This commercial, for a transmission shop here in Burbank, beats anything Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has ever done. And for obvious reasons.

Here’s a claim that I flat-out don’t believe: that the “craft beer industry” is more important to the San Diego economy than Comic-Con. Here, read the piece for yourself, as found on the freelance entertainment site Examiner.com .

The article tabulates the craft beer industry as putting $299 million into the San Diego economy, while Comic-Con purportedly contributes only $180 million.

But lets look at this another way, in per-day revenue. If these figures are true — if — then craft beer, which is a year-round endeavor, brings in $819,000 a day. (And a lot of that is no doubt attributable to those sweaty fanboys in town for Comic-Con.) That’s not even enough for Lex Luthor’s latest battle suit. But comics, with their annual event lasting only five days, bring in an astounding $36 million per day. That’s Zuckerberg money.

So when it’s comics vs. snooty beer, the ales pale by comparison.

Here’s how one man came to eat in 6297 Chinese restaurants (and counting).

I was going to post all sorts of things on this blog tonight, but wound up writing 10 pages of my new play tonight instead.

Late last year, I started going to the gym regularly. Mostly to deal with chronic pain I’ve been experiencing since a car accident (not my fault) two-and-a-half years ago. It’s not something I talk about too much, and it’s not something I believe I’ve written about here before. At first, I started going to the gym just to loosen up, and to sit in the jacuzzi as often and for as long as I could. But then, sometime in February, something started to happen: I started to feel like I needed to go to the gym. Like I had things to work out. And now I’ve further turned that corner: Now I’m someone who looks forward to going to the gym.

For years, I posted on this blog every day. Every single day. Lately, it’s been more sporadic. I’ve wondered why that is, especially since I write every day. It’s not always playwriting (or, clearly, blog writing), but every single day I’m writing something, some of it for a fair amount of pay, some of it for some small amount of pay at some point (those tend to be plays), and some of it, I’m sure, for no pay whatsoever (those would be poems and short stories, which I haven’t even bothered to send out for years now). The itch I now get when I don’t go to the gym or get some other physical activity — the sense of feeling “rammy,” as the adults used to say about the overly rambunctious son of my father’s friend — is akin to the itch I get when I’m not writing.

But here’s what I think spurred an unexpected 10-page writing session on my play tonight: the miracle of seeing four compelling, enjoyable, thought-provoking plays recently, which were like finding water after being in the Mojave of bad theatre for the past two years, and the resumption of my playwriting workshop today. My workshop is stuffed with good writers writing good plays. When you’re in the room with that, you’d have to work not to be inspired by it.

The play I’m writing is a memory play. That’s not what I normally do, or, more appropriately, it isn’t what I’ve mostly done. (Or done at all?) But that’s what this play is. Tomorrow, we’re removing the seats from Moving Arts, the seats that we installed in 1993 or 1994, the seats donated to us that came from a silent movie house in the Bay Area where they were installed in 1916. We’re doing that because we’re putting in new seats. Parting ways with these seats that we’ve had for 20 years, and which have seen almost 100 years of audience derriere, will certainly spark more feelings fit for a memory play. But I’m excited to be part of taking them out for two reasons: because a number of them are going to a good new home where they’ll be cherished; and because while it’s good to appreciate the past, the future always beckons. And we’re already there, all the time.

Farewell to stage star Elaine Stritch. She’s still among us, but no longer on stage.

I love her sass. Her comic vinegar has always reminded me of my aunt who felt her leg cast went too high for her comfort — and so, banged some of it off with a hammer.

I’m glad I got to see Ms. Stritch in “A Delicate Balance” on Broadway about 20 years ago (where she was clearly too old to be talking about wearing a topless bathing suit, but I still didn’t care) and in “At Liberty” 10 years ago here in town.

She’s a character. I hope that all of us who think this is her final exit from the stage are somehow proved wrong. But I think her looming move to Birmingham, Michigan at age 88 tells us what we need to know.

Here’s Part Two of that interview with the curator of the David Bowie Is show in London. (And Part One is still available here.)

Two notions I find especially interesting here:

First, the idea that David Bowie is someone we project onto: “The truth is, when you get Bowie fans in a room they have absolutely nothing in common.” That may be true — but isn’t the same true of other major groups from that time, like the Rolling Stones? We now live in an era of niches; we used to live in an era of mass markets. So perhaps Geoffrey Marsh hasn’t recognized this changing dynamic and is projecting onto his exhibit what he wants to see.

Second, I’m intrigued by the idea that Bowie’s 10-year “disappearing act” was actually performance art, and Bowie trying to play Marcel Duchamp. But, again, that sounds like someone in the visual arts telling us that it’s all about visual artists — so, more projection.

My further thoughts about these two points: I think all artists are what we project onto them; and I doubt that even David Bowie could tell you with surety why he took off 10 years. He just did.

Hey, we got a room for this year’s Comic-Con!

It’s not downtown — it’s five miles away.

It’s not on the shuttle route (but it is on the trolley line).

And it isn’t a suite. But it IS a room (and not five guys sleeping in a parked van).

Now… I wonder if Len Wein has been able to find anything.

My play “The Size of Pike” opens here in Los Angeles in April. We just finished two days of auditions, with callbacks tomorrow night. More news to follow about this when I have more news.

This is a new production of the play, by Moving Arts, which premiered it in… 1995, I think. (I could check on that, and will at some point.)

A lot has happened since 1995, and even 1994, when I wrote it. (I think. Again, I could check on that.)

One of those things is called the World Wide Web.

Another of those things is called the smartphone.

I could go on in this way.

This came to my attention, as it has in recent years with so many of my plays from the 1990’s or, gasp, the 1980’s, when someone has asked to read one or perform one or something: I look it over and suddenly see that elements of the play are now dated thanks (or “no thanks,” actually) to technology.

Witness “Happy Fun Family,” wherein editions of a newspaper are thrown in through the window at key moments. Here’s something that’s not too far off in the future: “Hey, Grampa, what’s a newspaper?” My kids don’t know what a cassette tape is. Not one of them has a wristwatch. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

While listening to actors audition to sides from “The Size of Pike,” I came to realize that an argument in the play — a central argument, one that winds through about, oh, 20 pages of the script — would be easily settled in 2013 by pulling out a smartphone. So I’m presented with two options:

Option A: Update the script, bring in the smartphone (or the threat of using it), and develop a new comic riff involving that;

Option B: Talk to the director about staging this as a period piece, i.e., set the play prior to that pesky World Wide Web / smartphone era.

Further complicating this matter: This play was selected as one of 20 plays drawn from its 20-year history that Moving Arts is revisiting. In other words, it’s a revival. Is it right to contemporize a revival? That seems somehow… wrong. Except I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen with at least one of the other 19 productions. Also, if I’m going to bring this play up to date, I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me with at least 10, maybe 15 other plays too — and I have new plays I’d rather write. I don’t know which path to take, yet, with this particular situation. I do know that I’m not the person who wrote it in 1994 — how could I be? — and tampering with it will not necessarily improve it. I’m well-versed in the bad tradition of writers seeking to improve or update their past successes and making them worse. No, I didn’t want or need the prequel to “The Zoo Story,” and I didn’t want most of the 388 poems Whitman added to the original 12-poem “Leaves of Grass” over four decades. On a lower plane of art, I also don’t want all the various versions of “Star Wars” — I liked that first one, complete with crummy models and bad prosthetics. The more it got “fixed,” the further removed it was from my appreciation of it. I’d rather I didn’t wind up accidentally contributing to the weakening of my own play.

Mr. David Bowie is back in the news, with a new record after a 10-year hiatus (beating the break John Lennon took to bake bread and watch the wheels) and a fancy new museum retrospective.

Re the latter, here’s part one of an interview with the curator of that show, “David Bowie Is,” which opens Saturday in London to massive publicity and record (couldn’t resist the pun) ticket sales. (Thanks to Rich Roesberg for sending me that link.) The show runs through August 11, should you find yourself in London. (In fact, it will run through August 11, whether or not you’re in London. Which I will not be.)

Re the former, on the day of its release, the new Bowie CD, “The Next Day” was happily found on my kitchen table, having been shipped by Amazon and delivered by a competitor of the USPS. I like it very much, and find it full of surprises. One of the surprises: the prominence of saxophone, an instrument I’ve never much associated with Bowie’s work. Another: that it’s a rather stripped-down album, mostly straight-out mid-tempo rock music featuring vocals, guitars, and drums. That’s rather traditional, but in the Bowie oeuvre, I think of that as rather untraditional. In some ways, this sounds more akin to the two Tin Machine albums, when Bowie decided to try to be a regular bloke in a band with three other guys, but more palatable. I miss the odd textures and surprises, circa the work he did with Eno, or on “Scary Monsters” or “Outside” (which features the fantastic “Heart’s Filthy Lesson,” one of his best songs and one of his best-produced songs).

What I haven’t enjoyed in all the recent press coverage are the blithe claims that this album is a return to form for Bowie, the implication being that he’s been off-form. I wonder how many of these people have heard his last two albums, “Heathen” and “Reality.” “Heathen” had many of the fine qualities I’m missing from the current album — which, seemingly alone, Sasha-Frere Jones noted in The New Yorker, in praising that disk — and “Reality” was a truly, truly fine pop album. I like both of them a lot, and play them frequently, and they’ve lived in my wife’s CD rotation for more than a year. Moreover, we saw Bowie on his last tour — which may have, indeed, been his last tour, but we’ll see — and he was in fine form then, too. The songs sound good on record, and sounded great live. It’s easy for critics to paint the picture that after 10 years away Bowie has had a magnificent re-emergence, but the two disks he did before stepping away bear further listening. They don’t deserve the criticism.

p.s. I hate the cover art above. Deeply. Strenuously.

If you’ve always got a disaster, then the disaster is you.

Applies to someone whose latest Facebook status notice I just saw, and too many other people I’ve known.