I like music videos of the song "The Rhythm of Life" from the musical Sweet Charity…and the weirder, the better. Here's one…

In the past here, I've mentioned an auld acquaintance of mine named Gerard Jones. Gerry now resides in a Correctional Training Facility — that's a nicer term for "prison" — in Soledad, California. He's around a third of the way through a six-year sentence for possession of child pornography…which I'm sure we all agree is a pretty horrible thing to be involved with in any way. It's a crime and a pretty bad one, not of the "victimless" variety. As I wrote here a while back, I have had a lot of emotional responses to the news that he did this. They include anger, outrage, frustration, disgust, sadness…and I probably should have mentioned a hefty dose of shock.

He didn't seem like the kind of guy to be messing in something like that. But then I think of all the times someone goes ballistic with ballistics and starts randomly shooting masses of people (another pretty awful thing to do) and the reporters always find some neighbor or relative who'll say, "I can't believe it of him. He seemed like such a nice, quiet fellow." Maybe there's an important lesson right there: You can't always tell.

So now Gerry, being a writer, is doing what writers do: He's writing. There's a website that posts his little essays about his life and how it went horribly, horribly wrong. In his latest piece, he tackles the question, "Can you separate creative work from its author?," meaning could someone put aside the fact that he committed a despicable deed and enjoy his writing as a standalone matter?" He comes to the conclusion that we shouldn't; that it's all a part of who he is.

I'd already come to the conclusion that I can't separate the art from the artist. Not in this case and probably not in any other. I think that's also my answer when anyone asks me that about Bill Cosby or anyone who's been tossed behind bars for a crime of sex and/or violence.

I'm a fan of the musical, Catch Me If You Can.  Based on the film of the same name, it had a disappointingly brief run on Broadway…though it seems to be all the rage with colleges and community groups.  Back when there actually was live theater in the country, a fair amount of it was restagings of this show.

Here are Sam Gravitte and my pal Jason Graae in their respective living rooms singing one of the songs from the show. Usually, this would be performed with the two singers in the same place but you know how it is these days…

Long before she was Thelma Lou on The Andy Griffith Show…even before she was my neighbor when I was growing up in West Los Angeles…actress Betty Lynn was a contract player at 20th Century Fox.  Its studios were a few blocks from where the Evaniers and the Lynns lived. And in 1949, a few years before I was born, Betty had a big role in the film Mother is a Freshman, which also starred Loretta Young, Van Johnson, and Rudy Vallee.

And he's not billed but Charles Lane is in there.  That must be because of that law Hollywood seemed to have back then that every movie had to have a mean old man in it and the mean old man had to be Charles Lane.

I haven't seen the film in years so when the TiVo listings told me it was on TCM tonight at 6:45 PM, I set a recording for it…and if you're reading this in time, you may want to do likewise. But there's a possible problem…

They have a theme going here because according to those TiVo listings, Mr. Belvedere Goes to College precedes it at 5 PM and it's followed by Blondie Goes to College at 8:30. Fine…but the online TCM schedule doesn't mention Mother is a Freshman. It says Mr. Belvedere Goes to College (which runs 83 minutes) starts at 5 PM and is followed by Blondie Goes to College at 8:30.  These, I should mention, are all Pacific times.

Obviously, there's something else in there to fill the rest of that 3.5 hour gap and I presume it's Mother is a Freshman, which runs 81 minutes.  But maybe it's something else.  And if it's something else and it's of that era, it will doubtlessly have a mean old man in it and the mean old man will certainly be Charles Lane.

I screwed up the numbering on these Dispatches. And I have gone back and corrected a few so this is indeed Day 182.

Y'know, I did not like it when Richard Nixon tried to suggest that wearing an American flag pin symbolized support for Richard Nixon. I do not like the growing idea that not wearing a mask in public symbolizes support for Donald Trump.

Meanwhile, Steve Benen notes how Trump is still trying to rewrite history and claim that he really won the popular vote in 2016. I have occasionally described certain folks, both in the blog and in stories, as being under the delusion that never admitting you're wrong is the same thing as always being right. A close companion to that is the person who thinks that never admitting a loss is the same thing as always winning.

Okay, that's yesterday's one Trump item and today's.

Several folks have written to ask me why, in his long career drawing comics for New York-based publishers, Bob Fujitani never worked for DC Comics. I never heard him address that question but it seems to me that the answer probably goes something like this: They never asked him and he was never without work for someone else so he never asked them. There were times when I think both DC and Marvel would have loved to have him but he was happy with what he was doing and who he was doing it for.

Several others have written to ask if I am in any way threatened by the wildfires raging outta control here on the west coast. I appreciate the concern but I live far from any area that could ever be threatened by that kind of thing. I do have friends though who can't say that and I am concerned for some of them.

Lastly: It's been announced that Jay Leno will soon host a revival of Groucho's old quiz show, You Bet Your Life. This has been tried before — once with Bill Cosby and once with Buddy Hackett — and both were quick collapses. Both times, it wasn't that the host wasn't good at engaging in humorous banter with the contestants. It was that the format just seemed dated and trivial. In an era where you can win a million bucks on a game show, I suspect it will seem even more dated and trivial. But we'll see…

You see that cover? That's from the eighth issue of Hangman, published by MLJ in the Fall of 1943. The cover and the story inside that went with it were drawn by one of the prolific, underappreciated artists in comics — Bob Fujitani, who passed away this past Sunday at the age of…well, almost all online sources give his date of birth at 1920 but not long ago, he told interviewer Jim Amash that he was born October 15, 1921 so that would make him a little over a month shy of 99.

He was employed as a comic book and strip artist constantly from 1940 until some time in his eighties when he retired…to paint. His first job was as an assistant to the great Will Eisner. His last jobs were mainly as a ghost artist from comic strips including Rip Kirby and a long stint on Flash Gordon. In between, he drew comic books. He did a few for Marvel, none for DC and quite a few for MLJ comics, Quality Comics, Holyoke, Lev Gleason and Western Publishing. For Western, he was the first artist on the well-remembered Dr. Solar comic. For Lev Gleason, he did hundreds of crime stories and many of their classic covers, some as paintings.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Bob a few times on panels.  He was an artist who loved to talk as much as draw, and he told grand tales of his childhood and how growing up as part-Japanese and part-Irish subjected him to a wide array of ethnic slurs.  He was also an enormous fan of all the artists he worked with or around, including Eisner and Nick Cardy.

"I learned to draw from everyone I ever knew," he said.  Fast, dependable, good and easy to get along with, he was never out of work until he chose to be…a career that is hard to chart but which lasted at least sixty-five years.  What an amazing achievement.

Today's one item about Trump is an article in The Atlantic by Peter Wehner headlined "Why Trump Supporters Can't Admit Who He Really Is." Wehner's answer is that they have become convinced that a Democratic regime will destroy everything they care about in the world. Excerpt…

This phenomenon has no shortage of explanations, but perhaps the most convincing is the terror the president's backers feel. Time and again, I've had conversations with Trump supporters who believe the president is all that stands between them and cultural revolution. Trump and his advisers know it, which is why the through line of the RNC was portraying Joe Biden as a Jacobin.

Republicans chose that theme despite the fact that during his almost 50 years in politics, Biden hasn't left any discernible ideological imprint on either the nation or his own party. Indeed, Biden is notable for his success over the course of his political career in forging alliances with many Republicans. I worked at the Office of National Drug Control Policy in the early 1990s when William Bennett was its director and George H. W. Bush was president. Biden was then chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee; he and his staff were supportive of our work, and not in the least ideological. There will be no remaking of the calendar if Joe Biden becomes president.

I voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary but you have to wonder what the prophecies of America's total destruction would be like now if the ticket was Sanders/Warren.

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The weekend we just lived through brought record temperatures to Southern California. Whenever it's really cold anywhere in this country, a guy I know tweets something like "Well, so much for the theory about Global Warming" as if record cold spells prove the climate is not changing. Somehow, he does not apply this "logic" when it's 121° in Woodland Hills and a third of the state is on fire.

For some reason — age, I guess — the touchscreen on my iPhone X has become super-sensitive. It's almost as if I blow on it and it immediately loads a random app, plays a random song or calls Sergio Aragonés. They're reportedly about to unveil a new model today or any day now and I can't help wondering if Apple has changed something about my current phone to make me more interested in upgrading.

A follower of this site and my webcasts wrote to say, "Your upcoming line-up is all comedy writers. I hope you're not abandoning comic books." Not at all. It's just the order in which I get around to people. I have a couple of cartoonists and comic book people lined up for October and November. I'm also, in response to many requests, going to give a few more folks a shot at interviewing me about different areas of what I laughingly call my career.

Readers of Groo keep writing to ask when we might see more issues of everyone's favorite lunkhead barbarian. There are completed, ready-to-print issues on a shelf somewhere but The Pandemic has thrown much of the marketplace into chaos so they await the proper time. I am told we will shortly be able to announce the proper time.

Similarly and lastly, The Pandemic (and certain tariffs imposed by that gent who already got his one mention today here) have made it rough to get books printed overseas and then imported to our shores. The seventh volume of The Complete Pogo got to the printer in plenty of time for an October release but we're now looking at mid-November. I hope, I hope, I hope.

Tuesday, September 8 at 7 PM Pacific Time
A CONVERSATION WITH CARL GOTTLIEB
Mark talks with a man who was at the center of the comedy revolution of the late sixties and early seventies. Carl Gottlieb was involved with the famed improv troupe, The Committee…he wrote for the controversial Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour on CBS (and other shows)…and he was even an actor in the movie, M*A*S*H. Later, he wrote movies like Jaws and The Jerk and became an important presence in Hollywood labor relations. We'll try to get through most of this in ninety minutes.

Tuesday, September 15 at 7 PM Pacific Time
A CONVERSATION WITH DENNIS PALUMBO
Mark talks with the man who was his writing partner when they broke into television together. Dennis Palumbo went on to become a screenwriter (My Favorite Year) and a popular mystery novelist along with becoming a psychotherapist dealing mainly with the problems of success (or the lack thereof) in show business. So they've got a lot to talk about.

Tuesday, September 22 at 7 PM Pacific Time
A CONVERSATION WITH RON FRIEDMAN
Mark talks with his buddy Ron Friedman, one of the most prolific TV writers since the sixties with credits that include The Danny Kaye Show, The Andy Griffith Show, The Good Guys, Bewitched, Gilligan's Island, All in the Family, The Odd Couple, Happy Days, That's My Mama, Chico and the Man, Barney Miller, Wonder Woman, Starsky & Hutch, The Dukes of Hazzard, Fantasy Island and dozens more, plus for animation, he wrote G.I. Joe, The Transformers, Iron Man and dozens more of those as well.

I'm not sure I really understand John Oliver's "war" with the city of Danbury, Connecticut and I'm also not sure there's a rational reason. But if you've been following the matter, you're probably quite pleased that it looks like the town's sewage plant will indeed be renamed The John Oliver Memorial Sewage Plant as he wishes.

The mayor of Danbury has accepted his offer on the condition that Oliver shows up for the ribbon-cutting…and why on Earth would the star of Last Week Tonight on HBO not do that? Oliver knows the value of publicity and the need to "pay off" a joke.

Frankly, if I'd had any influence with the mayor, I'd have added one more condition: That Oliver stop taking so many Sundays off. He's currently off until the 27th and I'm going to really miss him.

This is the oldest photo I have of myself with Sergio Aragonés. I'm reasonably sure it was taken at the 1972 San Diego Comic-Con, which was called San Diego's West Coast Comic Convention and held at the El Cortez Hotel. I am not at all sure who took it and I have never been able to figure out why I have the negative to this photo among the strips of negatives I took at that convention. A logical assumption would be that whoever took it took it with my camera but in the photo, I'm holding my camera. There are some mysteries in this world that we can never solve and this is one of them.

I thought I'd repost it to give you some sense of how long I've known this man…and we weren't even new buddies then. Working backwards, I remember hanging out with Sergio at the July 4th 1970 Comic Art Convention in New York. A few days before, my pal Steve Sherman and I were wandering around Manhattan, just sightseeing and killing time before an appointment with Stan Lee. On the corner of 58th and Madison, we heard someone yelling "Mi amigos!" and across a very busy street, there was Sergio recognizing us! (I told this story in greater detail in my Conversation with Steve Sherman.)

So the point is that I knew him well enough for him to spot me in a crowd in late June of '70. We met when he was a guest speaker at my old comic book club in 1969. That's more than 51 years. During all that time, we have never had a serious argument…and the three or four unserious ones we've had have lasted an average of under two minutes each. Each ended with both of deciding the other guy was right.

Sergio is my Best Friend, at least in the Male Division…and I don't use the term "Best Friend" lightly. I know people who refer to every friend — even folks they see every three years — as their Best Friend. One guy I know has Best Friends he hasn't even met yet. Sergio is not that kind. He is a joy to know, a joy to work with, a joy to just be around.

In 2012 when I wrote a post like this with the same subject line to wish him a Happy Birthday, part of it went like this…

I've encountered one instance of someone who didn't like him…and the disliker almost admitted the reason that was obvious to all: Pure jealousy. He was envious of how popular Sergio was as both a creator of mirth-inducing sketches and as a human being who was fun to be around. That's about the only reason I can imagine for anyone to dislike my friend.

Since then, I've thought of one other person who didn't like Sergio and while the jealousy reason was probably part of it, his stated reason was this: Sergio does most of his inking with a fountain pen.

The fellow — I honestly do not recall his name — came to a few meetings in the seventies of C.A.P.S., the Comic Art Professional Society founded by Don Rico, Sergio and Yours Truly. We decided there oughta be a group where professionals in the fields of comics and cartooning could gather and discuss, among other topics, their craft.

Sergio began discussing how he'd found the perfect fountain pen with which to draw and how he had found a certain brand of permanent ink with which to fill it. Permanent ink would clog most pens but his worked great, especially since his was rarely not in motion and therefore didn't have time to sit idle and clog. The members of C.A.P.S. were fascinated by what Sergio had to say but this new gent was furious.

He took me aside and told me — and he even spoke in boldface for emphasis — that real cartoonists use pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He said this as if it was an immutable law found in the Ten Commandments somewhere between honoring thy father and thy mother, and not committing adultery. For emphasis, he repeated it a few times, also in boldface: pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink, pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink…

Sergio's work, he said, could not be real cartooning because it was not produced with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He was angry that the art form he so loved was being polluted by people who did not understand that.

Sergio was not the main target of his ire. The main target was Garry Trudeau, whose Doonesbury was somehow being hailed as a real comic strip even though it was not done with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink — or if it was, it didn't look like it was. To show me what a real comic strip looked like, the militant guy hauled out the original art to a newspaper strip he was shopping around.

He had about ten weeks of it — dailies and Sundays. They didn't look very well-drawn to me and the ones I read were supposed to be funny and weren't. But by God, there was no doubt they were drawn with pens and brushes dipped in a bottle of ink. He had no doubt whatsoever that syndicates would soon be fighting with chains and knives for the right to syndicate his work.

And of course, his strip never achieved syndication, I never saw the fellow again and you don't know who he is or was, either. Meanwhile, Sergio has every single award that is given in this world for cartooning. What can we learn from this?

Happy Birthday, my friend. May you live long enough to look back on this day and refer to it as when you were middle-aged.

Facebook allows you 5,000 "friends," though I've heard their software sometimes cuts you off around 4,975. For the last few years, I've hovered around 4,900 with something like 900 friend requests. Since I knew I'd never be able to add all of them, I figured I'd hold a hundred spots open for people I knew really well. Somehow, my total has crept up to 4,952 and that's with me unfriending a half-dozen folks who were posting that Joe Biden is an android paid-for by George Soros with the express purpose of blowing up Earth.

So my apologies to those of you who, for sheer numeric reasons, will never make it to my Friends list. Believe me: You're not missing anything.

One of my favorite performers, Stephanie J. Block, performs one of my favorite Sondheim songs…

I'm going to get it out of my system right now and not think about him for the rest of the day.

As we all know, an article in The Atlantic says that, according to multiple sources, "The president has repeatedly disparaged the intelligence of service members, and asked that wounded veterans be kept out of military parades."  Given some of his on-the-record quotes about John McCain and others who've served, it's pretty easy to believe that…but that doesn't mean the story in The Atlantic is true.

Trump insisted in a tweet that "I never called John a loser," and dismissed it — as he does all reporting that puts him in a bad light — as FAKE NEWS. And of course, everyone instantly located an earlier tweet in which he did exactly that. But that doesn't mean the story in The Atlantic is true.

Most of the pundits on Fox rushed to deny the story in The Atlantic even though Jennifer Griffin, the national security correspondent for Fox News Channel, said she'd confirmed some of it. But that doesn't mean the story in The Atlantic is true. It just makes it a little harder for those who want to disbelieve it to disbelieve it.

And that's what this comes down to for most people: Can I justify not believing it or at least telling myself, "We'll never know for sure so I won't hold it against him?"

Most of us choose to believe every bad thing, however thinly-sourced, about the candidates we hope will lose and we believe every good thing, however thinly-sourced, about the candidates we hope will win. Will the article be confirmed to the point where even Trump-lovers can't pretend it isn't?

One thing that might make that happen for some would be a confirmation from John Kelly, the retired four-star general and former White House chief of staff who was present when some of the incidents in the article occurred. He sure couldn't be dismissed as part of some liberal cabal. But according to The New York Times…

…Mr. Kelly, who served for more than 40 years in the Marines, has told associates that a retired four-star general should not come out against a sitting president in the heat of a political campaign, even though former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis, another retired four-star Marine general, publicly criticized Mr. Trump in June for lacking "mature leadership" and trying to divide rather than unite the country.

"He wants to avoid taking a position that might be perceived as political," said Gen. Anthony C. Zinni, a retired four-star Marine Corps general and a close friend of Mr. Kelly, who had not spoken to him since the publication of the Atlantic article. "I also think he takes to heart the commitment to confidentiality in matters related to their interaction with the president."

I guess that's admirable in some ways but here's the problem with it: If Kelly knows the assertions in the article are untrue, it would not be political or in any way a breach of confidentiality to say so.

If some reporter lied and claimed that Trump confessed to twenty murders in a meeting where Kelly was present, Kelly would be doing a horrible disservice to the president he served (and to The Truth, which has to have some standing in all this) to say "No comment" or anything other than some form of "That story is not true." If there was any question of it being a breach, Trump would certainly release him from any pledge to stay silent so he could say that.

It also would not be a breach to say, if it were so which it almost certainly isn't, "I have no information about this matter because I was not present for the incidents cited in the article." What would be a breach that might be "perceived as political" is to come out and confirm the story. So his silence is making a lot of people think the piece is true.

And you also have to wonder: If Mr. Kelly thinks a retired four-star general should not come out against a sitting president in the heat of a political campaign, does he think it's okay for that retired four-star general to be an unidentified background source for an article in The Atlantic?

In my Conversation with Max Maven the other day, we discussed how folks who go to see magic performed fall into two categories: Some very much do not want to know how each trick is performed and some do.  The same thing probably applies with theme parks.  The one time I journeyed to Walt Disney World in Orlando, my companion was a lady who I think got a bit annoyed with my fascination with how everything worked…and I wasn't just focusing on what some might call magic.

I was intrigued by the way the mechanical stuff worked, by the crowd control, by the way they steered you to walk this way or that way…the way they lured you to pass certain vendors, etc.  The same disparity between my interest and my date's existed when I took a different lady to Disneyland.  She didn't like when I mentioned that the voice in the Haunted Mansion was Paul Frees.  She wanted to believe it was the Ghost Host speaking to us "live" from the dead.

If you side with those two women, you won't want to watch the video below.  A website that specializes in "tech" stuff took a look at that Haunted Mansion, especially the infamous "Stretching Room," of which there are two.  This kind of thing makes me appreciate the ingenuity and tech wizardry all the more but I can see where it might spoil things for some.  If you're among the some, don't click…