I go on Facebook about five times a day, increasingly with mixed feelings. I've sometimes made joyous connections (and reconnections) with people through that system and I've read informative articles and discussions. Fine. Now, here comes the mixed part…

I don't know if it's me getting older or our intraspecies dialogue growing coarser. Most likely, it's both…but I'm getting increasingly dismayed at vitriol, insults and outright anger. I sometimes even feel that people are being too nasty to Donald Trump, a man I think is seriously harming this country and its citizens. He is also, I believe, responsible for a large chunk of this coarseness…or maybe just for making it more socially acceptable to let it out.

Please note that I am not trying to deny anyone's Right to Free Speech here — but mine includes the right to say I think someone's being rude or hostile or even — and this is often the case — that they're being so hysterical as to kill all possibilities of actual, valuable discussion. Free speech certainly includes my right to absent myself from forums that I think have just devolved into screaming matches…or at least have ceased to be constructive in any way. At some point, many of them just become about some Wanna-Be Alpha Male (even if it's a female) trying to "win" by shouting down or driving away everyone else.

I understand and can rationalize a certain amount of the hysteria with regard to politics, where there may be genuine, reasonable fears that a given person or action will get us all killed, destroy our planet and/or health insurance, raise our taxes, etc. I am stunned though at the sheer hatred I see out there for certain movies, celebrities, athletes, musicians…even comic books. Sometimes, I see what feels like actual loathing towards someone who has committed no wrong greater than simply being annoying on television and I think, "You know, you can make Billy Eichner totally disappear from your world by changing the channel."

In most cases, I leap to the assumption — perhaps unfairly but often accurately, I think — that the person who is livid at some TV host or comic book artist is actually just mad about his or her own life. There is no anger in this world like self-anger but often, angry people are in deep denial that that's what they're railing against.

In online forums, I find myself in two kinds of discussions and I've come to think of them as Real Discussions and Cockfights. The "Cockfights" label works on two levels because those arguments are about as hysterical and meaningful as two roosters trying to peck each other's eyes out, and also because those battles have a lot to do with virtual genital size.

In a Real Discussion, the participants genuinely want to hear what each other has to say. I've been in or witnessed some great Real Discussions since I got my first modem — discussions that have informed me, changed my mind about things, entertained me, given me new ways to look at things…

In a Cockfight, all that matters is who wins — or more accurately, who can claim victory, if only to himself. There are some people who, when they enter a Real Discussion, simply have to turn it into a Cockfight. That's when I know it's time to get out because that thread ain't going anywhere.

It won't have any more substance to it than…well, a Cockfight. I would never venture anywhere near the real kind, the kind involving actual birds. I'm going to try harder to avoid the kind I sometimes encounter on Facebook. Like the real kind, they always end with both sides bloodied…and even the winner doesn't have a lot of feathers left.

I've written much here about the Los Angeles-based improv troupe The Black Version and gone to see them many a time. Here's a piece about them and about the state of improv in L.A., especially involving actors of color.

The Black Version is performing tonight at the Brava Theater in San Francisco as part of the SF Sketchfest series. Then they're performing Monday, January 29 at the Groundlings Theater in L.A. and on Saturday, April 14 at the Largo at the Coronet, also in my fair city. I have seen acres of improvisational comedy in my life and it doesn't get any better than these folks.

• Right now, there are people in countries Trump called shitholes who are thinking, "Yeah, but our government is still functioning!"

Last week, Amber and I went to dinner with our two friends: Chanteuse extraordinaire Shelly Goldstein and her husband, filmmaker Brendan Foley. We went to Benihana, which is one of Amber's favorite places to dine and mine, as well.

I was reminded of a time many years ago when Sergio Aragonés and I were guests at a comic convention in Texas and we went to dinner at a Benihana with our friend and editor, Archie Goodwin. Sergio, who cooks almost as well as he cartoons, kept asking questions of our chef and our chef kept showing him how this was done and how that was done…and by the end of the cooking process, Sergio was preparing the food under rather minimal supervision from the chef. I wasn't sure which one of them to tip so, of course, I tipped neither.

Amber loves Benihana Fried Rice and that evening along with her entree, she consumed two bowls of it, plus I got her one to go. I suspect she's just hanging around me for the fried rice. Here we see a Benihana chef teaching someone who's not quite as fast a learner as Sergio how to make it…

I need to make some technical adjustments to this blog and I'll be making them in the next few days. There might come a brief time when it will be unavailable or where a few recent messages may temporarily disappear.

Also: As some of you may know, I've maintained the website and blog of my good pal Steve Gerber since he passed away in 2008. I will continue to maintain the blog indefinitely even though no one has posted on it in something like sixteen months. Things over there require more severe maintenance and so at some point, it may be offline for a few weeks. Fear not. It shall return.

Real Time with Bill Maher returns tonight with a new show.  Too bad there's nothing in the news for Maher to talk about.

Last Week Tonight with John Oliver doesn't return until a month from now — on February 18. I wish HBO would arrange it so those two guys weren't both off the air at the same time.

Imagine a few years ago, I'd come to you with the following prediction/offer…

Within in a year after the next president is inaugurated, it'll be revealed that he cheated on his wife with a porn star — and probably other women, as well. What's more, during the presidential campaign, he paid a six-figure amount to the porn star to keep quiet about it. But as this comes out, his supporters really won't care much about it. A lot of them thought Bill Clinton was unfit for office just because of Monica but they'll be fine with their boy doing what he did and there'll be no real outrage over it.

How much money could I have won from you if we'd bet? You could have cleaned me out if you'd told me that and I don't even get that they're ignoring it because they don't believe it. It's more like "We're in power. That's all that matters." So forget about that and let's look at some links…

• Fred Kaplan discusses America's place in the world under Trump. As Kaplan notes, other countries question whether America will honor its commitments. Why do they do this? Well, maybe it's because the president keeps saying he's not sure if he will honor our commitments.
• William Saletan discusses the "shithole" matter and the squabble over did he say it or didn't he say it? I'm amazed and maybe amused about Lindsey Graham who, when asked if Trump had used the "s" word, refused to say because "I want to make sure that I can keep talking to the president." Do we think that Trump would stop talking to someone who said, "I agree with the president's account"?
• Here's Ezra Klein on where we stand at this moment in the battle to get a continuing resolution that will fund the government and keep the lights on and the doors open. This story may be obsolete by the time I finish this post and put the whole thing up. Oh, if only we could have a continuing resolution of our continuing resolutions.
• Jonathan Chait notes how little Trump's inaugural address — you know; the one that a bazillion people filled the National Mall to hear — has to do with anything he's done since.
• As Joe Conason notes, polls say that by pretty lopsided margins, Americans view Robert Mueller and his investigation as fair. And they'll continue to feel that way until he tells them something they don't want to believe.
• And lastly for now: Doug Bandow reminds us that Republicans once preached Fiscal Responsibility and said how awful it was that our nation was in debt. Yeah, remember that time? It was any time a Democrat was in the White House.

I have nothing to say about Trump's medical report except that isn't it amazing that we don't even trust it when someone tells us what this guy weighs?

• I'm watching a funding debate on CSPAN…or as we now call it, The Gorilla Channel.

One thing that's made me happy lately is the debut the other night of the new CW series, Black Lightning. The first episode sits on my TiVo waiting for me to have time to get to it but I'm just happy it's there, happy its debut got good reviews and happy its debut got great ratings. What's my stake in this thing? Nothing…I'm just happy for my friend of over fifty years, Tony Isabella. And I've only met him once or twice but I'm happy for Trevor VonEeden, too.

Back in 1977, the two of them launched a new comic for DC.  It only lasted eleven issues back then but it was a great eleven issues and the concept was too good to go away.  I know that whenever Tony and I were together at a convention, everyone would ask him, "When's Black Lightning coming back?"  No one was expecting it to be a weekly TV series but there it is, complete with on-screen creator credits for Tony and Trevor.  When I think of all the great comic book creators who never got their names on their work in other media, I'm especially happy that that doesn't happen anymore.  Congrats, guys.

Here's Mac King doing his rope trick. Every magician in the world has done a version of this trick and they all wish they could do it as well as Mac King and with all the embellishments he's added to it. If you're ever in Vegas, you will not be gambling if you go see the show Mac does, Tuesdays through Saturdays at Harrah's at 1 PM and 3 PM in the afternoon. He's been there half past forever and there's a reason.

Two tips: The show officially costs $36.95 per seat. Do not pay this. If you wander around Harrah's — especially if you wander to the Total Rewards booth — you can almost always find a discount coupon that will get you in for $14.98 a person and that includes a free drink. ("Total Rewards" is the club card for Harrah's, Caesars, Bally's and all the other casinos owned by the same company. It's free to get one and it'll save you a few bucks here and there.)

Second tip: While you're at Harrah's, it's free to drop by The Piano Bar and catch a little of Pete "Big Elvis" Vallee, who's been playing Vegas even longer than Mac King. Big Elvis now performs Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Friday from 2 PM to 6 PM — or so it says on the Harrah's website. If you're there on the days both Mac and Pete are performing, you can probably time your visit to see both of 'em.

Anyway, here's Mac performing his rope trick as he wears one of my old suits…

As an add-on to my article about sleep: Sometimes, you're also up until All Hours dealing with matters of credit card fraud.  For the third time in three months, someone is charging purchases I didn't make to one of my cards.  When it happens, I know right away because all my cards are set to send me a text message when any amount is charged to them.

So just as I was getting into bed, I got a flurry of such messages and immediately called the credit card company.  They're reversing the charges, canceling the card and sending me a new one.  This has been happening a lot lately and I'll bet not just to me.

Makes me wonder.  Some (not all) of the text messages noted that the issuing company's computers suspected the charges weren't Kosher.  Those texts showed me the suspicious charge and asked me to press 1 if the purchase was legit, 2 if it was not.  Why can't a card be set to do this for every purchase and then the purchase doesn't go through until the legal holder of the card responds?  Wouldn't it drastically reduce bogus charges if the bogus chargers knew using my card number would be useless if I didn't respond to a text?

I'm trying to think of reasons that credit cards don't work this way and I haven't come up with one yet.  This may because it's the middle of the night and sectors of my brain think I'm already asleep.  I'll see if I can think of any in the morning.  In the meantime, the thief has by now probably learned that the card number is no longer valid so he's giving up on it and going on to another one that is also not his. Could be yours.

Jeff Ross is, I think, one of the best comedians working today. Somehow though, I only recently got around to watching his latest special for Comedy Central, which had been languishing on my TiVo for some months now. It's called Jeff Ross Roasts the Border and I wish everyone who weighs in on the various debates about immigration would watch it before they harden their positions.

Ross went to a Tex-Mex border town to perform and he also shot conversations with folks on both sides of that border.  It's a funny show but it also gives you a chance to "meet" some of the people who'll be most affected by what this country decides to do about letting people come in and maybe stay in.  Give it a look…which you can do one of two ways.  There's an online version you can watch right here and it also reruns this weekend.  It's on Comedy Central at Midnight, between Friday night and Saturday morning on my cable channel.  Your source of TV may vary.

That's Jeff Ross Roasts the Border.  Well worth your viewing time.  The televised version is in a 75-minute slot and the online version runs 50 minutes.  I'm not sure if the difference is just because of fewer commercials or what.

Have you been watching Seth Meyers? His "A Closer Look" segments are some of the smartest political humor I've ever seen on television. Here's the one that's on tonight's episode…

A question I get now 'n' then on this blog is "When do you sleep?" For some odd reason, folks look at the time stamps on my posts and get intrigued by this matter. One wrote recently to ask, "Is the time I see on the posting the time you yourself wrote it and posted it or is it posted via some sort of timer?"

Answer: Via the software here, I can post via timer — I could specify that this post would go up tomorrow morning at 5:27 AM — but I rarely have any reason to use that function. Sometimes, I write something and post it as soon as I finish it — as I will do with this post. Sometimes, I write all or most of a post and then manually put it up hours or even days later — as I will not do with this post.

I generally sleep five hours a night…sometimes, six. I do not seem to able to do much more than six at a time. Every once in a while, my body demands an extra hour in the form of a nap later but that is a fairly recent development and a sign of getting older. I don't think I ever took a nap between ages three and fifty except when ill.

Until I was around thirty, I often had trouble falling asleep. I'd lay in bed for hours — or for what seemed like hours — wide-awake, trying to calm my mind, which felt like a race car, revved-up to the max, waiting for the "GO" signal. It was especially bad when I was traveling and sleeping in a bed not my own. I finally figured out I was doing two things wrong, one being that I was underestimating the impact of caffeine on my system.

I've never liked coffee but I was getting plenty in Cokes and Pepsis. And being someone who occasionally has trouble with "the local water" in another city, I was consuming two or three times as many colas when I traveled. Once I realized how they were affecting me, I made a rule: I'd still drink them during the day but after 6 PM, I'd only have 7-Up or ginger ale. That helped my sleeping a lot and it also helped when in 2006, I gave up carbonated drinks completely. It has been a good thing for me that just about everywhere you got, you can now get bottled water fairly easily.

The other thing I learned to do was to find good stopping points in my writing. Before, I'd reach a point in a script where I had no friggin' idea what should happen next and if I gave up for the night and went to bed, I'd lay there trying to solve the problem. Now, I try to knock off and head for the mattress before I get to one of those points…or I stay up until I put a good dent in it. I also adhere more to two pieces of advice I often give other writers but occasionally forget to follow myself…

One is: If you get stuck on page 22, go back to page 19 and try it again from there.

And the other is: Have a little confidence in yourself. Maybe you can't solve it now when you're weary and functioning on about a third of whatever fraction of a brain you use at your best. But it'll be easy if you get some sleep and get the other two-thirds back.

This brings us to the question of what hours I sleep. Let me tell you about a writer I knew many years ago named Artie…

Artie was a good friend and a good writer but I thought he agonized way too much over his writing. Working hard does not have to mean working tense and he had this idea that he couldn't write anything good unless he was in Crisis Mode. Each script had to become a life-or-death struggle with various demons waiting to destroy him if it was not good. And of course, there was no such thing as getting it done even one day before the deadline.

The last few days before something was due, he'd labor all night, guzzling coffee and various stimulants to keep him at the keyboard. When he absolutely had to sleep, he'd set an alarm for two hours, then it was back to rolling that boulder up the mountainside. I don't think he ever got any of those scripts in on time but he'd usually come close enough…and then once one was in, he'd crash. For days. At some point, his life became largely disconnected with this thing called a clock. If you asked him what hours he slept, the answer was — truthfully — "Whenever I have to."

He did not sleep 10 PM to 6 AM or Midnight to 8 AM or any regular pattern at all. Monday, he'd sleep 3 PM to 7 PM, then Midnight to 4 AM, then on Tuesday from 11 AM to 5 PM, then he'd be up all evening and all night, crashing at 6 AM. He'd sleep all day Wednesday, then barely on Thursday. If I needed to phone him, I had no idea of a proper time to call. He was as likely to answer at 3 AM as he was at 3 PM. Once, I did call at 3 PM and woke him up. Barely conscious, he asked me what time it was and I told him it was three. He asked, because he honestly didn't have a clue, "AM or PM?"

For what I could observe, this was not good for his health. It certainly wasn't good for his career. He couldn't reach editors because he was asleep when they were in their offices. He'd make doctor appointments and then not show up for them because he was sound asleep. He could buy his groceries at all-night markets but for days, he needed to go into his bank to clear up a problem and could never somehow synchronize with the hours the bank was open. One morning, I got up at 8 AM and found an e-mail from him that read…

Please do me a favor. I have a 10 AM appointment with [name of producer we both worked for] but I've been up all night and I'm not going to make it. I can't find an e-mail for his office so please phone them when they're open and tell them I won't be in.

The e-mail to me was time-stamped 6:45 AM. That was, I guess, when he was going to bed. He ended up losing that job and then the best one he could get was one that required him to go into an office every day and write there from roughly 10 AM to 6 PM. He couldn't do it. He physically couldn't discipline his sleeping so he could be there with a full night's sleep at 10 in the ayem. After that, he had trouble getting work and his health got bad and the rest of the story is pretty unpleasant.

What he got into is a potential hazard for freelancers who can set their own hours and there have been times when I find myself slipping into it. It's not bad for a few days now and then but eventually it creates problems — problems with my health, problems with my career and just plain problems functioning as a human being. I need to be awake more or less when the world around me is awake and when the people in my life are awake.

I'm fortunate I don't need eight hours a night. Sometime between 1 AM and 3 AM, I start to feel drowsy enough that I can sleep and with luck, I also feel like I'm in enough control of what I'm writing that I can leave it for a while and not keep writing it in my head. That's when I'm off to bed, which means I get up between 6 AM and 9 AM, which is close enough to the normal world to not cause any problems for me or anyone else.

Still, I occasionally slide into an odd sleeping pattern for some period. It often happens when I'm writing for someone in another time zone, especially on another continent. One night, I was pounding away on a script for a producer in France and around 3:00 AM, I decided to call it a day. Before I could, I got an e-mail from said producer, wanting to know if I'd be available for a very important conference call in two hours — 2 PM their time but 5 AM here.

That's sometimes how it starts. Other times, I get so engrossed in work that I suddenly find, much to my surprise, that it's 4:30 AM or even sunrise. That can throw my life off for days and that's when I do my darnedest to get back to some normality. I keep thinking to myself over and over, "I have to get off Artie Time, I have to get off Artie Time…"