There won't be much of me around here today. If you come to this blog for Trump Dumps, relax. I just checked and practically every website on the whole friggin' Internet looks like a Trump Dump. Which is unfortunate for those of us who are trying — with very little success, obviously — to not think as much about him. You can see from this blog what a bad job I'm doing there.

I will repeat my frequent advice to friends, which is to remember how long it'll be until we vote and to remember how volatile everything is about our current political scene. Everything can change tomorrow. Everything will change within the month, let alone the 321 days until we go to the polls and vote for whoever's names are on the ballots. The way things are going, I wouldn't be surprised to find no mention on them of either Trump's or Biden's.

A little over a year ago, the great singer Petula Clark went on a tour of the U.S. and another fine singer, Shelly Goldstein and I went to see her. The clip below is from the night before we saw her — same band, same show, different venue. Ms. Clark did about 100 minutes on stage singing most of her hits and some other tunes without taking a break or even a seat…an amazing feat for a woman of 86.

For her closing she sang…well you can guess what she sang. I think she performed it better when we saw her but you can sense for yourself how delighted the attendees were at this performance. I remember it from the performance we saw as a very thrilling moment with the audience about as happy as any audience could be. The video probably won't give you the same tingle we got standing in the front row about eight feet from her but it might warm your spirit a little…

Ms. Clark seems to have no intention of retiring soon. She's currently appearing in London in the musical of Mary Poppins as The Bird Woman. I didn't much care for the show when I saw it here without her but I think I'd pay to see it again just to see her perform her one song. Here's a little promotional video shot in St. Paul's Cathedral there…

To put the current impeachment brouhaha into some context, let's look back at this article that ran in Vanity Fair dated November 4, 2016. That was four days before Election Day. Here are the first few paragraphs…

With the latest polls showing Hillary Clinton remains likely to win the election on Tuesday, Republicans are preparing for the possibility of a second Clinton White House by promising to make the next four years a living hell. Some lawmakers are talking openly about refusing to approve any Supreme Court nominees until a Republican is elected president, the F.B.I. is investigating both the Clinton Foundation and the former secretary of state's use of a private e-mail server, and House Republicans have vowed to launch additional investigations of their own. Now, a growing number of conservatives are warning that there could be a "constitutional crisis" if Clinton is elected, and threatening her with impeachment.

While the F.B.I. is currently looking into both Clinton and Donald Trump, there is currently no reason to believe an indictment is forthcoming, despite the "large swath of F.B.I. personnel" who reportedly see the Democratic nominee as "the antichrist personified." The word "investigation" is "a term of art in the F.B.I.," reports NBC's Pete Williams. "There was an initial inquiry that was opened a couple months ago based largely on media reports and a book called Clinton Cash." Still, that hasn't stopped a number of Republican lawmakers from jumping the gun. "There's been nothing like this where you can have potential criminal charges," New York Rep. Peter King said in a radio interview Tuesday. "You really could have a constitutional crisis here," he added, echoing a similar charge by Texas Rep. Louie Gohmert and Wisconsin Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner.

Other Republicans are already using the "I" word. "Assuming she wins, and the investigation goes forward, and it looks like an indictment is pending, at that point in time, under the Constitution, the House of Representatives would engage in an impeachment trial," Texas Rep. Michael McCaul said on Fox News. "They would go to the Senate and impeachment proceedings and removal would take place." Wisconsin senator Ron Johnson declared that Clinton could be impeached for "high crime or misdemeanor." And Donald Trump, who has turned "lock her up" into a rallying cry at his campaign stops, said Wednesday that Clinton would be impeached just as surely as Bill Clinton was. "You know it's going to happen. And in all fairness, we went through it with her husband. He was impeached," the Republican nominee said at a rally in Florida Wednesday, adding that Hillary is "most corrupt person ever to seek the presidency."

So…if there was so much evidence that Hillary Clinton had committed all these crimes, why has she never been charged with any of them? You'd think it would make the current President of the United States pretty happy if she was. Just asking for a friend.

Well, not right this second. But on January 25 and 26, they're doing Puppet Up! again on the Henson Lot in Hollywood. In the past, they've done two shows on Saturday and one on Sunday but this time, it's two each day. If you order tickets now, you can grab some real good seats. Here's the link. I'm going Sunday evening.

For those of you who don't know: Puppet Up! is a live, improvised puppet show for adults. The puppets often say or do things that Kermit and his pals never did, at least in front of an audience. The whole thing has a kind of "night club" feeling (they serve booze) and it's somewhat naughty and very funny…and you even get to be on a real movie lot that was once owned by Charles Chaplin. We highly recommend it.

Harvey Weinstein, who is awaiting trial for rape and other sex-related crimes, has gone and gotten himself back in the news again. He gave an interview in which he called himself a "forgotten man," not receiving proper credit for the many good things he did for women.

I haven't seen anyone thoroughly fact-check his claims but let's say they're all at least approximately true. Among his many well-compensated attorneys, wasn't there one who could have advised this man to shut the "f" up? Did none of them make a little speech that went something like this —?

You know, Harvey, you may well be right that you did some good things for women that no one is talking about. But if no one is talking about them, it's because they don't really matter until all your legal problems are solved and you show some contrition and regret for the bad things. There is no trade-off here. You don't get a pass on raping someone because you paid her or some other women decently for working on a movie. Bill Cosby did an awful lot of humanitarian work and philanthropy and no one thought it canceled out one rape, let alone all of them.

As your well-compensated attorney, I would advise you to keep out of the public eye as much as possible. If you absolutely must say something, tell the world you're sorry for the way you treated certain women. Even if you're not, say you are. Tell them you've seen the error of your ways and you want to do everything you can to atone for the damage you did…and you'd damn well better sound like it's sincere. Because that's all anyone wants to hear from you now and if you can't pull that off, you're better off saying nothing.

Maybe someone did say that to him and he ignored it. It's been my observation that a lot of wealthy folks have a very real "the rules don't apply to me" attitude and think they can talk (or maybe, talk and buy) their way out of any jam. Not that Weinstein won't deserve whatever happens to him but it's always a little sad when those people find out the rules do apply.

• Of course Trump will claim complete and total exoneration when the Senate fails to convict him. Trump always claims complete exoneration. He claimed he'd been exonerated by Robert Mueller even after Mueller said he did not exonerate him.

I don't get why so many people who don't believe a word published in Time magazine care so much about who they put on their cover one week a year.

The publication has always made it very clear that the selection as "Person of the Year" (formerly — and changed for good reason — "Man of the Year") is of someone (not necessarily a human being) that "for better or for worse…has done the most to influence the events of the year." The list of those so designated has included Joseph Stalin (twice), Nikita Khrushchev, the Ayatollah Khomeini and the man to whom no sane person wants to be compared…Adolf Hitler. Would you like to see your name on a list that includes those fellows?

I sure wouldn't but some people have apparently decided to regard it as a list of the Best or Most Wonderful Person of the previous twelve months. Then and only then can they be outraged if their fave doesn't adorn the front of this magazine for which they already had no respect. Donald Trump is so upset he wasn't their pick this time that he began attacking the sixteen-year-old girl who was.

I can't find the words right now to describe how poorly that speaks of the president. Just imagine what Mike Huckabee would say if Obama felt the need to bad-mouth a high school student…then substitute "Trump" for "Obama." Our current prez also once reportedly had a fake Time cover, showing him as their Person of the Year long before he really was, on display in one of his resorts.

Almost everything Trump does lowers my opinion of him as a leader and/or a human being. The ones that are primarily the latter are kinda fascinating in their own way since they parallel so many foolish, petty things we see done or said by people who aren't President of the United States, Commander-in-Chief of the United States military, very wealthy, very much admired by many and — perhaps arguably — The Most Powerful Person in the World. You'd think that would be enough for anybody, wouldn't you?

But no…he has to make a pissy remark to a teenager who is engaged in a non-profitable effort to make the world a little better for everyone to live in. Something is seriously wrong there and it isn't with Greta Thunberg. To attack someone like that, you've got to have a real problem with the selflessness of others.

On a vastly smaller (but similar) scale, I encounter people like this in the entertainment business…and yes, I'm including comic books in that category. Every so often, you run into someone who is by any reasonable scale, very prosperous and very honored. I'm talking about someone who has plenty of fame, plenty of fortune and a career that has given them about 98% of everything they could ever have imagined.

And instead of luxuriating in all the good that's come to them, they're absolutely furious about that 2%. They have somehow learned to be successful but not how to be happy. Worse, they've convinced themselves that the contentment that's eluded them will be theirs if only they can attain that unattainable 2%. If you're generally satisfied with anything in your life — your job, your mate, your family, your home, your bank account, your fame, your honors, your blood pressure, your sex life, your Groo the Wanderer collection — any of those — you might just be way ahead of a lot of people you think are doing better than you are. That is to say you might be a happier person.

Most Friday afternoons, I can be found up at the Magic Castle in Hollywood, lunching with one or more friends. Yesterday, I was there with three, one being my buddy/aide John Plunkett, who isn't in the above photo because he was busy taking it.  I'm on the right.  On the left is Frank Ferrante, the only person mentioned more often on this blog than Donald Trump.  The two of them have something in common: Frank can sometimes be found imitating Groucho Marx.  Donald can sometimes be found imitating a human being…admittedly, not convincingly.

Frank's in town at the moment because he's not touring America doing his splendid Groucho show.  He's next scheduled to do it the first two days of next February in Bellport, New York, then the following month in Virginia and New Jersey.  Details are on this page where other dates and performances will soon be added.

The lovely lady we bookend is my friend of more years than she looks to have lived, Jewel Shepard.  Jewel is an actress and a writer and a person who constantly amazes me with her versatility and her ability to master whatever new skill set she needs at the moment.  If the U.S. Space Effort is ever really serious about getting an American to Mars, all they have to do is give Jewel a darned good reason to be that person and she'll figure out how to do it.

When the Castle is serving lunch, they always have a great magician doing close-up shows at Noon, 1 PM and 2 PM.  The four of us convened at 11:45 and got so immersed in conversation (and a little eating) that we missed all three shows.  That probably means we had a good time.

Here's a promo for John Mulaney's upcoming special. It looks suspiciously like a movie I've seen…

Glenn Kessler, who fact-checks for the Washington Post, reviews some of the biggest whoppers of 2019. They're not all from people named Trump but an awful lot of them are.

"Andrew B." wrote me to ask…

Who would you say is the greatest comic actor of all time, living or dead?

Oliver Hardy…with Stan Laurel a close second. I can watch Oliver Hardy in anything — even the worst Laurel & Hardy movie (and they made some awful ones late in their careers), even that dreary John Wayne movie Hardy appeared in without Laurel.

The best way I can explain what I love about "Babe" Hardy (his friends called him that) is like this: Harold Lloyd made a lot of great comedy films in roughly the same era but in Lloyd's films, the situations were risible and the gags were clever but he himself was not all that amusing. Reportedly — and this is easy to believe if you've seen his movies — if a scene called for him to walk across the room and open a door, he'd turn to the director and writers and ask, "What do I do to be funny?"

That was a question Oliver N. Hardy never had to ask. He was actually funny just walking across a room and opening a door. He also had a great sense of scale. Early comedy films drew a lot of their performers from the stage — shows we might now think of under the general heading of vaudeville. A lot of these folks were used to playing to the second balcony, making their reactions and movements too extreme for the camera. Other performers were literally learning to be comic actors before the cameras, never having done it before. They tended to underplay. But Hardy was always just right.

Once sound movies came along, a lot of comic actors were more interested in talking funny than in being funny with their gestures and actions. Among those who came around long after Stan and Ollie and who moved funny were Dick Van Dyke, Art Carney and most of the leads in It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World. That's one of the things I love about that movie.

The best episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show are ones which give Dick many opportunities to react to situations not just with his face but with every part of him from the neck down. And I love watching Carney on the classic episodes of The Honeymooners where he steals just about every scene he's in — no easy thing to do when you're sharing the screen with Jackie Gleason. The difference between them is that Gleason was a good physical comedian and Carney was a great one.

And I really love Phil Silvers. A few months ago, I watched the 1955 movie of Guys and Dolls for the umpteenth time. I always think what a classic that would have been if they'd cast Sinatra as Sky Masterson instead of Nathan Detroit, and hired Silvers to play Nathan. To me, Sgt. Bilko was the most wonderful comic character ever created for television.

These days, I don't see many comic actors who act with their entire bodies, perhaps because the shows and the scripts do not demand that of them. I'm not talking about a need for more slapstick and pratfalls. I'm talking about "takes" and reactions and adopting postures that reflect the situations…and being funny walking across a room and opening a door. Nowadays, actors do that exactly the way you or I would and if they're supposed to be funny, they say something funny as they walk across the room and open the door. If you don't get what I mean, watch Oliver Hardy, especially in a silent film or a talkie scene where he has nothing to say. He could say so much with nothing to say.

• I'm getting tired of people saying Donald Trump can't win or can't lose. This is the most volatile, unpredictable, nobody-knows-what-will-happen-next presidency of all time. We don't even know what we'll be impeaching him over next time or the time after…

Christmas is coming! This would be a good time to enroll in the Charlie Brown School of Dance…

• How come all the people in politics who complain about "bias" are the ones who themselves have the strongest, set-in-concrete and "anyone who disagrees is an idiot" opinions?

I have Spectrum Cable for my TV, Internet and a few other things. Whenever I need help from their tech support people — which happens way more often than it should — it takes a long time, much of it spent listening to bad hold music and/or waiting and waiting and waiting and then having their computer hang up on me.

I wanted to install a new TiVo to work with the TV feed I get from Spectrum. This should be easy but it never is. When you call TiVo, they tell you the problem you're having isn't their doing and you need to call Spectrum. When you call Spectrum, they tell you the problem you're having isn't their doing and you need to call TiVo. So right there you don't know where to turn.

If and when you can convince the Spectrum folks that they need to do something on their end, they're more than glad to help. But I suspect that when they go to their manuals and look up how to fix things so my TiVo can interface with their service, the manual says something like: "Tell the customer to get rid of his TiVo and rent one of our special DVRs from us."  One of the reasons I got rid of DirecTV some years ago was that no matter what I asked them, the reply was "Junk your TiVo and switch to our wonderful DVR with fewer features and more confusing controls."  One tech support guy insisted to me that all TiVos were incompatible with DirecTV, which was true at one time but ancient history by the time he said it.

Another swore that TiVo was going out of business any day now. I told him he was wrong and he assured me he'd just seen a memo that told employees to expect a flurry of calls as soon as the closure was announced. That was well over ten years ago and TiVo is still in business. Not only that but they continue to make much better DVRs than anything DirecTV or Spectrum have to offer. Here's what my new one looks like…

A few days ago, Spectrum sent me a standalone tuning adapter and the cables necessary to allow a TiVo to work with their signal. They said it'd come with all the instructions I needed but it came with no instructions so I called up and spent some time before I managed to reach someone who could tell me what to do. I did as directed and you know what happened. I wouldn't be posting here if it had worked.

So I called up again and bounced around with Spectrum for a lot more time getting to someone who seemed to know something. That person talked me through it again…and it turned out, I'd done it exactly as directed but I still had a blank screen — no sound, no picture. All he could do at that point was tell me they'd send an expert technician over to find out what the trouble was.

The next day, a very nice gent showed up on time, told me he didn't know a whole lot about TiVos and proceeded to prove it. He wound up calling someone at the Spectrum home office…and I had that little moment of smug delight when the Spectrum employee kept being put on hold and couldn't get through to anyone at Spectrum.

When he did get someone on the phone, that someone had him rearrange every connection that I'd made as per instructions. Then my "expert" said to me, quoting the guy on the phone, "Go through TiVo Guided Setup again and it will definitely work." That can take an hour so he left, I went through Guided Setup again and, of course, it didn't work.

I inspected what he had done and among other things, saw that on the tuning adapter, he had the RF In and the RF out connected in reverse. I switched them, did Guided Setup again and guess what! It still didn't work but at least I had the sensation that it was now not working the right way instead of not working the wrong way.

So it was back to the labyrinth of bad hold music and periodic recorded statements that I could have solved all my problems myself on the Spectrum website…and every so often, I'd be connected to the wrong division. At long last, I was able to speak with a gent who seemed to know a lot about TiVos, though not enough to fix my problem. I was on with him maybe a half hour before he gave up…

…and then, with a smidgen of help from me, he figured out what was amiss!  The serial number of the CableCard that Spectrum had sent me to insert in my TiVo did not match the serial number of the CableCard that his computer over at Spectrum HQ showed him was in my TiVo here!  I suspect it was the number from the CableCard in my old TiVo but however it got there, once he typed in the right number, the face of Wayne Brady magically appeared on my TV screen and all was well. After all the hooking and rehooking and rebooting and redoing the Guided Setup over and over here, the problem was on their end all along.

But that wasn't the end of it. I had all my channels but several were in the wrong place. For instance, I switched to what my TiVo thought was CSpan and there, I swear to you, was Comedy Central showing me an episode of South Park! And yes, I could tell the difference.

The gent on the phone who'd solved the CableCard problem couldn't explain this but after I got off the phone with him, I figured it out. When you run Guided Setup on a TiVo, it asks you to select from a list of cable TV sources in your area. The menu showed two that it could have been: Spectrum HD for the City of Los Angeles or Spectrum HD for the Hollywood and Westchester areas. I'd called up (another call!) and reached a lady at Spectrum who'd told me to definitely select the one for the City of Los Angeles. Which I'd done.

Now, seeing the face of Cartman where Jim Jordan's should have been, I ran Guided Setup for about the ninth time, selected Hollywood/Westchester…and when all was done, all my stations were in the right place. Deep exhale.

Each time I dealt with a different Spectrum employee, I received a robocall asking me to use my touch-tone pad and rate the friendliness and knowledge of that person. The friendliness was always fine. The knowledge seemed to only be lacking in terms of insufficient instruction and the Spectrum Knowledge Bank or whatever those folks consult to tell you how to solve your tech dilemma.

What I wish is that the company would ask me to rate the ease of winding one's way through their robotic phone answering maze, how impossible it is to reconnect with the right person if your call is dropped, and whether I think they need to train some of their employees better. I also wouldn't mind explaining to them why I want a TiVo instead of the vastly inferior DVRs they offer. I understand why some people who may know the difference still opt for the cable company's DVR.