If you encounter a cluck who thinks that real cold temperatures and blizzards prove that Global Warming is a myth, link them to this page which explains why not. It probably won't do any good because they're going to believe what they want to believe…but give it a try. Can't hurt.

And note that these people are the same people who, every time an election doesn't go their way, insist that it was rigged and there's proof that tens of thousands of illegal aliens voted. And their "proof" is usually something like, "My guy couldn't have lost fairly. Everyone I know voted for him!"

Fred Kaplan says it would be a huge mistake for the U.S. to use military force against Venezuela. Hey, since when has Donald Trump been adverse to making a huge mistake? Especially when he thinks it will distract people from paying attention to his previous huge mistake…

I think this is the last part of this series.  I noticed a couple of interesting things on my recent five-night stay in Las Vegas, one being the sign on the hotel formerly known as Treasure Island…

Treasure Island opened in 1993, back when most new hotels had to have themes.  This one's was piracy…and when you think about a place where you want to gamble, don't you dearly want to be surrounded by pirates?  Outside on the Strip, there was a free show in a man-made lake called Buccaneer Bay. It was staged several times an evening — two motorized ships would engage in battle and at the end of it, one of them would sink and its band of cutthroats (live actors) would wind up in the (hopefully, heated) lagoon.

One Christmas, my partner Sergio Aragonés and I were there for a bookstore appearance and the lagoon had been drained for maintenance work. You could see all the mechanics — tracks and gizmos — that enabled the sinkable ship to sail into battle against the other one and then sink. It was kinda fascinating and it inspired a story we did in an issue of Groo all about a scam with a ship that was designed to sink and then rise up again.

In 2003, Treasure Island got rid of that show. Buccaneer Bay became Sirens' Cove and in the new show — "The Sirens of TI" — one team of pirates consisted of sexy ladies who vanquished a competing ship filled with bare-chested stuntmen. That show also lasted ten years. It closed in 2013 and there is no replacement since the hotel is shedding its pirate theme, bit by bit. It's no longer Treasure Island. It's now T.I. and I'm guessing the sub-name "Treasure Island" and maybe its initials will go away in a few years.

"Theme" hotels are no longer "in."  Makes you wonder what the hotel Paris, if it goes that route, can do about that 33-stories-tall Eiffel Tower out front or how New York, New York could de-theme itself when it has a 150-foot-tall Statue of Liberty and a scale model of the Empire State Building.

Anyway, what I found interesting about the big T.I. sign was the big proclamation of FREE PARKING on it.  A lot of Vegas hotels have taken to charging you to come there and lose money on their slot machines.  It's one of those things that, like I mentioned here, they've learned they can get away with. Few visitors balk at paying it.  I believe the MGM-owned casinos started the practice and many a Vegas pundit predicted they'd back down when it drove hordes of players to other hotels.  This did not happen so other hotels starting doing charging for parking…and every so often, they raise prices and people still pay it.

The new owner of T.I. decided to see if it would drive players into driving to his hotel.  So far, it apparently hasn't done that.

Meanwhile, I wanted to show you this which I found in the food court at the Fashion Show Mall.  You can click on this photo to make it bigger…

It's called the Pharmabox and it's a vending machine that dispenses things you'd buy at a CVS Pharmacy or Walgreens: Beauty products, pain killers, antacids, etc.  It seemed a little odd to me that there were all these fast food stands around and right in the middle of them, they're selling Zantac and Pepcid.

And Advil.  If you look at the enlarged photo, you can see they stock a lot of Advil.  Shouldn't these machines be closer to the casinos?

I think that's all I have from my last Vegas expedition but today or maybe the day after, I'll be posting a story from a Vegas trip from some time ago.  Hope you enjoy it.

• 75% of the U.S. will have temps below freezing this coming week so we have the opportunity to identify the real stupid people among us. They're the ones who'll be saying, "Well, so much for that crap about Global Warming!"

Last night, Fox broadcast a "live" performance of the Broadway musical, Rent. Well, it was supposed to be live but one of the cast members was injured so most of what was telecast was a recorded dress rehearsal.

I wasn't watching. I'm usually a fan of this kind of event but I saw Rent on Broadway and didn't enjoy it very much. I'd planned to TiVo it anyway but my cable TV has been cutting in and out. Last Friday evening, I couldn't get Bill Maher's show on any of the various HBO channels that broadcast it and I had to watch it online. I decided I didn't care about Rent enough to deal with it being difficult to watch.

---

Speaking of Bill Maher last Friday night: I see a lot of online rebuttals to him that strike me as serious overreaction to his little anti-comics rant. It's the uninformed opinion of one guy, people. It's not the second coming of Dr. Wertham.

I have been reading comic books for…well, probably a lot longer than 95% of the folks reading this. My life has been seriously intertwined with them and even when I was writing network TV shows, when someone asked me what I did for a living, I was more likely to say "I write comic books" even during some period when I was doing little if any of that. It's part of my identity and before I started writing them, reading and collecting them was part of my identity.

Since I was around twelve, I've been hearing other lovers of comics react defensively because someone somewhere said that comics were junk, comics were for idiots, there was something really wrong with you if you read them past age ten, etc. I have almost never heard someone actually say they were junk, for idiots, etc.; just a lot of comic fans getting indignant and perhaps lashing back at such reported insults.

I have probably heard more such aspersions cast on network television or whatever music "those kids today" were buying. When I hear that someone has belittled comics — I rarely hear the belittling itself — I mentally file it with all those people I did hear say that The Beatles were a passing fad and that soon, those who bought that garbage would come to their senses and switch to good music…you know, like Mantovani or Perry Como.

You know the only group I ever heard really putting down comics? Back in the late-sixties to early-seventies, it was science-fiction fans. Some of the ones I encountered at s-f conventions in and around Los Angeles were unbelievably snotty about comics…and you'd think they'd be the last ones to deride someone else for their consumption of fantasy stories. I kinda caught on that they were defensive about having their passions slandered so they were trying to draw a bold line between reading Doc Savage paperbacks and reading Superman comic books. Because one is so much more intellectual than the other.

I was invited once to a meeting of the long-running Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society. This was around 1968 and I thought it might be interesting until the person doing the inviting told me, "For God's sake, don't mention comic books while you're there. They frown on that kind of thing." Well, I didn't need to go anywhere people frown or even look askance at my tastes…so I didn't go.

I did go though to a couple of s-f conventions and at one around 1970, I heard a fellow complaining that some of the vendors were selling — and this was said with a note of horror in his voice — comic books. Comic books, he insisted, were childish and infantile and beneath the dignity of science-fiction fandom. And so help me, as he said this, this person was wearing Spock ears, brandishing a plastic Star Trek phaser gun and wearing a t-shirt that said on it, "Beam me up, Scotty!"

That may have been the last time I heard that kind of putdown of comic books from a self-identified science-fiction fan. Some of those people became good friends. The sentiments expressed by that one guy are now ancient history and I think the views expressed last Friday night by Mr. Maher are going bye-bye the same way.

Okay, okay…we get it. You're so much smarter and more discerning than us. Fine. What he isn't discerning enough to know is that comics have never been more diverse in content, nor have they ever appealed to a wider audience. And judging them all by the super-hero movies is like assuming all comedians are doing pretty much the same thing as Gallagher.

Just ignore this kind of stuff, people. I've been ignoring it since I was twelve and that's worked out just fine.

Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. Randy Rainbow. And did I mention Randy Rainbow?

The Democratic National Convention to select their next presidential nominee will take place July 13-16, 2020. Someone might have a lock on it before then but maybe not too far before then. In any case, 7/13/20 is 1 year, 5 months and 15 days from now. I do not have to start thinking about whether I want it to be Bernie or Beto or Elizabeth or Kamala or any of the 7,244 others who will toss their chapeaus into the ring or be seriously mentioned.

In fact, I can wait at least a year before I have to start seriously thinking about which person I want to see get the nod. I can wait to see who else becomes possible and what all the contenders have to say, even about issues that do not yet exist. I can wait until the competitions and primaries and debates and — most of all — the inability to raise money whittles the field down to a dozen or so.

Right now, I'm thinking I won't pay much attention to this matter until a few weeks before the California primary, which will occur on March 3, 2020. That's like thirteen months from now.

As an aside: I'm not 100% sure of this but I believe the 2020 Comic Con International will be held July 23-26 with Preview Night on 7/22. So you won't have to choose between watching the Democratic Convention and attending whatever panels I do at the con next year. The Republican National Convention will be held August 24-27 and I have a hunch they won't be nominating an incumbent unless it's President Pence.

Lewis Black was great last night in a one-night stand at the Orpheum Theater downtown…but the photo above is of John Bowman who was Black's opening act. Why a picture of the opening act? Because he was terrific. No, let me rephrase that. I've seen Mr. Bowman before because he's usually Black's opening act and he's always been good. Last night, he was way better than that. If the man had a little more TV exposure, he'd do well to bag the opening-for-Lewis job and be the headliner of his own show.

He didn't use the ukulele — that was just the best photo I found of him online — but he did use a blonde wig and a delightful/savage sense of humor. It may have been the funniest Trump-bashing I've ever seen. The wig transformed him into Trump and then when he whipped it off, suddenly he was Rudy Giuliani. If they'd announced Lewis Black had taken ill and that Bowman was just going to do another hour, I don't think much of the audience would have complained.

Black was fine, of course. He mined a lot of the same topics Bowman had just discussed including stupidity — that which exists in our elected officials and that which exists in our electorate. He talked for close to 90 minutes then did one of his webcast segments. (They're free to watch here but they're only up for a few days after the does them.) Black didn't talk about Trump as much as the audience expected because — this is not a direct quote — "You've all been talking about him all day." He was right.

I see Lewis Black perform every year or so. He always seems to have fresh material, some of which feels warm from the oven and some of which seems to be created on the spot. He's always funny, often when reminding you about things you don't think are very funny. When he comes to your town — which he will some day — go see him. Especially if he has John Bowman opening.

Going to see this guy tonight. I hope he isn't angry about anything…

This coming Wednesday, January 30, I'll be doing a very rare bookstore signing at Atlantis Fantasyworld in Santa Cruz, California. The shop is located at 1020 Cedar St. — in Santa Cruz (of course) and I'll be there from Noon 'til 6 PM. Come by. Make a purchase. Keep me company. I think this is the first bookstore appearance I've made in about ten years.

In March, I'll be at two conventions, both of them in Southern California. March 7-10, it's the San Diego Comic Fest, a small (by Comic-Con standards) gathering that's intimate, friendly, unjammed and always a lot of fun. Details can be found on this website.

Then later in March — March 29 thru 31, to be precise — you'll find me at WonderCon Anaheim. Details here. At both of these assemblages, I'll be hosting panels and talking to people and doing my best to avoid sitting behind a table.

And I've accepted an invite to guest at this year's Heroes Con in Charlotte, North Carolina. It's June 14-16 and I don't know much more about it than that right now. Their website is over here.

And as you can probably guess, I'll be at Comic-Con International in San Diego, which is July 18-21 with a Preview Night on July 17. I still don't understand why they don't just say the convention is July 17-21 but then there are many things in this world I don't understand. This will the fiftieth of these conventions, which I find amazing. Even more amazing is that it'll be the fiftieth one of these I've attended. That is not humanly possible.

Ben Sternbach sends me an awful lot of questions and this morning, I decided to respond to this one…

I'm sure you watched Bill Maher's show last night so you must have seen his New Rules rant about how comic books are infantile garbage. If you'd been a guest on that show and had thirty seconds to rebut him on air, what would you have said?

I would have said something like, "You're right that there are a lot of childish, stupid comic books out there. There are also a lot of childish, stupid stand-up comedians and even some childish, stupid TV shows where people sit around discussing politics. I wouldn't judge everything in a form of communication by its worst examples.

"As for your point about how people should outgrow that kind of thing, I kinda feel that way about smoking pot but since I've never smoked pot, I'm not really in the ideal position to judge those who do. Since you proudly have not seen the best of what's being done in comic books, maybe you don't understand what people get out of them."

And then I'd pretty much forget about his comments. People say lots of things on television which strike me as wrong or simply uninformed. If you get upset about every one of them, you'll be upset a lot over things that you can't do anything about…and which don't have any impact on the world except to get you upset.

A profile of Mr. Eric Idle…

• Oh, great. They end the shutdown "temporarily" so we get to go through this again in three weeks. Meanwhile, Bill Maher has Ann Coulter as a guest tonight so we get to hear what she thinks about all this…

As I'm sure you've heard, Trump adviser Roger Stone was arrested this morning when FBI agents went to his Florida home…FBI agents who aren't being paid, apparently. There's devotion to duty.

There's news footage of them swarming all over his property but, alas, no video of Stone being taken away. I was hoping to see someone frog-marched. I still don't know what that is and won't until I see it actually done. Please, Robert Mueller, before you file your final report and the fight starts about whether anyone will get to read it, frog-march at least one person you take into custody. I'd really like to see it done to Jerome Corsi but you can even do it to me if you have to. I just want to see what that looks like.

If you want to know what Mr. Stone did to warrant all those warrants, Andrew Prokop has a full explanation. Basically, he's guilty of associating with Donald Trump, which apparently no one can do without obstructing justice.

I'm not sure who "Mr Dooves" is other than that he's someone who does a cappella renditions of TV theme songs. I love good a cappella singing and here he provides that for the theme from a show I wrote and co-produced for seven seasons…