Being a total cynic about Donald Trump means you have to watch a lot of position-shifting…you know, like how when Barack Obama played golf, people who didn't like him would say he was a lousy president because he spent too much time on the links but now they're fine with Trump spending a whole lot more. Or people who chanted "Lock her up!" because Hillary didn't take every possible security procedure don't mind one bit that Trump uses an unsecured cell phone, ignoring his aides' pleas to not do that. This shifting-of-supposed-principles is not new to politics but we've never seen it on quite this scale before.

We all remember Trump on the campaign trail accusing Ms. Clinton of "Pay for play" and now it's pretty clear that in his White House, there's no play without pay. China invested $500 million in a venture involving Trump-branded hotels and, just by an extraordinary coincidence, Trump decided to remove the ban on U.S. companies selling to ZTE, the failing Chinese telecom giant. No connection! And read Kevin Drum about another couple of deals, one of which could be our next big White House sex scandal. Would so-called "pro-life" people turn on a president if it turned out, he'd not only had an affair but arranged for the lady to have an abortion? A few of them would.

John Cleese has a message for all of his fans who live in Belgium. The rest of us can ignore this…

If you want to know what's happening with that Korea summit, the reporter to follow is Fred Kaplan. Here's his latest.

And I actually do have a TiVo. A few years ago, I checked out some of the DVRs that cable companies offer and didn't like any of them.

Late Wednesday night or early Thursday morning (depends how you look at it), mine will be recording Late Night with Seth Meyers because his first guest will be David Letterman. Beard and all.

The image of a can of Campbell's Cream of Mushroom Soup on this blog indicates a day of reduced activity on this blog.  I could probably have come up with a better indicator but I made up all these cute soup can graphics and I don't want them to go to waste.  When you see it, it means I'll be posting once a day (or so) instead of several times a day (or so) because I'm busy with some non-blogging activity.  You will be seeing my cute soup can graphics a lot here for the rest of this month.

I'll tell you why in June.  It's not medical, it's not important and it's not even a top-secret writing project. The same lack of online presence may apply to my responses to e-mail. I'll be around. Just not as often as I usually am.

Zack Hample doesn't have nearly enough baseballs. Make sure you stay for the end…

• Here's a frightening thought: What if Rudy Giuliani is actually a great lawyer and that's the best defense anyone could possibly offer for Donald Trump?

• I posted a couple of tweets that were critical of Donald Trump and now he's demanding that I pay twice as much to mail a letter.

Thrifty Drugstores used to be everywhere around Southern California.  Since all such chains sell pretty much the same Bayer Aspirin and calamine lotion at pretty much the same prices, most people go to the drugstore most convenient to them.  If you were the owner-operator of some chain, you'd probably be thinking, "Okay, a certain amount of people will come to us because we're in their neighborhood or because their business takes them past one of our stores and they find it easy to pop in and out of our parking lots.  What additional reason can we give them to patronize us instead of our competitors?"

The main thing (of course) is to sell people on the idea that you have the very lowest prices and the folks who ran Thrifty Drug and Discount Stores tried that with their name and in every bit of their advertising.  They also tried it with ice cream.  Every Thrifty store I ever went into as a kid had a counter selling very good ice cream cones for an unbelievable bargain.  I remember a nickel for a one-scoop cone and a dime for a two-scooper.

You did not go to a Thrifty ice cream counter for anything fancy.  Some stores offered milk shakes and sundaes but I do not recall ever seeing anyone get anything but a cone or a scoop or two in a cup.  They usually had around a dozen flavors — standard ones like vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, a sherbet or two, plus one odd one that whatever it was called, it was pink and filled with multi-colored sprinkles. I usually had the orange sherbet — or if I went for two, orange sherbet and vanilla with the vanilla on the bottom. The arrangement was important because it was better if the orange melted down to flavor the vanilla than if it worked the other way around.

It was very cheap ice cream and it was also very good ice cream. I mysteriously lost my sweet tooth in 2007 and have tasted no dessert-type edibles since then. Still, I can remember how good a Thrifty ice cream cone was. There was nothing wrong with a Baskin-Robbins ice cream cone but you had to make a special trip to get one of those and since they cost more, they seemed like more of an extravagance. Few parents hesitated to buy their kids a nickel cone when they stopped in at those drugstores to pick up some kaopectate and Band-Aid® brand band-aids.

It was expert marketing.  It gave you a reason to buy your medicines and small necessities at Thrifty instead of, say, your friendly neighborhood Sav-On Drug Store.  Some Sav-Ons had ice cream counters too but they weren't as good or as cheap.  Also, the cheap ice cream made people assume that everything at a Thrifty was a bargain.

I'm repeating a few of the things said in this newspaper article which our pal Vince Waldron called to my attention.  Long ago, the Thrifty drugstore empire was purchased by and merged into the Rite-Aid chain but most still had Thrifty ice cream counters…and now, the company that owns Von's Markets (and Safeway and Albertson's) has purchased the Thrifty ice cream business.

Does this mean the end of those counters?   I dunno and neither does the person who wrote the article.  It doesn't matter a lot to me since I don't eat ice cream and the Thrifty product is no longer so notably cheaper.  Still, it's nice to remember those great ice cream counters with their unique cylindrical scoops and the way you felt the cones were almost free.  I recall one time when I was probably around seven and my Aunt Dot was about to buy us two — one for her, one for me.  I had a dime in my pocket and before she could open her purse, I flipped the coin up onto the counter and said, "Don't worry.  I've got this."

Dave Portnoy, aka "Davey Pageviews," is El Presidente of Barstool Sports, a big website devoted to sports, though Dave seems more interested in great pizza. This works for me as I have zero interest in sports and more than a passing interest in great pizza. He and I agree that John's of Bleecker Street has the best pie in New York City.

Do not write to tell me of a better place since a hundred other people will and I probably will never get to any of them.

Dave does these pizza reviews — "One bite, everybody knows the rules" — and I find them very entertaining, as much for what happens to him on the streets of Manhattan (and elsewhere) as for what he thinks of the pie. In case you are not one of those people who knows the rules, here are some I've learned from watching Dave's videos…

1. Pizza should be scored on a scale of 0 to 10.
2. But you should never give anything a 10 because, as in figure skating, you're then closing yourself off to the possibility of something better coming along.
3. On the other hand, Dave was fine with giving a Zero to Blaze Pizza, in part because Lebron James is a big investor in it.  So what happens if someone comes out with pizza that's identical but it has a dead mouse on it?  How do you give that a worse rating than Zero?  And if you're going to go into negative numbers, why can't you give a great pizza a 10.3?
4. You take one bite and then score it and you can't change your score.  Unless you're Dave.  He takes multiple bites (the third is usually of the crust) and he sometimes scores a slice then amends that score.
5. He scores plain cheese with no toppings.  With this, I absolutely agree.  Great pizza should be great pizza before you add pepperoni or mushrooms or pineapple.
6. You can lower the rating of the slice if the guy who sells it to you is kind of a dick.  Of course.
7. Ideally, pizza should be rated when it's so hot it's burning your mouth a little.  But it's okay if you're busy with something to let it get cold first.
8. Ratings in whole numbers are "rookie scores" and are to be avoided.  A true pro might rate a slice as 6.9 or 7.1 but he would never give it a seven.
9. Pizza that is identified as "Neapolitan pizza" is mostly all the same but I don't understand Dave's designation of some pizza as "Neapolitan" that isn't billed as such, nor do I get why he doesn't think certain other slices are "Neapolitan."  He knows more about this stuff than I do.
10. And lastly: Every so often, it's nice to get a slice for your camera guy.

You get the feeling I've watched a lot of his videos?  I have…and I have a lot more to go.  I like this guy and I don't know why he doesn't have a series on truTV and Billy Eichner isn't selling him slices.

Here's Dave in Las Vegas last year at a Sports Illustrated press event, getting supermodels to try and rate pizza with him.  You can just tell by looking at some of the women in that magazine that they haven't had enough pizza lately. This may be the last one of his videos I post for a while since there are literally hundreds and I have to stop somewhere. If you enjoy them, you can check out this page.

A homeless guy gets arrested for allegedly trying to pass a counterfeit $10 bill. Three months later, authorities conclude the bill is real so they let him go. What is wrong here? I'm wondering the same thing that Kevin Drum is wondering.

We're back talking about school shootings again…or in some cases, not talking about them because "this is not the time for that." I continue to take my usual cynical attitude that nothing will change and it's been a long time since that was wrong.

Something like 80% of this country is open to or even very much in favor of changing gun laws to make background checks more effective and the bigger guns harder to get. Around 20% sees any moves in that direction as threats to their right/need to own the guns they feel they must have. The 20% is willing to mobilize against a politician who votes with the 80%. The 80% is not as determined to vote out anyone who votes with the 20%. And there we shall stay until the shootings get a whole lot worse in frequency and/or body count.

This is a series of articles I've written about writing, specifically about the problems faced by (a) the new writer who isn't selling enough work yet to make a living or (b) the older writer who isn't selling as much as they used to. To read other installments, click here.

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Portions of this column are cribbed from earlier articles I've posted here. So if you feel some déjà vu, that's the reason.

As I've probably mentioned more than once in past installments of this series, I'm not a big fan of a piece of advice that is often dispensed to wanna-be writers and actors and musicians and all sorts of folks who aspire to the careers that many covet. It's the old "Never give up, keep at it, don't let anyone discourage you and you'll eventually get your dream" advice. I don't think that's true.

When you hear that, you're almost certainly hearing it from someone who did achieve their dream. If people don't, they don't tell you that. So in a way, it's like someone who won the lottery telling you, "Hey, if I won, so can you! Spend every cent you can on lottery tickets." That may be good advice for two or three people per lottery but not for most. The odds of winning one recent PowerBall were one in 292 million and they rarely get much better than that.

The odds of you or anyone attaining a dream in the creative arts will, of course, depend a lot on what that dream is, how suited you are for the position and what kind of access you may be able to get to those who hire. Included in the "what that dream is" factor is the question of specificity. If you say "I want to be a working actor," you stand a better shot than if you say "I want to be a working actor who takes over playing James Bond, wins many Academy Awards and earns $20 million per movie."

And sometimes, the dream can be so narrow that nobody can see it happen. At the Baltimore Comic-Con last year, I had a brief conversation with a reader of this series who wants to write Marvel Comics…but not just any Marvel Comics. He wants to write all the Marvel Comics. This is approximately what he told me — and remember, this is a person who has never written even one comic book of any note. Nothing for Marvel, nothing for DC, nothing for Dark Horse or IDW or Boom or any of those…

"I want to do a run on Fantastic Four. I've read it for years and I have great ideas about how it should be done. This will be the definitive series, the one everyone will point to and say, 'That's how F.F. should be handled!' And then I'll do a run on Spider-Man and show everyone how that book should be done, a run on Thor, a run on The Avengers and so on…"

This is not going to happen. And even if it could happen, it's a pretty unhealthy way to approach a new career. This guy's goal should be to get to write one issue of one comic for anyone. If he can achieve that, he can aspire to writing a second something somewhere.

All writers, even the lousy ones, are real good at fantasizing. Often, we're too good at it. Dreams are great but making a dream into a reality requires dealing with that reality.

You can have an idea for the greatest movie ever and, hey, maybe it really is that. But it still has to be written and marketed and even if some big, legitimate producer says he wants to make it, you're still only about 15% of the way to the start of principal photography and light years from opening at the IMAX. I've known writers who didn't have their breakthrough screenplay finished but they'd done eight drafts of the Oscar acceptance speech to go with it.

There's nothing wrong with aiming high as long as you remember that high targets are harder to hit…and when you aim for them and miss, you're not aiming for the ones you might be able to hit.

A story. I've been fortunate to meet and work with a number of my Show Biz heroes — folks whose work I loved when I was a kid. It's great when you can become pals with someone like that but it had its downsides. There have been a few — just a few — I wish I'd gotten to know a little less. For one thing, it's hard to say no to those people.

One called me one day and said he has a friend who'd written a screenplay and would I please read it and give its author some advice? Pretty please? As I've probably mentioned here, I don't like doing this. The writers who ask you to do this aren't really asking for your advice. I mean, they'll be okay if you say, "I think the scene in the bar could stand to lose a page or so" but that's only if you say everything else is perfect and (big "and" here) you know someone they can send it to who'll quickly arrange a six-figure contract for it.

But I was stuck so the writer sent his script over. This was the guy's first attempt at writing a script and, I suspect, darn near his first attempt at writing anything in a professional arena. It arrived with one of those amateurish, paranoid attitudes: The script was registered with every agency in the world, I was expected to sign a confidentiality form with the assurance that he could sue and take my house away from me if I plagiarized him, etc. Don't you just love it when you agree to do someone a favor and they respond with threats?

When I opened the package, I glanced at the accompanying warnings and then noticed something about the script itself. It was sealed in plastic with a warning label that said something like, "By breaking this seal, you agree to abide by the terms of the enclosed form," etc. And the script itself was huge. It had to be over 300 pages. In which case, I would not be reading it so there was no point in breaking that seal.

I called the guy and asked him how long it was. I don't remember the precise number but let's say it was 325. It was around that.

I told him I had my first comment: Cut it by two-thirds. "There are very few people in this business who will read a script that's over around 120 pages," I said and I added, "I am not one of them."

He said, "I'm not cutting a word of it. Not now, not ever. I have a copy here of the screenplay to Apocalypse Now and it's 325 pages." (I'm not sure it is but that's what the man said.)

I said, "Maybe it is but this is not Apocalypse Now and you are not Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius."

He said, "What difference does that make? This script is just as important."

I said, "I doubt that…but the script you have of theirs is not a script they wrote to try and impress a producer into taking on the project. Everything was probably committed well before they wrote that draft, maybe before they wrote any draft. What you have there is a shooting script. You need to produce a selling script. Do you understand the difference?"

He said, "Sure…but a perfect shooting script can be a selling script. All a producer has to do is read this and he'll see it's perfect and ready to go. All my friends who've read it agree."

That was pretty much the end of that conversation. Oh, sure…I went on and told him that had never happened in the history of Hollywood and he told me he'd be the first and I told him his fantasy was predicated on producers reading the script at all and they wouldn't and he told me he'd be the first and you can see why this script was never made. It was probably also never read by anyone besides his closest friends. It certainly wasn't by me.

Could this guy have succeeded if he'd aimed lower? I dunno. I never read a word he wrote…but I'm also guessing that his main problem was attitude. It's hard enough finding a way to fit into Show Business the way it is. If you're going to expect them to remodel the industry so it works the way you want it to work, you're going to wait a long time.

A few nights ago at The Comedy Store in Hollywood, there was a memorial service for its owner and operator, Mitzi Shore. Her son Pauly — one of countless comedians who advanced his or her career in that building — prepared this memorial video about his mother…

• I don't think of mimes as performance artists. I think of them as guys who are just taking the Fifth Amendment a little too seriously.