It just dawned on me that last Saturday marked twelve years since I had Gastric Bypass Surgery and lost…well, it's hard to say how much weight I lost. I lost a large amount between the time I decided to have the surgery and 5/26/06 when I actually went under the knife or the laparoscopic tools or however you'd phrase it. That was because I began to change my eating habits including the abandonment of all carbonated beverages.

After the surgery, I ate almost nothing for a few weeks without the slightest craving or ill effects. The rate at which pounds evaporated slowed as I began eating again and various after-effects of the surgery settled down. At one point though, I realized I'd lost 72 pounds in 72 days — or maybe it was 75 pounds in 75 days. Something around that. In the morning, Carolyn would wake up, look over at me and ask, "Who are you and why are you in Mark Evanier's bed?"

My weight went up and down as is the norm with everyone…and I guess the best answer to the "How much did you lose?" question is just to say I'm now 90 pounds under my top weight and five or six waist sizes.

What I'm remembering today is something that was said to me before the surgery by the doctor who helped me through the process. I was in pretty good health back then. I was just too large to fit into the world in which I was trying to live. He said, "If you have this surgery now, you'll breeze through it because all your vital signs are great. If you have it in ten or twelve years, you'll be doing it to save your life and you'll have a much rougher time of it."

He was right. I didn't exactly "breeze" through it. It was more like a stiff wind with gusts up to 40 MPH. But it was a lot easier than if I'd waited until, say, now. That doctor no longer practices and doesn't want me mentioning his name but he reads this blog and I want him to know how grateful I am to him for all the wisdom and caring he bestowed on me. May you all have a doctor who's that good at what he does.

As I get older, I find myself more and more starting sentences with the phrase "As I get older," as in "As I get older, I find myself more and more starting sentences with the phrase "As I get older…"

One thing I hope I never do is something a friend of mine started doing around the time he hit 75. Almost every sentence that came out of his mouth contained a phrase like…

• "Well, speaking on behalf of us old farts…"
• "Well, you won't have me around much longer…"
• "We dinosaurs have to stick together…"

You can't avoid getting old but you don't have to surrender to it the minute simple math passes some arguable date that you think is old. For one thing, I believe that thinking you're old will age you. For another, anyone who cares about you is really sick of heaing how you'll be kicking the bucket any day now.

I'm 66 and I'm not ruling out the possibility, slim though it could be, that I have some good years ahead of me. Don't give up before you have to.

We continue our parade of soup cans today, expressing our usual amazement at the slippery stylings of the guy who says he's president but sure doesn't act like one.  I suppose you've heard about this one…

Matt Pottinger, who serves on the National Security Council, gave a "background briefing" to a large number of reporters.  It was about the state of U.S. relations with North Korea and the possibility of rescheduling the canceled peace talks.

A background briefing is where some government official gives info to members of the press and they can report it but are not supposed to release his or her name.  I'm not entirely certain where this practice started and the ethics of it might be arguable but it is certainly not new or rare.  In this case, Pottinger initiated this briefing, gave it from the podium of the White House briefing room and many audio recordings of it exist.

Reporters reported what was said without naming Pottinger. Trump's tweet on those stories read as follows…

The Failing @nytimes quotes "a senior White House official," who doesn't exist, as saying "even if the meeting were reinstated, holding it on June 12 would be impossible, given the lack of time and the amount of planning needed." WRONG AGAIN! Use real people, not phony sources.

Lately as I read this kind of thing, I imagine a guy who's been relentlessly cheating on his wife, maybe even with a porn star. He knows that the lady next door is about to tell his wife about it and all he can think to do is to go to his wife and say, "That neighbor lady! She's insane! She's a pathological liar! You can't believe a word she says!"

Because Trump knows there's a lot of very bad stuff coming…

I've set the TiVo to record John McCain: For Whom the Bell Tolls, a new HBO documentary that debuts on Memorial Day because…well, he almost got killed in the war.

Sounds like it'll be of great interest to those of us who've blown both hot and cold (and hot again and cold again and hot again…) about the very-senior senator from the great state of Arizona. I'm oddly encouraged by Matt Taibbi writing "I hope my editors boil in oil in the afterlife for asking me to review [it]."

If you don't watch the show, at least read Taibbi's take on it. He hits on a lot of the reasons why some of feel as we do about the guy. I think this nails it…

McCain's tragedy as a politician is that he is forever torn between his intense desire to pander to the bomb-humping, deregulating right and the fact that he so obviously thought most Republican voters – particularly the religious ones – were dipshits.

This schizophrenic brand of politics has left McCain marooned between two electorates that could never quite embrace him, and have since drifted apart at light speed.

Once upon a time, McCain had some friendly and honest chats with Jon Stewart on the old Daily Show. The last time he was on, Stewart seemed well aware it was the last time because McCain was about to begin seriously pursuing the Republican nomination for president. The host knew there'd be no more friendly chats because McCain was about to do what he felt he had to do to secure that nomination and it included pissing-off (and on) most of Stewart's demographic.

I remember Stewart pleading with McCain not to go over to "Crazy Base World" (that's the term Jon used) but that's where that candidacy took McCain — especially with his selection of a running mate. And look where it got him. I still don't think he would have been a good Chief Exec but of all the hawks who got us into the Iraq War, he still seems to be the only one who has the common decency to be ashamed of it.

As you've probably heard, hyphenate Harvey Weinstein (I believe he's a mogul-swine) turned himself in today and was charged with rape in the first degree, rape in the third degree, committing a criminal sexual act in the first degree, and doing a very bad imitation of a human being. He is currently developing a new movie — a jailbreak caper film to star himself, Bill Cosby and Jared from the Subway commercials. And featuring a score produced by Phil Spector.

Bail for Weinstein was set at one million dollars. When the amount was announced, Weinstein was heard to shriek, "Jesus Christ! A whole week's salary?"

Weinsten's attorney Benjamin Braffman said — and the rest of this is real, not me being silly — that his client would plead Not Guilty and that any sex acts which transpired were consensual…

"Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood," Braffman said. "And to the extent that there is bad behavior in that industry, that is not what this is about. Bad behavior is not on trial in this case. It's only if you intentionally committed a criminal act, and Mr. Weinstein vigorously denies that."

Weinstein's in that much trouble.

Aren't all criminal trials about someone's bad behavior? And no, Mr. Weinstein did not invent the casting couch in Hollywood; no more than O.J. Simpson invented the idea of stabbing people to death. "A lot other people did this and got away with it" is a pretty lame defense.

And what all this "consensual" stuff is about is that Weinstein not only pressured women into having sex with him, he also pressured some of them into pretending they wanted to. He will not have to do that with anyone where he'll be going.

• This morning, Harvey Weinstein demonstrated why he was such a successful Hollywood producer. Once again, he gave the public what they wanted to see.

I am still on a reduced schedule here, posting not as often as I usually do.  I'm also not looking at the news as much as I usually do, though my iPhone and iPad each screamed at me from a dozen different websites that the North Korea summit has been canceled.  We can debate whether it was ever truly on and if so, if there was a chance in Hades it would ever result in anything positive.

As much as I dislike Trump and think he's a mega-fraud, it would be nice to see him accomplish one thing he promised to try and convince people he was a moderate.  I guess one of the reasons some of his fans love him is that they know he'll never betray them by keeping any of those pledges.  Because that's just the way a Man of Integrity operates these days.

In other news: The great documentary on Rose Marie, Wait For Your Laugh, runs on MeTV, the TV network named for me, this Sunday evening.  I've already told you how good it is.

And while I've got your attention here, here's another Allan Sherman clip.  In it, he sings his biggest-ever hit…

• The North Korea summit is off. Can't wait to hear how it's Hillary's fault.

For some time here, I've been planning an article about why I am seriously unconvinced that Woody Allen molested a seven-year-old girl. I haven't gotten around to it, in part because I can't fully wrap my brain around why some people are so Absolutely, Positively, Without a Shadow of a Doubt Certain that it happened, and that you're as bad as any child molester if you question that he did that foul deed.

For the record, I think a lot of people have been wrongly convicted of murder — like, for example, those who have been freed from Death Row due to DNA testing — so I guess that makes me as bad as any murderer.

I think we ought to listen to any woman who claims to have been violated — or even to any male who claims to have been abused by someone with greater power. All should be heard and their charges should be investigated and, where warranted, prosecuted.

And if you've listened to Dylan Farrow insist that she was abused by Woody Allen, you should also listen to (read, actually) Moses Farrow insist that she was not but that he and his siblings were abused by their mother.

Here's a clip of Allan Sherman I'd never seen before singing a song from one of his albums. It's supposed to be from an Australian TV show in 1966 and the year seems about right given that Sherman was then going through a stage of not wanting the world to view him as a short, fat guy with glasses. He lost weight, let his hair grow and ditched the glasses plus his wife of many years.

Mr. Sherman had an amazing roller coaster of a life. In 1961, he was an oft-unemployed producer of TV game shows who couldn't pay the rent on his Bel-Air mansion. In 1962 with the release of his record, My Son, the Folk Singer, he was the hottest act in show business. By 1965, his stardom had cooled dramatically. His recording career was over by 1967 when his label dropped him. In 1969, a Broadway show he wrote closed after four performances. In 1973, a book he authored about the sexual revolution failed and later that year, he died at the age of 48. Hard to think of anyone else who went up so quickly and down so suddenly.

When he was on the rise, he was a wonderful, funny performer. Here he is around the time he was just into his runaway descent…

Kent Cross wrote to tell me…

A TiVo search for Wait for your Laugh doesn't find Sunday's showing because MeTV lists the show as Me-TV Special Presentation: Wait for your Laugh. I found that it is on at 11:00 PM here in San Diego it using the TiVo Guide option.

Thanks, Kent. Very helpful.

I forgot to mention that last Sunday afternoon, I went to see this lady sing…

If there's a better singer than Audra McDonald warbling these days, I'd like to know who that might be. She did one Sunday matinee down at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion accompanied by the LA Opera Orchestra and if they'd been selling tickets for future performances, every single person there might have bought a few on their way out.

The music was great, her voice was great and the in-between-the-showtunes banter was delightful. My favorite moment was when she sang "Summertime…and the Livin' is Easy" without the orchestra and without the microphone. She did this the last time I saw her perform but that was in a much smaller room. To hear that magnificent voice fill the Dorothy Chandler — that's the place they used to telecast the Oscars from — was as thrilling as anything I've ever seen or heard on a stage.

• If the Korean summit doesn't happen, Trump expects a Nobel Peace Prize anyway…for reuniting John Goodman with Roseanne.

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.