If you take time out on this Independence Day to watch the movie 1776 — or even if you just regard it fondly as I do — you may enjoy this brief interview with the late Peter Stone, who authored the book of that fine musical. I think Mr. Stone is wrong in his assessment of how closely his play adheres to the facts but he sure wrote a nice piece…

The Comic-Con folks have juggled around a few program items so Keith Knight can appear on the Quick Draw! panel…so that problem is solved. I will repost my panel schedule at least once before the con and you'll see that everything is as it was except that some additional panelists have been added to some events.

It's time to start final preps for the gala event…time for me to haul out my annual joke about how I'm trying to arrange for them to postpone the con for a few weeks because I'm not ready. Every time I say it to someone on the convention staff, they reply, "Oh, do you think we can do that?" It is not usually visible to you because they do it so well but those folks really, really work like crazy to pull this thing off every year. My unique position as a constant guest, an attendee of every one of these and the guy who participates in more programming items than anyone else gives me a vantage point to learn a lot about how the con operates. I don't know everything but I see enough to be thoroughly impressed with how they do the impossible each year. The efficiency makes it look effortless but trust me: It's not.

Other sites are sending folks here for tips on how to "do" the convention. I refer you to these I put up a month or so ago and I stress the one about not stressing. Accept that it is going to be crowded, that you won't be able to get into everything you want to see, that parking and traffic will be bad, etc. You may be able to make some of those things less frustrating via some advance planning, especially about what to go see and how to get to and from the convention. Every year, I hear from folks who are genuinely surprised that the freeway to San Diego is crowded on Saturday morning — which I suspect it is even when the con isn't occurring — and that there are somehow no open parking spaces right in front of the Convention Center.

Oh, this might interest you. My partner Sergio Aragonés will be at the convention, probably at his table the entire time except when he's on a panel or off in the Men's Room. I assume he'll be at his usual location, which is space I-7. Hang a right at Scott Shaw! and you can't miss him. His table just consists of him sitting there, doing sketches for money and autographs and selling a few books, and there's usually this odd person named "Gary" hanging around, helping him out.

I am webmaster of his website and any e-mail people send to it comes to me. Lately, because he is technically an exhibitor at the convention, he's been getting ad-type mail from agencies that offer — I guess you'd call them employees to staff one's exhibit. There's one that has photos of cute women you can hire to be at your booth, handing out flyers or dressing in sexy costumes or whatever. I wanted to write back to them and explain that Sergio doesn't have to pay to have cute women around him. He also got one from an agency that represents NBA, NFL and MLB stars — famous pro athletes — offering their services if it will enhance your convention presence. So Sergio could hire a linebacker or a shortstop to be at his table. I think I'd like to see either a model or a sports figure standing next to Sergio as he sits there for 4.5 days drawing Alfred E. Neuman and/or Groo for people. Maybe we could save money and dress Gary up as Princess Leia or Kobe Bryant. Or both.

Have a safe 'n' sane Fourth. And look forward to the YouTube videos of people being maimed for life by stupid fireworks handling. Nothing says "America" like drunks with cherry bombs.

My pal Ken Levine writes a nice piece about Andy Griffith but gets one thing wrong. He says they mimicked Griffith's voice for Huckleberry Hound. Not so. That was a voice Daws Butler had been doing in cartoons for years before it was assigned to the mouth of Huck Hound. It was a voice animation directors (especially Tex Avery) loved and they often hired Daws, who could do a zillion voices, just for that one. This was years before Mr. Griffith had burst onto the national scene and anyone knew who he was.

The voice itself was basically Daws's own with a North Carolina drawl that he said he picked up from a neighbor of his wife Myrtis back when they began dating. At Hanna-Barbera, they did base voices on celebrities — Doggie Daddy sounding like Jimmy Durante, for instance. But this was not a case of that.

Republicans say they want to "repeal and replace" the Affordable Care Act.  That's half right.  They want to repeal it but as Jonathan Chait notes, the "replace" part is fantasy.  They don't have an alternative plan or any real desire to come up with one.

Pete Barbutti was on The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson an estimated 17,408,226 times, give or take 17,408,134. I love this bit he did one of the times he appeared with Johnny…

I mentioned here the other day the panel we're going to be doing at Comic-Con about how to break into the field of cartoon voice work. I got a lot of messages from people who said they wish they could be there for it and is there any way they could get a video or even an audio of the panel. No, there isn't. But there's plenty of good, solid advice out there if you know where to look for it. As a general rule, listen to people who actually work. For instance, Dee Bradley Baker has set up this website full of tips and counseling. Dee (who'll be on our Cartoon Voices II panel on Sunday at Comic-Con) works all the time. So does Bob Bergen, who teaches on the side. This article tells you a number of things that his students learned in a recent class.

Bob is an example of someone who works a lot in V.O. and also teaches. There are others in this category like Gregg Berger and Bill Farmer and Brian Cummings and I think Charlie Adler is still teaching. There are others and they provide useful information for what it seems to me is a reasonable price. There are also V.O. classes and coaching available from folks who don't work very often…and some who have less paid hours at the microphone than some of their students. A few of them charge what does not seem to me like a reasonable price…and more annoying is this: If you have very little talent, a reputable tutor will say to you, "I'm sorry. Even if you spend a lot of money on lessons with me, you will never make much (if any) money in this business." The not-reputable tutor will say, "My God, you have so much potential! With a little seasoning and coaching, you could be getting all the jobs Rob Paulsen gets. All it will take is…uh, how much money did you say you had in the world?"

I am not saying everyone with little or no working experience is a crook. Some of them, I'm sure, are quite helpful and honest. But my observation is that almost everyone who is a crook is in the category of not working very much if at all. So notes of caution and skepticism about those folks are not unwarranted.

After every election in recent memory, you hear the losing side screaming about "voter fraud" and claiming that their guy was defeated because a whole kennel full of cocker spaniels were allowed to cast ballots. Our pal Kevin Drum says that actual voter fraud is very rare and that most of the current efforts to extinguish it are efforts to get certain groups of humans — the kind unlikely to vote your way — to not vote at all.

I grew up in the house next door to Thelma Lou. That is, Betty Lynn was our next door neighbor and Betty, as part of a long acting career that spanned many shows and stages, played Barney Fife's girl friend on The Andy Griffith Show. She was like my unofficial aunt and I'm still in contact with her.

When I was around fourteen I got to visit Mayberry — a trip to the set to watch them film a little. I got to meet Aunt Bee and Barney and Goober (Gomer had already gone off and joined the Marines by then) and I played a little handball with Opie who trounced me. Ernest T. Bass was not in the episode they were shooting but Howard Morris, the man who played him, was visiting the set and I met him and told him I knew that he was also Atom Ant. Howie would later become my unofficial uncle and I sometimes called him Uncle Goopie.

And I met Sheriff Andy that day. Just for a few moments.

The best thing I can tell you about Andy Griffith, who has just died at the age of 86, is that I never saw or heard any reason to think he was not like the characters he played on TV. I never saw that. Betty told me all about him and the show and what went on when cameras weren't rolling and nothing she said ever contradicted the qualities of warmth and honesty and humility that he displayed in all his TV roles. (Parts he played in movies like A Face in the Crowd were another matter.) Even Howie, who would explode in anger about those he'd worked with and tell you an hour of stories about what a prick Danny Kaye was, didn't have one bad thing to say about Andy.

The last time I saw Andy Griffith in person was at Howie's funeral in '05. He and Howie weren't that close but Andy still made the difficult trip out to L.A. from North Carolina for the sad event. He didn't get up and speak; just sat with Betty and me. After the service, I heard someone ask him why he didn't appear at the podium and he said, "'Cause Carl [Reiner] was speaking and I knew he'd say everything that had to be said and anyway, I couldn't do any better than him." That was true but it didn't stop a lot of performers from getting up there and talking just to get into the spotlight. Show biz funerals usually include a certain amount of that.

There were rumors then that Andy was about to revive the character of Ben Matlock for a couple of TV Movies. On the old show, which had been out of production for ten years, Andy had asked the producers to offer at least one job to each of the recurring actors on The Andy Griffith Show and even to some prominent guest stars. It was a bit of a ratings gimmick but when Betty appeared on Matlock, she viewed it as a kindness by Andy — making sure his old friends still got a bit of work — and wanting to see them again.

There was an actor who'd done the old Griffith Show but had never been on Matlock. As we all filed out of the funeral and milled about outside, this actor walked up to Andy, grabbed his hand to shake it and introduced himself, reminding Andy of the role he'd once played.  "Hey, I hear you may do more Matlocks," he then said. "That would be great, really great. People really love you as that character." Then, doing a very bad job of pretending he meant the following only as a joke, he added, "And hey, maybe I'll finally get to do a Matlock like everyone else who was ever on The Andy Griffith Show, heh heh."

If it had been you or me in Andy's position, we'd have "joked" back something about how a funeral isn't the place to be trolling for employment. But then you and I aren't as polite as Andy Griffith. Sorry to have to break it to you but you aren't…and I'm certainly not. We wouldn't have done what he did and just force a smile and make like we were happy to see this person again. Andy did that and replied that the reports weren't true. He'd retired Ben Matlock because he was afraid the public had just plain seen enough of that guy — but he added, "If I change my mind and do any more, I'll sure keep you in mind."

The actor thanked him and stepped away, probably figuring he'd done the best he could do for himself to plant a seed. Then Andy turned to Betty, who I was standing with, and gave a look that you'd know if you ever watched The Andy Griffith Show. It was that "it takes all kinds" look and it was about as close as Sheriff Andy Taylor ever got to losing his temper.

But of course you watched The Andy Griffith Show. Everyone did and many still do. Its timelessness is amazing and its popularity endures, long exceeding shows that got higher ratings back when it was in first run. There's something so primal and warm about that series that new generations latch onto it and old ones won't let it go. No one can quite explain it but whatever it is, it came from Andy Griffith. He was the core. He was the heart of that show and that's what it still runs on: Heart.

One thing he did was to forget the fact that it was The Andy Griffith Show. To him, that was just a name and some weeks, it could be The Jim Nabors Show or The Ronny Howard Show or The Frances Bavier Show or The Whoever Show, and every week until Barney left, it was certainly The Don Knotts Show. There are many stars who would never have allowed that; who would have figured it was their show so they were going to get the punch lines and they were going to get the attention and they sure as hell weren't going to let any friggin' supporting player steal as many scenes from them as Don swiped from Andy. Some weeks, it was all of them.

Andy didn't care. In fact, he truly seemed to enjoy it and he sure loved Don. All that mattered was that the show was good and popular. Deep down, he knew if it was that, he'd get all the benefits he could get.

This is pointed out often in the TV business. Whenever some insecure star starts complaining that someone else in the show has too many lines or a big scene that has "Emmy" written all over it and they demand a rewrite, someone reminds them about Andy Griffith. Often, Mary Tyler Moore and Jack Benny are also mentioned — two folks who had pretty good careers letting someone else be The Funny One. But they always mention Andy and note how he may well have been the most successful TV performer of all time. Letting Don get the laughs sure didn't hurt.

What a nice, secure man. What a nice, secure and smart man. There's no point in saying we're going to miss him because we won't. As long as there are television sets in this world, he's never going to leave us.

Greg Kelly sent me this link which I imagine is making the rounds of the 'net. It's to a series of message board posts by someone — I'm not clear just who — explaining "Obamacare" in pretty simple English. Worth a look if you're curious or if you have relatives telling you the bill has provisions that mandate daily rectal probes of everyone under 6'2".

Kliph Nesteroff found this on YouTube and put it on his blog but it's so good, I have to steal it for mine. It's Strictly For Laffs, an unsold pilot starring Dave Barry. About every three years, someone does some variation of this idea: Have a bunch of comedians just sit around and tell jokes. This one's not bad and you may want to spend the 22 minutes it'll take to watch the whole thing. We can figure out roughly when this pilot was filmed from the content. There's a joke in there about John F. Kennedy getting votes of questionable validity so it would have to be after the presidential election on November 8, 1960. But Mel Blanc is in it and unharmed so it would have to be before his near-fatal auto accident on January 24, 1961.

I'm going to hazard a guess as to why it didn't sell. Given the rock-bottom budget and low production values, it was clearly done for syndication. But I'll bet that when they offered it to stations, they had no idea where to put it on their schedules. It's not a daytime show. It's not a prime-time show. It's not a late night show. If you put a half-hour on the air, you kind of have to "marry it" with a similar half-hour program and there were no similar half-hour programs.

I'm most interested in Dave Barry, who was a wonderful stand-up comic and an occasional cartoon voice actor. He's the guy who did Humphrey Bogart in most of the Warner Brothers cartoons where someone did Bogart. He also turned up in a lot of other cartoons and was briefly Elmer Fudd and Popeye's nemesis, Bluto. Also on Strictly For Laffs, we have Alan Reed (best known as the voice of Fred Flintstone), Rose Marie (from The Dick Van Dyke Show), Sid Melton (from The Danny Thomas Show and Green Acres), Harold Peary (The Great Gildersleeve), Willard Waterman (also The Great Gildersleeve), Marvin Miller (from The Millionaire) plus Jesse White, Mel Blanc, Ken Murray, Buddy Lester, Moe Howard (!), Jack Durant, Tommy Noonan, a few others and Paul Gilbert. Gilbert was a comic actor who was famous for being able to do an amazing flip/pratfall. He did it a number of times on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In but was most famously the drunk who was judo-flipped by Laura Petrie in an episode of The Dick Van Dyke Show.

I think Rose Marie is the only person in it who's still with us. Next time I see her, I'll ask if she has any recollection of this at all…

Roger Ebert recalls his days as a science-fiction fan and fanzine publisher. If you want to know what s-f fans and fanzine publishers were like back then, they were exactly like Roger Ebert.

Obamacare is "the largest tax increase in the history of the world?" Not true. It isn't even as big as that one Reagan signed. But from now 'til Election Day, we're going to hear that it is because, you know, we shouldn't let math get in the way of a good talking point.