The good news: Some hoteliers in San Diego have banded together to commit a $500,000 inducement over five years to keep the Comic Con in San Diego.

The bad news:  The money is going to come from people who stay in those hotel rooms, in the form of a 2% tax on top of  the 10.5% hotel tax.

In other words, about 7,000 of us who stay in Comic-Con block hotel rooms will be paying 2% more to keep 126,000 people who come to the Con and spend their money in hotels and restaurants and on cabs and so forth.

That doesn’t sound like much of a contribution from the city — and, technically, it isn’t any contribution from the city. Moreover, it sounds suspiciously like a regressive tax.

At least this book is from someone who has read a book.

In addition to being a terrific actor, my good friend Darrell Kunitomi is an avid fly fisherman (and, to my family and me, a nature guide of sorts). Courtesy of the Sierra Club, here’s a slideshow of what he recently found while fishing in the Angeles National Forest. It involves spraypaint, and it isn’t pretty.

Take a look.

If you’re tired of hearing a patient or family member’s private conference with a doctor misconstrued as a “death panel,” you may enjoy this:

Public radio’s Ira Glass, on his show “This American Life,” devoted his show this weekend to a fact-based analysis of California gubernatorial candidate Steve Poizner’s book “Mount Pleasant,” which details Poizner’s semester as a volunteer teacher at a high school in  East San Jose. Here’s part of what he found:

“I’ve been in great schools, I’ve been in dangerous schools — urban schools, suburban schools. Mt. Pleasant is definitely one of the better public high schools I’ve ever visited. And I know it may seem like I’m belaboring all this, putting this book under a microscope point-by-point, but so many of the political discussions in our country seem so disconnected from reality. Every year there are egregious examples of politicians and commentators who believe if they repeat some non-fact over and over, it becomes true. And the more I looked into Poizner’s book, the more it seemed like one of those rare cases that’s so obviously and provably untrue. “

I’m looking forward to Poizner’s response to this. (And I’m surprised we don’t already have it.) Here’s my prediction: This is another example of “liberal media bias, made worse because this is public radio, funded by taxpayer dollars.” Or something like that.

Here’s the LA Times’ coverage of this fun episode, where you can download the transcript or click to listen to the broadcast.

Last night I went with three other playwrights to see what I thought was a pretty dull play, David Hare’s “The Blue Room.” Whenever you find that you’re more involved with the lights and the sound and the music and watching the set changes (all of them admittedly pretty interesting in this production), then you know that the play isn’t working. I kept debating whether it was the script, the actors, or the direction, and landed finally on the script. Sex has never been so uninteresting, and every line sounded written, not spoken.

Afterward, the  four of us went out for a drink. I sat there, determined not to be the first to dig into the play. Maybe because I was so drained by seeing it. The experience was so enervating it had me wondering again whether the balance in quality between theatre and television had permanently shifted. When television is producing shows like “Breaking Bad” and “The Wire,” and you can carefully select what you want to see and when you want to see it with your DVR, and nine out of ten plays are a disappointment and every experience is a crapshoot and it all costs more, the argument for getting off your couch becomes harder. And no, you cannot imagine what it feels like to say this here.

One thing the theatre will always have over television is this:  drinks afterward. We had some fun at the expense of the show — I offered my usual analysis of why a play in question was 90 minutes with no intermission:  “So no one can leave early” — and somehow we got on the subject of drink and drugs. And then we got the quote of the night, something far better than anything in the play, something that I’ll be putting in a play of mine unless the playwright who said it beats me to it:

“I smoked weed. I didn’t like it. It made me feel like part of the wallpaper. Drinking is better. Alcohol is like me, plus.”

It’s so perfect a bit of dialogue that it sounds written. If only anything approaching that level had been in the actual play that night.

Imagine if the Tea Party was made up of black people.

The coverage of armed people showing up near the capitol threatening the president would be a little different, wouldn’t it?

Here’s how it might go.

Here it is. Let the battle begin!

This is deliciously bad. As such, this scene from some long-lost movie may provide the finest entertainment of your day. I know it amused and entertained me.

By the way, despite claims to the contrary, this does not represent the worst acting ever. That distinction belongs to some odd-looking and unremarked character actor who auditioned for me 15 years ago and who at the end of his audition proudly punctuated the end of his standing monologue by planting one foot atop the seat of a nearby chair much in the way of an imagined Admiral Wellington or Napoleon Bonaparte. After he left, my producing partner said she didn’t believe any part of this man’s monologue. I replied, “I didn’t even believe the way he put his foot on the chair.”

This video therefore represents the second-worst acting ever. Although I’m open to other nominees, if you’d care to comment. And I suppose I’d nominate a third-worst: Nicolas Cage’s performance, such as it was, in last year’s “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call: New Orleans,” in which Cage’s lieutenant is best described as a cackling hunchback. Now that was pure enjoyment!

Living inside my house we have four people (and a fifth who still lives here occasionally), a dog, and assorted spiders that my daughter is always aghast to find lurking unexpectedly in some corner.

Outside in addition to the expected flying and crawling insects, and worms, we have a squirrel who proudly serves as our dog’s arch-nemesis, baiting her and chittering at her whenever given the opportunity, at least one patchy brown opossum who plays dead quite convincingly, tree rats in the palm trees towering nearby, hummingbirds — and a nest of mourning doves that lives in our cactus. That’s right, in our cactus.

That’s them right in the center. There are two parents and two recently hatched chicks in the nest. Just two weeks later, the chicks are almost as large as the parents. This nest is eye-level with me, which might beg the question, what bird would build a nest here? Isn’t it easy prey for predators — like raccoons, which we also might have, or neighborhood cats? But note two things:  Look how well the birds and their nest blend in with the bark of the cactus; color-blind animals will have a challenge seeing them there. (So did I, at first.) Note also the severe challenge to entry:  Yes, there’s a wall behind the tree, but the entire nest is surrounded by a thicket of cactus needles no animal wants to brave.

Here’s another shot, below. From this angle, you can see how the birds get in:  There’s one clear angle of approach for flying in. But in the photo above you can see that any other way in is fraught with danger for would-be marauders.

It’s absolutely ingenious.

Man vs. Octopus!