My pal Gordon Bressack has written 'n' directed a new play that's currently running in Los Angeles at the Hudson Backstage Theater. It's called "Fuggedaboudit" and swamped as I am these days, I haven't had the chance to get out to see it. But many folks I know have had the time and they tell me it's very funny…so I'm going to try to make the time and maybe I'll even do it this coming weekend. September 4, 5 and 6, if you order tix online and enter the code word DONOR, 25% will go to OneLegacy.org, a charity that raises dough to help folks who need organ transplants. Gordon was recently one such person so the cause is near and dear to his new liver.

Gmail was down for a while today. The official explanation is over here but we know the truth. The entirety of Google (including GMail) operates off one old HP N3330 notebook computer with a 5GB harddisk and only 64 MB of RAM. It runs Windows 98 and the guy who has it at his apartment sometimes forgets to plug it in so the battery runs out and all of Google goes down. You'd think with all the money that company is making, they're upgrade at least to one of those cheap reconditioned Dell systems they sell at Best Buy…but no. Damn foolish if you ask me.

If you have a spare $12.9 million, you can buy the house where Groucho Marx lived for the last few decades of his life. But if you do, read the contract carefully and check out the sanity clause.

This morning's headline: "Improving weather gives exhausted crews hope." Well, that's something.

Okay, I'm going to bed. The current headline over at the L.A. Times site says, "Blaze consumes 105,000 acres, no end in sight." When I get up, I want there to be something there about an end in sight…maybe an estimate of containment for this awful thing.

I'll meet you back here in the morning and we'll see if that's happening…

Recently here, I said I was voting for Elias Davis for president of the Writers Guild of America, West. I still may be. But there's a new eruption in the battle between the two factions in the current election — his and the one supporting John Wells for the presidency. It's all gotten angrier and nastier with each side accusing the other of bald, premeditated lying. That's above and beyond each side blaming the other for the fact that our current contract isn't better than it is.

(I think, by the way, it's not a bad contract, especially when you consider the opposition we had to face down to get it. But one of the many things that soured me on WGA politics is that no matter what we achieve — and we achieve a lot — there are always members willing, even eager to piss on the efforts of others and say, "That's not nearly good enough.")

The current spat is an ugly squabble, especially because most of it's being played out in Nikki Finke's online column. If this battle has to occur at all, it should be waged within the Guild, not out in public where things become harder to settle. It also means anonymous and unverified commenters hop in to pour petroleum on the conflagration. It's always clear to me in such donnybrooks that while some who post are what they say they are, a lot are not…and some of them are the same person under a variety of pseudonyms. This does not help.

My ballot arrived today and is presently unmarked. It may just stay that way or I may still mark it for Elias, as he's always struck me as a good man and all the reasons I had for favoring him are all still valid. This is not a retraction of my endorsement…more like me saying, "Hmm…I may want to think this over a bit more." Or I may not. Having been caught up in many Guild brouhahas that I thought were destructive to everyone involved, it doesn't take a lot to cause me to wash my hands of the whole schmear, mutter something about a pox on all their houses and turn my back on WGA politics. I've done it before and I can do it again.

So I have to decide if I still want to vote for Elias Davis…but first, I think I have to decide if I want to spend more than five more minutes of my life thinking about Writers Guild politics.

Earlier today, I linked to a video of four guys singing barbershop quartet in Star Trek costumes. I've just replaced that link with one to a longer, better clip of the same fellows. If you watched it this morning, watch it again.

One other key point to keep in mind in this Disney-Marvel deal…

A lot of fans are wondering what this means about publishing plans…will the Marvel Masterworks reprint series continue? Will Marvel add a new Sub-Mariner comic? Will Aunt May either die or get resurrected? (I'm not sure if she's currently dead or not but if she isn't, she will be, and if she is, she'll come back.) Well, this deal is not about any of this. Take a look at the opening line in the L.A. Times coverage, and it's pretty much the same in all the reporting everywhere…

The estimated $4-billion deal would give Disney access to a library of more than 5,000 characters and help it strengthen its appeal to the young male audience. Ike Perlmutter, Marvel's CEO, will work directly with Disney to build and integrate Marvel's properties.

This isn't about publishing. Disney didn't say, "Gee, it would be great to own a comic book company!" They could have started fifty comic book companies for four billion clams. This is about characters and properties which can be exploited in many forms. The publishing of comic books may or may not always be one of them. But Disney's interest here is in two closely-related areas. One is to be able to market all these great characters and the history that rounds them out and makes many of them beloved. And the other reason is to make sure nobody else gets 'em.

The best news for the comic book division of Marvel in all this is how unlikely it is that anyone at Disney will care much what they do as long as the department shows a profit. If it generates new properties that can be turned into movies and video games and iPhone applications, so much the better. But the future of Spider-Man has very little to do with the Spider-Man comic book. That hasn't mattered for a long time.

The big news today, at least for me, is that the hills are still alive…and not, sadly, with the Sound of Music. They're alive in fire and it looks like it'll get worse before it gets better. I awoke this morn to headlines that said the "Station fire" (that's what they're calling the big one) doubled in size overnight to 85,000 acres.

I'm not personally threatened. I'm a good fifteen miles away from it and the inferno would have to burn through most of Hollywood to get to me. I don't think anyone I know is in its path, either. Still, it's just scary and sad. Every so often, the wind is such that I can see huge, ugly clouds of smoke to the north. It's hard not to think of those clouds as someone's life, perhaps literally, going up in flames.

It makes me angrier when I think of how, for example, various energy companies stole billions from this state in the last decade. I know there's no guarantee that that money, if it hadn't been looted the way it was, would have gone to help battle the fires and rebuild. But I'll bet you we could be doing more than we are or will.

That's really all I wanted to say. I need to get back to work, need to put it out of my mind for a while. I probably also need to stop checking the L.A. Times website and even looking out my window to the north. Sometimes, the way I stop thinking about things is to write about them here.

I woke up this morn to a mess o' e-mails asking me for my take on the news that Disney is buying Marvel for four billion bucks…and some are also asking me to speculate on how Jack Kirby would have felt about this.

Jack, I think it's safe to say, would have been unsurprised at the pricetag. One of the many ways in which he was a visionary is that in the sixties when Marvel was catching on, he was utterly alone in his belief that the stuff he and the others were creating for chump change had that kind of lasting value. Many of his monetary frustrations flowed from the fact that he was trying to negotiate with people who thought the material was a passing fad…so they personally had to grab as much money as possible before the whole thing went the way of the old Doc Savage pulps…and that when he spoke of the future in Disney-sized terms, that was just Ol' Jack being looney again. Marvel's original owner Martin Goodman sold out pretty darned cheap in 1968 to the firm's first corporate overlords. He never imagined his company would be worth twenty million smackers, let alone four billion…but Kirby did.

So Jack would have nodded at the amount and recalled unfulfilled promises of financial participation…and he would not have been a happy man. Then again, I think if Jack had been with us these last fifteen years, Marvel would have long since cut him in with what would to them have been a microscopic reward — and to him, all the money in the world.

As for what I think: I think I don't know. I don't even know what this means for me. I own four shares of Disney stock and two of Marvel stock. I may clear like eight, nine dollars on all this.

I doubt Disney has a lot of firm plans for the X-Men and the rest of the Marvel properties at this time. Most of the biggies are encumbered with existing deals. Sony has the movie rights to this one, Fox has the film rights to that one, etc. Everything the Disney folks might want to do for a while will be subject to current contracts, though they'll find some ways to begin intermingling the characters in the public mind…photo-ops with a guy in a Spider-Man suit posing with a guy in a Mickey Mouse suit. Stuff like that. Down the line, I suspect the word "Marvel" will become about as unimportant to the Fantastic Four as "Hanna-Barbera" is now to Scooby Doo.

And though we won't see evidence of this for a while, the publishing of comic books (those things on paper with staples in them) at that company is a few notches less important than it was last week. And it wasn't all that important last week.