Kevin Meaney always made me laugh…

I had a great time last night seeing Robert Klein perform. More on this later today or maybe tomorrow. The guy's still got it.

I've been getting lots of entries in our contest to guess how many electoral votes Hillary Clinton will receive. A few folks do not seem to grasp that I'm asking how many you think she'll get, not how many you hope she'll get. A few folks also seem to not have read the part where I asked that you put your predicted vote total in the Subject line of your e-mail.

We have a few complaints that I didn't give you an opportunity to predict how many electoral votes Evan McMullin will win. McMullin is on the ballot in eleven states: Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Mexico, South Carolina, Utah, and Virginia but his campaign seems to only have a pulse in Utah. So it wouldn't be much of a game to guess how many electoral votes he's going to receive. He's either going to get six or zero.

No one complained my game doesn't have you predict how many electoral votes Gary Johnson and Jill Stein will win. I'd say they're each going to get somewhere between zero and zero.

Donald Trump says that if elected, he'd block the proposed merger of AT&T and Time-Warner. Y'know, if I thought he'd actually do it, that would be a point in his favor with me. So it would be like 1 in his favor and 378 against. If he banned cole slaw, it would be 2 and 377. If he banned candy corn, 3 and 376. If he made it a felony for contractors to call me up and hustle me for work, 4 and 375. If he made Jon Stewart go back to the Daily Show…

What I'm saying is that Trump still has a chance to get my vote. Or would if I hadn't already sent in my ballot.

In other news, he is listing the important, vital deeds he will do with his first 100 days in office. These include repealing Obamacare, securing our nation's borders and suing all the women who have come forth to say he did exactly what he said in that video that he like to do. He continues his policy of accusing others of what he himself is guilty of when he complains that with these women, there was "no fact-checking."

More later, including a rave for Robert Klein.

Real sad to hear about the death of comedian Kevin Meaney at age 60. His agent announced he was found dead in his home and no one seems to know yet what the cause was. But he was around sixty and he was a very funny man on stage. I thought he was great in short spots on programs like The Tonight Show but you had to see him live doing an hour or so to realize how good and how versatile he was. In five minute hunks, he did a lot of catch phrases and funny faces…but there was so much more to the guy.

I build a recurring character around his "scolding" voice on Garfield and Friends. He would have recurred more but he was in such demand as a stand-up comic that he was usually outta town somewhere. Whenever we could get him though, he livened up the shows and the recording sessions…and he always seemed to show up with some incredible story of what was going on his life.

One time, he told us he'd gone to Vegas, had way too much to drink and woke up married to a woman he barely knew. Another time was right after the 1994 Northridge Earthquake in Southern California. We recorded a few days later and Kevin told us all a harrowing tale of being on the freeway when the quake occurred and finding himself trapped between two overpasses that had fallen, blocking off any route off the freeway. We never knew how much to believe his tales but they were always very tragic and very funny at the same time.

At one point, I believe he gave up stand-up for a time and appeared on Broadway and elsewhere in the musical Hairspray. Not long after, he came out as gay, telling all that his experiences working with openly gay people in the theater had given him the courage to do that. I heard him on some cable talk show discussing it and, again, it was very tragic and very funny. A fascinating, gifted guy…and he never failed to make me laugh.

On my way to see one of my favorite comedians. It's this guy…

I shouldn't have made fun of my cable provider in a tweet. Since about the time I posted that, some (not all) e-mails sent to my personal address have been bouncing or otherwise not getting to me. The folks who are supposed to fix this will fix this as soon as they figure out how to fix this. Might be some time year after next.

• My cell is AT&T and my home internet connection is Time-Warner. They may merge so if I want to send any e-mails, I'd better send them now.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells discusses how much of Trump's rhetoric reveals the mind of a man who really, deep down, doesn't believe in Democracy.

Not long after the Iran-Contra hearings, the great comedy writer Larry Gelbart decided to try and see if he could top that absurdity and the use therein of the English language to deceive. He wrote Mastergate, a play that had a brief Broadway run of 69 performances but which has lived on via regional productions. There was also a radio drama version that starred Walter Matthau, Ed Asner, Harold Gould, Hector Elizondo and Charles Durning, plus there was a 1992 Showtime TV-Movie version which also had a helluva cast.

It presents to us the television news coverage of a series of Congressional hearings. On the spot is a soldier named Major Manley Battle who, not unlike Oliver North, arranges for some U.S. weapons to go someplace they weren't supposed to go — in this case to guerilla forces in Central America, ostensibly to use in filming a war movie.

But it's not just a parody of what went on with Iran-Contra but also of Watergate and the Joe McCarthy inquisition and every time our legislators sit before TV cameras pretending to seek some important truth from witnesses who do their best to reply without actually saying anything. Indeed, it even parodies hearings that have occurred since Gelbart wrote it. As the L.A. Times noted when the Showtime version was released…

"I feel that these kinds of situations are going to be with us forever with government, the military and business being as big as they are," said Gelbart, whose long list of credits includes creator of TV's M*A*S*H and Tony-winning writer of City of Angels. "But first and foremost, Mastergate is a play about the language. It's not for me to discover that politicians are corrupt or full of hot air. It's really about what they and television have done to the way we speak and the way we listen."

The dialogue is amazing…and difficult. Broadway singers have been known to say that the lyrics of Stephen Sondheim are wonderful but very, very challenging for the performer who has to perform them. The speeches, many of them lengthy that Gelbart wrote for Mastergate present the same challenge.

Wanna see it? Well, you can. Today, the video of the 1992 video version becomes available again. My buddy David Jablin who produced it has arranged for it to viewable for a small fee on Vimeo's On Demand service.

As I mentioned, it has an incredible cast that includes James Coburn, Robert Guillaume, Dennis Weaver, Bruno Kirby, Ed Begley Jr., Marcia Strassman, Darren McGavin, Henry Jones, Pat Morita, Tim Reid, Buck Henry, Jerry Ohrbach, Richard Kiley, David Ogden Stiers, Paul Winfield, Ken Howard and Ben Stein. Here's a preview that will make you want to see the whole thing…

You can view it on this page for $1.99 for a one-week streaming period or $9.95 for unlimited streaming. All proceeds go to Norman Lear's People For The American Way Foundation in memory of Larry Gelbart, who was a big supporter. It's 90 minutes of pure Gelbart wit.

• People keep saying "Trump has no respect for women" as if he has a whole lot for men who are not (a) fabulously successful or (b) him.

• Just had root canal work. More fun than watching the first and second presidential debates. About the same as the third.

Nate Silver obviously found out that I sent off my vote-by-mail ballot yesterday because he's ready to declare that Hillary Clinton has all but cinched the election. I wasn't going to claim sole credit for that but the timing is a little hard to overlook.

Worth quoting is when he says…

Clinton's win will have come by rather conventional means. Her big surges in the polls came following the conventions and the debates. She got the largest convention bounce of any candidate since at least 2000, and she won the debates by a clearer margin than any previous candidate in the six elections in which there were three debates that CNN polled.

Of course, this overlooks the release of the notorious Billy Bush tape which not only made Trump look like a sexist pig but also unleashed (because it made credible) a series of accusations by women…and I see the series continues with another one today. I'm curious to see how much of Hillary's victory the analysts say can be attributed to that. She was ahead before it came out but did it make a difference of one point? Two? Three?

Here's one more post about that musical number from the 1958 episode of The Steve Allen Show. If you haven't seen it yet, go watch it here before you watch the video below.

In 2013, a broadcast engineer named "Bob Z" who used to work at NBC Burbank took a video camera and attempted to replicate the path the performers followed from Stage 1 to Stage 4. Naturally, a lot of the geography there had changed since '58 with new walls erected but it's still a clear path. You'll see that in the video below which replays the old video with the new video as an inset. Take a look…

The amazing thing about this is that the '58 version was probably shot with an RCA TK-41 camera. Those old color cameras were heavy and bulky and they required a lot of light, especially for color — and this number was originally telecast in color. Still, the cameraman — probably with the help of a lot of crew members — moved it flawlessly backwards at a steady pace and it was properly lit almost every step of the way with only the tinest flash of cables. I still don't know where they had some speaker to play the pre-recorded audio back for the performers but they somehow pulled it off…on live TV.

One thing that puzzles some folks is which shows were in which studios. It was not always consistent. Stage 1 was where Johnny Carson taped and I don't think he was ever anywhere else in that building. Remember the famous time when Johnny took a camera across the hall and barged in on Don Rickles taping CPO Sharkey? CPO Sharkey was on Stage 3. In the video, you see Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme emerging from the corridor between Stage 1 and Stage 3. The make-up room and wardrobe department that served both stages was in that corridor along with some dressing rooms.

When I was prowling and trespassing at NBC in 1971-1973, Bob Hope was usually taping a special — the portions with an audience on Stage 1 and the portions without on Stage 3. Laugh-In used Stage 4 as its main stage but sometimes set up on 3. The Flip Wilson Show and The Dean Martin Show were usually on Stage 4, occasionally on Stage 2. The game shows taped on whatever stage was available. The original Hollywood Squares at one time or another was probably in every studio there except the one used for the local news. So was Tom Snyder when he did the Tomorrow show from there.

NBC Burbank was kind of a magical place in those days. The facility opened in March of 1955 and the network sold the place to a real estate firm in 2008 whereupon it was renamed Burbank Studios, which is what it's called today. The plan was to move all the shows then produced there over to the new NBC facility on the Universal Studios lot. Conan O'Brien's Tonight Show was done on Stage 1 at Universal but Ellen DeGeneres instead moved her afternoon talk show to the nearby Warner lot and Days of Our Lives remained at Burbank in Stage 4 which NBC leased back from the new owners.

Jay Leno started his Tonight Show in Stage 1 at Burbank where he'd guest-hosted for Johnny. Later, they decided he needed a new layout where he could be closer to the audience for his monologues. Since the seats in Stage 1 were fixed, they moved him across the hall to Stage 3 for the remainder of his first Tonight Show stint. He then did his short-lived 10 PM show on Stage 11, which had just been erected on the other side of the Burbank lot. Again, NBC leased space on its old lot from the new proprietors. When Jay returned to The Tonight Show, NBC wanted to move him into the stage Conan had used at Universal but (a) he was already set up with offices on Stage 11 in Burbank and (b) there was all that anger at Leno displacing O'Brien in that time slot and it might have made it worse had Jay displaced him in the studio that was sort of built for him. So Jay stayed on Stage 11 at Burbank.

The last time I was at the Burbank facility was one day when I had lunch with my buddy Wally Wingert, who was announcing The Tonight Show on Stage 11. I'll tell you when this was: One of Jay's guests that night was presidential candidate Ron Paul. Wally and I toured 11, then went to lunch at the commissary — formerly the infamous NBC Commissary and still not a good place to dine. Then I walked Wally through Stages 1, 3 and 4 and showed him where Johnny's desk had been, where Bob Hope did his monologues, where the Laugh-In joke wall was, etc. 3 and 4 were vacant that day but 1 was being used for an infomercial of some sort. It was a bit sad to feel the "ghost town" atmosphere of the place and to realize that nothing was going on there that was in the same league as what Carson, Hope, Dino, Steve Allen and so many others had done there. I doubt there'll ever be a studio like that again.

Jonathan Chait on "rigged elections" in this country. Actually, I don't think it's that horrendous that Trump refused to say whether or not he would respect the outcome of the election. True, there is a fever dream out there among some that any election that doesn't go their way is a fraud, a cheat, a crime, a theft of democracy, etc. Seeing a lot of lawn signs and bumper stickers and knowing how all your friends voted is, after all, an infallible way of knowing how the entire country voted.

But if you want to increase some folks' belief that their votes are not honestly counted, just spread the notion that they have to the accept the outcome without question, no matter what evidence might turn up of incompetence or skullduggery. Trump was wrong to say that he's sure it's rigged and that a million dead people are already in line to cast ballots or whatever he said. He's especially wrong when he defines "rigging" to include the media being against him since, first of all, it isn't as unanimous as he makes it out to be and secondly, to the extent it is, it's his own fault for attacking them, blatantly manipulating them and giving their fact-checkers so many fibs to itemize.

Also, lots of newspapers saying he'd make a dreadful president is legal. And not the same thing as deliberately miscounting ballots or manufacturing spurious votes.

Still, I think it's okay to wait until you see if there's any actual evidence of voter fraud before you promise to say the outcome in legit. What if Hillary somehow gets eighty zillion votes in Alaska? And anyway, Trump promising to accept the outcome of the voting is pointless since if it's closer than the polls now suggest, he won't validate it no matter what he says now. And he may not no matter what the official total says. This is Donald Trump, remember.

Ben Casselman offers a good recap of where the two candidates stood last night on certain key issues. And yes, I'm as amazed as anyone that they even talked about key issues.