Speaking of shows being closed in Las Vegas: One of my favorite live shows there, which I've seen a couple times, is/was Absinthe, which presumably will come back soon when more of Vegas does. I once described it here like this…

Imagine a Cirque du Soleil show but take away about 80% of the budget, all the weird costumes and sets and bizarre music. Keep the part where human beings go out and do physical feats — aerial stunts, balancing, juggling, lifting, etc. — that seem physically impossible. Then add in the rudest, nastiest host ever in show business history — a man who makes Mr. Rickles look like Mr. Rogers — and his assistant, who has the mouth of a sailor and the I.Q. of a potato chip. Mix well and pour. That's Absinthe.

The company that produces it also had two other shows in town — one called Opium and another called The Atomic Saloon Show, neither of which I've seen. All three closed, as did almost all other live shows in town, when The Pandemic hit. They briefly reopened Absinthe at the end of October under rules that limited seating to 150 people in a theater (a tent, actually) that usually holds 660.

That only lasted until the allowable seating was reduced to 50, at which point it closed again and I believe it is still closed. This, of course, creates great financial problems for the producers and a lot of personal problems (including but not limited to the financial kind) for the folks who appear in the show. The Spiegelworld people have been especially vocal in protesting some of the governor's rules, particularly those which allow nightclubs to be a lot more crowded than theaters or tents.

I don't know enough about Nevada rules to have an opinion on any of that. I am however intrigued by a series of rather elaborate videos that Spiegelworld (or someone in its midst) has been making about the shutdown, told from the POV of the producers and performers. Some of it is funny, most of it is sad or frustrating…and I'll warn you that some of it is rather adult in content, though not so much in the first installment which I'm embedding here…

That's Episode #1. As I write this, they're up to Episode #18 so if you want to catch up on them all, it'll take you some time. The whole series is best watched on this page.

William Saletan lays out the case that Donald Trump has known all along that he lost the election. Maybe so. But I never got the sense that there was a strong link between what Donald Trump believed and what Donald Trump said. And not all that much between what Donald Trump says today and what he'll say tomorrow.

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It's been ten days since a nice lady shot me full of Moderna vaccine. That was Dose #1 which brought on zero side effects. As many of you have informed me, if one is going to have side effects from this vaccine, they're more likely with Dose #2. So be it. None of the descriptions I've heard of such side effects sound even a hundredth as bad as actually getting the disease.

I have not changed my isolation lifestyle. Everything I've now done for 331 days to try and avoid COVID-19, I'm still doing. I just feel a little safer. And please stop trying to make me feel less safe by telling me about strange new mutations of the virus that will turn your brain into orange marmalade and give your knees the consistency of Silly Putty.™ We all have quite enough to worry about already, thank you.

Among the many things I used to do and am not doing now is going to Las Vegas. Actually, I'm not going anywhere but especially not to Las Vegas. Everything I read about what it's like there now makes me want to not be there for a long time. They've cut way back on everything but the gambling…which means everything I go there for since I gave up gambling late in the previous century.

Some restaurants are still open…though most, including some fast food places, require reservations. They're trying to manage how many people are there at any given time.

Only one hotel-casino offers a buffet at the moment. It's South Point, which is way out in the midst of nowhere else you'd want to go. It's operating "cafeteria-style," which means no self-service. You tell an employee, assuming one's on duty, which food you want and how much to put on our plate. Many hotels have, in fact, not only closed their buffets but remodeled those spaces into something else, indicating they do not expect buffets to make a comeback in the next few years.

There are only a few shows running, mostly comedy clubs, small magic shows or shows where a half-dozen people — male or female — dance with almost no clothes on. Wonder if any of them wear masks. The closest thing to a headliner performing now is Rich Little, who used to be an impressionist and now does a so-so impression of one.

Most discouraging is that the Vegas chat boards are full of tales of poor or non-existent service. A couple of folks are telling stories of arriving at a casino-hotel with a confirmed, paid-in-advance room reservation only to find that the casino-hotel is only operating as a casino. They abruptly closed down the hotel part without notifying reservation holders. What a nice thing to do to someone you refer to as a "guest."

One reason it's been easy to stay at home almost 24/7 for 331 days now is that I can't think of anyplace else I want to be.

These two people are both my pal Charlie Frye. You will see why I will never play cards with this man. Either of him…

The other day here, I mentioned that in the seventies, I — well, here. Let me quote that paragraph again…

I did, however, spend some time at both their offices. Every year or two, I'd go spend a week — once it was three weeks — back in New York and I'd hang around the DC offices or the Marvel offices where absolutely no one ever said to me, "What are you doing here? You don't work here." Most, if they noticed me at all, just presumed I did. And once in a while, I'd be asked to do something as if I was an employee and I'd do it.

So now I have about a dozen e-mails asking me what I actually did while poaching in the DC and Marvel offices. I hung around. I kept friends company and tossed out a few ideas. I read some comics that were going through the production process and in so doing, did some proofreading.

On the last day of one of my New York trips, I was up at Marvel when an issue of Unknown Worlds of Science-Fiction was being readied for the printer. This was a black-and-white magazine featuring comic book stories and text articles. A gentleman named Len Grow was in charge of whatever was being done with it and he started reading one of the articles that had been pasted-up onto page blanks. Today's that's all done on computers but back then — this was mid-seventies — the type for an article was set on sheets of glossy paper and you'd literally — like with a scissors — cut out blocks of this typeset copy and paste them in place on the page.

Mr. Grow couldn't make sense out of the article and he was under the gun to do a dozen other things on the book before a messenger would arrive to take it away for printing. Thinking I was some new employee, he handed it to me and said, "Quick! See if you can make any sense out of this." I read it over and I couldn't; not until I realized that whoever had pasted it up had pasted several paragraphs in the wrong order.

I figured out the right order and marked the text in blue pencil to indicate what should go where. Then I looked around for Len Grow so I could tell him what had to be done. But I couldn't find him and time was running out so I grabbed up an X-Acto knife, peeled the blocks of copy off the page and repasted everything in the proper order. Just as I was finishing but before I had the chance to give it a read and make sure it was right, Grow ran back in and said, "The messenger is waiting for the issue. Did you figure out what was wrong?" I told him I'd fixed it, handed him the pages and off they went.

I don't recall now which issue or article it was but I do remember that a couple months later when that issue came out, I read it carefully and was relieved to see it was really correct. I also recall wondering who Len Grow thought I was or if he was puzzled as to why I wasn't at work the next day or any day thereafter.

And today's video link is from Mr. Randy Rainbow…

This is kind of a follow-up to this recent post about how I don't understand people who get so emotional cheering for "their team" in sports. It's that way in other areas.

Back in the seventies, I wrote a lot of comic books for Gold Key Comics, plus I was the editor of the Edgar Rice Burroughs Estate's comic book division and of the Hanna-Barbera comic book department. For the latter two, I wrote a lot of what those outfits produced. Much of what the H-B department did was published overseas and all of what that E.R.B. division did was for foreign publishers, plus I wrote scripts for a foreign comics department that Disney operated on its Burbank lot.

So I wrote quite a few comic books…just not many for DC or Marvel. Before any of you write in and take issue with that statement, let me tell you two things. Yes, I did assist Jack Kirby for a time with his books for DC…but those were comics Jack wrote, even if my pal Steve Sherman and I did give him some minor, wholly unnecessary help. We were paid by Jack, not by DC and as far as we were concerned, we worked for Jack, not DC, and he wrote those comics.

And yes, some of the comics I worked on for Hanna-Barbera were published by Marvel…but I worked out of the Hanna-Barbera studio and I was paid by Hanna-Barbera, as was everyone who worked on those comics. Marvel just published some of them in this country. If you read one, it may have looked to you like I was working for Marvel but I was working for Hanna-Barbera. Like I said, I didn't do much for DC and Marvel.

I did, however, spend some time at both their offices. Every year or two, I'd go spend a week — once it was three weeks — back in New York and I'd hang around the DC offices or the Marvel offices where absolutely no one ever said to me, "What are you doing here? You don't work here." Most, if they noticed me at all, just presumed I did. And once in a while, I'd be asked to do something as if I was an employee and I'd do it.

One of the things I observed was how loyal — and I don't necessarily mean this in a good or bad way — some people were to the company that was employing them at that moment. If a company is giving you a paycheck, what it should get in return is your best labors and efforts in whatever way it's been agreed you will earn that paycheck. But it shouldn't automatically get your heart and blind allegiance…or at least, you shouldn't give it freely.

Loyalty to people is great when properly dispensed. Loyalty to companies? Not so great…especially because companies change as the people change. And the people change. With both DC and Marvel, I have occasionally been in this position: I get hired to work with Editor A and then something happens and I find myself working with Editor B.

Again, that's not always bad. On one comic, I was hired by Editor A, was suddenly working with Editor B, then was suddenly working with Editor C and I wound up being Editor D. In this case, I got along fine with all of them, even that last guy.

I was friends with a man named Archie Goodwin who went back and forth a couple of times between DC and Marvel, at times being a very important editor and writer at each. Archie was great at many things and one was that he avoided thinking that the company that was paying him that week was the best because they were paying him that week.

We talked about it once and he said — I'm paraphrasing from memory here — "You can't get too emotionally involved with one company because then you get whiplash when you go to work for the other or when the boss changes." We had both observed folks who had suffered mightily from mistaking their workplace for their homes, their co-workers for their family, their boss for Mom and/or Dad, and what often turned out to be a short-term gig for Job Security for the rest of their lives.

This is not peculiar to comic books. I've seen it at animation companies, movie studios, newspaper syndicates, book publishers, TV networks…everywhere my career has taken me. I'm sure it happens to some degree in the insurance business and the aluminum siding business and just about every other kind but I'm just using comic books here for my example.

At one point, DC and Marvel used to exchange bundles. Each week when the newly-published comics came in from the printer, DC would send Marvel a batch of their new releases and Marvel would send theirs in return. I was up at Marvel one morning when that week's bundles came in from DC and everyone crowded into an office as one fellow opened the package and he and everyone there offered instant critiques. It sounded something like this…

"Oh my God! Look who they've got drawing Batman now!" "That's the worst cover I've ever seen on Wonder Woman!" "They must be desperate to give work to that guy!" "They're absolutely destroying Aquaman!" "They need to put that Sgt. Rock book out of its misery!"

Later that same day, I was over at DC. Someone had that week's bundle from Marvel and again, everyone who was free at the moment crowded into one office and offered their immediate reactions as the occupant of that office browsed past book after book…

"Oh my God! Look who they've got drawing Iron Man now!" "That's the worst cover I've ever seen on Hulk!" "They must be desperate to give work to that guy!" "They're absolutely destroying Daredevil!" "They need to put that Sgt. Fury book out of its misery!"

The rhetoric, if not the specific dialogue but for the nouns, was just about identical. Trust me on this. The air in both rooms was thick with the sense of "If the competition did it, it must be awful."

I'm sure they didn't all believe that. I think most of them thought that when you work for a company, that's what you say about the competition. (There was a gent there who was then freelancing for both companies. He'd been in the Marvel group earlier that day, happily engaging in bashing the other company that employed him.)

But I think a few of them believed what they were saying. And I think a few more were more inclined to believe it, sorta.

One person on the premises who did believe it was a DC executive who wandered by the room while this was going on. He poked his head in to ask what they were talking about. Someone said, "Just looking at this week's Marvels." He asked why and said, "They're all crap." And from this point on, I believe I am quoting the conversation verbatim. It made that much of an impression on me at the time.

Someone said, "They have some good artists working for them." He said, "No, they don't. And he added — and I'm sure I'm quoting this accurately — "The worst artist at DC is better than the best artist at Marvel."

This was followed by stunned silence even among those who'd been trashing Marvel only moments before. Someone ticked off some names of the best current Marvel artists: "John Buscema, Gene Colan, John Romita, Joe Sinnott…" He shook his head as if to say he was standing by what he'd just said.

In case you don't know comics, those are four guys who pretty much everyone would agree were good artists. That is, unless deep down, you had some emotional need to believe that the company that paid you was outrageously superior to all others.

And then the only guy in either room who hadn't joined in on the insulting of the comics in that bundle spoke up. I didn't work there so I guess I thought, "What's he going to do? Fire me?" I thought of someone then working for both companies and I asked, "Are you trying to tell us that Gil Kane art DC publishes is great art and the Gil Kane art Marvel publishes is bad art?"

He nodded and said, "Exactly. Gil knows he can't get away with handing that shit in to us." Yeah, right.

As some of you have noted, I'm giving myself a vacation from politics. You get weary of this stuff at times and I'm especially tired of articles and discussions with friends about "What's Trump going to do?" It seems clear to me that even Donald J. can't answer that…or if he can, the answer could change tomorrow — or as often as he changes impeachment lawyers.

But I was interested in this piece by William Saletan about why Trump lost the election. A couple of his own pollsters are writing about it and they both seem to think he could have won but he made a couple of fatal mistakes. Here are two of them. ("Fabrizio" is not a detergent. It's the name of one of the pollsters.)

Fabrizio flagged two particularly foolish mistakes in Trump's response to the virus. One was ridiculing masks. In the 10 battleground states, voters who favored mask mandates (Biden's position) outnumbered those who opposed mask mandates (Trump's position) by a ratio of three to one. The enormous pro-mask constituency went to Biden by about 30 points, on average, in the five states that flipped to him. Trump's other dumb move was his persistent slander against Anthony Fauci, the director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. In the five states that flipped to Biden, 72 percent of voters approved of Fauci's job performance, and 63 percent of those voters went to Biden.

For all his detractors and death-threateners, Dr. Fauci is still the only human being on the national scene with any credibility at all to speak to the Herculean task of stopping the virus. No one else has any at all with the public…and certainly no one who isn't a doctor does.

Hal Holbrook did so many plays and TV shows and movies in his long, rich career. So many. In some ways, it's a shame that folks will say, "Oh, yeah…he's the guy who did that Mark Twain thing on stage"…though even if that was the only thing he ever did, we will still be mourning the passing of a great, accomplished actor.

He did that show for 63 years and I'm so happy that after missing many opportunities, I finally got the chance to see him do it back in 2014. I went with my friend Jewel Shepard and we met up with our friend Frank Ferrante for dinner first…and then at the theater, we hooked up with our friend, James Karen, who literally had known Mr. Holbrook since before the days of Mark Twain Tonight.

It was wonderful — one of those theatrical experiences you carry with you for a long, long time. And as a bonus, we all got to go backstage after and meet the star. Jewel was wise enough to haul out her camera and record this little video and capture the reunion of Mr. Karen and Mr. Holbrook. You'll see Frank and me grinning in the background…

From a concert at the White House back in 2012, my favorite singer — Audra McDonald — sings what is probably not the easiest song in her repertoire…

A few years ago on a panel at Comic-Con, I mentioned that I was a fan of the 1978-1981 TV detective show Vega$ starring Robert Urich. A fellow in the audience who reads this blog had an extra set of the entire series on DVD (this set) and he was nice enough to send it to me. I've been watching one or two episodes per night for long enough to get through, so far, the first season.

Have to say I don't enjoy it as much now and I did then but I enjoy it enough to keep watching. A small part of the problem may be watching so many of them back-to-back, night after night. You begin to notice a certain sameness from episode to episode. For instance, Dan Tanna — the private detective played by Mr. Urich — takes on very few cases that would pay him his oft-quoted, rarely-paid price of $200 a day plus expenses.

They're mostly cases involving friends or friends of friends or people who can't pay…as if the producers told the writers, "We want him to be personally involved in every case." Tanna seems like a great guy but if you're his friend, you're destined to be beaten up every so often, shot at and/or framed for murder.

Then again, seeing shows in rapid succession has made me impressed with how good Urich was in the part. And I'm impressed with how elaborate some of the episodes are in terms of set-ups and crowd scenes and shooting all over Vegas. It's hard to believe they could have filmed some of those in five days.

Las Vegas of 1978-1981 is one of the big stars of the show. Tanna rarely drives his red 1957 Thunderbird convertible to any hotel that still stands. The T-Bird is also a star. I used to own one of those cars and I still love 'em. There are big chase scenes involving it where I'm thinking, "Oh, I don't care if Dan Tanna gets killed. Just don't wreck that great car."

(I assume they had a couple of 'em. I actually saw the main T-Bird he drives in person some years before the show went on. It was owned by Dian Parkinson, one of the prize models on The Price is Right long ago, when she was married to the guy who later produced Vega$. It was in the valet line at a party and she was ahead of me. I never saw such a beautiful woman get out of such a beautiful automobile.)

I also like that the show has just about every familiar face from that era of television either in a starring guest spot or a cameo. The first season alone, we had Cesar Romero, Robert Reed, Sid Caesar, Molly Picon, Barbara McNair, Slim Pickens, Strother Martin, Bill Dana, Nehemiah Persoff, Richard Bakalyan, Cameron Mitchell, Kim Basinger, Red Buttons,  John Marley, Henry Jones, Isabel Sanford, Shelley Berman, Pernell Roberts and everyone else who ever sailed for the same producers on The Love Boat.   Norman Alden and Andrew Duggan had major guest roles as two different people in different episodes in the first season. Muhammad Ali, Dean Martin and everyone else who set foot in Vegas did cameos.

One person I hadn't seen in the first season was this comedian I keep talking about on this site, Dave Barry. To remind you: Dave Barry was a stand-up comedian who appeared often on The Ed Sullivan Show and in clubs and hotel rooms across the country. He also had a decent career doing voices for cartoons, including a lot of vintage Disney and Warner Brothers shorts. I had the pleasure of meeting him twice before he passed away.

Vega$ filmed all over that city but was most often based at the Desert Inn and in the show, you saw a lot of the big marquee signs out front of every hotel but especially the Desert Inn. In the show's opening titles, and often in the episodes themselves, you see that WAYNE NEWTON was headlining there and in smaller letters below his name, it says DAVE BARRY. His name was on the show a lot that way.

So I figured Dave Barry would show up in an episode but he didn't. I looked him up in IMDB to see which one he'd be in…and while the credits there for the series seemed pretty complete, there was no listing for Dave Barry ever appearing on Vega$. Wayne was on the show twice — once playing a character, once playing Wayne Newton — but no Dave Barry. It seemed kinda unfair to me.

Now, since I've been writing here about Dave Barry, I've been in e-mail correspondence with two members of his family. Last night, I was watching an episode of Vega$ while I was answering some e-mail and I was about to write to his grandson when I heard a familiar voice from the screen. I looked up and there was an actor playing a bit part as a casino security guard…

The voice gave him away. It was Dave Barry without his toupee and with what may or may not have been a fake mustache.  He was not listed in the show's credits and he was not listed in IMDB, though I think his grandson is adding him in for this.  But that was Dave Barry…in a scene that was probably filmed at the Desert Inn during the day when he was opening for Wayne that night.  It's only about a minute and a half but you can see it in this video, about four minutes in.  They even found him a bald stunt double or maybe a hairy one with a bald cap.

I'm very proud that I recognized him.  That's the guy who did Humphrey Bogart in all those Bugs Bunny cartoons and was briefly Elmer Fudd and a lot of other folks.  I'm now into the second season of Vega$.  I'll let you know if anyone else interesting shows up.  I'm sure many familiar faces will.

My pal Ken Levine has posted a nice piece about Allan Burns, a greatly-respected TV writer who passed away over the weekend. My history with Mr. Burns consisted of a handshake and a few friendly words on a Writers Guild picket line so I'm not the guy to write a real piece about what he was like but Ken is.

And as near as I can tell, everyone else who knew Allan Burns well had the same opinion of the man and everyone else who watched The Mary Tyler Moore Show or any other show that Allan wrote, had the same opinion of his work. And hey, the guy wrote cartoons for Jay Ward!

Here's another one of these "lots of singers and musicians on Zoom" performances. This one is the best song from the movie Dumbo. Go for it!

As you might've read here, last Tuesday I got a COVID-19 vaccination down at Dodger Stadium. Yesterday, vaccinations there were delayed for close to an hour by a group of anti-vaxxers and COVID-deniers who blocked traffic, imploring people to throw away their needless (they believe) masks and/or not kill themselves with a poisonous (they believe) vaccination.

None of the news accounts I read made it clear if all the anti-vaxxers were also COVID-deniers or vice-versa or if this was an amalgam of two groups with slightly-related beliefs. Seems to me it's possible to believe that the vaccination is safe but that it's a cure for no known disease…or to believe The Pandemic is legit but that the vaccination is poison. I suppose the latter group would believe that, yes, COVID-19 could kill you but the alleged vaccine is more likely to kill you. Or something like that.

And I would guess that there were a lot of people who believe both; that there is no real Pandemic — it's all a hoax — and that the two vaccines are dangerous. Maybe they think whoever arranged the hoax — which seems to have fooled like 98% of the doctors and medical personnel in the world — is an excuse to shoot people full of these drugs that will kill them or make them all Bill Gates's mind slaves or something.

If you're dumb enough to believe one nutty conspiracy theory, you're dumb enough to believe the other. And maybe also that Anderson Cooper eats babies.

What I'm wondering is if they convinced a single person of either belief. Did anyone who'd arrived to get Moderna pumped into their veins see these protesters, listen to them or read their leaflets and say, "Turn the car around, Albert. I think these people are right!"? We can assume they pissed-off and inconvenienced a lot of people and I'm not saying that's without some value when you have a cause…but did they stop one single person from getting the vaccine? I'd be surprised.

I haven't linked to a Bill Maher clip in a long time because (a) I haven't watched him that much and (b), I haven't liked a lot of what I've seen there. But I caught this from the other night and I think it's spot-on. It's about Henry Waxman, who was the Congressperson for my district from 1975 until 2015.

He was (and I suppose still is) a Democrat and he won re-election handily each time he ran with, usually, token opposition if any. Even when he did have a serious opponent, he got a pretty nice chunk of the Republican vote. One time, I voted for his opponent, not because I wanted to see Waxman defeated — I knew he wouldn't be — but because that opponent had run a mature, respectful campaign only about genuine issues. When he lost, he was gracious and wished Waxman only the best. I wish we still had elections like that.

As Maher notes, Waxman was never flashy. He never grandstanded, he never demagogued, he never raised rabble and when he made one of his rare appearances on TV, he talked policy, not polemics. I ran into him several times at the now-extinct Souplantation and he was never too busy to talk seriously with a constituent. (I've also met his successor in the job, Ted Lieu. Same deal.)

I see people today of both parties who seem to think the best public servants are those who say the nastiest things about the other party. I hope I never vote for anyone on that basis. I like elected officials who get things done…

If my e-mail is any indication — and it probably isn't — there are a lot of people in this world who loved Supercar.