One time in the seventies, I was at his house with, as I recall, the writer Mike Friedrich. Mike (if indeed it was Mike) and I were talking. Harlan was in his office pounding away on some essay — for what, I do not recall. He was wearing only a towel, which was his usual writing uniform in those days. And this doesn't matter much in the era of Microsoft Word but he was working on a manual typewriter — as he did all his life — and producing the cleanest, typo-free copy I ever saw. It was a skill somehow linked to his ability as a writer to choose words with great precision.

So like I said, Mike and I were sitting there talking and we suddenly heard Harlan whoop and shout to no one in particular, "I have just written the greatest fuckin' sentence I have ever written!" He bolted from his chair and began running madly around his house and even out into the street, losing the towel in the process. Like a nine-year-old on a Frosted Flakes high, he was sprinting and dancing and working off a rush of joyous, supercharged energy.

Mike and I looked at each other and one of us said, "That must be some sentence."

So while Harlan danced nude on his front porch, we rushed into his office for a peek at the greatest fuckin' sentence Harlan Ellison had ever written.

You may be crushed to hear that I cannot recall what it was; only that Mike and I agreed it wasn't notably superior to the fuckin' sentence before it or the fuckin' sentence before that or the fuckin' sentence before that or any of the many fuckin' sentences already on that page. It was a fine fuckin' sentence, a good fuckin' sentence, a fuckin' sentence worthy of the name Ellison…

…but not a particularly outstanding fuckin' sentence. An hour or so later when Harlan had completed the piece and he made us both read it, I don't think either Mike or I could even pick out which one it was and I'll lay you even money that Harlan couldn't either. By then, he might even have preferred several other fuckin' sentences in the article.

Next July, I will have been a professional writer for fifty years — or as Harlan would say, fifty fuckin' years. I have written a great many sentences. I wrote two just now for this paragraph. Make that three. I may even have written more sentences than my late friend, Harlan Ellison. Not better ones, certainly, but more.

I have definitely never written one that caused me to run out into the street for a naked victory dance…and since I am presently in a hotel room near the San Diego Convention Center, that is probably a very good thing. Not one sentence has made me do that, although that last one wasn't bad. That day at Harlan's, I think I got a bit of insight as to one thing that made his writing so exceptional.

As a longtime reader of everything he wrote that I could get my paws on, I guess I already knew he wrote with such passion, throwing himself into every noun, verb, adjective and adverb. I just hadn't seen and heard it before. I marveled at that passion, envied it at times and felt reassured that when I felt it on a page of his, it was really and truly there.

When used for good, that passion could be an awesome force and it was one thing…probably the main thing that made his books stand out for me from the work of so many others on the same shelves.

I have one more story I want to post here about Harlan. I'll try and get to it in the next week or so. You may already have guessed what it'll be about.

It's been a while since I shared a video of one of the funniest men I ever saw perform. Here's the late, great George Carl…

Matthew Yglesias explains Trump's lame "walk back" of his Helsinki performance. No one believes he didn't intend to say what he said but it didn't play well for Republicans in Congress so he had to backtrack a bit to make them comfy in their blind support of him.

I'm going to be busy (understandably, I trust) today and probably for the next few days with Comic-Con prep and travel and such. If you are attending, I urge you to download and peruse the PDF of the Comic-Con Quick Guide. Just about everything you need to know is in there.

The guide also announces the dates for the 2019 Comic-Con International. It'll be July 18-21 with a Preview Night on July 17. Same location. Same dealers in the same booths. Higher prices. And your top three choices of hotel rooms are already sold out.

A friend of mine made an interesting comment the other day: "The people who complain Comic-Con is not about comics are all people who don't go to the Eisner Awards." That's true. Even though some movie and TV people are present, the Eisners are only about comic books. Of course, I have friends who complain that the Eisner Awards are never about the right comic books but that's the nature of award shows.

If you're cruising off-site events at Comic-Con, remember my favorite. The Ralphs Market at 1st Avenue and G Street is practically an official annex of the convention — and it's open 24 hours if you're suddenly in desperate need of Pringles at 4 AM.

And lastly for now: I'm told that the Dick's Last Resort restaurant in the Gaslamp District has closed, which has me gravely concerned. Where will the really obnoxious, unfunny people who think they're funny get work? Where will masochists who like a side of abuse with their meals eat? I worry about such things.

Nothing much to say but I direct your attention to an article by San Diego journalist Peter Rowe — and I'll warn you it contains a number of quotes from me. It's kind of an overview of how difficult Comic-Con is to put on every year. The more I learn about how it operates, the more impressed I am with the skill and wisdom of those who make it happen.

The stand-up comedian Guy Marks (1923-1987) had one hit record — this lilting tune in the style of an old radio dance band remote. Long after anyone knew of dance band remotes, Marks was still singing this in his act and occasionally on TV shows. Here he is in a 1978 appearance on the British series, Top of the Pops. The word nobody can make out in the lyric is "shipfitter" although some of the back-up singers in this rendition seem to think it's "shoplifter"…

• Putin promising to help uncover Russian hacking efforts is like O.J. vowing to find the real killers.

• Great joint press conference from Helsinki. I especially liked the part where Trump talked while Putin drank a glass of water.

Steve Bacher writes…

I appreciate your comments on Sacha Baron Cohen's new and old shows and why you don't enjoy them. But I'm curious to know if you feel the same way about segments on The Daily Show or Full Frontal where correspondents are sent to interview a semi-public figure to show them in a bad light, or to question, say, Trump supporters on the street to let them hang themselves on their own words.

Don't some of the same things apply? I'm sure some footage gets discarded on the editing floor for these as well.

Btw, I always hated America's Funniest Home Videos because they were almost all predicated on the notion that it's funny to see someone in pain. Fictional comic characters in pain can certainly be greatly funny (cf. Laurel and Hardy). Real pain inflicted on real people, whether by accident or otherwise, I don't find amusing in the least…even if self-inflicted.

I haven't seen what you describe on Full Frontal…but then I rarely watch that program. Dozens of episodes were accumulating on my TiVo and sitting there unwatched.  I finally dumped them, canceled my Season Pass and decided to give the show another chance one of these days. That day hasn't come yet.

Regarding The Daily Show, my understanding is that they have a pretty firm policy of not misrepresenting themselves, whereas Sacha Baron Cohen has a pretty firm policy of not telling interviewees who he is or what the interview is for. This is apparently why they've been springing a lot of traps on Big Names in the months before the show's debut tonight. Everyone's going to be on the watch for Cohen now. If you want an interview with a prominent right-wing figure, you may have to produce several forms of I.D. to prove you're not Sacha Baron Cohen.

Of course, The Daily Show is edited and if I went before their cameras and came off as a boob on the finished show, I'm sure I'd claim I was victimized by selective editing.  I'd probably be accusing them of being Fake Fake News.  I just don't get the sense that they're as sneaky or as interested in making their subjects look like jackasses.

I rarely laugh at depictions of anyone in pain unless they're so over-the-top outrageous that the joke is not the pain but the exaggeration of it.  Ralph Kramden hitting his thumb with a hammer comes to mind and many scenes in cartoons but not much more…not even a lot of what my favorite comedians, Laurel and Hardy, did.  And yes, I know that may seem odd but that's just not something that amuses me.

Getting back to The Daily Show by the way, I'm currently working my way through a book that is much, much better than I was expecting — The Daily Show (The Book): An Oral History as Told by Jon Stewart, the Correspondents, Staff and Guests. It's much longer and more detailed than you'd think, giving many Rashomon accounts of the same incident and delving deeply into process.  There's also history that was not reported at the time like an incident where Mssr. Stewart and Colbert briefly resigned.  I thought I knew a lot about this show but clearly I did not know as much as I thought.

I bought the book on Kindle and now and then when I find myself waiting somewhere, I open the old iPhone and read a few pages.  That's the only reason I haven't finished it yet.  It's a perfect book for that.  I also like that while it quotes Stewart extensively, it doesn't do so exclusively.  Everyone else on the staff gets their say and often, they are not in perfect alignment with the man who was then their Boss.  It is to Mr. Stewart's credit that he allowed that to happen…and they even went out and got quotes from folks like John McCain, Tucker Carlson and Jim Cramer.

The amazing interview Stewart did with Cramer is well-covered.  In case you don't remember it: Stewart pilloried the CNBC Financial Advisor-Host for giving out lousy advice to his watchers.  In the press and on other shows, Cramer complained that Stewart had misquoted him and mistreated him.  Then Cramer went on The Daily Show, Stewart hauled out video clips and Cramer wound up saying, "Yeah, you were right."

One reason it's taking me so long to get through the book is that I keep stopping to do research.  I stopped to find and watch again the Stewart-Cramer interview, which is still on the Comedy Central website and easily found with four seconds of Googling.  Fascinating, fascinating stuff…and it made me miss that Daily Show even more than I already did.  You can order a copy of the book at this link. I suggest you do.

YouTube star Yousef Erakat was about to give a free concert last night at the Greek Theatre in Griffith Park in Los Angeles.  That's a great outdoor venue in which to enjoy a show but not when someone phones in a bomb threat and the concert has to be canceled and the place evacuated.  I saw the above item on Twitter and had four immediate thoughts…

1. Five thousand dollars?  If I was the guy in charge, I would have figured it was a hoax just based on that.  Why not ask for ten?  Or twenty?  The penalty if you get caught is pretty much the same so why settle for such a low amount?  That is, if you were serious about the bombs and the money.
2. Then again, if I were the guy in charge I probably would have said, "I'm pretty confident there are no bombs but I also can't take the chance," and I would have done the same thing.
3. But what would I do if this happened a lot?  If the same idiot called in before every concert, when would I have stopped canceling the shows and evacuating the theater?  Would it matter if it seemed to be a different idiot calling?  I'm glad I don't have that job.
4. And what the heck are "pope bombs?"  Are they bombs that are infallible?  Bombs with little red shoes on them?  Bombs that wash the feet of peasants while sending mixed signals on contraception?  That couldn't possibly be a typo for "pipe bombs," could it?

The weather forecast for Comic-Con International in San Diego calls for partly cloudy skies, high temperatures around 80° and low temperatures around 70°. Matter of fact, that's roughly the forecast for around the next month in San Diego and when you come back to that town for next year's Comic-Con, you will have partly cloudy skies, high temperatures around 80° and low temperatures around 70°. It doesn't change much there.

The other day, I phoned a restaurant near the convention to try and make a lunch reservation during the con. I like talking business with publishers over lunch because they pay for the meal and then when the project falls through or they don't hire me, I can think, "Well, at least I got a free lunch out of it."

A man at the restaurant said, "I'm sorry but we don't take reservations during the convention." I guessed the reason but I asked why anyway. He said, "Because during Comic-Con, we don't have to. We never have an empty table for longer than it takes to clean it for the next party."

Right there's a lot of the reason I don't think Comic-Con will ever move unless the parties who negotiate on behalf of the city are really, really stupid. What we bring to the local economy there would not have anywhere near the same impact on Los Angeles, Anaheim or Las Vegas, which are the only real alternatives.

By the way: It'll be 110° next week in Las Vegas. If they moved Comic-Con there, the cosplayers dressed like Iron Man would melt away like the witch in The Wizard of Oz.

Getting ready for my panels. The third seat onstage for Quick Draw! will be filled by the brilliant cartoonist Lalo Alcaraz. If you're familiar with his work, you're as excited about that as I am. And we have some surprise folks joining us for our Cartoon Voices panels. More tomorrow.

Showtime tonight is debuting a new series starring famed punkster/prankster Sacha Baron Cohen.  In it, he goes about in a variety of guises interviewing people — some of them very famous — and getting them to say embarrassing things. I will not be watching and not just because I don't subscribe to Showtime.

I don't like pranks. I don't like them so much that I don't even like them when they expose and exploit people I think are very bad human beings. Some folks, I know, find Mr. Baron hilarious but I sat through Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan and laughed less than I do during root canals. Here's some of what I wrote back then…

I laughed a few times…but only a few and not with much vigor. Why? Hard to say. It wasn't because of the frequent lapses into low comedy. I usually love low comedy. What I don't usually love is the kind of Candid Camera humor where we're expected to laugh at the humiliation of people who are being ambushed and filmed for our alleged amusement. It always feels like a rigged game to me…like the situations that are arranged make it impossible for the victims not to look at least a little foolish. And if by some miracle they don't, that footage gets tossed.

This may sound like a leap in topics but it's not: There's a trend in magic on TV that I don't much like. It's Street Magic where the magician goes out to some public place with a video crew and they stop people who look like decent sports and the performer does tricks for them. It's really great for the magician because if he fails, they can just throw that video away. I could go out, give someone a totally free choice to pick a card and then — employing no magic techniques whatsoever, say "It's the nine of spades!" And if we do this enough times, we'll get footage of me being right which we can broadcast and make me look like I did an impossible feat.

I'm not going to watch Mr. Cohen's new show because to begin with, I think most pranking is dickish, even without putting a camera on it. I also think being able to control the editing gives the producers the opportunity to be even more dickish…and on a "prank" show, they figure the more dickish, the better. And I really, really don't want to sit there and feel someone has been grossly unfair to Dick Cheney or Sarah Palin.

Like the banner above says, I stand with the Animation Performers who are currently authorizing a strike vote.  The issue is the compensation for voice work on animated programs made for subscription-based streaming platforms such as Amazon, Netflix and Hulu.  You can read all about this here.

The strike vote will pass, probably by a wide margin.  I see just about all the important voice actors endorsing this stance and that's a solid indicator.  These are the people the producers most want to hire, after all.  As a general rule, the higher the vote to strike, the greater the chance there will not be a strike or it will be a brief one.  The negotiators, who thus far have resisted making a satisfactory offer, will be more inclined to make one if the Strike Authorization Vote is 95% than if it's 80%.

If you are a voice actor who isn't among those who work a lot (or at all), you might think, "Oh boy!  If the in-demand guys all go out on strike, it'll clear the way for me to get a lot of work."  It never seems to play out that way.  Yeah, you might get a job or two for the rotten money that is now paid but you'll be typing yourself as a breed apart from the kind of performer you want to be.  And at the same time, you'll be undermining the drive to establish the kind of pay scales you want to earn.  If you want to be one of the top voice performers, you have to act like one.

Here is a partial list of Animation Performers (as well as producers and directors and other folks like me) who support the current effort.  I'm proud my name is on there.  I always like seeing it surrounded by the names of people with talent and integrity.  It fools people into thinking I have some of either.

• I wonder how many people who rushed to vote for Donald Trump would have had second thoughts if they'd known then how much Russia wanted him to win.

As I prep for my 49th Comic-Con International — even though they weren't called that until 1995 — I'm being asked, "Why do you go to these things?" Good question and here's a really good answer: I have a great time at them.

I do not go to make money. A lot of my friends do and there's not a thing wrong with that but I just choose not to even try. I do meet with publishers and producers, and writing work sometimes results but that's like a nice, unintended bonus. It's definitely not the reason I go. I also do not run around buying things to add to my collection.

Someone asked me the other day, "Do you go to be a celebrity?" and my reaction was, "If I do, I'm not doing a very good job of it." I suppose that when I first started attending conventions, I got a certain sense of faux importance out of being asked to sign something but I outgrew that long ago. As you get older, you realize that once you divest yourself of certain childish motives, you simply make healthier life choices.

No, I just go because from the moment I arrive to the moment I leave, I enjoy what I'm doing. I enjoy hosting the panels. I enjoy seeing friends. I enjoy talking endlessly about comics and related topics. I even enjoy the sheer energy in the building and yes, that includes how crowded it is. A friend of mine who spent a large part of his life visiting Disneyland would say, "I have a great time being among so many people who are having a great time." That's a lot of why I go to Comic-Con. Your mileage, as we used to say back when people cared about the cost of operating a motor vehicle, may vary.

I'm not sure if I told this story here before but about ten years ago — maybe a bit more — my lovely friend Carolyn invited two longtime friends of hers to "do" Comic-Con with us. These were friends who had only the most microscopic interest in comic books, comic strips, cosplayers, anime, etc. She said, "I want them to experience this" and my reaction was, "Okay but why?" She assured me they'd love it and she was right.

The last day of their trip, I asked them why and her friend Sue said, "It was so exciting to be among so many people who'd made something."

That comment made me look at Comic-Con in a slightly different way…and when I looked, what I saw was creativity everywhere. No matter where you turned, someone had drawn a picture, written a book, designed a costume, made a display, painted a painting. Carolyn and her friends had sat through a panel which consisted of my pal Steve Rude doing a painting and explaining as he did, how he approached his work and why he was doing each little thing he was doing on his canvas. I don't think Carolyn or her pals were about to race out and try to do what Steve does but they were mesmerized to be invited to be so up close and personal with his creative process.

I'm sure there are those reading this who have no idea what the hell I'm talking about and have their own reasons for attending Comic-Con, some as simple as "I want to complete my run of Deadpool" or "I want to see all the women dressed as Red Sonja." Nothing wrong with any of that. If at a given moment there are 100,000 people in the building, there might be 100,000 different reasons for being there…which is why we all have to seek out our own conventions, tailored specifically for us, within that big one staged for everyone.

Four days from now, I'm going to go there and start having the con I want to have. If you're there, I hope you have the one you want to have…and I love the fact that it won't be anything like mine.