I posted this last week and didn't get much response, which is odd for this blog. So, one more time…

Hey, I've been playing around with the GoPro Hero4 Silver video camera — one of these. It's a great little camera but I'd like to minimize the "fisheye" look it gives to people when you shoot them close up…like in the same zip code.

I find conflicting advice on the Internet. Does anyone reading this know the camera well enough to advise me? I know there are programs for the MAC that can correct the imagery but I'm a Windows kinda guy.

…athough come to think of it, I never told you I was gone. Monday, the 104° temperatures in my part of Los Angeles weren't quite bad enough so I jumped on a Southwest flight to Las Vegas, where it was 115°. Five degrees hotter than that and you would have seen half the showgirls' chests there melt.

…although come to think of it, I don't think there are any more showgirls in Las Vegas; not since Jubilee! closed at Bally's. Never mind that. Actually, I went there for the Licensing Show, an annual event where licensors (folks with characters or properties or even well-known trademarks) interface with licensees (folks who pay money to put those characters, properties and trademarks onto merchandise.) I am neither licensor nor licensee but I had business-type meetings with a couple of each so I Southwested there Monday afternoon.

The above photo is not from this trip. I didn't take any photos this time and in fact, didn't even see a walkaround Cookie Monster costume. It's from the last time I attended the Licensing Show, which was in 2011. When I reported on it back then, I promised you a photo of "me posing with one of my favorite TV stars." So that's it. But I'm getting ahead of my story.

I didn't experience one of those longer-than-your-flight TSA lines we hear so much about lately; not at either airport. I did though at LAX encounter a TSA employee who apparently had never dealt with a passenger whose replacement knee set off the metal detector. That took a while.

The flights both ways were crammed full, as all Southwest flights tend to be. On the way there, I was crammed next to a man who was unable to stop talking loudly about how the United States is doomed unless we elect Donald Trump. I was under no delusion this fellow's mind could be changed but just to amuse those around us, I had a go at it. I'll discuss our exchange in a future post here but I'll give you a little preview…

I asked him a few questions about how Trump would fix some of the alleged disasters about which he rants. My fellow passenger's reply was always along the lines of "He'll bring in the best experts!"

ME: In other words, he has no plan at all. He'll just find someone who does. That's real leadership. Bozo the Clown could do that.

HIM: Bozo the Clown is not a successful businessman. He doesn't have his name on dozens of buildings!

ME: No, but Ronald McDonald has his on thousands. Hey, maybe if you vote for him, you'll get fries with it.

We did about 600 air miles like that. It ended when we hit the turbulence that results when you fly over desert when it's eighty quadrillion million degrees on the ground.

How did I cope with the Vegas heat? By not going out into it. The convention, which is still going on as we speak. is at Mandalay Bay. I was staying in the Excalibur, which connects to the Luxor which connects to Mandalay Bay. It's a helluva long walk, especially for a guy with a new knee but I didn't have to venture outside at all except going to and from cabs. If you add it all up, I was outside the jurisdiction of air conditioning for about 90 seconds.

That was one reason I stayed at the Excalibur. Another was that since I was traveling alone, I didn't need luxury. I needed a bed, a desk on which to write, a sink, a toilet and a shower. At the Excalibur, the cheapest rooms have all that and the shower is an actual shower, not a shower-tub combo. I could have spared myself a lot of hiking if I'd stayed at Mandalay Bay or the Luxor but at the Luxor, some rooms don't have desks and at both hotels, most lower-priced rooms have shower-tub combos. Shower-tub combos are something I avoid when possible. I suppose they're manageable if you're shorter and narrower than I am and have a better sense of balance.

The Licensing Show is huge and vast and it involves a side of show business that most folks rarely see. There, people speak a language I do not understand…one of marketing and demographics and penetration into certain areas that I've never longed to penetrate. But there's also creative stuff. And celebrity appearances. And people in big, goofy walkaround costumes playing characters who are available for licensing. It feels a teensy bit like Comic-Con…enough that I kept feeling I should be upstairs somewhere moderating eleven panels.

I was going to stay through today but I completed all my planned meetings Tuesday morning and was getting weary from all the walking, plus experiencing a bit of back trouble. The bed in my hotel room was hard enough that I think the Excalibur previously used it as a drawbridge, plus — and this is going to seem silly in a town the size of Las Vegas — I was having trouble finding a place to sit down. The chairs in my room and the bed were all built low to the ground, which is not good for my new knee. As I passed through the three hotel-casinos, every bench I passed, every resting spot around the convention…they were all too low for me.

So I spent Monday staggering around, looking with little success for someplace to sit that was good for my knee. At one point at the Licensing Show, a lady representing a Korean animation firm asked if she could tell me all about their operation. I really had no interest in what she was selling but my legs were fatigued and begging for relief just then and I noticed their booth had high stools. So I said to her, "I'd love to hear all about it if I can do it sitting on one of those." Anything for a comfy chair.

Later in the non-convention part of Mandalay Bay, I spotted not a bench but a fountain with a proper-height wall around it and I just parked myself on that wall for a half-hour, hauled out my iPad and read Kindle books. It may have been the high point of my trip and it felt so good that while there, I also used the iPad to move my return flight from Wednesday afternoon to Tuesday evening.

Some people love to gamble in Vegas. Some people love to dine or see shows. My big thrill there this trip was sitting on the edge of a fountain.

Let's see what else I saw while in Vegas. I watched but did not put any money into an elaborate Flintstones slot machine…or any other such devices. There were also new slots of Batman (decorated with pics of Adam West, Burt Ward and other cast members) and Wonder Woman (with Lynda Carter). The Flintstones one got me wondering: Does Nevada still have that law against making gaming devices look attractive to children or has everyone just decided to ignore it?

I played no Blackjack, either. Years ago, it was my game of choice and I got to be really good at it. Then one day, when I was "ahead" collectively for all the Blackjack I'd played in my life, I decided it might be nice to remain "ahead" forever. I quit Cold Turkey and haven't wagered a buck on the game since, though I used to stop and watch others have at it and "play along" in my head. This time, I didn't even do that.

Mandalay Bay is connected to the Luxor by a mall with about forty stores in it and I had to walk through it several times. In it is a collectibles shop and apparently most days, they have Pete Rose there signing autographs for some fee. I didn't find out what it is because though I felt sorry for the man, I had no intention of paying it.

Why did I feel sorry? Well, remember the scene in This is Spinal Tap where the band sits sadly in a record store when no one shows up to get their signatures? The scene in the mall store looked a lot like that, with a guy out front practically begging passers-by to come in and get a ball signed by a living legend of sports. My last time past, Mr. Rose seemed to be writing his name on a jersey for some fan so I felt better about the whole thing. If you ever become a truly great baseball player, try to not get caught betting on games.

I dined Monday evening at the Excalibur Buffet, which really isn't cost-efficient for a guy like me who's had Gastric Bypass Surgery. Even if I wanted to, I physically could not eat enough food to justify paying $24 a plate. But I needed grub just then, the convenient alternatives to paying that much were Pizza Hut and Popeye's fried chicken…and I knew the Excalibur Buffet had really, really good carved roast turkey, which is my favorite entree. So I went in, paid the $24 and just to amuse the cashier, told her to close the place down because since I was there, there'd be insufficient food left for any who came after me. She laughed.

I had my one plate of two slices of turkey, some whipped potatoes and gravy, a bit of stuffing and I also grabbed a piece of BBQ chicken, some glazed carrots and a few meatballs. No beverage, no dessert. I've given up all foods high in sugar and all drinks that are not water. It was a plate o' chow that in a sit-down restaurant, you might pay ten bucks for, twelve tops, but it was pretty good.

It took me about ten minutes to consume it and as I got up to leave, the cashier lady was circulating, playing hostess. She saw me and asked, "Going back for seconds?" I told her no, I was done. She said, "You mean I closed this place just so you could eat two damn pieces of turkey?"

I very much admire Lewis Black but I feel he's a bit off-base here when he discusses "Political Correctness," which strikes me as a term that everyone is using with their own, self-serving definition. What one guy is ranting about when he speaks of P.C. is not what some other guy is ranting about…though under most definitions lately, opposing P.C. has become an all-purpose excuse for a lot of bad behavior.

See, the way I view it is that a comedian — or actually anyone who can get a public forum — has the right to say whatever they want. And the audience has every right to not laugh or not agree or to think that what the person said was bigoted or just plain stupid. Free Speech is not just for the person with the microphone. Lately, a lot of comedians are complaining that the audience didn't laugh or the college didn't book him because he wasn't "politically correct."

Well, maybe…or maybe his act was just lousy.

Or in the wrong place. That's another thing to consider here. If you get up before a room of older people with strong evangelical convictions and start telling dick jokes and doing Bill Maher's anti-religion act, I don't think it's fair to blame the audience if they aren't amused or accepting. You don't have a constitutional right to be appreciated everywhere you go. (A comedian friend of mine thinks that when comics complain that colleges these days are too "P.C." to hire them, what some of them are really complaining about is that colleges aren't willing to pay established headliner rates to which the comedian feels entitled.)

In the video below, Lewis Black complains that audiences freeze up and don't listen the minute he mentions "guns" before they even know what he's going to say about them. That might be the kind of Political Correctness he decries but it also might be a reaction to him introducing a topic that usually seems to go nowhere. I've seen a lot of comics discuss guns and the only one I can think of who hasn't been preachy, pedantic or unfunny on the subject is Jim Jefferies.

Black does not say people reacted badly to whatever he had to say about guns; just that the topic brought a chill to the proceedings. I don't see why that's bad. It's not wrong for a comic to take the thing you might prefer not to hear about and have a new, fresh perspective on it that will make them glad you brought it up. George Carlin did that all the time. He liked venturing into those topics.

Some Trump backers speak of "The Tyranny of Political Correctness" and what I usually think they really mean is "The Tyranny of People Not Liking What I'm Saying." It's like they should be free to make racist comments without someone accusing them of racism. After all, racism is not Politically Correct and Political Correctness is bad, in and of itself, right?

I keep hearing people say we should applaud Trump for speaking his mind. I actually don't think Trump is speaking his mind. I think he's saying whatever he thinks his base wants to hear, regardless of the facts of the matter or what he would actually do were he to be elected. But even if what he says is from the heart, so is the opposition to it. He has the right to say it. We have the right to boo it. That's how it works. Here's Lewis Black…

Here are two lists. One is of shows that are scheduled to open on Broadway shortly. The other list is of shows that are trying to arrange to open on Broadway in the near future. About 75% of the shows on the second list will probably make it.

There are a number of great movie musicals being adapted for the stage and it's looking like an especially good year for Irving Berlin with a scheduled opening for Holiday Inn and a likely production of Top Hat. Meanwhile, the non-Berlin Singin' in the Rain, which was already turned into a stage musical is being turned into one again. You also have a lot of non-musical movies being turned into stage musicals including Anastasia, Amelie, 17 Again, Mean Girls, Bull Durham, Diner, Magic Mike and King Kong. A musical based on King Kong? Well, why the hell not?

There are also movies being turned into non-musical plays, like To Kill a Mockingbird, Shakespeare in Love and Rear Window.

For younger audiences, there's a SpongeBob SquarePants musical and Disney is adding more songs to Frozen and putting it on stage. Oh — and the West End musical adaptation of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (based on the book, not on the Willy Wonka movie) opens next March.

But you notice what movie-turned-into-a-musical isn't on the list? The Jerry Lewis version of The Nutty Professor. Heck, it's been more than a year since Jerry announced its last absolutely, definite opening date on Broadway. I have this odd hunch that the problem isn't that there's no market for it or that no one wants to back it. My hunch is that its producers are waiting for Jerry (age 90) to either leave us or give up on the idea that he can be involved and approve everything.

There's a lot of anger out there at the Senators who yesterday voted down four pretty minor Gun Control bills. I suppose a good case could be made that in this instance, nothing is better than something; that if they had passed one of them, it would have resulted in no law more substantial making it through in our lifetimes. It would be like, "Okay, you got your Gun Control so shut up," and then — after the next mass shooting — it would be, "See? There's incontrovertible proof that Gun Control doesn't work."

The working premise of its opponents has always been that if it isn't 100% effective, it's 0% effective. I'm surprised they don't want to get rid of all laws designed to stop murder, rape and assault because, you know, there are still murders, rapes and assaults.

And I wonder if some of the anger isn't misdirected. Yeah, the Senators who vote with the N.R.A. have generally taken loads of moola from them but the more important "bribe" is probably that the N.R.A. hasn't recruited opponents to take them out. Yeah, polls show that overwhelming numbers of us, a majority of gun owners included, want stricter controls in this area…but we're not going to get what we want until it's possible to point to a number of ousted Congressfolks and say, "S/He lost her/his seat because s/he opposed Gun Control!" That ain't happened yet.

In Trump News, Kevin Drum and Jonathan Chait both note that the man running as the Supreme Financial Manager seems to be outta cash and way behind Hillary Clinton in fundraising. How embarrassing is that?

Chait and Ed Kilgore here debate whether the Republicans will or should find some way to dump The Donald and slide someone else in as the nominee. Kilgore says they shouldn't and they won't…and all his arguments make total sense to me. Then again, very little about this election has followed the guidelines of total sense.

The main argument that Trump won't be displaced seems to me to be that there's no one else with enough importance and charisma to fill the role of super-hero saving the Republican Party. If they ran someone like Jeb Bush or even Ted Cruz — someone Trump trumped in the primary — it would really reek of ignoring the will of the electorate and infuriate many. But who else is there? Romney? Scott Walker? And it's hard to imagine Trump bowing out gracefully. Heck, it's hard to imagine Trump canceling a dinner reservation gracefully.

Kevin Drum has an incomplete list of times when Donald Trump has "walked back" some comment or promise. That means he said it one day, everyone thought it was stupid and so the next day, he went out and pretended he said something else the day before…and anyone who says he didn't is lying or they misunderstood.

Hard to believe there are folks in this world who like this man because he's outspoken and he speaks his mind and he really means what he says. Well, he does for 24 hours,

• The Senate should have voted down 12 more tepid gun control bills today. That would save time after the next three mass shootings.

When I was a lad, we sometimes got our bread and pastries from one of the yellow trucks that cruised the streets of Southern California back then. The following remembrance I wrote about Helms Trucks is cribbed from our sister site, Old L.A. Restaurants…

The Helms Bakery Building still stands on Venice Boulevard with much of its signage still intact…but inside, they bake no bread or cinnamon buns. It's a furniture mart in there now but once upon a time beginning when Paul Helms founded the business in 1931, they made bread and sugar cookies and rolls and cupcakes and all the things that great bakeries bake. Then nice men would load them into their Helms Bakery Trucks and drive about surrounding neighborhoods, selling them to housewives and kids.

If you wanted the Helms Man to stop at your residence, you had to, first of all, put the Helms placard up in your front window…although a good Helms Man knew his territory, knew that certain homes expected him whether they had the sign up or not. He'd pull up in front and blow his distinctive whistle and you'd scurry out to his truck and buy stuff. Inside the truck, he had drawers full of cookies and donuts and rolls and I think they even carried milk and butter, though at somewhat higher prices than the nearby Safeway Market.

When I was very young, you could often find me waiting outside our home for the Helms Man. We had a rough idea of when he'd get to our street and I'd go play out front, keeping an eye out for the guy. When he approached, it was very exciting and I'd run in and get my mother. She'd buy a loaf of bread and maybe some rolls and always at least a cookie for me. Actually, the first thing our Helms Man would do when we stepped up inside his truck to make our purchases was to hand me a free cookie, usually one of their terrific sugar cookies.

Once, I got to go inside the plant thanks to an L.A. City School District program of field trips. We all piled into buses which drove us over to Culver City for a tour. Upon arrival, we were marched through the place and shown how the bread was baked, how the cookies were mixed and formed on large conveyor belts…and you couldn't help but love how great it smelled in there. The aroma was heavenly and a whole lot better than the tuna cannery or the dairy we toured on other field trips. On the way out, each student received a small loaf of bread and a little cardboard Helms Truck.

I'm not sure why the business model was as successful for as long as it was. As mentioned, the prices on the Helms Truck were always somewhat higher than buying roughly the same things at a Safeway or Von's, and you'd have to go to one of those markets anyway to get the other things you needed. Why not get your bread and cookies at Von's while you were there and save a few bucks? Whatever the reason was to opt for the trucks, it seems to have faded out by the late sixties. Maybe there were fewer mothers staying at home all day or something. Maybe the quality of baked goods at the markets had improved. Whatever the cause, the whole operation shut down in 1969 and I still remember the day its trucks made their last, melancholy rounds. There was a real sense of loss when our Helms Man drove off, having sold us our rolls and sugar cookies for the last time.

The big building on Venice Boulevard sat vacant for a few years and rumors abounded as to what would become of it. In 1972, it was acquired by a real estate firm that soon began its transformation into a complex of furniture dealers…and even a little jazz club called The Jazz Bakery. Happily, as noted, they kept a lot of the old Helms Bakery decor intact and sometimes when you drive past it, you can almost imagine you're smelling the sugar cookies, fresh out of those huge ovens.

So why am I telling you all this here? Because today's video link is a short song about these wonderful trucks and their friendly drivers. It's from L.A. Now and Then, that musical revue that I told you about here. And by the way, a CD of the show has now been released and you can order one here. It's full of perky tunes like this one…

Quite prematurely I think, a lot of folks are assuming Democrats will win the White House and the Senate this year…but what about the House? Could all of Congress flip from red to blue? David Wasserman explains what it would take. SPOILER ALERT: He doesn't think it's likely.

Hey, here's an unlikely thing: Donald Trump firing someone. In this case, it's his current campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski, who must be responsible for all that has gone wrong. I mean, none of that couldn't possibly be Trump's fault, could it? Of course not.

Jonathan Chait tells us more about it and he mentions something that I hadn't heard before. In his immediate, self-serving response to the Orlando mass-killing, Trump wrongly declared that the shooter was foreign-born. It says here that that's because "staffers had accidentally uploaded the wrong version of the speech into the teleprompters" — or as I spell it, TelePrompters. That sounds like a "blame someone else" fib but I suppose it's possible.

It's interesting to me that (a) Trump has begun to sometimes use a TelePrompter for his speeches instead of rattling off whatever silly thing pops into his mind and (b) it hasn't helped. He's still saying stupid, factually-incorrect things.

Remember when one of the umpteen insults that Obama detractors were hurling at that man was that he uses a TelePrompter? The people who don't like Obama will still say absolutely anything negative about him that comes to mind. He was born in Kenya, he's a Nazi, he's a fascist, he's gay, his kids are adopted, he's a puppet of William Ayers, etc. "He uses a TelePrompter" was how some of them said he really wasn't intelligent. Never mind that he did fine in debates and press conferences without one, he was incapable of uttering a semi-coherent sentence without reading what someone else had written for him.

This was uttered by people who fervently supported and voted for other politicians who often used TelePrompters and/or read speeches written by others. It wouldn't surprise me if some of the charges that Obama was so stupid he needed a TelePrompter were read off TelePrompters. And now here's Donald Trump employing one and none of the folks who thought that proved Obama was kinda dumb for using one thinks that of Donald.

Anyway, I am mystified why Trump is running such a weak, underfunded campaign. You don't have to be an experienced politician to know that you have to at least come close to matching the efforts of your opponent. There are wealthy Trump donors, even if he doesn't have as many as he'd like. So what's the deal here? Saving it all for the Big Finish?

One of the most-read articles on this site is the piece I wrote about the late, looney Rod Hull. Most of it is about me being on the set of The Tonight Showin 1983 when Rod made his first appearance with Johnny Carson. He was the second guest. The first was Richard Pryor, making his first public appearance following the accident (?) in which he suffered severe burns over most of his body.

Note to Self: Later this week, let readers of this blog know that that episode is airing Monday evening, June 27, on Antenna TV.

One of my reservations about Hillary Clinton as president is that I keep hearing she's too hawkish and likely to get us into ill-advised wars. Fred Kaplan gives us a pretty wide look at her past actions and inactions relating to defense. It makes me feel a bit better though I don't think I'll ever be totally comfy with anyone who supported the invasion of Iraq…even if Bush did pull a fast one and turn one kind of authorization into another.

Hey, my sometimes-employers Sid and Marty Krofft have brought forth a new version of their 1973 hit TV series, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters,and it's pretty good and not at all unfaithful to the original! I just watched the first episode for free on Amazon Prime and I think it's available elsewhere.

If you fondly remember the original show, give it a look. There's even a cameo appearance by the show's original human star, Johnny Whitaker. And if you fondly remember the original show and have kids, get them to watch with you do they can fondly remember this one. And if you don't remember the original show or are too young to have watched it, watch anyway. I think that covers everyone.

It's Father's Day so here's a rerun of what I posted here on Father's Day, three years ago. This was the first in a series that I hope you enjoyed reading because I very much enjoyed writing it…

I've been posting stories here for some months now about my mother. It's Father's Day so I've decided to write about my father.

My father, as I've mentioned here many times, worked for the Internal Revenue Service. It was a lousy job he took on a "just for now" basis while he looked for something better to do…and he wound up staying with the I.R.S. until he retired. He simply did not have any particular skill that would have allowed him to pursue any of his fantasies: Opera singer, baseball player, newspaper reporter or comedy writer. He was about as proud as a human being could be that I wound up realizing one of his dreams.

And he'd never pushed me in that direction, not one bit. Matter of fact, he tried several times to warn me away from the profession for two reasons. One was that the one time he'd made a serious attempt at it, things had not gone well. This was back in Hartford in the early forties, not long after the military had rejected him for most of the same reasons he never became a baseball player. He had a friend who had an "in" to someone at a local radio station. My father and the friend wrote up several pages of comedy material, took it to the guy at the radio station…and received a devastating turndown. It was so insensitive and heartbreaking, he said, that he never tried again. Many a time, he cautioned me how writing could break your heart.

So that was one reason he was wary of me doing what I've now been doing for 44 years. Another was that as a Revenue Officer, every professional writer he ever met was in deep financial trouble. This included some "name" authors and prolific screenwriters you'd think would have had a buck or two. That they rarely did made him worry when I went that route. It was important to him that I do something I loved but being a Depression-era kid, it was also important to him that I be able to make a real living at it.

He had a little trouble with the way I was paid in my profession: Nothing for weeks and then a big check, then nothing or a month or three. It didn't bother me but it bothered him. After I moved out of the family home and into my own apartment, he'd come by to visit me once or twice a week — he was joyously retired from the I.R.S. by then — and he'd say, trying to be casual about it, "So…any checks lately?" That was his way of saying, "Please…reassure me you're doing okay." That was especially important any week in which my name didn't appear onscreen on a TV show.

He died when I was 39 and right to the end, he was a world-class worrier. He worried about the oddest, most unlikely things — and never about himself; only about other people. If I was due at the house around 5 PM, he'd start worrying at 5:02 that maybe I'd been in a terrible auto accident. Once, I walked in at 5 on the dot and he said, "Oh, thank God. I was worried you'd had an accident or something." I pointed out that I was right on time. He said, "I know. But I had the feeling you were going to be early."

Usually, people like that tend to shout a lot and lose their tempers. Not my father. He almost never got at mad at me or anyone. He just plain didn't see the point of it. When I was in my early teens, I had a best friend named Rick. When I went over to Rick's house for the day, I would literally hear Rick's father yell at him more than I heard my own father yell at me in those 39 years. I could probably list every time he raised his voice at me during those 39 years in about three Twitter messages.

I'll tell you one story right now. At what was for him enormous expense, my father arranged for me to get braces when I was thirteen. The orthodontist was a colorful man named Dr. Nathan M. Seltzer who was based in Beverly Hills and who did a lot of work on kids who went into show business. You've seen many a Dr. Seltzer smile on TV and movie stars who are roughly my age. At one point, I was supposed to wear this ghastly retainer at night — a terrible contraption that Josef Mengele would have condemned as cruel and unusual punishment. If Dick Cheney had known of these, he would have done away with Waterboarding and threatened prisoners with Dr. Seltzer Night Retainers. And believe me, those guys wouldn't have just talked. They'd have yodeled.

One morning, I awoke with bleeding gums. My mother and I phoned Dr. Seltzer and he said, "Stop wearing it until your appointment next week and I'll adjust it." So I didn't wear it the next night. Somehow, we neglected to tell my father about this.

The next morning, he casually asked me if wearing the retainer had interfered with my sleep last night. I told him I hadn't worn it — and before I could tell him why, he exploded. He was paying a lot of money for that orthodonture and I damn well was going to wear it. I don't think I ever saw him as furious as he was at that moment and it was a long time before I could get a word in, not even edgewise but between his sentences, to tell him about what Doc Seltzer had said. When I did, he said he didn't believe me. He was even angrier at me for concocting such a feeble lie. Then he stormed out of the house to go pick up my mother at the market. Shortly after that, Rick arrived.

Thirty minutes later, Rick and I were playing croquet in the backyard when my father came out of the house in tears, hugged me and apologized about eighty times. My mother had told him what Dr. Seltzer had said. I was crying, too…and I remember thinking it was embarrassing that Rick was seeing my father and me crying. But as my father headed back into the house and I turned towards Rick, I saw that he was crying more than either of us. I asked him why. He said, "My father isn't always right but he would kill himself before he'd apologize to me for anything."

I'd seen Rick's father in action and he was right. It was one of those moments when I realized how very special my father was.

Another came a few years later. It was my father's unfortunate job to go to people who were seriously in arrears in their taxes and say, "We need to negotiate a payment schedule." He hated it. No, that's not strong enough. He hated, hated, hated it. He especially hated it when the people were desperate and in trouble.

Not all were. Some of them were very rich guys who just felt it was beneath them to pay taxes. When my father called on one, he'd walk into a mansion in Bel Air or Beverly Hills. Most of them had on their walls one or more framed photos of themselves with Ronald Reagan and/or Richard Nixon.

My father knew what that meant. These guys would never pay their taxes in full and probably not at all. He'd be lucky to get five cents on the dollar out of them. And he'd be real lucky if his boss didn't call him in and say, "We got a complaint from someone in Washington about you harassing this fine, patriotic gentleman." My father was about as menacing as Wally Cox with a broken fly swatter. In the meantime, the boss would order him to get every cent plus penalties out of the poor woman in Venice whose husband had never paid their joint taxes, then had deserted her and the six kids she now couldn't afford to feed.

The woman in Venice was a real person. My father came home pale from the afternoon he called on her. She owed more money than she could ever possibly come up with and since she was not a Reagan donor, she was expected to actually pay it. She had six kids who were all running around her little dilapidated home barefoot.

My father had a thing about "barefoot." No matter who the person was, if they didn't have shoes on and weren't on the beach or en route to a swimming pool, he felt sorry for them. It was from his upbringing, I guess, that he associated shoelessness with stark, life-threatening poverty. After I was six or seven years old, I was discouraged from it.

We used to get a lot of these mailings that asked us to "adopt" an orphaned child in some third world country — one of those deals where you send the kid five bucks and he can somehow eat for nine months. They would include what looked like trading cards of these impoverished children and ask you to select one or two and send money for them. My father would always send money for any child who was barefoot. If a kid had shoes on or if the photo didn't show his or her feet, no bucks…but he was very generous with the others.

He asked the woman in Venice why the kids who were old enough to be in school weren't there. She had a chilling answer: "The school won't let them attend without shoes and I can't afford to buy shoes for them." This was the person my father had been ordered to get thousands of dollars out of.

For days after his first meeting with the woman, my father was haunted by the image of those kids scurrying about sans footwear, unable to go to school and better themselves. Finally, one night about 3 AM, he woke my mother up and said, "I need to do something I probably shouldn't do but I have to do it." My mother knew what he was thinking and she said, "Do what you have to do," kissed him and rolled over and went back to sleep.

The next day, my father went to a Stride-Rite shoe store in Santa Monica and made arrangements with the manager. The woman would bring in the six kids and he would pay for one pair of shoes for each. Children's shoes cost a lot of money and working for the I.R.S. didn't pay well so it was a big, significant expenditure…but he had to do it. I think that year we didn't go on summer vacation because of it but I sure didn't mind. I did ask if I could somehow get the free March of Comics comic books that Stride-Rite gave out when you purchased shoes at their stores.

He also went to bat for the woman with his superiors, finally getting them to settle her case for considerably less than the full amount. She was so grateful for that and for the shoes, she found out who my father's boss was and wrote him a letter, praising Bernie Evanier for his kindness. She meant well by it but my father was scolded. People were supposed to be afraid of an I.R.S. man, he was reminded. They were not supposed to think he'd tear up most of their bill and buy their kids shoes. Not unless they were a pal of Nixon's, at least.

He was still glad he'd done it. He did things like that all his life, often anonymously. I think I need to write more about my father here…and not so much for your benefit as for mine.

Nate Silver just posted a bunch of tweets which collectively say…

In state-by-state polls, Trump is considerably underperforming Romney 2012 in red states; he's similar to Romney in blue & purple states. This has several implications, one of which is that national polls may *slightly* overstate his troubles. We need more purple state polls. On the flip side, if the election were to turn into a rout, there aren't very many totally safe red states, and Clinton could get 400+ EV.

Obviously, this is not good news for Trump. I mean, equaling Romney's performance still means you lose by a pretty wide margin. Underperforming is even worse.

Obviously too, we're 141 days from the election, the presumptive candidates are still presumptive, they don't even have running mates yet, the debates haven't happened, yadda yadda yadda. I still think we have some scandals as yet unknown to the public and that you can count on both Clinton and Trump saying and doing some really, really stupid things.

So why does current polling matter? Well obviously, this makes it harder for Trump to get certain donors and endorsement and supporters. Other candidates have come from behind to win but other candidates didn't have his disapproval ratings. Hillary has whopping disapproval numbers too but hers don't seem to be hurting her too much.

More significantly: Trump's primary appeal, such as it is, is that he's sold himself as a "winner," as a guy who always triumphs. It's hard to make that work when your opponent has a double-digit lead on you and there's a real possibility that you'll lose states that have traditionally gone for your party.

At the same time, one of the bigger arguments for Bernie Sanders was that he could beat Donald Trump but Hillary Clinton could not. That's also a hard argument to make at the moment.

I'm about 97% certain the Hillary/Donald contest will change in the coming months…then change again and again and again. I will get more "talk me off the window ledge" calls from friends who are panicked that Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. But I'm happy to not be getting them now.