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Oops. I did the math wrong — always a possibility when you let me fiddle with numbers. September 11, 1984 was 22 years, 6 months and 5 days ago. So the 9/11/84 Jeopardy! when they had a three-way zero tie was within the last twenty-three years. If that's what happened today on the show (and I'm now inclined to think it isn't) then they're fibbing to say it's never happened before in the last twenty-three years.

We'll see what it is in just a little while. I can catch the East Coast telecast on my satellite dish at 4:00 Pacific Time. Maybe it'll turn out that Alex Trebek admits that he plotted 9/11, fathered Anna Nicole's kid, fired all the U.S. attorneys, blew Valerie Plame's covert status and put the bomp in the bomp-she-bomp. Or has that happened before, too?

WARNING: Whenever I find out what it is, I'm going to post it here. So if you don't want to know until you see the broadcast, don't check back here 'til then.

For some reason, I haven't been watching Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg, a little talk show on TV Land that is nothing more than Mr. Steinberg chatting with some prominent comedian. At the suggestion of Shelly Goldstein, I caught the one currently running, which is a back and forth with Jon Stewart. Very good. It's real conversation, as opposed to that time-limited, pre-planned stuff that Leno, Letterman, O'Brien and the others do. Steinberg and Stewart seem to really like each other, which is something you almost never get on the aforementioned hosts' programs these days.

The episode with Stewart runs four more times, the next being very early tomorrow morning. Next Wednesday evening, they debut an episode with Garry Shandling. I've set the TiVo for that, too.

Still speculating over what the big secret is about tonight's episode of Jeopardy!

Richard Leung points out to me that a three-way tie with all the players at zero has happened before. As noted at this site, it occurred on the show that aired on September 11, 1984. That was the second show of the Alex Trebek era.

But consider this. In that promo to which I linked (this one), they say, "In 23 years, it's never happened." That would seem to indicate that it never happened on the show…but a fast calculation shows that September 11, 1984 was 23 years, 1 month and 5 days ago. [Correction: No, it wasn't.] So the first time there was a three-way tie with zero scores was more than 23 years ago. It could still be that. And maybe it's significant that they said "In 23 years, it's never happened" instead of, "In the history of Jeopardy!, it's never happened." I think there were several ties, zero and otherwise, in the earlier version of the show hosted by Art Fleming.

Meanwhile, as has been noted on several message boards this morning, there's an interesting clue which may give it away or it may be something that a smart guy did to trick us. The address of that page with the promo announcement ends with "20070314_3wt.php." Note the "3wt" in there. One would assume it stands for "three way tie." That would seem to tip the surprise but, as Maxwell Smart would say, maybe that's what they want us to think.

We shall see, we shall see.

It's been a while since we've heard the chilling phrase, "Stan Lee Media." That was a dot-com company that was briefly a shining star of the Internet. It was said to be worth zillions even though during the brief time that I was a vice-president of the firm, no one there could explain to me just what it did that made money. Not long after I departed — no connection implied — the whole thing crashed and burned and people were convicted of various crimes that fell under the general category of Stock Fraud.

Well, Stan Lee Media is back in the news, at least for a day. It's been announced that the current owners are suing Marvel Entertainment for five billion smackers. Here's a story with more of the details. Basically, they're saying that Stan Lee assigned certain proprietary rights to Stan Lee Media and that despite the company's bankruptcy, it still exists and still owns those rights and that the stockholders are entitled to profit from them. They're further asserting that it all amounts to half-ownership of Spider-Man, The X-Men, Hulk and such.

I have no more information on this apart from what's on the Internet this morning and I ain't a lawyer. Those caveats noted, this sounds to me like a lawsuit of the kind that gets filed to try and panic someone into a quick settlement. There are legal actions of the sort that work because the company being sued is afraid that the lawsuit will interfere with their commerce and it's easier to pay off than to allow that to happen. I doubt that will be the case here but that's a view from afar since I haven't read the contracts.

Still, it sounds like a tough case to win. Stan Lee says he never had half-ownership of those characters. Stan Lee Media is saying he assigned half-ownership of those characters to Stan Lee Media. That's quite a speed bump. Moreover, though the current owners of Stan Lee Media are apparently all honest souls, they're trying to enforce a contract negotiated by a regime that has copped to various frauds and misrepresentations. It might be a little dicey to argue that it was all done in good faith and that it means what all those folks who went to prison might say it means. Are they going to be called in to testify on the intention of that deal and if so, who's going to believe them?

But hey, weird things sometimes happen in courtrooms. I can't recall the last time I heard someone say that the law always comes to the logical conclusion. It may have been O.J. Simpson after his first murder trial. If the Stan Lee Media people can get that jury, they might have a shot.

So I was lying awake in bed and my mind kept drifting back to wondering what the big deal is on tonight's Jeopardy! Shows you how great my fantasy life is, eh? Anyway, it dawned on me — and yes, I know I'm probably overthinking this — that the tip-off is that the press release said they'd consulted an expert in Game Theory. It did not say that they'd consulted a statistician or other expert in the science of chance and numbers. Game Theory experts deal in how people strategize; how they try to exploit their opportunities for maximum advantage.

So what is it in Jeopardy! that involves strategizing? Answer: How much you wager in Final Jeopardy! Everything else in the game is a function of (a) whether you know a given fact and (b) whether you get the button pushed at the proper moment. A Game Theory expert would have nothing to say about either of these matters. What he would be able to discuss is how the contestants wager. This suggests to me that they wagered in some manner as to yield an interesting finish…and it had to be a finish that was not desirable. (If it was a desirable outcome, then you wouldn't have the Game Theory expert saying it might never happen again.)

Anyway, what this all lead me to, lying in that dark room, was the deduction that they wound up with a three-way tie, probably with everyone having zero dollars because all each player bet his or her entire wad. And the Game Theory guru then said, "This will probably never happen again because after this, players will always make sure they don't bet everything and at least hold back a few bucks."

I got up to post this, checked e-mail and discovered that several of you guessed a three-way tie and one even guessed the zero part. We'll see if we're right.

One other thing: There are promos up (see one here) for this already saying that something amazing happens on the show. If the amazing thing was a new one-day total, the promos would suggest something about big money because they could do that without saying who won and therefore giving away the ending. But there's no way to hint at a three-way tie and not blow what happens. So it's gotta be something like that.

This is the second part of I-don't-know-how-many detailing the creation of the cartoon character, Scrappy Doo. If you haven't read the first part, you might want to study it before proceeding with this one. Which you can do over on this page.

Now then. When we last left me, I was lunching with Joe Barbera at the Villa Capri restaurant in Hollywood, being charged with my mission: To write a Scooby Doo script that would introduce the character of Scrappy Doo. I had to make Scrappy "work," at least on paper, so the good folks at ABC would invest in another season of the series. Mr. B. had sketches of Scrappy — mostly by Iwao Takamoto, I believe — and a rough idea of who the character was. As he told me what he had in mind, it sounded to me like he was trying to avoid saying two words. The two words were "Henery Hawk."

It is not uncommon for a new creation to start with what some might call a reference point or some element of inspiration. We all know about The Honeymooners turning into The Flintstones or Sgt. Bilko being a jumping-off point for Top Cat. Some are less obvious and there are also times in the development process when you start with one idea and by the time it reaches the air, it bears so little resemblance to that idea that it really qualifies as a new creation. The Scooby Doo show itself started out with the template of the old Dobie Gillis show and morphed into something altogether different.

There was at the time at ABC, a senior exec who (it was said) could best be sold a new series if he perceived some lineage to the classic Warner Brothers cartoons. Years later, I discussed this with the exec and became convinced his passion in this area was greatly exaggerated. But at the time, many of the folks whose livelihoods involved selling shows to him believed it, and so would laden their pitches with WB references — "This character is like Daffy Duck crossed with Wile E. Coyote" or somesuch gobbledygook. There was also a special sales magic to obtaining the services of Mel Blanc to voice a new character.

Not long before, H-B had tried to sell a series to ABC featuring a hero whose body was mostly mustache, a la Yosemite Sam. The network was only semi-interested so more sketches were done and the concept was changed a bit…and the character got hairier and hairier. At some point, he was so hirsute that they decided to make him into a caveman and that's when ABC bought the show. Soon after, he made his debut: Captain Caveman…with a voice provided by Mel Blanc.

I was startled when an H-B exec told me this. The two characters have zero in common apart from hair and Mel. It's one of those cases where Yosemite Sam was a jumping-off point but he jumped so far that he became a wholly new entity. Still, the WB connection (and Mel) were of some import in the sales of the series.

As Mr. Barbera told me how he saw Scrappy Doo, I kept thinking of Henery Hawk. Barbera never said that name and may not have even realized he was describing the pint-sized chicken hawk from several WB epics. But that's what it sounded like they wanted. So I went home and wrote a short scene, imagining Scrappy to have Henery Hawk's voice and swagger, and when Mr. B. read it, he called and said, "You've nailed it. That's exactly what I had in mind."

So that was Hurdle #1. The next hurdle was to come up with a ghost and mystery for the script. For this, I decided to steal from myself. I looked back over the issues of the Scooby Doo comic book I'd written a few years earlier, selected a couple of my favorite ideas and typed up short summaries. Someone at ABC picked the one they liked best and I went ahead and wrote the script in about a week. The hardest part of it was that every day, some Hanna-Barbera exec or agent (though never Joe) would call me and try to convince me how vital it was that the script be strong enough to convince ABC that Scrappy was viable. They all had a way of saying it as if they expected me to go, "What? You want it to be good? Well then, maybe I'd better take out all the recipes I'm putting in and insert some jokes instead!"

I handed the script in on a Friday and it was simultaneously distributed to all the important folks at H-B and sent to the folks over at the network. Over the weekend, Barbera called to say he was very happy with it. He had a few notes but not many and he thought we were in very good shape. Monday morning, I got a call from a rival producer, the one for whom I'd done another pilot that ABC was considering for that season. He "jokingly" told me that I did too good a job for Hanna-Barbera. He'd just heard that the show I'd developed for him wasn't going to make it because ABC liked my Scrappy script. (I put "jokingly" in quotes because the truth is that the guy was pissed.) Later that day, someone called from Hanna-Barbera to say that I was a hero and that Scooby Doo was being picked up for another season.

I was happy, of course. Little did I know my troubles were only starting.

Tune in one of these days — I'm not sure when but soon — for more of the story of how Scrappy Doo came to be.

Here's a great clip…Spike Jones and his City Slickers playing "Yankee Doodle Dandy," complete with a Jimmy Cagney impersonation by Billy Barty. The visual gag of Spike sitting on the piano with his feet playing the keys was devised for him by the great animation director, Tex Avery. Matter of fact, I have Tex's original sketches for this gag here someplace and if I can find them, I'll post 'em one of these days. In the meantime, here's my favorite bandleader and my old pal Billy making George M. Cohan spin in his crypt…

The publicist for the TV game show Jeopardy! has sent out a press release to TV writers telling them to alert their readers that something special happens on the show tomorrow night…

This Friday, March 16th, 2007…and for the first time in 23 years, "Jeopardy!" history will be made. It was such a remarkable event we consulted a Game Theory expert and he said it may never happen again! I wish I could give you more information about this special show, unfortunately, I can only encourage you and your valuable readers to watch Friday's program. Alex Trebek and our producers remain mum and I, myself, have been sworn to secrecy.

Your guess is as good as mine. Maybe someone got every single question and set some new one day record.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. When even Republican Senators are calling for your resignation, that's a good sign that the Bush administration is going to cut you loose.

Rahm Emanuel is the Democratic caucus chair. He has a couple of nuggets of advice to new Congresspeople in his party but here's the main one: Avoid Stephen Colbert.

The lovely Diana Schutz sent me this lovely photo she took of the lovely Arnold Drake and it made me want to write a little more about my friend who passed away Monday morning, just eleven days after his 82nd birthday. I've been fortunate to meet most of the major figures who created comic books I loved as a kid and who were still alive when I got into the business. As I must have written somewhere else on this website at least once, only a very few of them turned out not to be great people to be around. Some, of course, were special joys.

Arnold was one of my favorite comic book writers before I knew who he was…even before I knew that the guy who wrote those Tommy Tomorrow stories I thought were so great was the same guy who'd written all those Challengers of the Unknown comics I liked so much. There were no credits then and when I later did learn who'd written what, I could see the connection. Arnold's writing was a little wittier, a little sharper than most of the others then scripting books by the tonweight for DC. He seemed to presuppose a little more intelligence on the part of the readers. He didn't explain everything four times the way some of the other writers did. He expected us to "get it."

I corresponded with Arnold in the seventies and met him in person in the early eighties. This is kind of a cliché but that doesn't mean it isn't accurate. He was a writer who made you feel like a writer. He was very serious about his work and always discussed it with people as if their opinions and respect mattered to him. He was full of wonderful anecdotes about the business and unlike some others I've interviewed, I found that Arnold's accounts usually checked out. I especially loved the story he often told about Bob Kane and the clown paintings. Do you know that story? Here — here's Arnold telling it on a panel a few years ago…

Bob had gotten to the point where he never drew anything. Never drew anything on the Batman comics, anyway. [Sheldon] Moldoff was ghosting them all and when he didn't, someone else did. The only thing I think Bob ever drew was when we'd be out somewhere, in a restaurant or someplace, and a pretty girl would come over to him and say, "Are you really the man who draws Batman?" Then he could whip out a little sketch for her, a big sketch if she was wearing something low-cut and would bend over to watch him draw.

One day I'm over at his house to discuss this newspaper strip idea we had and he's talking about who we might get to draw it. I was going to write it and we were going to get someone else to draw it. I'm not sure what he was going to do on it except sign his name. I said to him, "Bob, isn't it disappointing to you that you don't draw any more? You were once such a great artist." He wasn't but you had to talk to Bob that way.

He said, "Oh, no. Let me show you something." He took me into a little room in his house. It was his studio. I didn't even know he still had a studio. It was all set up with easels and things and there were paintings, paintings of clowns. You know the kind. Like the ones Red Skelton used to do. Just these insipid portraits of clowns, all signed very large, "Bob Kane." He was so proud of them. He said, "These are the paintings that are going to make me in the world of art. Batman was a big deal in one world and these paintings will soon be in every gallery in the world." He thought the Louvre was going to take down the Mona Lisa to put up his clown paintings. I didn't have the heart to tell him.

So a few months later, I'm up at DC and I ran into Eddie Herron. Eddie was another writer up there and we got to talking and Bob's name came up. Eddie said, "Did you hear? Bob's getting sued by one of his ghost artists."

I said, "How is that possible? Shelly Moldoff's suing Bob? But they had a clear deal. Shelly knew he wasn't going to get credit or anything…"

Eddie said, "No, not Shelly." Bob was being sued by the person who'd painted the clowns for him…

Love that story. But then I just loved Arnold. I loved the guy's feisty, honest manner. He was very proud of his work but also very critical. We once talked for a half hour on the phone about the work he did for Marvel after he got booted out of DC for having the nerve to demand health insurance. Arnold was not happy with the writing he'd done during that period and very disappointed with himself for booting that opportunity. He said that after he was ousted at DC, he was so angry that he lost his bearings as a writer and forgot certain basics. He was not writing to do good Marvel stories, he said. He was writing to show DC they couldn't destroy his career, which was the wrong attitude. The difference can be quite significant as it relates to what gets on the page. While it's sometimes easy to see when others have their priorities askew, it's difficult to perceive when you do. I was impressed that Arnold had that ability.

One of my last memories of Arnold is of a moment two years ago when we were all in San Francisco for the Wondercon. For some reason, a batch of us decided to go to Chinatown on Saturday night. That would ordinarily be a fun thing but this evening was one of intermittent downpours and parades. It was around the Chinese New Year and traffic was being diverted via odd routes. You literally could not get a cab at our hotel or anywhere near it. We had to walk about four blocks to find one and we only got the one we got because I spotted it discharging a passenger and I sprinted over and practically vaulted onto the hood.

We went to Chinatown. We ate a lovely meal. When it came time to leave, it was raining as hard as I've ever seen in my life and there wasn't a cab anywhere. It was like they'd all disappeared from the surface of the planet. My friend Carolyn walked one way to look for one and my friend Sergio went the other. I stood there on the sidewalk, trying to hold an umbrella over Arnold for what seemed like the longest time. Eventually, Carolyn flagged down a limo driver and made a deal with him to take us back to the Argent Hotel. But before that, there was a moment when the situation seemed hopeless.

I was standing there in the driving rain. I don't like rain anyway and I really didn't like the idea that poor Arnold Drake was in the midst of it with only my flimsy umbrella keeping some (not all) of the rain off him. We were stranded and it didn't look like we'd ever get a cab and even though none of this was my fault, I felt like it was; like I should have planned things better so an eighty year old man wasn't standing there in the cold and wet with no way to get home. A sudden wave of sadness came over me…

…and Arnold — brilliant, perceptive judge of character that he was — sensed it. I don't think I said anything to give away how I felt but still, he turned to me and said, "Don't get upset, Mark. I live in New York. I worked for DC Comics. This is nothing." And I realized that he wasn't the slightest bit upset or worried or even troubled by our predicament. He knew we'd get back to the hotel eventually and a minute or so later, Carolyn showed up with the limo and that began to look remotely possible. (Finding Sergio was now the big problem…)

Everything worked out fine, of course. But when I think of Arnold in the future, I think I'm going to remember him on that corner. He was, of course, not happy to be there but he acted truly unbothered by it all. Didn't complain, didn't express any fear. He knew, as I didn't at that particular moment, that there was no point to any of that. It was just something we had to get through and he didn't make it any worse by dwelling on the negative or whining or being weak. In fact, he made things better by setting a good example for me.

He always did, at least in my encounters with the man. We didn't get to speak during his final hospitalization because he was asleep for most of it. But many months earlier when he was in for something else that could have been fatal, we talked almost every day and he was the same way — positive without being delusional, realistic without being glum. It struck me as the perfect mindset for dealing with any problem.

Anyone who read Arnold's comics could tell you that he was a superb role model as a writer. I just wanted to add that he was an even better one as a human being. Those two things don't always go together so it's important to notice when they do. They did with Arnold Drake.

Let's go back to the one of Cartoon Voice panels I hosted at last year's Comic-Con International in San Diego. Last week, we linked to a video of the fine actor Gregg Berger telling a story about working with Mel Blanc in a Jetsons session. Shortly before he told that tale, another fine actor, Michael Bell, told about working with Mel in a recording session for Speed Buggy. Here's what Michael had to say…

And now, in case you didn't click on it the other day, here's Gregg Berger with the follow-up anecdote.

Any time you hear anyone in government say, "Mistakes were made," it's someone who's afraid of a discussion over who made those mistakes.

The CompUSA chain is closing down an awful lot of its stores. Here's a list of the ones that are shutting down, and it isn't even complete. The one on La Cienega at the Beverly Connection closed about a year ago and I noticed yesterday that the one at Pico and Westwood in West L.A. is already vacant. Neither is on this list, which I guess is of imminent closures. I used to shop at all three. As one who has purchased an awful lot of software and hardware from them, I'd like to suggest the reason those stores failed.

It's not because there's no demand for their product, that's for sure. Computers…cell phones…PDAs…plasma-screen televisions…My God, if there was ever stuff that people are buying left and right, it's new, high-tech stuff these days. Even people who own those things are in a constant state of upgrading to the next model. You'd think this would be the time that many chains of that sort would be blossoming like Starbucks on every corner.

But there was a problem with CompUSA: Finding anyone worked in one who knew anything about the equipment they were selling. I think you could have walked into the one in Culver City and yelled, "What's a spreadsheet?" and not gotten an answer. It seemed to me like in every store, they had one or two people who knew everything and those people were always too busy to wait on anyone, leaving customers at the mercy of the Amish.

You ever try asking a question in one of these places? Anything more technical than "Where's the men's room?" and you'd get back these blank Orphan Annie eyeballs. Inevitably, they'd start looking around for the one person in the building who might know…and that guy was always occupied and unavailable. I have been in CompUSAs where I wound up taking pity on bewildered customers and helping them with questions. I was also once in one where I had to explain the difference between DVD-R and DVD+R to a salesperson.

There's a place for a chain of computer stores where the people know their merchandise and know their technology. A lot of people would be willing to pay a little more for their technology bling to shop at that store…but it wasn't CompUSA. If I want to buy where they don't know anything about computers, I can go to Walmart or Costco or Best Buy…or better still, order over the Internet. It's cheaper and you get the same amount of personal attention: None.

In the meantime though, the buzz is that the CompUSA stores that are closing are offering substantial discounts. So if the one near you is on the list, you might want to check and see if it's still there and if so, drop by. Just don't try asking anyone anything. If one assumes the smarter employees are already gone to get other employment, you may not even be able to find out where the men's room is.

Lincoln Caplan explains what the scandal is all about regarding the fired U.S. attorneys.