This is A Fowl Affair, a 1931 short comedy from Educational Pictures. Educational was kind of the low rung of the studios back then. Most of the comedians who starred in their films were either on the way down or on their way to nowhere but there was the occasional gem…and the occasional "What was someone thinking?" film like this one.

I hesitated before posting it because it contains some antiquated racial stereotypes and also because I don't think all of its performers were treated well. Then again. it was a long time ago and no one to my knowledge makes pictures like this one anymore. Maybe it's useful to remember the kind of thing that became unfashionable and why.

And it is, you have to admit, weird enough that it has genuine curiosity value. The Library of Congress must have spent serious money to preserve it. Pardon the odd framing but it was apparently scanned that way as part of its preservation.

One of the main characters was voiced by Billy Bletcher, who was a short guy with a deep voice heard in many films. He was the Big Bad Wolf and many villains in Disney films. He voiced the character who has the last line in the movie — just in case you make it that far…

There's much talk on the 'net today about why the new Spielberg-helmed remake of West Side Story seems to be — to use the nicest possible term — underperforming at the box office. I've seen about twenty-five explanations offered, several of which are in this article by Owen Gleiberman and I suspect there's some merit to all of them. There are so many reasons, you wonder why anyone is shocked.

I sure dunno why they aren't lining up for it. I haven't seen the film and probably won't until it's on my home video screen. I'm not as huge a fan of the original as some people. It's one of those films where I find myself thinking, "This is really well-made but I'm having trouble caring about those characters." The one time I saw the musical staged live, I admired the heck out of the dancing, the singing and the music but, again, didn't get deep into the story. That's my vote for why the movie is, as they say, "underperforming." But I'm sure it isn't the only reason and maybe not even the main one.

Since it probably won't get the attention it deserves, I'd like to note the passing of actress Cara Williams at the age of 96. She was a movie star, best known for pictures like Meet Me In Las Vegas and The Helen Morgan Story. She co-starred with Danny Kaye in The Man From the Diner's Club and was Oscar-nominated for her work in The Defiant Ones.

Like a lot of movie stars of her day, she then went into television and while she guest-starred all over the place, she was best known for starring in two TV series — Pete & Gladys (1960-1962) and The Cara Williams Show (1964-1965).

Pete & Gladys was a spin-off from and successor to the long-running series, December Bride, in which Harry Morgan had appeared as Pete Porter, the "wacky next-door neighbor."  On it, he was always talking about his never-seen-on-December-Bride "wacky wife," Gladys…and after that show went off, Pete and a few other characters on it were joined by Gladys  (played by Ms. Williams) in this new series.

This was in accord with some law in the television industry that apparently said that Harry Morgan always had to be on a series. He went from December Bride to Pete & Gladys and then on to The Richard Boone Show, Kentucky Jones, the revival of Dragnet, The D.A., Hec Ramsey and then on to M*A*S*H, followed by AfterM*A*S*H…and even that wasn't his last series.  He was also on Blacke's Magic and You Can't Take It With You.  If he hadn't died in 2011, he's probably be a regular on Fleabag.  Never mind that he'd be 106 years old.

Pete & Gladys was one of the better ones owing largely to the great chemistry he had with Ms. Williams and the fact that she was a terrific comic actress.  Comparisons to Lucille Ball were inevitable even without the same hair color but I thought Cara Williams deserved to be respected as a gifted comic actress in her own right.

I remember nothing about The Cara Williams Show other than that she co-starred with Frank Aletter, Paul Reed and (occasionally) Jack Sheldon…and that it wasn't as good as Pete & Gladys.  But she was probably great on it and there are several episodes of each series on YouTube if you want to decide for yourself.

She was a really good actress who had a fine, though maybe not long enough career.

Broadway performer Greg Hildreth performs "Buddy's Blues" from Follies. He's accompanied by Charlie Rosen's Broadway Big Band and some talented (but unidentified) ladies. I like this performance because, for one thing, it's quite unlike the way Mandy Patinkin did the number in the concert album…and therefore, the way most singers try to do it since. I believe Mr. Hildreth is in the new, just-opened revival of Company…

This post is largely about the time stamp on it. As (basically) a freelance writer for (approximately) 52 years and five months, I occasionally slip into a lifestyle of being awake when everyone else I know can be presumed to be asleep — like now, for instance. Some people, I'm sure, are awake — I see a number of them apparently online on Facebook at the moment — but my phone isn't ringing, there's very little traffic noise on my street and it feels like I'm the only one conscious on the planet. This can be very good for a writer and it's often when I get my best — or maybe just my most writing done.

But you have to make sure you treat it as temporary; that at some points, you get your life in sync with the rest of the world. There are calls I must make and calls I must take…and especially during The Pandemic, orders I must make and deliveries I must receive. Some of those calls are ZOOM conferences so I have to make at least a token attempt to have about the top quarter of myself look presentable.

Leaving ZOOM out of it, this is roughly how I have lived for much of those 52+ years. There have been extended periods when I've had the kind of writing jobs that require one to report to an office almost every day. There have been periods when I had two or more such jobs. But basically, I think of myself as a guy who works at home. When people ask me, "When do you write?" I usually say, "All the time" or sometimes "When I have to in order to get the work in to them when they need it." Another good and true answer sometimes is "Between other obligations."

I feel like during The Pandemic, more and more people are living this way. Certainly, more of them are working from home and/or waiting for Grubhub to deliver. And this is going to sound odd but I occasionally think that if there had to be a Global Pandemic — and there didn't — it could certainly have come at a worse time for me. Like when I had to spend so much time at hospitals because my mother was in them (as she often was) or my lovely and loved friend Carolyn was in an Assisted Living Home battling the big "C."

Carolyn was in one for eleven months and I occasionally look online to see reports on how COVID has infested that particular home. It seems stable now but for much of the first Year of the Coronavirus, they were losing patients and medical personnel at a ghastly rate. She would likely have added that to the long list of things wrong with her…and I would have been in danger every time I went in to see her, which I did almost every day.

I'm also fortunate to have a very good doctor who has given me — and his other patients, one presumes — very sound advice based on a pragmatic assessment of What We Know and What We Don't Know. I've usually had good doctors but there were periods when I didn't…when I'd lost one good doctor and was searching for another. You know the old saying about how a man who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client? I've come to feel that way about laypersons who think they know all about medicine.

If all this sounds self-obsessed…well, it's easy to slip into that mode when you feel like the only conscious human being in the world. I'll finish an article I'm writing after I finish this, then I'll go to sleep, then tomorrow — whenever it feels like "tomorrow" begins — I'll start working my way back to "normal" hours.

And I do understand that others are awake. Checking back on Facebook, I see several other friends apparently online and I wonder what day it is for them where they are. Are they up late on Saturday night or up early on Sunday morning? Or do they, like me, not know the difference…or care? There's one there I need to talk to about something but it can wait for a time when it's today for both of us.

Here's a somewhat new video of a somewhat old song from the somewhat changed (I think) group of singers called Voctave. It's "The Trolley Song," a tune I like a lot and I like their interpretation…

Sympathies and good thoughts — including the hope that they receive as much aid as can humanly be given A.S.A.P. — to the people in Arkansas, Illinois, Kentucky, Missouri, Mississippi and Tennessee affected by that big swarm of tornadoes. The news footage looks horrendous.

Wanna help? Every time something like this happens, my mind goes back to another natural disaster — I don't even remember for sure which one — when the lady then in my life said, "We've got to do something to help those poor people." She was talking about rounding up canned goods and blankets and medical supplies and then shipping them to the scene of the tragedy many states away…

…but when she called a rescue agency to ask how to do that, she was told, "Honestly, the best thing you can do is to send money. We don't have to stop and figure out how to transport crates of supplies, some of which we might not need or figure out where they're needed. With money, we can purchase exactly what's needed nearby…or give vouchers to the victims so they can get what they need."

Everything I've read about disaster relief since has convinced me that's the best way to assist. Money. Whatever you can spare.

I send what I can spare to a group called Operation USA. I know some of the people involved in it and I've investigated and found that almost all of what you give them goes to the people in need, as opposed to bureaucratic salaries and fancy offices. They are non-political and quite dedicated to helping victims in any country, including this one. There are other good charities but I doubt any do more good with what you send them.

I just heard about this…

…a few hundred comedians…had their albums taken down by Spotify the night before Thanksgiving, according to Spoken Giants, a publishing-rights company that represents the likes of Mike Birbiglia, Tiffany Haddish, Lewis Black, Jeff Foxworthy, the Bob Hope and Lucille Ball estates, and many other comics you know and love.

The dispute between Spoken Giants and Spotify dates back a few months, when the former company approached all the streaming services, as well as SiriusXM and terrestrial-radio outlets, to point out that comedians deserve royalties on their written work, not just the audio of their performances. Spoken Giants — which represents people who perform spoken-word entertainment, including podcasters and poets — is asking that its clients be compensated in the same method as the music world.

You can guess where I stand on this battle.

A moment with The Muppets on The Ed Sullivan Show for January 17, 1971…

The gender-inverted production of the musical Company opened last night on Broadway and the reviews are in. They range from The Daily Beast…

Two and a half hours of sublime entertainment that becomes more sublime and more pleasurable as it continues, it is a transporting experience, an emotional one, a full meal with dessert, and at least two drinks of your choice.

…to The New York Times which called it "confusing, sour remake" and went on to say…

…the revival that opened on Thursday night at the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater is not the Company Sondheim and the book writer George Furth (along with the director Hal Prince) unleashed on Broadway in 1970. Sure, the score remains great, and there are a few perfectly etched performances in supporting roles, especially Patti LuPone's as the undermining, pickled Joanne. As directed by Marianne Elliott, however, in a gender-flipped version abetted by Sondheim himself, what was once the story of a man who is terrified of intimacy becomes something much less interesting: the story of a woman who is justifiably tired of her friends.

Most of the reviews found something to love but even the raves don't make me yearn to see it…which is fine because I probably won't. I do have some curiosity if the lack of coherence I felt in the productions I've seen has been remedied…but I won't be going East for quite a while.

There don't seem to be any good clips from the show online yet so here's the big number — "Being Alive" — performed by a man. This is from the 2010 BBC Proms in concert version and the man is Julian Ovenden…

• Joe Biden signed papers today raising the debt limit of the United States. The least he could have done was raise mine while he was at it.

These days, everyone seems to think they have to have an opinion about everything, including but not limited to books they haven't read, TV shows they haven't seen, movies they haven't seen and which may not even have been made yet, and many, many things that can in no way affect them.  What's more, they feel they have to tell us all these unnecessary opinions and sometimes even get angry at those who do not share them.

As I demonstrated back here and here, I am trying to minimize the number of opinions I have, especially about matters that don't matter to me.  Like, I have never cared what some Big Star wore to an awards ceremony.  Hundreds…sometimes thousands of opinions are voiced about Scarlet's gown or Denzel's tux.  I have no such opinions of any sort.  I probably don't even care about the awards ceremony, either.

Some people get offended and even angry when you don't listen to their opinions and judge them to be right and proper.  It's sometimes like: "If you don't care about my opinions, you don't care about me."  Nonsense.  I can separate the two.  The fact that I don't care about some opinion you have doesn't mean I don't care about you.  I can not care about you for all sorts of reasons.

Here are a few other things I don't care about. I don't care about Being the Ricardos, the new movie from Aaron Sorkin about Lucy and Desi and their iconic sitcom. I care a little about the old I Love Lucy show, though not as much as some friends of mine do. I thought it was a cleverly-written show (most of the time) and I thought everyone in the cast was good — Desi, especially. I respect Lucille Ball's efforts and contributions but I just never sparked to her as a performer, especially in her movies and her three subsequent situation comedies.

And I have less interest in a semi-bio film that purports to show us what folks like that were like and then invents conflicts and dialogue and generally fictionalizes famous lives. We might admire the effort but I usually feel we're being offered drama at the deliberate expense of truth. I have felt that way so often — most recently, Stan & Ollie and the Judy Garland film with Renée Zellweger — that I'd feel "fooled again" if I expected anything else. I always end up, dazed and flat on my back, with Lucy (Van Pelt, not Ball) chuckling how she pulled the ball away at precisely the right moment to prank me again.

I've just stopped caring enough about these films to even have an opinion.

And while I'm at it, I'll add in that I don't have an opinion about this year's Academy Awards, what the members of the Beatles secretly thought about each other at some specific moment in time, anything about Kanye, just about anything about anyone who became famous on a so-called "reality show," the many varieties of Pringles, and The War on Christmas, which I think is about as real as The War Against Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter movies.

I think this is a good approach and you can get way ahead of me on this by not having an opinion about me not having these opinions. Give it a try or don't. I don't care.

• Sad news about Mike Nesmith, a great talent and one of the reasons his group overcame being a corporate creation and turned into a real rock band. Condolences to all his fans and to L.M.S. Micky Dolenz…Last Monkee Standing.

Hadley Freeman talks with Mel Brooks, whose autobiography has just come out. I decided to buy this as an audiobook because hearing Mel say it for real will be better than imagining his voice in my head.