Recently, I linked to this article by Jeffrey Goldberg which charged general ineptness on the part of the TSA department at the airport that is allegedly screening passengers for signs of terrorism. If you read it, you might be interested in this response from the agency. It's not all that convincing to me.

This is not exactly a recommendation since I've only seen a few minutes of it…but Friday night (or Saturday morning, depending on your point of view), Turner Classic Movies is running The World's Greatest Sinner. This is one of those movies that film buffs often discuss even though few of them have seen it. It was made in 1962 but never really released. No matter how few people tune in to see it on TCM, their number will probably be greater than all the people who've seen it to date.

The film was a vanity production, written and directed by Timothy Carey, who popped up in a number of films by Stanley Kubrick or John Cassavettes. He stars, as well, playing an insurance man who quits his job and becomes a Rockabilly star and a cult leader. The legendary Paul Frees was the narrator and the music was done by Frank Zappa, who later called it "the worst movie ever made" and urged his fans not to seek out copies.

Is it all that awful? I dunno. I've seen about five minutes of it in clips over the years and while nothing in those clips was inconsistent with that description, you hate to label a movie that way without actually seeing all or most of it. Is it so awful it's funny? Same answer. But its trailer did include this blurb: "The most CONDEMNED and PRAISED American movie of its time!"

That's quite a claim for a movie that wasn't released and which very few people ever heard of. In fact, it's enough to make me want to see the thing. So I've set my TiVo. Whether I'll watch the film it records remains to be seen.

I was interviewed this afternoon for an hour on Inkstuds, a comic book talk radio show hosted by Robin McConnell and heard on CITR radio in Vancouver, Canada. The topic? Jack Kirby, of course. You can hear it over on this page if you're not sick of hearing me talk about Jack Kirby.

Veteran stage actor George S. Irving will be honored on December 8 with the 17th Oscar Hammerstein Award for Lifetime Achievement in Musical Theatre.

As this piece notes, Mr. Irving made his Broadway debut in the chorus of Oklahoma! and won a Tony Award for his performance in Irene, along with appearing in dozens of Broadway shows including Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Two's Company, Can-Can, Bells Are Ringing, Call Me Mister, An Evening With Richard Nixon and…, I Remember Mama, The Pirates of Penzance and Me and My Girl. But I hope someone will mention at the ceremony that he's worked extensively as a cartoon voice actor, including his stint as a cast member of the show, Underdog.

Tom Fagan is dead at the age of 76, and I probably need to explain to most of you who he was. Tom was a longtime resident of Rutland, Vermont and he was the mover and shaker most responsible for that city's famous annual Halloween parades. As he explained in this interview last year, he'd always loved Halloween and he had a vision for what the town's parade could be and set about to make it happen.

A lot of it involved filling the streets with comic book characters. Fagan promoted the idea in comic books and to comic book companies…and by the early seventies, the parade was awash with superheroes and villains. Writers and artists from the industry journeyed to Rutland to participate in the festivities, often in costume, and art began to imitate life: Many comic book stories were done that were set in Rutland involving DC and Marvel heroes actually attending. The illo above is from an issue of Batman in which the Caped Crusader went there…and the guy you see him talking to is Tom Fagan.

I never got to attend one of Tom's public parties but I always heard great things about them. We corresponded briefly in the seventies and you could tell from the way he wrote about the events that he was very proud of what he'd created. Here's a link to an obit in the local paper there.

So we have this proposition on the ballot in California. A decision of the State Supreme Court made gay marriage legal and now we have Proposition 8, which would make it illegal.

Naturally, there are commercials all over the place…and to see some of them, you'd never know the issue at hand has anything to with gays or marriage. Some of the "no" spots speak of equal protection under the law without discussing what exactly is being protected. Some of the "yes" ones speak of "tolerance" but their notion of tolerance is respect for the rights of those who choose to oppose gay marriage. Some of both could make you wonder how many voters will really know what they're voting on…or whether a "yes" vote means "yes" or "no" to gay marriage.

(The "yes" votes I've seen seem to be getting a bit more honest. For a while, they made it sound like the point of Proposition 8 was to stop sex education from being taught in schools, protect the tax-free status of churches and limit the power of "activist judges." Nothing in the actual Proposition 8 mentions any of that.)

A few months ago, polls showed 8 going down to a solid defeat. That's when a lot of us who see nothing wrong with same-sex wedlock (and everything wrong with barring it) thought the game was over and we could bite our nails over the presidential race, instead. That'll teach us to get cocky. Current polls suggest it's neck-and-neck and that the vote, like some whose relationships it would impact, can go either way.

This is quite disappointing and not just because it might lose. It's disappointing because it means the vote will probably be close…and that means the losing side will just try again in the next election. We'll be fighting this battle again…and again and again. Perhaps that was inevitable but some of us had hope. Then again, I still think gay marriage is inevitable and that it will some day seem ridiculous that it was ever an issue. Maybe if we get out the vote, we can make that day happen sooner…and minimize the injustice until it does.

Various politicians are rushing to condemn John McCain's unsolicited robocalls about Barack Obama's "relationship" with William Ayers. I would like to take this opportunity to condemn all unsolicited robocalls about anything. This includes the ones that want to tip me to great pay-per-view events on DirecTV and the ones that invite me to try out a free membership at my local Family Fitness Center. We're not getting political-type calls here in California but if I do, I will condemn them, no matter who they're from or what they're about.

I actually question whether they're effective in any way. They seem to me like a great way to piss people off, interrupting their lives or dinners or other, more important calls to listen to some unwanted sales pitch. There also seems to be a high potential of robocalls reaching the wrong person…someone in the home who couldn't buy the product if they wanted to.

I suppose the companies that set up such things have statistics that prove robocalls are of some value in moving a product or public opinion, however illogical that seems to me. Nevertheless, even if they make sense for the sponsor, I think they're a slimy, annoying way to do business and I think less of any enterprise that employs them.

Obviously, they should be outlawed and the people who do them should be sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole and, more important, no access to a telephone. Failing that, they should be required to include their home phone numbers in any robocalls so we can ring them up at our leisure and tell them exactly what he think of such tactics. 4 AM sounds like as good a time as any to me.

The nice folks at Google will be glad to not only tell you but to show you.

So let me see if I have this right. When it came out that John Edwards was paying $400 for his haircuts, that told us everything we had to know about him being vain or vapid or phony or out of touch with America or something. Whatever it told us, it was pretty derogatory about Edwards.

But the folks who said that didn't care that John McCain usually wears $600 shoes or that Cindy McCain has worn gowns (including one dress at the G.O.P. convention) that cost over $100,000…and they're not going to care that the Republican National Committee has coughed up more than $150,000 to clothe and coif Sarah Palin. That kind of spending says nothing about the person wearing all the money. Right?

I actually don't think it does about the McCains and Palin and it didn't about Edwards. And I'm really sick of that mode of politics where if your opponent eats an almond, you have to immediately issue talking points about how the eating of almonds proves someone is unfit for public office.