As I wrote back here, the first movie I ever saw once I was old enough to understand what I was seeing was the 1959 Jerry Lewis vehicle, Don't Give Up The Ship. I was seven years old at the time and as that link will also tell you, that viewing was followed by a very odd, memorable encounter with Mr. Lewis.

Paramount Studios has put it and many other films online for free viewing. It runs 88 minutes and it's not a bad film as Jerry Lewis films go. Gale Gordon gives an especially arch performance in the kind of role Gale Gordon played so well. If you're in the mood…

I was away from my home for ten nights due to the surgery. Neither the hospital nor the rehab center offered Comedy Central or HBO but I managed to keep up with The Daily Show and Last Week Tonight with John Oliver thanks to my iPad, and since those places did have CBS, I could watch Stephen Colbert.

Nevertheless, I somehow came home to about twenty hours of other programming on my TiVo and I have the feeling that by the time I catch up on all of it, it'll be time to go in and get the other knee replaced.

This is the third in a series of essays here about how professional or aspiring professional writers can and must cope with two various kinds of rejection — rejection of your work by the buyers and rejection by various folks in the audience. Part 1 can be read here and Part 2 can be read here.

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There are all sorts of reasons why as a writer, your work gets rejected or fails to sell. We'll be discussing a lot of them before I finish this series but the one I'm trying to get out of the way here is that sometimes, you're pure and simple playing an unwinnable game. You're submitting your writing to someone who cannot buy it. It's like if you and I had twenty bucks between us and no interest in purchasing a new car but still, since it doesn't cost us anything, we walk into the store down on Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills that sells Maseratis and act like we're in a buying mood.

The salesguy can fast-talk and charm and offer us a great deal and even promise to arrange the sexual activity of our choice. It's still going to be No Sale and it's not like he's peddling an inferior product. We just ain't buying. In much the same way, it doesn't really cost anything for a publisher to advertise that he's looking for manuscripts or for a producer to spread the word that he's reading screenplays. He doesn't commit himself to spending a nickel and he doesn't even have to read what you send him.

Why would someone who wasn't prepared to buy try to look like he was? Maybe because we're dealing here with businesses where looking like you're active and busy and successful can be just a step or two away from actually being active, busy and successful…so image has its value. Often too, you're dealing with people who are quite sure they're about to be in a position to buy something and they just can't wait to get started. Or who are in denial that they aren't about to publish a book or make a movie.

Well over ten years ago, I was approached by a small animation firm that wanted me to come up with a feature they could produce. I told them an idea I had and they loved it…or at least, they said they loved it. Anyone can say "I want to produce this" but it becomes a very different statement when the next step is a large financial commitment. Still, they bragged they had twenty million dollars in financing and they seemed to be honest, skilled, enterprising, etc. I try to avoid talking money with people who want to hire me but before I could suggest they contact my agent, one of the folks there blurted out a range for my fee and it was a very nice, acceptable range. "Give my agent a call," I said, "and we can get started on this."

It was all going so well until the next moment. That's when they said they'd be contacting my agent the moment they closed their deal for the twenty million dollars.

You see, they didn't actually have the twenty million. They were about to get the twenty million. Until they had it, they couldn't give me a contract…and until I had a contract, I'd be working on spec. I decided not to do too much of that despite their urging that I get started.

As I said, it's been over ten years and they still don't have this financing. Every year or two, the head guy there phones and assures me it's coming, it's coming and, hey, it's up to thirty or forty mil now! He usually calls it a "done deal," a phrase I almost never hear with regard to a deal that is actually done. I tell him, "Fine. Call me when you have it and we'll start." If I'd started back when we first began discussing this idea of mine, I could well have spent a decade working on a project that was never going to happen, never going to pay me.

Moral of the Story: Don't kid yourself into thinking there's an opportunity where there isn't one. This may be tough because — to use a phrase I always thought was pretentious — writers are dreamers and it's easy to dream a successful, unrealistic future for yourself. Also, it may be tough because people you encounter may look like genuine buyers. They may appear sincere or even actually be sincere. (This animation producer really, really thinks all those millions in financing are a "done deal.") They may be well-connected. They may even be actively in business with others…and here's where I should tell you about Mr. Frack…

Frack, as I'm calling him, is an active producer of motion pictures in Hollywood. You may well have seen a film with his name on it. If he was interested in your spec screenplay, you'd have reason to be excited. But the harsh truth is that he would never be interested in your spec screenplay. Every movie he has produced since his first success has been a project that he originated.

They started with a one-sentence idea he came up with…or a topic that interested him. They've all had some subtle autobiographical component. He simply doesn't want to expend two years of his life on a movie unless he feels a great emotional connection to it and your idea won't do it for him. It has to be his idea. So he hires good writers, gives them some basic premises and ideas and let's them whip up scripts under his supervision and steering.

He doesn't get or even seek a writer credit. He doesn't contribute enough to deserve one. He just contributes enough to feel he provided the seed.

I have not been one of those writers but I worked for him on another project, a prospective TV series that his company wanted to co-produce. Since it was a co-production and television, he didn't feel the need to put himself at the top of the flow chart. But I lunched with him and sat in meetings with him…and I met Geoffrey. Geoffrey was his Director of Development. This was a fancy way of saying that Geoffrey was the guy in charge of receiving screenplays that were submitted to the company, reading them and then giving each a polite, professional rejection.

Geoffrey told me they got between twelve and twenty a week. He sat in an office all day and read them…or at least, read enough to write a little piece of coverage for each explaining dispassionately why the material in question, while perhaps wonderful in its way, didn't fit with the company's current needs. He could give just about any reason except the real one: Because it was already written and Frack didn't want to produce something that was already written.

I asked him if he ever read scripts that were so wonderful, he recommended the writer for one of Frack's self-generated projects. He replied, "I read lots of wonderful scripts by very talented writers. But every time Mr. Frack decides what kind of movie he wants to do next, he always seems to have a writer in mind."

Geoffrey has been doing this for Mr. Frack for at least ten years and before him, there were other Geoffreys, all charged with the same mission. It was and is imperative for Frack to remain on good terms with Hollywood agents. He needs to deal with them to get the writers he wants to hire to work from his rough blueprints. He needs to deal with them to get directors, stars, cinematographers, composers, etc. You stay on good terms with agents by considering their submissions and by giving them the ability to tell their clients, "I just submitted your screenplay to Frack Productions and they always read everything I send them."

And they do. They just don't buy them.

Do the math and it's not impossible that Frack Productions has rejected 15,000 screenplays. That could be 15,000 writers who wondered, perhaps with some amount of despair affixed, what was wrong with their brilliant script. Each had no way of knowing that what was wrong with their script was that they'd written it.

I believe that writers (and actors and other creative folks) who believe they'd had a large number of rejections are foolishly including in that number a large number of turndowns that were never in a million years going to happen. They submitted to or were submitted to people who were in no position to buy or not really interested in buying. That's frustrating to the rejected person but if your screenplay is rejected by someone who couldn't have bought it and maybe didn't read it, that's not the same thing as when it's submitted to someone who had the power 'n' budget to buy it who then read it and decided it wasn't right.

If your work gets to someone who can't say yes, why score it as a loss for yourself when they say no? I mean, it might be a loss in terms of marketing but it's not a failure of the material. Don't treat it as such. You have a different problem there, one we'll discuss later on in this series.

This is almost all I want to write about rejections that aren't really rejections. The last aspect of that I need to cover is when you submit not a bad piece of writing but the wrong piece for the buyer's needs. We'll get to that next time.

Hello. My knee is much better, thank you. I'm hobbling about but I've largely abandoned the walker. The Rehab Center gave me one but I wanted another — one for upstairs, one for downstairs — and they arranged for Apria Home Healthcare to deliver one to me on Thursday. That turned into Saturday and now I'm thinking it's going to be Monday or Tuesday and I'm going to refuse delivery because I no longer need a walker.

And remember the problems I had with Apria keeping me on hold? It was worse with the CVS Pharmacy that's supposed to be filling a prescription for me. Yesterday, I wound up calling the CVS corporate headquarters to complain there and I made my way up the food chain to a gent with a very impressive-sounding title. He promised he would contact my local CVS and have someone there call me, apologize for the absurdly-long hold time and discuss my prescription with me. Half an hour later, he called me back and admitted that even he couldn't get through to them. But I'll be okay for a few days without the drug in question and may decide that, like the walker, I no longer need it.

Tomorrow is the actual 40th anniversary of the first Saturday Night Live, not to be confused with that big, premature celebration they did last February. Doug Hill and Jeff Weingrad wrote the book about the show's history and here we have some excerpts from that first, crisis-plagued telecast.

The soup can graphic is up because I have a deadline that will keep me from frequent posting this weekend. Tomorrow, you'll be getting the next installment of my series on Rejection for writers. Some other goodies may turn up but for the most part, I'll be struggling in a primitive era with a very stupid barbarian. Back soon.

What do Doris Day and I have in common? Don't bother trying to figure it out and don't even go for a Rock Hudson joke. We both had our personal finances handled by The Most Honest Man in Hollywood. His name was Ronald R. Koblin and I found out yesterday that Ron died September 29 from a stroke. He was 71.

Ron was my Business Manager for 38 years. I am a ninny when it comes to the handling of money and Ron knew everything. The fact that I have any at all today is due to his skills, acumen, adulthood and total integrity.

He specialized in Hollywood agents, stars, directors and writers. He was very, very smart. If you're familiar with the history of Doris Day, you know that she once had every nickel she had in the world stolen by her business manager. When she regrouped, her lawyers had to select the most reliable, trustworthy outfit to manage her finances from future work plus the limited amount she was able to recoup in court from the crooked accountant. They chose the firm in which Ron was a partner.

In fact, he was so good at what he did that when friends asked me to recommend a good money handler, I always sent them to Ron…and Ron always turned them down politely because he had enough clients and didn't want more than he could service without delegating responsibility. Around 1985, he left the large firm in which he was a partner with and started a smaller one that was just him and his trusty secretary Toni servicing a select group of clients. Then a few years ago, he closed that office and retired but he retained an even smaller group of clients and watched over their finances, working out of his lovely home. I was so pleased to be part of both groups.

In 1980, I bought my first and current house. Ron's handling of my cash in the years before helped make that possible and he worked out all the details from my end for escrow and loans and confusing things like that. The house I found and agreed to purchase was owned by a nice lady named Sarah who was paying off a mortgage on it from Home Savings and Loan in Beverly Hills. My realtor, with Ron's aid, negotiated two different purchase prices for it.

If Sarah paid off her home loan early — which she would do in selling it to me — she would have to pay a $10,000 penalty to Home Savings. However, if the new owner of that house (i.e., me) secured his home loan through Home Savings, the penalty fee was waived. Ergo, the purchase price to which I agreed was a certain amount if I got my loan at Home Savings and it was $10,000 more if I got it elsewhere.

(Am I confusing you? Sorry. All you need to know is that I was going to save ten grand if I got my home loan at Home Savings.)

I made an appointment to go see the man there who was in charge of deciding if his firm would give me one. This was by no means a slam dunk because of my profession as a freelance writer of comic books and TV shows. If you do that kind of thing for a living, your income can be very unstable and unpredictable.

I dressed nicely and went to the Home Savings offices which were in a beautiful building with ornate tile work at 9245 Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills. (It's now a Chase Bank and still quite beautiful.) A serious man who looked very much like a humorless Gavin McLeod looked over my application, made some grunts, eyed me with suspicion and when he got to part that gave my occupation, he said, "Writer? That's not good. We've had to do a lot of foreclosures on writers."

I immediately imagined $10,000 going away. Then my dread intensified: I thought, "If Home Savings won't give me a loan, maybe no one will." I had a brief vision of the wonderful house I'd found going away.

It was interrupted when Gavin said, "Before we can make a decision on this, we'll need copies of your tax returns for the last three years. How soon do you think you could get them to us?"

I asked, "Would twenty minutes be soon enough?"

He looked at me like I was trying to pull a fast one. I said, "No, really. Could I use your phone?" With a dire look of skepticism, he pushed his desk phone towards me and I called Ron, who was all the way across the street. (Don't believe me? Check the addresses. Home Savings was at 9245 Wilshire. As you can see on the above check, Ron's office was at 9350 Wilshire.)

I told Ron what I needed and that I wanted to run over and get copies. He said, "Don't bother. I'll bring them to you myself!" Less than fifteen minutes later, a bit winded from sprinting across the boulevard, Ron walked in with copies of the forms. Gavin McLeod recognized him from past dealings and said, "Ron Koblin! If you're this young man's business manager, there should be no problem with this loan." Within minutes, it was approved.

I realized later that Ron thought that might happen if he took them over himself, which is why he didn't send a secretary or let me cross Wilshire. It was one of countless services that this very wise, good man did for me over the 38 years. I am so sad to lose him as my protector and, more importantly, as my friend.

Hung up when I hit the one-hour mark. How is this company, as the recording keeps telling me, "The nation's largest provider of home health care"?

Listening to a recording tell me how glad they are I called and how someone will be with me shortly.

That's right. Rub it in.

So the Rehab Center arranged for Apria Home Healthcare to deliver a walker to me to use at home. Having had experience with Apria when they were furnishing medical equipment for my mother, I told the folks at the Rehab Center (a) they never delivered on time and (b) to call them about anything is to spend much of your life on hold. In light of that, the Rehab Center loaned me one of their walkers to use until the one from Apria showed up.

Sure enough, Apria didn't deliver yesterday. Someone there left a message on my voicemail early this morn to phone them to arrange a delivery time. I called them back, explained what I needed, gave them my credit card for the co-pay and a lady said, "Please hold while I verify your delivery information." I have now been on hold for 37 minutes. It would only take 40 for me to crawl on my hands and knees over to CVS to buy a goddamn walker.

James Corden, Rachel Bloom and Nathan Lane offer up some Inappropriate Musicals. Mr. Lane's head has been shaved for his upcoming role as attorney F. Lee Bailey in an upcoming episode of American Crime on FX called "The People Vs. O.J. Simpson." That strikes me as real odd casting but, hey, maybe they added in some show tunes. It's not like it would lower the dignity of that trial.

I love Rachel Bloom and the fact that she now has her own TV series. She started pretty much promoting herself on the web via self-produced and self-financed music videos, one of which was the controversial, "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury." If you've never seen it and can handle a bit of naughty, you can view it here. Ray was among the many who loved it.

At the 2012 Comic-Con International in San Diego, there was a big Ray Bradbury Tribute event to note his passing. Rachel had volunteered to perform the number but someone (this was before I became involved) had told her it was too "adult" for a Comic-Con event. No problem, said she. She wrote a set of clean alternate lyrics that I believe turned the tune into "Touch Me, Ray Bradbury" and she showed up in her schoolgirl costume from the video to perform it. She would be singing live to a recorded musical track.

I was co-hosting with Ray's friend/biographer Sam Weller and on one of my trips out on stage to introduce a speaker, I noticed something about the audience: There were no kids there. Not a one. No one under the age of 18 or maybe even 30. When I went backstage, I went over to Rachel who was waiting to go on and asked her if she'd rather sing the raunchy lyrics. She said, "I'm not sure I can remember them but I'll give it a try."

So when it came time to introduce her, I went out and polled the audience. I told them they had a choice: They could hear the laundered version or, in the spirit of Fahrenheit 451, Rachel could perform the unexpurgated version. We did a show of hands and not one person present wanted the cleaned-up lyrics…so out she went to perform the song as written.

There's an online report on the memorial that says she was the one who asked the audience which version they wanted to hear. Nope. I did that and I want credit for it because I could hear Ray giving his wholehearted approval.

Rachel is a tremendous talent who will go far. Here she is the other night with James Corden and Nathan Lane…

Fred Kaplan on how what's happening in Syria reminds him of how World War I started. I don't know what's going to happen over there but we won't like it.

Not long ago, I mentioned a "secret project" here. Here's what it was. Monday the 28th at an ungodly early hour, I traded in my old right knee for a brand-new knee. I got a fairly good one I think and for a rather good price: 99 cents at — where else? — the 99 Cents Only Store on Wilshire. I wanted to get my knee at Costco until I found out that they make you buy a dozen.

First question people ask: Did it hurt? Answer: Yes, of course. It hurt like hell. As of today, it only hurts like heck and only when I put weight on it or twist it in an odd way. I trust I will look back on this decision and feel that the result is less total agony than I'd have experienced if I'd kept the old one much longer.

Actually, keeping the old one indefinitely was not a real option. It just plain wore out and it was time for it to go. Would that all things in this world that have outlived their uselessness could be replaced so thoroughly. (Have you watched Meet the Press lately?)

Please understand before I go any further that I am not recommending this surgery to anyone or not not recommending it to anyone; just describing my experiences. Would I do it again? Alas, I may have to as my left knee has been giving me trouble, too — and why not? It's just as old and I got it from the same place. I probably could have delayed the right knee for six months but because it was so intermittently efficient, I stopped driving about three weeks ago. And as I'm sure everyone can understand, I wanted to try and get it replaced and healed before the left knee became an issue.

What did I learn from the experience? Well, one thing is that many narcotics may have zero effect on my body at least for pain management. As you may know and even care, I have taken precious few drugs in my life…and I'm including alcohol and tobacco in that list. Never tried most others either but I'm kinda unsurprised that the ones they tried on me at the hospital didn't all do for me what they do for most folks.

As I've mentioned here, I have a lot of Food Allergies. One thing you learn when you have a lot of them is that bodies are different. This is not something that dawns on most people who either have none or have only had minor bad experiences with one or two foods. They're always saying to folks like me, "Oh, you should eat artichokes! They're so healthy for you!" And some of us think to ourselves, "Healthy for you maybe, poison to me!" You'd be amazed at the number of folks who don't believe that anyone can't eat the things they love. (Sometimes, they'll even say, "What if we melted cheese on the artichoke?")

So since walnuts do not have the same effect on my body as they do on most bodies, I see no reason to assume that any given drug will. Invulnerability to drugs is apparently not a hereditary trait. My mother used to consume Vicodin like those great Molasses Chips bars that come in assortments of See's Candy. The time I took my one and only Vicodin, which was in connection with some minor surgery, I got violently seasick on dry land.

I had my surgery on Monday. After, there was much pain, especially if I did anything foolish like moving my leg or exhaling. They gave me Norco. It had no effect. They gave me a higher dosage of Norco. Still no effect. Then they tried Dilaudid. That did have an effect: It made me nauseous and dizzy. The leg remained indifferent and ablaze.

The Dilaudid experiment was in the wee small hours of Tuesday morning. Once it had failed, doctors were unreachable and my nurse wasn't authorized to give me anything else so I suffered until about 7:30 AM when my surgeon made his rounds to see how I was doing. When he found out, he ordered up a new nerve block for my leg, like the nerve block they'd used along with other anesthetics during the surgery. For reasons they explained but which I'm not sure I can replicate here, the second block wouldn't take so we plunged back into trying other drugs.

Morphine didn't work on me. Percoset didn't work on me. Oxycontin didn't do a thing for my pain but it did make me very, very stupid for most of one night. Finally, I understand this Rush Limbaugh thing.

A few others failed and then on Thursday morning, they called in a Pain Management specialist. A young Korean woman suggested a muscle relaxant called Robaxin which, working in tandem with more conventional pain-killers, suddenly did the trick. By Thursday evening, I could move without sounding like Sam Kinison with his dick stuck in his zipper. Friday morning, I even took a few steps with a walker.

Friday evening, I was moved to a Rehabilitation Center, a move I initially feared. I dealt with several for my mother when she was in her final years and even the best one I found wasn't wonderful. The worst one reminded me of one of those post-apocalyptic movies where the survivors of the nuclear holocaust wonder aloud if those who'd perished weren't the lucky ones. But folks at the hospital assured me I was going to one of the better places and they were right, though I turned out to be allergic to every single thing on their menu except Cheerios.

That amazingly was not a problem since some combo of after-effects of the surgery and/or my pain meds completely nuked my appetite. My friend Carolyn and my cleaning lady Dora brought me the few meals I felt like eating. (The chow in the hospital was, amazingly, not bad. I wasn't hungry there either but what I did consume could have been served at a Denny's or Bob Evans'.)

That was one difference between the hospital and the Rehabilitation Center. Another was that in the hospital, I had a private room and didn't have to listen to a lot of old people screaming all night. I don't mean that to be insensitive but that's an accurate description. I shared a room with two gents far more elderly than I and across the hall from us was a woman I never saw but heard aplenty. From her voice, I imagined her looking just like Shelley Winters and she was always hollering to have her door left open, her door left closed, her food tray brought, her food tray taken away, her medication given, etc. Mainly though, the demands were toilet-related.

So it's 4 AM and we're all listening to this woman announce in graphic terms what she'll do to the bed and herself if someone doesn't come and help her. No wonder I had no appetite. Meanwhile, one of my roommates kept yelling in pain while the other was nice about 23 hours and 55 minutes out of each day. The other five, he'd spend in nightmare-delusion land, yelling at the nurses here that they had broken into his home and they should leave immediately because he was calling the police.

And still, it wasn't that bad. The staff was friendly and efficient. The place was clean and well-equipped. The Physical Therapists knew what they were doing. I did not have a terrible time.

Please do not write me that you or a loved one had a terrible time in a nursing facility. I know that's the norm, especially after what I experienced having to yank my mother out of several. I just thought you'd all appreciate hearing that it isn't always that way.

Since the wonderful Korean Pain Specialist solved the riddle of what would manage my hurting, my knee has gotten a bit better each day. I came home this afternoon and finished/uploaded this post which I mostly drafted at the Rehab Center. The four days at the hospital, I managed this blog, posting pre-written items and writing some new ones on my iPad and iPhone. At the Rehab Center, I had the space (and ability to get outta bed) so I could set up the laptop. Now I'm home and I expect to be back to normal walking and driving in two weeks, maybe sooner.

I did not mention this before now except to a few good friends, or keep a real-time blog of the experience because I knew I'd get e-mails with anecdotal tales of folks whose knee replacements went horribly, horribly wrong. For some reason, some people think they're being helpful when they do that while others do it out of a heightened sense of Nasty. Even after my Gastric Bypass Surgery in 2006 which was utterly successful, one of my fellow comic book writers couldn't resist coming up to me at Comic-Con and telling me, "You know, most people who have that operation are okay for a time but then they suddenly die." He was not kidding. He just wanted to piss on someone else's self-improvement.

That's everything I can think of to tell you right now but others, I'm sure, will occur to me. It was briefly awful but all in all, less awful than I expected. Once I'm well enough to get down on one knee, I'll start working up a dynamite Jolson impression to go with my Durante.

Before there was YouTube, there was Public Access TV. Here from a 1979 public access broadcast is a half-hour with Mel Blanc. Mel tells the story of how he invented Porky Pig's voice by deciding that a pig's grunts were not unlike a stutter. That's not true. Porky was created as a stuttering pig and originally voiced by a stuttering comedian until Mel was called in to replicate what the previous guy had been doing.

But apart from a few of those, it's a good conversation with a great, talented man. The interviewer is Dennis Tardan, who is still doing interviews, now in podcast form…

I think I've written about this before but I'm not that wild about anyone who runs for public office. Never have been, never expect to be. Moreover, I question whether deep down, anyone really is. I think we all select the Least Objectionable Candidate and then having made that decision, we try to convince everyone that he or she is terrific, perfect, sent-by-God, flawless, the best hope of America, a true leader, etc. Often in the process, we convince ourselves of that to some delusional extent.

I can understand how some people preferred George W. Bush over the alternatives at the time but I don't believe that anyone who said he was a great man really thought that. My friends who supported him — I had more than you might think — always seemed to be cringing over the mangled English, the bad economic news, the certainty over so much of the Iraq War that has since been found to be untrue…I could make a very long list.

Time and again, they had to put on brave faces and pretend none of that stuff diminished their respect for Their President. Does anyone think it wouldn't have if it was done by President Gore?

The reverse is just as true. I may well wind up voting for and supporting Hillary Clinton. I think she's a smart woman and I have a certain sympathy for her because I think she's been smeared by fake scandal after fake scandal. But I promise you (and more important, myself) that I'm not going to start cheerleading for her and pretending she's The Best of All Possible Candidates. At best, she or anyone might be The Best of All Candidates Who'll Be On My Ballot. Which is sure not the same thing.

Lately, she reminds me of one of those candidates who if you asked them their position on a vital issue and they were completely honest, they'd say, "I don't know. My advisors haven't finished analyzing the polls yet." Her statement today of opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership Deal doesn't make a whole lot of sense as anything but a vote-getting calculation. It hasn't changed much since an earlier version she supported. This is how she is lately with everything.

Not long ago, one of the worst things you could say about a politician was that he was for something before he was against it…like John Kerry was for the Iraq War before he was against it. That kind of shift was rarely viewed as new enlightenment or changing one's position due to new developments or new information. I could respect it one of those contexts but a lot of folks couldn't. They saw it as wishy-washiness, trying to have it both ways, being willing to say anything to get elected, etc.

These days, we don't even seem to expect our candidates to be consistent. Ben Carson was for some forms of Gun Control before he was against them all. Bernie Sanders was (somewhat) against national marriage equality before he was for it. Donald Trump was probably at some point for everything he's now against and against everything he's now for. The few candidates who haven't done wide U-Turns are all polling at 4% or less.

I don't like any of these people that much. I'm going to vote for whoever won't try to cripple Obamacare and health suppliers like Planned Parenthood, whoever's less likely to pack the Supreme Court with more Scalias, whoever seems less prone to initiate sequels to the Iraq War in Iraq or elsewhere, whoever's not going to slash taxes for the rich and compassion for the poor and so forth. It'll have to be someone who won't play ostrich when anyone utters the words, "Climate Change."

Sure looks like that'll be the Democrat. I'm thinking this election has a lot of twists and turns ahead but the nominee of that party could well be Ms. Clinton.

But I won't get into that trap of thinking she (or he if it's Sanders or Biden) is perfect, wonderful, ideal, etc. And if you're likely to vote for the G.O.P. nominee, you can save yourself a lot of pretending and disappointment by not getting into that trap, either. If there are such people in politics today, the silly (and monetary) demands we place on them pretty much guarantee they won't make it through the gantlet.

I never much cared for the cereal, Post Crispy Critters…but I really liked their commercials. That's Sheldon Leonard, of course, as Linus…

Tomorrow is, amazingly, the 20th anniversary of the O.J. Simpson murder trial. I don't know about you but I came to two pretty firm conclusions after it…

1. O.J. Simpson murdered Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, and probably did so exactly as alleged and with no hanky-panky on the part of the police and —
2. I spent way too much of my life watching this trial and reading about it and talking about it and just thinking about it.

If you disagree with #1, fine. Because of #2, I have no interest in debating any part of #1. I will say though that just as a spectator sport, I found the second trial — the civil one — more interesting.

And the best bit of reporting on that second trial was done for Slate in a series of first-person accounts filed by the Renaissance Man of Show Biz, Harry Shearer. I kinda disagree with Harry that the L.A.P.D. "enhanced" the evidence against Orenthal in order to make sure an obviously-guilty man was convicted. But that aside, Shearer's 36 dispatches offer fascinating insight into our judicial system and the way the media intersects and interferes with it.

Slate still has the pieces up but they're in a format that makes them awkward to read in sequence. I have therefore gone to the trouble — no, no, don't thank me — of compiling links to each chapter so you can read the articles in the right order by clicking on these links…

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, Part 8, Part 9, Part 10, Part 11, Part 12, Part 13, Part 14, Part 15, Part 16, Part 17, Part 18, Part 19, Part 20, Part 21, Part 22, Part 23, Part 24, Part 25, Part 26, Part 27, Part 28, Part 29, Part 30, Part 31, Part 32, Part 33, Part 34, Part 35, and Part 36.

That I went to the trouble to do this should give you some idea how valuable I think Mr. Shearer's reporting is. The least you can do is go read it.