Vanity Fair has up a piece about Jerry Lewis using his fame and power to mistreat women. I was initially leery of it because its authors include the folks who did that one-sided (and to my mind, wrong-sided) Allen v. Farrow documentary for HBO but this new article rings true.  Part of that is because they interviewed multiple women who told of Jerry's horrendous behavior. And also, Lewis did a lot of shameful and arrogant things not involving women. Judge for yourself.

Much fuss is being made about the announcement that the Academy Awards will drop a number of categories from the live, on-air telecast and present them at the ceremony but not on the air. The categories they will present before the world are Actor in a Leading Role, Actor in a Supporting Role, Actress in a Leading Role, Actress in a Supporting Role, Animated Feature Film, Cinematography, Costume Design, Directing, Documentary (Feature), International Feature Film, Music (Original Song), Visual Effects, Writing (Adapted Screenplay), Writing (Original Screenplay) and Best Picture.

First off, I think marginalizing the other categories is a mistake. When you see someone win for Film Editing or Makeup and Hairstyling, you're probably seeing the high point in that person's life and maybe even a moment that will change their career for the better. When you see Spielberg win for Best Director, it's just another award for a guy who's already got a lot of them.

But forget about that. Why does anyone who isn't nominated and/or stands to profit from an award even care about that ceremony? Clearly, every year, fewer people do. No one thinks the statues always wind up on the right mantles and many folks are just tired of seeing rich and famous people honor each other. The Academy Awards have long been a dysfunctional institution but somehow, people who think that keep being disappointed by it. Just take a cue from the 2013 winner for Best Original Song: "Let it Go!'

Here's another article about how the current Broadway revival of The Music Man has been drained of much of its meaning by being drained of anything to which someone in 2022 might object. Having not seen the show, I resist the trap of assuming these articles are all correct…but I'm beginning to feel like the main reason I'd like to see it is to find out if these articles are right.

From what I hear, mixed reviews and high ticket prices aren't keeping audiences away from this show. High ticket prices don't seem to be keeping people away from a lot of shows of different kinds. The comedian Kevin Hart just announced four performances — two each night on July 2 and 3 — at the Cosmopolitan Hotel in Las Vegas. Ticket prices start (start!) at $300 each for the worst seats and go up to $1,250 and they're just about sold out. This is for 90-120 minutes of one person standing on a stage talking.

People everywhere are complaining about The Price of Everything going up and I think they're sometimes too quick to blame Inflation or government actions or international money fluctuations or things like that. Sometimes, the price of something goes up solely because the people offering it simply thought they could get more money for it…and they're sometimes right.

I don't know why people like this pastor in Arkansas don't know better than to talk to Jordan Klepper…

And if we go by the 24-hour clock, it is now 22:22 on 2/22/22 in Los Angeles. I will be doing this again in March of 2033.

I mentioned here the other day that I was getting used to a new keyboard on my P.C. Quite a few of you wrote to ask what I was using and how I liked it so here we go. I prefer the kind that clicks and you feel like you're working on the keys of an old electric typewriter. A friend who's well-versed in computer stuff recommended one of these…

It's the Redragon K580 VATA RGB LED Backlit Mechanical Gaming Keyboard with Macro Keys, Dedicated Media Controls, Onboard Macro Recording and to match my eyes, Blue Switches. Yes, it's a gaming keyboard but so far, it works just fine for my purposes…which do not include gaming of any sort.

The keys light up — which I like — but the default is a series of rainbow colors that display in different patterns — which I don't like. It was however an easy matter to find the code to switch them to all-white and unchanging, thus eliminating that drawback. Otherwise, I like the "touch" and I'm quickly getting used to its slightly-different layout from what I had for the last few decades.

Amazon has them for, at the moment, $73. I'm sure it'll be wrong for some people, especially those who prefer quiet keyboards with a feathertop sensibility but so far, it's working for me.

As I post this in Los Angeles, it is 2:22 on 2/22/22. Again.

This is from Ed Sullivan's TV program on September 27, 1953. The video says it's from The Ed Sullivan Show but in '53, it was still called Toast of the Town. It emanated from New York and back then, it was very common to refer to California — as Ed does here — as "The Coast." Something could happen in the Mojave Desert but to New Yorkers, it was happening on "The Coast," as if the Eastern United States didn't have a coastline of its own.

Stan Freberg and Daws Butler then had a best-selling comedy record. Both sides parodied Jack Webb's popular series, Dragnet, which was a radio series from 1949 to 1957, and which added a TV version in 1951. One side of the record was "St. George and the Dragonet" (Dragnet in medieval times) and the other was "Little Blue Riding Hood" (a Dragnet version of the children's story). Here's the latter with Ed assuming the announcer role done on the records by Hy Averback.

June Foray, who also appeared on both sides of the record, plays Little Blue Riding Hood and her grandmother. Daws Butler plays the other cop back at the station. It took a certain amount of ingenuity to do this live on stage with no sets or props and minimal costuming. On Ed's show that night, they also did the flip side of the record with the same no-budget staging.

The records were very popular and Jack Webb — who as Ed says, gave permission for it all — was delighted and felt that the parody upped the popularity of his series. But he was a bit annoyed that it planted in many minds that "We just want to get the facts, ma'am" or similar lines were heard often (or even at all) on his show. That was a Freberg/Butler invention which became part of Dragnet lore.

I was privileged to know and work with Stan, Daws and June…three people of awesome talent, amazing careers and vast amounts of sheer niceness. I miss all three of them very much…

As I post this in Los Angeles, it is 2:22 on 2/22/22. And it will be again in twelve hours.

• I'm having plumbing problems. I'm fairly sure Trump is sneaking into my house at night and flushing documents down my toilet.

So now I've seen all four parts of the documentary by W. Kamau Bell about you-know-who and you-know-what and the main revelation I had was that I approached it with unreal expectations…or maybe "hopes" would be a better word. I hoped it would give me some insight into a problem with which I've struggled. I hoped for an "aha!" moment when I would figure out how to deal with a conflict within my own private brain.

It's a problem based on the fact that few human beings are so overwhelmingly flawless or even overwhelmingly flawed that you can regard them wholly as one or the other. Some might get close…but even then, that may be because of what you don't know about them. Clearly for most of us, there was a time when the portrait of then-Doctor William Henry Cosby Jr. was purely a good one. Clearly too, there was a time when that became more arguable…and clearly now, there are those who would place him squarely and without hesitation in the Horrible Person category. He is hardly the only human who has undergone this change of image.

As a fan of so many things, chief among them comedians and cartoonists and comic book creators, I've formed opinions of so many people. I've gotten to know many of them, up close and personal…which means I've wrestled with a problem: How do you regard someone when 90% of what they've done is admirable and brilliant and maybe even wholly benevolent…

…and then there's that 10% that just won't go away.

Or maybe it's 80/20 or 70/30. I have no problem knowing what to think of them when there's no good and plenty of bad…but sometimes, the ratio is harder to measure. How do you quantify the good and bad? And even when, as in the case of Cosby, the bad pretty much negates the good, do you pretend the good never existed? Is it wrong to honor Cosby's accomplishments as a performer and a humanitarian and philanthropist? He was clearly a grand role model for a helluva lot of people. How much weight do we give that?

It's probably easier when the person in question raped at least sixty women — probably a lot more — because that's the kind of sin/crime that can't be spun in an innocent light. You can't say, "Well, maybe they gave consent while they were unconscious…" Some of the bad things I know other people have done are bad but not that bad.

Obviously, I'm not going to name names here but I can think of at least a dozen people I've known where the following was true: I admired them and even liked them for good things they did. Then at some point, they did bad things or I became aware of bad things. At times, I've almost envied those who, either due to naïveté or willful blindness, saw these people as All Good or All Bad. The naïve or willfully blind don't have to deal with the conflict.

I don't see how anyone could watch even one installment of We Need to Talk About Cosby, let alone all four, and not be convinced that "America's Dad" is guilty as hell, sick as hell and that it's awful that he's not still behind bars. He was not in any way exonerated by the legal decision that let him out but I guess he and his more delusional fans are more comfortable thinking he was.

My only "Aha!" moment watching the doc — the moment I learned something from it — was that there was no "Aha!" moment, nor could there ever be. We will have to always deal with The Good Cosby and The Bad Cosby as two sides of the same human being. With the folks I've known who've led to mixed feelings, those feelings will forever be mixed. Those individuals are both of those people — the one I admire and even like, just as much as they're the one who disappointed me because I'd thought they were just the first guy.

You may think that's obvious and so did I. But it was worth the four hours to realize that I wasn't missing something; that there really is no other way to deal with someone like that. And I think I also learned about why so many people had so much trouble dealing with Cosby's dual nature. I was never a huge fan of him as a performer but I sure identify with those who were in agony coming to terms with the ugly side of the man. And I can sure get angry, as anyone watching the documentary would, that he got away with as much as he did.

If your answer is "never," skip the article I'm about to link to. In fact, skip this blog indefinitely. But if you're wrestling with this question, this article might help you wrestle.

More impossible feats from my pal Charlie Frye…

…how good it is to have John Oliver's show back.

Even though masking rules are still in place in Los Angeles, I see a lot of uncovered faces every time I go out. I sense a lot of wishful thinking there: It's over, it's all over, it's not coming back. It would be great if that's so but I'm not that optimistic. I have one of those milestone divisible-by-ten birthdays in ten days and I think I'll err for now on the side of skepticism.

I'm not watching much in the way of news or politics but when I turned on the TV this morning, I saw Ted Cruz denouncing the Biden Administration for the decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. I did not hear the reporter remind him that the agreement for the U.S. to do this was signed in February of 2020, nor did I hear Cruz reminded of who was president in February of 2020.

Jeff Zucker was ousted recently as the president of CNN because — and I quote — "…he had failed to disclose a romantic relationship with another senior executive at the network." A friend of mine asked me if I didn't think his firing was unduly harsh given the stated reason. I gave my stock reaction to this kind of thing: "We know what they announced but we probably don't know the whole story." That's proving to be true and I think it's almost always true when someone is fired like that. In fact, I think it's often a matter of "You're going to resign now for these reasons so all the other reasons won't come out." And sometimes, those other reasons don't come out.

If I make more typos than usual here lately, I'm going to blame it on getting used to a new keyboard. For most of my computing life, any non-laptop work I've done has been either on old Northgate keyboards or clones thereof. None of those keyboards are still made and while I had a good guy who'd fix and clean mine, the seven-or-so I had have just plain worn out. I tried a new Dell membrane-type keyboard but it had what I don't like (but tolerate) on a laptop…that kind of "spongy" feel without the sensation of individual keys. My computer guy recommended a new mechanical model and I like it so far. If I like it for another week, I'll tell you about it.

Here's one you might not know. In 1967, British singer-songwriter Jonathan King had a modest (exceedingly modest) hit with a song called "Round Round," which I stuck on my mixtape. I didn't have his much bigger hit, "Everyone's Gone to the Moon" on there nor did I have any of the dozens of other songs on there that he reportedly recorded under other names. He was quite prolific, though his career hit some major blocks some years later when it was alleged he'd had indecent contacts with underage boys. I won't claim I understand enough about it to say if he was innocent or guilty; just that he was charged and tried and convicted but there were appeals and some dismissals and…oh, go look it up yourself if you're interested.

What interested me was "Round Round," which was an anti-drug tune released at a time when there were a lot of songs glorifying drugs.  It felt to me like Mr. King's song was getting some airplay on KHJ on something like an "equal time" basis…so the station wouldn't be pilloried for some of the other records they were broadcasting to a young, perhaps impressionable audience.  Or maybe I was just imagining this about a song that was about people imagining things that weren't there.  Here it is…