Unsummoned as always.

The way this place works is that we sit all day in a big, comfortable room waiting to be called. "We" is me and maybe 200 people who either weren't able to get out of jury duty or didn't want to. I'm not quite sure which of those I am.

Every time a courtroom in this building is ready to impanel a jury, the folks who run this department have a computer here select 35 or 40 of us at random and those folks are dispatched to that courtroom to be quizzed as potential jurors. Whoever is accepted becomes the jury for that trial for however many days it may last. Those who are rejected traipse back to this room and await the next lottery.

This is, I think, my fifth stint on jury duty. I have never been dispatched to any courtroom to be interviewed. Wasn't the last four times. Wasn't the one time they sent some of us up this morning. And now it's just past 2:45.

At noon, we were released for lunch and told to be back at 1:30. I walked out of the courthouse, hopped on a Dash bus and six minutes later, I was at Philippe the Original ordering one of their world-famous double-dipped French Dip sandwiches and a sack o' chips. There is no finer lunch in this hemisphere.

And now I sit here, presumably because there's at least one case going on in this building that might be ready to start the process of seating a jury in the next 60-90 minutes. If not, we all get released and our jury service is done…for this time. Stay tuned.

We're coming to you today from one of the many Jury Rooms in Downtown Los Angeles where I'm here to do a civic duty I can no longer postpone. One time when I did this in Van Nuys, I walked in to report for what I expected would be a long, boring day and found that one of my fellow jurors was my longtime buddy Scott Shaw! That day passed in a hurry. We sat there and talked about comics and cartoons and mutual acquaintances.

No such luck today, though I did get into a not-uninteresting political discussion with a gent who made this point. He, unlike me, thinks the 2020 election will be Trump v. Biden, two men who are famous for their verbal gaffes and for getting too familiar with the opposite gender.

Says he, Democrats will fault both men for those two things, whereas Republicans will fault only Biden. "Look at the way Dems reacted to Al Franken pretending to grope someone as opposed to the GOP ignoring rape allegations against Trump, the whole Stormy Daniels thing and other charges. Since Bill Clinton, Democrats demand their guy be perfect while Republicans just demand that theirs win." I don't think it's quite that bad but the guy has a point.

I got here at 7:45 and from 8 to 9, a lady explained to us how jury duty works, how to fill out the forms we have to fill out, where the vending machines are, how to ask for a postponement of service, etc.

Each topic was covered a half-dozen different ways and explained in microscopic detail, including this point: At the end of your service, you will be given a Certificate of Completion that affirms you have served and need not serve again for twelve months. If you served more than one day and are therefore to be paid $15 per day, a check for your juror pay will be mailed to you within two weeks. Do not take the piece of paper you will receive at the close of your service to your bank and attempt to deposit it. It is not a check.

No kidding. They really had to explain that, no doubt because people have made that mistake. Frightening to think that those same people sat on juries and made decisions that altered the course of someone's life. They also vote. More later.

Paul Simon, a long time ago, visits Sesame Street. He does not seem all that happy that the young lady has decided to rewrite the lyrics to his song. Hers actually make more sense than his…

From the Washington Post…

Some members of the [Mueller] office were particularly disappointed that [Attorney General] Barr did not release summary information the special counsel team had prepared, according to two people familiar with their reactions. "There was immediate displeasure from the team when they saw how the attorney general had characterized their work instead," according to one U.S. official briefed on the matter.

Summaries were prepared for different sections of the report, with a view that they could be made public, the official said. The report was prepared "so that the front matter from each section could have been released immediately — or very quickly," the official said. "It was done in a way that minimum redactions, if any, would have been necessary, and the work would have spoken for itself."

Mueller's team assumed the information was going to be made available to the public, the official said, "and so they prepared their summaries to be shared in their own words — and not in the attorney general's summary of their work, as turned out to be the case."

Is there anyone who didn't see this coming? Of course the next chapter in the story of the Mueller Report was always going to be whether the A.G. summarized it accurately. If and when Barr does release some version of it, we'll have the mud-wrestling over whether the redactions are hiding things just because they make Trump look bad. And Trump and his defenders will at some point have to switch from commending Mueller for his fine, honest job back to denouncing him and his crew as partisan witch-hunters.

This kind of thing could be so much fun if the future of the United States of America and its citizens wasn't at stake.

Each year at Comic-Con, we hand out the Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. In fact, we hand out two of them — one to someone we hope will be with us to accept it and one, posthumously, to someone who left us but is worthy of recognition. The award was founded by the late Jerry Robinson and it recognizes a writer of comics who produced a splendid body of work but who did not receive proper recognition and/or financial reward. At the time Jerry proposed this award, that was all too true of his late friend, Bill Finger.

These days, Finger gets his name on his great co-creation Batman but since others do not receive their due recognition, the awards continue. This is the annual announcement that as its Administrator, I am now open to receive nominations and suggestions for the 2019 presentation. Here's what you need to know…

1. This is an award for a body of work as a comic book writer. Every year, a couple of folks nominate their favorite artist. Sometimes, they don't get that "writer" part and sometimes, they argue that their nominee qualifies because their favorite artist has done so many comics, he must have written one or two of them so we can give him this trophy, right? Wrong. It's for a body of work as a comic book writer. Got that? Also, "a body of work" is not one or two comics you liked written by someone relatively new to the field.
2. This award is for a writer who has received insufficient reward for his or her splendid body of work. It can be insufficient in terms of recognition or insufficient in terms of financial compensation or it can, of course, be both. But this is not just an award for writing good comic books or a lot of them.
3. And it's for writing comic books, not comic strips or pulps or anything else. We stretch that definition far enough to include MAD but that's about as far as we'll stretch it.
4. To date, this award has gone to Jerry Siegel, Arnold Drake, Harvey Kurtzman, Alvin Schwartz, Gardner Fox, George Gladir, Archie Goodwin, Larry Lieber, John Broome, Frank Jacobs, Otto Binder, Gary Friedrich, Bob Haney, Del Connell, Frank Doyle, Steve Skeates, Steve Gerber, Don Rosa, Robert Kanigher, Bill Mantlo, Jack Mendelsohn, Don McGregor, John Stanley, Elliot S! Maggin, Richard E. Hughes, William Messner-Loebs, Jack Kirby, Joye Hummel Murchison Kelly and Dorothy Roubicek Woolfolk. Those folks, having already won, cannot win again.
5. If you have already nominated someone in years past, you need not nominate them again. They will be considered for this year's awards.
6. If you nominate someone for the posthumous award, try to also suggest an appropriate person to accept on that person's behalf. Ideally, it would be a relative, preferably a spouse, child or grandchild. It could also be a person who worked with the nominee or — last resort — a friend or historian who can speak about them and their work. And if it's not a relative, we would also welcome suggestions as to an appropriate place for the plaque to reside — say, a museum or with someone who was close to the honoree.

Would you like to nominate someone? If so, here's the address for nominations. Nominations will be accepted until April 15 and you can remember that because it's when your taxes are due. Of far greater importance is that it's also when all reasonable suggestions will be placed before our Blue Ribbon Judging Committee. Their selections will be announced soon after and the presentations will be made at the Eisner Awards ceremony, which is, as it always is, Friday evening at Comic-Con. Thank you.

I'm writing this on my iPad because the Internet is out on my home computer. My week is never complete without at least one visit from a repairman from Spectrum.

So that might be why I haven't posted more today and why I haven't answered your e-mail. And since I pay my Spectrum bill online, that's probably why I haven't done that either. If I thought any other company would be a whole lot better, I wouldn't do that last thing anymore.

Dahlia Lithwick discusses the Trump administration's current strategy on the vital issue of health care. She thinks the plan now is to promise to get the courts to completely repeal Obamacare and then Donald and his crew will come up with something much, much better. This prospect thrills his supporters and they won't even mind that he won't start working on that "something better" until after he wins and starts his second term.

Then the second part of the plan is to lose that repeal effort so they won't have to come up with that plan and Trump can instead blame the courts. Because he knows that he can't deliver what he's promising. In fact, a large part of his party would really, really like it if there were no government health plans at all.

I don't know why anyone falls for Trump's assurances that he can come up with a health plan that will be cheaper and better than the Affordable Care Act. If he could, it would be real simple: They draw it up, they release it, various health care experts endorse it…and even Democrats would get behind it. But it's like he's promising to open a zoo full of unicorns and dragons and yetis and sane Alex Jones followers and other non-existent creatures. He can't deliver so he needs an excuse why not.

Let's take a visit to the farm that grew the potatoes that were used to make the french fries I ate with my burger yesterday afternoon at a Five Guys.

Well, these are probably not the specific potatoes that were used since this video is from 2015. But you understand what I'm getting at…

• Today's potatoes are from K.W. Huskinson & Sons, Inc., Rexburg, ID.

I really like Joe Biden, the man who was Vice-President for eight years and I think that guy would make a great president. I'm not as fond of certain other Joe Bidens who predated him and if any of them were to become the Democratic nominee, it would be one of those guys that Republicans would run against…like the Joe Biden who made one verbal gaffe for each three paragraphs of a speech or the one who could have treated Anita Hill a lot better.

Assuming the Republican nominee is Trump — an assumption I still have a mild hunch is wrong — it would be bizarre to see folks who don't care about rape accusations and porn star payoffs by their guy saying that Biden's unwanted shoulder massages prove he's morally unfit to be President of the United States. Or that Biden's gaffes from the previous century matter, whereas the constant current stream from you-know-who are kind of adorable.

Still, I more or less agree with this opinion piece by Michelle Goldberg that the moment for Mr. Biden has passed. I really don't get why any man wouldn't have realized something long ago: While he might think the neck-nuzzling is harmless and while some of the women might take it as not-unwelcome affection, it only takes one or two who don't like it to create an unnecessary problem. It also creates photos that do not look as innocent as they probably are in some (most?) cases.

With hundreds of thousands of Democrats throwing their chapeaus in the ring these days, there must be one who shares Biden's political positions — and maybe is even more in step with the current dynamic of the party. Yes, he has the name recognition but there's plenty of time for someone else to become just as famous. I'm kinda feeling the same way about Bernie Sanders. I'd support either man if they got the nod because they'd both have that wonderful, highly-desirable quality of not being Donald Trump. But so would plenty of other possibilities.

Randy Rainbow is currently on a tour — he's in Des Moines on Thursday, Kansas City on Friday and St. Louis on Saturday. So when does he find the time to make videos like this? I'm honestly amazed because you don't knock something like this out in one evening…

I mentioned here the other day that with the passing of Ken Bald, the title of "World's Oldest Comic Artist" is up for grabs again and my guess was that the honor now belonged to Bob Fujitani.

That was a good guess. It was wrong but it was a good guess since almost all online sources say Fujitani was born in 1920 and the next likely contender, Al Jaffee, was born in 1921. Well, it turns out that almost all online sources about Mr. Fujitani are apparently wrong. Fujitani told an interviewer for Alter Ego that he was born October 15, 1921. Jaffee was born March 13, 1921.

So unless there's someone we haven't thought of…or unless one of those two men fibbed around his age, Al Jaffee is the World's Oldest Comic Artist. He's 212 days older than Bob Fujitani and still drawing for MAD, though I'm told he missed an upcoming issue. Anyone got someone older?

Here, from the current revival on My Fair Lady in New York, is the "Rain in Spain" number. It is said that lyrist Alan Jay Lerner and composer Frederick Loewe would take days, weeks, even a month to perfect a song. Lerner especially took an extremely long time to do his end of the job. But inspiration hit them on this song it only took something like thirty minutes, culminating in a celebration quite like the one in the tune. It is a really spectacular stage number…

I haven't seen the new Tim Burton version of Dumbo and if I do, I doubt it will be in a theater. A darker, longer, live-action version of the original simply holds no appeal for me.

I find my tastes are generally in sync with Leonard Maltin and he didn't like it. Then again, he loved Stan & Ollie which I didn't like so maybe I should go see the new Dumbo…

Nah. I don't think so. Still, reading online reviews, I'm kinda amazed how much the people who liked it liked it and how much the people who hated it hated it. That intrigues me a little but not enough to get me to a Cineplex. End of Quick Comment.