• Next time you get to thinking you wasted money on something, just think how much Mike Bloomberg spent to win four out of six delegates from American Samoa.

Obviously, California is the big enchilada tonight in terms of votes and it's pretty likely Bernie Sanders will take the biggest bite. But Jim Newell reminds us that it may be many days before the vote is finalized and we know exactly who's getting how many delegates. A lot of people voted by mail. I'm one of them. And our ballots may not even be opened let alone tallied for a few days.

Folks covering the election on TV don't like that. They want you to watch them for many hours and then they deliver the pay-off of telling you who won and by how much. Look how awkward they were covering Iowa when they were waiting and waiting for something to announce and were reduced to talking about one county here or there as if it was indicative of the whole. And then they had to tell you that after all that watching and waiting, you were going to go to bed without the answer. So be patient…and skeptical of incomplete results.

There are other questions on ballots today besides who's going to face Donald Trump in November. In San Diego, there's Measure C which, if it passes, will cause the city to issue $2 billion in bonds, paid for by an increase in the tax on hotel rooms. Why should we care? Because it may have something to do with the future of Comic-Con International in that city. I'll let Rob Salkowitz explain it to you but note that Rob says…

San Diego has, for 50 years, hosted Comic-Con International — also known as San Diego Comic-Con (SDCC) The event famously evolved from a humble gathering of geek tribes to one of the world's largest and most celebrated entertainment events, drawing upwards of 150,000 badged attendees and possibly many, many more visitors to San Diego over five days in July.

A 2018 report issued by the Convention Center estimated that Comic-Con alone contributed $147 million to the regional economy out of a total of $1.1 billion generated by all conventions, trade shows and community events. The second largest event, the American Association for Clinical Chemistry, clocked in at 60.4 million.

I will overlook the "geek tribes" remark. I've been to every Comic-Con and I can't recall seeing more than three or four attendees bite the heads off live chickens. And those were all later on in the convention's history, around the time The Powerpuff Girls got popular.

But just look at the money involved here. A lot of folks talk about Comic-Con moving to another city like it's about as simple as vacationing at a Motel 6 instead of a Comfort Inn. There's a lot of commerce involved here with mucho impact on where it would go and where it would leave.

So when all the votes are counted in tonight's primaries, it looks like Bernie will have the most votes and Biden will be in a respectable second place, not to be counted-out yet. I can't help but wonder if all those folks who've dropped out of the running would have dropped out by now if the primaries were held in a different order.

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Someone else who dropped out is Chris Matthews, who opened yesterday's Hardball on MSNBC by announcing it was the last Hardball on MSNBC. Matthews always reminded me of that guy at every party who talks and talks and talks without realizing that he's saying the same thing over and over and over and that his voice is rising in volume each time he says it.

The nice thing about some people who are like that is that they say things without calculating, "How will this make me look?" and wondering if they should say something else. A lot of what we got out of Matthews was goofy and clumsy but I never felt it was disingenuous or insincere. That put him way ahead of a lot of people in his profession, at least in my book. And his resignation speech had more of an apology for sexist remarks than many men would ever make.

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Turning to the vastly more-important-than-anything-else topic of The Bullwinkle Statue, I got a nice note from Ric Scozzari, the artist/craftsman (I guess he's a little of each) who's been responsible for the restoration and repainting of Moose and Squirrel lately. He's going to be at the unveiling which we now know will be on Saturday, March 28, 2020 at 10 AM.

It's at the spot where Sunset Boulevard forks off to Holloway Drive, right across from where Tower Records used to be…and I think that building still is. I'm thinking I want be there for the ceremony but I tell myself I'm going to go to a lot of things on a Saturday morning and then when it's time to leave, I decide they're quite missable. So I don't know if I'll be there but I'm thinking if I am, it'll be by Uber. The parking up there is, I honest to God think, one of the reasons there's no more Tower Records.

I posted my thought process (such as it is) and two minutes later, found that Randy Rainbow just posted his. This may be the best video he's ever done (such as it is) and of course I only say that because his matches mine…

I don't want to act like I think my decision on who to vote for in the California primary is important. I mean, it is important but no more than anyone else's decision. At the moment, the polls suggest a Mr. Bernard Sanders will run away with it, with or without my vote or yours. But a lot of you are writing and asking me about my thought process, such as it is, so I thought I'd explain it. If you don't care, I won't blame you if you skip the rest of this posting. I might skip one you wrote about your thought process.

My thought process (such as it is) turned into trying to decide if I should vote for the person I'd most like to see in the White House or the person I thought had the best chance of beating Donald Trump. I wish those were the same person but I came to the point of deciding that my top picks in the first category were Sanders or — second choice — Warren…

…and then my thinking in the Trump-defeating contest was more like Biden or Bloomberg or someone more centrist. There are two goals here and neither one is to try and peel off votes from the people who think God picked Trump and told them to ignore all those bankruptcies and financial scandals and sexist remarks and outright lies. One goal is to win the Independent vote. The other is to motivate folks who would vote Democratic if they went to the polls but who might think they had better things to do on Election Day than to vote. Both goals are especially vital in crucial states like Pennsylvania and Florida.

But then I got to thinking about some advice I read on a blog — I think it was the one you're reading at this moment — about how so much can and will change between now and November. Look how the matter of the coronavirus came outta nowhere for most of us and how it's changing the game in so many ways.

We know how popular Sanders is in the polls taken today but where would he be after Trump and his allies had hammered Commie, Commie, Commie into the worries and fears of so many frightenable Americans? (Did you know Bernie and his wife honeymooned in Russia? If that doesn't prove he secretly wishes they'd conquer and enslave us, what does?)

And where will any Democrat be after all the phantom, not-to-be-proven-until-after-the-election (i.e., never) scandals that will brand him or her as corrupt and certainly headed for the prison cell next to Hillary's? (As we all know, no human being has ever opposed Trump over even the teensiest things and not been utterly corrupt.)

So I came to this way of thinking: The electability of any nominee will change, in ways we can't know yet. We have no idea how much of the mud will stick…or how many swing votes would still prefer a muddy Democrat to a second term for Donald…or what scandals and batshit-looney statements will impact Trump's own popularity with those willing to take that kind of thing into account.

How popular (how "electable") any of the Democratic candidates will be after the dirtiest election in the history of mankind is unknowable at this time. Nor do we know how it would impact the incumbent if his taxes were released or the infamous, alleged pee-tape actually turned up or one of the women accusing him of Weinsteinesque behavior came forth with solid proof or…well, we can all think of endless possibilities. I'll bet even some of Trump's staunchest supporters are anticipating new dirt they'll have to justify ignoring.

What is pretty knowable is what the candidates say they want to make happen in this country. That probably won't change much, whereas their electability can go in all different directions, especially after the Dem's standard bearer selects a running mate and we see if Trump keeps Pence. There were people who were way more enthused about John McCain after he selected Sarah Palin and those who thought less.

So I decided to put that stuff I can't predict mostly aside and focus on who sounds most like they understand how the economy and the environment can hurt us. As I was pondering this, it got easier. Not all decisions in this world get easier if you put them off. Some get much, much harder but in this case, it got easier as Julián Castro dropped out and Cory Booker dropped out and Andrew Yang and Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar and all the others dropped out, and Tulsi Gabbard was never really in it in the first place as far as I was concerned…

Mike Bloomberg seemed like a maybe before I read more about him. That quickly eliminated him in the "Would Make a Good President" category and he failed in the "Could Beat Trump" consideration due to his rotten first debate performance. So that left Bernie, Joe and Elizabeth. I marked my ballot for Bernie but I'd be fine with any of them. Anyone would be better than Trump…and I don't mean anyone who is or was an announced candidate. I mean anyone, maybe even you. That's my thought process…such as it is.

The late Orson Bean was a great teller of jokes. One night, he told one on Johnny Carson's show about a horny parrot..a joke that absolutely killed. I, of course, helped myself to it and told it many, many times to many, many friends. I don't know if any video exists of that appearance but many years later when he returned to Johnny's guest chair, he told it again. That's the clip below.

I'm about 95% certain that in the first telling, he repeatedly used the word "horny," which was one of those words that was sometimes on the forbidden list of the Standards and Practices people and sometimes was not. I think what happened was that Saturday Night Live used it a few times on the air and then Carson used it and it was bleeped and he threw a fit over the double standard for shows in the same time slot. So they let him say it for a while.

If someone wrote a good, in-depth book about NBC in those years, it would include some stories about how wet-your-pants terrified most of the executives there were at the prospect of getting Johnny mad. If he got really pissed-off, that could be the end of your career in broadcasting and you might spend the rest of your days polishing hub caps at the Burbank Car Wash. After Johnny left — and maybe even before — much of that terror was redirected to the notion of angering Lorne Michaels.

So for a while there, Johnny and his guests could say "horny" and a few other words that couldn't be used later on The Tonight Show. I believe the clip we're about to see is from a period when they'd dialed the randy vocabulary back. Mr. Bean had certainly been cautioned by someone not to use the "h" word and its absence diminishes the joke by about 50%. You can see Johnny, well aware Orson can't use the word, trying to help him work around it.

Today, you could probably say "horny" on any late night show but they might delete the rest of this joke as sexist…

Thanks to all for the birthday wishes. No, I don't feel like I'm 68 but I also don't deny it. I just deny that 68 is as old as some people think it is.

Last night, a friend of mine and I went out to Vitello's, a fine Italian eatery in Studio City. Upstairs there, there's a showroom operated by Michael Feinstein's company that features great cabaret-style entertainment. Last night, for one night only, my pal Bruce Kimmel was hosting a tribute to the late Jerry Herman — six performers of fine voice singing his well-known hits and some that were not so well-known but should be.

The six were Daniel Thomas Bellusci, Brittney Bertier, Jason Graae, Kim Huber, Kerry O'Malley and Robert Yacko, with Jeff Rizzo at the piano. Great songs, great talk, great response. Jerry Herman wrote the most optimistic songs of any major Broadway composer. Even his sad ones have an underscore of survival and persistence about them. But it was fun and at the end, everyone in the room sang "Hello, Dolly!" because you can't sing anything else after you sing "Hello, Dolly!."

I got to talk with a lot of great people and one of them was a great composer who was not Jerry Herman but was, in fact, Richard Sherman, who with his late brother Robert gave us all the songs in Mary Poppins, all the songs in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, all the songs in many other films and shows, and about half the songs in Disneyland.  We always enjoy running into Richard and reminding him of some song of his that no one else ever mentions…like "Miracles from Molecules" or "Pineapple Princess."

Apart from his musical accomplishments, Richard's an inspiration.  He's 91 and he's still writing songs.  I want to be writing something when I'm his age even if it's only notes to my gardener to cut the grass in front of Lydia's house in the backyard.

• I don't know what this means but people working for Mike Bloomberg have stopped ringing my phones and flooding me with paper mail, e-mail and text messages to vote for Bloomberg…and people working for Bernie Sanders have started.

• ‪If you're in charge of any facet of the entertainment industry and you say no to everything, you"ll be right about 50% of the time. And that would put you way ahead of everyone else.‬

Here's a still from an episode of Get Smart.  The man playing Oliver Hardy is E.J. Shuster, the man playing Stan Laurel is Jim MacGeorge and the fellow who looks remarkably like W.C. Fields is Bill Oberlin.  Playing Mr. Fields was a sideline for Mr. Oberlin who was mainly an art director and jack-of-many-trades for cartoon studios and puppet shows.  He did the sets for Time for Beany, the TV puppet show produced by Bob Clampett.  Later, he became a handy person around the Jay Ward cartoon studio. (Jim MacGeorge also worked on Time for Beany as a puppeteer and for Jay Ward as a writer.)

My friend Harry McCracken wrote to jog my memory that it has always been reported that Bill Oberlin built the statue of Bullwinkle 'n' Rocky we were just talking about here.  Yeah, I remember hearing that…and it's in Keith Scott's superb definitive history of the Ward operation, The Moose That Roared: The Story of Jay Ward, Bill Scott, a Flying Squirrel, and a Talking Moose. If you want to know anything about that studio, that's the book to buy.

Which makes me wonder what I'm remembering. I'm quite sure Bill Scott told me Jay was waiting to restore the statue because he couldn't locate the guy who built it and that I didn't recognize the name he mentioned of that person. But I knew who Bill Oberlin was then. I'd met him. I might even have had his phone number and it's unlikely Jay or Bill didn't.

Also at the time, Mr. Oberlin was like 66 years old and not likely to be getting up on a scaffolding on Sunset Boulevard to sandblast and repaint a 14-foot statue. So I'm thinking they were looking for someone else…someone who'd assisted with the physical labor of putting the thing up and maybe had been involved with maintenance work on it or something. Bill Oberlin died in 1994 so we can't ask him. We may not be able to ask anybody.

Our long national nightmare is over. As this article explains, the statue of Bullwinkle and Rocky, which once fronted Jay Ward's offices on the Sunset Strip, has returned to Sunset. At the moment, it's apparently under a tarp at the intersection of Sunset Boulevard and Holloway Drive, awaiting its grand unveiling at a soon-to-be-announced date.

The article says "The statue dates to 1961, but the original creator is not known" and that seems to be true, though one time I heard his name. I worked with the late Bill Scott on a couple of projects back in the early eighties. Bill was, of course, the producer and head writer on that show along with being the voice of The Moose, Dudley Do-Right and a host of others. At the time, the statue was out in front of Jay's office and looking pretty shabby, having gone unrestored since '61. Bill told me that he had to avert his eyes whenever he drove by or walked in and out of the building.

He said he was after Jay to restore it and even volunteered to split the cost with him. Jay, he said, wouldn't let anyone but the original sculptor touch it and the guy had moved and no one knew how to reach him. Bill told me his name but it meant nothing to me and it immediately left my head…which is odd when you consider how much utterly useless information is still in there. A few months later, Bill told me they'd located the sculptor and he had been hired to give Rocky and His Friend a good makeover…and he did. The work was completed not long before Bill passed in 1985.

At the time, a trio of us — the other two being Frank Welker and Bill — were working on the screenplay of a live-action Dudley Do-Right movie. The project died along with Dudley's original voice. But I remember how happy Bill was that he could look at the statue again and I wish he could see it in its new, hopefully-permanent location. But I know that intersection and I'll bet you a round-trip ticket to Moosylvania that within the next few years, some drunk driver's going to plow into it, making for very funny headlines and Restoration #3.

The subject line is a reference to a great Allan Sherman song parody. It's to the tune of "Bye-Bye, Blackbird" and it's about a traveling salesman named Charlie Bloomberg. If you want to hear it, click this link. But I'm borrowing it to refer to another, real Bloomberg…

Yesterday afternoon, I got a phone call that my elaborate network of spam detectors did not flag as a solicitor. It was a live human being who was calling to try to convince me to mark my ballot for Mike Bloomberg. He started reading from a script about how Bloomberg had taken on the N.R.A. and how Bloomberg had led the nation's largest city through the 9/11 recovery and Hurricane Sandy and how Bloomberg had given zillions to worthy causes…

And when he got to "Bloomberg runs an absolutely transparent campaign with full disclosure and no secrets," I interrupted to ask him…

ME: Could you tell me where you got my phone number?

HIM: It was on a list I was given.

ME: Yes but that list came from somewhere. Can you tell me where? Or can you use some of that absolute transparency you just mentioned to find out where it came from?

HiM: No, I really can't. Listen, just let me finish…

ME: Because you don't get paid unless you get all the way through the script?

HIM: No. Listen, buddy. I get paid either way.

ME: You even get paid if I tell you to eat shit and then I go mark my ballot for Bernie Sanders or Joe Biden?

HIM: Yeah.

ME: Okay. Don't spend it all in one place! Bye!

And with that, I hung up on him and completely ruled out the notion of voting for Michael Bloomberg in the primary. I was already 99% sure he wasn't the guy but it's always nice to get to 100 with things like that.

That's part of the Pogo newspaper strip that ran on February 29, 1952.  The morning that appeared all across the nation, Bernard and Dorothy Evanier were expecting to become parents any minute.  Dorothy was pregnant and that was the day I was due.  But somehow, no one had bothered to tell me.

If I'd been born that day as per the schedule, I would today be celebrating my seventeenth birthday.  I did not emerge into the world on 2/29/52 and I also did not make my much-anticipated debut on 3/1/52.  The day after that, some impatient doctor — probably sick of waiting and eager to get out on the golf course — made the decision to go in and get me.  I was removed from my mom's innards, that impatient doctor guy slapped me and, as I tell everyone to this day, I dropped whatever comic book I was reading at the time.

If they'd waited one day longer to send in the S.W.A.T. team, I could have been born on my parents' first anniversary.  When I was a tot and people asked me — as people often ask small children — "When's your birthday?", I would answer, "I was born on March second. My parents were married on March third."

That always got a laugh. I didn't know why but it got a laugh so I kept saying it despite my mother's embarrassed plea to not do that or to at least include the years.

I was my parents' first and only child. An interesting thing that happened on the day I was finally born was that the doctors who delivered me told my mother not to do that again. That is not a joke. When they opened her up to spring me, they noticed loads of scar tissue and apparently what had delayed my roll-out was that I was, as I remain to this day, in an unnatural position.

Once outside her, I was reportedly lying on her stomach when they told her not to risk having any more children. Being about fifteen minutes old at the time, I somehow have no memory of this. I do remember being around twelve years of age when my folks decided I was old enough to hear and understand the story of why I had no brothers or sisters — a lack that has never bothered me for one second. I had my own room. I got 100% of my parents' attention. No one touched my comic book collection but me.

And I was spared the problem I witnessed in my pre-teen years at the home of every single friend of mine who did not have the great fortune to be an only child: Brothers and sisters fighting and screaming at each other all the time. Most often, the screaming was of the phrase, "Keep your hands off my stuff!"

You may think I'm exaggerating but I am not. I don't think I knew a single kid my age who did not let me in on their occasional private fantasies of seeing a little sister or older brother (or vice-versa) die an agonizing death. Sometimes, they told me how much they envied me my lack of siblings.

The only brothers or sisters I met who were happy to have one another around were identical twins. They shared the special bond that when they conspired, they could confuse the hell out of everyone else. A couple times when I was asked if I didn't wish I had a brother, I think I actually answered, "Only if he looks exactly like me." This was obviously after 1961 when I saw Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in The Parent Trap.

Upon reflection, I'm glad I didn't have another me around. I don't think I could have handled even a duplicate of myself pawing through my comic books and I certainly wouldn't have wanted to share a room with a brother, no matter how handsome he was. No one else was needed in our family. I had a great relationship with my parents until the day each of them passed away.

And I escaped having February 29 as my birthday. I know that may sound kind of special and, yes, I know that in the Superman mythos, that's the date they say the Man of Steel was born. Someone once told me maybe being born on 2/29 would be good luck like it was for Superman. I responded, "What good luck? A couple days after you're born, your entire planet explodes!"

If I had been born on Leap Year Day, I think I would have taken the position that you can't sing "Happy Birthday" to me unless the calendar says it's February 29. I've never really liked that custom and it would be nice to have it happen one-fourth as often. Unfortunately then, people would have taken the position that they only had to give me gifts when the calendar said it was February 29…

One of my favorite comedians is Lewis Black, who spends much of the year criss-crossing the nation with his monologues…which come with a little bonus. Black has an opening act and then he comes out and does the kind of set you'd expect from a performer of his stature. And then, he does a little segment called The Rant is Due which is 15-30 minutes of him reading questions and comments from the audience and responding to them. This segment is webcast each night. You can watch it live if you know when to tune in on your computer or you can watch it later if you know where to find it on the web.

In the past, the place to find them live or archived was Black's website but just, like a day or two ago, his company began streaming them on YouTube, which means I can embed them here on my site. This is the show from last night when Mr. Black and his opener — currently, Jeff Stilson — were in Charlottesville, VA. That's Stilson you'll see introducing Lewis on this, the 415th of these Black has done. I've managed to catch at least half of them and even be in the audience for two or three.

This one runs 23 minutes and the video starts after about 40 seconds of dead air through which you can fast-forward. It's not his best and not his worst but even the weak ones are interesting to me at a time when so much comedy we see on TV is tightly scripted and edited. This is just Lewis Black working without a script and without a safety net…