Turner Classic Movies is running A Face in the Crowd later today. It's on at 2:45 PM on my TV and you might want to check the schedule to see when it will be on yours. It is, first of all, a great movie with a stellar performance by Andy Griffith. All those years playing Sheriff Andy Taylor made you think that was all he could do but he's truly electric in this 1957 film directed by Elia Kazan and written by Budd Schulberg. Those who know the picture know why it's so appropriate for today. Here's the trailer…

David Remnick warns of what's coming after You-Know-Who places his hand tomorrow on what he once called the only book better than The Art of the Deal. He points out that there were people who thought that after the election, Trump would drop the sleazy campaign tricks, accept the gravity of the position he'd won and turn into another person. The fact that that obviously isn't happening is, I suspect, the reason Donald's approval rating has been dropping as fast as an elephant on a zipline.

The hearings of the last few days have been amazing. You can't get hired by McDonald's unless you have some concept of what the job entails. But apparently, you can get a position in Trump's cabinet if you have no idea what your department does.

I strongly agree with Kevin Drum that Barack Obama has been a very good president. I don't hold it against him that he wasn't able to deliver things like Single Payer Healthcare and a higher stimulus. I'm impressed that he accomplished as much as he did.

I've made a few false starts at writing a post that says that but Kevin did a perfectly fine job. Go read him.

We're big fans of Philippe the Original, a downtown L.A. restaurant that claims to have invented the French Dip sandwich. Whether it did or not, they sure make great ones…and a lot of them. Here's a profile of the place and it's history, including the story of how their signature sandwich was invented by accident. As I mentioned here, I'm always skeptical of these stories about how a famous food item was invented by accident. One of these days, we're going to hear how one day, someone accidentally spilled hydrogen into their oxygen or vice-versa and — lo and behold! — they invented water.

No, it's not Numberwang. It's Lewis Black talking about something that makes even less sense…

The debate over Climate Change generally takes place between Actual Scientists and people who say "I'm not a scientist" but believe their viewpoint is just as valid (if not more so) than folks who are Actual Scientists. Well, the Actual Scientists have announced now that 2016 was the hottest year ever recorded on this planet. Before that, 2015 was the hottest year ever recorded on this planet and before that, 2014 held that honor.

The Actual Scientists say that's significant and ominous. The "I'm not a scientist" people just kind of ignore it because…well, it kinda messes up their position and they can't have that.

• I'm not going to watch the inauguration on Friday. I'll wait for the Alec Baldwin version on Saturday.

Norvell Hardy was born on January 18, 1892 in Harlem, Georgia.  His father Oliver had been a soldier in the Civil War — fighting for The South, of course — and Dad died when Norvell was one year old. When Norvell was around the age of 18, he began going by the name Oliver Norvell Hardy.

A poor student in school, his interests turned towards entertaining and at least once, he ran away from home to join a troupe of actors and singers. Around the time he took his father's name, he got a job working in a movie theater in Milledgeville and as he watched the primitive films of 1910, he kept thinking, "I could do that." A few years later, he moved to Jacksonville, Florida and proved it. His first film role appears to have been an otherwise-forgettable 1914 short called Unwitting Dad. He was billed as "O.N. Hardy" but away from the camera, friends called him Babe. It was a nickname he picked up from a barber near the Lubin Manufacturing Company, which was the studio that gave him his first screen roles.

Babe Hardy moved from Florida to New York and then in 1917, to Los Angeles. Everywhere he went, he made movies — so many that researchers are still finding new credits for him. Mostly, he was in comedies but he did dramatic parts, as well. Mostly, he played "heavies" (what they then called the villains) but he was quite good when he was a lead comic.

In 1921, he played a small role as a mugger in a film called Lucky Dog. The lead comic — the person he tried to rob in the film — was the British comedian, Stan Laurel. Nothing came of their proximity then but in 1924, Hardy went to work for the Hal Roach Studio and a few years later, Laurel popped up there, mostly as a writer and director. In 1926, Hardy was cast in a short called Get 'Em Young but he injured himself in a kitchen accident and Laurel was tagged to return to a position in front of the cameras to fill in.

That led to Laurel acting in more Roach comedies. He and Hardy were both in a film called 45 Minutes From Hollywood, though they shared no scenes. Then they appeared in more films together and did share scenes…more and more until it became obvious that these two men were funny together. Before 1927 was out, there were Laurel & Hardy comedies and there always will be.

I can't think of anyone I enjoy watching more on the screen than Babe Hardy. A lot of comics in the silent era were funny because they fell off cliffs or into mud puddles. He did plenty of that as well as anyone but he could also be funny just reacting…or looking into the camera…or doing something simple like writing his name in a ledger. He died in 1957 but people still laugh at his performances and they always will. Today, in honor of his birthday, I'm going to try to find time to watch him and Stan be so wonderful in Sons of the Desert.

That is not only a photo of Bill Finger, it is darn near the only photo of Bill Finger. He did not leave many behind. What he did leave us was his contribution to the creation of Batman — a contribution that was formidable and throughout Finger's lifetime, criminally neglected or even denied.

That injustice has been undone somewhat as the credits on Batman now say "Created by Bob Kane with Bill Finger," whereas they used to just say "Created by Bob Kane." It's sad that Mr. Finger never lived to see this happen but at least it has happened. Unfortunately — and yes, I've written about this before here — his face has also been miscredited. Maybe that's his fault for not taking more photos when he was around but I keep seeing photos of other longtime contributors to DC Comics identified as Finger. Here are the two most often wrongly identified as him…

The man on the left is Robert Kanigher, who wrote Wonder Woman for about eight million years and who edited and often wrote DC's war comics for a very long time. When Kanigher received a posthumous Bill Finger Award, I procured that photo from a relative of Kanigher's and did an awful lot of Photoshopping to make it look even that good. It was part of the press release announcing the award.

The photo on the right is Gardner Fox, who wrote Justice League of America and The Flash and Hawkman and who created the last two and many others. Fox actually was the second writer to write Batman, shortly after the debut story, which was by Finger. Fox also won the Finger Award and therein lies some of the confusion.

The way search engines like Google and Bing index photos is that they find photos and then they find words and names near those photos. If I were to go onto the 'net and post a photo of you on many websites with the word "aardvark" near your pic, the engines would eventually decide you were an aardvark and would probably display the pic of you when someone searched for an image of an aardvark.

Because the photos of Kanigher and Fox have often appeared near the term "Bill Finger" on the web, the search engines display them when you search for a photo of Bill Finger…so I keep seeing them identified as him.  The new issue of Comic Book Creator magazine has the Kanigher image identified as Finger.  So I made up these two graphics and I'm posting them here to alert anyone who comes here…but I'm also posting them because I want them to get into the database of Google, Bing and other search engines.

Maybe now people who search for a photo of Mr. Finger will see these graphics and understand what is and is not a likeness of Bill Finger, the most neglected man in comics.  Feel free to help out and post them anywhere you like.

I'm getting sick of Numberwang. Let's watch something else…

Ezra Klein has figured out a way the Republicans could keep their promise to replace Obamacare without creating a human — and therefore, political — calamity. I somehow don't think that's what they're going to do. I think they're going to come up with a lousy plan and sell it hard as a great one. But maybe…

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

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This installment starts with a rerun of most of a post that appeared on this blog on 10/16/14. I'll let you know when the new stuff starts…

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There's a famous quote from the great playwright George S. Kaufman that was uttered when a producer asked him if he could have a certain script done by Tuesday. Kaufman asked him, "Do you want it Tuesday or do you want it good?"

There's a point in there but it's not the one that some writers want to extract from it. That quote is used to justify lateness and it's employed as such by folks who forget that Kaufman did operate under deadlines and did meet them. He had to. An awful lot of his best work was produced on the road when a play was in tryouts and wasn't working. Kaufman and his collaborator (whichever one it was at the moment) would hole up in his hotel room, write an entire scene by dawn and then rehearse and stage it in the morning. That was probably the most grueling deadline-meeting you could have in his profession.

Others have said that what you have to do is to make it as good as you can by Tuesday. That's one of the things you need to learn to do as a professional writer. And what that involves usually is not seizing on any of the eighty thousand reasons you can come up with not to write and not to finish by Tuesday. There's always one. Sometimes if you're sharp, you can use all eighty thousand.

I have a couple of writer friends who sometimes need to be scolded a bit in this regard. Recently, one wrote me to detail all the things that were happening in his life that were preventing him from finishing his novel by the deadline. Actually, this was about his fourth deadline on this alleged book. He blew the first one so they gave him another. Then he didn't get it done by that date so they gave him an extension…and so on. I would ordinarily be more tactful and friendly in my response but this friend's recent antics seem to demand something more like this…

Stop explaining to me how it's everyone's fault but yours that you're not going to finish your book by the latest in a long series of deadlines. I'm surprised you haven't found some way yet to blame Vladimir Putin, Tony the Tiger, me and Edward Everett Horton. If you took all that effort you're putting into blaming others and applied it to the book, you'd be autographing printed copies by now.

Yes, yes…I know this person distracted you and that person put you in a mood where you couldn't write and some other person didn't get your computer fixed on time and on and on. There is always a reason to not get one's work done and you're seizing on every one of them. You probably won't get anything done before Thanksgiving because you have to decide which dinner to attend…so it'll be the Pilgrims' fault your book isn't finished.

Look, I'll say this simply: Get the book done. A writer who can't get his or her work finished is like a plumber who can never fix a leak. You're kind of useless. 20% of your excuses are probably valid but we all have those things happen to us and still, we get to the last page and type "The End." The other 80% are you looking for excuses not to write or, at least, not hand in anything.

Remember our friend [Name Redacted]? She never got anything finished which is why she's now in another line of work. I understood why she couldn't finish her work and it wasn't all those problems, not unlike yours, which she claimed to have. It was because she was terrified to finish the script and hand it in. She was terrified of the moment that the editor would call up and say, "I have some real problems with his." Or she was terrified of it getting published and then getting bad reviews or not selling or something. As long as she didn't finish, she was putting off those catastrophes.

I'd be sympathetic if this happened once in a while. It happens once in a while to everyone. But you have developed this dogged determination to not accept the responsibility for what you're doing…or more significantly, not doing. I like you and your writing too much to go along with this. Finish the script or give up and go apply for a job at Subway making sandwiches.

In case you haven't figured it out, this is me being supportive. I'm always supportive. If you decide it's time to go work at Subway, I'll have a foot-long meatball on Italian bread with provolone cheese. Toasted. And a bag of Baked Lays.

At last report, the novel wasn't finished yet but I think I got him from Chapter 8 to Chapter 9. He was almost to 10 before his sister came into town to visit for six weeks. And as we all know, you can't possibly be expected to do your job when your sister is in town.

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That's the end of the reposted material. From here on, it's all new…

Okay. You need to finish your work and you need to turn it in on or before any deadline you were given. We all agree on that. What I want to talk about now is this: There are deadlines and there are deadlines. We'll call them soft deadlines and hard deadlines. Knowing which is which can be very important…and not always easy because folks rarely use those terms when they give you an assignment.

To make matters more confusing, they sometimes talk about a soft deadline as if it's a hard deadline or they outright fib and tell you it is. They tell you, "We absolutely positively must have this in by March 1 or it'll kill the project and everyone will be fired and I can't explain this next one but if your script isn't in by March 1, your dog will die. Yeah, I know it sounds silly but last month, Harry turned in his script twelve hours late and went home to a dead lhasa apso. Don't risk it!"

So you neglect other parts of your life and you inconvenience others and you stay up all night because you think disaster will occur if your script is in on, say, March 3rd. You might think, "Gee, I wish I had a few more days so I could polish this more and make it a bit funnier or tighter…but they need it March 1 so March 1, they'll have it!" You get it in then and you're proud of yourself…

…and then you find out later that it sat on someone's desk for five weeks and they didn't do anything with it until April 8. Is there any professional writer out there who's been working for any length of time and hasn't had this happen to him or her?

I didn't think so. A lot of time what you're up against is a schedule made up by someone who isn't thinking, "When do we really need this?" He or she is picking dates arbitrarily, making up a chart that looks rather nicely organized. Other times, they're operating from the mindset that most writers are late…so if they really need it September 1, they tell you August 1.  Or maybe sometime in mid-June.

I worked for many years at Hanna-Barbera, mostly as a story editor. My duty was to get scripts written — by myself or others — and have them approved by the network and ready to go into production on certain dates. It was not until my second year there that I realized that the dates were often bogus…or at least, they didn't relate to when I'd have to turn a script in so as not to slow down production. The dates would also keep being moved up on me. At the start of a season, I'd have five months to complete all the scripts. Then one day, I'd blink and the schedule gave me four months.

They did this to all the story editors…and once a week, a memo would be circulated that would say this show was eight weeks behind schedule on scripts and that one was six weeks behind. The first time I saw my show was five weeks behind, I panicked and wrote a script practically overnight…

…and when the next memo came out, it said my show was six weeks behind.

They kept moving the deadlines and I kept falling for it. I finally realized that none of the veteran story editors there were worried that the memo said they were ten weeks behind. And then one of them explained the game to me…

"We're being paid by the week. The fewer weeks it takes us to do our jobs, the less they have to pay us. Real simple."

That made sense except in my case. I was the only story editor there being paid not by the week but by the show. The total pay to me was the same whether I got the show done in three months or six. I went to Bill Hanna, called this to his attention and from then on, they didn't speed up my deadlines as much. But he did impress on me that it would help production if I could get ahead on the schedule. Here's why…

The show I was doing at the time was Richie Rich. There was a production unit assigned to do the artwork and animation on Richie Rich. Now, Mr. Hanna had two concerns with regards to the schedule. One was, of course, that each episode should be finished in time to deliver it to ABC when they needed it in order to broadcast it to the kiddos of America on a specified date. We all understand that.

But also Bill Hanna had a constant fear of artists sitting around with nothing to work on because a script was late. And he was afraid of that not only because the show might not be done when the network needed it but because — and this was the horror — it meant people who were on the payroll were being paid to do nothing. He just hated that.

So let's say Richie Rich was ahead of schedule but down the hall (or in some other country to which H-B farmed out animation), Scooby Doo was behind and there was no approved Scooby Doo script for the Scooby Doo unit to be working on. In that case, Hanna would grab one of my Richie Rich scripts and assign it to the Scooby Doo unit to work on, just so they'd have something to do.

That was another reason the schedule would change on me. My show could be two weeks ahead of schedule on scripts and suddenly, for reasons that had nothing to do with me, my show was suddenly one week ahead or even behind. At least one time because of this, I had to call one of my writers and say, "Hey, I know I told you I needed it in two weeks but suddenly, I really need it next Wednesday. Is there any way you can have it in then?"

I didn't like that. I also didn't like that the episode done by the Scooby crew would probably not look as good as it could have because they weren't as familiar with the characters and the style of the show. The Childrens Department over at ABC was quite upset with how some episodes turned out because they were expecting animation by the good Richie Rich unit and instead got cartoons animated by a bad unit that was doing busy work while they waited for a script for their show…maybe even an NBC or CBS show.

At one point, I found myself caught in the middle: Mr. Hanna was urging me to get farther ahead on scripts so he could juggle them between units and keep each crew busy…and the folks at the network were telling me not to get ahead in order to prevent him from doing that.  (Sometimes, the network would put it into the contract that the studio couldn't divert a show to some other unit.  They did it anyway.)

So why am I telling you this story? It's not because you're likely to be story-editing Richie Rich for Bill Hanna some day. It's because I want to make this point…

However inelegant or crass it may feel, you have to think of your script as one of the first steps on an assembly line. You may think of it as a self-contained creation that's complete when you finish it — but it's probably not. If you're writing a TV show or a movie or a play, it goes on to directors and actors and set designers and all sorts of folks. If you're writing a cartoon, it goes on to voice actors and directors and animators and editors and others. A comic book script goes to someone who's going to draw it, someone who's going to letter it, someone who's going to color it, etc. Even a novel is going to a book designer and to printers and many more people.

All of those people make contributions to the form in which your work reaches its audience. All of those people have deadlines.

You need to understand what those people do. It might also help you in many ways to actually know some of them if that's at all possible.

You have a duty to get your work in on time…and this brings us to the key difference between a soft deadline, where you always have a few more days if you need them, and a hard deadline where you don't. A hard deadline is when your writing must be completed so the people who follow you are not inconvenienced or prevented from doing the best job they can do.

Let's say it's a comic book you're writing. The soft deadline is when the editor would like to have it in…when he can take his time reading it and perhaps make suggestions for changes. Who knows? Maybe he'll point out some howler of a mistake you made and then you'll have time to rewrite and fix things without creating problems for others.  Most of all, everyone along the assembly line can breathe easier to know that the story in question is not in a time crunch from the start.

The hard deadline is when it has to be in because otherwise, you stop the assembly line. That may be a rotten thing to do to the artist, for instance, because he was expecting to start on it on a certain Monday…and now he has to wait for you. You might harm his income because he can't do the work he was planning to do starting that Monday to earn money to pay his rent, feed his family, splurge on hookers, whatever.

Then he might have to rush his work out or cancel some social engagement or stay up too late…or hand in work that could have been better if he'd had the full time. Or he can be late with his end of things and create those kinds of problems for the next guy on the assembly line.  You don't want to start that chain of dominoes toppling.

So, to summarize…

• If you have deadlines, you must meet them.
• To meet them, you must understand the difference between soft deadlines and hard deadlines.
• To meet soft deadlines, you must understand which ones are soft deadlines and then you must understand the process — the jobs and needs of others involved in the project — to understand how much wiggle room you may have.
• To meet hard deadlines…well, you simply have to meet them. It may help to understand the process so you can better understand why you must meet them.
• Finally, if you aren't sure whether a deadline is soft or hard, presume it's hard. You're almost always better off being too early than too late.

One last point…

I know writers whose careers have been severely damaged — and in some cases, ended — because they got the reputation for always being late. Heck, when I've been in a position to hire writers, I turned down a few because of that.

As I noted in the recycled paragraphs way above, a writer who's late often has a hundred different excuses, some of them even valid ones. You can get by now and then but if it becomes a pattern, you will pay for it. Once you get a reputation for being constantly late, you'd better either (a) hand in something so much better than everyone else's writing that folks will say "he's a pain to work with but this was worth waiting for" or (b) apply for a job making Bacon Cheddar Melts at Arby's.

So learn to meet deadlines.  And I'm sorry I didn't post this a few days ago but I had a cold and then my car needed to be fixed…oh, and I had to drive a friend to a dentist appointment…

Like all popular game shows, Numberwang is produced all over the world in great many languages. Here's the German version…

Kevin Drum points out that for all the hysteria about government acting to make sure as many Americans as possible have health care, the only group that is strongly against it is wealthy Republicans.

And it's worth quoting what Drum predicts about what Trump is going to do to fulfill his promise of "something terrific" that will make sure everyone is covered…

Unfortunately, the answer is pretty obvious: he's going to propose a replacement plan that does hardly anything for anyone and then he's going to lie about it — loudly and relentlessly. Congressional Republicans will all join in, and the press will then report that the effect of the replacement plan is "controversial." Because, really, who can say what it does? All those numbers are pretty confusing, after all.