This month, Turner Classic Movies is running a lot of films directed by W.S. Van Dyke and a lot of movies starring Marie Dressler. Remind me though to remind you later in the month that on June 28, they have an evening of Disney classics…and before that, on June 25, they're running a movie I haven't been able to see since I saw it in 1967 and liked it a lot. It's The Flim-Flam Man starring George C. Scott. I'm eager to see if it's as good now as it was then.

The whole month's schedule is here. They have a lot of good musicals including for some reason, the 1982 version of Sweeney Todd with Angela Lansbury and George Hearn. But this wasn't a movie, was it? I recall it as a videotaping of the stage production. Has TCM expanded its definition of the word "movie?"

MGM Resorts International owns the MGM Grand, New York-New York, Monte Carlo, Bellagio, Aria, Vdara, The Luxor, Circus Circus and a couple of other casino-hotels in Las Vegas. Starting any day now, those businesses will be charging for parking. If you want to drive to one of these palaces, park your car and then go in and gamble away your life's savings (and your car), it will cost you money just to stash your vehicle somewhere — up to $10 a day or $18 if you valet.

But not everyone. If you're a member of their loyalty program and you've racked up sufficient points by playing a lot at their hotels, you can earn free parking status. If you're a Nevada resident, you can park for free, though there are two catches to that. One is that they seem to be hinting that that's temporary; that later on, they'll be charging Nevadans too. The other catch is that you have to let them scan your drivers license to prove residency. Some folks have privacy concerns there.

Also, there's no charge for parking for under one hour, just in case you want to go there, lose the house and then go home to the house you don't own anymore. You folks won't have to pay.

This last is the part I really don't get. I don't get why a company — which knows you can go to a competitor and play the same slot machines without paying for parking, would insist you pay for parking. But I especially don't understand why if you do go to the Bellagio or Aria or any of these places of worship, they would give you an incentive to not stay more than sixty minutes.

Vegas was built on the concept that the longer you stay on their premises, the more of your money they get. Great effort goes into figuring out ways to get you to not leave. The simplest are the deals like they have at Binion's Casino downtown. There, you can get a free photo of yourself with a million dollars in cash. The catch, of course, is that they take the photo and then you have to wait around a half-hour for it to be "processed." In that thirty minutes, most folks lose enough money to more than make up for the cost of those "free" photos.

So why does MGM Resorts want to give you an incentive to leave? Or to not come in the first place? The only thing I can imagine is this: The costs of most things in Vegas have gone up — in some cases, a lot; way more than mere inflation. The showrooms discovered that raising ticket prices to shows did not impact patronage that much…and when it did, it was easy to spread around coupons during the slow periods. So instead of charging $30 to see our show, we charge $60 and then discount it to $40 or even $30 when we have to. Tourists have also not rebelled a lot against the new "resort fees" that most hotels charge. The cheapest rooms at the Excalibur Hotel there are $28 plus — and they add this in tiny type — a resort fee of $29.12 per night. Folks pay it, gleeful that they scored a room for $28 and ignore the fact that they're really paying more than twice that.

I guess someone has just decided to see if they can make money off parking without it affecting business. I wouldn't be surprised if they can.

Weekend's over! Time to think about Donald Trump some more…

Jonathan Chait points out that the Trump opponents starting riots against Trump supporters are only helping Trump. They certainly aren't helping democracy.

If you want to know what this Trump University thing is all about, read this article by Steven Brill from last November and this article by Joe Mullin and Jonathan Kaminsky about how the whole enterprise got started. What a sleazy enterprise.

And William Saletan points out that it isn't so much that Trump is a racist but that he likes to exploit racist sentiments, especially when he's in trouble.

Lastly, in Non-Trump News: Bill Kristol, the man who's always wrong, said he had a great third party candidate lined-up to run against Trump and Clinton. That man, conservative writer David French, now says he's not running. Kristol is off looking for someone else and I'm sitting here, waiting for my phone to ring.

My favorite Muhammad Ali moment: The lighting of the Olympic Torch, 1996…

Matt Taibbi reminds us that Muhammad Ali was more than just a great athlete. He was also an outspoken critic of the Vietnam War and the man whose refusal to be drafted changed the way a lot of people looked at that war and the draft.

I used to be one of the writers of That's Incredible! One day, we booked a very special guest star…a man who according to surveys was then the most famous living human being on the face of this planet and also, I believe, the most admired. It was Muhammad Ali.

I don't know if I can possibly convey, in this short a space, how admired this man was and is…how much more important he has been to lives and to history than your average, garden-variety World Heavyweight Champion. I am not even sure I fully understand it, myself. Suffice it to say no other athlete will probably ever be held in the awe and reverence that a generation or two reserves for Muhammad Ali. The day he appeared on our show, everyone was excited. Everyone was concerned that it go well. We always cared about that but we cared a lot more since it was Ali.

During the afternoon rehearsals before he arrived, a little question came up, namely, "How do you address him?" "Muhammad?" "Mr. Ali?" What? (When someone asked me this, I answered, "Sir." It didn't get a laugh and it didn't satisfy anyone.) There had recently been some sort of incident on the news where Ali had snapped at a reporter who addressed him by his first name, as if they were bosom buddies. Everyone, obviously, wanted to avoid a similar situation on our stage.

Our show was hosted by John Davidson, Fran Tarkenton and Cathy Lee Crosby. Fran is no small figure in the Sports Hall of Fame himself. Many of the records he racked up as a Quarterback for the Minnesota Vikings may never be broken. He may not be as singularly-honored in football as Ali has been in boxing but Fran is and was certainly a super-sports star in his own right. He had met our guest on several occasions and always addressed him as a peer, as "Muhammad."

Cathy Lee Crosby had a not-undistinguished sports career of her own in the tennis world. I'm not sure if she said it or if one of her associates said it but it came down to this: If Fran was going to address our guest by his first name, she would, too. Naturally then, John Davidson didn't want to be the only one addressing our guest as Mr. Ali.

I know this sounds trivial but…well, welcome to Television. On the other hand, if you're doing a show, getting someone like Muhammad Ali to drop in and tape an appearance is a major coup and no one wanted to be the one to muck it up. Some members of the crew — like the make-up lady and the Stage Manager — also approached me and asked how they should address the former Heavyweight Champion of the World.

I went for a little walk to try and think of a solution. Outside the studio, I ran into Ali's advance man, whom I had met earlier, and I asked him how people addressed his boss. He gave me a wonderful, brilliant answer…

You just call him, "Champ."

Who could object to that? What man who had ever stepped into a boxing ring and won could be offended at being called "Champ?" I ran back in and told everyone, "Call him Champ!" Everyone liked the notion.

That evening, a limo pulled up and Muhammad Ali got out, looking every inch The Greatest. The man who opened the door for him said, "Good evening, Champ!"

Our producer ran up to greet him: "Great to have you here, Champ!"

John, Fran and Cathy Lee hurried over and welcomed him: "Thanks for coming, Champ!" "It's an honor to have you here, Champ." "Hey, you look great, Champ." Ali seemed pleased but we couldn't be sure.

I spent some time with him going over what he'd be doing on the show and I called him "Champ." He asked, by the way, that he not be too prepped. He said, "It's better if it's spontaneous."

Everyone wanted to meet him and everyone treated him like a superstar. I've been around some pretty famous, successful people and I can't think of one who matched him in sheer luminance. You just felt you were around someone very, very important. Maybe "significant" would be a better word.

I should have thought to keep count of how many times he was called "Champ" but I'm sure it was at least once a minute, maybe twice. All the way out of the building, across the street for dinner at Roscoe's House of Chicken and Waffles and then back to the limo, it was "Champ This" and "Champ That." The only two times his real name was heard during his visit were (a) when the hosts introduced him on the show and (b) when an Associate Producer noted for her huge chest ran over to meet him and I muttered something about the mountains going to Muhammad.

The next day, Ali's advance man came around to pass out some autographed photos that The Champ had promised folks. I asked him if Ali had any reaction to everyone calling him "Champ" like that so abundantly.

"It's funny," Ali's man said. "He was a little touched by it…he took it as everyone's way of saying that even though someone else currently has the belt, as far as we're concerned, you'll always be The Champ."

"That's nice," I said. "Don't ever tell him that everyone called him that because we didn't know what else to call him."

"Hell, no," the guy said. "I want to keep my job and my teeth."

Here's another number from L.A. Now and Then, the fine revue I wrote about here. The show's creator Bruce Kimmel has great feelings for C.C. Brown's, an ice cream parlor that was on Hollywood Boulevard that was beloved for its hot fudge sundaes. Legend has it that its founder Mr. Brown (the C.C. stood for Clarence Clifton) invented the hot fudge sundae. Well, maybe. They served a great one…though now that I think of it, I don't think I ever had not-great one anywhere and…

Well, okay. I'll risk getting Bruce mad at me and say it: I was never a big fan of hot fudge sundaes and when I did have one, I usually thought it was just too much dessert to be consumed in the amount of time you had before it all melted into something runny and problematic. Also, the fudge so overpowered the ice cream, you could have poured it on a ball of chilled Minute Rice and had much the same dining experience.

My fave H.F.S.? The now-defunct (in L.A.) restaurant Ed Debevic's used to serve what they called "The World's Smallest Hot Fudge Sundae." It came in a tiny cup, cost $1.95 I think and was consumable in two small bites. It was, for me, the perfect after-dinner bonus and, matters of size aside, it wasn't much different from the ones at C.C. Brown's. Here's Robert Yacko singing about another lost landmark in the City of Angels…

Hello. I'm back. I was away. Yesterday, I took an Amtrak train up to Santa Barbara where my buen amigo Sergio Aragonés and I spoke to a class of undergraduates who are maybe-perhaps interested in careers in the entertainment industry. This was at the University of California, Santa Barbara where the class is taught by my longtime pal, Cheri Steinkellner. Cheri knows the field well. She and her husband Bill are Emmy-winning TV writers and producers (Cheers, The Jeffersons, many others), Tony-nominated playwrights (Sister Act) and they've done loads of other impressive things.

The class seemed to enjoy hearing about Sergio's and my careers, together and apart…and they enjoyed watching us do a mini-version of the Quick Draw! game we do at Comic-Con. Afterwards, Sergio and I went to dinner with Bill, Cheri and two of their friends. Sergio went home. I spent the night at the Steinkellners' lovely home and then today, Bill drove me back home to Los Angeles. And that's where the heck I've been.

I'm taking the weekend off from thinking/writing about the presidential election. I wish I could take June, July and August off as well but I'll probably be back following the thing by Monday. Tomorrow, I have a Muhammad Ali anecdote to share with you.

• "We need credibility in the political arena. Let's hire the guy who was so certain Romney would win in a landslide!" http://tinyurl.com/za7nwub

For those of you new to this blog: A mushroom soup day means that I may be too busy to post much today. What does that have to do with mushroom soup? I may also be too busy today to figure that out.

So what's up with the Trump News? He and his staff continue to throw reporters out of campaign rallies and Trump continues to make promises about controlling the media. All of this is loudly cheered by that certain section of the population that doesn't like it when the press — as it occasionally does — points out that people are believing things that may not be true.

As Fred Kaplan notes, Hillary Clinton is starting to show that when Trump slams her, she can slam him back pretty well. I smell a battle ahead when it comes time for these two folks to debate and Trump tries to control the format and moderators to his advantage. He'll do that, you know.

A lot of Mr. Trump's business practices remind me of a TV producer I worked for who viewed every business relationship as a negotiation…and every negotiation as a battle which he had to "win" in some way. If he was prepared to pay me $5000 to write a script and my agent called up and said, "Mark wants $5000," that wouldn't do. Any other producer would have said "Fine" but this guy wouldn't because he had to control the negotiation. He had to dominate it some way and make certain that I was giving in to his offer. So in that case, if we thought he was prepared to pay me $5000, my agent would say, "Mark demands $6000 or he won't do the show" and the producer or his rep would say "$5000 and not a penny more" and we'd give in. He'd be happy because he'd be able to pretend he beat me. He'd even be happy if we'd demanded $7000 and his guy got us to come down to $5500.

It was all about who's the boss and that's how Trump rolls. Watch. When they begin to plan the debates, he'll try to play things so that he can tell his supporters, "She was so desperate to debate me that she gave in to my demands."

Meanwhile, one of the things occupying me at the moment is planning the panels I'll be hosting at Comic-Con this year. The schedule seems to be pretty much set — a fact I mention because people always contact me in June and even early July to ask if I can help them arrange a panel or event they want to do at the con. That's wrong two ways, the first being that the convention has a whole, expert Programming Department and I'm not part of it. I'm just a guy who does a lot of panels there. Also, the schedule gets set around two months before the con and there's very little chance of events being added after that. I have to now figure out who's going to be on my panels but the times, room assignments and such are all pretty much locked.

The schedule and event descriptions will be released about two weeks before the convention. We're not supposed to announce things before that but I think it's okay if I tell you that I'm hosting all the same panels I usually host — at the same times and in the same rooms — plus some others.

Lastly before I get outta here: Some jokes just write themselves. This is a true item…

The National ENQUIRER today announced that renowned Author and Political Commentator Dick Morris would be joining the magazine in the role of Chief Political Commentator & Correspondent. The appointment of Morris to the editorial team further establishes The ENQUIRER as one of the leading voices of this political season.

It's a match made in heaven: A newspaper and a reporter, both of whom are constantly defended with the cry, "Hey, they're not always wrong." Except, of course, that Dick Morris is. See you later.

My favorite musical group, Big Daddy, is back with a music video of their interpretation of the song, "New York, New York" — a version that will probably send John Kander to his grave and cause Fred Ebb to roll over in his. But maybe not. I prefer Big Daddy's arrangement of the tune over Frank Sinatra's.

Big Daddy, in case you didn't know, is a group founded on the principle that the only acceptable sound is the fifties sound…so when they come across a song that doesn't sound like a fifties song, they fix it so that it does. If you're anywhere near Burbank, California and you'd like to hear them performing live, they're playing on Friday evening, June 24 at the Burbank Music Academy. Tickets can be purchased on this site. They'll be doing lots of great songs including perhaps even this one…

Former Bush speechwriter David Frum lists all sorts of things Trump does that a presidential candidate is not supposed to do — and with good reason. The worst is probably this one…

Trump is running not to be president of all Americans, but to be the clan leader of white Americans. Those white Americans who respond to his message hear his abusive comments, not as evidence of his unfitness for office, but as proof of his commitment to their tribe.

Nice of Frum to spell "clan" with a C instead of a K there. And while I'm at it, I'll link you to Jeffrey Toobin explaining how Trump doesn't understand how the Supreme Court works. He only understands that those who support Donald Trump must be rewarded and those who oppose him must be slapped down hard.

Bernie Sanders keeps vowing to fight all the way to the convention. Matthew Yglesias thinks he won't; that before it convenes, Sanders will face the reality of numbers, drop out of the race and endorse Hillary Clinton. That seems like the most likely scenario to me…though I do keep in mind that a lot of most likely scenarios have not happened with this election. I just can't imagine how Sanders can have any sort of effective future in politics if he doesn't do that…and he hasn't been running his campaign to become ineffective.

Then again, it might not be as neat as all that. The polls for California are still all over the place. The latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal/Marist poll has Clinton at 49% and Sanders at 47%, which is within the survey's margin of error…in effect, a tie. Okay — but even if Sanders wins California, he won't have more delegates than Clinton, nor will more Democrats have voted for him. His path to the nomination would still involve persuading the so-called "Superdelegates" to switch their allegiance from the candidate with the most delegates and the most votes from rank-and-file Democrats to the guy who finished second in both categories. Hard to imagine that happening.

The Marx Brothers made their Broadway debut in a 1924 revue called I'll Say She Is. They did two other Broadway shows — The Cocoanuts and Animal Crackers — which were made into movies and otherwise had lives after they closed in New York…but I'll Say She Is disappeared, never to be seen again. Well, not until recently when a gent named Noah Diamond led the way to bring it back, first in a 2014 workshop production and now in a fully-staged off-Broadway production which opens tonight.

Since I'm in Los Angeles and it's at the Connelly Theater on East 4th Street in New York, I won't be seeing it any time soon…but of course, we're quite intrigued by the whole project. This article by Adam Gopnik makes it sound pretty wonderful but it also makes it sound like the folks behind it only found a few pieces of the original script and score and so have had to make up a lot of it anew. That doesn't mean it isn't a good show. It just makes us wonder how much of what they present is what the Brothers Marx did back in '24.

(One error in the article: Gopnik writes of the search for pieces of the material and discusses "…a version of the Napoleon scene that had, improbably, been made into a rather mediocre episode in a long-forgotten, cheaply made cartoon special in 1970, with the very elderly Groucho supplying his lines and Hans Conried doing the other brother's voices." That was The Mad, Mad, Mad Comedians produced by Rankin-Bass back then and while Groucho did supply his own voice, the other guy wasn't Hans Conried. It was Paul Frees. Paul did a better Chico Marx than Chico Marx. I linked to a copy of the show back here.)

Anyway, I hope the show's terrific. I also hope that the publicity about it causes someone someplace to think, "Hey, I think I have an old, complete script called I'll Say She Is in my attic…"

Keith Olbermann on how the media goes too easy on Donald Trump because he's good for their ratings. I doubt there are many folks in the business who would disagree with his premise even as they commit the crime.