Tonight, Jimmy Fallon's guests are Bill Cosby and Fred Willard. Mr. Willard was booked before his recent arrest and is enough of a mensch to not cancel because of it.

I'm not embedding this because it's a C-Span video and anything with Congress on it seems to cause everything to freeze up and not work. It's Senator Al Franken taking to the Senate floor to eulogize his late writing partner, Tom Davis. I'm of two minds about this, one being that it does seem like a self-indulgent squandering of the peoples' time. On the other hand, every single Congressperson and Senator does things like this and some of them do a lot more of it than Franken…and it is an interesting speech.

A lot of it was about a sketch Franken and Davis wrote for Saturday Night Live in which Julia Child (played by Dan Aykroyd) cut herself and bled to death on her show. I don't recall that as being anywhere near the finest work for Mssrs. Franken, Davis or Aykroyd but some folks — including the three of them plus Ms. Child — loved it. What I do find kinda funny is to imagine them doing that sketch…and there they are backstage afterwards with several of them still dripping stage blood…

…and Franken says to the other two, "Hey, that went great. You know, I think I'll mention that on the floor of the United States Senate if I ever get elected as — oh, I dunno…maybe the junior senator from the great state of Minnesota."

Somehow, I don't think that was said. Here's a link to the video…and do be careful. It is, after all, C-Span.

Can you see what's different about me today? Give up? I'm on my backup computer. Don't be embarrassed that you didn't notice. I'm sure you would have, eventually. My regular computer got one of those virusy things and it's been removed but I'm doing a deep, deep scan of every nook, cranny and byte to make sure it's outta there and that'll tie up that terminal for a few hours. So that's why I appear to you to be on the other side of my office.

It's a busy day with not much time for blogging, I fear. I could fill a lot of this page quickly if I quoted all the messages I've received from folks telling me about the book they bought or the article they wrote that was all but illegible due to Art Director malpractice. I'll quote some (not all) of them in the next few days.

Yesterday, I spent a (thankfully) brief amount of time quashing a bogus death report on the 'net. Someone for some reason posted on a forum that a certain aged actor I know had died. The actor had not…and something about the way the guy announced it made me suspicious. It was just too casual. I called the actor's home and got his voice mail…and I didn't leave a message because I really didn't want to explain to him why I was calling. Just wanted to hear his voice. So I called his agent and asked, "So, have any of your clients died in the last 48 hours?" She said no. I asked about the actor in question. She said she'd spoken to him a half-hour earlier. The Internet posting was three hours earlier so I wrote to its author, told him it was wrong and without responding to me, he deleted it from the forum. It seems to not have travelled.

Lastly before I get to work: Comic-Con appears to be officially over. I finished unpacking. Bye for now.

Holly Gilliam has been digging through her father's personal archives and posting things she finds on her blog. Why do you care about this? Because her father is Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, that's why. Go look at some of the neat stuff there.

I would like to complain about something. Lately, I've gotten (or just paged through) a lot of publications with stunning, innovative graphics that were designed by an Art Director who didn't seem to think it was all that important that people be able to read the text. This is a generalization and there are plenty of exceptions. But what I see happening in these days of digital book and magazine design is that designers are sitting there with way too many fancy fonts at their disposal and it's way too easy to flow text in unnatural shapes around illustrations or to put yellow type over a green image background or something. The result is often a lot of showing-off at the expense of legibility.

I have a couple of prejudices here, one being that as (primarily) an author of prose, I want text to be easily readable. Not just readable. Easily readable. Last year I did the foreword for a book and did not see a proof or anything before the book went to press. Asked what I thought of the finished version, I told the editor that I wasn't wild about what his designer had done with my words. The editor said, "I think that section looks great." I allowed as how it did…but it was hard to read. That to me makes the art direction a failure no matter how attractive the pages seem at arm's length.

"No, no," the editor said. "You can read it." And he was right that you could. You can also usually see (to some extent) a drawing that's been printed badly with dropped-out detail and fuzzy linework and maybe even get a sense of what the artist intended. But the point is that you shouldn't have to do that. The material is not being properly-served if you have to work at it. In reproducing artwork, any editor would tell you he or she wants the crispest, cleanest reproduction of the material possible so you can see every microscopic detail the artist put into it —

— and what I'm saying here is that not always but too often, the same respect is not shown to the text. The designer puts "How do I make this page attractive?" ahead of "How do I make this page legible?" To read text, you shouldn't have to squint and put it under an extra-strong light and concentrate hard on it.

Here's another one of my prejudices. If I can't read it easily, it's wrong. I have near-perfect vision. Lately, I sometimes find myself struggling with an article that I've written. It happened with the foreword I recently did for a book. Even though I have 20/20 orbs and even though I kinda already knew what it said, I had trouble reading my own article. Which of course got me to wondering what it's like for someone with poor vision who's coming to this piece cold.

And here's another: There's nothing wrong with black type against a white background. For my book on Jack Kirby, I turned down a couple of Art Directors, one of whom seemed to think there was; that it was "old-fashioned and boring." He wanted to flow the text over and around Jack's drawings and make collages of Kirby figures to frame my paragraphs. I, on the other hand, wanted Jack's art left the way Jack did it and I didn't want the Art Director's design sense (or my words) intruding on what Jack did. You know, it was kind of a book about Jack Kirby.

Ultimately, we did not hire that particular Art Director. I think what he had against black type against white is that people might look at those pages and think about what I was writing instead of about what a brilliant Art Director he was.

At the Comic-Con, I said some of this to a friend of mine in publishing and he agreed it's getting worse. His theory was that it flows from books being designed on computer screens instead of on paper. Said he, "You don't give enough thought to the font size when you're designing on a screen because it's one click to enlarge it on there. Unfortunately, it's not one click when it's printed out as a book or magazine."

This is more or less the end of my complaint for now and I want to emphasize that it isn't this way with every book and every magazine. It may not even be the majority…yet. I just think it's a trend that's got to be nipped in the bud, as the great philosopher Barney Fife would say. I wrote this to throw this thought out there for public perusal and also to remind myself of something. From now on, when I negotiate my fee for writing something, I think I'm going to try negotiating my font, as well — and make them promise not to try layering my text over a picture or graphic. Because while that may look great in InDesign or Pagemaker, it rarely works as well on that old, primitive, non-layered display thing called paper.

Here's an interesting relic: A manila envelope in which Stan Lee mailed something (we have no idea what) to Jack Kirby in January of 1968.  Under the "J" in "Jack," there's a "D" so it looks like whoever addressed it started to address an envelope to Don Heck or Dick Ayers, then realized the error.

I have really nothing to add to this. Just came across it in my files and thought it should be shared with the world.

Ari Fleischer, who used to be George W. Bush's spokesperson, writes an article that sums up what a lot of this election is about. Though wealthy Americans are paying less in taxes than they have in decades, Fleischer thinks they ought to pay even less. And we oughta be grateful that they pay anything at all.

I'm a little uncomfortable with anyone questioning someone else's religion…but Frank Bruni is right. It's hard to reconcile Michele Bachman thinking she's a godly woman with some of the things she does.

As Jonathan Cohn notes, the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office has again scored the projected costs of the Affordable Care Act and again they say it will save this country a lot of money.

I posted one of these then got busy with other things. On July 9, there was a screening of It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World at the Motion Picture Academy. Billy Crystal was the host and here's some of what he said that evening…

I never debate people about Gun Control. I mean, I suppose I would if there was any evidence that anyone's mind was ever changed by discussion but there isn't. People getting killed doesn't seem to change many minds either.

My friend Roger tried to engage me on the topic the other night to no avail. I don't think I understand his view on the issue and I know he doesn't understand mine. His sounded like he thinks that the First Amendment does not give you the right to yell "Fire" in a crowded theater but the Second Amendment does gives you the right to fire an AK-47 in one.

That can't be what he thinks. I must not have understood him.

He thinks mine is that all firearms should be banned. That's not my view at all. I mean, even if it were possible, which it's not, that's not the ideal situation. There is a place for private gun ownership and even use. Roger is making the mistake which too many firearms owners make, which is to assume "Gun Control" means "Gun Confiscation." It doesn't, any more than licensing cars has led to banning cars. As long as a lot of folks think those are the same thing, nothing will change. Which is why nothing will change.

I believe there are a lot of responsible gun owners out there. They are sane and they know how to store their guns safely and fire them safely. They have no fear of gun registration or of law enforcement efforts to make guns more traceable and responsible with things like background checks and waiting periods. They also have no desire to own automatic weapons or ammo clips that let you kill more than five people before you have to stop and reload, and might feel safer in a nation where those things were a little harder to obtain.

I'm sure there are such people and I even believe that they're a solid majority of gun owners in the country today. I just think it'll take more than one or ten or a hundred Aurora-like massacres before those folks have any meaningful say in how our gun laws are written and enforced. Saner gun laws will not be instituted by the kind of person who'd never have one in the house. They'll be passed by responsible gun owners who decide that their interests are not being served by the N.R.A. and similar organizations these days. And who are sick of being viewed as part of the same group as that asshole in Colorado we're all hearing way too much about.

Fred Willard is back and Tweeting. You can follow him at this link…

Most Republicans have taken this silly pledge to not raise taxes even a penny, no matter what…and of course by that, they mean not raise them on wealthy Americans. They can always find loopholes to raise them on the poor.

Bruce Bartlett thinks he may have found the reason that some will tear up the pledge and enrage Grover Norquist. Deep and automatic cuts to Defense Spending are looming. Many have taken another blood oath to not let that happen and there doesn't seem to be a way to keep both promises.

The conspiracy-minded radio host Alex Jones believes the Aurora, Colorado massacre was arranged by the Obama administration as a step in their ongoing plan to empower the United Nations to take away every American's guns. I'm afraid he's wrong about this one. It was all engineered by Fred Willard to get his name out of the headlines. And you know what? It worked!