Someone likes Groo.

Back in this post, we had a music video by a barbershop quartet called Midtown. In it, they did their version of the theme from the 60's Spider-Man cartoon show. Well, here they are doing it on a stage…

Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
I guess the worst news is that the impeachment inquiry will become more of a formal thing with a vote on Thursday. One must assume that if Nancy Pelosi is putting it to a vote, she knows she has the votes to pass it. But the worst news for Trump could also be the testimony of Alexander Vindman, a National Security Council staffer and a US Army lieutenant colonel. Vindman was on the line for the two phone calls with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and says he heard Trump demand that Ukraine investigate the Bidens. How many people now have corroborated the Whistleblower's charges? Also, Vindman says the transcript left out a lot of damaging things that were said. ("What? It could be even worse?")

Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
The racist sliming of Colonel Vindman is pretty bad but we don't know how much of that was at the dictation by Trump. The continued bragging and fact-distortion of the raid that "got" Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is outrageous, especially the stuff Trump says that the generals say didn't happen. But I'm going to go with the decision to admit no more refugees into the country for a while, leaving many stranded without a place to go. So many to choose from.

Well, this is a bit disturbing. When people ask me to name my favorite restaurant in the whole wide world — keeping in mind I've seen less than 1% of the whole wide world — I usually say it's Peter Luger's, the legendary steakhouse in Brooklyn. That's because the times I've eaten there, I was bowled over by the superb steak and sides.

It sounds like a good answer. I mean, I'm not saying my pick is the Wendy's down on Venice Boulevard. What I don't mention is that I haven't dined at Peter Luger's in something like fifteen years.

If there's any truth at all to a new review of the place in The New York Times, maybe I ought to be citing that Wendy's. Read it if you want to see how brutal a reviewer can be to a once-great dining establishment. Or just take a look at the last paragraph which [SPOILER ALERT!] says…

The restaurant will always have its loyalists. They will laugh away the prices, the $16.95 sliced tomatoes that taste like 1979, the $229.80 porterhouse for four. They will say that nobody goes to Luger for the sole, nobody goes to Luger for the wine, nobody goes to Luger for the salad, nobody goes to Luger for the service. The list goes on, and gets harder to swallow, until you start to wonder who really needs to go to Peter Luger, and start to think the answer is nobody.

Yow. And what's disturbing is that it rings true. Others have told me in the last few years they'd suppered there and wondered what the fuss was. "What exactly is it you like about that place, Mark?" I was asked not that long ago. I worried that my love of it might be sadly have past its expiration date. But it's true that I haven't been there for about twenty times as long as they age their filets.

The last two visits to New York, I was with Amber and I wanted to take her there for what I told her many times was the best steak I'd ever had. What stopped us was the hassle of getting out to Brooklyn, waiting for a table, dining, etc. The price always seemed steep and most of my experiences there were when someone else — someone who worked for a big company with a big expense account — was check-grabbing. There was also the matter of time.

The seaters and servers always acted like they knew you wouldn't go anywhere else no matter how long it took to get you to your table and put hot meat on it. It always consumed enough of an evening that I couldn't do anything else so this was my choice: Spend one of my limited nights in New York going to Peter Luger's or going to a great restaurant in the Theater District, perhaps with friends I only see when I'm in Manhattan and then attend a Broadway show.

I always opted for the latter and I probably always will. I didn't even get around to taking Amber to my second-favorite restaurant in New York City, which is (or maybe was) the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station. And that doesn't even require shlepping out to Williamsburg; just over to East 42nd Street. I'm thinking now that maybe I avoided both eateries because I'd built them up in my mind to be much more than they could be and I feared being disappointed or, worse, disappointing her.

So I guess there are three questions here, the first being to wonder if Peter Luger's has really gotten as bad as the Times critic says. I'd ordinarily not take one critic's word for anything but I have heard such talk from others.

The second question I suppose would be: "Will this review cause the folks who run Peter Luger's to shape up and return it to its former glory?"

And the third question is: "Even if they do, until I sacrifice the time to get out there and see for myself, assuming I can ever bring myself to do that, what am I going to use for a favorite restaurant?" Because that Wendy's down on Venice sure ain't gonna cut it.

• All of the complaints about the booing and chants at that World Series game pretty much come down to "How dare an anti-Trump crowd act like a pro-Trump crowd?"

Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
"A White House official who listened to President Trump's July 25 call with Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky will tell House investigators on Tuesday that he was so alarmed by the Ukraine pressure campaign that he twice alerted a top White House lawyer. Lt Col. Alexander Vindman, who has served on the National Security Council since 2018, will recount overhearing U.S. Ambassador to the E.U. Gordon Sondland — a key player in the pressure campaign — discuss with Ukrainian officials the need for the country to launch investigations into the 2016 election and the Bidens in order to secure a Zelensky meeting with Trump." This is…what? The fifth or sixth bit of corroborating testimony that backs up the whistleblower? Fuller details here.

Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
Trump keeps saying he's in favor the U.S. seizing the assets of other countries — Iraq's oil, especially. This is a blatant violation of international law but Trump either doesn't know or doesn't care, probably both. Jonathan Chait has more. And as Will Peischel notes, Trump wants to keep Climate Change off the agenda of topics to be discussed at the next G-7 summit. Lovely.

A Question from Brian Trester…

I know that you are an expert in the history of Hanna-Barbera cartoons and how they ran things there. Can you answer a simple question for me? I noticed much like Sid and Marty Krofft, most of their shows were very short-lived, some only making 16 cartoons or less. Why did they give up or cancel shows so fast? I know it took a lot of time, effort and money to create these shows. This seemed to be a running theme with a lot of cartoons in the 60s and 70s.

Was it that the networks always wanted something new or were they that poorly received by the audiences? I loved cartoons like Hong Kong Phooey and the like but they seemed to come and go before you could really build a strong following. However, cartoons like Scooby Doo seemed to drag on forever to the point I almost dreaded to see the new Scooby Doo offering in the fall.

Can you help shed some light on this?

Sure. There are a few exceptions but very few to this: The show was axed because the folks at the network, wisely or unwisely, thought its ratings were just not high enough to warrant another season. They'd look at how the show was drawing audiences and in particular how it did in reruns. During the years I worked on Saturday morning network shows, the math was that they'd make thirteen episodes and run each one four times.

There were a lot of shows that did well on the first run, a little less well on the second run, a lot less well on the third run and poorly on the fourth run. If yours did, that was a show that was not going to get renewed for another season. Once in a while, a show fared so poorly in reruns that they switched in reruns of something else they thought would do better there. And of course, there were many that didn't do well on the first run, which almost always meant it wouldn't do well on any runs.

But really, that's all there is to it: How are the ratings? I can think of only a few exceptions. The run of the 1973 Addams Family cartoon show was reportedly truncated because of a legal dispute over the ownership of the property. In 1984, I worked on a live-action Saturday morn show for Sid and Marty Krofft, Pryor's Place, that probably would have had more than one season if its star, Richard Pryor, had been willing to do more than the thirteen episodes we did. Another show I worked on, Garfield and Friends, could have had at least one more season than the seven we did if the producers had been willing to lower the price it cost CBS. There are probably a few other cases but not many.

You sometimes hear that a certain show — like yet another series I worked on, Dungeons and Dragons — was canceled because protest groups thought it was too violent or too scary. I know that wasn't why that show went off. It was declining ratings. And I don't think it was ever true with any other program. As with most things in show business, it all comes down to the numbers.

What's on my mind this morning? The awful, awful fires going on around Southern California. I'm not worried for me. Except smokey air for a few days and some traffic closures, they don't affect me particularly but I must know some of the folks who've either lost homes or been evacuated…and others who are worried that will come. They're saying the winds will get more dangerous before this is over. I wish I had something helpful to say about it all.

So I have nothing to say about that and I'm tired of writing about Trump. I'm going to dig into my folder of "ASK me" e-mails and see if I can find something to write about today…

Did you see John Oliver last night? If not, you need to see John Oliver last night. Here is John Oliver last night…

I've been trying to make this blog less about Trump and as you can see, I'm not doing a very good job of it. This week, I resolve to do better.

Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
The death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the founder and leader of the Islamic State, should have been sorta Good News for Trump but he managed to ruin that by (a) being on the golf course when it happened (b) faking a photo later of himself with the military leaders to look like he was seriously involved, (c) trying hard to take the same credit he argued should be denied to Obama for the death of bin Laden and (d) reviving his old claim that he predicted 9/11. He made that prediction, he claimed, in one of his books — you know, the ones written by others, the ones he probably never read. Those who've searched the books cannot find quite what he is claiming.

And Fred Kaplan explains why killing the ISIS leader is a big deal but not in the way Trump tried to make it out to be.

Today's First Runner-Up Bad News for Donald Trump
He was also greeted with boos and chants of "Lock him up!" at the World Series game he attended. I'm sure he heard it all as cheering and demands for "Four more years! Four more years!"

Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
Trump keeps claiming that his administration will eliminate AIDS within ten years and that the previous administration spent no money on this problem. As FactCheck.org notes, the previous administration spent about the same amount of money on it as this one and no one working on the problem thinks they can eliminate that awful disease. The real goal is just to make it not as common.

Bonus Link About Donald Trump
The Wall Street Journal is still apparently in the White House despite its "defense" of Trump which basically came down to "He's too inept to commit a high crime or misdemeanor." Gene Healy of the Cato Institute explains why that ineptness is even more reason to toss the guy outta office.

73 questions with Simone Biles. I think she actually answers about 55 of them but who cares? She's still amazing…

Today's Bad News for Donald Trump
This may be more like bad news for acting chief of staff Mick Mulvaney but his predecessor in the job, John Kelly, has been talking to the press. Kelly said, "I said, whatever you do — and we were still in the process of trying to find someone to take my place — I said whatever you do, don't hire a 'yes man,' someone who won't tell you the truth — don't do that. Because if you do, I believe you will be impeached." In other words, Trump doesn't know what he's doing and Mulvaney's been doing a bad job of reining him in.

Today's Outrage by Donald Trump
And of course, the Trump response to Kelly is the same one he has to anyone who suggests he's anything less than perfect and brilliant. He suggests the critic is an inept loser. And then White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham said what she knew Trump would have wanted her to say — or maybe he told her what to say. She said, "I worked with John Kelly, and he was totally unequipped to handle the genius of our great President." Here's the article on both the Bad News and the Outrage.

Did you see any of the funeral of Congressman Elijah Cummings? I caught excerpts, including some moving and poetic speeches by folks I'd never heard of…and the two main attractions, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. I'm going to embed those two speeches below for anyone who wants to return to a day when leaders spoke with eloquence about values and things that always have and always will matter.

In events like this, your first thought is that politics should be forgotten…but politics were never forgotten for long during the life of Representative Cummings. And it's impossible to not compare the grace and selflessness of these two men, whatever their shortcomings, with you-know-who. Clinton's best line in there is "You can't run a free society if you have to hate everybody you disagree with."

• It's bad enough Rudy Giuliani keeps butt-dialing me but every time I answer, I have to hear him telling someone on the other end, "With me as your lawyer, you have nothing to worry about!"

I haven't had the TV on much the last few days. There's a lot of hard-to-avoid coverage of the wildfires that every now and then seem to pick a few days to pop up in different places and threaten lives and homes in California. The local news coverage is very good. In fact, it sometimes may be too good. I don't like seeing a news reporter, mike in hand, approach someone whose home has just been reduced to charcoal. In what might just be the worst moment in their lives, they don't need a newsperson putting them suddenly on live television and asking some slightly-more-tactful version of "How does it feel to lose everything you own?"

We can all imagine what that feels like. Leave those poor people alone.

On the other hand, the local stations have also been showing us scenes of great heroism…of hard-working fire fighters in heavy gear in heavier heat working to save people and property. One channel had some magnificent live shots of "super scooper" planes that would scoop up a load of water from a nearby body of H2O, fly over a burning area and dump its liquid cargo at precisely the right moment. Other planes were dropping fire retardant chemicals. I'm not sure if I cheered audibly for those pilots but I sure cheered inwardly.

None of this is anywhere near me but I have friends who might be threatened by this batch of blazes. Just thinking of people worrying about this makes me think that whatever we spend to prepare for these disasters, it ain't nearly enough.