Boy, she's amazing — Petula Clark, I mean. It's not polite to tell a lady's age but everyone in the house tonight knew she was 86 and while she doesn't sound exactly as good as she did in 1965 — how could she? — she sings way better than any of us in the audience were prepared to settle for. Not only that but she sang for about 100 minutes without an intermission or having her band play a number without her. She didn't even sit down and she doesn't look anywhere near 86 either.

And that's all the more remarkable when you consider that her professional singing career began when she was nine years old and her film debut was at age 12. None of this is humanly possible.

Tonight as part of a current tour, she performed before an audience that was just the right age to watch and listen as she topped the hit parade of the sixties with hit after hit. She sang most of 'em for us as well as tunes made famous by others plus some new offerings. There were also selections from Sunset Boulevard, Evita and the film version of Finian's Rainbow and by the time she got to "Downtown" (second from the end), every customer in the house had gotten exactly what they came for.

I had a great time. My friend Shelly had a great time. You'd have had a great time. I actually looked for you but you didn't seem to be there. Your loss.

This evening, my friend Shelly Goldstein and I are going to see the lady on the above album cover perform live. And if that lady doesn't sing the title song from that album, I'm going to make Shelly get up on stage and sing it…at least three times, plus a chorus or two of "I Know a Place."

So if anybody needs me tonight, I'll be in 1965. And before the show, I'm taking Shelly to dinner at a Howard Johnson's.

There was a time when Love's Wood Pit Barbecue restaurants dotted the California landscape and seeped into other states, as well. Some folks believe it's impossible to get decent barbecue in a chain. You need a small, one-of-a-kind restaurant in a building that used to be a welding shop and was converted by some guy who's obsessive about good bbq and has been doing it all his life. I've been to some great places that fit that description and also some where the food was close to inedible.

Love's fell somewhere in-between but they were always conveniently located and there are times you need to eat and you can't find one of the "other" kind of bbq joint, or maybe you're just not in the mood to gamble. Love's had decent ribs, great chicken, terrific sandwiches and easily the best beans I've ever had in my life. I used to go to every Love's I ventured near and for a time, I had a running correspondence with a gent who was either the president of the company or very close to that. Each time I ate at a new (to me) Love's, I'd send him a critique. He'd write me back a nice letter and toss in coupons for free meals. A fine relationship.

But I liked Love's for other reasons beyond the coupons. They were friendly and dependable and the food was pretty darned good. So you could often find me at the one on Pico Boulevard near Beverly or at the one on Hollywood Boulevard at Cherokee or at the one in Encino or the one in Pacific Palisades or any other one. I probably went to twenty different Love's including the one Love's Junior they operated (briefly) on Ventura Boulevard in Van Nuys. It was an attempt to repackage their cuisine into something that functioned like a fast food outlet. Had that experiment succeeded, I assume we'd have seen them in locations too small to handle a full-sized Love's or in food courts.

Alas, over the years the chain just lost business and got smaller. The one on Pico, which had once been a kind of "flagship" Love's and was used as a model and training facility for others, turned mysteriously one day into a place called Noonan's. Noonan's was the name of the company that supplied uncooked ribs to many L.A. restaurants and they went into business in some kind of partnership with Bob Morris, who had founded R.J.'s for Ribs, Gladstone's and other popular Los Angeles restaurants. (Morris now operates the Paradise Cove Beach Cafe in Malibu, which is not covered on this site because it's open and thriving.)

Then it became Bob Morris' Beverly Hills Cafe even though it wasn't really in Beverly Hills…and it may have changed names one or two more times before closing down. The building is now the office of a limousine company. The Love's on Hollywood Boulevard seems to change identities every time I'm in the area.

There were some changes of ownership and some lawsuits in the Love's operation. A lot of them closed and the ones that didn't changed names. The Love's in Brea, for instance, changed its name to Riley's and went on serving the exact same menu for years. The one in Chula Vista renamed itself The Great Rib Restaurant, which was a subtitle that Love's sometimes used in its advertising and on its signs. Eventually, all such after-life Love's closed. For a while, the company website claimed there was one left in Jakarta, Indonesia but I wasn't about to go and check.

Folks who loved Love's still love it…and miss it. If you do some Googling, you'll find a number of different recipes that purport to be the secret to replicating Love's Beans and others that teach you how to make the sauce. Since the recipes differ, some or all of these are obviously wrong.

The following one, which is sometimes attributed to the L.A. Times, is probably bogus.  For one thing, Love's beans contained bits of pork and beef in it, probably leftover scraps from other things prepared in their kitchens.  At no point does this supposed recipe for their barbecued beans tell you to add any such pieces of meat…nor does it call for any beans, either.  So I'm pretty sure it's wrong but here it is anyway…

2 cups cider vinegar
3 1/2 cups brown sugar
2 tablespoons salt
2 tablespoons onion powder
2 tablespoons garlic powder
2 tablespoons celery seed
1 tablespoon black pepper
1 tablespoon paprika
2 tablespoons lard
1/4 cup pickling spices

Place lard (not shortening) in a pot. Add sugar and then other ingredients. Cook over a low flame stirring occasionally until sauce reaches the desired consistency.

Every so often, I order a case of genuine Love's sauce from the Love's website. As you might imagine from all that alleged brown sugar, Love's sauce was very sweet but it was and still is awfully good. Putting the sauce on things I now eat makes them better but it also makes me miss the real restaurants all the more.

I really enjoyed Harold Prince: A Director's Life, a new PBS special about the great director (and producer) of so many fine Broadway shows. He was involved in one capacity or both in The Pajama Game, Damn Yankees, West Side Story, Fiorello!, West Side Story, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, She Loves Me, Fiddler on the Roof, Flora, The Red Menace, Cabaret, Zorba, Company, Follies, A Little Night Music, Candide, Pacific Overtures, On the Twentieth Century, Sweeney Todd, Evita, Merrily We Roll Along, The Phantom of the Opera, Kiss of the Spider Woman and a few million others.

Even if you aren't a theater buff, you might get something out of it. Hearing Prince explain why he did this or that or how he handled being in charge just might teach you something that's applicable in some other profession or arena. I'm going to watch it again and maybe again after that.

You can catch it for a while on your local PBS station and it's also online for a limited time at this link.

Here's a link to a pretty good obit on this fine performer.

And I said I thought the clip of him dancing was from The Ed Sullivan Show. Nine of you so far have written to say no, it's from Hollywood Palace. Okay, so it's from Hollywood Palace. I believe nine people are always right unless they're the Supreme Court.

That's me in the center flanked by Ken Berry and his F Troop co-star Larry Storch at a birthday party for Larry back in 2008. Larry is still with us at the age of 95. Sad to report, Ken died today at the age of 85. I saw it announced on Twitter by his former wife, the wonderful Jackie Joseph.

There doesn't seem to be a good, well-researched obit up yet. I'll link to one when there is and you'll be amazed at this guy's credits. In his teen years, he was touring the country and getting reviews that usually called him the next Gene Kelly or Fred Astaire. He was a top song-and-dance man but he also had a good flair for comedy. He gained fame as a performer with "special services" while in the army and his career was even promoted by his Sergeant, who was — believe it or not — Leonard Nimoy. Later, he became a favorite of Carol Burnett and Lucille Ball. Burnett featured him often as a guest star on her popular series and added him to the cast of the "Mama's Family" family.

Before that, he was a star of the famous Billy Barnes Revues (that's where he met Jackie) and that led to many TV roles and to him starring in F Troop as the hapless Captain Parmenter. If you watch those shows, you will sometimes see Berry pull off some amazing physical comedy.

I had the chance to meet him a few times and found him to be very humble…but still a little pissed that CBS had canceled Mayberry R.F.D. back in 1971. That was the successor to The Andy Griffith Show which kept most of that show's supporting cast with Berry plunked into a central role like Andy had. It was axed not because it was unpopular but because it was rural and that was the year CBS didn't want rural shows on its schedule even if they were winning their time slots. He said, "We played by their rules, we won by their rules and then they changed their rules."

Until the last decade or so when he began to have some health problems, he was one of those performers who was always working. If you want to be impressed, go look at the partial list of his TV appearances on his Wikipedia page. You've got to be really talented to work that much and he sure was. If you still don't believe me, take a look at this clip, which I think may be from The Ed Sullivan Show The Hollywood Palace. And stay tuned to see some of it again in slow-motion…

I'm generally fine with the idea that when someone dies, there should be a grace period in which we focus only on the good they did in life and we overlook the bad. I'm not sure though that that applies to people whose actions were as important and life-changing as most Presidents of the United States. If you feel it should apply to Presidents…if you think we should for a while only note the many fine, principled actions of George H.W. Bush, then maybe you'd better wait a few weeks before you read this essay by David Greenberg.

From Chris Dahl…

My wife and I were watching an animated movie the other day and got into a discussion about the sequence of events in creating an animated feature. Obviously everything starts with a script, but which comes next: the voice tracks or the animation? Do the voice actors record their tracks while they are watching the preliminary animation or are they sitting in a studio reading from the script? Obviously there's lots of editing and retakes involved in both voice and animation as the work proceeds, but I was curious. I guess it's a chicken or egg question from someone who's never been exposed to this behind the scenes process.

Traditionally, you record the voices then you do the animation. There have been exceptions, most notably the cartoons produced at the Fleischer Studios such as the Betty Boop series and the early Popeyes. They would do the animation and then at the bottom of the frame, there would be a little strip that would be cropped off the image before the cartoon was released. In that strip, there would be something similar to the graphics in those "sing along to the bouncing ball" cartoons that the Fleischers also produced. It would show the words and when each syllable should be spoken.

The point of doing it that way as to have the animators unencumbered by what the actors had done. If you were interested in good lip sync though, it didn't work so well. Then they'd also allow the actors — especially Jack Mercer, who was the main voice of Popeye — to ad-lib extra lines. That was why you often heard the Sailor Man muttering little asides and his lips were not moving.

Here and there, it's been done animation-then-voices since then but not often. If the budget can afford the added expense, sometimes this will happen: The actors will record their lines, the cartoon will be animated…and then they'll bring the actors back in to watch the animation and add little grunts and sighs and other vocal sounds where it seems appropriate. Usually though, there isn't the time or money for that.

It's Furry Potter and the Goblet of Cookies. Of course it is…

Ron Glasgow writes…

I've noticed that on a lot of animated pictures coming out these days which feature well-known actors doing the voice work, that the voices of the characters in those films are often quite different from the actors' natural speaking voices that we hear them use on talk shows and in live action films. Guys like Mel Blanc did all kinds of different voices for radio and animation as a matter of course, and some actors today can do a range of voices and accents when they're making recordings for audiobooks, etc. I get the distinct impression though that many actors' voices have been electronically/digitally altered after being recorded for use in animated films, the way that some producers or audio engineers use Auto-Tune to make recordings of singers sound a little better.

Does that happen during the production of The Garfield Show, and are you aware of it happening in other animated productions? Maybe that has always been the case and I just wasn't aware of it. I did figure out ‎Ross Bagdasarian's trick with Alvin and the Chipmunks when I was a kid by playing around with the speed of those records when I listened to them.

Voices in theatrical animation are often tweaked and futzed and sped and pitched a half-dozen different ways. Modern technology makes it so simple, it's almost irresistible.  Obviously, it's done to actors playing giant robots and space aliens but it's also done to folks playing normal human beings or aardvarks.

Altering voices is not a new thing. A lot of Mel Blanc's voices in the classic Warner Brothers cartoons were sped, as was Woody Woodpecker's most of the time and others at still other studios. With Mel, they had this problem: They'd speed his Daffy Duck lines up X% but then when Mel made personal appearances or did his characters on live radio shows, he'd try to imitate the sped voices…and then when he went into the studio to record Daffy, he'd do him higher and faster and the engineers would find that X% was too much and they'd have to modify the numbers. Some of the engineers were not very good at this and when certain of Mel's voices didn't sound right, that was often the reason.

There's less tech-tampering with voices in TV animation but there's some.  Often, it's so subtle that the actors themselves don't realize their voices have been modified ever-so-slightly.

Quick story: When they did the Fantastic Four cartoon show for Saturday morning in 1978, my friend Frank Welker supplied the voice of a silly little robot named H.E.R.B.I.E.  Frank is one of those vocal magicians who can sound like anybody or anything.  He speaks for Transformers and fuzzy bunnies and makes the sounds of squeaky door hinges or cocker spaniels.  For H.E.R.B.I.E., he did a voice that sounded artificially-enhanced but wasn't…and then after he left, the engineers would trick it up a little more. No one had told that to Frank.

After the first four or five recording sessions, the director told Frank to re-read a certain line a little slower.  He said, "We need it clearer because we're filtering you to make you sound a little more robotic."  Frank said, "Really?  Could I hear what that sounds like?"

They played him a sample of how H.E.R.B.I.E. would sound in the finished shows, which of course were not finished yet.  Frank immediately began imitating that sound, giving them the filtered voice without the filter.  That's why the guy works all the time.

On The Garfield Show — for which Frank, by the way, had the title role — we did some fiddling when we needed a voice that sounded like a robot or a computer.  On the earlier series, Garfield and Friends, we had some recurring characters called the Buddy Bears who would sing and talk with sped-up voices…

Because people keep asking me about this: The speaking voices of the Buddy Bears were done by Thom Huge (who played Jon on that series), Gregg Berger (who played Odie on both series) and whatever other male happened to be in the room at the time. I did a few lines once as one of them. The late and lovely Lorenzo Music played Garfield then and we tried speeding his voice to play one of the Buddy Bears but found Lorenzo sounded like Lorenzo, no matter how much we sped him.

That was for the voices of the Buddy Bears when they spoke. When they sang, Thom Huge did all three voices. And yes, I wrote the lyrics and Ed Bogas wrote the music…and if you watched that clip, I apologize that you'll have that tune running around in your head for the next eight days.

Don't worry. It goes away.

The only other times I recall us adjusting voices on either series were because I would sometimes hire veteran, older voice actors. The pitch and timing might be A bit on the low side but they still had the acting chops. I did one session once where three of my seven cast members were in wheelchairs.

One was the late Marvin Kaplan, who was then in his mid-eighties. Our ace engineer Andy Morris would push a few buttons and turn a few dials and, like a miracle, Marvin would sound exactly as he did in the sixties when he was the voice of Choo Choo on Top Cat. We did a little of that with a few other actors, as well — Stan Freberg and Jack Riley, to name two. I wish more studios would try that instead of saying, "He's too old. Let's replace him with a younger guy!"

Donald Trump's former attorney Michael Cohen, has admitted that he lied to Congress about Trump's deal to build a skyscraper in Moscow so as to support a lie that Trump was telling to the public.  Conor Friedersdorf explains why this is such a big deal.

We interrupt Cookie Monster Week to bring you this…and you only need to watch the first one minute and forty seconds of it. It's the opening to Dean Martin's 1968 Christmas Show.

I was fascinated by The Dean Martin Show — the series that ran on NBC from 1965 to 1974. They had a lot of great performers on it (including its star) but the way it was put together was also interesting. Usually, if someone starred in a weekly hour-long network variety show, it would mean four or five long days per week of rehearsing and taping.

Dino did that for his show's first season and decided that if that's what it took to have a weekly series, he'd rather not have one. To keep him doing it, producer-director Greg Garrison invented a new way of doing a show. During the week, they'd tape all the segments Dean wasn't in and rehearse (without him) all the ones that required his presence. They eliminated the pre-recording of songs, kept Dean in a tux for almost everything and staged things so Dean could just stand in one place and read everything off cue cards on his one day a week in the studio.

If you watch those shows with that in mind, you can see all kinds of shortcuts and cutting tricks. Often when some bit went wrong, Garrison preferred to try and save it in the editing room rather than to take the three minutes on the stage to do a second take. Or if during a song, Dean was having trouble hearing the orchestra, they wouldn't stop, turn the volume up and start over. Instead, Dean would give a special hand gesture — you can spot it once in a while — to tell them to make the track louder as he kept on singing.

When I watched the opening to the show below in '68, I thought I noticed another trick but in those pre-VCR/TiVo days, I couldn't rewind the video and check. I just found this on YouTube and, sure enough, if you watch carefully, you can see how Dean managed to participate in a dance number that would have required some rehearsal. They could have made it impossible to notice if they'd done it in two pieces and edited it together but that might have taken an extra two minutes of taping…

Rebecca Onion — who does not write for The Onion — discusses the "I'm not a scientist but…" ploy.

26. Many people do not understand that writing a comic book is not just writing the captions and dialogue. It involves coming up with a plot, figuring out how to develop that plot beat by beat, figuring out how to tell that plot one panel at a time…and writing the copy and dialogue that appear on the pages.
27. Comics are not about drawing individual panels that are pleasing to the eye. They're about drawing individual panels which tell a story as you go from one to another. A drawing can be absolutely magnificent in a stand-alone context but wrong from the standpoint of storytelling.
28. One of the biggest mistakes made by beginners involves the density of information. They try to convey too much of it in one panel or too little.
29. Copying the work of another writer or artist is sometimes best described as an "hommage." But sometimes, the more appropriate term is "plagiarism."
30. It is impossible to make a decent living in comics if you don't love what you do.
31. If your hero is as unheroic or as insane as your villain, then I really don't care who triumphs in the end unless, of course, the villain is out to destroy Los Angeles.
32. The ability to write dialogue that feels natural and conversational when read on the page has less to do than one might think with the ability to write dialogue which sounds natural and conversational when read aloud by an actor.
33. In most fight scenes, the amount of time it would take actual combatants to throw all those punches is often less than one-tenth the time it would take them to speak all the words in their word balloons while they battle.
34. The paper that's available to the artists to draw upon gets worse with each passing year. So do the brushes, pen points and ink they use on that paper.
35. The drawing paper that most pleases the penciler will always displease the inker and vice-versa. And when letterers lettered on the same pages, they never liked either kind but they were stuck.
36. Whenever anyone tells you you are one of the two best writers (or artists) in the business, the other person they like will always be the person you think is the most untalented person in the field.
37. The two most important things an editor brings to a project are to create the proper working environment in which the work will be done and to place the right people in the right positions. And "right" is at least as important as "good."
38. Readers will usually have a deep fondness for what they read when they first got into comics and so will have a natural antipathy for a major revamp of those books and the characters in them.
39. Better comic books usually result when the writer and the artist are friends with good channels of communication. Sometimes, it helps if they are the same person but not always.
40. A character cannot register more than one emotion or perform more than one action per panel. That's because there's only one drawing of that character per panel. I don't think the "multiple image" trick works unless you're trying to convey super-speed a la The Flash. And I don't think going through multiple moods in the captions and word balloons work since the visual only shows us one mood.
41. When a comic ships late, it is not always the fault of any of the creative talents involved. Often, it's the fault of the traffic manager or schedule-maker but the talent will usually get blamed anyway.
42. People too often confuse the job of the editor with the job of the proofreader.
43. In comics, as in all the other arts, the most difficult response to get out of your audience is laughter.
44. Some of the best comic books ever done were done by writers and artists who were amazingly fast.
45. And being fast was often not because the person wrote or drew amazingly fast but because they were dedicated enough to sit at the keyboard or drawing table all day and/or all night.
46. An artist should never try to draw the female form until he or she has seen — and preferably, drawn — a lot of them in person. This applies to the male form also but not quite as much because comics don't do variations on the male form as much as they do on the female form.
47. Plots need to be the right length. Some very poor comics have resulted from trying to cram a good 25-page storyline into twelve pages or to spread a good 12-page storyline over twenty-five.
48. The more powerful your protagonist is, the harder you have to work to come up with a credible challenge to him or her.
49. Colorists often have to make up for the fact that the artist has not bothered to think about the source(s) of light in the panels.
50. "Stunt" storylines like marrying off or killing beloved continuing characters have very little impact because everyone knows they're stunts to be undone at a later date.

Sure have been a lot of them lately, haven't there? And there's an old saying that I just made up that says that when lots of people are going to jail for perjury and lying, there's something pretty serious being covered-up.

Hey, how many witches does a witch hunt have to catch before you can no longer dismiss it as just a witch hunt?