• Harlan Ellison may have hated the Internet but the Internet sure loves him.

Writer Harlan Ellison died in his sleep this morning at the age of 84. For what feels like forever but was probably more like ten years, we who knew him had been hearing that he was dying. It seemed impossible that he could go away but more believable when we also heard that he was not writing.

Harlan was a writer who made other writers proud to be writers. He celebrated and exalted the profession…and would have winced at the inevitable obits that are already describing him as "science-fiction writer Harlan Ellison" or, worse, "sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison." He was a writer who wrote many things, some of which belonged on the same shelves as unabashed science-fiction writers. One time I startled him when I, perhaps insensitively, told him I wished he'd write more that in no way belonged on those shelves — and his instant reaction made me think for a sec that I was in for a scolding and tirade from which I might never recover. To my relief, he sighed and said he wished that too.

I'm having real trouble writing this because I knew Harlan from 1969 on and was proud to be among his many, many friends…but in the last couple decades, I came to feel that the friendship was best served by maintaining distance. I admired the man greatly for most of what he did and most of what he stood for. I saw him perform many warm, human acts of kindness and benevolence. Most of the time when he mounted one of his many campaigns against injustice and/or insanity, I was with him all the way. But…

Well, having written and deleted and rewritten this paragraph ten times now, I'm thinking this is not the time or place to sort out my mixed feelings. That discussion would be as much about me as it would be about him and this is a time to remember him and to bond with others whose lives were changed by knowing this extraordinary man. I'm looking at that ominous "but…" I typed a half-hour ago and thinking, "Not now."

He was a great writer. He was, at times, a great human being…and if the "at times" seems like faint praise, think of all the people on this planet who never seize the opportunity to be great human beings at any time. I will miss him…but I guess I already have for about ten years. So have a lot of other folks even if some of them didn't know it 'til today.

I said here the other day that I would, like Charles Schulz, feel genuinely flattered if I ever created something that people wanted to wear. This brought way more e-mails than the comment deserved, including one from Brian Olson who wrote, "I'd gladly wear your Kirby bio around my neck on a chain ala Flavor Flav." Well, that's nice of you, Brian, but I have a new, longer Jack Kirby bio in the works which I expect will be out for Christmas of 2019. It's so big that if you wear it on a chain, you'll be walking like Groucho within a day and Quasimodo for the rest of your life.

Ed Waters and Jo Bristow were the first of several others who wrote to ask (basically), "Haven't there been t-shirts of Groo or The DNAgents?" Well, first off: I did not create Groo. I have worked on the feature since the second story but any time you see me credited as the creator of Groo the Wanderer, politely inform the appropriate person that Groo the Wanderer was created by Sergio Aragonés.

I think writers and artists look absolutely terrible when they are credited with someone else's work and they do nothing about it.  I do not buy the excuse — and yes, I have heard this from folks who have been wrongly credited with something they wish they could claim as their invention — that if you yourself didn't make the claim, you have no responsibility to correct it. To me, that's like if someone found Sergio's wallet, returned it to me and I said, "Well, since I didn't steal this, I can keep it!" And really, you have to nip misassignments of credit in their proverbial buds because everyone gets their info from what's posted online so faulty "facts" keep getting repeated.

But yes, there have been Groo t-shirts and we'll probably do more one of these days. Here's a quick story which for some odd reason amuses the heck outta me…

I was in Vegas one day and I ducked into a little convenience market to get a beverage. I took my selection up to the counter and the clerk there was wearing a Groo t-shirt. I said, "Oh! A Groo fan!"

He said, "Yes, I think it's the greatest comic book ever…and get this! I actually met the man who does the comic! I met Sergio Aragonés! He was so nice and he's so wonderful that it was one of the greatest moments of my life…to meet the man who does my favorite comic book!"

I said, "Have you ever met Mark Evanier, the fellow who works with Sergio on Groo?"

He said, "No, I haven't."

I extended my hand and said, "Well, here's your chance. I'm Mark Evanier!"

And he said, "Nice. That'll be $1.75 for the water!"

Back in the eighties, I did co-create (note the "co-" there) the comic book The DNAgents with the talented artist Will Meugniot. We thought what the industry needed was a super-hero team done by two guys whose surnames no one could pronounce. The book was successful enough for a time and I loved doing it and somewhere on my unofficial "to do someday" list is to find the right time and place to bring it back. I also need to make a real "to do someday" list.

There were, it's true, DNAgents t-shirts.  I was going to go photograph one but I have no idea where I stored mine, none of which ever fit me.  Fortunately, I have this photo which I took in 1985.  I would love to pretend I just happened to spot the lady somewhere proudly wearing the shirt to celebrate her favorite comic book…but the truth is that she was a friend named Angela Aames who put it on because I asked her to, just for this shot which we never got around to using in an ad.  This is just about the kinkiest thing I have ever asked a woman to do which did not involve a hockey mask and a mango.

Anyway, Will did the drawing and I did the logo, just in case you were wondering why the drawing is better than the logo.  This may be the high point of my career in terms of creating (co-creating, in this case) something that someone wears.  If so, well, it's better than nothing.

• The 2018 election will be The Most Important Election Ever until, of course, the 2020 election which will be The Most Important Election Ever until the 2022 election. For the rest of our lives, every major election will be The Most Important Election Ever.

Hey, you hippies and hipsters! If you're in or around Culver City this Saturday night, my favorite band is performing at Boulevard Music, which is over on Sepulveda near Culver Boulevard. That's right — it's Big Daddy, the group that fights the good fight to make every hit record recorded since 1963 sound like it was recorded in 1958. Hear the hits of today rearranged so they sound like the music your parents used to listen to when they made out. If you don't know these guys, you should!

You can hear some of their rollickin' rearrangments here, here and even here. You can get info 'n' tix to their show this Saturday here. Be there or be square!

Five Muppeteers explain how they operate their characters on Sesame Street…

My amigo of about half a century Tony Isabella and his too-good-for-him wife Barb were in town for one day, flown in for the premiere of the Ant-Man movie. They were on such a tight turnaround that the only way I could see them was to volunteer to pick them up at their hotel in Hollywood and drive them to their flight at LAX, stopping off for breakfast on the way. I wish I had a friend like me.

I chauffeured them to Pann's, an old-style coffee shop that seems to exist largely as a place to eat breakfast when you're going to or from Los Angeles International Airport. Tony, Barb and I talked about all sorts of things including the current TV show and comic book resurgence of Black Lightning, a hero born of the vast imagination of Mr. Isabella.

We also had an interesting discussion about how when we re-read comics we liked back in the seventies, we find that some of the work holds up well, some actually improves with age and some of it causes you to wonder, "What the heck did I like about this back then?" I shall expand on this topic one of these days in this space.

Before we left for the airport, I had to use the restroom. I was delighted to find that Pann's has now designated one just for me…and I know this because it has my initials on the door. I shall have to stop in and use it more often…

Dumped them off, then went to Fry's Electronics in El Segundo and couldn't find a single thing I wanted to buy. If you've ever been to a Fry's, you know that something is horribly, horribly wrong when you can't find nineteen things you want to buy. I'm just not sure if it's wrong with them or me but I suspect it has much to do with the ease of ordering from Amazon Prime.

I had no such problem at my next stop, which was at a Costco — and I think I'll stick in one of these which I haven't done lately…

What I think I love most about Costco is that moment as you and your cart head for checkout, you look at the mass quantities you've selected and you momentarily think, "This is great! I won't have to go shopping again until late next year…if then!" This is followed by the sad realization that some necessities of life are perishable so you cannot stock up with them at Costco and not have to stop in at a supermarket later in the week. Oh, why oh why can't Costco stock bread and vegetables that stay fresh forever?

Of course, I feasted on some yummy Costco dim sum, which is what I call the free samples available throughout the store. I watched as one young man sampled a little cupcake-wrapper full of "kettle" potato chips, enjoyed the hell out of them, then began going around and around one of those long aisles so he could pass the potato chip lady again, grabbing another free sample each go-round. She either wasn't paying attention, didn't care or thought that every ninth shopper who helped himself to chips was a clone of the same person.

Ahead of me in line at checkout was a lady with a cart that looked like this truly was the last time she would be shopping until late next year…if then. And she certainly had enough toilet paper to last a family of six until about 2027. She was giggling and expressing audible delight at the great prices as she transferred everything from the basket up onto the conveyor belt.

That was when the checker asked her for her Costco membership card — to which the woman replied, "Oh, I don't have one. Do I really need one?" Behind her in line, all of us thought, "Oh, we're going to be here for a while." Others farther back immediately shifted over to other lines but I was next and I decided I'd do better to tough it out. It got pretty tough.

The whole concept of membership was explained to this woman. She could not shop Costco without a Costco card, the cheapest of which runs $60. She should not even have been allowed into the store without one but somehow, she'd slipped past the person at the door at whom you proudly flash your card so you can feel momentarily special. Her reply? "I don't want to spend sixty dollars on a card. I'm spending hundreds of dollars here. You should just give me a card!"

A very patient sales person explained it doesn't work like that. He pointed to the rest of us with our carts bulging with cat food, paper towels, laundry detergent, Kirkland® Signature Organic 100% Juice Box Variety Pacs, beef jerky, snow tires and the obligatory rotisserie chickens and he said, "Everyone spends hundreds of dollars here and they all buy cards!" I held up mine as proof of what he said.

The lady was not budging from her position and it looked like the conversation would last longer than the metric ton of Ritz Crackers in my cart which I had opened and started eating, lest I starve while this brouhaha ensued. Fortunately, Costco employees are sharp and another one of them saw what was happening. She quickly opened the adjoining checkout counter so I and the rest of the line could take a detour around Ms. "Why should I have to buy a card?"

When I departed with my swag, I could still hear the woman protesting having to spring for a Costco membership in order to receive membership privileges at Costco. The unfairness of it all. I can be stubborn at times but I do usually recognize that there is something in this world called An Argument You're Not Going To Win. This is especially true when you're fighting with someone who hasn't the power to do what you think should be done. It's like demanding that your mailman do something to get your Uncle Morris on the new Forever Stamps.

Being able to spot systematically unwinnable arguments can save a lot of time and stress in your life. It's a good thing to remember, especially if you come upon someone who thinks the precise opposite of whatever it is you think about Donald Trump. As far as I know, that woman is still standing there at Checkout Counter 4 at that Costco, trying to get a guy with no power to change the rules of the corporation to see things her way. When I run out of 13.5 lb. sacks of Arm & Hammer Pure Baking Soda and have to go back there for twenty more, I will not be surprised to see her there.

Since I last appeared on Stu Shostak's show, he's gone from audio-only to a simulcast. You've long been able to listen to him on your computer and you can still do that…but you can also watch the proceedings on any Roku-enabled TV set and some other ways. This page will tell you how to watch or listen for free when the show "airs" at 4 PM Pacific Time, which is of course 7 PM back east.

But I'm on today, filling in for someone else. TV expert Wesley Hyatt, Stu and Yours Truly will be discussing the current vital topics in the world of television…like what's up with Roseanne's show? If it can be a hit without her on it, just imagine how successful Sean Hannity's show could be without Sean Hannity! And what about that Murphy Brown revival? And what's with all these mergers? Tune in and catch 2+ hours of us batting this stuff around.

• Some words get misused and mauled and stretched across so many different definitions that they becoming largely useless. "Elite" no longer has any meaning whatsoever except to denote a font on a real old typewriter.

The 2019 additions to the Hollywood Walk of Fame (the names in the sidewalk up there) have been announced. They are as follows…

For MOTION PICTURES: Alan Arkin, Kristen Bell, Daniel Craig, Robert De Niro, Guillermo del Toro, Anne Hathaway, Lupita Nyong'o, Tyler Perry, and Gena Rowlands.

For work in TELEVISION: Alvin and The Chipmunks, Candice Bergen, Guy Fieri, Terrence Howard, Stacy Keach, Sid and Marty Krofft, Lucy Liu, Mandy Moore, Dianne Wiest, and Julia Child (Posthumous).

In the category of RECORDING: Michael Bublé, Cypress Hill, The Lettermen, Faith Hill, Tommy Mottola, P!nk, Teddy Riley, Trio: Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris, and Jackie Wilson (Posthumous).

And in the field of LIVE THEATRE/LIVE PERFORMANCE: Idina Menzel, Cedric the Entertainer, Judith Light, and Paul Sorvino.

Nice to see my occasional employers Sid and Marty Krofft being honored…and until this morning, you could have won a lot of money betting with me that they didn't already have a star.

Also nice to see they're saluting the two greatest musical trios around today: The parlay of Dolly Parton, Linda Ronstadt and Emmylou Harris…and Alvin, Simon and Theodore. If you're a recording artist who has yet to be recognized by the committee, it must be wonderful to know that you don't have a star in the Hollywood Walk of Fame but that three singing chipmunks will.

There are no dates yet for the star dedication ceremonies. The way they do this is that the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce coordinates with the honoree not just about their availability but also about getting some other "names" to show up for the event. The honorees have two years to schedule the installation and unveiling…and usually it's done to correspond to when they have a big movie opening or a new TV series debuting. Sometimes though, the stars are too big to be bothered with it. After George Clooney was voted in, he let the two years expire so he has to wait until they vote him in again. That is, if he cares.

Dedicating the star in conjunction with some P.R. campaign for a project helps with the cost of it. Theoretically, the honoree's fans are supposed to somehow raise the money but I doubt that happens very much. Sometimes, the honoree pays for it but most of the time they get a network or studio to kick in for it. Currently, the price is $40,000.

Here's a brief interview with Jim Davis on the occasion of Garfield's 40th anniversary…

And yes, I've spent a fair amount of time at Paws HQ in Muncie and in the conference room you see in this video. Part of it is a museum of Garfield merchandise and when I'm there, I'm always struck by how well-made and well-designed it all is. As I mentioned here, when I worked for Hanna-Barbera, there were people there who didn't care if a Scooby Doo t-shirt was badly drawn or made out of shoddy materials by child labor getting paid a dime an hour someplace. Jim really is serious about quality control.

He has endured some criticism for there being so much merchandise, much of it from folks who never let the fact that Snoopy was selling life insurance influence their opinion of Peanuts. I just think it's a fact of life that if a character is popular, there's going to be merchandise…and what's more, the people who love the property want merchandise. Someone once asked Charles Schulz about Charlie Brown knapsacks and he said something like, "I'm genuinely flattered that I created something so beloved that people want to wear it." That's how I would feel about it if I ever created something that people wanted to wear.

We're just now hearing that the fine comic book/strip illustrator Bill Lignante passed away on February 27 this year, three weeks before what would have been his 93rd birthday. Bill worked on many projects in many fields but is probably best remembered for his association with Lee Falk's long-running character, The Phantom. Bill drew and occasionally wrote a long run of comic books of The Phantom across three different publishers, and was also a fill-in artist for the newspaper strip. He ghosted or assisted on other newspaper strips as well, including Ozark Ike, King of the Royal Mounted and Red Ryder.

Bill didn't do much in comic books besides The Phantom. For Gold Key, he did a few TV-based comics like The Girl From UNCLE and Secret Agent. In 1968, he briefly tried working for Marvel and penciled at least one issue of a Doctor Doom comic book they were planning to launch then. Alas, he did not get along with Stan Lee or with the Marvel method of doing comics. Bill departed and Marvel tried two other artists on the project before canceling plans for the comic.

Bill worked a lot as a layout artist and designer in animation, mostly at Hanna-Barbera. For them, he worked on dozens of shows including Jonny Quest, Scooby Doo, Dynomutt, Jabberjaw, Super Friends and Laff-a-Lympics. A lot of folks think that Alex Toth did all the designs on the super-hero shows that came out of H-B but though Alex did more of the designs of the main characters, Bill probably did a larger percentage of the overall design work on those programs.  On Super Friends, some characters like Superman and Aquaman usually looked more like the way Bill drew them than the way Alex drew them.  Bill also worked for Filmation on their Superman cartoons and for Ruby-Spears on Plastic Man and other series.

He spoke more often of two gigs he had outside of comics and animation. Bill was at times a courtroom sketch artist for ABC Television, covering (among others) the trials of Angela Davis, Charles Manson, Sirhan Sirhan, Daniel Ellsberg, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme, John DeLorean, William Calley and Rodney King. He would sit in a courtroom during the proceedings, sketching like mad.  Then he would have to bang out finished color drawings in time for the evening news coverage. It was a challenge he very much enjoyed.

He was also one of the main renderers of the famous celebrity caricatures that adorned the walls of The Palm restaurant in Beverly Hills, downtown Los Angeles and other cities.  He told me he loved that job because he was "paid well" — not so much in money but in free food and drink at The Palm.

I had a brief telephone and pen-pal relationship with Bill before meeting him at a couple of Comic-Con Internationals in San Diego and interviewing him once on a panel there.  He was a delightful man who managed to be both very proud of his work and very humble at the same time. I'm sad to hear of his passing and I wished I'd known it at the time.

Here's Laura McGann with the best article I've read about the incident where Sarah Huckabee Sanders was asked to leave a Virginia restaurant. Ezra Klein summarized it as follows: "The Trump administration's position is not that restaurants shouldn't discriminate against people whose life decisions they disagree with. It's that restaurants shouldn't discriminate against the Trump administration." I still don't know what I would have done in this situation but I'll tell you who's really wrong in this case: The Trump supporters who are phoning in death threats and posting hateful reviews of other, unaffiliated restaurants that have names similar to the one that kicked out Sarah.

Trump's current immigration policy isn't much more humane than the one he "fixed."

Fred Kaplan previews the upcoming Trump-Putin summit. It'll be a lot of kissing-up to Donald's role model and a display of, as Kaplan puts it, "Trump's naïve belief that personal relationships — specifically, his own charisma — can transcend national interests." This is, after all, a man who recently said, "If Vladimir Putin were sitting next to me at a table instead of one of the others and we were having dinner the other night in Canada, I could say, 'Would you do me a favor? Would you get out of Syria?' 'Would you do me a favor, would you get out of Ukraine? You shouldn't be there. Just come on.'"

Meanwhile, Kaplan doesn't think muoh of Trump's Space Force proposal, either.

Daniel Larison on how Trump keeps misrepresenting what happened with his North Korea summit, boasting about things in the agreement that aren't really in the agreement.

And getting back to the "border crisis" stuff, Matt Taibbi summarizes what he sees as hypocrisy on all sides. Supporters of Trump's policies keep trying to claim that he's doing nothing that Obama and other Democrats didn't do. That's not true but some of the folks opposing what's happening right now weren't all that uncomfy with at least the mentality behind it, pre-Trump.

• I'm fast developing a Zero Tolerance Policy for Zero Tolerance Policies.