So…what happens at Disneyland after the last guest leaves for the night? Click here to find out.

Patrick Healy discusses an important aspect of what gets to play on Broadway…the shortage of (and therefore, competition for) theaters. Some shows don't reach the Great White Way because, quite simply, there's no suitable house available when they need it.

There are all sorts of stories about this kind of thing. Richard Sherman told me that the stage version of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang only got to Broadway because the revival of 42nd Street closed at the Hilton Theater. There were only one or two houses that could accommodate the special effects necessary for the show's flying car and the rest were booked solid, probably for years to come.

All sorts of shows are aspiring to make it to New York in the next year or two. Just in the musical category, we have revivals of How to Succeed, Brigadoon, Godspell, Dirty Dancing and Fosse's Dancin' and new musicals adapting Betty Boop, Spider-Man, Paradise Lost, the life of Bruce Lee, the life of Harry Houdini, and the life of Liberace, as well as a number of movies including Catch Me If You Can, Father of the Bride, Robin and the Seven Hoods, Pure Country, Priscilla Queen of the Desert, Leap of Faith and the Jerry Lewis masterpiece, The Nutty Professor. There are at least thirty other plays or original musicals that have announced an intention to play Broadway. There can never possibly be enough theaters for half of them.

Today is Free Comic Book Day, which means you can go to your local comic book shop and get some free comics. There's a story about it on the CNN website and it's illustrated with the above graphic. Apparently if you hurry, you can go to your local comic book shop and get free copies of the first printings of Detective Comics #27 and Action Comics #1. Don't be greedy. One of each to a customer.

Roger Ebert explains why he hates 3-D in movies. I don't like 3-D, mainly because it puts me to sleep…and if it's not adjusted perfectly, it gives me a headache. So that's my reason for not liking it, and since that's enough of a reason, I never stopped to ask myself if there's any case to be made for the process. Does it add anything besides gimmickry and higher-priced tickets? If it does, I haven't seen an example so I suspect Ebert's right on that point.

Still, I don't have quite his emotional rage on the topic. This may be because I don't have a job that pretty much requires me to see every movie that comes out.

Attention, Southern Californians! This coming Friday night, you have a rare opportunity to see our friend Frank Ferrante perform his unnatural act, which basically consists of him transforming himself into Groucho Marx for ninety very funny minutes. By "rare," I mean that though he travels the country with it, you usually won't find him Grouchoing anywhere those of us who live in Los Angeles can get to easily. It'll probably be at least a year until your next opportunity and it might well be longer.

Friday evening, May 7, he's doing it down at the newly-refurbished — I hear it's magnificent — Fox Performing Arts Center in Riverside, California. This is about an hour's drive from L.A. and a lot of us are making it to see the guy. I've seen him…well, this will be my fifth time, I think, but so much of Frank's show is improvised that I could see it again and again. We're going to car pool down to Riverside, eat first at a restaurant near the theater and then go see a Groucho double-feature. They're running the movie Duck Soup at 6:30 and then F.F. goes on, live and in person, at eight.

Duck Soup has been shown at this theater before, by the way. It opened there first-run on November 26, 1933, sharing the bill with a 20-minute short called Bye-Gones, starring torch singer Ruth Etting.

The restaurant, also by the way, will not be the Old Spaghetti Factory, as I mentioned here once before. We've decided the occasion calls for someplace a little fancier. Which reminds me: When are they going to start opening New Spaghetti Factories?

I have given Frank many a rave here but I can pay him no greater compliment than this: I intend to drive the Pomona Freeway on a Friday afternoon at rush hour in order to see him. If you're anywhere in the vicinity, I suggest you click here to get tickets and join us.

Journalist Matt Taibbi has been the stud duck in the whole Goldman Sachs scandal. He said their execs were scum who's committed criminal fraud and it's beginning to look like he erred on the side of being too nice to them. Here's his latest piece in Rolling Stone about how people lost jillions of bucks. Makes me glad I put all my money into that line of Muhammad comic books for the Muslim audience.

I have a great plumber. His name is Bobby so we call him Bobby the Plumber. I met this fellow years ago when he was working for a large plumbing company and he did such a good, conscientious job for me that I recommended him to all my friends. That inspired him to strike out on his own and set up his own small business…and by "small," I mean it's just him and a helper. He did not leave the big plumbing firm just for the increased money but because he didn't like the way they did business, making him overcharge people and suggest unnecessary repairs. That's why he decided to work for himself…and when he started working for me, he charged me around half his old employers' rates.

For around fifteen years now, maybe longer, he's plumbed on word-of-mouth: No advertising, no promotion…I'm not even sure he's listed in the Yellow Pages. Everyone he works for tells all their friends about him. I've probably recommended him to at least a hundred people I know and about 97% have thanked me. The 3% were the kind of folks who I suspect are just impossible to please so I don't hold them against Bobby.

The economy being what it is, he lately has days when he isn't rushing from client to client. If you're in L.A. or the Valley and do not have a terrific plumber, you should have his contact info. I hope you don't need him but if you do and you're as happy as I am with his service, pass him on to others.

[SAD UPDATE: I have removed the contact info because, as explained here, Bobby passed away in 2011.]

This kinda falls into the "Draw Your Own Conclusions" category…

Last evening, Carolyn and I were in a Home Depot. So were a lot of people buying paint and lumber and ball-peen hammers and flanges and such. So were a number of rats. I spotted at least two rats scurrying about, one of them large enough that I think he was wearing an orange vest and a tool belt.

Just to be helpful, I mentioned it to one of the employees there. He said, "Yeah, we have a lot of them here."

I said, "I know a place that has a whole aisle full of products to trap or kill rats." And I pointed to that aisle, not twenty feet from us.

He said, "Yeah, well, we've tried everything and nothing seems to work."

Like I said: Draw Your Own Conclusions.

As I mentioned here, an entrepreneurial concern in San Diego has offered the Comic-Con International a cool half-million ($100,000 a year for the next five years) to not move out of their fair city. I said the money would be earmarked for new shuttle services. Actually, it would go towards the current one, which I'm told is beastly expensive.

I still hope 'n' predict the con will not migrate. As my pal Tom Spurgeon notes here, "Personally and professionally I believe San Diego is the best place for them to be. It's the best location of the three to visit, "San Diego" is a significant part of their branding, the remove from LA gives it a sexy junket feel that it wouldn't have in or near LA…the Vegas option would be a disaster based on the McCarron cab line alone." Yeah, if you get in that cab line, the odds are good you'll wind up riding with David Siegel.

The decision will be made, I'm told, before May is over. Anaheim is just too Anaheim and anything within about three miles of Disneyland is just an add-on in that city. In San Diego, we're the whole show and that's where we should stay.

Fred Kaplan on the war that the U.S. is unprepared to fight: The one in cyberspace.

Bill Maher is right. If you ever chanted "Drill, baby, drill," you should get your ass down to the Gulf Coast and help with the cleanup.