In the 18 years, 7 months and 22 days I've been doing this blog, I have rarely had the problem that I couldn't think of anything to write about. I do not have that problem now but I'm having trouble coming up with anything that isn't about Donald Trump and/or Guns and/or White Supremacists. One of the many things I don't like about Trump — and it's a long, long list starting with the time he called my dear friend Jan Hooks a misogynistic
term because she was in sketches they did about him on Saturday Night Live — is the way he often seems to panic that all America is not talking about him. So what does he do at those moments? He does something stupid or vulgar to get that dialogue going again. There seems to be an overwhelming fear there that if we aren't talking about him, even if it's just to say we loathe him, he will somehow cease to exist.

I don't like this blog too much when it's mainly about one thing, no matter what that one thing is. That's because I don't like my life as much when my brain is working overtime on one topic, no matter what that one topic is. I've started a half-dozen posts this week that are either about D.J.T. or the N.R.A. or wind up inexplicably segueing into being about them. Then I stop and say, "No, I'm spending too much of my life writing/thinking about this stuff."

You can help. If you'd like to see more new content on this blog, send me some questions that aren't about Trump or guns or White Supremacists or how people like Tucker Carlson will say anything (anything!) if it keeps the old bank account bulging. The e-mail address to use is askme@newsfromme.com. It can be about comics, TV, animation, old comedians, tomato soup, the evils of cole slaw or any of the other vital topics on which this blog obsesses. Just stay away from politics because I have too many thoughts already along those lines. Thank you.

Are you concerned that Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant might be spying on you? Then you'll want to read this.

William Saletan makes an interesting point about White Supremacists — you know…those guys Tucker Carlson says barely exist. Saletan notes that White Supremacists used to argue that non-white races were inferior…ergo, the name "White Supremacists." Nowadays, a lot of them seem to be arguing non-whites are superior and therefore must be stopped. I don't completely buy into this but there's something to it.

John Green has become one of my favorite authors though I haven't gotten around to reading even one of his books. A friend familiar with his work suggests I wait until I become a teenage girl who doesn't know how she fits into the world…but filling the time between now and then, I watch his YouTube videos and they make me like him all the more. This one strikes the proper mood of despair and hope that I'm sometimes feeling these days, though I think I'm more certain that all this shall pass…

Right now if you want a mid-week room in Las Vegas, you can book one at the Excalibur for as little as $27 a night. A great price? Maybe not. If you look closer, you'll find that that price doesn't include room taxes (13.35%) and a few other add-ons, most notably the Resort Fee. At some point in the booking process, you will probably but not certainly notice that at the Excalibur, the Resort Fee is $39.68 a night, way more than doubling the price of that bargain room. At some other hotels in town, it could run as high as $45.

What do you get for your Resort Fee? Well, it varies from hotel to hotel. You might get access to their Fitness Center, which you probably won't use. Some days, you might get a free newspaper you won't read. You'll probably get free local phone calls, which won't matter because you'll be using your cell phone. You might get a free bottle or two of water that costs them about half a buck.

You might also get to print the boarding pass for your flight home, saving you the thirty seconds it would take to do that at the airport. That's assuming you even want a boarding pass on paper. I find the one on my phone app to be more efficient in every way.

At a lot of hotels, your Resort Fee gets you free notary service…and I don't know about you but when I'm in Vegas, I always have a lot of papers I need notarized. I don't gamble there these days but if I did and I lost, say, a thousand bucks, I'd be comforted by the fact that I could make it back by getting a hundred or so escrow documents notarized along with eating about ten entire prime ribs at the buffet.

The Resort Fee does usually include one item that might be useful to you: Access to the hotel's wi-fi. There's often an additional charge for high-speed wi-fi but even the slow kind might be nice to have…except that you wouldn't pay $45 a day for it.

For some reason, most of the hotels list a separate price for the wi-fi service that everyone gets as part of the mandatory Resort Fee. The price for it is sometimes the same as the Resort Fee and sometimes, it's less even though no one staying there is going to pay that amount for it. I don't understand this at all.

But the big problem with Resort Fees is that they presume everyone is dumb enough to think that that they're paying that $27 price for a hotel room that actually costs eighty-three bucks. It's like how a lot of folks who go out and buy a car haven't learned not to decide they've found the one to buy until they hold a piece of paper with an "out the door" price that includes prep fees, tax and licensing, delivery charges, document fees, Additional Dealer Profit fees, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. They fall in love with the sticker price and by the time they realize their $16,000 car costs $19,457.77, they're in too deep to get out.

Last time I booked a stay in Vegas, Harrah's offered me a free room. All I had to do was pony up the Resort Fees. It was still the cheapest deal I could get for a decent room but it sure as heck wasn't — as they insisted it was — a "free room."

My buddy Greg Ehrbar has a great article on the TV Academy website about some current celebrations of the late and looney Ernie Kovacs. I've probably expressed it elsewhere on this site but I think that Mr. Kovacs should be remembered more than he is and that the remembrances that are out there focus too much on his visual humor. The man was hilarious and brilliant just sitting in front of a microphone and talking.

I'm having a great deal of trouble not thinking about the recent shootings. Here are James Corden and Trevor Noah on the topic. In the days of Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Merv Griffin and even Johnny Carson, addressing national tragedies was nowhere within the job description of Talk Show Host. Now it is…

There are a lot of prominent folks — mostly Republican, some not — who want to blame mass shootings on (a) mental health and the lack thereof, (b) a dearth of religious acceptance and/or (c) video games. Even if those were the main reasons, the problem is that none of those people intend to do anything about (a) or (c), and they won't do much about (b) except what they always do, which is to argue that everyone should embrace their particular religion.

So those are all really different ways of saying they don't want to do anything. We may or may not see some Congressperson get up and propose regulating or banning videogames but that's one of those proposals that won't last much longer than the time it takes that legislator to propose it to a roomful of empty chairs on CSPAN. Ain't gonna happen.

Mike Huckabee, who makes his living peddling his version of religion as the answer to everything, is out there peddling his version of religion. This is like me insisting that the way to stop mass shootings is for more people to buy Groo the Wanderer comic books. Come to think of it, the Groo comics might even do more good. There is no reported incident of any mass-murdering committed while reading Groo, whereas a lot of people who kill other people believe they're doing it because God told them to or because they'll be rewarded in the afterlife or something of that sort.

But I'm just writing this for the sake of writing it. I don't expect anything anyone says on this blog or in less-read sources like the New York Times to change anything. Sadly, the only thing which might move someone to constructive action would be an increased flurry of mass shootings…and even that would not motivate many someones who could do anything.

Somewhere though, there must a district or two where some Republican running for re-election gets the message that he or she might not get re-elected if they can't answer voters who demand to know why they haven't done more than blame mental health, not being religious enough and Grand Theft Auto. And maybe the next attempt to ban assault weapons will lose by a narrower margin and give some of us a wee bit more hope. I'm not counting on it.

Another interview with Hal Prince. This will give you more of an overview of his unmatched career…

Los Angeles magazine and Variety have both run articles noting the fortieth anniversary of the movie, Rock 'n' Roll High School, which I thought was one of the best films ever made for that kind of budget for that kind of audience. Fun movie. Good cast. Great poster art by my pal Bill Stout. If you've never seen it, see it.

Because of a pressing deadline and a general disgust at the news these days, I won't be posting a lot of new content for a day or three here. The disgust has a lot to do with leaders of all stripes who think that Doing Something About Mass Shootings means making speeches about how someone has to Do Something About Mass Shootings.

So far, the only actual action I see that stands a chance of becoming reality is to make sure that mass shooters get the Death Penalty. I dunno…seems to me that when a guy goes into a public place with an assault rifle and starts shooting anyone and everything, he assumes that he's going to perish in the process, probably in a hail of S.W.A.T.-team ammo. I don't get that a lot of those fellows are real worried about dying by lethal injection.

And that's the last time today I want to devote my mind to that matter or the guy in the White House.

I would have loved the evening with Dick Van Dyke even if it hadn't been such a good distraction from the news. He was sensational. His wonderful spouse Arlene was sensational. The band and his singing group The Vantastix were sensational. My gripes about the club and its food should in no way be viewed as a reflection on the show. Two very-separate things. I do not know if and when Dick will do it again but if/when that's arranged, I'll tell you about it here. After I secure my tickets, of course.

The last week, I've received a number of inquiries on a certain topic. Each of those asks when Sergio Aragonés and/or I will be appearing at another comic convention, preferably one near the residence of the person asking the question. As far as I know, we'll both be at the WonderCon in Anaheim (April 10-12, 2020) and the Comic-Con International in San Diego (July 23-26, 2020). I have nothing before that and I don't think Sergio does, either.

One gent who's written me before is angry that we don't come to his turf and acts like it's some sort of regional discrimination on our parts. It's actually because we don't get invited to his town…or if we do, they're unappealing offers. Please understand that if we don't come to your area, it's not because we hate your state and it certainly isn't because it went for Trump. One correspondent a few weeks ago actually accused me of having that petty motive. I got his e-mail saying that right after Sergio and I got back from North Carolina…a state Trump carried.

And Oops! Here I am thinking about Trump again. I'm going to go work on something that pays…not much but it pays.

This is for those of you who like to start their days dancing to a Japanese disco record about Popeye.  Admit it.  You do.

Lana Wood, little sister of Natalie, gets a profile in the New York Times and to restate her case that her sister was not the victim of an accidental drowning but was, in fact, murdered.  I have no opinion on this…just the sense that the matter could do with more investigation than it received at the time.

One really trivial matter: Perhaps Lana Wood's most memorable movie role was as Bond Girl Plenty O'Toole in Diamonds are Forever.  In the Times article, it says…

In Plenty's last scene, she is thrown through a high hotel window into a swimming pool below, which Lana accomplished without a stunt double, she said, plummeting from a towering platform on full display for an enormous crowd of gamblers on the Vegas Strip, wearing less than she had in Playboy.

In other places, it says stuntwoman Patty Elder doubled for her in the out-the-window high fall and Ms. Wood herself did the splashdown-in-the-pool shot.  This sounds to me like a confusion of the reporter, not someone claiming credit for someone else's feat.

After the mass shooting in El Paso but before the mass shooting in Dayton — that's how we tell time in this country now — I took a friend to see Dick Van Dyke perform at the Catalina Bar and Grill in Hollywood and here's my review: Terrible. Just terrible.

That's a review of the food at the Catalina Bar and Grill, not Dick Van Dyke who was as wonderful as you'd imagine Dick Van Dyke could be. In fact, he was so wonderful that an absolutely packed house (few in the standby line made it in) endured the meals that preceded the show. My steak could have been used to resole a shoe and my date left her swordfish largely unconsumed. In fairness, Stu Shostak and his wife Jeanine who shared a table with us were happier with the chicken and the mushroom ravioli.

Everyone who loves cabaret performing — someone performing on stage with a tiny band or one pianist — bitches about the lack of better venues in Los Angeles. Vitello's out in the valley isn't a bad room. The Federal out on Lankershim is passable. Everyone hates the Gardenia on Santa Monica. And then there's the Catalina and just about nowhere else. We go to these places in spite of unspectacular cuisine and the many inconveniences of parking and seating because we want to see certain performers and there simply are no better venues. (Actually, the chow is pretty good at Vitello's.)

We go because that's where you see people like Dick Van Dyke…and yes, I know that's a misleading statement. There are no other people like Dick Van Dyke, arguably the most likeable performer in the history of mankind. If you don't love Dick Van Dyke, there's something really, really wrong with you.

Yeah, he's 93. And he does pretty well up there for a guy who's 93. Sings okay, dances a little…manages to be real funny, mostly with joking about being 93 and not being able to remember what the next number is. He had help up there — from his lovely wife Arlene, from his vocal group The Vantastix, and from a pretty good band. When the band struck up the theme from The Dick Van Dyke Show and he shuffled up onto the stage, it was worth eating the Odor Eaters that were being passed off as New York Steak. There were many such moments.

He and the Vantastix opened with an a cappella "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang." They closed with a sing-along "Let's Go Fly a Kite" and we all sang along. In between, he and Arlene sang some of the duets that Rob and Laura Petrie warbled on The Dick Van Dyke Show like "Mountain Greenery." Dick sang a few old jazzy songs from his childhood. They did "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" and "Step in Time" and a few other tunes you'd eat cockroaches to hear Dick Van Dyke perform. Mostly, we sat there and just loved him.

In early 1965, shortly before my 13th birthday, my parents and I attended the filming of an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show. I wrote about that life-changing evening here. I got to see the man in person and chat with him briefly from our seats in the front row of the bleachers. In the last few years, I've gotten to spend some time with him and it's oh-so-terrific when your heroes don't disappoint you; when what you love about them turns out to be utterly and totally justified and valid.

Last night, Dick Van Dyke didn't do one thing wrong. Unless, of course, he cooked that steak…but I could even forgive him for that. Are you beginning to suspect that I had a very good time?

I'm going to get away from the TV where people argue and shoot each other. Instead, I'm going to go see a 93-year-old man sing and dance and maybe even trip over a footstool.