Another sad bit of news. John Boni was a very fine writer, producer, stand-up comic and even an actor. Taking the last of these first, he was a fine musical comedy performer working off-Broadway, most notably with a long-running role in the longer-running show, The Fantasticks.

In television, his credits included Three's Company, Facts of Life, 227, General Hospital, All My Children and he won an Emmy for his work on The Electric Company. You may be especially impressed that he was one of the main writers of Fernwood Tonight and America Tonight — you may remember those shows with Martin Mull and Fred Willard — and that he co-created When Things Were Rotten along with Norman Stiles and Mel Brooks. I also recall some very clever pieces he wrote for National Lampoon in its golden days.

He was not only a talented man, he was a nice man…the kind who was liked by everyone. I hadn't seen him in a while and I missed him. Now I guess I'm going to have to go on missing him forever. It's sad to lose a guy like that.

I'm not sure if Johnny Thompson (aka "The Great Tomsoni") was the most beloved figure in the magic community or the most knowledgeable but he was at least one of those. A most respected performer, much of his career in recent years had been consulting with Penn & Teller and serving as one of the judges on their show, Penn & Teller Fool Us. If the program was a contest to see if anyone could fool Johnny, no one would ever win.

I was honored to see him perform on several occasions and to talk with him about his art 'n' craft. There are magicians who are very skilled at trickery and there are those who are very funny in performance. Johnny was one of those rare ones who was both…and an absolute joy to meet.

Hey, it's Rapmaster Cookie Monster!

Mark Joseph Stern makes a pretty good case that those of us who don't like Daylight Saving Time are wrong as to what we don't like. He says what we don't like is Standard Time. I think he's right.

Whenever you check into a hotel room, look to see if the previous occupant left the alarm clock set for 5:30 AM.

Hello from San Diego where I'm a guest at the San Diego Comic Fest and where I'll be doing these panels over the next few days. My co-conspirator Sergio Aragonés drove us down here yesterday for what I expect will be a lovely, low-pressure weekend talking about comic books with a lot of folks who love them, whether or not they get turned into movies, TV shows or anything other than comic books.

Nice welcoming reception last night. Sergio and I went out for dinner along with my pal Buzz Dixon and where did we go? Well, it's the month when Souplantation restaurants serve my favorite tomato soup and there are several Souplantations not far from the con hotel. Process that information and take a wild guess.

I think I'm going to try to not get ensnared in Trump-themed political discussions this weekend. Most of them are way premature. What do I think about Joe Biden running for president? I think I have plenty of time to consider that months from now when we have a better idea what the issues will be and even who might be the Republican nominee. With an incumbent this volatile, you can't take anything for granted.

Hey, I gotta go eat breakfast. Follow my Instagram page. After neglecting it for a long time, I'm starting to post daily on it. Back later. If you're here at the con, say hi. It's not hard to find anyone in a con this size.

Lewis Black and the Daily Show writers on the anti-vaxx movement. I have learned the painful way — seeing people I loved die — that placing Stuff You Read on the Internet above what Most Medical Professionals Say is a fine method of doing away with yourself. And when it comes to vaccinations, you can also do away with others around you…

If there's anything Democrats and Republicans both agree on it's that Michael Cohen has told a lot of lies. But I'm not sure they agree on which things he said were lies.

First, he said a lot of things supporting Donald Trump and that was because he worked for Trump for a long time and Trump trusted him and said he was great and, for example, when reporters asked Trump questions about a possible payment to a porn star, Trump referred them to Cohen. I don't get that Republicans had a lot of problems with those lies. He's admitted that a lot of those statements were lies and some of them are among the reasons he's going to prison.

But Republicans aren't mad at him for those lies, nor do they seem to be outraged that Trump ever hired this guy. They all seem mad about what Cohen's saying now and they insist it's his current statements that are outrageous lies. They don't seem to have any proof of that, not are they trying to rebut any of it. Their proof that Michael Cohen is now lying in that he's going to prison for the lies he told before in service of Trump even though they don't want to say most of those were lies, especially the ones Cohen now says Trump was in on.

Trump's lawyer Rudy Giuliani says we can't believe anything Cohen says because, after all, he's going to prison for the lies involved in covering up Trump's illegal payments to Stormy Daniels. But — and here's where I get a bit confused — Giuliani also insists paying off Stormy Daniels wasn't illegal even though he and his client used to fervently deny he'd done this.

In any case, Rudy joins the chorus of those who say that because Cohen lied when he was making big money lying, you can't believe him now when he isn't…unless, of course, he has a book deal. They don't seem to buy the argument that if Cohen lies now, he's facing additional prison time and further prosecution. Question: Don't most of the Republicans saying this also believe in waterboarding and otherwise torturing people in order to get accurate information out of them?

Meanwhile, Democrats are saying that, sure, Cohen lied before and he lied again when he started to get caught and now he's not lying. The proof of that is that he's implicating the guy he worked for…you know, the guy who could grant him a full and complete pardon for some of the laws he's broken. They say we should believe Cohen now because to them, he sounds credible now. And he will until he says something that's not useful to them, which he might do if someone offers him money or a pardon or a condo in some country without an extradition treaty.

And Independents have it easy. They can say he was lying then, he's lying now and so are Trump and everyone else. Do I have this right?

Randy Rainbow's latest! Mr. Rainbow is again on tour but he's not coming to Los Angeles this time and most of his dates seem to sell out about eleven seconds after tix go on sale. One of these days I'll go see him perform material like this…

I have a number of e-mails asking me what I think of the new documentary and charges against Michael Jackson. They're asking me because they know I worked with the man (boy?) for a while on a never-happened Michael Jackson cartoon series. My first response is that I haven't seen the doc yet. It waits on my TiVo until such time as I can work up any enthusiasm to delve into that topic.

And the second response is that I didn't know the boy (man?) that well. I met with him at his Encino home about six times and in all those times taken together, I was alone with him for under three minutes. I was not even supposed to be allowed that but his various associates were occasionally called away briefly from their bubble-minding duties.

With or without them in the room, it was like being allowed in to see the Young Prince in his castle where he was carefully guarded by these folks who made a lot of money from their association with him. I did not feel like he was a prisoner…or if he was, it was clearly a self-imprisonment. Before I met with him each time, someone briefed me on topics I was not to mention.

In one case, he'd gotten a bad review in the L.A. Times and he was not to know of it. Another time, I was not to bring up Johnny Carson's name and if Michael did, I was to reply, "Oh, I never watch him." There was no explanation what that was about. A general caution was that if Michael suddenly got the urge to work on a song for the next album, my meeting was over and I was to be off the premises within seconds to allow him to go write.

In a way, it reminded me of books I'd read about Howard Hughes, who had built walls around himself and then had what insiders called "The Mormon Mafia" keeping him voluntarily penned within them. In the long run, it was to his own detriment. When you have your very own reality plus that kind of money, you can do that to yourself.

As Michael said and did things that caused some to think he was a child molester, I found myself wondering if he'd allowed anyone at all into his world who could tell him how many potential legal problems he was creating for himself and how bad he was making himself look. Even if you gave him the benefit of every doubt and assumed he was innocent of all the pedophilic charges made against him, he was still doing something very self-destructive.

As I said, I haven't been in the mood yet to watch the documentary. What I've been hearing about it though makes me feel it makes that self-destruction pretty complete.

Daniel Larison of the American Conservative is one of the more outspoken critics of virtually everything Trump does with regard to other nations and foreign policy. Here's a good overview of what's gone wrong there and I'll quote this paragraph because I think it hits the target…

It's true that Trump called U.S. foreign a "complete and total disaster," and many critics of our foreign policy were pleased to hear him say that, but on reflection we can see that he was just condemning almost everything that came before him without making any distinctions. He was happy to denounce previous wars, including ones he had supported earlier, because they had turned out badly and had become unpopular. He also denounced practically every diplomatic agreement made by previous administrations with no regard for whether the agreements were working or not. According to Trump, everything that preceded him was a bad deal or the worst deal of all time.

Trump is all about what's good for the Trump brand the Trump bank account…and nothing else. And the message he thinks got him elected has been "You were dying before I came along and I'm saving you." Enough people buy that to keep him in power…so far.

Julien Neel, the one-man quartet, favors us with a song from the turn of the century — and not this century…

Here's a little something I'm curious about — a very little something. No one outside the Trump family circle seems to know how wealthy he is. He used to quote all sorts of numbers and it was obvious from how often they changed that he was just making them up off the top of his oddly-haired head. But it's safe to say the guy ain't sending Melania to shop at Food 4 Less.

It's also pretty obvious — I don't think he even denies it since there's hard evidence — that he had Michael Cohen make that payoff to Stormy Daniels and then Cohen got reimbursed via a series of checks from Trump. Cohen's lawyers turned one over to investigators a week or two ago and they just found another one. Michael Monico, Cohen's lawyer, appeared on an MSNBC show today and displayed it. Here's some of what he said…

"The president of the United States wrote a check — as president — to Michael Cohen. That was part of a scheme to violate campaign finance [laws]," Monico said during a live appearance on The Beat with Ari Melber. "This was a scheme, in part, to defeat the election…and the first check, by the way, which was referenced in Mr. Cohen's testimony, was a $70,000 check, which I have with me today — a copy of it I have with me today. A $70,000 check written on the Donald J. Trump revocable trust.

"When Michael Cohen went to see the president for the first time in the White House in February of 2017…The president said to Michael, at that time, you will be getting the two checks soon. The two checks meaning the two $35,000 checks," Monico said. "And sure enough it was on Valentine's Day 2017."

Monico said Cohen claims the check was signed by Donald Trump Jr. and [Allen] Weisselberg [chief financial officer of the Trump Organization]. He added that Trump told Cohen that the two checks of $35,000 would be forthcoming at the meeting at the White House.

Why was this paid off in installments? This is the way you and I pay off debts when we're strapped for cash. Shouldn't Donald Trump, one of the world's wealthiest men he says, be able to pay back $130,000 in one check? And wouldn't one check that he'd rather not see be made public be preferable to several checks that he'd rather not see be made public?

Was the premise that one $130,000 check might be too easily connected to the $130,000 that was paid to Ms. Stormy, whereas a number of smaller amounts that totaled $130,000 would fool any investigators? This is kind of lame way to hide a transaction that Trump's lawyers insist was not illegal in the first place. Was the idea that it would look like a regular retainer paid to Cohen? I guess it's something like that but it sure didn't work, did it?

And seriously, did Trump not have the dough to take care of this right away and not make his then-loyal, "I'd take a bullet for Trump" attorney not have to wait months for reimbursement? And who was Trump waiting for to pay him so he could write those two checks for $35,000?

I have about ninety things to do today and posting on my blog is around #81…so you may not see much here today. To save me the task of doing it, see if you can find one article somewhere on the 'net about how Donald Trump is even a worse person than we thought. It shouldn't be hard. (He's bragging this morning about how some polls show he's hit a new high in support among Republicans. He seems to have given up on anyone else liking him.)

One thing to add about online cooking videos: Is there some law that says if you make one, you're required to put cayenne pepper in whatever you make? The pizza video I just posted was one of the few I've seen without it and I'm thinking the chef just plain forgot and is now going to be pulled over and ticketed by the Internet.

I even see people putting the stuff in biscuits or puddings or meals where even a professional fire-eater might not want "that little extra kick." Some of us don't want that kick anywhere. Some of us don't like spicy foods and hot sauces and having the inside of your mouth feel like a pottery kiln. If you do, fine. Me, I'm waiting for someone to invent a little bottle on every restaurant table that can remove the tabasco, hot peppers, Jalapenos, Sriracha, etc. Maybe at the same time, it could calm down Alex Jones.

I'll be back later. When, I cannot say.

This is a cooking video from someone who has spent a lot of time trying to learn how to make "New York style pizza" at home. I have the feeling this guy has learned how to do that about as well as it can be done…but I also have the reaction that it is clearly more trouble than it is worth. And unless you value your time as being close to worthless, it's not even a way to save money.

I find myself watching a lot of cooking videos these days and as a result, I have just about given up cooking myself. I was never very good at it and about 35% of the time, the end product was such a total disaster that a few bites into it, it went right into the garbage. I'm not a good cook and while I would enjoy the satisfaction of doing it myself, a better course of action for me would be to let some professional make my meal and for me to spend the time 'n' effort on something that will give me more satisfaction because I stand a better chance of having it turn out well.