Respect comes from honesty. You can’t respect opinions if they aren’t honest, and you can’t respect people if you aren’t honest about them.

So, out of respect for the late Antonin Scalia, I have this to say:  Sure, he was a “strict constructionist” — until it came to Bush v. Gore, that is, whereupon he and the rest of the majority on the Supreme Court twisted themselves into pretzels to halt the recount and name Bush the “winner.” Without Scalia, we would’ve had no Iraq war, hundreds of thousands of people would still be alive, thousands of soldiers and civilians wouldn’t have been horribly maimed, and we’d have trillions more in the treasury.

Think about that.

And ask yourself if that isn’t what should go onto the tombstone. Out of respect for the truth.

Who created Spider-Man? Was it, as credited, Stan Lee and Steve Ditko? Or was it Jack Kirby, who claimed authorship of the signature costume? Or was it… Halloween-costume company Ben Cooper? (Steve Ditko says no.)

Yesterday at a luncheon, a woman with a mic was asking rhetorically, “What do we call that thing where you do something again and again, expecting a different response?” I leaned over to the woman next to me and said, “Voting.”

One thing I would vote for again and again is “Candidate Confessions — a 2016 Cabaret,” a show about all the “major” 2016 presidential candidates (it’s tough to call them “major” when they’ve even included Jim Gilmore) that the folks at Second City in Hollywood were nice enough to invite me to. If you think it would be hard to make  Donald Trump and Ted Cruz look even more absurd, this show will change your mind. As a cabaret, the show is built around original songs, almost all of them funny and unexpected. I especially enjoyed Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz competing for who could be more “Latino” (with Bush trotting out his Mexican wife), Chris Christie finally getting to sing his version of “Born to Run,” and Carly Fiorina whipping up a new spell for us. Big, big highlights:  a spot-on Ben Carson (courtesy of Choni Francis) so funny it was hard for me to recover from; a closing number (also by Francis) that alone makes the entire show worth seeing; and anything that prominently featured Sarah Oliver (especially that Fiorina bit).

If you’ve got an hour or so and prefer your laughable politics to be on stage, go see this.

For Carly Fiorina, ending her campaign provides another opportunity to fire people.

So this is what it feels like to be sick for three days running.

Late Thursday afternoon, I was driving back from San Diego when my nephew called. He wanted to know if I was going to watch the Democratic debate that night. I took the hint and invited him over and asked him if he’d like dinner too. “Sure!” he said excitedly. When I got back home, I scribbled an order for Ameci Pizza — a large pepperoni pizza, and a large feta cheese pizza, with two dinner salads — handed it and forty bucks to my daughter, and crashed upstairs for half an hour. An hour later, we were all downstairs, the debate on, with me chewing away at my pizza and trying to hear what anyone on the screen was saying while my nephew and my adult son engaged in a loud conversation seemingly about politics but actually about nothing, much in the way that the endless footnotes, end notes, and side notes in a piece by David Foster Wallace claim to shed further light but generally occlude anything that’s happening in the main body.

The debate over, I raced glow-in-the-dark cars for 20 minutes with my daughter, then said I was going to bed, and at the very unfashionable hour of 8:30, because suddenly I wasn’t feeling well. In bed, I checked some things out on my laptop, including an animation of the eruption of Vesuvius that should have served as a cautionary tale. Because within an hour it was being re-enacted in my bathroom — both the eruption and the hot lava.

As in the video, my own version went on for hours and hours, but with one difference. In the video, there’s only one eruption. In my version, there are seven. Plus the concomitant lava flows. That ended, finally, at some point yesterday after first light, followed by two days of sweats and chills and countless gagging threats to repeat the entire ordeal.

Some takeaways:

• If you’re going to be vomiting anyway but desperately need something to drink because now you’re so dehydrated, allow me to recommend Coca Cola. I say that because it takes pretty much the same going up as it does coming down. The same cannot be said for other liquids.
• If you ever sense in advance that you’re going to be ill for hours on end, I recommend that you do not eat the feta cheese pizza. Feta is a pickled curd cheese that has been submerged in brine. Let that sit in your thoughts for a minute
• If you’re home in bed for a few days, nothing, nothing you have recorded on your DVR to watch at a later date looks any good
• Finally, given what you’re going through, when you finally struggle downstairs to watch “The Martian” with your youngest, you can’t help feeling that the guy stranded alone on Mars for a year and a half doesn’t have it nearly so bad

Today, I’m feeling a little better. (After all, I’m writing this.) But yesterday, I was determined to feel better, and stripped the bed and washed the sheets and the comforters, only to wake up soaked again this morning. Either way, I’m not spending another day mostly in bed.

The Iowa caucuses are tomorrow. I’ve been following the polls closely, as well as a great deal of press coverage. Also, I have been to Iowa, to lose about a hundred bucks in a casino a few years ago, and to stop in at a strip club with friends. (Female friends who thought it would be fun. But the club was closed.) Given my obvious expertise, expertise that puts me on equal footing with anyone on MSNBC or Fox News, I feel confident that I can make this prediction regarding the caucus results:  I predict that the winners will be a Republican and a Democrat that the majority of Americans don’t want as president.

In fact, I 100% guarantee this will be the result.

If you’re at all interested in how a song recording gets built, or in the music of David Bowie, you’ll want to check this out:  Bowie producer Tony Visconti breaks down the elements  of  “Heroes” into separate tracks, and discusses the recording process. It’s 20 minutes very well spent. (And provides a welcome companion primer to the release of The Beach Boys’ “The Smile Sessions” from a few years ago, which included several discs of bonus tracks where you could hear the “Smile” pieces separately, before they came together.) I especially enjoyed hearing the result of Brian Eno’s “synthesizer in a suitcase,” as well as Bowie’s isolated vocal.

If you’d like to watch this — and, again, I promise you it’s 20 minutes well-spent — do it now. This is from the BBC, and generally they don’t leave special content like this up for long.

I’ve really had it with this. Instead of all this misery and loss, we need to focus on bringing Bowie back. Who’s in?

Last night at a quarter to midnight, I saw a link on a friend’s Facebook page to a statement saying that David Bowie had died. “Is this true?” she was asking. I did some quick checking around the Internet, didn’t see anything, and responded, “This is bullshit. It pisses me off when people pull hoaxes like this for their own enjoyment.”

Twenty minutes later, I felt I had to delete that response. Unfortunately.

I texted my friend Trey with the news. He was similarly in shock. We exchanged several more texts, and then he sent one that said, “I could be at your place in about 30 minutes.” And so, until 2 a.m., we sat outside and drank drinks and smoked cigars and listened to the music of David Bowie and wondered aloud about each other’s health and mortality.

David Bowie was more than just an innovator. He was an explorer. An adventurer. Because he seemed to live every moment to the utmost, infusing our world with art of all sorts (making music, but also film and stage and paintings and more), constantly surrounded by art and artists and never looking backward, in an effort to prove that Bowie must after all be human, one publication saw fit to collect a series of photos of Bowie doing ordinary things. It is by far the most unusual photo series about the man, because Bowie appearing down-to-earth looks so out of context.

In addition to his superhuman accomplishments,Bowie  also was an avatar for people who wanted to be themselves, no matter what society thought they should be, or do, or look like, as so many friends have reminded me today. One, a gay man, said that Bowie was seen carrying a purse in the 1970s, and that made things seem easier. Holly Hughes posted this on her Facebook page:  “Like many queer people of my generation I can’t overstate how much I loved David Bowie. He was the first pop star I loved.”  Bowie made it okay to be different.

Even more than the essential reality check he brought to every moment, in which he reminded you that what others thought shouldn’t matter because, as Jim Morrison wrote, “no one here gets out alive,” Bowie provided music that always sounded somehow very right by sounding somehow a little wrong. In the way that my favorite Fitzgerald novel is “Tender is the Night” because the structure doesn’t quite work and its imperfections make it seem more true, the dissonance and off-kilter rhythms Bowie brought to his best work could snap you out of the conformity of sound. Whether it’s the achingly slow vocal in “Cat People,” the surprising double-tracked piano solo in “The Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” or the alien aural landscape of Low, Bowie’s work demanded attention. Muzak it wasn’t.

Today, I’m grateful for several things.

That I got to see him perform live — including on his very last tour, in April of 2004 in Anaheim. I’d seen him in the 1980’s on the “Serious Moonlight” tour, when he traversed the globe with a massive set and special effects, and that was wonderful. But seeing Bowie 12 years ago with a stripped-down band on a nearly bare stage, performing in jeans and a t-shirt and sneakers and seeming every bit of 20 or 30 years younger, was powerful. Here was someone stuffed to the gills with life.

That he was such a powerful gateway drug. Is it because of David Bowie that I was introduced to Devo, and Brian Eno, and TV on the Radio, and Robert Fripp, and so many other things that made me sit up and ask “What is that???” Perhaps not all of it — but a lot if it. Bowie had taste. I was willing to eat anything he was serving.

And I’m grateful for so much more, including all the wonderful music, but I’m especially grateful that I got a full day of listening to “Blackstar,” which I bought immediately upon release, before I learned that he was dead. The album had one meaning for me — “Here’s Bowie’s latest! What crazy shit is this?” — before it had another:  “Here’s Bowie’s last. It fills me with joy, and with ashes.”

I bought “Blackstar” on Saturday and listened to it that night while my wife and I drove to hear the Pasadena Symphony. It sounded exotic, and difficult, and haunting. It played through once, and then I changed it — but she stopped me and asked, “What are you doing? I want to hear that again.” Something hypnotic and unknowable that I hear in most of Bowie’s music had grabbed her. The next day, I lay on the living room couch, drinking coffee and reading the LA Times while playing the CD loud in the background. “Why is this so loud?” one of my children asked. “Because it’s fantastic,” I said. I will always cherish that moment — listening to the new David Bowie album, really letting it sink in, admiring the adventure of a 69-year-old international celebrity daring to do something brand-fucking-new-sounding at that advanced age.

Twelve hours later, the album held a very different meaning.

Three final thoughts.

Of all the messages and thoughts I’ve read — too many to read them all, given that literally hundreds of millions of people are mourning —  this is my favorite. It actually makes me feel better:

David Bowie has returned to his home after an all too brief sojourn amongst humanity.

The departure means that sadly it is the world that looks very different today.

He leaves behind a substantial body of work, including several autobiographical albums about the experience of being something more than human amongst mere mortals.

The singer’s home is believed to be somewhere in the constellation of Sirius but, like so much about him, this was left extremely ambiguous.

Bowie took up residence on this planet after falling to Earth, but it was generally accepted that no one planet could sufficiently contain him for long.

Fans are comforted with the knowledge that life continues somewhere, if not necessarily on Mars.

In response to the news, people worldwide are politely requesting that Tom Waits and David Attenborough go to bed early and take care of themselves, as there’s only so much of this we can stand.

Jodrell Bank have confirmed ground control will continue to call for him into the silent, eternal void, hoping for a signal.

Hats off to whoever wrote that.

Secondly, my daughter, who had gone with me on Saturday to buy the new CD, told me today when I picked her up from school that she was glad she knew David Bowie’s music while he was alive. In her view, everyone at school had climbed on board because he was dead, but she had been there first. I know that view well, having been there with Bowie a long, long time ago. She also bemoaned the music of her generation:  “What do we have? ‘Whip Nae Nae’?”

Finally, by the end of today, a different feeling came over me. A deterministic sense that because our own path lies within each of us, we can make of everything what we will. Therefore, now that it’s The Next Day, I’ve decided not to buy into the whole David Bowie is Dead hoax and to just go on in happy anticipation of his imminent tour.

It’s better this way.

David Bowie lives on.

Eric Idle being straightforward about how much money he’s made — from Monty Python and everything else. Until very recently, it’s been surprisingly little.

When you read this, bear in mind what he leaves out:  the cuts taken by managers, agents, and the lot.

I know a well-known and highly regarded, somewhat legendary, star of Broadway, dance and choreography, a person who is a two-time Tony winner and who was a key element in major premieres (including by Sondheim). I used to visit him in his very nice home that had once been Gloria Swanson’s. One thing he clarified for me:  All of his money actually came from real estate — flipping houses, including to Jack Nicholson, who simply wanted to knock down the adjacent house (my friend’s) and paid dearly for it.

So part of me isn’t surprised that Eric Idle didn’t make bank until he was 61. At age 72, and having been famous for about 50 years, Idle is reportedly worth $15 million, and most of that is recent. Given his profile, that’s not a lot of money in Los Angeles, and it’s not a lot when  you consider he’s paying tax in three countries (the U.S., England and France).