• At the Writers Guild Theater waiting for the movie Judy to start. If they're true to the spirit of Garland, they'll keep us waiting for at least 45 minutes past the scheduled start time.

Last December, you may recall, I went into an outlet of the Boston Market chain. I used to love those places but this visit was a disaster. The place was not very clean and I waited 22 minutes for a plate of roast turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a side of corn, took one or two bites and walked out. Terrible food, terrible service. I complained to the company website and in this post.

The next day — which was a Sunday — I was surprised to receive a phone call from a senior exec with the Boston Market chain. He apologized, said he'd send me coupons for free meals, look into my complaints and call me back when he can tell me something concrete that might get me to give Boston Market another try. As I said in this post, I was impressed.

I shouldn't have been. He never sent the coupons, never called me back…and the Boston Market in question closed its doors forever. Gee, I can't imagine why…

In the fifteen minutes a day I allow myself to talk and/or think about Trump, I had this thought: You know how furious and incoherent he's been this last week? Well for the rest of his days in office and a long time after, he will never be less furious or more coherent. That's just the nature of this guy and I doubt many of his supporters would even praise him for any ability to be calm and rational when under attack. The Ukraine matter will only go away or recede into the background if/when it is displaced by a bigger scandal and an even more impeachment-worthy crime.

Here's Frank Rich on Trump's increasingly-worse skills at Crisis Management.

Here from a 1969 episode of The Hollywood Palace, we have a performance by my favorite pantomime artist, the incomparable George Carl…

In 1942, America rounded up tens of thousands of people of Japanese ancestry and hurled them into internment camps. One of them was my pal Willie Ito, who was then all of eight years old and obviously a great threat to the security of the United States. His family was released almost three years later and at age 19, Willie got a job animating at the Walt Disney Studio. He tells his amazing story in an N.P.R. interview you can hear at this website.

Apparently, the pending/possible impeachment is not just the major issue on Donald Trump's mind, it's the only thing in the world that matters. Fred Kaplan takes us through some of the worldwide crisis situations that our small-p president is ignoring.

It was my extraordinary good fortune and pleasure to work for a few decades with a delightful man named Dan Spiegle. I don't know what percentage of the comic book scripts I've written were illustrated by Dan but I'll bet it's high and I wish it was higher. Here's a note from Joe Cabrera…

If you haven't answered this already, how did you get involved with Dan Spiegle? Your work with him on Blackhawk and Crossfire has to be some of my favorite book runs ever.

I was a fan of Dan Spiegle's work for…well, almost from the age I started reading comic books, which was in the womb. As I've related many times in many places, the first movie I remember seeing in a theater was Don't Give Up The Ship starring Jerry Lewis, and the next day I happened to be reading the Dell comic book adaptation of it when I met Jerry Lewis. It was 1959, I was seven years old and that comic was drawn by Dan Spiegle.

Flash ahead to the early seventies. Western Publishing (AKA Gold Key Comics) was producing a Scooby Doo comic book based on the then-sorta-new Saturday morning TV show from Hanna-Barbera. The first issue of it was drawn by Phil DeLara. #2 thru #5 were drawn by Jack Manning. 6 thru 13 were drawn by Warren Tufts and then Warren asked off the assignment so someone else was needed. The editor, Chase Craig, assigned the book to Dan Spiegle.

There were many reasons why Dan was a great choice. For one thing, he was one of the best artists Chase had ever had in his stable…and easily the most reliable. As I would learn, if you told Dan the assignment was due on Wednesday at 3:30 PM, it was there Wednesday at 3:30 PM — and usually before. He never cut corners. If you'd told him to draw the 3rd Marine Division in every panel, he'd have drawn the 3rd Marine Division in every panel and all of their uniforms would have been precisely accurate.

But Dan was not that adept (yet) in the kind of semi-cartoony style necessary for Scooby Doo. He drew more realistic comics. Trouble was, Chase didn't have very many of those on his schedule just then. Dan needed work…Chase needed someone to draw Scooby…so he took a chance. The results were passable but they could have been better.

So now it's 1972 and I'm writing scripts for Chase…scripts for the Disney comics and I think I'd just done a few for the Road Runner and Bugs Bunny comics. I'm in one day and he asks me if I'd like to take a crack at Scooby Doo. My first thought is no; I'd seen the TV show and wasn't a particular fan. But before I can decline, Chase says, "Dan Spiegle is drawing the book now and I think the two of you would work well together."

I thought, "Dan Spiegle?" I said, "Sure." Like I said, I'd always loved his work.

I wrote one. Dan drew it. I happened to be at the office the day the package came in and everyone who'd thought Dan didn't quite have a feel for this kind of material was looking in the pages and sounding like Henry Higgins singing "The Rain in Spain!"

It was like, "He's got it! By george, he's got it!"

I got more credit for the change than I deserved but I loved the art so much, I said yes immediately when Chase said, "I'd like you to write this book from now on."

We also became good friends through another artist friend named Dan — this one a then-young gent named Dan Gheno, who may have been the first person to ever send me any kind of fan letter about my work. Gheno was a beginning artist then and has since become one of top portrait painters and art instructors in this country.

Gheno lived near Spiegle and they'd met with the older Dan coaching the younger Dan. Shortly after that first Scooby Doo job, I drove up to Carpinteria for a day and met both of them. Here's a photo that Mr. Gheno took that day with my camera. It's me and Spiegle in his studio…

We did Scooby Doo for Western until the company lost the rights. There was one inventory story by another writer but aside from that, I wrote the rest of the run until Western dropped or lost the rights to Scooby. The divorce was one of those "You can't fire me, I quit" arguments. Thereafter, whenever I had a comic book job that was even remotely in Dan's wheelhouse, I tried to get him on board as artist. When he was offered something and there was no writer attached yet, he asked them to get me.

We did lots of comics for different publishers — including more Scooby Doo for two other publishers…or was it three? — and never had an argument of any sort. He was never late. I was never unhappy with anything he drew. He was one of my favorite people on the planet and the fact that he drew so well was just a happy bonus. Thank you for asking about him, Joe, because I really enjoyed writing this and remembering Dan.

Here's a video mentioned in the George Conway article below. I'm going to try and write about topics other than Trump this week but I had to get this video up here…

I've decided to reinstate this daily feature and I'll keep it until the day the man leaves office…and maybe even a while after that. I'll post it during the fifteen minutes a day I'm allowing myself to think about the guy in the White House.

Today's installment is this article by George T. Conway, an attorney who was once a stalwart "Everything Republicans Do Is Good, Everything Democrats Do Is Bad" advocate. What changed that? Trump did. Mr. Conway is the hubby of Kellyanne Conway, who is still an advocate of the "E.R.D.I.G.E.D.D.I.B." philosophy. Things must be a lot of fun at their house.

The piece explains George's belief that Donald J. Trump is unfit for public office just because of who he is and how he is incapable of certain things we want in a President like honesty, being in touch with reality, and caring about something other than himself. I am a bit uncomfy with Mr. Conway's belief that "Any intelligent person who watches Trump closely on television, and pays careful attention to his words on Twitter and in the press, should be able to tell you as much about his behavior as a mental-health professional could" but most of what the article says is tough to deny. Which is not to say Trump supporters wouldn't.

Anyway, there's a lot of interesting stuff in there about what the Founding Fathers intended for the Presidency and you'll learn a lot about narcissistic personality disorder and antisocial personality disorder. Here's that link again.

• The folks complaining about Trump demanding all these investigations of the Bidens are forgetting that if those investigations turned up nothing, Donald would instantly admit that and apologize…you know, like he admitted he was wrong about that birth certificate thing.

The late Alan Rickman was an actor much admired by other actors. Here, he gives some excellent advice to them…

Richard Gagnon writes…

I have a nephew that wants to be a comic book writer/artist. He's a little rough around the edges, but he's at an age where his work is going to improve tremendously in the next few years. He has the potential to be a professional comic book artist. From everything I've read, being a comic book pro is more a labor of love than something that will be financially rewarding. I'd be interested in your insights on pursuing a career in comics. I'd imagine that the pay you get for writing comics is the least lucrative writing that you do (although it must be a sheer pleasure to see what Sergio draws from your scripts).

Well, first of all, most of what I do with Sergio is co-written, not always in the same ratio, so I never think of him drawing my scripts. I think of it all as what we produce together. That said, I often find great joy in writing comics because (a), I grew up loving comic books and (b), because of how few collaborators you have. On a TV show, live or animated, there are contributions by dozens and dozens…sometimes hundreds of others. You don't even meet a large percentage of them and on a cartoon show, many of them may be located in another country and speaking a different language so what you do gets handled by a lot of strangers.

And their sheer number guarantees that some of them will not be very competent or on the same wavelength. On a comic book, three or four people are involved so there's a real good chance that you'll all be in contact, you'll all be in sync and they'll all be good at what they do. I loved it when I was working with Will Meugniot or Dan Spiegle or Scott Shaw! or…well, most of my co-conspirators. And yeah, the money was less than some other jobs but you have to factor in the stress and the time spent in meetings and arguments and such. Compare making $1000 on a job that's fun and easy and quick with one that pays ten times that but has 20+ times the tsuris.

Personally, I've had good and bad experiences in each work area and there have been many non-monetary perks in each. I worked briefly as a story editor on a network adventure series and I probably made less per hour on that job than I made writing Scooby Doo comic books. And I had a lot less fun.

But to get to what you asked about: I tell everyone these days, "Do not under any circumstances become a comic book writer or artist!" Tomorrow night, I'm speaking to a bunch of wanna-be cartoon writers up at U.C.L.A. and I"ll tell the same thing about writing cartoons. What you should do instead is to become a comic book or cartoon writer or artist who does many things, one or two of which are in one or both of those areas.

There are a couple of reasons for this. One is that we're in the era of merging media. Writing or drawing cartoons and writing or drawing comics and writing or drawing videogames are all overlapping and morphing together. There are jobs where it's hard to tell which you're doing and it will only get harder.

Another thing is that we are no longer in a time where you could do what a lot of my friends did in the seventies when they were breaking into comics or cartoons. They'd say, "Once I get established at DC Comics, I'll work for them the rest of my life" or "I'll get a job at Hanna-Barbera and work there until I retire." That doesn't happen anymore. Companies like DC Comics move across country and go through many changes of management. (I don't know anyone at DC now who is reasonably certain they'll be there in three years. Some of them will be but no one is sure it'll be them.) Companies like Hanna-Barbera go out of business and others get sold and become largely-new companies.

In July of this year, I marked fifty years of being a freelance professional writer. I've never been out of work for more than about six hours and that's because I've never been exclusive to any company nor have I ever gotten 100% of my income (or even close to it) from any one source. I'm not saying that to brag and I'm not claiming I was brilliant to run my life this way because it really wasn't planned. I may have done, as we sometimes do in this world, the right thing by accident. But if your kid is thinking, "All I want to do in life is write and draw Marvel comics" — or do any one thing for any one employer — I think he's in for a lot of grief.

Since I haven't seen anything he's done, I am making zero judgment on his skills. But this applies even if he's the absolute best at what he does and the farther he is from being that, the more it applies.

I would also suggest that he has to love the work. I assume he does now…but will he love it when he hits the inevitable rough periods? When he works on some project where everyone involved winds up hating each other and pointing fingers at one another to escape the blame for what resulted? There will be such projects and what keeps you going is that you love the profession even when one or more assignments are like skinny-dipping in the fire pits of Hell. There's a quote I've heard attributed to many actors but usually Henry Fonda. It goes, "To be an actor, you have to still love acting even after the play that closed during rehearsals directed by the worst human being who ever lived."

I could go on and on about this topic and surely will in subsequent posts, and I've said some of it before here. I'm quite serious about it. I think the reason to become a writer or artist (or actor or anything of a creative nature) is because you don't think you'd be happy doing something else. If your son feels that way, he's off to a good start.

Like all of you, I awoke this morning to news that went roughly like this…

Bernie Sanders had heart surgery Tuesday night after experiencing pain in his chest at a campaign event earlier in the day, senior adviser Jeff Weaver said in a statement Wednesday. The 78-year-old Sanders had a blockage in one artery and had two stents inserted. He is now "conversing and in good spirits," the statement said. All of his events and appearances have been canceled until further notice, and the campaign has reportedly begun canceling ad buys in Iowa, where it was due to begin airing its first TV ads of the campaign.

Aw, shit. Senator Sanders might not have been my first choice for President this time around but if I get a ballot with his name on it, I'll have no trouble voting for him. I fear now I won't get that ballot…and if he stays in the race, there will only be one topic around him: He's not healthy enough. I hope we have him around and in front of microphones for a long, long time. But even people who supported him yesterday are probably quietly thinking they need to support someone else. That's not the way his admirable, exciting campaign oughta end.

Twenty years ago (this week, some claim) on one of the many incarnations of Hollywood Squares, this happened and it's well worth your time to watch it. If you're in a hurry, start at 8:15 when they call on Penn & Teller and watch it from there. But if you can spare 18 and a half minutes, watch it from the start…

Kamden Spies wrote to ask…

Since you're a historian of late night television, I thought you could answer this question. What do you think changed Late Night in terms of politics? Before Trump, it seemed that The Daily Show was the only show that focused heavily on politics. I know that Carson and Letterman would do political humor, but not to the extent that Meyers or Colbert do. While I think they're hilarious (particularly Seth Meyers' Closer Look segments), I'm just curious what changed Late Night.

I'd say audience response did and I'd give some credit to the thing that's changed just about everything everywhere: The Internet.

But The Daily Show wasn't the only late night show that offered it. The Colbert Report did. Bill Maher's two shows did. Saturday Night Live usually has a couple of political bits plus whatever's in their Weekend Update segment. There are a few others…and while Carson and Letterman and those guys didn't do as much of it as some guys do now, they did during the Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky matter. During that period, it was very hard to write a joke about anything else.

The Internet has made everything more topical. Once upon a time, newspapers went to press once a day and TV news shows happened at a few specific hours. Now, news reporting is a 24/7 thing and current events are a lot more current. It's why the late night shows no longer pick their reruns from a year back as Johnny and Merv once did. A rerun now is of a show that first aired two weeks ago. If they ran a year-old show, it would feel like they'd dredged something up from the sixties. More topical humor means more politics.

And then there's the fact that when Stephen Colbert replaced Letterman, a guy who did topical humor and who was immersed in politics replaced a guy who seemed uncomfy in that area and often half-joked about not knowing very much about it. It is widely believed in the industry that Colbert's rise to the top of the ratings had a lot to do with getting more political, which has largely meant slamming Trump. In TV, when you want to know where something came from, the answer is usually someone who got real successful doing it so everyone else felt they should do it.