I have a New Concept for the Target Stores: Having salespeople who can actually sell you stuff…and this goes for Home Depot, as well. In the last month, I've had two instances, one at each chain, where I wanted to buy something, the store's computer system seemed to be doing everything possible to prevent that transaction from transacting and human beings were of little use to override it. I'll start with the Home Depot story…

I needed to buy something for my house. Never mind what it was. Call it Item A. Item A sells everywhere for $99.00 but a lot of stores were out of it and I needed one A.S.A.P. The Home Depot website told me that my nearest Home Depot had about a dozen available so I went there and was unable to find even one on their shelves. I asked a helpful store employee who told me they were out of stock. I told her their website said they had about a dozen. She looked it up online and, sure enough, that was what it said: 11 of them in stock.

She asked a senior member of the staff who looked it up and after intensive study told her and me, "Oh, yes. We have them but they're for online sales."

I asked if they could sell me one of those. She fiddled with the computer terminal for a while and told me, "We can. The in-store price is $149.00." I pointed to the first computer screen where it still said they were $99. She said, "That's the price if you order it on the web and then come in and pick it up here" and I think I'll switch to script format here and make this more readable…

ME: Do I have to pay online?

SHE: No. You can pay here. You just have to place the order on the web.

ME (waving my iPhone:) So if I go to your website and order one, you can sell it to me for fifty dollars less?

SHE: That's right. The only thing is you'll have to wait until your order drops.

ME: "Drops?"

SHE: Right. Because you're ordering it from the main company. You'll have to wait until they process your order and they forward it to us before we can fill it.

ME: And how long do we think that will take?

SHE: Two or three hours. If you'd like, we can phone or text you when the order comes in so you can come back and get it.

By now, a stockboy had brought one of Item A out from the stockroom and it was sitting on the counter not two feet from me. I pointed to it and said, "Because that's ever so much easier for everyone than you just selling this to me right now?"

SHE: I didn't arrange the system, sir. If you'd like to take it now, there may be a way I can sell it to you but the computer will say it's an in-store purchase and I'll have to charge you the in-store price of $149. If you order it online and come back to get it later, I'm sure I can let you have it for the online price of $99.

ME: You do know this is ridiculous. You have a customer here who wants to buy this item. You are in the business of selling items. I have the money to purchase this item…

A supervisor or manager or someone with more power was summoned and much discussion ensued. I think the whole thing took 45 minutes before the person with more power decided they probably wouldn't get in trouble if they sold me the online-only item in-store and they could give me a "courtesy discount" and let me have it for $99.

The argument at Target took about the same length of time. Amber and I had gone to buy supplies and we filled two shopping carts with one Item B, a couple of Item Cs, one each of Items D, E and F and so on. It was a lot of stuff and it took us quite a while to locate it all and fill our carts, but that's one of the appeals of a store like Target. You can stock up on everything you'll need for the next new months in one visit.

The checkout guy scanned it all, item by item, which took a fair amount of time since — I'll put this nicely — he wasn't the swiftest scanner in the retail business. And then about two-thirds of the way through the process, he noticed (as I had, only moments before he did) that the prices of each item were not appearing on his computer screen as he scanned them. Not until he punched in some sort of employee code did they began appearing.

I had inserted my credit card into their reader and once everything was packed into bags, it charged my card and he told me the price was $85 and change.

If I'd just kept my silly mouth shut and left, I would have saved hundreds of dollars and a lot of time but Dummy Me had to say, "Wait…that can't be right." He looked at the bags and the quantity of purchases therein and said, "Oh, of course not. The computer must be malfunctioning."

I said, "I think the problem is that you logged-in in the middle of scanning and it's only reporting the items you scanned after you logged-in." He said that couldn't possibly have been what happened but obviously it was and he knew it was. He started trying to figure out which items he'd scanned before the log-in so he could scan them anew. I insisted that if he was going to do that, he void the $85 charge to my card and start over. It took him a good five minutes to figure out how to do that but he did it. Then he started trying to figure out the most efficient way to unbag our items, scan them all again and rebag: Should he unbag everything at once or do one bag at a time?

By now, there was a long line of other shoppers, some with just one or two items, waiting behind us to pay. A Supervisor Lady came over to see what the problem was and I explained. Without a hint of apology — it was the computer's fault, not the clerk's and somehow not the store's — she told him to unbag everything and scan it all again.

Amber suggested this could be done by someone else. If the same guy had attempted it, we'd still be there. The Supervisor Lady agreed and called for two more employees to move the stuff we were trying to purchase to an adjoining, closed checkout line and take everything out of the bags. She herself would ring them up.

She made it as far as the fourth item, which was a package of paper towels.  I was watching the screen that said what the item was and how much it was. The paper towels came through as "Despicable Me" for what I think was probably the wrong price and I pointed this out.  The amount seemed to me more like the price for a Despicable Me DVD, which is not what we were buying.  The Supervisor Lady told me the computer was probably malfunctioning giving the wrong names for the items but the prices were surely correct.  That did not seem like a belief in which I could put a lot of faith.

The lady who was bagging for her said, "They did an offer on these paper towels that tied-in with the Despicable Me movie a few years ago.  That's why the name of the movie is listed for these paper towels."  Okay, that's possible but by now, I was untrusting of the store and its computer…and I wasn't buying the premise that the store and its employees were blameless if the computer was screwing up.  That seemed to be the prevailing attitude I was getting.

So a few screw-ups later, I told them to just forget the whole thing and Amber and I left and went to another store.  That meant more driving and filling our carts again but everything there was totaled correctly (I think) and it came to a bit over $400.

I called the main Target offices and got the person you're supposed to get when you have a complaint.  It was a gent who obviously had a bunch of prepared scripts in front of him and his job was to read me the generic apology that seemed most applicable to my problem and get rid of me.  It pretty much came down to "We deeply regret that this happened and we hope you'll consider shopping at Target again. Bye-bye!"

The next day, I phoned up and got the manager of the Target store where it all happened and she was very sincere and pained to hear it but it all came down to "We deeply regret that this happened and we hope you'll consider shopping at Target again. Bye-bye!"  Neither gave me any reason to believe that it wouldn't.   And of course, neither offered a discount or a gift card or reimbursement for my parking or anything to lure me back.

But the thing is: I will be back.  These stores have good prices and they're convenient and I don't have a lot of better options.  Everywhere is like that these days.

I know they don't screw up most of the time and that I just got unlucky and I'm sure I'll get unlucky again someday. My problem is not so much with the people or the computers as it is with the power structure between them.  At the Home Depot, it took 45 minutes for what should have been a one-minute transaction.  The computer essentially said, "No, no!  You can't sell this item to the customer who is standing there eager to pay our advertised purchase price for it!" And it took the 45 minutes to work around that digital decree.

At Target, the computer was scanning items but not registering their prices and it may not have been totaling what it did total correctly.  In both cases, the human beings in those stories were helpless to do anything about the problems.

I have a GPS in my car that works great…most of the time.  If I'm driving to my home from the south, it tells me the wrong route.  When I'm approaching my garage and all I have to do is to continue in the same direction for four blocks and I'm there, it's telling me to hang a right and make four turns to travel an extra fifteen blocks to get to my garage.  Something similar happens when I'm heading east on Franklin approaching the Magic Castle.  I can see the entrance right ahead of me and the GPS wants me to make a left on Sycamore and head up into the Hollywood Hills.

I need to treat the GPS as a guide and to occasionally override its commands.  Retailer clerks need to be able to say "This isn't right" and to override the machines when they're wrong.  In both cases, the store employees knew something was wrong.  They just didn't know how to work around that something wrong. Look — I love computers. You may be amazed to learn that I'm using one right now and there's a good chance that you are, too. But they're built by humans so they're subject to human error, which can only be corrected by human effort.

Also, the Target stores need to field customer complaints with something more substantial than "We're sorry we screwed up. Give us another try and maybe we won't." Imagine if someday you heard that from a hospital that removed the wrong kidney.

Ray Bradbury called his classic book about censorship Fahrenheit 451 because that's the temperature of burning paper. This new department on this blog is called Fahrenheit 212 because that's the temp when human blood comes to a full, rolling boil.  It will be about items in the news that test that statistic.

Today, if you wanna get mad just read this. It's about how the overwhelming majority of teachers in this country find it necessary to dig into their own wallets to pay for things like pens and paper and bulletin boards for their classrooms. Then think about (a) how poorly we pay teachers in the first place and (b) how much our governments (national, state, local, etc.) pay for things that aren't necessary or which enrich the rich. Got you up to an internal temp of 212? It should.

I was a guest on this evening's podcast from The San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog. It should replay in the space below…

We note the passing of the fine writer (and reporter) Thomas Wolfe. It's been a long time since I read any of his works but much in them has stayed with me. Jeffrey Toobin has some worthy thoughts about the man.

• Donald Trump now vowing to identify and fire all White House staffers who leak stories to the press, which by the way made up those leaking White House staffers who don't actually exist.

• Discourse in this country would be better if people would stop viewing any stupid Liberal who says something dumb as a spokesperson for all Liberals or any stupid Conservative who says something dumb as a spokesperson for all Conservatives.

Another high recommendation for those of you in the Los Angeles area! Every so often — but not often enough for me — my buddy Vince Waldron convenes a session of his funny, funny improv show, Totally Looped! Here's how Totally Looped works. Vince assembles a bunch of unusual video clips. Vince then assembles a bevy of funny people he knows — and believe me, Vince knows some very funny people. Takes one to know one, I guess…

Anyway, the funny people don't see the clips before the show or have any idea what they are. During the performance, they're called upon to dub in the voices, making it up on the spot. I've seen this a half-dozen times and always laughed that thing I call my head off…and that's about all you need to know except Where, When and Who.

"Where" is Dynasty Typewriter at The Hayworth Theater, which is located at 2511 Wilshire Boulevard in Westlake in downtown Los Angeles. "When" is Friday, May 25 at 8 PM. "Who" — the folks Vince will have looping the clips — amounts to Joe Liss (Curb Your Enthusiasm), Maribeth Monroe (Workaholics, The Good Place), Oscar Nunez (The Office), Rick Overton (I"m Dying Up Here), Angela V. Shelton (Frangela), Cole Stratton (Rifftrax) and Gary Anthony Williams (Boston Legal). Tickets and more info can be found here.

Sadly, I'll be outta town that night so go in my stead and encourage Vince to do more of these when I'm in town. Thank you.

A million people — give or take 999,993 — wrote to tell me about this article about a bar in New York with a wall that will interest any fan of quality cartooning. Note that the cartoon Sergio drew would make more sense if the photo hadn't cropped off the sword the guy on the left is holding.

I haven't posted a Seth Meyers "Closer Look" lately but they've all been pretty good. Here's tonight's…

Nell Scovell writes about the lack of female writers on David Letterman's TV shows. There's no real excuse for it but I think the imbalance was a smidgen better than most of these articles suggest. This particular one would make you think Letterman had Merrill Markoe, Nell Scovell and no one else of their gender. There were a few others. I know my wonderful friend Tracy Abbott was a writer on Dave's NBC show and if she isn't a woman, she did a great job fooling everyone, including the doctor who delivered her baby.

Like I said, no real excuse. One that Scovell's piece doesn't really get into but which I've heard is that some shows don't hire women because women don't submit sample material to them or agents don't submit their female clients. There's probably some truth to that but it's part of a Catch-22 situation: The show has never hired women so people think, "Well, there's no chance at a job there so why try?" And that's not an excuse because those who do the hiring oughta do whatever they can to break that roadblock. Even if you didn't create the obstacle, it's wrong to have it in place and it's foolish to not be open to a great new writer simply because she ain't a guy.

Also, these articles should note that Letterman is not the only offender in this area. Years ago at a Paley Center I attended, Bill Maher announced flatly that he would probably never have a woman writer on his show because he never found one who could write his kind of comedy well enough. I'm not sure he hasn't located one or two but his current staff seems to be all male. And the archetype late-night program, The Tonight Show, hasn't done too well in this area either…

Steve Allen never employed a woman writer and neither did Jack Paar. In fairness, it should be noted that those shows had pretty small writing staffs and fairly brief runs, and there just might not have have been anyone around if they had actively tried to find a lady joke writer. There weren't that many Sally Rogerses in those days.

But the number of women writers hired by Dave Letterman's hero Johnny Carson in thirty years on-air was zero. Not a one. Jay Leno hired the first ones and I'm not sure but I think the first-ever female writer in the long history of The Tonight Show was the aforementioned Tracy Abbott. I also seem to recall that after she was hired, someone at NBC Publicity asked her if she'd consider changing her first name…because, you know, what's the point of having a woman writer if people can't tell from the credits that she's a she?

Our dear friend Marvin Kaplan was one of the great character actors and cartoon voice artists.  He passed away in August 0f 2016 and I wish you all could have known this delightful gentleman.  He was very sweet, very funny and — most of all — very Marvin. He was also very active…the kind of actor who when no one's hiring him, he goes out and makes his own job. At age 89, he was working on a movie on which he was an actor, writer and producer.

It's called Lookin' Up and it stars Steve Guttenberg. It's about a bank teller (played by Guttenberg) who loses his job to an Automated Teller, snaps and decides it would be a good time to murder his wife, his mother-in-law and his daughter, all of whom are in serious need of murdering. He is unable to carry out his plans but then all three women die for other reasons and guess who gets accused.

Wanna see it? It's playing through Friday at the Laemmle NoHo Theatre out at 5240 Lankershim Blvd. in North Hollywood. It will play other dates in other theatres, here and in other cities but that's where you have to go this week to see lovely Marvin's final performance. I hope to get out there myself because nothing he did was without interest and it's always nice to have a little Marvin Kaplan in your life.

Here's a wise article about 17 Secrets of Magicians. I'll add one more: A lot of people think a trick is all about the secret of how it's done. That's true with some tricks but in most, the key thing is how well it's done. This is why magicians are often really impressed with other magicians. Frequently, you know how the trick is done but you're amazed with how well some guy does it. The real magic is not in the gimmick but in the split-second timing and the masterful manipulation that comes with years of practice. It's like in cooking. You might know the recipe but that doesn't mean you can make that item as well as someone who's been doing it for a long time.

We are 65 days from the start of Comic-Con International 2018 so this might be a good time for some of us to unpack from last year's con and begin packing for this one. And if you're going, I always refer you to the official convention website — where lots of helpful information has already been posted with more on the way. But I also refer you to the unofficial convention website, sdccblog.com, where folks who have zero to do with running the con post also-helpful info.

The San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog is compiled by enthusiastic con-goers, headed by a wonderful lady named Kerry Dixon. They can make your convention experience a lot easier with their tips, announcements, shared experiences, suggestions and insights. A lot of these are on the site itself and a lot of them are in their weekly video podcasts where they discuss what they've heard and what they think and every once in a while, they have a special guest on.

They're doing this week's video podcast tomorrow night at 6:30 PM Pacific Time, which due to some strange time-travel technology that I'll never understand is 9:30 PM in the east. Their special guest will be someone who attended the first San Diego Comic-Con in 1970 and has been to every one since and has moderated hundreds of panels and program items. That's right — it's me! I'll be discussing 48 years of schlepping down to S.D. each summer through worse and worse traffic to attend larger and larger conventions…and I'll explain why it's never not worth the hassle. In the meantime, Kerry and her crew will have wise counsel on how to lessen that hassle.

You can watch us live on The San Diego-Comic Con Unofficial Blog site and if you miss it, I'll either post the whole thing here or link you to it or something. All I know is I'll be watching too because I can't wait to hear what I'm going to say.

Since I know you all come to this site in search of great recipes, I have one for you…

As I've only mentioned eight million times here, I'm a big fan of the Classic Creamy Tomato Soup that the Souplantation chain serves during my birthday month of March and occasionally for one other week per year. This past March, it seemed a little less spectacular than the previous March and I decided the time had come for me to not be dependent on them for decent tomato soup. I'd already tried all the canned and boxed soups one finds in any market and found them lacking so I decided to find a recipe and make my own.

I've found one I like almost as much as the Souplantation version. I'm still experimenting with the precise spice components but it's already good enough that I don't care if Souplantation ever has theirs again. It's also pretty easy and, of course, I can make it any time I like. You can make it any time you like too if you can get your mitts on cans of San Marzano Peeled Tomatoes.

This is not hard to do. You can order them from Amazon. You can find them in lots of supermarkets and at least in my neck o' the woods, they have them at some Target stores.  Of note: I found my first cans in a gourmet-type shop where they were $7.50 a can.  Target sells the exact same thing for $3.69.

I've been using the Cento brand but I have no reason to believe theirs are any better than any other.  If your store only has Crushed Tomatoes, I believe they'd work just as well since the whole thing's going through a blender before it reaches your mouth.

To make two or three servings, you need one can of those, half a yellow onion, a tablespoon or two of butter and whatever spices you like.  I've also been experimenting with tossing in two crushed cloves of fresh garlic.  Oh — and it might be nice to have a stove, a pot to cook all this stuff in and the aforementioned blender. A food processor would also work.

Chop the onion up a bit and toss it in the pot. Throw in the garlic if you like. Sauté them if you like in the butter or a little olive oil but I've tried it without sautéing and it doesn't seem to make much difference.  Toss in whatever butter you didn't use for sautéing if you sautéd.  Empty in the 28 ounce can of tomatoes and break them up a little with the wooden (not metal) spoon you'll be using to stir your soup occasionally throughout the cooking process.  Add a little water to the can, swish it around to get all the remaining tomato remnants off the inside, then dump that water into the pot.

Add some salt and then turn on your burner and adjust until you have this mixture simmering.  Let it do that for 45 minutes, then run it through your blender.  Blend it a lot if you want it silky smooth.  Blend it a little if you want it a bit chunky.

The last step is to play around with additives.  You'll probably need more salt and I always add onion powder because I somehow have a big, big jar of it and that's a fine reason to add anything to whatever you're making.

The online recipes from which I stole the components of mine all demanded Cayenne Pepper and sometimes Red Pepper Flakes but I don't like spicy anything.  I get the feeling there is no one who posts recipes online who is humanly capable of not adding Cayenne Pepper to every preparation including French Vanilla Ice Cream and baby food.  I guess they must all have big, big jars of it to use up.

I've also tried adding — not all to the same batch — a dash of sugar, a little bit of cream, a half-cup of chicken stock and when I don't add fresh garlic, some garlic powder. My experiments continue but so far, I like it best with just the salt and some onion powder.

Once it's done, let it rest a while before consuming. Last time I did this, I ate half of it an hour later. I then refrigerated the rest and then microwaved it back to life twenty hours later. It was a little better the next day as some prepared foods tend to be.

When I first swooned for the soup at Souplantation, I asked them to show me the recipe, foolishly thinking I could make it at home. They'll show it to you if you ask but you can't copy it and you can't remember it because it has around thirty ingredients in it, some of which have long, chemical-sounding names like Something Benozate and Something Else Mononitrate. I really like that this has less than a half-dozen components…and really all it is is tomatoes with a few flavor add-ons. If you can get some cheese 'n' garlic croutons in it, that's a great combination.

In honor of what day it is, here's a piece that ran here about five years ago…

My mother died a year ago last Friday. Today, the doctor who took such wonderful care of her for more than the last third of her life phoned to see how I was doing. He was never my doctor. He was my mother's. But that's how strongly he felt a connection to her…and thus, to me.

The answer is that I am fine with it. Do I miss her? Sure…but I miss the woman she was when she could walk and see and do things without me or a caregiver assisting her. But by the time her heart stopped beating on 10/4/12, that person was long ago and far away. So for me the mourning period hasn't been one year; more like ten.

I felt so sorry for her the last decade of her life. It was all about surviving — taking pills, going to doctors' appointments, etc. — and not much else. She couldn't eat the foods she wanted to eat. Couldn't read a book. Couldn't walk without a walker…and then, not very far. She couldn't even get down the front steps of her home without someone to help and couldn't get down the rear steps to go out in her backyard even with assistance.

She hated it. She hated being so reliant on others. And when I had to run over there or haul her into the hospital at 4 AM, she hated what she felt she was doing to my life. Over and over, she talked about how there should be some simple, painless way she could choose to just be done with it. (My mother is not the best example in my life of the sheer humanity that would be involved in allowing the elderly and ill to make that decision. Before long here, I'll post the tale of some neighbors we had whose story makes the case even better.)

So yeah, I miss her. But the elation at seeing her out of pain drowns a lot of that out and so does this: Had she lived another few months, she would have been totally blind, as opposed to legally blind, and she would have lost the last crumbs of the independence she so dearly loved. And to be honest, I would have had to make some hard decisions about where and how it was best for her to live. Nothing I would have decided would have been to her liking…and I'm glad for me I didn't have to pick the least painful alternative.

Every so often, it hits me that she's gone. Most days around 5:30 or 6 in the afternoon, I get the odd sensation that I've forgotten to do something I was supposed to do. And then I remember: Any day I didn't see her earlier, I'd phone her around then to check in, say hello (and usually, something very silly) and just connect. That's what I'm remembering I haven't done yet.

The other day, I was talking about her with my dermatologist. I had an "atypical mole" removed and I was there so he could yank out a few stitches. He said, "It looks like you've been doing a good job cleaning the sutures." I said yes, "I've been washing the area off with Bactine."

He looked surprised. He said, "Bactine? Do they still make Bactine?"

Yes, they do. It's not always easy to find in the First Aid section but it's usually there, just to the left of the Neosporin. Bactine is what my mother used to spray or daub on any cut, scrape, abrasion or place on my body that hurt. It usually stopped hurting within moments and I'm not sure if it was the magic healing/cleansing powers of Bactine Pain Relieving Cleaning Spray or just the fact that my mother was fixing the boo-boo. It may well have been a combination.

My mother could heal anything with a bottle of Bactine. Anything! If I'd needed a heart transplant, she would have just sprayed on about a tenth of a bottle and — poof! — new heart! I'm sure of it.

I always keep a bottle of it in my medicine cabinet. It doesn't work quite as well when I spray it on. I just don't quite have her touch. But it does help, maybe because it reminds me of her. I hope something always does.