I know I spend way too much blogspace on What I Eat but I once made quite a fuss here about my love of Five Guys burgers so — out of sheer honesty, as Daffy Duck would put it — I should report that I've lost much of my passion for them. I had one a couple weeks ago that was ehh: Not at all bad but nothing to get excited about.

A few years ago here, I confessed that I had lost whatever love I once had for In-N-Out Burgers. I wasn't sure if it was me or them and I finally decided it was a little of each. My tastes have changed since my 2006 Gastric Bypass surgery, most notably in a complete loss of any Sweet Tooth. I no longer want to even be near let alone eat candy, cake, pie, ice cream, cookies or even fruit and fruit juices. A similar change seems to be happening slowly within me regarding beef.

Years ago, I read part of a book called Sugar Blues that urged people to drastically reduce their consumption of sugar, especially of the processed variety. The author further suggested the giving up of red meat, saying that it was easier to abandon one if you eliminated the other. At the time, I didn't think it was humanly possible for me to do without either so that was that. That was where I stopped reading Sugar Blues.

Now, I find myself not disliking beef but also not liking it as much. But I also don't think it's just me. I think the Five Guys I go to isn't as good as others I've been to, especially those back east.

My favorite place in the world (as much of it I've visited) to eat beef is Peter Luger's Steak House in Brooklyn. I haven't been to it — or for that matter, New York — in quite a few years. I'm eager to get back there soon and one reason is that I want to go to Peter Luger's and just see if I love it as much as I once did. I have a feeling I won't.

Years ago, I read an interview with one of the proprietors. Someone had asked them, "Why can't I cook steaks at home that are as good as what I get here?" His answer went something like this…

Well, you probably don't have a temperature-controlled room in your home devoted to aging beef and you don't know the specific process we use. You probably don't have a grill in your kitchen as hot as ours, nor are you as experienced as our chefs, who cook hundreds of steaks a day, seven days a week, and know precisely the right second to turn one or take it off the grill. But the main thing is that if you shop at any butcher store or grocery open to the general public, you probably aren't getting meat as good as the meat we can get.

Obviously, that "main thing" matters a lot. Peter Luger's has been cloned to some extent by a restaurant chain — Wolfgang's Steakhouse, unaffiliated with Wolfgang Puck — run by a former Peter Luger's headwaiter. I frequent the one in Beverly Hills and it's quite wonderful, especially if you can stand being at a table next to Larry King, which is where I always seem to find myself seated.

It's almost as good as I remember Peter Luger's being and I'm thinking that "almost" is a function of that "main thing." I'm thinking they age their beef the same way and they have an equally-hot grill manned by an equally-experienced chef. I'm thinking the difference is the quality of the meat available to them.

Or maybe it's me and my diminishing taste for beef. That's one reason I want to get back to Luger's for a meal and compare. And while I'm back there, I'll grab a Five Guys burger and see if I like 'em there more than I like 'em here. I have the feeling I will…but not as much as I liked them a few years ago.

This is a "lost" sketch from the original series of Monty Python's Flying Circus. It was done for Episode 12 of the third season, which was the episode with "Spot the Looney" and other bits you probably remember. This one, you may never have seen.

The sketch is called "Political Choreographer" and I haven't heard an explanation of why but it was aired once or twice, then cut from the show (and apparently, the master recording) for reruns. The BBC did not have a copy of it in their vaults but someone found a home recording of the 1973 episode from when it aired on station WTTW in Chicago in 1980. The tape starts with a short pledge break pitch with Terry Jones and Graham Chapman that preceded the episode. Then you'll see the sketch, which has apparently been included as a bonus item on some recent DVD releases…

For some reason, I'm writing a lot about food here lately…and I have a long post tomorrow on that topic. But I wanted to link to this article about the trouble McDonald's is in. Being the leader in the Fast Food business was fine in its day but America is turning on Fast Food and Mickey D's hasn't a clue what to sell them instead.

I'll just toss out one thing I think is a problem, which is not to say it's the only one. I hit a McDonald's about once every few months. I walk or drive past a playground. I'm surrounded by clown images and kids and games, and I'm waited on by a sixteen-year-old wearing a paper hat. I feel like I'm back in fifth grade, walking into the school cafeteria.

Also, when I ask for a Quarter-Pounder without cheese, they react like I just ordered a bottle of H2O and asked them to leave out the O and just give me the H2.

Conservatives are outraged that a New York Times photo of the recent Selma march did not show Mr. and Mrs. George W. Bush in it. They say he was "cropped out." The Times says the photo wasn't cropped at all; that Bush was simply not near Obama and the lead marchers so he was never in the photo in the first place. They note that his participation was reported in the news article.

Other photos of the event show that, yes, Bush was not near Obama so the "cropped out" term is probably not valid, though I doubt those using it will ever stop using it. Seems to me though their real complaint is with whoever was responsible for Bush not being physically closer to Obama — if indeed anyone was responsible. Like it or not, George W. Bush is an important man and it would have been a good additional marker of how far we've come since the original Selma protests to have the most recent Republican president near the front.

So if someone stuck him off to the side, that was wrong. If he just wound up there by chance or because he went the wrong way, there was no foul committed. I presume the New York Times had nothing to do with choreographing who marched where but it would have been nice if they'd run a separate photo of him, assuming one was available.

Also, the chances of seeing an important Republican leader get into the main part of that historic photo might have doubled if, say, two of them had showed up. But good for George W. Bush for supporting the demonstration with his presence. I still think he and Cheney committed war crimes and lied their asses off and did things that, had they been done by Democratic leaders, would have had the G.O.P. demanding impeachment and firing squads. But sometimes, they did the right things. Well, Bush, anyway.

We have a sudden flurry of articles pointing out that no one really benefits from or wants Daylight Saving Time. Here's a feature John Oliver's show did about it last night.

I have the feeling we're about to see some politician score a lot of points by leading the charge to rid us of this practice.

I understand people being Catholic and I understand people being in favor of the Death Penalty. I am neither (though I was once the latter) and I respect those choices and do not think anyone is a bad person for having made them.

What I don't get is folks who claim to be devout Catholics but who think that the Catholic church's opposition to the Death Penalty is just for show and not meant to be taken seriously. For years, I have watched Pat Buchanan make this case and it never does not stink of hypocrisy. Abortion is bad, he says, because his church says it is and The Pope is, after all, infallible on such matters. But when the same church and the same Pope say the same thing about the Death Penalty they (a) really don't mean it and (b) especially don't mean it because the person receiving the Death Penalty has taken an innocent life and no one is ever wrongly convicted of that.

So The Pope is infallible except when we aren't supposed to listen to what he says…or something like that. And the courts do not sentence someone to Death Row unless that person deserves to die and pay no attention to those DNA-testing exonerations because, well, just don't pay attention to them.

I really don't get this. Here's an article about this but mainly about how race seems to impact which Catholics do the Pat Buchanan Dance on this topic.

Jan's Restaurant is closing. It's over on Beverly Boulevard a block east of La Cienega here in Los Angeles but it won't be there a week from now. Some time after it closes, the building will be torn down and a new Chipotle Restaurant will be erected, fulfilling a vital need. My God, how can we have three square blocks of this city without a Chipotle? Next thing you know, they'll be opening them inside Starbucks.

I used to live a block from Jan's and I ate there once or twice a week. Once I stopped living a block from Jan's, I still ate there, only once or twice a month. Sorry, Chipotle. I've seen your menu and you won't be getting a dime of business outta me.

Jan's advertised themselves as "L.A.'s Best Coffee Shop," which I only took to mean that the two other coffee shops owned by the same guy weren't as good. Compared to coffee shops that had other owners, it didn't stack up badly. Jan's served great breakfasts, great hamburgers, decent homemade soups and, best of all, they had one of those vertical pie cases up front near the register so if you had to wait for a table, you could stand there and watch pies revolve.

One time, I took a lady friend there and she ordered eggs and sausage. The menu said "Any style" and she told our server she wanted them — and I quote — "basted in water." Our server said, "I'll check and see if the chef knows how to do that." She went off and came back and told us the chef didn't know how to do that.

My friend was shocked. "How," she asked me and the gods, "can a professional chef not know how to make eggs basted in water?" She went over to where he worked and tried to explain it to him. You start like you're going to fry the egg sunny-side-up and then you drizzle a tablespoon of water on it, cover the pan and let it cook for 2-3 minutes, creating an egg that's sort of poached and sort of fried.

The chef listened politely to her lesson and then said, sounding way too much like Peter Falk for his own good, "Hey, lady, I'm sure with the right cook, it would be a work of art. But I'm only cooking here because I'm not classy enough to eat here. And no matter how I cook an egg, it comes out scrambled. Life's like that sometime."

She returned to our table and ordered her eggs scrambled…and sure enough, they came out scrambled. The man did not lie.

I'm going to miss Jan's. There was nothing remarkable about it but for its general dependability. Still, it served me well and fed me well and I spent some great hours there talking with friends after the ultra-efficient bus boys had cleared the dishes away. You can do that at any restaurant, I suppose, but I liked to do it at Jan's. Life's like that sometime.  And what the hell am I doing up at this hour?

My TiVo thinks tonight's episode of Last Week Tonight is a rerun so it wasn't going to record it. But it's a new episode so I just told my TiVo it was wrong and ordered it to record the show. It tried to argue but I showed it who's boss around here.

I have crickets in my house. Well, maybe I should say "had" crickets in my house because I seem to be getting rid of them.

At first, I tried getting them out in a humane manner but I couldn't figure out how to do that. I tried scooping them up on a piece of paper so I could put them out a door or window but they just hop right off the paper. I could have started squishing them but that seemed cruel. They weren't harming anything…just distracting me by hopping through my kitchen or hunkering down in some bathroom to make their not-unpleasant noise. At times in there, I've felt like a bear doing you-know-what in the woods.

I also get a lot of spiders in here and some of them look like if they bit me, I would probably not gain the proportionate strength of a spider and then figure out how to make a web shooter device that shoots webs out of my wrists that are strong enough to swing from building to building on and which then dissolve without a trace. (I always wondered why Peter Parker had so many problems when he'd invented something he probably could have sold for millions of dollars.)

Anyway, I decided I needed to find a way to remove crickets, spiders and perhaps other occasional creatures from my premises without gooshing them so I bought one of these…

There are several similar devices from different makers out there to choose from and I have no experience with any of them. I just tried this one because it looked simple and because their ads say, "You will be pleased with the sucking results!" How do you not respond to a slogan like that?

It's called the Bug Vacuum by One Kubed Designs and it sells for $24.00. It runs on one 9 volt battery and it has two buttons on it. One puts out a little blacklight LED glow to enable you to find the bugs. The other turns on a little vacuum that sucks the bugs into a tube. I've found the light to be fairly useless but the rest of it works as advertised, at least on crickets and spiders. I'm skeptical it has enough power to budge a large cockroach but fortunately, I haven't had to test that out yet.

When I see a cricket or spider, I grab my Bug Vacuum and suck them up into the tube. You can cork the end of the tube (a plug is included) or put your hand over the end but I've found that if I just point it upwards, the bug stays in the tube long enough for me to take it outside and release it unharmed.

That's all it does but that's all I wanted it to do. Well, actually, I'd like a larger model which will work on people who come to my door and try to convince me that my life is meaningless and that I'm going to hell unless I instantly convert to their religion and donate money. Them, I may have to start stepping on…and believe me, I've got the feet to do it.

Why do we have Daylight Saving Time? According to this article, most of what we believe about it is not true.

But we have it so remember to set your clocks ahead tonight. My thanks to Steve Stoliar for suggesting this clip that shows you how to do this…

The 2015 Tony Award Ceremony will be broadcast live on CBS from Radio City Music Hall in New York on June 7. Who's hosting? Usually, this would have been announced months ago but it hasn't been yet. My deduction? They're waiting to see if Neil Patrick Harris can work it into his schedule. Given the mixed reaction he got to his Oscar hosting, he may decide he needs to remind people how good he is at that kind of thing. The Tony Awards are more "his room" and he's a lot more in control on those telecasts.

So now Samantha Bee is departing The Daily Show. I see a lot of speculation that all these departures were triggered by Jon Stewart's announcement that he would soon leave the host chair but Bee's deal, as well as the one involving her husband Jason Jones, had to have been in the works for some time. One wonders how long all these folks knew about Stewart stepping down before we knew about Stewart stepping down. I have the feeling that when Mr. Stewart made that announcement, he knew exactly who'd be taking over his chair — or at least knew of a short list of feasible, gettable replacements — and that he didn't make that announcement until he was confident there was someone who could keep the ship afloat.

I try from time to time but I still find Jimmy Kimmel unwatchable as a talk show host. Still, I admit his show's attacks on the anti-vax mob are very clever and probably effective.

Incidentally, last night Kimmel reran a show from February 25 where his lead guest was Will Smith while Jimmy Fallon reran a show from February 5 where his lead guest was Will Smith. David Letterman got a one-day jump on both of them. He reran his February 18 show with lead guest Will Smith the night before.

There's a probably-apocryphal story from back in the early seventies when there were four major late night talk shows, all emanating from New York: Merv Griffin's on CBS, Johnny Carson's on NBC, Dick Cavett's on ABC and David Frost's in syndication. The story is that thanks to staggered taping schedules, Jerry Lewis — who presumably had something to plug — managed to guest on all four on the same night.

I don't think that happened. I suspect Jerry did all four on one New York trip and they all aired close enough to one another that it was easily exaggerated into the same night. But Will Smith got on all three 11:30 network shows over three weeks and they all got rerun over two days. That's darn close to what Mr. Lewis is said to have accomplished.

I buy cleaning supplies for my home a year or so at a time. Yesterday, I decide it's time…and my car could also use fueling and washing. So I get the car fueled and washed, then I drive it to a shopping center, taking a ticket on my way into the lot. I park my car. I go into a Target store there. I select Lysol and generic Windex and Swiffer refills and laundry detergent and Oxi-Clean and trash bags and many other items. I push my cart up to a checkout lane where a cheery checker asks, "Do you need a parking validation?" I do…so I reach into my pocket to get my ticket —

— and it isn't there. The ticket, not my pocket.

Figuring it fell out when I pulled my shopping list out of that very pocket, I backtrack and search the aisles. I do not find it. I ask a lady who's stocking shelves in that area if she saw a lost parking ticket. She says no, then pulls out a walkie-talkie and calls the Customer Service desk and asks them if someone has turned one in. They check and tell her yes. Ah!

I walk over to the Customer Service desk and they tell me, yes, someone did turn in a lost parking ticket…a few days ago. The ticket is dated March 3. I figure out rather quickly that it is not mine and that a two-hour validation on it won't be of much help.

Well, I think, maybe mine is in my car or near it. I pay for my purchases and head for my car where, it turns out, there is no sign of the ticket. I load everything I bought into the trunk and then, Target receipt in hand, head for the Parking Office of this lot. I explain the situation and an attendant tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. Full price is $10.00, which is ten bucks more than I'd pay if I had my ticket and it had been validated.

I explain to the gentleman that I just spent $251.00 at the Target store and show him my receipt. Doesn't that deserve a little consideration? Yes, it does. He considers it and tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. "That will be ten dollars," he tells me.

I explain I have not been there all day. I have been there less than an hour. He tells me that this may be so but he has no proof of that. I ask him, "If I could prove I've been here less than an hour, would you let me go without paying?" He says he would but, of course, there is no conceivable way to prove this.

I pull out my receipt from the car wash and show him that it is time-stamped 55 minutes before. It also has my car's license plate info printed on it. "As you can see," I tell him, "I was in a car wash having this car washed 55 minutes ago. The car wash is five to ten minutes away from here so the longest I could possibly have been here is 50 minutes." I tell him he can come with me up to the third parking level if he doubts me to check my car's license plate and its cleanliness.

The man, well aware he has just been Perry Masoned to within an inch of his life, thinks for a moment, then tells me I will have to talk to his boss. He phones this person to come over from another office. In five minutes, I am explaining the whole matter to the boss.

I say, "I'm a very good customer, the kind you want to encourage to come back to this shopping center and shop. I just spent $251.00 at the Target store. Why don't you just let me exit for the price I would be paying if I hadn't lost my ticket, which is zero?"

The boss mulls it over for a few moments, then tells me that since I lost my ticket, I must pay full price, as if I've parked there all day. "That will be ten dollars," he tells me.

I sigh. I am reaching for my wallet when he looks again at the receipt from the car wash. He asks, "What is MAGNOR?" I tell him that's my license plate.

He says, "I remember a comic book called Magnor. It was done by the guys who do Groo the Wanderer."

In 1993, Sergio Aragonés and I were far enough ahead on Groo that we did a mini-series about a super-hero we named Magnor. At about the same time, and certainly not because of what I was paid on Magnor, I bought a new car. On a whim, and figuring wrongly that Magnor would be around for a long time, I got that as my personalized license plate. Many thousands of miles later when I traded in that car and got a new one, I transferred the plate over and it adorns the auto I now drive.

The comic has been outta print for a long time, although it's scheduled for a hardcover collection (and maybe a new sequel) next year. Since it was last published, I have spent much of my life explaining to people in parking lots who ask what "Magnor" is. Standing there in the lot of this particular shopping center, I am amazed. I have found the one person alive, with the possible but not probable exception of Sergio, who remembers that comic.

I tell him I am indeed one of the guys who does Groo the Wanderer. He is delighted to meet me and to tell me he has "almost every issue of Groo" and for some reason, he also feels the need to tell me that though he loves Groo, his favorite comic book is DC's Secret Six by Gail Simone. He spends a considerable amount of time telling me how wonderful it is.

Attention, Gail Simone: I will send you the location of this shopping center. If you ever go there and lose your parking ticket, do not panic. The parking lot boss not only will not charge you full price, he may even give you your choice of any car in the place.

What he gives me is a free ticket to get out. Some days are better than others and this, my friends, was one of them. Ten bucks is ten bucks and by saving it, I think I just doubled my lifetime income from the Magnor comic book.

Once I admitted the Batman serial photo I posted was from the 1949 sequel instead of the 1943 original, I unleashed another wave of correcting e-mails. These all point out that that means the two men in the photo were not Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft but were, in fact. Robert Lowery and Johnny Duncan. So I've swapped out that photo for one that's from the '43 version. Happy now?

The still I posted of Lewis Wilson and Douglas Croft as Batman and Robin was from the 1949 sequel, not from the 1943 Batman serial. That's what I get for having Bill O'Reilly as my researcher.

Here are videos of the demolitions of ten Las Vegas hotels. I was present for the toppling of the Hacienda and I wrote about that casino-shattering event here.

Don't you love the fact that for some, the crew felt it was necessary to add some fireworks? Somebody said, "You know, Harry, seeing a fifteen story building engulfed in flame and crumbling to the ground…I just feel like it needs something to make it feel more exciting…"