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22 minutes and counting.

MARK'S PAYPAL ADVENTURE STARTS HERE!

I'm trying to clear up a small (I hope) problem with my PayPal account. Their online "help" feature is of no help so I called the service phone number. According to the little call timer on my telephone, I have now been on hold for 14 minutes. Every thirty seconds, a recorded voice tells me that they're experiencing "an unusually high call volume" and I should be patient but, better still, I should consult the online help service. Let's see how long it takes me to get to a real human being.

Hack two people to death with a knife if you want to…but don't you dare steal cable TV!

Warner Home Video has formally announced the upcoming DVD sets we've been mentioning here for months. The Yogi Bear Show comes out on November 15, as does the first collection of The Huckleberry Hound Show, as does the fourth season of The Flintstones. Those links go to articles that list the contents. I'll provide Amazon ordering links as soon as they're available.

One cautionary note: My voice and/or face appear on a couple of these in my capacity as a Hanna-Barbera expert. I'm also going to be on the second volume of The Adventures of Superman, part of Warner's ongoing releases of the classic series starring George Reeves. I don't much like appearing on camera but I do like the fact that all those years of watching this stuff has turned me into an authority.

More Hanna-Barbera shows will be emerging on DVD in the months to come. Why, it wouldn't surprise me if we see an announcement any day now about Quick Draw McGraw…

I assume by now, everyone knows that a number of newspapers dropped yesterday's Doonesbury strip while others did some editing on it. The whole tale is here (and the strip in question is here) but basically, Garry Trudeau had George W. Bush using his reported nickname for Karl Rove, "Turd Blossom." One suspects that such excisions do wonders for Mr. Trudeau's notoriety and call extra attention to the term in question. I'll bet there are some people who only read Doonesbury when someone doesn't want them to.

According to the USA Today/CNN/Gallup poll, 51% of all Americans believe the Bush administration deliberately misled the public about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

Now, I don't believe any poll on its own proves much, and there are others that place that number a bit lower than 51%. But as more and more of Bush's negative ratings hit that magic number of half-the-nation-plus-one, I wonder about something. It's how many Bush supporters who thought 51% in the last election was a mandate or even a landslide will now argue that 51% or even anything below 55% or so isn't really a majority.

Last night, one of Jay Leno's guests was Australian Joseph Hachem, who recently won $7.5 million bucks (American) in the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas.

There was an interesting subtext to their discussion. Jay was asking Hachem about what it's like to be a professional gambler. Hachem kept suggesting that he really isn't a professional gambler. He's a mortgage broker and playing poker, he says, is just a sideline.

He had a good reason for insisting on the distinction. Under Australian tax law, income from your primary business is taxable, whereas income from a hobby is not. If it's ruled that gambling is Hachem's primary business, the tax collector there could claim up to $4.85 million of his winnings.

If I were him, I'd run back to Melbourne and arrange a lot of mortgages. And fast.

Fred Kaplan, whose commentaries on the Iraq War have been frighteningly prescient, says that the Bush administration is making a major shift in its approach to combatting terrorism…but only in how they try to sell it to the American public.

I didn't mention it when it happened but I spent another long day in the hospital emergency room with my mother. Our previous visit there — the one I described here — was last Friday. We were back there on Saturday afternoon. She was in the hospital for two nights and then I brought her home Monday afternoon. (My thanks to those of you, including several total strangers, who've sent good wishes and messages of concern. I think she's okay now.)

I lack many skills in this world but I have one that comes in handy in these situations. It's the ability to be in peoples' way. This is not just because I'm a pretty large human being. Even back when I was svelte, I had the uncanny capacity to stand in the wrong place and to enormously inconvenience others around me. This is usually a source of embarrassment and personal shame but it helps when you're trying to get attention from scurrying doctors and nurses. In an emergency room, they wind up tending to Mom just so they can get me out of their way.

The most interesting thing I observed/eavesdropped this time was a conversation between a doctor and a patient in the next cubicle. The physician was informing the poor guy that he would need a kidney transplant. Worse, the patient did not have a potential donor in his family, nor did he have the funds or insurance to cover the cost. Still, the whole thing was discussed quite matter-of-factly. The vocal tones and rhetoric were about the same you'd hear if an auto mechanic was telling someone they needed new seat covers they couldn't afford. I found the dispassionate air quite chilling; like both parties were resigned to the fact that nothing could be done for the man. The doctor asked, "Any questions?" and when the man said he had none, the doctor hurried off to treat a lady who could be helped…who'd just been brought in with severe (but not fatal) facial wounds, courtesy of her "boy friend." I mentioned to one nurse that they seemed to get a lot of cases like that and she said, "If it wasn't for psycho boy friends, we wouldn't be in business."

A few minutes later, the guy with the faulty kidney got dressed and left. And ten minutes later, that cubicle was occupied by a very pregnant lady (like, any day now) who'd been severely beaten by the man who got her that way. Doctors were huddling just outside the door, discussing if and how they could save the baby. One gave the order, "Get the social counselor down here. I don't want to save this woman and then have to release her to go home to that guy."

So here's my latest story about the hospital cafeteria. On weekends, this one doesn't have the steam table with three hot entrees and as many side dishes. It's just the grill, meaning burgers and chicken sandwiches. I suddenly flashed on the 1962 MAD Magazine parody of the TV series, Dr. Kildare — this panel, in particular…

I don't know if you can read the tiny type on your screen but the senior doctor lectures the younger doctor by saying, "…if you never learn another thing from me, please remember this! Never…NEVER eat a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria!" At the time this issue came out, I was ten and I had an uncle dying, so we were spending a lot of time at a hospital and dining in its cafeteria. Heeding the advice of MAD, I avoided ordering a burger, even though I wasn't sure what the line meant. Was it that hamburgers in hospital cafeterias were just notoriously bad or was there something more to it than that? Maybe hospitals made their burgers out of…I don't know…leftover body parts? When you're ten, things like that occur to you. I didn't really believe that was it but I couldn't quite figure out why, as I thought was implied in the joke, the burgers at a hospital cafeteria were worse than the ones in any cafeteria. What was it about them being served in a hospital?

I outgrew such worries but until last Saturday, I don't think I'd ever had a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria. I wasn't going to have one then but they were all out of chicken and I was famished. So, well aware that I was scorning the sage counsel of MAD, I steeled myself and ordered…a hamburger in a hospital cafeteria. And after I took two bites, I suddenly realized I was right when I was ten. That thing was definitely made out of somebody's spleen.

Next year's Comic-Con International will be held July 20-23. Good time to start looking for a parking space near the convention center.

Michael Tomasky explains how George W. Bush has gone from saying he'd fire anyone involved in the Valerie Plame leak to saying he'd fire anyone convicted of leaking the name. The change is not a little one since, among other things, a trial and conviction could easily be delayed for years.

My friend Paul Dini has started blogging.

Frank Rich tells us why Alberto Gonzales wasn't nominated for the Supreme Court. Good point.

As reported here and elsewhere, the WB Network is dumping Michigan J. Frog as its mascot. Mr. Frog may have had the most stupendous career of anyone who only appeared in just a couple of cartoons, only one of which anyone saw — the original, 1955 One Froggy Evening. Years later, after his stardom was firmly established, came its barely-released 1998 sequel, Another Froggy Evening. and a few cameos on Tiny Toon Adventures and other WB venues.

I never quite understood why he was dancing about in WB promos, or even why the network for a time had the receptionist at its offices greet each caller with, "The dub-dub-dubya-yew duba-yew-bee!" They had a frog doing their commercials and Porky Pig answering their phones.

I recall attending a big "kick-off" party for the WB. They had a guy (or maybe it was a gal) in a big Michigan J. Frog suit, dancing about. I thought it would have been much hipper to have the person in the costume dance only when one person was looking.

Here are some fun facts about Michigan J. Frog, who wasn't even called that when the original cartoon was made by director Chuck Jones, writer Michael Maltese and some fine animators. It was many years later, when WB wished to see merchandise of said frog that they decided he had to have more of a name than "that singing frog in the cartoon about the guy who finds a singing frog in a building's time capsule." Mr. Jones came up with the name, spinning off one of the tunes warbled in the cartoon by the awesome amphibian — "The Michigan Rag," which sounds like an old standard but was actually written for the film by Jones, Maltese and music guy Milt Franklyn.

For years, animation historians thought the frog's voice was provided by opera star Terence Monck. This assumption sprang from the fact that Mr. Monck did provide a not-altogether-dissimilar voice in two cartoons Jones and Maltese did for MGM — The Cat Above and the Mouse Below, and Cat and Dupli-Cat. (Monck is also wrongly credited with the voice of the opera singer in the Jones/Maltese WB cartoon, Long-Haired Hare. That was Nicolai Shutorov.)

The frog's voice was apparently done by a gent named Bill Roberts, about whom little is known other than that he was a nightclub performer in Los Angeles for years and worked on a lot of non-animation films and records as a back-up singer. Someone sent me the above photo which they swear is the man, himself. Perhaps so.

One thing I didn't know until fairly recently is that the storyline of One Froggy Evening may have been inspired by an actual event, sort of, but not really. In 1897, a horned lizard named "Ol' Rip" (as in, "Rip Van Winkle," I guess) was sealed into the cornerstone of a building in Eastland County, Texas. Allegedly, in 1928, the cornerstone was opened and the lizard was found alive within. Do we believe this story? No, of course we don't believe this story. But it made the press, and what was passed off as Ol' Rip went on tour and was even photographed with Calvin Coolidge, which may have been the high point of his administration.

One Froggy Evening debuted in theaters on December 31, 1955. I don't think it's the absolute best cartoon ever made but if you do, I certainly won't waste time arguing.

Our condolences to comic book legend Jim Mooney on the passing of his spouse, Anne, about a week ago. Anne, who had been ill for some time, was a lovely lady and just as pretty and dazzling as Supergirl back when Jim drew that comic. We already miss her.