Designing this website has forced me to learn all about a strange and mysterious language called HTML.  It is the lingo in which this and most websites are written.  Did you ever get a e-mail that was full of odd markings in brackets like <BR> and <p align="center">?  Well, those are HTML codes and often, someone writes an e-mail message in that language but your e-mail reader will for some reason read it as a straight text message.  That causes you to see all them codes that are supposed to just format your message and then get out of the way.

I have recently made a number of unseen changes in this website to make it as close to 100% HTML proper as humanly possible.  This means encoding ampersands not as ampersands but by typing this: &amp;

Inserted into the HTML code of a website, that should cause your browser to see an ampersand.  This strikes me as an enormous waste of bandwidth.  We are now sending you five characters' worth of data — one of which is an ampersand — instead of just sending you an ampersand.  Leave it to computer scientists to figure out a way to make an abbreviation take longer to write.

In theory, this is supposed to make the text more widely compatible.  In truth, different browsers see things different ways and no matter how I write my code, there's always someone who e-mails and says, "I'm using Schlocko Browser version 7.1a and all your apostrophes look like pieces of rigatoni."  I have finally decided that if you ain't using the latest versions of Internet Explorer or Netscape, I don't care about you…and maybe not even then.

• Security in the Air by William F. Buckley, Jr.
• Let Bin Laden Speak by Joshua Micah Marshall, New York Post
• Search and Destroy by Joshua Micah Marshall, The New Republic
• George McGovern Was Right by Cal Thomas, Tribune-Media Services
• GOP Anger at President Gore's War Actions by Bernard Weiner, Democratic Underground
• Count Down by Jonathan Chait, The New Republic

Is it my imagination or is John Ashcroft out to break Janet Reno's record of pissing off people of every possible political stripe? Reno holds a certain advantage because Ashcroft probably can't torch Waco and lock Wen Ho Lee up again. On the other hand, she occasionally convicted someone…

How I spent last week:  Why, voice-directing Squishees, of course!  This is a soon-to-be-released animated feature concocted and produced by my pal Don Oriolo, who otherwise manages the career of Felix the Cat.  You all know Felix the Cat?  The wonderful, wonderful cat?  Well, whenever he gets in a fix, he reaches into his bag of tricks.  Don has a pretty potent bag o' tricks himself, one of which is this new film which will be out I-dunno-when-or-where but the animation has been completed and this week, we had to dub in the voice track.  Yes, this is the reverse of how the process is usually done.

Squishees is the story of a little girl, her scientist father and a very nasty lady.  That's the nasty lady at right in the red dress.  The scientist's experiment opens a portal into another world where the people are multi-colored and tend to squish a lot and when one of them tumbles into this existence, the nasty lady decides to make a new toy out of him.  The result is a cute, fast-paced tale that I think younger kids will enjoy.  You can read more about it — and about Don's current Felix projects — at his website, www.felixthecat.com.

We had a terrific cast which included Mark Hamill, Laura Summer, Ruth Buzzi, Gregg Berger, Neil Ross, Anna Garduno and the always-incredible Frank Welker.  I've worked with Frank now since…well, since he appeared in the on-camera cast of a Bobby Vinton Special I wrote in 1978.  He still manages to dazzle me with his ability to instantly come through with the sound of anyone or anything.  On one show, we asked him to make the sound of angry oatmeal cooking…and he did.  I'm serious.  If I played you the tape and asked you to identify it, you'd say, "Gee, I know this sounds crazy but that sounds like angry oatmeal cooking!"

You hear Frank incessantly in movies and TV shows, animated and otherwise, and often don't know you're not hearing the person whose mouth is flapping.  Same with the other folks in our cast.  You can hear on-line demos of Gregg Berger's and Neil Ross's extensive voice work at their websites, www.greggberger.com and www.neilrossvo.com.

What a joy to work with all these folks…and to spend time with the absolutely-delightful and very funny Ms. Ruth Buzzi, who voiced our villainess.  When I was a wee lad, taking the bus out to work for Disney in Burbank, I'd sometimes hike over to NBC, just a few blocks away, and bluff my way in to watch tapings of Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In.  The show was done in Studio 3 (wherein Leno now lurks) and only for the first few did they have a formal studio audience.  That was because they taped all day, several days a week, and you couldn't keep a live audience properly ensconced for any meaningful length of time.  So they let folks — mostly those there for the otherwise-disappointing NBC Studio Tour — wander in and fill the bleachers.

I remember thinking that some members of the troupe were very funny on-stage but not off, while others were funny off-stage but not on.  A few managed to do both…and then there was Dan Rowan, who had a pretty good career without ever managing to be either.  Ruth Buzzi, on the other hand, was funny when the cameras were on.  Ruth Buzzi was funny when they were off.  She was funny going to get a bagel from the craft services table.  She was funny sitting on the sidelines in grotesque make-ups, waiting patiently for hours for them to get to her sketches, which was how I most often saw her.  Cameo guest stars were being hustled in and smooth-talked by the producer, George Schlatter, into saying lines they feared might be injurious to their careers.

No matter how long, Ruth sat there, being patient, waiting for her moment in front of the camera which was invariably accompanied by the announcement that they were running late and she'd have to try and get it on the first take.  She usually did.  And if they allowed her a second take, she was even funnier.

Watching those old shows, I'm amazed how well they hold up.  More that a decade back, someone tried syndicating Laugh-In reruns that were chopped in half.  They attracted few viewers; not even myself, and I really loved that show when it first appeared.  I dunno if it was because they'd been slashed to 30 minutes or if it was just the wrong moment in history to see those shows again but they didn't work then and they do now.  One can also see — and this is true of the Saturday Night Live reruns — why certain cast members kept working and others did not.  This is not true of everyone but it's certainly true of some.

Ruth has worked pretty steadily since those days.  To a young generation, she's not "Ruth Buzzi of Laugh-In" but "Ruth Buzzi of Sesame Street."  Or maybe the lady on that soap opera — I forget which one.  They hire her because they've learned what I just learned.  She's a wonderful person, relentlessly dedicated to her craft and fun to be around.  And boy, is she funny.

Much to my surprise, the membership of the Writers Guild has voted to accept three of the four proposed changes to the credits manual…and the margin of loss for #4 (the most controversial change) was much smaller than I think anyone expected.  The complete vote totals are available here.  This will probably mean that the committee that drafted these proposals — or some successor-in-interest to that committee — will begin drawing up some more.  Most likely, they will cautiously visit some of the more extreme suggestions that have been talked about but never formally proposed.  These would include some sort of acknowledgement, probably in the closing credits, of writers who participate in the rewriting of a screenplay but who don't qualify for the traditional up-front credit.

In any case, the news here is that WGA members — who said an overwhelming no to the last vote on changing the credit rules — now seem more open to the concept.  That presumably will mean more changes, some of which could genuinely change the way the industry works.  Stay tuned.

Several of you have e-mailed me copies of this column by William Safire which seeks to alert the world to the clear and present danger presented by the Bush Administration's snooping on the citizenry.  I've got to admit I've come to disbelieve anything Mr. Safire writes.  This is the man who was dead certain that Hillary Clinton (and maybe Bill, too) would be indicted in Whitewater, Filegate and Travelgate.  This is also the man who claimed that our government had proof of an "Iraqi connection" to 9/11 conspirator Mohammed Atta.  Perhaps he's right this time, but I sure hope not.

I flipped through a copy of the new MAD at the newsstand.  The parody of The Onion was written by Scott Maiko.

We've spoken here before of Brad Oscar, who is subbing (matinees and some evenings) for Nathan Lane in The Producers on Broadway.  Brad is now getting reviewed by the New York critics and, so far, they love him.  Here's one review and here's another.

Just added a column about my little buddy, Billy Barty.  Read all about him here.

A not-insignificant percentage of America watches its TV shows without at least fully hearing them.  They read them via closed-captioning, which puts the text on the screen, often inaccurately.  Vast howlers have emerged when speech-to-text conversion devices have been used on live events, since the devices "mishear" and do not distinguish between homonyms — "frees" and "freeze," for example.  But even shows that are captioned in a more leisurely, stenographic manner sometimes promulgate altered or truncated dialogue that way.

A few years back, folks at the Writers Guild were briefly considering raising a creative rights stink about them.  For some reason, on a flurry of shows, whoever was doing the closed-captioning was taking great liberties with what WGA writers wrote, doing major paraphrasing and condensation, often for no visible reason.  A couple of members wanted to lodge a protest and/or a lawsuit; others feared that it would somehow look like the Guild was making it more difficult for hearing-impaired viewers to be serviced.  Eventually, the issue was dropped due to a disinterest and because the captioners seemed to be getting more faithful.

For some time, it has been — well, not exactly a secret but something that no one mentioned out loud — that a few shows would censor/bleep spoken words but leave them in the captioning.  David Letterman's was among them.  Recently, this was the case with a joke about Gatorade.  Letterman's speech, which was bleeped, said something about the product including "5% gator urine" but these words turned up in the closed-captioning.  (The procedure is now being changed.  For more info, as well as a good explanation of different captioning procedures, check out Joe Clark's explanation here.)

Here is a possibly-interesting aspect to this issue: What if the Gatorade people decided to sue for slander?  They almost certainly won't but what if they did?  I'm a layman but, as I understand it, to win a defamation case, you generally have to prove (1) that the statement was false, (2) that the conveyor(s) of the statement knew it was false or should have known, (3) that it was defamatory and (4) that they acted either with malice or with a reckless disregard for accuracy.  It would seem to me that by cutting the joke, the producers are admitting the first two and would have a hard time defending the third.  After all, someone at the network made the decision to delete the reference for most of America.  That person would be put on the stand and asked why it was cut.  A reply like, "Well, we knew it wasn't defamatory but someone was afraid someone might think it was unfair to Gatorade" would not likely sway a jury.

That would leave (4) as the last line of defense and that would seem shaky to me.  It's easy to imagine some well-dressed Johnny Cochran-style barrister packing the courtroom with deaf people the day of his summation, gesturing to them and proclaiming, "These people make up X percent [whatever it is] of the American population.  Is the defense claiming that they don't exist?  That these people are so insignificant that we don't acknowledge them as a part of society?  That it isn't worth the twenty seconds it would have taken the producers to phone the closed-captioning company and have the offending line deleted?"  And so on, establishing some approximation of reckless disregard.

This is moot in the case of Letterman/Gatorade since, as I say, the company is unlikely to sue, if only because it would only prompt more (and worse) Gatorade jokes elsewhere.  But it has often dawned on me that the networks' Standards and Practices departments, in their never-ending quest to stop their networks from getting sued, often achieve the opposite; that they make their companies more vulnerable by admitting — and even arguing — that a given line which ultimately gets on the air is actionable.  I can't count the number of times a Censor Person told me that a given joke might be cause for legal action.  The joke usually aired anyway and nothing happened…but the Standards 'n' Practices person always wrote a cover-your-ass memo to say, "I warned him this was defamatory" and if someone had sued, that memo would likely have been subpoenaed and offered as some sort of admission on the network's part.

Just something to think about.

By the way: If you have know someone who is hard-o'-hearing, you might consider touting them on closed-captioning — and they don't have to be deaf to find it of value.  My father never went deaf but his hearing deteriorated to the point where he was having trouble watching television — especially shows with a lot of crowd noise (like sports) or background music intermingling with dialogue.  At the time, closed-captioning was not standard on TV sets, so I went to Sears, which was then the leading vendor of them, and bought a device to attach to his Zenith.  He left the sound on and was still able to distinguish about 85% of what was said…but the captioning helped him with the other 15%.  That 15% was the difference between enjoying a show and constant frustration.

When he passed away, my mother had me take the machine off his set and I stuck it in the trunk of my car, figuring I might someday find a home for it.  Six months later, I was at a San Diego Comic Convention, talking with a lovely man named Dick Giordano, who was then the head honcho at DC Comics.  Dick has a hearing problem and we somehow got to talking about closed-captioning.  He said he'd never tried it, and didn't know where to purchase one of the decoders.  I said, "Wait here a second…" and ran out to my car.  Dick used it for years, all the time wondering how it was that I just happened to have a spare closed-caption device with me.

• War is Heck by Frank Rich, New York Times
• Justifying War by Alan Keyes
• The Political Clock is Ticking by Kevin Phillips, Los Angeles Times

The above links, like most posted here, are to articles that the operator of this website believes are interesting and which contribute to the national debate. He does not necessarily agree with all or any of what they say…and you won't, either.

I thought it might be interesting to demonstrate how our nation's current war strategy can be completely summarized by two comic book covers.

The Big Press Recount of the Florida vote has come and gone without us learning much about anything. Most of the stories in the "consortium" papers didn't seem to think much of their own survey, and didn't seem to know what was so newsworthy that it justified the time and trouble. (The fairest story seemed to me to be the one moved by Associated Press. Here's a link.)

Watching the partisans frantically spinning, one got the feeling they weren't too thrilled with the thing, either. The pro-Gore folks seem disappointed that it did not yield hard evidence that Gore clearly got more votes than Bush, but was cheated due to thuggish Republican tactics. The pro-Bush folks seem frustrated that it pretty well establishes that substantially more Floridians who cast votes were trying to cast them for Gore.

Personally, I think more folks on both sides should be outraged at how sloppy the whole voting/counting procedure was. Can anyone doubt that, using that system and those machines, we've had a number of wrong guys declared the victor in elections past? And probably not just in Florida? But of course, no one in the public discourse gives a fig about voting accuracy if it doesn't lead to their guy getting in.

The reportage with which I would most disagree is that the claim that, had the recounts gone forward, Bush would probably have won; ergo, the Supreme Court decision is somehow vindicated. I think it proves the opposite. Ostensibly, they were arguing the application of the law, not that they were finding a justification for installing the correct guy. A lot of press reports (including The New York Times) have come perilously close to saying, "Well, the right man got in; ergo, the decision was sound." Clearly, a fallacious court decision can, via the old stopped-clock theorem, yield the correct result. A proper decision would have stood the test of either outcome.

Moreover, the press recounts show that "recoverable overvotes," (i.e., ballots that had two votes for president, both the same) could easily have altered that outcome. The Supreme Court decision was ostensibly about "equal protection" but its result was that such overvotes were counted in some Florida precincts and tossed in others. And, despite the screw-ups of Gore's lawyers, which now look more formidable than ever, more votes could have been counted and should have been counted. Ultimately, the decision of who won Florida — and, therefore, the presidency — turned on which voters had their ballots tallied and which ones didn't. And it all came down to a court decision that sought to prevent "irreparable harm," not to the voters but to the candidate who'd triumphed in the first, incomplete counts.

That America is not more outraged at the Supreme Court is, I suspect, indicative that we have come to regard that institution as just another partisan body, with no wisdom to rise above the fray. We're used to our legislative and executive offices occasionally going foolishly liberal or conservative on us, depending on who happens to comprise them that week. Now, more than ever, we track control of the Supreme Court with the same expectation of power shifts that accompanied one recent Senator switching political parties. We are no more surprised when the highest court in the land is "wrong" (as per our views) than we are when we lose a skirmish in a Congress or Senate.

The theory behind appointing Supreme Court justices for life was to remove them from the political fray. Sure ain't worked out that way, has it?

(For more on all this, check out this recent piece by Mickey Kaus, who seems to have been the first commentator, many moons ago, to zero in on the significance of all them overvotes.)

We're still waiting for The Game Show Network to rerun the two episodes of Press Your Luck in which an unemployed air conditioning mechanic named Michael Larsen figured out a way to beat the "wheel" for over $110,000. It was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen on TV. The latest out of GSN is that they have the episodes and will soon announce when they'll air. When I hear, I'll post it in this spot. Stay tuned.

I mentioned it here before but one of the most amazing things I ever saw on television occurred on two episodes of the game show, Press Your Luck in 1984.  Briefly, an unemployed electrician named Michael Larsen figured out how to "beat" the game board and, instead of walking off with $10,000-$20,000 like most winners, took the show for $110,237.  CBS was humiliated and didn't rerun the two episodes on which he did this and they were also skipped a few years ago when USA Network reran the series.

Well, Game Show Network is now rerunning Press Your Luck, two per day.  In fact, they're currently running the episodes that lead up to the Larsen sweep.  Word is, they're going to skip over Larsen's appearance when they get to where it would run in sequence (some time next week) and run them instead as part of a big, heavily-ballyhooed promotion later this month, probably during a marathon they've announced for part of the Thanksgiving weekend.  If I hear when they're going to air, I'll announce them here…but I'd like to suggest that you keep an eye open for news and also that you catch a few "normal" episodes of Press Your Luck.  It's a fun show most of the time, and you'll appreciate the Larsen episodes all the more if you're conversant with the program's slightly-complicated rules.  I'll also post some of the backstory here.

That is all for now.

Nathan Lane has been missing performances of The Producers in New York due to a throat problem.  A polyp, they say.  Anyway, last I heard, he's back but not doing matinees.  When he's out, my pal Brad Oscar plays Bialystock instead of Franz Liebkind, and someone else plays the Nazi playwright.  I haven't seen Brad in the role but if I weren't swamped with work, I'd hop on a plane and go back just to catch him.  Everyone who has seen him says that he's terrific.

Speaking of terrific musical comedy-type performers: My friend Shelly Goldstein will be doing her one-lady show — with the inimitable Scott Harlan at the piano — at the Gardenia in Hollywood, the evening of Wednesday, November 21.  Shelly spends way too much of her time these days writing top TV shows and not nearly enough singing funny and poignant tunes in front of paying customers.  You can reserve to be a paying customer (it's ten bucks) by calling the club at (323) 467-7444.

The morning of November 7, 2000, the Gannett News Service carried the following handicap of one of the most eagerly-watched competitions…

The Hillary Rodham Clinton-Rick Lazio Senate race, which most polls show will be close, follows the tradition of tight races in the Empire State.

Less than 24 hours later, Ms. Clinton defeated Mr. Lazio 56%-44%.  In other words, the vote wasn't close.  We use the word "landslide" to describe closer elections.

I think it's important to remember things like that when we watch political discussions these days.  I keep seeing predictions about what will happen in the next presidential election (3 years from now) or even when Hillary's up for re-election (5 years from now)…and not only predictions but confident, can't miss predictions: Bush can't lose, Bush can't possibly win, Hillary has no chance…

As Tom Snyder used to say on The Tomorrow Show, "You wonder what goes through their minds."  We don't, at this moment, know if Hillary Clinton will run again, who her opponent might be, what shape the country will be in then, what she may or may not have accomplished in the next five years, et cetera.  But folks who, 24 hours before her last election, were sure she'd lose are now insisting that their projections for the next one should be taken seriously.

The interesting thing is that, in the above-quoted Gannett story (which you can read by clicking here, though it isn't necessary), they say that the polls in the Clinton/Lazio race vary to show Hillary with anywhere from a 2% to 12% edge.  To me, this translates to "could be close, could be a rout," but no one is ever paid to write that the polls are meaningless, and the author of this story started with the premise that elections in New York are always close.

Well, maybe they are.  The one the other night was pretty close — and, significantly, the pollsters didn't think so until just a few days before voting.  I'm just real skeptical about any samplings more than about a week prior to an election.  Most people think they're worthless…and I think they're a lot less valuable than that even.  And I'm really sick of folks wasting bandwidth and insulting my eminently-insultable intelligence by saying that certain elections far in the future are definitely going to go their way.  Do a search for "Bush 2004" and see how many people are trying to convince everyone that it's already decided.  Once upon a time, and a lot closer to Election Day, his pop was a shoo-in for that second term.

I mean, can't we declare some kind of cyberspace moratorium on handicapping the 2004 presidential election until we at least have some clue who'll be running?  Call me crazy but I have a feeling that might affect the outcome.  At least a little.

Also, I have the following comment on the New York mayor's race: I get a couple of New York TV channels and both those men should be deeply ashamed of the commercials they ran.  In fact, no one who would allow such swill belongs in public office.

A fine comic book/strip artist named Gray Morrow died on 11/6, reportedly taking his own life after months of despondency over months of illness.  Morrow was a true gentleman and a fine illustrator who got into comics a few months too late to be part of the legendary crew at EC Comics.  They almost certainly would have hired him because he fit in well with their tradition.  He later distinguished himself as both interior artist and cover painter when Creepy and Eerie started up, reuniting most of the EC craftsmen.  Later on, he did work for DC and Marvel, and had recently been drawing the Tarzan newspaper strip.

Morrow was one of those artists — and sadly, there a number in this category — who are universally admired but often unhired.  Editors who thought his work was beautiful often feared it was too realistic and well-crafted to sell comics.  Of course, the books done by most of the artists they do think are commercial aren't selling either…but the biz is often lean in logic once it decides something won't sell, and Gray remained a great, untapped resource.  I didn't know him well enough to say, "I'll miss him" but I'll sure miss his work.