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From someone who works in a hospital emergency room…

The reason there's a 4-5 hour wait in our emergency room is simple. There's a 4-5 hour wait everywhere. People know they have nowhere else to go where there won't be a 4-5 hour wait so they sit there and put up with it. They have no choice. If there was a hospital down the street that got people in and out right away, we'd lose a lot of business and the management of the hospital where I work would make changes.

It often breaks my heart to see people sitting there hour after hour, moaning in pain and crying. I am proud of how many people we help but frustrated that we cannot do better for them. We could if we had more room and more facilities and more staff. More doctors would also help but I think we could cut the wait times in half with the same number of doctors if we had more examining rooms and nurses. Unfortunately then, there might be occasional hours when we weren't working to capacity (wouldn't that be nice?) and someone would say "Why did we build all these extra examining rooms and hire these extra people if they're not in use?"

People ask me what they can do to deal with the long wait times. I tell them the only thing is to only get sick when you know you can get an appointment with your physician. I wish I had a better answer.

It has been my experience — and I think I've said this before here — that the doctors and nurses I've encountered in hospitals have been generally wonderful. There have been exceptions but not many. My problems have all come from the overall bureaucracy and the paper shufflers and the setup, which includes crippling financial burdens. Within a very inefficient framework, dedicated medical professionals perform well. But that framework and the sheer cost of health care are killing a lot of people…and I use the word "killing" in its literal definition.

My mother is home now and doing better but I spent all of last evening in a hospital emergency room with her, appalled as I usually am about what you have to do to get medical care in this world. We got there before 8 PM and though we made it clear my mother was in great pain (a wound on her foot), we still didn't see a doctor until after Midnight — and that was only because I started in with threats to call this or that hospital official. A nurse told me that four hour waits are not at all unusual. In fact, they're pretty much the norm these days everywhere.

We don't wait four hours for any other business. We don't have to because when other kinds of businesses have people waiting, they expand and build new facilities and train more employees to meet the demand. Obviously, it's not as easy to build a hospital as it is to erect a new Starbucks, and it takes a lot less time to train the employees in the latter. But we have pretty accurate projections of the population in the future and a pretty fair idea of what percentage will need medical treatment. Why have hospitals, at least in terms of facilities, fallen so far behind the expected demand? In the emergency room I was in last night, it was Standing Room Only, even though some of the people there were there because they couldn't stand…and there isn't even an epidemic or natural disaster sending excess patients to the E.R. This is business as usual. A doctor shortage, I can almost understand. What I don't get is why they don't even have enough chairs in the waiting room.

I'll write more about this when I wake up. Right now, I just wanted to vent that much and apologize that posting may be light here the next few days. I was behind already and now this had to happen. Good night.

One should not judge a book by its cover nor a movie by its previews. Still, some covers and coming attractions make you not want to plunk down your bucks and the trailer for the new Oliver Stone film, World Trade Center, sure doesn't send me logging over to Fandango to reserve tickets.

Almost everyone praised United 93 for not "exploiting" its subject matter. In fact, I think some folks went overboard with that notion. The movie was made to generate a profit, after all. I don't think that's ignoble, especially if it's as honest a film as some say it is…but a production of that size and scope does not get made without someone figuring it'll wind up in the black.

Based largely on the trailer — and a little on Stone's track record — I'll predict that World Trade Center will be scorned as everything they said United 93 wasn't: Exploitive, sensational and manipulative in a non-organic way. If you watch the preview, see if you don't have the same reaction I did. As soon as I saw Nicolas Cage in the mustache playing what looks like a police officer (actually, a Port Authority Officer), I thought: The focus is on a star. That's wrong. Cage is a pretty good actor but 9/11 was not about one guy at the center of things, and that's how they're selling it.

I gather the film is about Cage's character and one other man getting trapped under rubble and fighting to survive. Not to cast any negatives at all on the real-life men who were in that predicament…but as a movie, there's a basic problem with depicting something like that. The advance publicity and simple history tell us in advance that the two men eventually got out alive. Okay, so how is an audience supposed to react to that? We watch them fight to survive for two hours knowing that they'll turn out to have been luckier than most? We cheer at the end when they're rescued because, though thousands died, thank God Nicholas Cage made it out? Might it not somehow trivialize the deaths of 9/11 to zero in on one story of survival when the real story was how many did not?

As you'll see if you click to watch, near the end of the trailer, it says "The world saw evil that day." I can already hear TV reviewers cite that and add, "But it won't see World Trade Center." Not unless this is a very different movie than its advertising suggests.

By the way, larger and higher-resolution clips of this trailer may be viewed at this website. You can also skip it altogether and go watch this footage of a monkey washing a cat.

Sebastian Mallaby has an interesting view of why Al Gore may be making a comeback.

What a surprise. I enjoyed the new version of The Producers in a theater-type screening room last December. I was well aware of its many shortcomings but I so enjoyed watching Nathan Lane's performance that I could mentally write off the negatives and walk out of there happy. Maybe it's just because it was my second time through but watching the newly-released DVD, the weaknesses won out over Nathan. He's still amazing, wringing every possible laugh out of every gesture and syllable, but the film still fails to come to life. (Maybe it was also the lack of an audience.)

I've seen the material twice on stage — once with Nathan and Matthew Broderick, once with Jason Alexander and Martin Short. I've also seen the movie. This was the first time I really missed Zero and Gene and Ken Mars and the less-hysterical (but still over-the-top) pacing. The previous viewings, the musical felt like a new work made out of the framework of the original. Suddenly now, it really strikes me as a remake of something that didn't need to be remade. Broadway-to-film conversions usually fail because they change too much. This one fails because what worked on the stage just isn't as good on the screen.

The DVD includes a mess of outtakes and deleted scenes, including the whole "King of Broadway" number and a shorter song called "Rio." Also cut was a short scene with Max Bialystock (Nathan) wooing a little old lady played by Andrea Martin. They apparently got to improvising as there are several versions on the DVD and they're all funnier than a lot of material that did get in. Director Susan Stroman also recorded a commentary track that sounds like she's reading a script…and not a particularly enlightening one. I wouldn't expect any director to air dirty linen and might not think much of them if they did. But you shouldn't do a commentary track unless you have something more to say than how much fun every scene was to shoot, how terrific everyone was to work with and how brilliant they are in the scene we're watching.

Here's a link to order the DVD in regular or widescreen versions. Obviously, this is not a glowing recommendation. It's a sigh of disappointment from someone who still retains an affection for the material. Just not this presentation of it.

Next Friday, Saturday and Sunday, folks in the Southern California area will have a splendid opportunity to see great magic, live before their eyes. The lovely Misty Lee and the completely-out-of-his-mind Sylvester the Jester will be performing three shows only at the Colony Theater in Burbank. We mentioned this before here and we're mentioning it again because we think it'll be wonderful and now is the time to buy those tickets. Misty does classic magic with a contemporary, dazzling twist while Sylvester is…well, twisted. And as an extra added attraction, the very funny Mr. Woody Pittman will be joining them with his witty feats. What more do you need to hear? Go to this page to order your seats.

Some days ago here, I cited a Jack Anderson statement that most of the things stamped Top Secret in Washington were classified not out of security concerns but because someone thought the information in question would embarrass them or expose wrongdoing. Tom Blanton elaborates on this in an article that includes this nugget…

Erwin Griswold, who as U.S. solicitor general prosecuted the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971, once explained the real motivation behind government secrecy — but only years later, when he recanted his prosecutorial passion. Griswold persuaded three Supreme Court justices to vote for a prior restraint on the Times in the case. But in 1989, he confessed in a Washington Post Op-Ed article that there was no actual national security damage from the publication of the papers. "It quickly becomes apparent to any person who has considerable experience with classified material that there is massive overclassification and that the principal concern of the classifiers is not with national security, but with governmental embarrassment of one sort or another," he wrote.

I think there's an awful lot wrong with the press in this country, including a lack of accuracy — for reasons of competence, quite apart from any ulterior motives. And certainly there are legitimate government secrets that should not be splashed across Page One. But I'm unconvinced that any cries we've heard to prosecute reporters for National Security Leaks are anything more than desperate ploys by folks with a vested interest in not seeing government screw-ups and corruption exposed. And that's not just a criticism of the Bush administration and its supporters. It's more common than not in Washington and politics.

You might not want to watch it in its entirety — this one runs a little under 27 minutes — but I thought someone would appreciate the link to "Dogs of War," a 1923 silent Our Gang comedy produced by the Hal Roach Studio…and also starring the Hal Roach Studio. It begins with the kids staging war games on a vacant lot and segues to them visiting the Roach lot, though it's called something else. There, they get mixed up in the movie-making of the day and there are some nice views of the process. There's also an almost surreal (at least by 1923 standards) ending where the youngsters have made their own movie and it's full of odd visual effects. Harold Lloyd, who was then about the biggest name in film comedy, has a nice cameo about two-thirds of the way into the proceedings.

This was one of the better Our Gang comedies of the period and this copy has a serviceable musical score on it — one that is probably a lot like those ad-libbed at the time by organ accompanists in theaters around the world. There were a lot of "kid" comedies being made by film studios then but the cleverness of this one demonstrates why the Our Gang series was the most popular and the only one that has really endured.

And before someone asks: For reasons I never understood, not even after putting the question once to Mr. Roach himself, the series had a couple of different names, sometimes using "Our Gang" and sometimes not, and wasn't too picky about what it called itself until around 1932. That's when "Our Gang" became pretty much official. The films changed ownership a few times after that and there were other names and maybe someday if I can muster the courage, I'll attempt to explain the back-and-forth. Or maybe I'll take the easy way out and refer you to the definitive book on the subject, which was written by Leonard Maltin and Richard Bann, and which itself changed its name from Our Gang to The Little Rascals: The Life and Times of Our Gang. Very confusing stuff.

Matt Tauber writes…

It's interesting that in a city known for its high crime rate, this is what they've got the police working on. I wonder who was behind the initiative to arrest the video pirates.

The problem is, where does it stop? A friend of mine produces faux Aurora model kit boxes, often featuring characters who never had a kit. He was quizzed last year by Paul Levitz about them and told he was violating DC's copyright. He didn't say anything to the dealer next to my friend, who was selling drawings of DC characters and stained-glass replicas of DC character logos, for which DC receives nothing. I guess I'm asking if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches? Convention operators always seem to get a pass when this debate comes up. Do you think this is something they should be policing, since they're benefiting from these dealers of unauthorized material?

To the first point: My guess would be that this was not a matter of the Detroit Police suddenly deciding they had nothing better to do than to go out and bust people selling unauthorized DVDs. My guess is that the M.P.A.A. (the producers' association) has put pressure on law enforcement agencies around the nation, starting with the FBI, and that senior agencies have passed the buck to lower agencies. And now that I think of it, the officers were probably less interested in the kind of bootleg I was describing — people selling shows they recorded off TV — than they were in pirated copies of current releases. No one pressures the law to take action against people pirating old episodes of Tennessee Tuxedo, though that may be an ancillary concern.

Of course, it's more important for the police to be arresting violent criminals but I don't think this is an either/or choice. It's also more important for them to be tracking down murderers than to be ticketing people who run stop signs but they have to occasionally ticket someone who runs a stop sign or else everyone would run stop signs.

Anyone who's in charge of protecting a copyright has a not-dissimilar problem deciding when to take action. There are egregious violations for which you have to summon the gendarmes (or pay legal fees) and those you decide not to pursue, either because they seem so trivial or because you're not sure some judge won't think they fall under the heading of "fair use." With the exception of a few known instances involving Disney, I've never heard of a copyright holder objecting to an artist selling a sketch or two. So my answer to the question "if you want to stop the DVD bootleggers, do you also stop everyone else, even artists doing sketches?" is "No, DC knows about it and they have the wherewithal to take action if they so elect. So if they're not bothered by people selling Superman sketches then I'm not going to let it bother me."

There are violations that even the violators would not argue were wrong and there are uses of others' copyrighted material that are considered acceptable. In between, there's an area that's extremely gray and arguable, and which often must be argued on a case-by-case basis. Its parameters get loosely defined by how proprietors object or give tacit approval…but selling a DVD of someone else's copyrighted material reproduced in full is well into the "violation" standard.

One other thing I should point out: When someone has a property and they sell licenses to other companies to exploit that property, they enter into business arrangements that are usually based on exclusivity. For example, if you go to Disney and pay them for the right to make Mickey Mouse cuspidors, the standard contract will stipulate (a) that Disney grants you the exclusive rights to make 'em, (b) that Disney has the legal right to grant you that exclusive license and (c) that Disney will defend your exclusive right. If I then go out and start bootlegging Mickey cuspidors and Disney doesn't stop me, they're in breach of their contract with you. Which is why they'd probably be more aggressive in stopping the counterfeit spittoons than they might be over some other infractions. I take a pretty liberal view of what constitutes "fair use" but I also recognize that some uses of others' property are not fair and need to be stopped.

It's the opening of an episode of Puppet Playhouse, the show that came to be better known as Howdy Doody. I don't know the date but this is an early clip so that's probably Bob Keeshan in the clown costume.

The obits for Lew Anderson, who died last week, said that he was the third and final actor to play Clarabell the Clown on the original Howdy Doody program. I believe there were at least four. Bob Keeshan, as we all know, was the first and the character was largely an accident. Keeshan, who then worked as an assistant and go-fer for host "Buffalo" Bob Smith, was assigned to herd around the kids who sat in the show's famous Peanut Gallery and to get them to shut up while Smith told stories, sang and fraternized with the show's puppet players. He kept getting on camera and someone suggested that the drab-looking guy in the sport coat didn't fit in with the program's circus theme. "Put that guy in a clown suit," they said…and that's how Clarabell was born. Keeshan researched clown makeups and devised one for himself — a pretty good one, as it turned out. Clarabell never spoke, in part because the show didn't want to pay Keeshan extra and in part because he really couldn't.

Years later — to make a living in children's television — Bob Keeshan learned how to talk on camera, and this made possible his legendary character, Captain Kangaroo. But back in his Howdy Doody days, he couldn't deliver lines and couldn't do much of anything. To the ongoing frustration of "Buffalo" Bob, who liked music on the show, Clarabell couldn't play an instrument…couldn't even master the triangle, despite repeated attempts to teach him. At least once, they let Keeshan go and put the clown suit on a professional musician who didn't work out. The replacement could accompany Smith but he flopped at replicating the Clarabell personality and when viewers (and more critically, licensors) complained, Bob Keeshan was hired back and Clarabell went back to being non-musical. Later, when Keeshan was fired for the last time, he was replaced by Bob Nicholson and then Anderson, both of whom were musicians.

The one time I met and talked with Bob Keeshan, he told me that his successors had pleased Smith and had also "nicened" the clown a touch, which he did not think was a bad thing. At times, Clarabell was a pretty nasty clown, less interested in making anyone laugh than in just spraying seltzer on other cast members out of sheer meanness. Keeshan mused that his first creation probably appealed to the worst in children, whereas his greatest (Cap'n Kangaroo) probably brought out their best.

I never met Lew Anderson but he was the Clarabell I knew as a viewer. I was never a very steady one because Howdy Doody was on the downslope by the time I was old enough to know what I was watching on TV. Much of the show's appeal was lost on me, at least when the clown was not on screen. When I watched at all, I watched for him…and I do remember viewing live that sad day when they aired the final episode and Clarabell broke his silence and said, "Goodbye." Goodbye, Lew Anderson. I hope someone at the funeral had the guts to get up and talk about "A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer down my pants…"

The Motor City Comic Convention got underway yesterday in Novi, Michigan, which is just outside of Detroit. I haven't seen any online news reports yet but two attendees have e-mailed me that the convention was "swarming" (both used that word) with police. No, they weren't looking for Jimmy Hoffa. My correspondents say the authorities were arresting (even handcuffing) dealers who were selling bootleg videotapes. There have been busts like this at other cons but if the accounts e-mailed to me are accurate, this one was scary in its scope and seriousness — enough to perhaps finally end the selling of pirated videos at conventions.

For those of you who don't get to cons: There's a thriving industry out there in video piracy…people who mass-produce videotapes and DVDs of copyrighted material in which they do not hold any copyright. Sometimes, it's a matter of just replicating commercial video releases and selling them cheaper…or selling copies of tapes and DVDs that are now out of print. There are also those who have pirated copies of new movies not yet available on video but more often lately, the bootleggers are producing videos of old TV shows or movies taped off the air or transferred from 16mm prints. While they sometimes find and offer very rare material, the fact remains that the material is still stolen.

I've had a few conversations at cons with folks who traffic in this area and have been amazed at the rationales for theft. Sometimes, the defense is just that they're not making a lot of money off these videos…which may be true but, you know, stealing small is still stealing. Sometimes, one hears the notion that it's not ignoble to rip off Time-Warner or Disney because, let's face it, those companies make skillions and perhaps are not always 100% honest in their pursuit of profits. Above and beyond the obvious flaw in that argument is the fact that the video pirates rarely spare the small producer or filmmaker…and that even a Disney bootleg cheats "little guys" like writers and voice actors who don't receive their contracted residuals.

The most frequent alibi is that the sellers aren't really doing it for the money…or at least, doing it just for the money. They're doing it as a public service since the folks who own the material in question are selfishly or thoughtlessly withholding it from the public. This is another way of saying the rights holders haven't gotten around yet to issuing the show or movie on home video but still, it almost sounds like a valid point. Doesn't change the fact that we're talking here about copyright violations but it sounds good.

I'll tell you how low some video buccaneers have sunk: They're even bootlegging stuff I wrote. The three DVD covers above are from complete collections of shows I worked on. People have taped these shows off Cartoon Network and The Disney Channel, and edited DVDs of them which they sell quite openly. I got all three cover images off eBay. (An authorized, legal collection of the Dungeons and Dragons animated series will be issued later this year, by the way. I'm guessing the others will follow within a year or two.)

I guess in a very small way, I feel sorry for some of the guys who got busted yesterday. They all seem to think they're creating product, not filching someone else's — or if they're stealing, they're stealing from someone else's bootlegs. Some of them have even put a lot of work into their editing and art direction and take great pride in their handiwork. But I don't feel sorry enough to not think they should have known this was going to happen…and that it's about time it was stopped.

Well, Karl Rove wasn't indicted today so we'll put another $100 in the jackpot…

This is great. The L.A.P.D. has had a man named Stephen Albert Briller on its "Ten Most Wanted" list since November of 2004. They can't seem to find him but a blogger has.

Dan DeCarlo was a lovely man who drew lovely women. Many of them were for Archie where, though he didn't invent the house art style, he still managed to become the guy everyone else looked at to see how to do it. And beyond the staggering quantity of work he did for that company, he also managed to do a staggering quantity for other publishers and even for men's magazines and other venues.

A bountiful sampling of his work is on display in the just-released volume, The Art of Dan DeCarlo, written by my friend (and more importantly, Dan's friend) Bill Morrison. A lot of books about great comic artists are labors of love and this one sure qualifies. Bill had unlimited access to Dan's widow and personal collection…and Bill already had a great collection of DeCarlo work from which to draw. Beyond the art, he tells the story of Dan's life — triumphs and tragedies, both — with passion and accuracy. This one has our highest recommendation so here's an Amazon link to get one.