Sorry I haven't posted all day. I kept meaning to but the phone would ring or something else would happen. And when I don't post here, it doesn't mean that I've totally forgotten you, dear blogosphere audience. Sometimes, I'm working on a long post that won't appear for a few days.

Today when the phone rang, it was often a unsolicited solicitor trying to sell me on home repairs, solar energy or, in one case, a reverse mortgage. That's a new one, the reverse mortgage. Even if I needed money, I think I'd try everything else — including selling my blood, selling my body and holding up Burlington Coat Factories — before I took out a reverse mortgage. In fact, I think all three of those are more honest professions than selling reverse mortgages.

Trump continues to be Trump, as he always will be. Every day, he says or does something which his die-hardest supporters would consider a disqualifying outrage if it had been said or done by Barack Obama…or worse, President Hillary. It's going to be fun watching those people shrieking any time the next Democratic President — there will be one, sooner or later — does something that's a milder version of something they cheered when done by Donald. Just wait'll they accuse him or her of being divisive or unpresidential.

I believe many of my friends in the comic book community are still overreacting to Bill Maher. Folks, it's Bill Maher. And I wish they wouldn't try the old "Who's Bill Maher? What has he ever done?" rebuttal. Jerk though he may be at times, Maher is one of the most successful TV personalities of the last few decades. Between his current series, which has been on HBO for sixteen seasons and his previous program, he's had his own TV show now for more than twenty-four years and 80+ Emmy nominations.

And you wouldn't be that upset if you really thought he was a nobody that no one listens to. It's like Trump's silly comebacks where everyone who criticizes him is a "failing" newspaper or if they're on TV, their ratings are terrible. You should never listen to someone whose business is declining….or so says the man who gave us Trump Steaks, Trump Vodka, Trump Airlines, Trump University…

I just got a news alert on my iPhone saying, "Woolsey Fire 100% contained, reports LA County Fire." That's the biggest fire to ever wreak destruction on California. It's about the size of Denver, Colorado.

And they got it all contained…just before it started to rain. Sigh.

A lesson in how to eat a cookie from the world's foremost expert on the subject…

I don't particularly have an opinion on whether Nancy Pelosi should be the new Speaker of the House…and I don't need one since it's highly unlikely I'll get to vote on this.

But I do agree with Matt Yglesias that the Democrats need a public face…a person who can go on talk shows and Face the Nation and other places and argue their policies. And I further agree that Ms. Pelosi would not be the best person for that job. It's too bad Matt Yglesias is not a Democratic Congressman.

I lost a bit of my loyalty to Nate Silver after the 2016 election. Yeah, most of the pollsters and poll analysts (Silver is the latter) called it wrong but I somehow expected better of him. But he redeemed himself with this past mid-term election and also with commentaries like this tweet…

And speaking of f'ed up: The Rasmussen Poll is often said to favor Republicans and that's the main one that keeps insisting that Donald Trump's disapproval rating is within a point or two of his approval rating. In the recent election, they projected that the popular vote for the House of Representatives would be one point in favor of the G.O.P. Looks like the correct answer will turn out to be eight points for the Democrats.

Here is Silver's take on whether the election can be called a Blue Wave. He says yes.

Getting back to the heinous crime of using a private e-mail server: Trump supporters won't care about this. They didn't care when it was revealed a few months ago. It's like what David A. Graham said in this article: When your guy does it, it's different from when the other guy does it.

That's my pal Christy Marx, who is best known for the Jem cartoon series, though goodness knows she's written lots of other TV shows, comic books, videogames and other things. She and her husband Randy could use some financial assistance.

They live just outside Paradise, California — or rather, they lived (past-tense) there. Paradise is that community in Northern CA that was almost completely obliterated by fire recently. They got out with their lives and not much else and though there'll be insurance money and maybe some government aid, you just know it ain't gonna be nearly enough or soon enough. That's why some friends of my friends have set up a GoFundMe campaign to try to get some bucks soon to these great people.

You've been watching the news. I don't have to tell you how horrifying it's been up there. If you're in a "Thank Goodness it didn't happen to me" state of mind, you probably want to help out some people it did happen to. You can read more and give whatever you can afford on this page.

I don't plug a lot of these things but this one is certainly worth your attention and your donation.

Matthew Yglesias summarizes the battle over CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta's press credentials. He also offers a solid (I think) view of it all and how it's to both Trump's and CNN's mutual benefit. Here's a little taste. Referring to how Kellyanne Conway is so often on CNN, Yglesias writes…

It's true that CNN hosts typically give [Conway] a hard time about the controversy of the day, and make various faces indicating disgust or outrage at her dishonesty. But they don't respond to that disgust or outrage by doing something sensible like declining to book her in the future.

Generally speaking, if you are interested in informing the public, you don't dedicate lots of airtime to letting a deeply dishonest person speak and then make weird faces as if you're surprised to discover she's a liar. You just go book someone more honest instead.

By the same token, if the Trump administration genuinely believed CNN was broadcasting "fake news," it wouldn't send its people to the network.

True. And by the way: Isn't it amazing that the person Trump sends out to try and convince everyone that he's a great, benevolent leader is a woman who hasn't even been able to convince her own husband of that? In the same way, James Carville couldn't convince his own wife that Bill Clinton was a force for good. Those both seem to be fairly happy, stable marriages.

If you're going to sit down for Thanksgiving Dinner with relatives or even friends who don't share your political viewpoints, this page might be useful for you. It's the Politifact people debunking some of the less-than-true talking points that might be served up along with the mashed potatoes.

I have decided not to weigh in on perhaps the greatest controversy raging in the United States at this time: Whether or not to brine a turkey before you cook it.

Eric Idle tells how he came to write that song that he sings darn near everywhere he goes…

In 1947, Stan Lee wrote an article for Writer's Digest, a magazine that is still very much in business. It caters to wanna-be writers, telling them how to sell their work and who might buy it. I've always been curious about (a) how many submissions it generates and (b) how many of them sell. My guess would be (a) tons and (b) a few but I may be quite wrong about this.

Stan's article was called "There's Money in Comics!" and while some of its advice about writing is still valid, very little of its advice about selling is. And the example of a comic book script format shown is way outta date. I have a lot of old scripts by prolific comic book writers like Otto Binder, Gardner Fox, Paul S. Newman, Jerry Siegel, Robert Kanigher and Carl Wessler and none of them are in that format. Stan certainly abandoned it.

The article says — and remember this was '47 — that writing comics paid from $6 to $9 a page. Twenty-three years later when I sold my first comic book script, I got $10 a page but there were still companies paying those 1947 rates. I think some small publishers still are but rates at DC, Marvel and other major companies are much, much higher today.

Anyway, Writer's Digest has posted Stan's article here for all to see.

I continue to have my odd fascination with the demise of the Sears and Kmart chains, which are now one company which is vanishing faster than Bill Cosby Fan Clubs. They were once retail giants and Sears actually dates back to 1893 — I did not mistype "1993" — and was once an American institution. I've read just about everything online I could find about this crash-'n'-burn and the consensus seems to point to one reason: Bad management by folks who did everything wrong but will somehow still walk away from this disaster with millions. Why can't you and I get a job like that?

Last night, I walked through the one nearest me, the Kmart in which I occasionally shop. As of today, it's seven days 'til closing. I don't know if that includes Thanksgiving but don't stop in. Everything is 80% off and about 80% of the store is empty. What's left on what shelves are left is a lot of stuff you wouldn't take at any price.

It looks to me like the goal was to sell off everything in the building, fixtures included. And once they had a good amount of it out, I think they brought in the contents of a warehouse or two and put out tons of stuff they couldn't even sell in the store when it was an ongoing business.

80% off is quite a jump from the last time I was in there a month or so again. Items were 20%-40% off their marked prices and I did find some bargains. Last night, I literally could not find one thing that was worth carrying home for free. The book rack was loaded with copies of one of those novels allegedly written by Glenn Beck. I should have gotten a photo of one of them with the "80% off" label and captioned it "Sticker refers to author."

I did take this shot of Wonder Woman and Frozen flip-flops in toddler sizes for $2.00 a pair. I'm guessing that's still about a 60% markup…

I wish I could describe the eerie mood in that place. A fair number of people were roaming around and they all seemed to be muttering, "There must be something here I can use." Mostly, it was cheap clothing, largely unsorted or unlabelled as to size.

I got to chatting briefly with an older lady who had found one shoe that she liked. I helped her rummage through a table of other footwear, searching desperately for its mate. I guess it was worth the gamble to spent fifteen minutes searching because if she'd found it, she would have scored a decent pair for about three bucks. She stopped when I suggested to her that maybe there was no matching shoe.

There were also a lot of toys, not a one of which I'd heard of, many of which looked like they'd been sold, returned and had their boxes taped closed. Completely cleaned out were the departments selling anything you might want to "stock up" on like canned goods, pet food, cleaning supplies, shampoo, toothpaste, etc.

They did seem to have a lot of extra-large brassieres in day-glo colors for a buck apiece. If this had been before Halloween and I ever got any trick-or-treaters in my neighborhood, I would have bought a bunch of these and handed them out, maybe along with some of those Glenn Beck books.

All in all, it was an odd experience and I think I can explain why it interests me so much. I'm really bad at so many things — math, science, physical labor, interpretive dance, getting Sergio to pay me for my work on Groo, etc. Every so often, you read a news item like "Man Goes to Dentist for Cleaning, Winds Up Dying" and you think, "My God, I could have been just as good a dentist as that guy." I could have run Kmart into the ground and they wouldn't have had to pay me millions of dollars to do it. Just gimme fifty bucks and a couple of them bright orange brassieres.

In honor of the upcoming Thanksgiving holiday, let's find out about where cranberries come from…with the help of Cookie Monster and Gonger…

And here's a man who could have used the above video to teach him all about cranberries…

Before I write anything else, let me note that a little counter that I can see but you can't informs me this is post #25,999 on this blog.

Folks are asking me to comment on a piece Bill Maher wrote the other day in which, they say, he trashes Stan Lee. It's here it you want to read it. Personally, I think he's trashing everyone of a certain age who writes or even reads comic books. That would include me and it might even include you.

I think Maher's a pretty smart guy about certain topics. Even when I disagree with him about politics — which I do, at times — I usually think he's raised a good point that's worthy of discussion. I don't care much about what he has to say about health and nutrition and I guess we can add comic books to that list. If I did care, I might point out that just about everything he thinks about grown people fawning over Stan is true of grown men who used to hang around the Playboy Mansion and suck up to Hef. But I don't care so I won't point that out.

By the way: One gent who wrote to me asked me to also give my views of Maher's repeated insistence that if/when Donald Trump loses the 2020 election, he ain't leaving; that he'll just declare it "rigged" and "fake news" and he'll try to go on being president. This, to me, is based on a number of unwarranted assumptions including that Trump will even be on the ballot that year. But if he is and if he loses and if he then barricades himself in the Oval Office, then I think it would depend on what G.O.P. leaders do about it and what military leaders do about it. If they all back him then we wouldn't have a country. Which is why I can't believe they'd back him.

Because it wouldn't be a new day without an obit for someone I respect, let us sadly note the passing of William Goldman. I never knew Mr. Goldman but having read just about everything he ever published and heard him speak a few times, I'm pretty sure he would have liked all his obits to refer to him as NOVELIST William Goldman, and then to refer to his acclaimed screenplays as kind of a side product.

It was the screenplays that made him wealthy and famous of course but he seems to have been fonder of the novels. The Princess Bride was a wonderful movie but I liked it better when it was a book. In fact, I liked it best when it was specifically the book in this picture…

That was the first edition — the one with the red cover and the red type. If you ever come across a copy of it at a reasonable price, grab it. I'm not sure I can explain it but it really seemed extra-magical in that edition. After that, my favorite of his novels was Boys and Girls Together and of course, I loved his non-fiction book, Adventures in the Screen Trade. I often recommend the latter to anyone pursuing any sort of career in any sort of writing and also mention The Season, a book Goldman wrote in 1969 discussing all that was recently on Broadway.

A fine writer. Of novels and other things.