Less than twelve hours from now, commencing around Noon today, I'll be signing Kirby: King of Comics at Hi-De-Ho Comics in Santa Monica. Come by. Buy a book. Get it signed. Buy some other stuff. If you like, I'll sign it too, even if I had nothing to do with it. I'm not sure how long I'll be there but I'm guessing around two hours.

Film buffs have been worried about what was lost in that fire on the Universal Studios lot and rumors have spread that some irreplaceable reels of film were destroyed. They're still saying no…but an awful lot of prints were lost, which means that revival houses and film fests that were scheduled to screen 35mm prints are outta luck. Read about it here.

I won't be posting a video link today but I'll mention that the Jack Kirby Museum and Research Center has posted a video of a panel I hosted at the New York Comic Con, interviewing two of Jack's best inkers, Joe Sinnott and Dick Ayers. It runs about 55 minutes.

Also, I wanted to mention that Jack's grandson Jeremy, a most talented young man, has set up a website about his grandpa and is also promoting some of the properties that the family controls. Go visit The Jack Kirby Universe.

And while I'm at it: Every year at the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I host a panel about Jack featuring folks who've worked with him. This year's, which takes place on Sunday morning, will delve into a part of Jack's career about which many of his fans know little. It's his years in the eighties working in TV animation…and among those who'll be participating will be Joe Ruby and Ken Spears, whose cartoon studio employed Kirby for some very happy years of his life, working on Thundarr the Barbarian and other shows. I'll also be co-hosting a panel on Friday about the Ruby-Spears studio, and I'll get Joe and Ken to tell how they started Scooby Doo and other Saturday morn superstars.

In the next week or two, I'll preview some of the other panels I'll be helming at San Diego…sixteen of 'em in all. Yeah, I know that's a ridiculous number but they're all things I wanted to see so I might as well moderate them and be guaranteed a seat.

I have a whole bunch of these piled-up so let's try and get caught up. This one's from Neil Shurley…

I saw a scene-by-scene comparison on the web a while back (I'm pretty sure done by Jaime Weinman on his blog, Something Old, Something New) that demonstrated that Lerner seemed to have utilized the film Pygmalion for source material for the movie My Fair Lady rather than Shaw's original play. The example that sticks out in my mind is the scene in which Higgins pops marbles into Eliza's mouth. That scene was lifted from the 1932 movie and didn't appear in the original play, according to what I read at least…

It doesn't…and there are other parallels, including the whole matter of the ending. I think the Broadway play was based much more on the screenplay than the original Shaw play. I'm guessing that this is something Lerner was afraid to admit because there were potential legal complications there. The movie was produced by Gabriel Pascal, who had originally engaged Lerner and Loewe to adapt Pygmalion into a musical. They worked on it for a time, then gave up. After Pascal died, they took up the cause again but there were all sorts of complications with the Pascal estate, which was contested by a wide array of past women in his life, some of whom he'd even married.

I'm not sure exactly what could have happened but I don't think Lerner wanted certain parties to figure out how much he'd taken from the screenplay.

I heard from a couple of Chick-Fil-A employees who asked that I not use their names. One of them wrote…

I enjoyed your commentary on fast food today, and I can confirm for you that Chick-fil-A chickens all arrive frozen to us. We thaw them for two days in refrigeration and then prepare them for breading and frying. Because Chick-fil-A uses a pressure-cooker style fryer, the filets and other chicken products cook very quickly sealing the juices in which is part of what makes them so good.

I should also note for you that they fry in peanut oil (as noted on their menu) and the "healthy" option grilled chicken actually has more fat content than the fried chickens due to its marinade. That tidbit is buried in the nutritional information in their restaurants.

I suspect the difference between the Chick-Fil-A sandwich and the McDonald's knock-off is that the McDonald's chicken filet probably arrives breaded and frozen, and that it's fried the same way as the fries and not in a pressure cooker. It is, after all, only one item on a very large menu, whereas it's the signature item at Chick-Fil-A.

And someone else sent this link to a summary of the Chick-Fil-A political connections and writes…

I don't know if you would care, but founder Truett Cathy is a major contributor to right-wing Christian organizations like Focus on the Family and Campus Crusade for Christ.

I care but not enough that I'd skip patronizing Chick-Fil-A if there was one nearby to patronize. I tend to think boycotts rarely do more than make the boycotter feel like they're doing something. Once in a while, I feel uncomfy giving money to some business…like I stopped buying my gas at Exxon and Mobil after the Exxon Valdez oil spill and you can see how the loss of my business has decimated their income. There are also publishers whose books I won't purchase because I think the company has done unethical things.

I can't quite explain why some of these situations bother me and others don't. Maybe it's that sleazy ethics bother me more than just having political views with which I disagree.

That's all I have time for now. Posting here, by the way, should be light the next day or so as I have to spend many, many hours in a recording studio wearing my director hat. But I'll be back to you soon.

In 1967, Groucho Marx published a book of his letters called — of all things — The Groucho Letters. These were letters he'd donated to the Library of Congress, and you can see one of them on this page.

Several years ago, my buddy Frank Ferrante, the great Hackenbush Impersonator, read some of them for a BBC radio special. It was recently rebroadcast and for the next few days, you should be able to hear it from a link on this page. Do not dawdle as it will only be there until the end of the week.

Thanks to some reader of this site named mightygaijin, who sent me the tip. I believe the BBC has some upcoming Groucho specials and if anyone sees them online before I do, please let me know.

Behind the scenes at The Colbert Report.

As we predicted here, the David Mamet play November will close next month when Nathan Lane departs the starring role. I wonder if the delay in announcing this was because they were trying to find someone spectacular to replace him and couldn't. I don't mean Nathan wasn't spectacular, and I doubt anyone could do the part better…but there might have been someone whose appearance on Broadway would have been such news — say, if Dustin Hoffman or Peter Falk was willing to do it for a few months — that audiences would have flocked.

The Tony Awards are this Sunday…and this year, the thing might even get semi-decent ratings. True, there isn't a lot of buzz out there about any of the nominees and the host, Whoopi Goldberg, doesn't seem like the kind of selection who'd draw an audience. But for the first time in recent memory, the telecast doesn't seem to be on opposite anything too formidable…so maybe the numbers won't be awful. They've been trending upwards the last few years, perhaps because the total number of awards shows on TV has diminished. They're starting to feel like events again.

Several writers on the 'net (including Ken Levine) are discussing this matter. Long story short: A wanna-be screenwriter, a guy who'd never sold anything, had three spec screenplays on his computer. A technician from SBC did a little work on the fellow's computer and innocently deleted what were, for some reason, the only copies of those screenplays. The writer sued SBC because he believed he was close to selling the three scripts for 2.7 million.

The court didn't agree the sale was likely but did award the writer $27,000 in compensatory damages and $33,000 in punitive damages. Both the writer and SBC appealed and the California state appeals court dismissed the punitive part of the award. The compensatory damages were upheld but the writer was ordered to reimburse SBC for its legal fees in the appeal, which pretty well wipes out any gain on his part. It might even mean he loses on the deal.

For professional writers — heck, even for non-pros — there are a couple of issues raised by this case. One is how non-professionals — heck, even pros — usually delude themselves into believing that a big sale is Almost There, certain to happen, virtually a done deal. Go to any gathering of aspiring writers and you'll hear an endless loop of such tales; of deals that were "99% set" but somehow, due to treachery or some caprice of nature, didn't happen or haven't yet.

It's possible the writer in the above-described lawsuit was an exception. After all, there are scripts that do sell and at some point, all those deals were "close." Still, a lot of us though hear of so many "done deals" that don't get all the way done that we develop a skepticism to all such claims. If you disbelieve them all, you'll be right at least 95% of the time and that estimate is, if anything, low.

The other issue, of course, is summarized by the phrase, "Why the hell didn't you have backups?"

Back when working on computers was somewhat new, the Writers Guild computer room used to get panic calls from members. The computer room had nothing to do with PCs or Macs — it was the operations center for the WGA computer which stored members' records and processed residual payments — but members in distress would phone there and ask for (or demand) aid. The folks there didn't know from PCs so many of those calls were referred to me.

One was from a woman who'd put in (she said) five years on what she called "The most important novel of our generation." She hadn't sold it (or anything, ever) but there was no doubt in her mind it was Hemingway-like in its greatness and importance. She kept telling me how "important" it was. She'd written the first half on paper. Then she got a computer and she'd dutifully typed that material onto a disc, then discarded the paper and finished the manuscript on her PC. You smell where this is going?

The computer, she insisted, had malfunctioned and deleted her life's work, all on its own. It was definitely not anything she'd done. Now, she demanded — like I was her paid employee — that I drive out to Chatsworth (45+ minutes) and get it back for her. I asked her if she had a recent backup. She said — this is verbatim or close to it — "I don't have time to learn that technical crap. I have a book to write!"

You can guess how much help I gave the lady. I did refer her to a friend who handled such matters for a fee. He trotted out to Chatsworth and managed to salvage a little of it…a service for which she ultimately refused to pay since he hadn't saved it all. She also refused to listen to him when he tried to explain to her about routine backups…or any of that technical crap. My friend still makes snide comments about the favor I did him with that referral.

Anyway, us sane people need to back stuff up so let me tell you what I do…

First off, my two non-laptop computers have mirrored harddisks, so when I write a file to disk, I'm making two copies of it.

Then I use a filesync utility to synchronize between computers. The one I use is SmartSync Pro, which I've been using for some time and which works fine. I haven't investigated to see if there are better ones…and I know there are now some free ones out there that are supposed to be pretty good. I paid a few years ago for SmartSync Pro so I keep using it…to, for example, sync my two desktop computers' data directories. So if something gets lost on one, it may be on the other. (I have SmartSync set, by the way, to retain the last three versions of everything.)

Plus, any time I'm about to travel or back from travel or otherwise using my laptop, I employ SmartSync to sync the data directories on the laptop with the others. They're all networked so this doesn't take a lot of time.

No matter which computer I'm using, I have an 8gb Flash Drive plugged into it. I wrote a special SmartSync profile and I have a shortcut to it on my desktop. One click and it backs up my "current" working directory to the Flash Drive. Every time I finish a few pages of something or leave the computer for a while, I click that shortcut.

About once every six months, I burn a data DVD with whatever data files strike me at that moment as recent and irreplaceable. This is not a formalized procedure; just something I do on an occasional whim.

Beyond all that, I do the following: Every month or so, I zip all my data directories into a file and e-mail them to a special address I set up on the server that hosts my websites. You could do this with a GMail account, too. The idea is to just have a copy of it all that's off-premises.

Finally, I routinely back the entirety of all three computers up to external hard drives. I have a number of these and I rotate them, doing both full and incremental backups. Originally, I did these with Norton Ghost but found that too buggy and clunky. Now, I use Acronis True Image, which seems much better…although I haven't yet had to use it for a restore so my recommendation can go only so far.

And even with all that, would you believe it? I still sometimes lose something. Fortunately, it's never been anything in the professional work category…but don't worry. It'll happen someday, probably as soon as someone offers me 2.7 million for three unsold screenplays. Just my damn luck.