I'll Buy That! was a game show hosted by Mike Wallace back in the days when Mike Wallace sometimes hosted game shows. The show debuted June 13, 1953 and lasted a few months into 1954. Home viewers would send in items they wished to sell and a celebrity panel headed by Vanessa Brown and Hans Conreid would attempt to guess what each item was. Every time they made a wrong guess, the "selling price" would go up.

How was it? A fine question. There don't seem to be many (any?) episodes around. But its cancellation and the failure of a few other attempts got Wallace out of the game show hosting and into news work. So that's something.

Amy Davidson notes that some in the Republican Party are starting to come around to the notion of Gay Marriage.

I've received a couple of interesting e-mails about Same-Sex Matrimony and I'll be posting and responding to them here over the next week or so.

Juan Cole itemizes ten Catholic teachings that Rick Santorum and a lot of other political figures reject while still professing their unyielding Catholicism. And I don't think it's at all wrong to think for one's self and reject a teaching with which you disagree. The problem is when you reject some, embrace others…and insist those others are inarguable because the Catholic church supports them. You know, either you believe the Pope is infallible or you don't. You can't insist he's infallible on alternate Tuesdays and then go the other direction on other days.

I'm always suspicious of restaurants that claim to have invented some item that you now find on menus everywhere. In Philadelphia, there are at least three places that will swear to you the Philly steak sandwich was first served on their premises, and there are two in L.A. alone (Phillipe's and Cole's Pacific Electric Buffet) that insist they originated the French Dip.

Legend has it that the hot fudge sundae was the creation of one Clarence Clifton Brown, serving patrons a dish of ice cream with a little apply-it-yourself flask of molten chocolate. This supposedly occurred in his parlor in downtown L.A. in 1906. In 1929, his son Cliff moved the business to 7007 Hollywood Boulevard, just down the street from Grauman's Chinese Theater. There it stood for decades, serving sundaes to celebrities and to tourists who came by to watch the celebrities eat sundaes. Its lush interior — mahogany booths with pink leather seats — was seen in several movies including Minnie and Moscowitz.

I went there the first time as a kid in the mid-sixties and the sundae was delicious but a bit of a disappointment. From all I'd heard about it in advance, I was expecting something that would put your basic Baskin-Robbins sundae to shame…and the one at C.C. Brown's was only marginally better. Which is not to say it was anything but delicious. I just imagined the world's greatest hot fudge sundae, as I'd long heard it was, would do something more than just taste good.

The establishment on Hollywood Boulevard finally closed in 1996, its final days marked by a stampede of patrons who acted like they might never taste a decent hot fudge sundae again. The company seems to still exist, franchising the name and selling fudge and yogurt and (I think) ice cream, as well. In many a restaurant, you can still find the assertion that they're serving a C.C. Brown hot fudge sundae indistinguishable from the original…but I'll bet most of those places microwave the fudge.

Our friends at The Comics Journal have posted Gary Groth's long 1999 interview with John Severin. Well worth a read.

Near the end, Gary asked Severin about a story for DC called "Spoilers" written by Jerry DeFuccio and Severin says he has no memory of it. This may be because he didn't do it for DC. A few years earlier, DeFuccio — who was then an Associate Editor for MAD — was trying to put together a magazine for a new publisher. It would have been almost identical to Warren's old Blazing Combat — war tales drawn by a lot of the same people, only edited and written by DeFuccio. Jerry commissioned a couple of stories for it, paying the artists out of his own pocket. Then the project fell apart and he recouped his investment by selling the finished material to DC for its war books. "Spoilers" was one of those stories.