended. I would have liked to have talked to him about his work — and he did give me short, get-it-over-with answers to a few questions I managed to slip in. But mostly, he just wanted to tell me (or anyone around) dirty jokes. At least, they were dirty jokes in 1971. Today, they might get a soft "R" rating. At least around me and in a public place, he was a man who went through life making others and himself laugh constantly. I have never seen another human who was that insufferably happy while telling jokes.

You can read that old article of mine if you're of a mind to and if you do, you'll find that I went to see him do his show at CBS twice. Once was a taping with Marcel Marceau as his only guest for an all-pantomime hour. The other was a rehearsal where Red ignored the lines on the cue cards and just told more of his dirty jokes to amuse himself and an audience of his crew and various CBS employees from around the lot. He seemed to live for that rehearsal and the subsequent taping of the actual script, and I'll bet it was jarring for him when he didn't have all that in his life. Maybe he began compensating by telling dirty jokes to college kids in Westwood Village.

I picked out one hour to embed below here. They occasionally messed with the format but most episodes started and ended with a troupe of singers and dancers welcoming you and in the opening, they billboarded the guests. A pretty wide array of folks in show business were guests…and in the sketches, you might also see a lot of great comic actors like Lennie Weinrib, Burt Mustin, Chanin Hale, Joi Lansing, Milton Frome, Robert Easton or Joyce Jameson. Among the supporting players in this one are Walker Edmiston and Dave Sharpe. Dave was a pretty famous stuntman and if you see someone take a big fall or crash through a wall in a Red Skelton Hour of the sixties, it's probably Dave.

The main guest in this one (which aired 2/13/68) is Burl Ives, who plays in the main sketch opposite Red's Deadeye character. Red had a little repertoire of characters — Clem Kadiddlehopper, Freddie the Freeloader, The Mean Widdle Kid, etc. — and he'd play one of them a week. Ives also does a song as does the musical guest, Lulu. There's also Red's monologue near the top, a pantomime bit ("The Silent Spot") at the end and around the 30-minute mark, Red does some comic blackouts and there's one that calls for him to be hit in the face with a tomato. Whoever was throwing the tomato had lousy aim so they had to do it again and again…and the funny thing about the sketch is about how much Red seems to enjoy that they had to do it again and again.

I doubt you'll make it through the entire show but if you do, there are plenty more on YouTube where this one came from…

One of my favorite political writers, Joe Conason, explains the vast differences between what Hillary Clinton did with her e-mails and what Donald Trump is alleged to have done with classified documents.  Short excerpt…

…while we don't yet know the extent or nature of Trump's abuse of classified documents, we can determine how many were found by investigators, after exhaustive searches, among Clinton's thousands of State Department emails.

The accurate answer is zero — although few if any news outlets have informed the public of that startling fact. And it is a fact that the Trump administration itself confirmed three years ago.

That's a photo of my best buddy in the male category, Sergio Aragonés. Sergio is alive and well and surprisingly healthy…and his drawing, which was always sensational, is somehow better than it ever has been.  I cannot come up with any logical explanation for that which does not involve cloning.

I was a bit hesitant to post birthday greetings to my amigo today for two reasons.  One is that any time I've posted them and a photo in the past, I get e-mails from a couple of folks saying, "You scared me!  I went to your blog and for a few seconds there, I thought So-and-So was dead!"  Sergio is, as I just said, alive and well…and drawing.  Matter of fact, I think this is supposed to be a secret but since they can't fire me and nobody told me not to mention this, Sergio has recently drawn some new material for MAD.  The magazine remains, sadly, a reprint vessel but they're doing some new pieces for an upcoming issue celebrating its 70th anniversary!

And the other reason I was hesitant to wish S.A. an H.B. is that in the past whenever I've wished anyone that, I hear that other friends are miffed and feel snubbed that their birthdays weren't celebrated on this blog.  Be reasonable, people.  I already post too many obits here.  If I salute all my friends on their birthdays, this blog will be nothing but He's Dead, She Isn't, He Is, He Isn't, She isn't, He's Dead…

So Sergio is, as he has been all his life, an exception.  He is a gentleman and a very funny person and a very good friend and I've known him for over 50 years and worked with him more than 40 of those and we've never had a fight and even when we disagree about something, we settle it with no friction and I just love the guy.  There.  I said it.

…my cell phone got a call from Bulgaria. I didn't answer it. I just looked at it and wondered how come the usually-efficient Spam Call blocker on my phone wasn't suspicious about a call from Bulgaria. A bit of online research told me that the phone number (the last four digits of which I have concealed) connects to a casino in Bulgaria.

(Must I point out that I have never been within 3000 miles of Bulgaria, I have no business with anyone in Bulgaria and would be shocked if anyone I knew was in Bulgaria?)

So what do they want with me and how would stupidity on my part lead to the emptying of my bank account, huge charges to my credit cards or other results of which I would not be fond? For a second there, I was thinking it might be one of those calls that claims to be from Microsoft to say I have an awful virus on my computer and they'll be glad to fix it for me if I just give them temporary access. But is there anyone brain-dead enough to not get a little leery of a call from a Microsoft Tech Support Office in Bulgaria?

But it's more fun to speculate on some purpose for the call which would make me regret not answering. Over in Bulgaria, let's say, there's a huge fan of Groo the Wanderer comic books and he's really old and he's dying and he wants to leave all his levs (that's what they call the money in Bulgaria) to the folks who've brought him such joy and comfort through the years…especially today since today is Sergio's birthday. (I'll post something about that later.) So he asked a friend of his who also operates a casino to phone me and arrange for the transfer of funds.

Wow. That's sounding so entirely possible that I'm beginning to regret not answering the call.