Like me, Sewell Chan mourns the loss of Souplantation. Its closure doesn't even make the list of the Top Ten Thousand bits of bad news we've had lately but I'll still miss it…at least during the periods when they would have been offering my favorite tomato soup.

To be honest though — and if we can't be honest about soup, what can we be honest about? — I am not surprised. First of all, just about all the "buffet-style" chains in this country were seeing declining sales and occasional bankruptcies before any of us had heard of COVID-19. Souplantation was crawling back from a 2016 bankruptcy when they closed thirty stores.

Buffets LLC, which operates Hometown Buffet, Old Country Buffet, Ryan's and others filed for Chapter 11 at about the same time (their third bankruptcy since 2008) and closed many outlets. For the last few years, Las Vegas hotels have either closed their buffets or not opened one in the first place.

I don't have any particular theory as to why this is but even before the coronavirus was in our lives, a lot of restaurant chains were in trouble and that included almost all the buffet ones.

Also, last September I wrote here…

…I've cooled a bit on the glories of the Souplantation chain…at least the three I used to frequent in or around Los Angeles. In honor of Classic Creamy Tomato Soup [this month], I'll go try one of them again in the next few days but my last visits there were a bit disappointing. The food didn't seem as fresh, the serving areas didn't feel as clean and they seemed to have troubles keeping the buffet serving areas stocked. They were all in or near L.A. Last year, I went to one in San Diego that was phenomenal — great service, great food, great decor, everything. It reminded me of how good the ones I patronize used to be. I suppose it's just a coincidence that the corporate offices of the Souplantation company are in San Diego…

So I'm not that surprised and I'm not as saddened as I would be if this closure had come ten years ago.  Back then, I used to even go to Souplantations when they didn't have my favorite soup.

Speaking of which: Since I first got on this subject, people have been sending me recommendations of restaurants that serve what they consider great tomato soup ("Next time you find yourself in Rineyville, Kentucky…") and endorsements of certain brands of canned or packaged tomato soup and recipes…

I appreciate the eagerness to help but please don't.  I loved the Classic Creamy Tomato at Souplantation because I thought it was great soup.  I'm not in love with any or even most tomato soups and am jes' fine with a good chicken or turkey or chowder.  I've also lost my interest in cooking anything more elaborate than a ham sandwich for a while.  I'll be fine, thanks.

Several folks — first among them, Gabriel August Neeb — sent me this link to an article stating that the Souplantation chain (aka Sweet Tomatoes) will not reopen after it's okay to reopen. They'd been in financial trouble for some time and I guess they figure that self-service buffet-style restaurants will not make an astonishing recovery. As you all know and probably don't particularly care, I really, really liked the tomato soup that they sometimes had on their menu. I'll be sad if this report turns out to be true and it's probably true.

By the way: Six posts ago, we passed 27,700 messages posted on this blog.

In times like this, what America needs is one of those great comedy teams of knuckleheads…and I don't mean the Republican Party. [Insert Rimshot sound effect here.] We need two guys like Biffle and Shooster. No, better still: We need Biffle and Shooster. Have you seen these guys?

I know, I know. Some of you think their comedy shorts aren't really from the thirties; that they were made recently in that style by producer-writer-director-occasional actor Michael Schlesinger. Yeah, and you probably believe Mae West was really a woman, too. Well, believe what you want but make sure to check out the comings and goings of Benny Biffle and Sam Shooster in their high-larious escapades. A good starting spot would be ordering this DVD which contains six of the classic Biffle and Shooster comedy shorts plus loads of extras that will tell you all about your favorite comedy duo that you never heard of until recently. The Kino Lorber video company did such a good restoration on these vintage comedies they they look like they were shot in the last six or seven years. Here's a trailer…

In 1944 when Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II wrote "You'll Never Walk Alone" for the musical Carousel, they never imagined that 300 people in fifteen countries would join together to perform it like this…

Here's the replay of a webcast from earlier this evening with special guest…me!

Mel Brooks on working with Orson Welles…

One of the keys to getting through this thing is, I think, accepting acceptance. Many things I don't like are way beyond my power to fix…Donald Trump, for example. In ordinary times, I've posted links to articles and arguments of my own about what a truly dangerous, incompetent buffoon I think he is.

That is not a recently-arrived-at position, by the way. Many years ago, I spent some time around him backstage at a David Letterman taping and Trump was rude, nasty, vulgar towards women and obsessed with two things: His personal wealth and people kissing his ass. He seemed to live for telling people how much richer he was than they were.

I have not seen one moment of his "presidency" that has even suggested to me that anything has changed about the man. He doesn't even strike me as a guy who really believes he's President of the United States or has a clue what that might mean in terms of obligations to others.

But you haven't seen many postings about him here lately because I figure that even the microscopic chances I had of convincing fans of his to see him my way are now non-existent. If the way he behaves during this — the greatest crisis of most of our lifetimes — doesn't change a mind, that mind is not changeable. So let's write about silly songs and comic books and cats in my backyard!

I accept that he's there. I also accept, as way too many people haven't, that we are in utterly uncharted territory here. We do not know when it will end and things will begin veering back towards normal…and how things will be different then.

I think it will end differently for each of us because each of us has a different standard for when we'll feel safe enough to venture more readily into public places. You may decide it's okay to go out, sans mask, and mingle with other people long before I do. If I owned a business that had to close because of the lockdown order, I would not assume I can or should open it the minute my state or city said it was okay. I certainly wouldn't reopen if I felt it would not be profitable to do that right away.

How many people are going to go to shows where they'd have to sit six feet from others? How many are going to get on airplanes? How much fun can you have anywhere if you're wearing a mask and worrying about what you touch and about that guy coughing seven feet from you?

Las Vegas is itching to reopen. Hotels are taking reservations for late May or early June. They're installing plexiglass panels between slot machines and when you check in, you'll be given a little kit with masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, safety instructions, wipes, etc. The gaming tables will keep players separated from one another and every hour or so, someone will come by and sterilize all the chips that have been changing gloved hands.

At each entrance, someone will be taking your temperature and if it's over 100.4°, you don't get in. (Foolish Question: If I'm one of those "whales" — the folks who go to Vegas, lose $200,000 and say we had a great time because they comped our room, meals and hooker — am I going to be turned away if my forehead says 101.5°?)

No shows. No tourist attractions. No Elvis impersonators. And at the few buffets that will reopen, you'll point to the food you want and a masked/gloved employee will scoop some of it onto your plate and then clean the serving spoon. This does not sound like a vacation paradise to me. The only folks who'll like it are the folks who've been banned from casinos for cheating or winning and who figure they might get back in somewhere masked.

I accept I'm not going there for a long time. How long? I accept that I have no idea. No one knows. No one can know. There are no precedents. This has never happened before. I couldn't even tell you when in the future I might feel it's okay to leave my house without a mask.

Nature abhors a vacuum and when there's something we don't know, we have a tendency to want to fill that gap with an answer even if it means yanking one out of one's butt. As I've gotten older, I've stopped believing (most of the time) that a wrong answer is better than no answer. If I ask you how to get to the post office, I'd vastly prefer "I don't know" to a semi-wild guess.

I love making plans. I used to drive Carolyn nuts with my itineraries and "to do" lists and telling her we had to leave for some event by exactly 5:05 PM. But I had a lot of information to use in making up those schedules and a sense of what everyone else would do. We're all living in the moment now and I accept that. I don't like it but I accept it. If your frustrations are reaching defcon proportions, you might try my approach. There's less disappointment when things don't happen.

If you absolutely must make a plan, label it "A" and then make Plan B and Plan C and D and an E and an F…and if you run out of letters before you run out of plans, go to "AA" and "BB" and so on. Because while I'm reasonably certain this will end and life will be a lot more like it was than as it is, I have no idea when or what will change. And neither do you so you might as well accept that.

There's no comic book convention in San Diego this year — or practically anywhere else — but our good friends at the The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog aren't letting a little thing like that stop them. Tonight, they kick off Season 9 of their fun 'n' informative podcasts about Comic-Con and related events and they'll be discussing with their special guest what it's like to have no Comic-Con and why it matters.

And who is this special guest? Why, it's me, of course.

The podcast kicks off tonight (Wednesday) at 6:30 PM Pacific Time and you can watch it live over at their website or it will be live on this blog.

I really like these guys who sing four-part harmony with themselves. Here's Sgt. Sonny with his latest…

Gerard Jones wrote comic books, including some for DC. He wrote books on comic book history and on pop culture. I liked talking to Gerry on the phone or at conventions. He seemed like a nice, bright guy.

Then something happened. I'll quote Wikipedia on it…

Jones was arrested in December 2016 on charges of distributing and possessing child pornography. His lawyer first entered a plea of "not guilty," but in April 2018 Jones changed his plea to "guilty," admitting that the police had found "numerous electronic devices containing tens of thousands of images and hundreds of videos of child pornography" in his home. In August 2018, Jones was sentenced to six years in prison, followed by a five-year period of supervised release, with an unspecified amount of restitution to be paid to his victims.

Jones is presently serving time in prison and is wrestling — I'm not sure that's the proper word — with various issues of atonement and rehabilitation and introspection and addiction and overcoming that addiction…and he's doing it the way most writers would: By writing. His letters from prison are being posted on this website and the design there is a bit confusing so here's a link to his first entry.

Reading what's posted so far left me with the sense of a man who's trying real, real hard to have his life make sense and to understand why he's where he is. I don't mean he doesn't understand why he was arrested and tossed in prison. I'm impressed that he seems to understand that with crystal clarity: It was because of an addiction…a couple, actually. But he's trying to grasp the reasons for those addictions and I'd like to see him achieve that. It might be a learning experience for us all.

Here's a short piece from the Writers Guild newsletter about how some of the late night shows are being written in this Time of Crisis. When this thing hit, I suggested here that they'd try what they're doing — a pretty obvious prediction if you ask me — but I haven't been all that thrilled with the results. Most of the interviews seem disconnected and in some cases, heavily edited. Many of them seem like awkward chats about how awkward the chats are, and a few that I've seen have been reminders that when things in this country are bad, wealthy celebrities don't have it so bad.

Here's thirteen and a half minutes of S. Sondheim's show Into the Woods performed quarantine style…

I do not have any webcasts scheduled at this time. I'm going to do some more. I just don't know when yet.

When Murphy the Cat began appearing in my yard, she would patiently wait until Lydia (who's been here since George W. Bush was president…ah, those were the days) finished eating. Only when Lydia had left the supper bowl would Murphy cautiously approach it and then eat every last bit of leftover Friskies.

Since Murphy has become a regular, I decided to start setting out two bowls, side by side, to see if they would dine side by side. That did not happen. Murphy still waited until Lydia had left the buffet, then quickly ate everything remaining. The other morning, I tried placing the dishes on opposite sides of the water dish and that made a difference. As you can see above, they feasted simultaneously…

…and then when Lydia left, Murphy went back and forth between the two bowls, dining alternately until they were both licked clean.

By the way, as you may have noticed, I've decided Murphy's a she. What's more, since her ear doesn't have the notch that indicates the cat has been spayed, she's a cat who may turn up preggo one of these days, as Lydia once did. I went through a lot to catch Lydia and take her in for a spaying and a feline abortion. Murphy seems impossible to ever catch and I sure don't want a yardful of kittens who take after their mother and meow constantly for no visible reason.

Hope it doesn't come to that. Heck, for all I know, she might already be eating for two. Or more.

Several folks have sent me this and the last one suggested, "You'd better caution your readers that it contains language." Consider yourself cautioned…