The past week, newsfromme.com has been coming to you live from Las Vegas. I had a script deadline of epic proportions and once upon a time when that happened, I would often hop a plane to that town and work in a hotel room. For a long time, I couldn't do that because I had ill loved ones who needed me nearby in Los Angeles but right now, I don't.

I'm not sure why being there helps me get work done but it sometimes does. So last Sunday night, that's where I headed. I just got back…and in case you're curious, I had no delays with TSA either coming or going. In fact, I breezed through today and had a very charming exchange with a lady who's not getting paid at the moment and likes Trump less than I do.

Here's a tip if you're going to Vegas and considering staying at one of the many hotels that are part of the vast Caesars Palace/Harrah's empire. It includes those places plus the Rio, Bally's, the Cromwell, Paris, The Linq, Planet Hollywood and many others. Before you book a room, join their Total Rewards club and get a price quote via the Total Rewards site. I scored my room for basically the Resort Fee price.

Resort fees are mandatory add-on charges that are not quite hidden but they still come as a surprise to some people. Let's say you find a room price of $75 a night. There may also be a Resort Fee of, say, $35 a night. That gives you a package of perks and depending on the hotel, it may include high-speed Internet, access to their spa, free bottles of water, free newspaper and a few other things. Whatever the bundle, it is probably not worth it to you and it is not optional. You pay it or you don't stay there…so your $75 room is really $110 a night. Plus tax.

I stayed in Las Vegas for five nights. One of those nights, my basic room price was $15. Two of those nights, it was $5 per night. And for two nights, it was $Zero. That's quite a deal even if you add on the Resort Fees. Of course, it had a lot to do with the town not being busy and the fact that in Vegas, they want their rooms filled at any price because empty rooms do not go down to the casino and lose money at Video Poker. Neither do I but they haven't noticed.

Other times of the year, that room could run $300 a night. Plus Resort Fees and tax. Anyway, I got a better price via the Total Rewards site than I could anywhere else on the 'net, including webpages that swear they have the lowest prices. Just something to keep in mind.

If you want to know more about Vegas Resort Fees and how much they can add on to your bill, this site will fill you in. More on my trip tomorrow and for the next few days here.

Nice obit today on our friend, Batton Lash. You can read it here.

• Trump should just tweet his State of the Union address — in 280 character chunks. It would keep him busy for a week and we could all mock his spelling.

• Reporters like talking to Rudy Giuliani because they always get two stories out of one interview. First, there's the one where Rudy admits something damaging to his client Trump's case. Then there's the one the next day when he walks back everything he said the day before.

Busy finishing (I hope) a script today. I have to fly somewhere tomorrow so I'm hoping at least one TSA agent shows up for work so I don't have to pat myself down.

There will not be much posting here today and probably tomorrow so try and find something else on the Internet to amuse yourself. I hear there's this new thing called "Google" that may help a little.

The other day here, I posted a link of Richard Sherman playing the piano in Walt Disney's office on the Disney lot. This video is a little tour of that office. You'll briefly see Richard in it. In the same scene, the lady wearing the black blazer is his wife of over sixty years, Elizabeth. Often when Richard performs "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" — which he does a lot — he gets to the line about "…and now me girl's me wife" and he points to Elizabeth and yells, "And she's sitting over there!"

Walt's office is actually two offices, connected. One has the desk he sat behind — and no, if you tour it, they won't let you sit there — and the other was a "working office" with tables and low chairs so he and associates could sit around and look at plans and artwork and discuss them.

Both were repurposed and redecorated after he died in 1966. Both have been restored back to the way they were the day he went to that big Carousel of Progress in the sky. This was possible because Dave Smith, who I believe was the first Disney archivist, went into Walt's rooms right after Mr. Disney died and Smith photographed every single detail.

The offices are not open to the general public but if you have an "in" with someone high in the Disney organization — say, Mickey or Donald or even Huey — they can arrange for you to join one of the tours which are conducted several times a day. There's a wait list for folks who work for the studio and they get selected by some kind of lottery.

A friend there got me in last September and I took along Maggie Thompson, who was in town visiting and working on Pogo stuff with me, and my assistant John Plunkett. It was kind of amazing if you stood in there and thought about the history that occurred in there. In case you never get to visit the Mouse Mecca, here's a little peek…

WonderCon, which takes place at the Anaheim Convention Center March 29-31 has just announced its third wave of Special-type Guests and, proving that some conventions never learn, this third wave includes me. My esteemed colleague Sergio Aragonés, was announced during a previous wave so I'll guess we'll be doing a panel together on when the next Groo comic will be out (soon, soon…) and we'll grab two other speedy cartoonists and do our Quick Draw! game, plus I'll be hosting five or six other fun events over the three days.

WonderCon is run by the same folks who bring you the annual Comic-Con International in San Diego each year. WonderCon is smaller (so is Utah) but not so small that you can possibly run out of things to see and do and buy. The other main difference it has to its the larger con — and this is a B.F.D. is that tickets are available.

They will not be available forever. This con, like all good conventions and bad politicians, will sell out eventually. But you can get tickets now. Do not take this information lightly.

If you like your conventions even smaller, Sergio and I will be at the San Diego Comic Fest earlier that same month. This is a more intimate assemblage with no big Hollywood guests and more emphasis on comic books, especially older comic books. If that sounds appealing to you, the con might be appealing to you. Hope to see some of you at one or the other.

Voice actor Bradley Bolke has left us at the age of 95. He was heard in many cartoons and commercials produced out of New York and was probably best known for the role of Chumley in the 1963-1966 Saturday morning cartoon show, Tennessee Tuxedo and His Tales. Chumley was an amiable walrus who tagged along with his penguin pal voiced by Don Adams. The show may not be remembered much but Chumley was. That's where Chumlee, the fellow on Pawn Stars, got his nickname.

Bolke was the brother of the fine comedian and voice actor Dayton Allen, who was born Dayton Allen Bolke. Bradley did occasional on-camera work (he was in the 1964 film, Diary of a Bachelor) but was mostly heard, not seen. He was heard in The Wacky World of Mother Goose, The Year Without a Santa Claus and many other shows, plus no small number of commercials. Perhaps most impressive is that he was in the cast of The First Family, the John F. Kennedy spoof starring Vaughn Meader which may still hold the record as the fastest-selling comedy record of all time.

I never had the pleasure of meeting or working with this Mr. Bolke but those who did spoke well of him…so I'm sure it would have been a pleasure.

A friend whose name you may know but who doesn't want it published wrote me a long message which I'm condensing down to this…

The sudden news that we'd lost Batton Lash hit me like a tsunami. I am somewhat amazed because while I certainly knew Batt, neither of us would describe the other as a close friend. We never ate together. We never vacationed together. I don't think I ever saw him outside a convention and all we did there was to chat and exchange compliments and pleasantries. Still, I find myself unable to think about anything else and to not be quite depressed at the news.

Your site has had some wonderful advice especially after Carolyn died about coping with grief and death. Do you have anything now which might make it easier to deal with this?

Well, it may help to acknowledge that one of the reasons a loss like that of Bat hits us hard is that he was roughly our age and we can't help thinking, "Gee, that could have been me!" As I've been mentioning here lately, one of the things that irks me about being 66 is that while I have a lot of friends who don't show or act their age, I have some who are determined to think older and to mention their depleted mortality in every third sentence.

I know a guy who's 72 and every time he sees that someone he knows of has died at the age of 75, he announces, "Guess I've only got three years left." Because we all know that people die at the exact same age, regardless of their physical conditions.  (One time when he said it, I pointed out to him that the person had died in a traffic accident.)

Don't do that. Just don't. It's the worst kind of self-destructive negative thinking. As for being jolted by an unexpected death, remember the words of the recently-deceased author William Goldman. At the end of The Princess Bride, he wrote, "Life isn't fair. It's just fairer than death, that's all."

Yeah, it sucks that a great guy like Bat or [INSERT NAME HERE] is here one day, gone the next.  So what are you going to do about it?  You sure can't stop it.

So I'll tell you what you're going to do about it: You're going to learn to live with it.  You're not going to like it but we live with lots of things we don't like and we find ways to cope with them and to minimize the harm they do to us.

When Carolyn was in what her doctors knew with rather uncanny precision would be her last year, I spent much time with Palliative Care (and later, Hospice) people. Palliative Care deals with "the quality of life" of a very sick person and even though I was not their patient and was covered by completely different healthcare, they spent a lot of time with me, making sure I'd hold up, get through it and retain whatever sanity and powers of judgement I had to apply. That was because the quality of Carolyn's remaining life had so much to do with me handling all the responsibilities and duties that fell on my rounded shoulders.

No one said this exactly to me but taking in all that they did say, I formulated the following view: The trick in coping with the death of someone you care about — whether that death has occurred or is just imminent — is to find the sweet spot between accepting that death and being paralyzed by it.

You don't want to be unaffected or unmoved by someone dying because, well, what kind of human being would you be if they told you someone you know just passed and you said, "Who gives a shit?" But too much grief is not good for your health. It's stupid to screw up your own life just because someone else lost theirs.

Celebrate the deceased. Remember them and if it's at all possible, try to keep alive something positive they brought to the world. But don't let the loss of them cause you to lose any part of yourself. If the departed was a good person, they wouldn't want that for you. And if he or she wasn't a good person…well, why are you overmourning them, for God's sake? You've got better things to do.

If you read this article by Matt Yglesias, you will know what the emoluments clause of the United States Constitution is. This will put you one up on the man seeking to be our next Attorney General.

Yesterday's video link was another great parody by Randy Rainbow and it brought a message from someone (a young someone, I assume) asking me what the song was upon which Mr. Rainbow based his effort. It's "Nothing Like a Dame" from the Broadway musical, South Pacific.

Here's the scene from the 1958 movie and yes, that's Ray Walston as Luther. In the number, you may also notice a brawny sailor with "Stew Pot" on his shirt. That's Ken Clark, who had a pretty good career appearing in "sword and sandal" movies, including a number of them with "Hercules" in the title.

You may also notice in this clip that his speaking voice in no way matches his singing voice. That's because his singing voice was supplied by the ubiquitous Thurl Ravenscroft, who was heard on dozens (if not hundreds) of records and also in movies, commercials and cartoons. He is best remembered for playing the voice of Tony the Tiger in the Sugar Frosted Flakes commercials, for singing "You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch" in the original Chuck Jones animation of How the Grinch Stole Christmas, and I think he's still heard in several attractions at Disneyland. You'll hear that distinctive basso profundo throughout much of this clip…

Galen Fott just sent me this…

I enjoyed your obit on Carol Channing. In the summer of 1984, I saw Channing in Houston in Jerry's Girls, a revue of Jerry Herman's music. (Her costars were Leslie Uggams and Andrea McArdle.) So I'm guessing that's the event Channing was plugging on the same TV show you were on.

…and I'll bet Galen Fott is right. In fact, I'm pretty sure of it. Thanks, Galen!

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) has called for a dramatic increase in taxes paid by really, really wealthy people. Republican leaders in government and the punditry have reacted like she's proposing that we dismantle the United States of America and turn the whole thing into a chain of Chipotle restaurants. But at least according to one poll, that idea fares well with Democratic voters and Independents, and doesn't even do so bad with Republicans.

If you want to know what's really going down with illegals crossing our southern border — and clearly, some people don't want to know because accurate information fouls up their goals — Kevin Drum has some real data, most of it even in EZ chart form. (Caution: Contains facts.)

I was in the same room with Carol Channing three times. One was when she was doing a "farewell tour" (and maybe not the last one) of her legendary role in Hello, Dolly! Keep in mind when I say that that I have a new policy of using the word "legend" sparingly because I think it's been devalued almost to the point of worthlessness by being applied to everything and everyone these days. It just happens to be the only applicable term in this case. And while I have never been all that fond of the show itself, what she did in it was legendary — in the real sense of that word.

Second Time: I was in Houston (or maybe Dallas but I think it was Houston) as a guest at a comic book convention there. This was in the mid-eighties, I believe. The convention operators arranged to have one of their guests go to a local TV station one morning to appear on Good Morning, Houston — or whatever the name of the show and the city were — and plug the con. Every guest more important than me (i.e., all of them) begged off and I let myself get talked into being the one.

It meant getting up way early, making myself as presentable as possible at that hour, being driven to the TV station and waiting an awfully long time to get on the air. I was mad at myself for agreeing until I found out that one of the other guests on the program that morn was Ms. Carol Channing. She was in town in some sort of concert-type show and she was appearing on the TV program for promotional reasons. I found that among the many, many things Carol Channing did better than me was to be awake, alert and very scintillating at 7:30 AM.

We had a wonderful half-hour in the green room waiting to go on. I told her I'd seen her in the above-referenced tour when it played Los Angeles. She was delighted but said, "You know, eventually you'll be telling people that you saw me on Broadway in the original production. Everyone who attended those touring shows eventually does. I think that's why they went to them…so they could tell people "I saw Carol Channing in Hello, Dolly! and either they say it was in New York or they don't mention it was in Schenectady!"

Great lady. Great talker. I was so delighted to spend that time with her and find out for myself that she was just like that for real. I didn't want to spoil the moment by asking her about being in the movie, Skidoo!

I was the last guest that morning on AM Houston or Good Morning, Dallas or whatever the hell it was. They gave me about 45 seconds to plug the con because Carol had been such a great guest, they'd gone way over talking to her. If I'd been the producer, I'd have dumped the clown from the comic book convention and all the other guests and just let her fill the whole danged show.

Third time I was in the same room as Carol Channing: In early 2009, the Magic Castle in Hollywood experimented with hosting cabaret shows in one of its performing spaces. The Board later decided to just stick with magic and they stopped the experiment but before they did, they had some wonderful shows there. Stan Freberg did a couple of nights there as did many singers of show tunes…including Carol. I went with my friend Shelly Goldstein, who herself sold out that showroom for a few evenings.

Carol was dynamic and funny and charming and very energetic. Of course, she was a much younger woman then. She was 88. She did an awful lot of magic of her own kind without pulling a rabbit out of a hat, sawing anyone in half or hauling out the linking rings. She just sat and talked and sang.

It was one of the best evenings I ever spent listening to someone just be legendary. See? There's that word again.