Let's march back to November 9, 1982 and David Letterman's old NBC show. His guest is the great Hal Roach, producer of some of the finest comedy films of the previous century including the best Laurel & Hardy and Our Gang movies. Do not believe the story he tells about the house his crew accidentally destroyed or the tale of how he hired Stan Laurel.

About a year after this, a friend of mine and I went to visit Mr. Roach and his memory was a bit better and we spent a few glorious hours discussing his work. We also spent some time discussing the way the world and Hollywood had changed. In particular, he wanted to know if "these young actresses today" were really that easy to get into bed. I recall having no good way to answer that so I said, "Probably a lot easier than they were in your day but not as easy as most men would like." He also told me a few good dirty jokes. I liked him a lot and he enjoyed our chat and told me to "come back anytime." I still cannot explain why I never went back. Anyway, here he is in '82 with Dave…

First off, that guy in the purple car has been taken into custody. I'm sure you were all concerned about that.

Secondly, we've been having a small software glitch here lately. As some of you have noted, the versions of some posts that were initially put up here were not the final versions. Until I corrected them, you had incomplete earlier drafts instead of the final versions. I think I've fixed this but if it happens again, we'll all know I haven't.

Thirdly, posting will be light tomorrow due to a day full of appointments and deadlines.

Saturday night, a bunch of us went to see Puppet Up!, the show I recommended here and later here. Judging by the number of folks who came up to me and thanked me for recommending it on my blog, I should be getting a commission. It was again a wonderful entertainment and everyone enjoyed it a lot, including (based on his reactions) Eddie Izzard, who was sitting not far from us. I will try to let you know when more performances are scheduled but they may catch me off-guard. The show doesn't advertise. They just announce on their website they're doing it again and all the tickets disappear in a flash. That should tell you how terrific it is.

Lastly for now, I mentioned Joe Pyne in a post earlier here. Craig Robin informs me that the Smithsonian magazine just ran a big article which you can read here. One possible quibble: It says Pyne was lured to Los Angeles by KTLA-TV and became a top-rated talk show host here. I don't remember him ever being on KTLA. I remember him on KTTV and on radio station KLAC.

Reader-of-this-site Sue Weitzman wrote to ask me how I would compare Pyne to folks today like Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh. I think it's pretty much the same act, though Pyne spent less time with political types and more time with people who claimed to have ridden in flying saucers, He also liked anyone he could denounce as a filthy hippie. Perhaps as a result, I don't recall any moment when it felt like Pyne was influencing elections or popular opinion or anything that actually changed government. And I think he was more entertaining than anyone today in the sense that, say, professional wrestling or guests on The Jerry Springer Show throwing punches are entertaining.

I'll see you tomorrow but probably not for long.

I got hooked watching this police chase through Orange County that's not on local TV but is streaming on the 'net. A guy in a purple car — reportedly stolen — is leading officers from various Orange County departments all through Orange County. It's been going on for over an hour and the suspect has been doing a pretty good job of eluding the cops.

The reporters, groping for things to say, keep monitoring the police band and telling us little things, including hints about what the pursuing officers have planned, plus they're wondering how the pursuee in the purple car is able to keep changing where he's going, just when the officers are setting up spike strips, traffic blocks and other tactics. Uh, maybe he's listening to their coverage or talking to someone who is?

A sexually-inappropriate squirrel…

My father died when I was 39. In those 39 years, we had very few arguments, very few fights of any sort. He was not the kind of person to yell and in those thirty-nine years, he probably yelled at me less than a dozen times…and not at all in the last fifteen or so.

I've probably said this before here about him but there were times when he almost seemed to wish I gave him more reasons to raise his voice or discipline me. I was just one of those kids who never got into trouble, never did anything really wrong, at least on purpose. He'd go to work and hear other men talking about how they had to smack their kids or ground them or otherwise punish a son in dire need of learning to behave. There was so little of that with me that he sometimes felt he wasn't being a proper father.

This is not to say he never got mad. He hated his job and worked in a bureaucracy that was sometimes very harsh or disrespectful of its employees so there was plenty there to holler about. He just couldn't find many reasons to get mad at me. Also, he had Joe Pyne.

Joe Pyne was a commentator-host on radio and TV at the time, and in some ways a role model for most folks who now do political-type radio shows. More than a decade ago on this site, I wrote…

Joe Pyne inspired a couple of generations of TV and especially radio personalities who learned that getting people pissed off was good for the ratings. I never met Mr. Pyne but the guy who used to cut my hair used to cut his, and you tend to trust your barber. He said that Pyne was, indeed, an angry, one-legged man who was always yelling about everything, but that the guy clearly laid it on thick and deliberately for his broadcasts. Like a lot of folks in radio, he found an act that worked for him and he worked that act for all it was worth.

Pyne was big on TV and radio in Los Angeles in the sixties, and I could never understand why some people went on his show or called in. He was generally Conservative but his overwhelming concern seemed to be contempt for his guests, no matter what they said. To the extent he had a political philosophy, it seemed to be mostly anti-freeloader. He was pro-police, pro-military, pro-gun ownership, etc., but he was also pro-union, at least when the union was actually representing the interests of working men and women. I don't think anything enraged him more than the concept of welfare…and not just for the poor or minorities. Unlike a lot of people who loathe welfare, he was also against various government subsidy programs that he thought functioned as welfare for the wealthy, and quite willing to rip even Republican leaders who were responsible for that kind of thing.

For a time when my father was dropping me off at school on his way to work, we used to listen to Pyne on the car radio. Even though I was pretty Conservative in those days, I thought Pyne was a jerk on many fronts, seeing Commies where they weren't any and presuming that if you were under the age of 21, you were almost certainly a worthless, dope-smoking hippie. It amused me that he was always railing against people (especially young people) who allegedly shunned honest work…this, while he was making a small fortune via what struck me as very easy, dishonest work. Pyne then did his A.M. radio show from a little studio in his bedroom at home. Often, he was lying in bed in his jammies, yammering insults and telling people to go out and get a real job. My father did not see the irony or amusement. Pyne simply enraged him…but he listened, and I guess that was the point.

I never understood why my father, who had stress enough at work, insisted each morning on turning on the Pyne program. Back then, there were plenty of channels on the radio that played music…lovely, non-controversial, non-inflammatory music. I think the appeal was that every so often, some caller would sneak in and give Pyne a real argument and point out the asininity of one of his positions — but that didn't happen often. In any debate, the host has a secret weapon which I suspect all hosts of such shows use at times. Many clearly use it a lot.

You can win any argument if you have a magic button that mutes your opponent, especially if you know how to use it so it doesn't sound like you cut him off. It's not hard to make him appear speechless because he couldn't find the words to reply to you. Pyne would sometimes delight in insulting a caller and hanging up on him but he'd also sometimes do the trick where he'd quietly cut the guy off, ask him to offer some proof of what he said or name an example…and then after a bit of silence, he'd say, "See? You can't come up with any, you jerk!"

My father really hated Joe Pyne. He didn't hate a lot. He hated Richard Nixon and most of the Republican leaders of that day, and he hated Joe Pyne. That was about it.

Oh — and Art Linkletter. Mr. Linkletter was a TV host who once on some show said something my father interpreted as "Really, all that matters in life is making as much money as you can, and there's nothing immoral about anything you do that makes you money, and if other people get hurt, that's too damn bad for them, and you shouldn't care about them because if they're not rich themselves, they aren't really human beings. They're more like dogs and, gosh, who wouldn't kill a dog if you could make money doing it?"

I am exaggerating…and my father didn't think Linkletter actually said those words or anything close but my father heard him say something — perhaps many somethings — that suggested that was the Linkletter credo in life. My father's awful job was that he dealt with tax evaders for the Internal Revenue Service so he encountered people who actually felt like that. He didn't make many jokes but one time, we were watching an adaptation of Mr. Dickens' A Christmas Carol and near the beginning when Scrooge was saying that the poor should just all die and decrease the surplus population, my father pointed at the screen and said, "I think I had a case on that guy."

What he hated about his job was that no one was ever glad to see him. If my father called on you, you were in trouble. You owed the government money, you had to pay and you had to work out a payment schedule. He was more-or-less Good Cop, warning you that if you didn't settle with him, he would have to turn the matter over to Bad Cop — another division which would seize your property and/or threaten jail time. Once in a while, he had to do the seizing himself.

Some people would cry and sob and tell him — and he often knew this to be absolutely true — that they were destitute, unable to even feed themselves or their families. And now, here was this man telling them that they had to come up with a couple thousand dollars for Uncle Sam. If you are a person of decency and compassion, as my father was, how would you like to be in his position a couple times a week?

In other instances, he dealt with people of fabulous wealth who could easily have bought one less Picasso that week and more than paid off their delinquent taxes, but who were like Leona Helmsley, the hotel heiress who supposedly told one of her many housekeepers, "We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes." As often as not, those people would wind up paying very little or even zero. They all seemed to have a friend high in the government — sometimes, it was Richard Nixon or Ronald Reagan themselves. They'd call the friend, the friend would call someone also high up in government and the tax bill would disappear or be settled for nickels. Once, my father was forced to write a written apology to say he'd made a mistake to think the person who actually owed millions owed anything.

Like I said: How would you like to be in that position a couple times a week? But having grown up in the Great Depression and having no particular marketable skills, he was afraid to look for anything else.

Some of our best father/son time came when he drove me to school in the morning, dropping me off and then heading off to work.

In his last years, and especially when he was hospitalized, we talked with absolute honesty…and it was father and son but it was also two adults. He was amazed and proud that his son had built a career doing something he loved…and in my particular profession. My father would have loved to have been a writer but probably didn't have the skill and he definitely didn't have the temperament to deal with two downsides. One is that a writer faces occasional (sometimes, frequent) rejection. As a young man, he'd tried out for one writing job and the turndown left him devastated and unwilling to try again.

The other downside is that for most writers, income can be highly unpredictable — how much you'll make and when they'll actually pay it to you. The upside of working for the Internal Revenue Service was that there was a guaranteed check every Friday for X dollars.

X wasn't a lot but it paid all the bills with a few bucks left over. He told me many times how he never understood how I could sleep at night, not knowing how much money — if any — I'd receive next week.

Not long before he had that last heart attack, he began telling me over and over how much he loved dropping me off at school — at high school and especially at U.C.L.A. He loved our conversations which often were about why Joe Pyne was full of shit this particular morning, as opposed to why he was full of shit on previous mornings. Then he loved watching me get out of the car with my notebook and scurry off to theoretically get a little bit smarter and more likely to make something of myself.

One time, he said, "I always loved that moment and I'd enjoy it as long as I could before my ulcer kicked in." Because once I was out of the car, he was no longer driving me to school. He was heading in to work…so his stomach would constrict and there'd be that little hurt in it, not knowing how he'd be kicked right there that day but feeling fairly certain there would be at least once kick.

I had not made the connection before. Seeing me going off to class, believing I'd do better than he had…that was one of his rewards for doing that terrible, terrible job each day.

We talked about that a couple times and one day when he was in the hospital, he surprised me by saying, "It always bothered me when you seemed ashamed to have people see your father dropping you off at school." My brain and voice responded in unison with a loud "Huh?" That thought never occurred to me. Not once…and I told him so. "When did I ever do that?"

He said, "When I dropped you off at U.C.L.A. I always offered to drive onto the campus and take you right up to your first class but you always insisted I let you off outside the campus."

Did you ever find yourself in a misunderstanding that could have been and should have been cleared up decades before? Let me explain this one…

The turf has changed a bit since 1970 when I went there but U.C.L.A. was and is a huge place with many entrances onto its grounds. There was one at the corner of Westholme and Hilgard and I always asked my father to let me off at that corner. From there, I could walk about ten steps onto the campus and turn right to go down a pedestrian walkway (i.e., a passageway on which cars could not drive) that took me straight to the building where my first class of the day was held. It was very easy and I liked the short walk, which also took me past some vending machines were I'd sometimes buy a bag of chips or pretzels to eat later in the day.

Had he driven onto the campus, the roadway immediately veered to the left — away from the walkway and the vending machines and the building I was trying to reach — and it went nowhere near my destination. Anywhere he'd let me off would have meant a much longer walk for me (and no pretzels) and then it would have been very confusing for him to find his way off the campus.

I thought I'd explained that to him several times back in '70…but now there we were in his hospital room nearly a quarter-century later and he was telling me, "I thought you were just saying that. I thought you were ashamed that your father was driving you to school."

I went over it with him one more time and he said he understood now…but some ideas, you just have to blast out of some minds. I went home and found an old map I had of the U.C.L.A. campus and a bit of the surrounding area. I drew up an enlargement a yard-wide of the relevant area and took it in to him the next day.

"Look," I said. "This big blue line shows how if you let me off outside the campus, I could walk down this little pathway, stop at the vending machines here and then go right to English 101. This red line shows you where we'd have wound up if I let you drive me onto the campus."

He stared at it and it was probably my tenacity more than my cartography that convinced him it was just as I said. "I guess I had it all wrong," he muttered.

I moved his I.V. stand over so I could get up real close to him and look him straight in the face. I said, "Is there anything else I ever did that still bothers you? Something we never discussed? I've apologized for a number of things and we buried those as issues between us. Think hard. Did I spit up on you when I was two? Did I forget to take the trash out once when I was fourteen? Is there anything else like this — anything! — that we need to talk about?"

He thought for a long minute or so then said, "You told me once you were up for a writing job on that TV show…that Maude thing. That was a good, successful show. Why didn't you take that job?" That was twenty years earlier.

I said, "They hired some other writer instead of me."

He smiled and said, "Oh. In that case, there's nothing else." Then he added, "Except you did spit up on me a lot when you were two. And three. And four. And five…"

Gee, I had a great father.

The 1999 Broadway show Fosse re-created many of the acclaimed musical numbers that were staged by the legendary Bob Fosse. Here are Ann Reinking and a line of fine dancers playing the line of dance hall dames in Sweet Charity…

The trial of Bill Cosby, as I'm sure you know by now, ended with a hung jury. I'm not sure we know if it was one vote for acquittal or eleven or somewhere in-between…but the prosecutors are saying they're going to try, try again. One suspects there will be a little attempt at a plea bargain, especially if it comes out the jury was 11-1 or 10-2 either way. The side that got the 1 or 2 might not be so lucky next time and willing to deal but maybe that's not in the cards.

A lot of folks online today are outraged that "the system" didn't work…but this is the way the system is supposed to work — sometimes. Juries deadlock from time to time because "reasonable doubt" is subject to so many interpretations. We understand they're not always unanimous just as they're not always right so we have an appeals process. If 12-0 verdicts can be reversed — and they are — then it's not shocking that we have 11-1 verdicts where the 1 is wrong, and I'm sure there are 11-1 juries where the 1 is right.

Also, I see a lot of folks online who are sure Cosby is guilty (or not) because they knew or heard of someone who said they once had an encounter with him and something happened…or didn't. I know a woman who is very, very attractive and back in 1980 or so, not long after she'd been naked in Playboy, spent an afternoon alone with Mr. Cosby. She said she was aware of his reputation but nothing sordid occurred and he was a perfect gentleman. That doesn't prove the other reported sex crimes did or did not occur. I mean, the Boston Strangler didn't strangleevery woman he could have strangled.

I happen to think Mr. Cosby is — as Doonesbury once said — "Guilty, guilty, guilty" but I was and am ready to hear a good case made that he is not. I haven't yet and it doesn't sound like one was presented in the courtroom in this case; just maybe enough to get one or two jurors to think there was something illogical about Andrea Constand's story about being drugged and raped, then seeking repeated contact with Cosby.

Even if Cosby is not retried and this is the outcome, he's still lost big: Lost his reputation, lost his career, lost millions in legal fees. That's not a proper punishment for what he probably did but it's not nothing.

I played hooky from work 'n' blogging yesterday and had a three-hour lunch at the Magic Castle with my friend, actress — and everybody's favorite Matinee Lady — Teresa Ganzel. We did not spend three hours eating. We spent three hours talking, joined for much of it by another friend of both of us, Trish Alaskey. Trish is the niece of the late, wonderful voice actor Joe Alaskey and she's on the staff of the Castle, which in case you don't know is a private club for magicians up in hills above Hollywood. I love being a member and I especially like lunching there because I don't have to wear the mandatory-in-the-evenings jacket and tie.

Teresa has done hundreds of different roles on television but we spent some time talking about her years as a sketch player and frequent interviewee on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. I've been watching old episodes on Antenna TV and they tend to run a lot of ones with Teresa. There's probably a reason for this apart from the fact that she was really funny and charming on the show. To avoid paying a lot of loot for music clearances, Antenna TV tends to not run many shows with big musical guests. That means they run a disproportionate number of episodes with big comedy sketches; ergo, more Teresa. There was one on just the other night.

As a fierce Carson-watcher, I had an observation recently which I shared with Ms. Ganzel and I'd like to share it with you. Those old Carson shows are a great time capsule and they show you a lot about how the world evolved from around the mid-seventies (the earliest shows they seem to have) to 1992 when Johnny left us. It has to do somewhat with the Tea Time Movie sketches that he did with some regularity, parodying an afternoon TV pitchman long after such personalities had disappeared from most channels. Lovable Art Fern — the man who would sell you anything and everything — was always accompanied by his lovely Matinee Lady co-host.

When Johnny first began doing the sketches, the Matinee Lady was played by a different actress each time. Usually, it was someone booked as a guest on the show and they'd draft her into service in the Mighty Carson Art Players skit. I remember Paula Prentiss doing it on a number of occasions. Around 1971, Carol Wayne became the steady co-star of these bits. Ms. Wayne was very lovely and sweet but I don't know that she ever understood a single line that they gave her to say. If she did, she did a good job of pretending she didn't and a lot of Art Fern's comedic "takes" were at the space cadet nature of her delivery.

I knew a few of Carson's writers and we talked about this a few times. Basically, because the way (and the when) she would say a line was so unpredictable, there were only two kinds of jokes they could write for her. One kind was based on the premise that her breasts were huge; the other kind was based on the premise that her brain was not. I am not saying that the latter was a fair appraisal of Ms. Wayne, though the one time I met her did nothing to disprove it. In any case, that's what she played on the screen…and of course, if you're a writer of jokes, those two premises are real easy to work off of.

They were also completely consistent with an attitude many TV shows had then and it was very much in evidence on Johnny's. If you were a woman and you weren't a superstar like Lucille Ball or Carol Burnett, you were there to be looked at. The comedy was best left to men. My pal Nick Arnold, who wrote for Johnny for a time, once told me that the secret to getting a sketch approved by Carson was "B.I.B." I asked what that stood for and I should have guessed. Nick said it stood for "Babe In Bikini" or maybe "Bimbo in Bikini." Then he told me, "If the sketch was really weak, you might need more than one." If you read any criticism of Carson during that era, it usually included a reference to "airhead starlets" and the show's love of booking them.

Carol Wayne died in 1985 in a mysterious accident. Carson suspended the Tea Time Movie sketches for not all that long before trying them with a couple of different actresses, all of whom were cast mainly for their bustlines and they all tried to do Carol. In the meantime, Teresa had become a recurring occupant of Johnny's guest chair. She had first turned up there in 1983 when she was on to promote a situation comedy on which she was then a regular — Teachers Only, which not coincidentally was produced by Carson Productions. Johnny found her amusing and charming, and had her back several times. She fit the eye candy requirement but was smart-funny as opposed to stupid-funny.

Finally, around late '86, they tried her out as the Matinee Lady and not only kept her in that esteemed position but began using her in other sketches, including a very funny series where she and Johnny played salesfolks on a channel not unlike the Home Shopping Network and another batch where they played TV news co-anchors. The thing that struck me as notable about them is that she was not just there as eye candy. They actually wrote jokes for her and in many, they had equal roles.

I remember thinking at the time that Johnny's sketches had grown up a lot. Before Teresa, a woman in a sketch on the Carson show was either playing gorgeous-but-not-too-bright or she was Betty White. She rarely had lines that presumed the lady — whoever she was if she was not Betty White — had the ability to deliver a line.

It is perhaps worth noting that Johnny Carson did that show from October 1, 1962 until May 22, 1992…a span of 29 years and 7 months. During that time, he went through something like a hundred writers. Not one of them was a woman. During this time, a lot of women were becoming important as writers and even producers on situation comedies…but not on Johnny's show.

Not long before Teresa became Art Fern's sidekick, Johnny had been getting some real bad press. Comediennes — most notably Elayne Boosler — had been complaining that they were not given the same consideration as male stand-ups. In a Rolling Stone interview, Carson had said — and probably regretted saying this — that he did not like "the new breed of female standup comic" because they were too "aggressive." About the only one he had on was Joan Rivers, whose act back then was mostly about how her husband didn't find her attractive. The few female stand-ups like Phyllis Diller and Totie Fields basically came out on stage and talked about how ugly they were.

Johnny didn't like the criticism so his show's lead talent scout, Jim McCawley, was dispatched to find some good, up-and-coming female stand-ups for the show. I knew Jim a little. He was a nice, smart guy with a near-perfect sense of What Johnny Will Like. When people write of how Carson "discovered" comics like Garry Shandling and Jay Leno and David Letterman and — well, you know the list — they're probably robbing Jim and a couple of other Tonight Show staffers of credit. Johnny himself occasionally dropped into the Improv or the Comedy Store but it was guys like McCawley who sat there all night, sitting through thirty bad comics in search of one with possibilities. I'd see him at those places, drinking 7-Up and fending off legions of ass-kissing new guys who knew exactly what a good Tonight Show shot could do for their careers.

He had trouble finding female stand-ups that Johnny would appreciate. The criticism of his show wasn't entirely fair. There weren't all that many of them then and some came off as fiercely hostile to males in almost a militant lesbian way. That, Johnny would not have wanted on his program. In one case that I know of, Jim even tried creating the kind of break-out female comic Johnny wanted to showcase. McCawley found a lady who could deliver jokes well but whose material was rather weak and he tried using his clout — and ability to promise male comics a turn for themselves — to get them to write material for her.

He put her on the show but she failed to click. For a while, his best "find" was Victoria Jackson, who was funny but who did nothing to change the image of The Tonight Show as liking its women cute and clueless. It wasn't until 1986 that a new female comic scored big on Johnny's show without playing or being dumb. That was Ellen DeGeneres and one does wonder if she'd have been booked if they'd known then that she was gay. I don't know.

But all during this time, there was Teresa Ganzel, not doing stand-up but doing panel and appearing in sketches, increasingly as a full partner with the star. I thought she was wonderful and I didn't even know her then. There were also fewer and fewer of the airhead starlets on the show. Johnny was not dumb. Among the many reasons he stayed on the air so long was that he recognized when something wasn't working and changed it.

He had dozens of guests who appeared frequently and then one day, he'd decide they'd worn out their welcome and instead of appearing every 3-6 weeks, they'd suddenly be down to once a year or not at all. Among these were Charles Nelson Reilly, Tony Randall, Jaye P. Morgan, Charles Grodin, Orson Bean and Robert Blake. At one point, he decided that his back-up bandleader Tommy Newsom was dragging the show down and thereafter, Tommy just remained in the band with no lines. Carson also sensed that audiences were not finding "drunk" jokes as funny as they used to and he cut way back on jokes about his announcer Ed McMahon consuming mass quantities of liquor.

And his show became much more open to smart, funny women like Teresa. She was the breakthrough. She took the Matinee Lady from being someone to be ogled and laughed-at because her I.Q. was lower than her bra-size to being a skilled comic actress playing that kind of character. As I watch the sketches with her in them, it's obvious the writers were giving her lines that poor Carol could never have handled…and Carson's performance is better because he was on stage with someone he trusted to come in at just the right moment, not when she suddenly noticed one of her lines creeping up on the TelePrompter.

This all may wind up to a tiny milestone in the evolution of women on TV but I think it's quite real and that Teresa deserves some real credit. I told her this over lunch not just to flatter her but because it's true. I admire her so much that maybe I shouldn't have stuck her with the check.

A couple of you have suggested linking to this article by Eric Levitz that says, "If the President Is Innocent, Then He Is Insane." I'm not sure I completely buy it.

Maybe it's spot-on but I keep thinking about a TV producer for whom I once worked. He was a very successful, wealthy fellow who'd never expected to be anywhere near as successful or wealthy. He had a sudden cluster of hit shows and couldn't explain why. When someone asked him what he'd done right, or even when he asked himself, the answer was "I dunno," which is not an acceptable answer, especially when it's you asking about you.

He finally decided, based on no evidence whatsoever, that it must have been his instincts. In fact, he was sure he was right because, hey, his instincts told him he was right to think his instincts were right to think it was because his instincts were right to think…etc.

So when he made illogical decisions and asked to explain them, he really couldn't. He'd make up some silly reasons or sometimes he'd say, "This is what my gut tells me." And it was on that basis that he operated a production company that did all sorts of odd things no one could understand. Most of them made the mistake of assuming there was some rational, devious explanation for what seemed to most of us working on the show when in fact, what he was doing was playing hunches. Maybe that's what Trump is doing. Then again…

No Trump Dump today but do read this article by Matt Yglesias about the big Trump scandal — bigger than the Russia thing. It's the bait-and-switch over Health Care…how the guy who kept saying he'd never cut Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security apparently meant, "…unless, of course, those things get in the way of giving rich people like me a yuuuggge tax cut." I really don't understand how people who voted for Trump thinking he was going to do all that are okay with what's happening now. Do they really think you can take $880 billion out of Medicaid and no one will lose coverage?

The wonderful folks who run Comic-Con International today announced…

Bill Messner-Loebs and Jack Kirby to Receive 2017 Bill Finger Award

Bill Messner-Loebs and Jack Kirby have been selected to receive the 2017 Bill Finger Award for Excellence in Comic Book Writing. The selection, made by a blue-ribbon committee chaired by writer-historian Mark Evanier, was unanimous.

"As always, I asked on my blog for suggestions of worthy recipients," Evanier explains. "Many were nominated and the committee chose Bill as the worthiest of those still alive and working, and Jack because although his artwork has always been justly hailed, his contribution as a writer has been too often minimized or overlooked. In fact, in the years we've been doing this award, Jack Kirby has received many more nominations than anyone else, but we held off honoring him until this year because it seemed appropriate to finally do it in the centennial of his birth, and because members of his family will be at Comic-Con to accept on his behalf."

The Bill Finger Award was created in 2005 at the instigation of comic book legend Jerry Robinson. "The premise of this award is to recognize writers for a body of work that has not received its rightful reward and/or recognition," Evanier explains. "Even though the late Bill Finger now finally receives credit for his role in the creation of Batman, he's still the industry poster boy for writers not receiving proper reward or recognition."

Bill Messner-Loebs has been a cartoonist and writer since the 1970s. He has worked for DC, Marvel, Comico, Power Comics, Texas Comics, Vertigo, Boom!, Image, IDW, and the U.S. State Department (for which he produced a comic about the perils of land mines). He has written Superman, Flash, Aquaman, Mr. Monster, Hawkman, Green Arrow, Wonder Woman, Dr. Fate, Jonny Quest, Spider-Man, Thor, and the Batman newspaper strip. He wrote and drew Journey: The Adventures of Wolverine MacAlistaire and Bliss Alley, and he co-created The Maxx and Epicurus the Sage. He has also delivered pizzas, done custom framing, been a library clerk, sold art supplies, and taught cartooning.

Jack Kirby has been called "The King of the Comics" for both his dazzling, trend-setting artwork and his innovative ideas and stories, as well as the countless popular characters and comics he created or co-created. Among those characters and comics are Captain America, The X-Men, The Fantastic Four, The Boy Commandos, The Newsboy Legion, Young Romance, Sky Masters, The New Gods, The Demon, The Challengers of the Unknown, The Silver Surfer, Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, Nick Fury—Agent of S.H.I.E.L.D., The Avengers, Iron Man, Thor, The Forever People, Kamandi — The Last Boy on Earth, Captain Victory, The Eternals, The Black Panther, Fighting American, and many, many others. Many readers knew him first as an artist on the Marvel comics of the 1960s, but in prior decades he wrote as much as he drew, and even at Marvel he plotted stories and made other contributions while receiving only an artist credit. His work, with or without other writers, continues to be the most reprinted ever in the history of comic books.

The Bill Finger Award honors the memory of William Finger (1914–1974), who was the first and, some say, most important writer of Batman. Many have called him the "unsung hero" of the character and have hailed his work not only on that iconic figure but on dozens of others, primarily for DC Comics.

In addition to Evanier, the selection committee consists of Charles Kochman (executive editor at Harry N. Abrams, book publisher), comic book writer Kurt Busiek, artist/historian Jim Amash, cartoonist Scott Shaw!, and writer/editor Marv Wolfman.

The major sponsor for the 2017 awards is DC Comics; supporting sponsors are Heritage Auctions and Maggie Thompson.

The Finger Award falls under the auspices of Comic-Con International: San Diego and is administered by Jackie Estrada. The awards will be presented during the Eisner Awards ceremony at this summer's Comic-Con International on Friday, July 21 at the Hilton San Diego Bayfront hotel.

The jury in the Bill Cosby case reported they were deadlocked and unable to reach a verdict.  The judge sent them back to try, try again…which I gather is Standard Operating Procedure in this situation.

People are trying to figure out what this means…but of course, they don't know if it was 11-1 or 10-2 or even 6-6 and if it wasn't even, if the deadlock leans towards acquittal or conviction.  There's been a lot of groundless speculation since the case went to the jury if the amount of time they were out deliberating boded well or ill for Cosby.

This is all the kind of thing we're thinking about when we quote journalist Jack Germond, who once said of his profession, "The trouble is we're not paid to say 'I don't know' when we don't know."  So reporters speculate, often based on nothing, and this takes the place of — and is mistaken for — actual news. When someone says, "Being out this long probably means we're looking at a Not Guilty verdict," they have no reason to think that.

All we can say is that they were deadlocked, they may still be deadlocked and if they continue to be deadlocked, we're probably looking at a mistrial…and a whole new trial or maybe some sort of plea bargain.

This is from a month ago when documentary producer Robert Weide interviewed Woody Allen live on Facebook.  One of the main topics is Mr. Allen's inability to grasp the concept of Facebook, as well as his limited capacity to understand modern technology…

By the way: The annual AFI Life Achievement Award presentation airs tomorrow night on TNT.  The recipient is Diane Keaton and there are only about nine hundred webpages that give away the surprise speaker at the end.  (The show was taped on June 8.)

I won't tell you who it is but he's in the above video and it's not Robert Weide.  I'm told his speech was outstanding so you might want to record the show and watch at least the last part.  As I understand it, TNT is running it twice tomorrow night with commercial interruptions and then Turner Classic Movies runs it sometime next month without commercial interruptions.

Tomorrow (Thursday) night at Los Angeles City Hall, our mayor Eric Garcetti will preside over a tribute to Adam West that will include the lighting of the Bat-Signal!  In the future, when some of the lesser actors to play the Caped Crusader pass away, they're going to have some guy at the Sanitation Department just wave around a Bic lighter.

Well, today's big news seems to be that Trump is being investigated for Obstruction of Justice. Remember back when he wasn't yet and how important it was to him to get James Comey (or someone) to tell the world that? Well, he seems to be now.  Things can't be too jolly in the White House — or wherever he is — tonight.

What's more, journalists like Josh Marshall are theorizing that this investigation wasn't launched by Special Counsel Robert Mueller but by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and that a whole lot of Trump associates are under suspicion for various crimes, some of them financial. So it may not be a matter of "Will Trump fire the Special Counsel to shut down the investigation of him?" but "Will Trump fire a number of people in the Justice Department to shut down a whole series of investigations?" In other news…

• "By a 97-2 vote, the U.S. Senate approved stronger sanctions on Russia Wednesday and took the first step toward limiting President Trump's ability to ease those sanctions." He can't be happy about that, either. Here's the whole story.
• As Ed Kilgore notes, the American Health Care Act is about as popular as projectile vomiting…and this is over a wide political spectrum. This is not something that Trump voters and Republicans love and Democrats hate. Just about everybody dislikes it and they haven't even read the Senate version of it yet! Are our elected officials really going to pass this thing? Or is the idea here that at Trump's insistence, it's going to be vastly improved, and people will think it's better even though it's just a little less terrible…and Donald will claim he saved the day?
• David Margolick has a theory about that strange televised meeting where all the members of Trump's cabinet praised him for his greatness.

Meanwhile, Trump may get a break in the next few days whenever the verdict in the Bill Cosby trial knocks him off the front page for a day or so. I don't know which way it will go but reporting from the courtroom suggest that if Cosby is acquitted, it will be because his lawyers convinced the jury that it was not rape but just a really, really bizarre mutual romance.  Frightening.