Another photo from my stash. That's my old pal, Steve Gerber. Steve passed away in February of '08 and it still hurts.

This is for those of you who venture near the Hollywood area — Hollywood Boulevard, Sunset, Vine, etc. The next month or three, you might want to be prepared. The local Chamber of Commerce has gotten more cooperative with producers and other entrepreneurs who want to block off streets. Over the next few weeks, there will be many long stretches — whole days, even — when boulevards will be blocked off to accommodate filmings, tapings, premieres and even (this Thursday) a free Depeche Mode concert.

The workaround, should you need to travel in or through that area, is to consult Navigate Hollywood, a website via which you can plan your travel and be up to date on what throughways ain't going through. But don't put total faith in it. Whoever configured the site thinks the Magic Castle is at Franklin and Vine. It isn't. It's at Franklin and Orange, which is a little less than a mile away. I just sent them a note about this. Let's see how long it takes them to fix it.

I just realized I can make the joke better…

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has announced that he's going to lead a drive to block the legalization of same-sex wedlock in New York. Giuliani said that he believes marriage is the sacred union of one occasional cross-dresser and a different woman every few years.

And maybe I can get something in there about him marrying his cousin.

Really. There are things I still admire about Mr. Giuliani but him lecturing people about proper relationships is like Newt Gingrinch lecturing people about proper relationships. Oh, wait. He's doing it, too.

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani has announced that he's going to lead a drive to block the legalization of same-sex wedlock in New York. Giuliani said that he believes marriage is the sacred union of one man and a different woman every few years.

U.S. agents waterboarded Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 183 times in one month. Why so many? Did he not tell them anything the first 182 times and they thought, "Ah…the 183rd time! That's when they all crack!"? Or did he keep giving them useful info each time and they couldn't resist going back over and over to see if he had any more in him? I've never been waterboarded but I have the feeling that if I had anything I could say that would get them to stop doing it to me, you'd get it out of me by, oh, maybe the second time. Maybe halfway through the first.

If they kept doing it, I'd tell them everything and if that wasn't enough, I'd just start making up stuff. You wouldn't believe the crap I'd come up with by my fourth or fifth waterboarding. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed confessed to masterminding the 9/11 attacks, plus roles in the Richard Reid shoe bombing attempt, the Bali nightclub bombing in Indonesia, the murder of Daniel Pearl, the 1993 World Trade Center bombing and various other attacks. Waterboard me six times and I'd plead guilty to all that, plus shooting J.F.K. from the grassy knoll while banging Marilyn Monroe and hiding O.J.'s knife.

The board of directors of the Screen Actors Guild has voted — barely — to recommend that its membership accept the contract that its negotiators brought back. The tally was close — 53.4% to 46.6% — which is probably closer than most folks expected. It opens the door wide to a bloody pro/con battle over ratification and that we shall see. A large part of SAG feels they've come too far to take essentially the same thing the other guilds did in "new media." Moreover, in some ways those terms are worse when they're applied to actors.

Ballots will go out around May 1 and are due back at the end of the month. Between now and the due date, we're going to see a lot of yelling and demonstrations and rallies and web campaigns. My guess though is that in the end, the contract will pass by a wider margin with the membership than it did at the board level. It's not so much that the members will like it any more but that they're worn down, worried about a permanent rupture in their guild, and don't see a leader able to carry them into battle.

A few days ago, we announced The "Let's Restore Len Wein's Comic Book Collection" Project. The goal, of course, is to replace Len's collection of comic books he wrote…a collection that was lost, along with many other things, in a recent house fire. The response has been terrific. I just uploaded an amended list of what we need. If you take a look at it, you'll be amazed and impressed by how much we don't need — how many comics have been "pledged" by Len's friends and fans. Go on. Take a look at the list I just uploaded.

There are, as you can see, still a lot more we do have to locate…but I'm sure impressed at what's been offered so far.

A few other points…

• Please don't mail us anything until we tell you. A couple of folks have already shipped us books that I know are already in the mail from someone else.
• Folks are writing to ask if condition matters. Well, sort of. If you have a beat-up copy of a book we need, I may ask you to hold onto it for a bit and see if someone else comes up with a better copy.
• Folks are also offering Len copies of comics that he once autographed to them. The gesture is appreciated but he'd rather you held onto those, thanks.
• No, we are not asking for money. I'm going to stand the cost of a Public Storage Locker for the year or so it's going to take Len to get his office back. The locker will be necessary because not only are so many of you sending copies of comics that Len wrote but several publishers are sending crates of books that Len didn't write but lost in the fire. Imagine that! Generous, compassionate publishers!
• Our list does not include most comics Len edited but did not write. Frankly, I thought that we'd be doing well just to get the comics he wrote…but people are also offering books he edited. I don't have a list ready of them but if you have some of those you'd like him to have, we'll take 'em! Send me a note (the address is on our special webpage for the cause) and let me know what you've got.
• We will have folks at upcoming comic conventions who are deputized to accept donations for the cause. If you have something on our "wanted" list, you can give it to them and they'll get it to us. First up is Sunday, April 26 — the MCBA MicroCon Comic Book Party in St. Paul, Minnesota. If you're there and you have something for Len, seek out Melissa Kaercher or Christopher Jones, both of whom will have tables there. They'll gladly accept your funnybooks and send them on. Thanks, Melissa and Christopher!
• I will be appearing next weekend (April 25-26) at the Calgary Comic & Entertainment Expo. Methinks someone there might have comics they'd like to have go to Len but I'm going to be travelling light. Is there someone who'll be there who'd be willing to take home whatever comics people there wish to donate and then ship them to me?
• Lastly for now: I'm swamped with deadlines and such at the moment so it may be a few days, maybe even a week or more before I respond to some offers and inquiries. It's not that we don't appreciate your offers. It's just that some days, I'm juggling a few too many cats here. If you write, you will hear back…eventually.

That's about it for now. Thanks to everyone for helping Len and doing your part to destroy my long-held belief that comic fans are cheap.

Many of you wrote me to say you enjoyed the little tale of the ad-lib that found its way into the Monty Python film, The Life of Brian. If you did — and I should have mentioned this but being an occasional lunkhead, didn't think of it — you'd enjoy a whole book of behind-the-scenes accounts from the making of that great film. My pal Kim "Howard" Johnson, the Python expert I consulted, was there and he kept a diary! It was recently published as Monty Python's Tunisian Holiday and it's one of those must-haves for anyone who cares about Python or even about how funny movies come to be. That's my recommendation. Here's an Amazon link to order one.

Recently here, we discussed the vital issue of who should be included in the exalted list of past Tonight Show hosts. It usually comes down to Steve Allen, Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and Jay Leno, with Conan O'Brien in the On Deck circle.

Which causes some of us to ask: What about Jack Lescoulie and Al "Jazzbeaux" Collins, who hosted the odd version of Tonight that came 'twixt Allen and Paar? What about Joan Rivers, who was Mr. Carson's permanent guest host for a long time? Or Joey Bishop, who wasn't a "permanent guest host" but who sat behind Johnny's desk almost as often as he sat behind his own on The Joey Bishop Show?

And hey, what about one other guy? When Steve Allen hosted Tonight, he did Monday through Friday, five nights a week, no reruns…and the show was an hour and 45 minutes long. In 1956, he added an hour-long Sunday night show to his workload and when that eventually proved to be too much, he turned Tonight over to another host for Monday and Tuesday nights. That host was Ernie Kovacs.

I said in the previous post I wasn't sure how long Kovacs had hosted. Al Quagliata, who operates The Ernie Kovacs Blog, sent me the answer. Kovacs hosted Tonight for two weeks in August of 1955 while Allen was filming The Benny Goodman Story. Then on Monday, October 1 of 1956, Ernie began doing Monday and Tuesdays and he continued through Tuesday, January 22, 1957. This isn't a lot of hosting. At most, it's ten days in '55 and then a stint of 34 days…only it may be less because both Christmas and New Year's Day fell on Tuesdays during that period and they may have taken some nights off.

So you can draw up your own rules here. A lot of Johnny's guest hosts hosted more than 44 episodes. Joey Bishop hosted 177 times. Joan Rivers did 93 and Bob Newhart handled 87. In addition to them and Leno, you have folks like John Davidson, Bill Cosby, Jimmy Dean, McLean Stevenson, David Letterman, Garry Shandling and David Brenner. They all hosted more Tonight Shows than Ernie Kovacs and there are still others. On the other hand, these people were all billed as guest hosts. Kovacs presumably was for his two weeks in '55 but for the other 34 (or less), it was "Tonight starring Ernie Kovacs."

I don't have an answer here. I could make the case that Kovacs belongs on the list because, brief as his stint was, it was his show those nights. The permanent host is "in charge" of his program in a sense that no guest host could be. Or I could flip and make the case that Joey Bishop and perhaps a dozen others hosted Tonight more times than Ernie Kovacs…so if you include him, you gotta include them.

I'm inclined to favor the former for what's probably a bad reason. I really like Ernie Kovacs. Talk about your television pioneers. Moreover, I think people forget what a funny man he was. All the retrospectives seem to focus on the visual gags on his shows, many of which were as much the creation of his writers and tech crew, and many of which were merely a matter of figuring out how to replicate Buster Keaton material in a TV studio. Where Kovacs (to me) soared was when he was just talking as himself or occasionally when he was playing a character. I'd love to see those old Tonight episodes he did, largely because I'm assuming there's a lot of Ernie being Ernie. Al Quagliata informs me that the Paley Center has a few clips from them totalling about a half hour's worth of material. He also writes…

My reason for wanting Ernie added is that he is, as far as I'm concerned, the originator of the TV sketch form that these late night programs (and SNL, SCTV, Uncle Floyd, Monty Python, et al) owe their success to. He was doing these things on TV in Philly before anyone else. He could have cared less about the interview portion as the clips of his tenure on Tonight will attest to (one of the reasons why NBC never made him the regular host after Steve Allen left).

Obviously, Ernie Kovacs deserves massive recognition for his many contributions to early television. I don't know that he originated the TV sketch form…and to the extent he did, that's a separate consideration from whether he qualifies as a host of Tonight in the same sense as Allen, Paar, Carson and Leno. My understanding is that Allen occasionally did sketches on his Tonight.

I'm also under the impression that the reason Kovacs didn't succeed Allen as full-time host is that NBC's execs had arrived at the idea that no one person could sustain Tonight for very long. That was why they turned to a multi-host, magazine format that made it more like Today and less of an entertainment program. Somewhere — darned if I can remember where — I read that when that format bombed, they scurried to restore the one-host entertainment format and inquired as to Ernie's interest or availability. He was by then off shooting a movie and had a contract for another to follow…so they went with Paar.

(And they still didn't think they needed to get back to what Allen and Kovacs were doing. Their original idea was to fill the time slot with three game shows, all hosted by Paar. It was largely because they couldn't pull that together quickly that they went with a talk show format.)

But hey, Ernie Kovacs was one of television's original geniuses. Would that more of his material was out on DVD. It keeps being rumored but never seems to happen. Maybe it would open up that marketplace if we reminded more people of the things he did, including hosting Tonight. So sign me up for that campaign. We can worry later about Jack Lescoulie.

The Orange County Register is conducting an online poll to determine the best "make-out" ride at Disneyland. Make up your own joke about "It's a Small World." At the moment, it's a landslide for "The Haunted Mansion" and I can certainly understand that. Something about the voice of Paul Frees always got me in the mood for hanky-panky.

In a similar vein, Disneyland is denying rumors that they've dismissed actors playing the Jack Sparrow character because women kept flashing them. Yo ho.