Today's dearth of postings is brought to you by the brilliant folks at Road Runner Cable. In case you've forgotten, let me tell you how this works.

You notice your Internet Connection is plodding along at about the speed of a tortoise on Valium. You call Road Runner Cable and ask if the problem is on your end or their end. A person there assures you they've had zero complaints from others so it must be on your end. This person suggests all sorts of things to remedy the problem and, like Charlie Brown taking a running start at that football Lucy's holding, you start trying to fix it. This means crawling under desks to rehook cables, then getting up to check (if at all) they've affected your computer's connectivity. They usually have no effect at all so you have to crawl back under the desk to rehook, then crawl back out to check, then crawl back under the desk to rehook…

And so it goes for hours, up and down, back and forth, with your knees feeling like they belong on that hooker who hangs outside the 99-Cent Store and charges accordingly. You do this, knowing damn well that nothing you do is going to fix the problem…and it's almost comforting when, after you do everything you can do, it doesn't fix the problem. At various points throughout this process, you call back the Time-Warner tech support people on the special phone number they gave you…and that's a waste of time too because their phones are broken. Honest to God, the number I was given by the service folks at the company that supplies my Internet and my telephone service gets you to a voice that says "Press 1 to speak to a service representative" and then when you press 1, you get that jarring phone-off-the-hook alarm sound that means you've connected to nothing.

Finally, you call back the regular tech support line and you do manage to reach someone there. That's the person who tells you, "Oh, we've had many reports of that. The problem is on our end and our technicians have been working on it all day. They expect to have it fixed sometime between this evening and the 25th century." Which means that all your hooking and rehooking and rebooting and crawling under desks has been an utter waste of time.

So that's why my website is slow and my e-mail is slower. And the worst part is not that I feel for this at all but that six months from now, I'll fall for it again.

I'll be back when things speed up around here.

A lot of people list Bill Hicks among the great stand-up comedians of all time…and if that name isn't familiar to you, it's probably because he died way too young — in 1994 at the age of 33. It may also be because he didn't get a lot of television exposure when he was around.

One place he wasn't seen was on Late Show with David Letterman on October 9, 1993. Hicks taped what would have been his twelfth appearance with Dave for that telecast…a rambling rant on topics including Easter, pro-lifers, smoking and some celebrities he wanted to kill. You didn't see it, even if you were watching that night. The entire routine was edited out of the show before broadcast and replaced with a routine by another comedian. The whole incident from Hicks's point of view was summarized in this article by John Lahr. As you'll note, there was some question as to whether the decision to clip the spot was made by CBS Standards and Practices or if it was decided by the folks running the Letterman show…which would basically mean Dave.

Like I said, you didn't see it…but you can on Friday. Already taped (Letterman tapes his Friday shows on Monday) is an episode with Mary Hicks, Bill's mother, as a guest…and they run the once-excised routine. Perhaps we'll hear more about who made the decision to cut it.

Last night, I hosted my friends Wendy and Richard Pini at the Magic Castle in Hollywood. You all know them as the gifted folks who've given the world Elfquest and other fine creations. I've known Wendy forever — since before she met and married Richard, in fact, and I've taken her — sometimes with him, sometimes without — to the Magic Castle a number of times.

I don't have to tell any fans of her work how creative Wendy is…or tell anyone who's met her how lovely she is. But I'll tell you something you may not know about the lady. She's the world class champ at getting picked to be the magician's "volunteer" from the audience. Take her into any room where any magician is performing and inside of ninety seconds, she'll be up on stage picking a card. It's happened every time I've taken her to the Castle and it happened again last evening.

Before that, we had a fine dinner. I've been a member of the Magic Castle for 25+ years, which means I've endured 25+ years of squabbles, financial troubles, closure rumors, emergency dues assessments and the like. Some of that might have driven me away but the place is so much fun that I always ride out the current crisis. At the moment, things seem to be stable. The Magic Castle is not about to disappear or be sawed in half or anything. The land on which it resides has been sold but everyone seems confident that will not affect our club. An outside group which had been managing the restaurant part of the club was ejected on New Year's Day and I think the food is somewhat better for it.

Then we headed over to the big showroom for a "special event" magic performance — Mac King was in from Vegas for two nights to do much the same show he does at Harrah's on the strip. I've seen him there and he's quite amusing and quite amazing. Dressed in a suit that Spike Jones would have found garish, Mac strides out on stage and just takes over the place. He's one of those performers who's so personable and charming, you'll just follow him anywhere.

Showing uncommon restraint, Mr. King waited until his second trick before he got Wendy up on stage to pick a card and sign her name on it, whereupon he made it disappear and reappear and reappear and reappear. Sometimes, it was in his pocket. Sometimes, it was inside his fly. He only made Wendy fish it out when it was in his pocket. Eventually, it turned up sealed inside a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes. Later, not realizing Richard and Wendy were a couple, Mac picked Richard to come up assist him in another trick. I thought the same thing you'd have thought: "Boy, I'm glad it was them and not me."

Anyway, I just wanted to jot down a reminder of a lovely evening, for myself if not for you, and to tell you the following: If you're in Vegas, clear the time one afternoon to go see Mac King at Harrah's. He's really good.

As I've mentioned here, I'm feeding an awful lot of feral cats in my backyard lately. Two of the most interesting — because they're so deeply in love — are Max and Sylvia. Max is also known as Max the Bulimic Cat because he spends most of the day binging and purging, binging and purging. Sylvia is also known as The Stranger Stranger Cat because she's stranger than (and apparently the daughter of) another cat who comes around who we call The Stranger Cat. The Stranger Cat is friendly and trusting. Sylvia spends most of her time scowling at those who give her food and staying far from them. For no visible reason, about once a month she makes herself available for petting. At all other times, she flees from people.

That's Sylvia scowling in the above photo…but the more interesting thing is where the two of them are. That's Max and Sylvia in their nest. They have a nest. Max found a little area between some bushes and he began sleeping in there…and soon, Sylvia began joining them. They sleep in there, one practically on top of the other. They nuzzle and cuddle and lick each other's faces. They seem very happy to be in there, and they're in there an awful lot.

I had to sneak up on them to get the above photo. When he knows I'm around, Max springs from the nest and hurries to demand food, while Sylvia often flees the yard. This time though, my camera and I were far enough away that I didn't disrupt the serenity of the cat nest. Max, by the way, will share his food with Sylvia but not with anyone else. He may be all stomach but he's also all heart.

The Screen Actors Guild board today took steps to oust its executive director and head negotiator, Doug Allen. No one will be surprised that he's going away but the all-around expectation was that he'd get the message (or the severance package) and resign with one of those "For the good of the union…" speeches that would go some distance towards healing. That he's being kicked out this way will probably make things somewhat worse before they can begin to get better.

By the way: I erred back in this message when I said SAG needs a 70% agreement of its members to call a strike. It actually needs 75%, which is of course even less attainable. I'd be surprised it they could get 50% right now.

A pretty amazing photo of the scene as Barack Obama delivered his inaugural address. Zoom in deep and look around.

A couple of folks wrote to ask what else I remembered about going to the audience testing for I Dream of Jeannie and Camp Runamuck. As I recall, it was early in 1965, several weeks before either was announced as a series, so our reaction may have been a factor in them landing on the NBC fall schedule. I'm pretty sure both pilots that were shown to us that afternoon were longer than what aired the following September and different in a number of ways.

The venue for the testing was a place called Preview House up on Sunset Boulevard, a few blocks east of Fairfax. I went with a friend of mine named Steve Hopkins and we had to wait in line for quite a bit. Through some confusion, we were actually a bit too old to be there — the testing was of kids 12 and under, and we were thirteen, but they let us in. We were shown to seats equipped with little handheld dials on cords. You could turn the dial all the way to the left to indicate you didn't like what you were seeing or rotate it to the right to show approval. Steve and I took our assignments seriously but a lot of boys and girls around us seemed to be just randomly spinning the thing because it was fun. As I recall, the place held around 200 of us.

A gentleman came out and talked a while, making it sound like the entire future of commercial broadcast television was in our hot little hands. Then he taught us how to use our dials and showed us a Mr. Magoo cartoon. I'm not sure if the man said this or if I read it somewhere later but the idea was that the Magoo film was the "control." It was shown at every Preview House screening and our responses to it would be measured against the responses of other test audiences to see how we weighed in against them. When we were asked if we had any questions, Steve wanted to know if our responses were individually recorded. Did they register that the person in Seat A-7 liked this or that? Or did they just record the responses of the audience as a whole? The host said he couldn't get into technical things like that and so we never found out. I might have felt a lot less self-conscious if I'd known.

Questionnaires were then passed out. We'd been promised that there'd be a drawing later for prizes and we were now asked to decide which items we'd select if we were the lucky ones. For instance, someone was going to win a case of cookies. In the booklet were photos of about ten popular brands of cookies and you had to check off which kind you'd like if you won. You then had to pick which candy bar you'd want if you won the case of candy bars and which kind of cereal you'd want if you won the case of cereal and so on. It seemed rather odd to me to have everyone fill out their choices this way. Why couldn't they do the drawing and then ask just the winner which brand of soft drink he or she wanted? Hmm…

After we all filled out the forms and passed them in, we were shown the Camp Runamuck pilot, which we kinda liked. It took place at a summer camp where the counselors were more childish than the youthful campers, and there was a lot of physical comedy and food fighting. I remember thinking that it was copied from the Disney movie, The Parent Trap, even to the point of having the same actor (Frank DeVol) play the camp supervisor. As I later learned, self-plagiarism was at work. The Parent Trap was written and directed by a man named David Swift…and David Swift was also the creator of Camp Runamuck. (Frank DeVol, by the way, was replaced when the series debuted the following fall. I hope my clumsy dialing wasn't the reason.)

We filled out some forms about how we liked what we'd seen, then it came time for the second pilot, which was preceded by several commercials — one for cookies, one for candy bars, one for cereal and so on. Then came the I Dream of Jeannie pilot, which we liked a lot. I darn near broke the dial, whirling it clockwise every time Barbara Eden was on the screen. Forms were passed out for our comments on Jeannie, and if there'd been a place I could have written something in, I'd have been the first person to ever demand they show Barbara Eden's navel.

As these packets were collected, someone called our host away and informed him of some dire news which he then passed on to us. Apparently, there was a problem with those questionnaires we'd filled out earlier — the ones where we picked the kind of cookie we'd want if we won the case of cookies, the kind of candy bar we'd want if we won the case of candy bars, etc. "We accidentally gave some of you the wrong questionnaire so just to be fair, we're going to ask you all to fill them out again!" New forms were passed out and Steve and I both noted that in each category, one possible selection was a product which had been in one of those commercials we'd seen and…

Hey, you don't suppose it was all a test to see if those commercials had caused us to change our minds, do you? Naah, they couldn't have been that sneaky.

That was about it. We were told that if we won the prizes, we'd be notified…and of course, we weren't. Given how sneaky these people were about getting us to fill out the prize form a second time, I'm skeptical that anyone got a case of anything. The host thanked us for coming and out we went. I suppose we should have felt somewhat exploited but it was kind of cool. The next week at school, we could tell our classmates that NBC had tested its new shows on us…and of course, we made it sound like the Head of Programming had called us into his offices and said, "Mark…Steve…I value your judgment so much that I'm going to let you program Friday night at 7:30!" Soon after, when Camp Runamuck and I Dream of Jeannie were announced, we could flaunt that we'd seen them, whereas the commoners had to wait 'til September. (Runamuck was a quick flop but managed to last all of one season. Jeannie was a hit for five years.)

Whatever "specialness" we'd felt at being a part of a select testing audience pretty much evaporated over the next year or so. Preview House got very active, I guess, because everywhere you went in L.A., there were teenagers handing out passes to go there and watch pilots and win valuable prizes. I declined at least one a week.

A friend of mine went once and reported back that he'd seen the pilot for a Batman TV show starring someone named Adam West. He'd also seen the same Mr. Magoo cartoon plus some pilot that never made it to series, and they'd done the same stunt about redoing the questionnaires that told them which prizes you wanted if you won the drawing, which I still don't think anyone ever did. I don't know how much the networks paid them to run this operation but I'll bet it was enough that they could have afforded to send someone a case of cereal once in a while. If anyone who was ever involved with Preview House reads this, I still want Cheerios.

People today are getting upset about this…

Impeached Gov. Blagojevich, on the first leg of his media blitz timed to the start of his impeachment trial, in an NBC interview broadcast on The Today Show Sunday compared himself to human rights heroes Nelson Mandela, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gahdhi.

I think it's a perfectly apt comparison. None of those other people are going to be the Governor of Illinois next month, either.

There will be a memorial celebration of Forrest J Ackerman on March 8 at the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood. More details will be announced later but if you were a friend or fan, you might want to save the date.

Jim Frank writes to ask…

Over on Ken Levine's blog, someone asked him about the value of testing for TV shows. I assume they mean when the network shows a pilot to groups of viewers and tests their responses. I was wondering if you had any opinions about it.

Yeah, I think it's mainly done to protect network execs from taking the responsibility for decisions. They do it because it may later prove useful to say, "Don't blame me. It tested well." But in certain circumstances, it may have its value. Many years ago, there was an NBC series called Bracken's World…which, by the way, I'd love to see again. It was pure soap opera and not always in a good way, but I recall it as one of those "guilty pleasure" television joys. It was set in a movie studio and one of the big story gimmicks for the first season was that no one ever saw Mr. Bracken, the guy who ran the place. He was a faceless voice on a speakerphone.

I guess the idea was that this made him seem more mysterious and powerful, and made the people who labored under him seem more like pawns. Whatever the intent, testing indicated that it wasn't working; that audiences either didn't notice they never saw Bracken or felt like they were being sold The Danny Thomas Show but Danny Thomas wasn't showing up for work. If you were producing the program, I would think that would be very useful information to have…kind of like a comedian hearing an audience not laugh at a joke he thought was hilarious. In this case, the producers of Bracken's World decided to go ahead and show Bracken for the second season and they hired Leslie Nielsen. If they'd let him bring along his fart machine and be himself, the series might have lasted into Season Three and beyond.

There have also been times that testing indicated that audiences didn't "get" some series with a complex premise. And come to think of it, there's another good use for testing. Sometimes, it validates what you believe. Years ago, I developed a cartoon series for Disney called The Wuzzles. I liked most of how it came out but there was a character in it named Rhinokey whose voice I thought was grating and wrong. I argued for changing it and I lost.

Near the end of the first season, in an attempt to try and save a show that was probably going to be cancelled, they did testing on it and the test audiences were nearly unanimous in their dislike of Rhinokey. It didn't save the show — it was riding too low in the Nielsens by then — but I got a nice "I told you so" out of it.

The trouble with most testing is that people use it as a substitute for thinking. The Mary Tyler Moore Show famously tested as a surefire bomb, and they especially hated Mr. Grant. We are all fortunate that testing was ignored that time. Testing is also sometimes uselessly ambiguous. I was actually in the test audience, many moons ago, for the pilot of I Dream of Jeannie, the show with Barbara Eden and Larry Hagman. (It was a double-feature test session. We were also shown the pilot for another sitcom which soon became a series but not for long…Camp Runamuck.)

On Jeannie, the villain was a man named Dr. Bellows. We were asked, "Do you like Dr. Bellows?" and I didn't know how to answer. He was the villain. We weren't supposed to like him. If I thought he was a valuable part of the show, was I supposed to answer, "Yes, I like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain" or "No, I don't like Dr. Bellows, he's a great villain"? There was no spot on the questionnaire to respond with anything but a yes or no.

I went to a few other test sessions over the years but they always seemed like a squandering of time. When I got into television, a network exec told me, "The trouble with those things is that the people who are willing to go in and do them are exactly the kind of people advertisers aren't interested in reaching. They're people with nothing to do all day or who have so little money that they'll waste three hours in the hope of taking home a five dollar prize." For a long time, CBS drew test audiences from L.A.'s famed Farmers Market tourist attraction, where I can often be found. I always declined the folks who approached to invite me to hike over to CBS (right next door) to "preview an exciting new television series and maybe win valuable prizes." I even declined once when it was a pilot I'd worked on…in that case, not because I thought it would be a waste of an afternoon but because I was afraid they'd catch me.

We are dismayed at the news out of New York this morning: MAD Magazine — the most successful humor publication in the history of mankind if you don't count The Washington Post — is downsizing. Its frequency of publication is being slashed from monthly to quarterly and all its ancillary publications, like MAD for Kids and the reprint books — are being axed. There is or will be a corresponding cut in its staff.

I am a devout MAD fan, having followed it through good times and bad. I have a complete collection. I've published a book on the history of the magazine and have interviewed just about everyone who ever was a part of it. I've written a few articles for the publication. And you see that painting up above? It's from the cover of MAD #46 and the Kelly Freas original to that painting hangs on one of my walls downstairs.

That 1959 cover was a joke but the new cutbacks aren't so funny. Which is a shame because lately, the magazine has been. Its current editor, John Ficarra, and his crew have kept the old tradition but made it relevant to today with sharp writing. (John is being quoted today as saying, "The feedback we've gotten from readers is that only every third issue of MAD is funny, so we've decided to just publish those.") The only thing really wrong with the magazine is that, perhaps unavoidably, it's a magazine.

Being a lover of its heritage, I'd be the first to trash Ficarra if the current MAD was unworthy of its name. It absolutely is not. But this kind of decline is very common in the periodical business. Playboy, this year, will only publish eleven issues and it isn't because the public is losing its interest in gorgeous nude women. Even before we all began living on the Internet and doing 90% of our reading there, magazines were on the way out. And since everyone got a computer, it's only become worse and worse. MAD has evolved to survive, adding color and advertising when that was necessary…but it can't escape the fact that people just don't read things on paper these days.

MAD will not go away. It's too valuable a brand name to ever disappear. (National Lampoon is still around. It just hasn't been a magazine since around 1988.) Today's announcement probably translates as follows: "We need to keep the name alive and to keep key staffers and contributors in the family. But it's losing money and we're going to scale it back and minimize those losses while we figure out what to do with it." Its new configuration is not a long-range plan…and maybe that long-range plan, whenever they arrive at it, will restore MAD to its former glory in some venue.

In the meantime, it's a shame. One of the best things about the magazine lately has been its topical humor, especially of a political nature. Being quarterly will kill most of that. Some of its best people (i.e., "The Usual Gang of Idiots") will probably go elsewhere, which will further wound it. I don't know what they can do with it but I hope they do it soon.