Michelle Nicastro was a wonderful singer-actress who was part of the Los Angeles musical comedy scene. She left us at way too early an age. Here she is singing the hell out of a great song from the under-noticed musical, Smile…

Everyone cares about current outrages but not many of us care about old ones. I care a lot about this one…

Some pretty solid new evidence has emerged that while the 1968 Presidential Election was in full swing, then-President Johnson was on the verge of brokering a deal that might have ended the Vietnam War then and there. But since that might have helped Hubert Humphrey win the presidency, his rival Richard Nixon sabotaged that deal.

If that's true, that's one of the worst things a human being — and certainly a person who won the presidency — ever did.

It's Treason with a capital-T — real treason, not using the word the way we do now in politics as a charge any time any political opponent does anything you don't like. People found guilty of a lot less have been stood up against a wall and shot by a firing squad…and they got off easy.

Now, I understand that it's sometimes difficult to summon up emotions about long-ago deeds and long-dead people…but we do. The Holocaust still matters to some people. So does the assassination of John F. Kennedy and a few others. This one strikes me as something that's deserving of more than a shrug and a head-shake. But that's probably about all it will get from many Americans who are more upset about Steve Martin tweeting that he thought Carrie Fisher was beautiful.

Republicans have been vowing to destroy Obamacare and replace it with, in the words of the incoming Oval Office Occupant, "something terrific." But after years and years of vowing to come up with a better system, they still have no idea what that something will be. As Jonathan Chait notes, anything that would be as good as Obamacare (let alone better) would do all the same things that they find so loathsome about Obamacare…except that Obama wouldn't get the credit for it.

This would almost be funny except for the possibility of so many people suffering and dying in the transition process to whatever we wind up with. It'll probably be something called Trumpcare, which will be Obamacare with a coat of cheap gold paint and massive increases in the deficit.

• Well, no celebrities died on the first day of 2017 so we'll put a hundred dollars in the jackpot…

You know the movie Red River? That's right: The 1948 western starring John Wayne and Montgomery Clift, directed by Howard Hawks. Well, if you know the film, you might also know there was a controversy about its ending and there still is. There are two versions and you could make a good case that either is the "correct" one. My buddy Michael Schlesinger recently wrote a good essay for the Library of Congress about all this and you can read and/or download a PDF of that article here.

Here's another approach to the song from Sweet Charity, "The Rhythm of Life." This one sings the original lyrics — or at least they sing some of them. Part of the performance is in another language…Welsh, I think. It was jazzed up for what I believe is a British TV show that's like The Voice but it's choirs instead of individual singers…

I started to write a post here about what might be in store for us this year from the new order of the government but it got too speculative and depressing so I hit the delete key. Why sour a perfectly good new year before you have to?

Then again, I am not one of those folks who think that we start each year with a clean slate and the chance to build something new. To the extent you can do that at all, you can start just as readily on September 23 or July 9 or October 14 or any day. So far this morning, the most constructive thing I've done is to write in "2017" on the first dozen or so checks in my checkbook. At least I won't get that wrong for a while.

I think we sometimes get too hung up on this "new year" concept. A long time ago, I shared an office with a writer who smoked incessantly. It was as bad an addiction as you've ever seen and he knew he had to quit…so he kept saying, "I'll quit January 1." He was saying this in March. It was an excuse for not quitting March 13 which, as I pointed out to him, was a perfectly acceptable date to quit smoking also. He said, "No, it's easier to quit the first of the year" as he lit up another.

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Apparently, last night on a live TV broadcast, there were tech problems that screwed up Mariah Carey's performance. Some people this morning are way too happy about seeing a star embarrassed.

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A couple of folks have written to suggest I write about Tyrus Wong. Mr. Wong was an artist of Chinese heritage who at one point in a rough (but long) life worked for Walt Disney and there had a lot to do with the beauty and success of Bambi. It's an extraordinary story but I know nothing about him that isn't properly covered in obits like this one. So I direct you there.

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I have a very busy week ahead. I hope the long post yesterday will make up for the short posts that may fill this site for the next few days. And I thank all the folks who made year-end (or year-starting) donations to this blog. Since I switched to a new hosting company, I think we've been "down" a grand total of about ten minutes as opposed to much longer intervals at the first two hosting companies where I had this thing parked. The new company is quite expensive so donations (or using our Amazon links) are most appreciated. See you later.

• Good morning. Anything better yet?

I'm hesitant to say this is the last obit I'll post here in 2016 because we still have more than four hours to go but I want to say something about William Christopher, who made it to the age of 84 before leaving us. You, of course, know him as Father Mulcahy on the TV series, M*A*S*H…and I want to make a point about you knowing him as Father Mulcahy on the TV series, M*A*S*H.

Most people who decide to become actors never become famous and that includes a lot who work constantly. Mr. Christopher might have been one of those actors. He worked a lot — I remember him playing a doctor in The Fortune Cookie with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon — but he got on M*A*S*H so you know who he was.

His co-star Jamie Farr was another one of those actors. He worked all the time in movies and television for the same reason Christopher did. He was good and he was reliable and those who did the casting knew they could count on him. (In the Doris Day movie, With Six You Get Eggroll, there's a brief scene with two stoned-out hippies. The stoned-out hippies were played by Jamie Farr and William Christopher, years before M*A*S*H.)

If Mr. Christopher hadn't landed the role of Father Mulcahy, he still would have worked a lot and done good work but you'd never be able to explain to people who he was. He'd be "that guy you see on TV all the time."

I never met William Christopher. Our pal Ken Levine who was producer on M*A*S*H, says "A sweeter, nicer, more gentle man you'd never find. He was an absolute pleasure to work with. And he took a thankless role and turned it into a vibrant character." I never heard anyone say otherwise.

So I have no anecdotes about the guy. I just wanted to say I think it's great that he landed the job that led to us all knowing who he was. He deserved it.  He was great on that series.

Tonight, my friends Stu Shostak and Jeanine Kasun, together with broadcaster Ronnie Paul, are doing a LIVE! six-hour New Year's Eve broadcast from Fresno, California. They're having on guests and contests and clips of classic television and it runs from 7 PM (West Coast Time) until 1 AM.

If you live in Fresno or surrounding areas, you can watch it on your very own television on Channel 43.5. If you don't, you can stream it on the web on the Stu's Show website, on the website of Cocola Broadcasting or on the UStream website. Oh — and for the length of the show, I'll be streaming it below.

(Also: If you have a Roku TV, you may be able to watch it there. This page will tell you how if you want to try.)

I will be a guest via Skype for, I believe, the first half of the final hour. I think we're going to discuss late night TV and Stephen Colbert…but then again, Stu may just ask me whether Peter Potamus eats cole slaw or something. Hope you can make it to the party and that someone in your house is prepared to function as Designated Driver. Here's either the live feed or a little graphic telling you it's over…

Woody Allen reviews a new graphic novel by Edward Sorel. I haven't seen the book yet but I sure hope it's half as entertaining as Mr. Allen's (rave) review.

Fred Kaplan on the sanctions Obama is putting in place against Russia because of the hacking…or maybe I should say "alleged" hacking. I have no idea about any of this and it wouldn't make much difference if I did.

Leif Erikkson was an Icelandic explorer best known (probably only known) for having "discovered" North America long before Christopher Columbus. I guess word of what Erikkson had found didn't get around much or people didn't grasp what it was he'd located so when that Columbus guy happened upon what we now know as a separate continent, he was able to "discover" America all over again.

Which of them really deserves the credit? Here's my absolutely correct answer: I don't care. Doesn't matter to me in the slightest. This article is not about that at all. It's about Pauline Binder. That's not her real name, of course.

When I was back in Elementary School though, I and a number of my classmates would fervently argue that it was Columbus. Why? Because it made our fellow student Pauline Binder mad and we hated Pauline Binder.

There was a reason the other kids hated Pauline Binder and a slightly different reason I hated Pauline Binder. I'll tell you my reason later. They hated her because, as some of them put it, "She thinks she's smarter than we are."

And why would she think that? Well, maybe because she was. Pauline was a real smart young lady. She was even smarter than I was and I was pretty smart.

Way back in this post, I told the story of how I was repeatedly skipped ahead in grades when I was at Westwood Elementary School. What I didn't mention then is that a girl named Pauline Binder was also skipped a couple of times. Some semesters, we were in sync. The counselor who came to the school every few months to test me and check on how I was doing would on the same visits also test her and check on how she was doing.

Pauline and I talked about all this once in a while and as it turned out, we were both unhappy with the skipping. What was the big hurry to get us out of school? Why was it more important than us having friends?

I didn't like being younger than almost anyone else in my class and I didn't like the mixed-blessing label of Class Brain and I didn't like that I had skipped the classes wherein kids were taught certain social skills and how to play certain playground games. I eventually figured most of them out but it took a while and during that while, I was a bit of a freak or outcast among my peers. Pauline had the same problem only worse.

As I said, every few months, this nice counselor lady would come to the school, call each of us out of class for a few hours — Pauline in the morning, me in the afternoon — and make sure we were (a) keeping up academically with the older students and (b) getting along socially and were happily fitting in with others. The answer to the first question for both of us was always yes.

The answer to the second question was always no but that didn't seem to change anything. In our separate sessions, Pauline and I would each tell the counselor lady that we weren't fitting in and that we were somewhere between "unhappy" and "miserable" in that regard. No matter what we said — and Pauline would usually start crying and telling how everyone else hated her — the counselor lady would say, "Well, that will stop soon. I'll see you again in two months."

Pauline was unhappier in her position than I was for three reasons. One was that I had a good memory for all the jokes and silly things I read in comic books or heard on TV. I could sometimes interject one at the right moment and make my classmates laugh. Pauline had no sense of humor whatsoever. In fact, she seemed to be pretty dour most of the time.

Another was that my passion for cartoons had led me to learn how to approximately draw a lot of my favorite characters. Other kids would come up to me on the playground and say, "Jimmy said you can draw Popeye. Can you really draw Popeye?" So I'd pull out a pen and draw Popeye on their book cover — not at all that well but impressive given my age and lack of art training — and they'd think I had a bit of a super-power. I drew a lot of Popeyes and Huckleberry Hounds and Charlie Browns.

And thirdly, if someone picked on me, I could usually do a semi-decent job of not showing the hurt and once I'd done that, gracefully fleeing the situation. Pauline would cry and scream and argue and just put on an incredible tantrum show. Some kids thought it was a lot of fun to get Pauline Binder upset.

I'm not big on that kind of "amusement." I don't like ugly confrontations. I don't like practical jokes except occasionally (and only occasionally) when they're the kind the "victim" will genuinely laugh about. As I got older, I began to get zero pleasure from the pain of others, even people I might think deserve some.

Around the time that many of my classmates thought the greatest sport was not handball but taunting Pauline Binder, some of the boys had another favorite activity — making prank phone calls. They'd gather at the home of one of the guys whose parents were out and take turns. One classmate had a reel-to-reel tape recorder he'd take everywhere and he also had a little suction-cup device that enabled the (illegal, I guess) taping of phone calls. So they'd take turns making the calls, then play them back so everyone else could hear how upset and angry and hysterical the person on the other end of the line got.

There was no wit in these calls, no attempt at anything clever. The idea was just to say hurtful and/or dirty things from behind the shield of anonymity and to get someone pissed-off. I never thought this was fun or funny but in a misguided attempt to "be one of the guys," if I was invited to the party, I went. And since the guys I wanted to have accept me were laughing, I laughed — or at least I pretended to. Like I said, I never thought pissing people off was funny. Not even when I was ten.

Mostly, they called strangers at random, making careful note of their numbers. If they lucked onto someone who got really, really hysterical, they'd want to call that person back and do it to them again. The targets were usually more upset the second, third, fourth and especially the fifth time.

At some point, one of the guys might say, "Hey, Mark hasn't made a call yet. Give Mark the phone!" And suddenly, I'd be on the spot to call some old lady and ask her how many wee-wees she'd sucked lately. I really didn't want to do this. I was just there to try and fit in with other boys my age.

Fortunately, I figured out a way out. When they shoved the phone to me and gave me a number to call, I'd only pretend to dial that number. Actually, I'd dial the number of the phone from which I was calling. Naturally, I got a busy signal and I'd hold the receiver out so the other guys could hear it.

I'd say, "She either took the phone off the hook or she's calling the police on us" and everyone in the room with me believed it. No one was afraid of the cops busting in the door to cart us off to the slammer. We all felt unidentifiable and untouchable over the phone. But everyone would just shrug and maybe joke about how Evanier had such bad luck…every time he dialed, the line was busy. And then someone else would call someone else. My friends never caught on to my little trick.

Told you I was smart.

But not smart enough than it didn't take me a while to make the connection between the victims of these calls and Pauline Binder. The adults who were targeted because they got the most upset weren't bright enough to just hang up the phone when they realized it was one of those damn kids again. There was no fun calling someone who didn't let the guys hear their upset and anger.

Similarly, Pauline — as smart as she was — wasn't smart enough to not cry and get furious and put on a show that only invited more picking-upon-her.

This was during the period when you could get Pauline real upset if you told her Christopher Columbus and not Leif Erikkson had discovered America. So other students kept doing it just to start the show and enliven a recess period. She'd shriek and sob and yell, "No, no, no! How many times do I have to tell you?" Then when she was all worked-up, they'd tell her she was ugly and they all hated her and she'd run off in tears to the principal's office or somewhere just to get away from her tormentors.

There are a number of things I did when I was younger of which I'm now ashamed. Heck, there are things I did last Tuesday of which I'm now ashamed. But looking back at my days at Westwood Elementary, I may be most ashamed that I joined-in on the picking on Pauline Binder. As I said, the other kids did it because Pauline was so snotty about being smarter than them. That's what started it but it was perpetuated by how upset she got and how much fun it was to make her cry.

I did it — and here comes that reason that I promised earlier — because I wanted the other kids to think I was more like them and less like her. After all, I'd been skipped a couple of grades like she had. I could be viewed as "Class Brain" like she was. There but for the grace of Popeye went I…so I joined in the tormenting —

— until one day I made that connection. I couldn't pick on the anonymous victims of the gang's "funny" phone-calling and I realized I couldn't pick on Pauline Binder. One day at recess when others sent her crying and running off to a secluded part of the playground, I followed her. "Leave me alone," she screamed at me through very real tears.

"I came to say I'm sorry," I said. "Sorry for what they said and sorry for the other day when I joined in."

She looked at me in a way that made me sure I'd done the right thing. Then she said — and this is a quote, I remember this conversation vividly — "Nobody ever said they were sorry to me. Ever."

And she stopped crying.

We sat on a bench and talked for a while. She asked, "Why do they always pick on me?" and I told her, "It's because the way you get angry is funny to them." Pauline was a very bright young lady but somehow, that had not occurred to her.

I explained to her about the stupid phone calls and because she was so bright, she understood instantly what I was telling her and what she had to learn from it. She said, "I had it backwards. I kept thinking that if they saw how much they were hurting me, they'd stop." But she didn't think she could stop getting upset when they kept saying Christopher Columbus, not Leif Erikson, had discovered America. That was really a big thing to her.

I said, "Why should you care if they're wrong? Some of these kids get F's on their arithmetic tests. Are you upset because Fred Stein thinks eight times seven is 53?"

That was part of what I did to solve Pauline's problem and make myself feel like I was undoing some pain I'd inflicted. The other part started later that day at lunch period. I went around to some of the kids who'd been insulting her and said, "Hey, let's stop picking on Pauline Binder. She's not hurting anybody." Every single student I said that to said some version of "Sure. I'm just doing it because everyone else does."

So maybe my reason for hating her wasn't that much different from their reason for hating her.

Not everyone stopped right away but some did…and the ones who tried to get her upset found that she didn't put on quite as good a show as she once had. So most of the problem went away and Pauline thanked me over and over for years to come. I felt a lot better too, especially after I stopped joining in when Donny said, "Hey, my folks will be away all Saturday. You wanna come over and we'll make some phone calls?"

I can look back at my life and list all sorts of stupid things I've said and done. If I were to write a post here about each one, we'd have to get another Internet because I'd fill this one to capacity. Fortunately, I can also point to moments when I realized some of those things were stupid or destructive (and that includes self-destructive) and had the smarts to stop and when possible, undo whatever could be undone. This has been the story of just one…the time I corrected my behavior and helped Pauline Binder.

The next time I write one of these, I'll tell the story of how Pauline's problem got worse in high school…and how I couldn't help her there. Nobody could.

There are a lot of fonts around that one can use to letter comic books in a manner that looks kinda like the old, hand-lettered ones.  Most of these fonts are pretty bad in design and even worse in spacing and leading.  Here and there, you'll find some good ones but you'll find a lot of good ones being offered by Comicraft, the folks who practically invented lettering comics on a computer.

At times, their fonts are pricey but New Year's Day — and only for New Year's Day — they price them as per the year. So tomorrow, they're all $20.17 per font. That includes some that usually sell for a lot more and even a few that normally sell for $19. If you have any thought of purchasing any of their fine fonts, this would be the wise time to do that. Their website is where you do this and you can also learn a lot there about how to use them effectively.

If you're smart, you'll stay in tonight. Drunk drivers will be out and it won't help their navigation that it's going to be raining in much of the country. Also, New Year's Eve parties usually suck. At least, the ones I've been to did…people trying way too hard to have a good time as they drastically overstate how bad the last year was and how nothing bad can possibly happen in the new one.

So if you're smart, you'll stay home. If you're really smart, you'll spend the evening watching as Stu Shostak and his lovely spouse Jeanine commandeer Ronnie Paul's late night TV show that comes out of Fresno, California…with the participation of Ronnie, of course. They're bringing in celebrity guests, games, prizes, classic TV clips, discussion about the world of entertainment and they're doing it live from Fresno for six whole hours! I've written prime-time network shows that didn't last six whole hours.

It starts at 7 PM West Coast Time and runs until 1 AM. Your hosts will be welcoming, among other folks, Jimmy Garrett from The Lucy Show and other programs, Beverly Washburn from Star Trek and other programs, Jeannie Russell from Dennis the Menace, TV historian Steve Beverly and animation authority Jerry Beck. A little after Midnight, they will dial the definition of "celebrity guest" down low enough to pass me off as one. Stu and I will be talking about late night TV…or something.

If you live in Fresno or surrounding areas, you can watch it on your very own television on Channel 43.5. If you don't, you can stream it on the web on the Stu's Show website, on the website of Cocola Broadcasting or on the UStream website. Or you can just come to this page because I'll be streaming it on this site. I don't have to give you a link to that. You know how you got here.

(Also: If you have a Roku TV, you may be able to watch it there. This page will tell you how.)

I don't know how this is going to go. I don't think Stu, Jeanine or Ronnie do, either. Tune in and we'll all find out at the same time.