I moan a lot here about airlines but I have to tell ya: The two flights we took to get here Friday ("here" being Columbus, Ohio) couldn't have gone much smoother. I still don't like the fight-for-your-seat policy at Southwest Airlines but the planes both took off on time, both landed early and both were staffed with pleasant, helpful folks. What's more, our luggage even showed up where and when it was supposed to show up. Can't do much better than that.

Carolyn and I flew in with our friends Gregg Berger, Len Wein and Marv Wolfman and today, we spent a fun day at Mid-Ohio-Con. I did three panels, signed a mess o' comics and answered a lot of questions, some of which weren't even about Jack Kirby. I'll write more of the con when I'm not about to go off to dinner but I did get to chat with Herb Trimpe, Joe Rubinstein, Dick Ayers, Joe Jusko, Billy Tucci, Thom Zahler, Tony Isabella, Bob Ingersoll, Gary Friedrich, Maggie Thompson, Brian Kane, Ron Frenz, Fred Hembeck and I know I'm forgetting a lot of names. I'll get them tomorrow. The Mongolian barbecue awaits!

In April of '08, many of you followed my exploits here as I attempted — without much success for a long time — to trap a pregnant feral cat that I've been feeding in my backyard. The first post on the subject was here and then I kept you and the world updated as I schemed and plotted to catch said pussycat and haul her off to a vet to be unpregnanted…and to make sure she stayed that way. If you read forward for a week or two, you'll see how I finally (finally!) succeeded.

Every now and then, someone writes to ask of Lydia and to see if she still comes 'round every night to be fed here. Yes, she does. The above photo was taken not two hours ago. Lydia is one of four strays (plus occasional guest stars) who dine nightly on my back step and occasionally turn up during the day. She's very nervous…as I guess I'd be if someone had done to me what I did to her. But she seems very happy and if you don't make any sudden moves, quite affectionate.

That's about all I have to report…but since folks ask, I thought I'd report what I had to report.

You're probably wondering what the deal is with this David Letterman scandal. This article seems to have the most complete info on it.

Do we think this will hurt Mr. Letterman's career any? Not one bit. Not unless one of the staff members in question charges non-consensual relations or job-related pressuring or something really, really kinky. What it will do to Dave's personal life is anybody's guess and nobody's business.

Is this kind of thing — the star of a TV show sleeping with members of his staff — unusual? No…though I'm not sure it's any more prevalent than the boss in a non-show-biz operation consorting with underlings. What's unusual is us finding out about it. Usually, such goings-on are pretty well hidden or overlooked when they go on. An actress friend of mine used to claim — and I absolutely believed her — that she once had a string of six consecutive auditions that included six consecutive sexual advances, many involving grabbing, from six very big stars with six very wholesome reputations. She developed a theory that the more a star marketed himself as a faithful husband and family man, the more likely he was to ask her to impersonate Linda Lovelace.

Anyway, as I Twittered, it looks like Dave won't be doing a lot of jokes in the future about congressmen who cheat on their wives. Or presidents who cheat with interns.

A letter from Groucho Marx to T.S. Eliot. Thanks to Seth Rosenblatt for the referral.

As mentioned back here, there is plenty of evidence that Cameron Todd Willingham, who was executed in Texas in 2001 for (they said) starting a house fire that killed his three children, was innocent. As I said then and have said elsewhere here, it's tough to prove conclusively that a wrongful execution occurs. Once the state kills a guy, they do everything they can to make sure no one can prove the guy was innocent.

Now, Governor Rick Perry — on whose watch Willingham was terminated — seems to be doing everything he can to make sure no one proves the guy was innocent. Barry Scheck, co-director of the New York-based Innocence Project and man I'd really respect if he hadn't worked for O.J., compared the move to Nixon's infamous Saturday Night Massacre. One hopes Perry's move will be just as effective as Nixon's was.

Just got this one from Jonathan Samuels…

I generally agree with you re: Leno's show not working. I heard that one of the reasons NBC will keep Leno on is that they have nothing else to put in that slot. If they decided they wanted to replace Leno, wouldn't it take months to produce the shows that would go in there?

NBC does have something they could plug into the 10 PM time slot quickly. They have Dateline. I doubt they'd ax Leno completely and program five nights a week of Dateline but it wouldn't shock me if they cut Jay down to three nights a week and stuck in a couple of Datelines. Maybe Leno and his crew could get the bugs out quicker if they could do fewer shows.

By the way, one correction: NBC has an owned-and-operated station in the bay area of Northern California but it's in San Jose, not San Francisco. It's watched in San Francisco but it's really based in San Jose.

We love the movie It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World and have written much about it over the years. I even have a small section of this website devoted to it.

Over the years, scholars of the film — I consider myself one — have wrestled with all sorts of questions and research about this movie…but none more maddening than its running times. That's running times, plural. The movie was trimmed on one or more occasions after its original release and key scenes were discarded. There have been several different versions, none of them quite like the one that debuted on November 7, 1963 at the Pacific Cinerama Dome in Hollywood.

I once spent way too much time matching up known facts about running times and compiling a chart of the various versions and their lengths. It's posted elsewhere on this site but I'm not going to link to it. Why? Because it's probably wrong. Most, if not all of us historians who have discussed the length of this movie are probably wrong.

I have just received (and will soon be posting) a document which may help clear up The Great Running Time Mystery…and create at least as many questions as it answers. There's a bit more research to be done but I wanted to give Mad World fans a "heads up." In a week or three, I'll be sharing this document…and folks, this is gonna confuse the hell out of you. Much of what we thought we knew is wrong.

Gene Popa writes to ask…

I'm writing to you now because you mentioned something in your observation about Jay Leno's new show and I, being largely ignorant of how these things happen, am hoping you can clarify it in a future posting. Specifically, you mentioned that NBC affiliates might "start to defect or juggle their schedules to move Jay later." I don't doubt that independent affiliates have the power…what I'm wondering is, what happens after they use it?

For instance, here in Chicago, I don't see our local NBC affiliate GM saying, "Okay, let's dump Leno and start running CSI's from CBS in that slot!" It would seem to me that everything which the network offers for airing is already committed to other time slots, so if an affiliate suddenly pulls Leno out of five hours of prime time each week, what can be put into those hours to plug the hole? I can't see local news programming or infomercials bringing in any better ratings than what Leno garners, so what recourse does an affiliate have were it to opt to not air Leno?

Well, first off, the NBC station in Chicago is not an affiliate. It's what's called an "owned and operated" station, meaning that NBC owns it. NBC also owns its stations in New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Dallas/Fort Worth, Washington, Miami, San Diego and Connecticut. While it is not unprecedented for an "o and o" station to not carry the precise network feed, it's pretty unlikely. An affiliate would be a station like the one in Boston that's owned by a separate company but which contracts to carry the NBC programming. Boston, you may recall, was briefly considering not carrying the new Leno show, or maybe they just wanted to bump it to a later hour.

That would probably be the first sign that Jay's show was in serious trouble…if an NBC affiliate moved him later. The most likely way they'd do that would be to put their local news on at 10 PM and start Jay at 10:35. (Subtract one hour from those times in a marketplace where Leno now starts at 9 PM.) It's doubtful that will happen any time soon because NBC has presumably convinced all its stations to give The Jay Leno Show a decent period in which to prove its value. Still, NBC has to be worried that if and when some affiliate does reconfigure, it could trigger a ripple-effect.

"Clearances," meaning how many stations carry a show in its intended time slot, have figured big in the history of late night. NBC dominated that daypart for years because of its clearances, and CBS and ABC were long at a disadvantage because of the many affiliates that had something else — a syndicated rerun or something locally-produced — ensconced in a late night slot that the network wished to program. Before Letterman agreed to sign on at CBS, he had to be satisfied that enough CBS stations would actually carry his show at 11:35…and the few that didn't quickly fell into line when he got those huge early ratings. If the whole Leno/O'Brien/Fallon parlay at NBC crashes and burns, the lasting damage may be what it does to the network's clearance factor.

I said a little while ago here that I wasn't sure if I'd ever seen a movie directed by Roman Polanski. I did. I saw Chinatown. It joined a good-sized list of films that I went to see, having heard the picture was sensational…and left, wondering what others saw in it. This list includes just about any critically-acclaimed movie with Jack Nicholson in it except for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.

I'm not going to post much more about the Roman Polanski matter…though I suspect we're going to hear a lot more. We all seem to concur that his crime was reprehensible and those who argue that one should not be able to do that kind of thing and avoid punishment are not, in the general sense, wrong. But I don't think hauling the guy back in this particular instance is going to achieve that; not given the apparent judicial and prosecutorial misconduct on his case…and especially not given the stated desires of the victim to leave that avenue unpursued.

There are loads of essays on the web arguing each side but I thought I'd link to two. Mary Elizabeth Williams makes the case that the matter should be dropped. And Steve Lopez presents a pretty representative example from the "string 'im up" flank. The piece by Mr. Lopez is entitled, "Polanski's defenders lose sight of the true victim," which is rather ironic given that part of his argument is that what the true victim feels about all this is "irrelevant."

By the way: Contrary to what a couple of folks presumed in their e-mails to me, I'm not a fan of Polanski's. I'm not sure I've ever seen a film he directed and if I did, it certainly wasn't one of my faves. I actually remember thinking he was a giant, economy-size jerk in his Playboy interview, which was published not long before the crime occurred. Nor do I think he (or anyone) deserves preferential treatment for being rich and/or famous. In this matter, it would seem he's received some of that and also some of the opposite, where he's been penalized for his celebrity. Both are wrong. I suspect that all the rich 'n' famous folks who are rushing forward to support him or sign petitions are harming, not helping his cause.

I like Jay Leno. I like David Letterman, too, by the way. Those two likes are not mutually exclusive…but this is about Leno. I knew Jay very casually back when he was working the Comedy Store. I even sold him a few jokes back then and decided he was a great guy and a terrific comedian, and I've seen nothing since then to alter those views. That doesn't mean I've liked everything he's done, of course. I doubt Jay even likes everything he's done. But I admire an awful lot of things about him, including his determination to fight good fights even when he's down.

That skill may come in handy in the months to come because I don't think his new show is working. The ratings say it isn't working for the public, which watched the first week when he was a novelty with weak competition, then abandoned him the second week. Some of those folks will come back when we reach the day that he's offering new shows opposite reruns on the other channels…but I wonder how many. Even I, last week, was leaving him unwatched on my TiVo…or speed-viewing, catching the monologue and racing through the rest. The Leno Tonight Show was usually fun and this show, which closely resembles that show, is not. So what's different?

Darn near everything, I'm afraid. I've been trying to figure out an incisive reason…and I do think the 10 PM program lacks a certain sense of importance and energy. Leno's early Tonight Show, where he first took over from Johnny, suffered because he was still guest-hosting for Carson. He hadn't established a new style and identity for a new show. His newest show suffers because, again, it isn't a new show. He's still doing his old show…and since it's in a new, fancy wrapper, you open it expecting more than the same old thing. An old bit can feel like an old friend — something you're glad to see again — but it can also feel like an old bit.

Of the new elements, the "Ten at Ten" questions segment is okay, I guess, though it feels pretty scripted and rehearsed. The "Green Car Challenge," I don't get at all. When I first heard about it, I thought the idea was to pit an environmentally-friendly electric car against a petroleum guzzler in order to prove something about going green. Turns out that's not it at all. Instead, they're pitting Drew Barrymore against Bob Costas to see who can notch the best time driving around a miniature golf course. I don't know why I should care about that contest or why anyone thought I would.

So far, the things I like least about the show are the remote "correspondents'" reports where Jay completely disappears from The Jay Leno Show and the whole thing is turned over to someone else. Leno did this on Tonight and even though some have been funny, it always feels like I accidentally hit the remote, changed channels and am watching a different program. What do I like most? The monologue…though most have not been as strong as the ones he did at 11:35. I also like it when Jay has a guest he seems to really like, which usually means someone who spilled blood with him on the comedy club circuit like Jerry Seinfeld or Bill Maher.

Word from inside NBC is that they're committed to this as a long-term deal. I suspect that will change if affiliates start to defect or juggle their schedules to move Jay later. For now though, it looks like they're going to tough it out, hope the affiliates don't panic, and wait and see what happens when Jay has new shows opposite reruns. Leno and his staff are reportedly working hard to beef up the comedy…and that may help a little. But they're dealing with a basic conceptual problem: The premise of this show is to do The Tonight Show without having it be The Tonight Show. That's a pretty shaky foundation on which to build five hours of NBC's weekly prime time schedule. I don't think little fixes are going to save it. I think they're going to have to raze the place and rebuild from the ground up.