Maybe it was because Buzz Aldrin was on our flight but Southwest Airlines performed flawlessly yesterday afternoon. If they hadn't — if the flight here to Vegas had been as flawed as some I've had — I was going to ask him to compare and contrast it with going to the Moon. I can't even say, "It took him less time to get his luggage on the Moon" because Southwest delivered our bags quickly and efficiently.

So I just shook his hand and then I went and grabbed a taxi. Some of you will be amazed that my driver was not Dave Siegel.

BTW: There was only one odd occurrence, not on the flight but in the always-interesting security line at LAX. Some shriekingly homophobic lady had to be searched because, I'm guessing, her soul set off the metal detector. A female security person was attending to her and the searchee started loudly demanding assurance that the searcher was not a dyke. All that was going to happen was that the guard was going to wave one of those wand-thingies around the searchee's questionable areas but before this could be done, we all had to listen to this loud anti-gay paranoia from a woman who seemed to think that lesbians everywhere have nothing more they want to do than get their lesbian hands on her, even in a public place. By the time I got my shoes on and headed for the gate, this had not been resolved…and I suspect for that woman, it will never be resolved.

I'm here for a thing called the Licensing Show. I'll tell you all about it when I get back from it. Have to go meet folks for Breakfast, then scurry over to the convention. Hope they let me do at least three or four panels.

Around twelve readers of this site have volunteered copies of that Girl From U.N.C.L.E. episode I need for Stan Freberg so I think we have it. Thanks to all you generous folks.

Nate Silver over at fivethirtyeight.com (soon to be a part of The New York Times) is doing some lengthy analysis of the accuracy of the various pollsters. If you head over there, you may find yourself pretty deep in the weeds and I'd be fibbing if I claimed that I know exactly what he's talking about every moment. My math skills are about on a par with my talent for Kabuki Dancing.

But I do understand some things and one is that when pollsters brag about their accuracy level, what they're talking about is how close their final polling came to the final outcome. They can be wildly off until a day or so before the election and still claim they called it within the margin of error. Silver cites this example…

In the 2008 Democratic primary in Wisconsin, for instance, which Barack Obama won by 17 points, American Research Group had released a poll on the Saturday prior to the election showing Obama losing to Hillary Clinton by 6 points; it then released a new poll 48 hours later showing Obama beating Clinton by 10 points. (It is very unlikely that there was in fact such dramatic late movement toward Obama, as most other pollsters had shown him well ahead the whole time).

In other words, I can now confidently predict for the next two years and five months that in the next presidential election, there will be a massive write-in vote for the robot from the old Lost in Space show and he'll win with 99% of the vote. Then a day or two before the election, I'll switch to whatever Gallup says and I'll probably be able to claim a pretty good batting average for that contest and boast of my accuracy.

A lot of folks claim that certain polls are slanted to please certain clients that subscribe to them. Sometimes, that's just a childish way of denying that the election does not seem to be going your way. Now and then, there may be some level of validity to the charge, which I especially see made against the Rasmussen Poll. It often (not always) looks like an outlier in giving far rosier forecasts for Republicans than all the others.

When Rasmussen is called out for deliberate bias, the answer is usually to point out how accurate their polls have been lately, meaning that they were on target just before the actual voting. I'm not interested in debating that. I'm just pointing out that you can be wildly off — deliberately or not — until very late in the game and still claim vindication 'n' victory when the final numbers are tallied.

The man at left in the above photo is our friend/idol Stan Freberg. He's seen with his fellow guest stars, Jack Cassidy and Ann Sothern, in a still from an episode of the sixties' spy TV of The Girl From U.N.C.L.E. In particular, it's "The Carpathian Killer Affair" and it originally aired on February 14, 1967.

Do you, perchance, have a copy of this show? Stan doesn't and I'd like to find one for him. A link to my e-mail address can be found over in the right-hand margin somewhere.

Roger Ebert on the state of racial tolerance in this country. That state does not seem to be Arizona.

A major "thenk yew" to Glenn Hauman, who's the Vice President of Operations and the Production Manager over at the fine comic news blog, Comicmix. What did Glenn do to deserve our enduring gratitude? He volunteered to fix the RSS feeds on this blog and it looks like he dunnit. Let me know, folks, if you have any further problems with it…and Glenn, I owe you one. I don't know one what but I owe you one of something.

My friend Laraine Newman is the exact same age as I am to the day — almost to the hour, I believe. It's a great argument against Astrology since our lives have diverged in so many ways. One, which she writes about in this article, is in the kind of music that has underscored her life and inspired her. She grew up in this city and saw (among others) The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Muddy Waters, Howlin' Wolf, Willie Dixon, The Ike & Tina Turner Revue, Big Mama Thornton and Jimi Hendrix. I grew up in the same city at the same time and saw none of those. I did, however, go watch them film The Dick Van Dyke Show, watched them tape Laugh-In, watched Johnny Carson do The Tonight Show…

Go read Garrison Keillor about the end of an era in the world of publishing.

Hey, if you think I have to deal with a lot of obituaries, take a gander at what my buddy Leonard Maltin has to put up with.

Recently, I sat for a couple of interviews for the obits of famous folks who haven't died yet but probably will in the next few years. It's a creepy practice but probably necessary. And I kinda like the fact that when Bob Hope died in 2003, the obituary that the New York Times ran was written by Vincent Canby…who died in 2000.

My friend Dave Schwartz (not to be confused with the other Dave Schwartz I know or the other Dave Schwartz I know or even the other Dave Schwartz I know) writes…

I worked with Wayland Flowers and Madame on Solid Gold in the early 1980's. He was a really nice man. He got me tickets one night to see him perform at the Roxy and he was much, much funnier than he was on television. He did a more risqué show than he could have performed on TV and it was very, very funny. I remember one of the jokes in the show had to do with a new home he had purchased and how run down it was. He called it, "Casa Tastrophe."

Anyway, just to add something to what you wrote on your site today… I spent some time as a stand-in on the Solid Gold show. That means if Wayland Flowers was going to do a routine with Andy Gibb or Marilyn McCoo, I stood in for the star while they were getting the lighting set on stage.

One of these times they brought Wayland out and I was standing on stage and we started a conversation. However, I didn't include Madame in the discussion. And that was the thing… if Wayland was operating Madame, you had better not ignore her. As Wayland and I spoke, before long Madame started darting around impatiently in front of me. And the more I talked with Wayland the more incensed she got at being ignored! I can't exactly describe it, but it was clear she had a personality completely distinct from Wayland and as long as Wayland had her on his arm, she came alive.

From my discussions with him, I can tell you that Wayland was an extremely nice man. I hope that somewhere there is footage of his live shows. It would certainly be worth seeing.

Apparently, there is. As a couple of folks have written to inform me, there is another performer — Rick Skye — who has inherited the act and who works with Madame, primarily in casinos and cabarets. He maintains this website and somewhere in there, you'll find an offer for a DVD of what they admit is not the best recording of a Wayland Flowers performance — but at least it's something.

By the way: This particular Dave Schwartz is the Dave Schwartz I've known the longest of all the Dave Schwartzes I know. Once upon a time, he was a production assistant on Solid Gold and I remember visiting the set one day there when the dancers were trying to teach him to do the dance routine that ran under the closing credits. This was a little like trying to teach a rhinoceros how to tightrope-walk but, hey, Dave gave it his all. He does a lot of daring things…and one recently was to make a video of a stand-up routine and —

Well, here: I'll let him tell you what he did. If you want to see an example of great courage, take a look.

Remember Wayland Flowers and Madame? Mr. Flowers was a devastatingly-funny puppeteer who moved from the gay cabaret scene into mainstream TV in the sixties and seventies. The act was the perfect example of the old saw that the ventriloquist's dummy can always get away with saying things that the ventriloquist could not. I never saw him perform live but folks who did all raved and said, as they do of some comedians, "You haven't seen him if you've only seen him on television."

I did briefly meet Wayland Flowers backstage when he was doing his 1982 TV series, Madame's Place on a stage that adjoined one where I was working. His program was being done on a very low budget…so low that they had to tape a couple of shows per day in order to bring it in for the money they had. That might have been fine but someone had forgotten something…which was that there's a simply physical limit to how long a puppeteer can keep the old arm extended in the air. The one time I got to spend any time with Jim Henson, I remember him talking about that and about the time Kermit filled in for Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show. Mr. Henson said, approximately, "It wasn't until I was out there doing the monologue that I suddenly realized, 'Oh, my God! I have to keep my arm up for ninety minutes.' We'd usually tape four or five minutes, take a ten minute break, tape four or five more…"

They figured that out when they started taping Madame's Place. The schedule simply demanded more of Flowers than he could handle. You remember those photos of Sandy Koufax after he pitched a game? The ones where he'd be in the clubhouse and they'd be packing his throwing arm in ice to bring down the swelling and pain? Well, one day I walked into the Make-Up Area on the show I was doing and Wayland Flowers was in there with his puppeteering arm soaking in a small Whirlpool of icy H2O, and he seemed to be in a great deal of agony.

We got to chatting…and I think he was talking to me mainly to get his mind off his arm, though we did talk about that, too. There was then, he said, talk of hiring a "stunt puppeteer" to switch off with him working Madame. When the other guy was doing it, Wayland would have been off-camera providing the voice. He didn't like that idea, he said. No one else had ever operated Madame…and puppeteers can get very protective and proprietary about their kids. He didn't want someone else's hand in there and he was also worried about maintaining a consistent performance. The precise way Madame moved — "her special rhythm," as he called it — was as much a part of the character as anything else. Then again, he was suffering a lot and they had something like fifty episodes left to shoot. I never heard if they wound up bringing in someone to relieve him or if he toughed it out.

That was in '82. Six years later, he passed away from one of those ugly, AIDS-related diseases.

According to his Wikipedia page, Flowers bequeathed his estate, including his puppets, to his manager, Marlena Shell. It also says there that Madame now resides in the permanent collection of the Center for Puppetry Arts in Atlanta, Georgia…and sure enough, that institution's website lists Madame as being resident and as a gift of Marlena Shell. But either there were two puppets (quite possible) or the old broad's gone and busted out of the joint.

The auction house called Profiles in History is having a sale of Hollywood memorabilia next week and one of the "items" up for bid is Madame, as shown above, complete with "fainting couch." The estimated price is $25,000 to $30,000. I hope she finds a good home.