Here's a new link to video footage (not live) of the fire at Universal Studios.

Someone was just on the radio saying — I'm not sure who it was or how sure they are — that nothing irreplaceable is being lost in the film or video vaults. That's probably true but there was a time when it might not have been. In the age of digital transfers and home video, it's a lot harder to lose the only copy or copies of an old movie or TV show.

In the meantime, the KNBC TV "live feed" channel in Los Angeles has stopped running old DIC cartoons and is now running an infomercial with Jane Seymour selling skin cream. It's been pointed out to me that there's a good reason why they're airing Archie's Weird Mysteries and shows like that. The F.C.C. still has that requirement that stations must broadcast X hours per week of shows for children. It doesn't matter if they air them on a sub-channel nobody watches but putting those cartoons on fulfills the rule.

So that's why they're on. Still, I think that if you have a channel that's there to present raw news footage of local interest and you have raw news footage of something like this, you might decide the cartoons can run later. Or maybe even bump the Jane Seymour infomercial.

It may (we hope) be out by the time you could go look but right now, this link is showing live video feed of a huge fire up on the Universal Studios lot. So far, it's destroyed several soundstages, a video vault and the King Kong exhibit. A spokesperson has already said that the material lost in the video vault is all replaceable from other sources.

None of this video is available on my TV. It's on the website of the local NBC affiliate. On my TV set, I can watch their "live feed" high-def channel that usually shows things like this…but at the moment, it's running old DIC cartoons like Archie's Weird Mysteries. So the video is only on their website. I think someone has odd priorities.

John Hodgman is the Daily Show correspondent that you also know from all those "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" ads. In this weekend's New York Times book section, he writes about new books on comics, including my Kirby: King of Comics. He's just being nice because it was written on a PC.

The other day, I linked to a video of Steve Lawrence and Sammy Davis singing "Not Even Nominated" songs at the Academy Awards. A blogger named Lis Riba writes, in part…

I listened with interest until they reached "Lucky Star" from Singin' in the Rain and realized that song wasn't eligible for an Oscar.

Only original songs are eligible for Academy Awards.

"Lucky Star" originally came from Broadway Melody of 1936. Singin' in the Rain was conceived as a vehicle for MGM's existing song catalog. The only original piece in the movie was "Moses Supposes."

It's one thing to advocate a change to the Oscar rules, but singing a lament to songs that weren't even eligible as if they'd been tragically overlooked — it seems disingenuous and misleading.

Uh, first of all, do I have to point out that I didn't pick the songs in that medley?

Secondly, as you note, "You Are My Lucky Star" was written for the movie, Broadway Melody of 1936. As I understand it, it was eligible for that year…and not nominated. "Singin' in the Rain" was introduced in the movie, Hollywood Revue of 1929. I think you're laboring under the impression that someone thought these two songs should have or at least could have been nominated for the 1952 movie, Singing' in the Rain. Not so. Whoever crafted that medley was right that those songs were introduced in movies but were not nominated for Oscars.

However, there was a bit of misrepresentation there. A possible reason "Singin' in the Rain" wasn't nominated was that it was introduced in a 1929 movie and the Academy Awards didn't add its Best Song category until 1934.

There may be a few others in there that weren't nominated for that reason. I don't think it changes my view that it was a swell medley and that its point is valid: That there used to a lot more great songs written for movies than we have today.

Since my big weight drop, my taste buds have changed. Sugary things do not have the same appeal to me and also a lot of "fast food" items taste more packaged and processed. I do not think McDonald's hamburgers have changed much in the last year or three but I have and they just aren't as good as they used to be…to me, anyway. A few weeks ago, I had an In-and-Out Burger that worried me because I didn't enjoy it. Is it me? Or did I just get a bad one? We'll find out next time I try one.

Obviously, there are upsides and downsides to this. One of the latter is that I like the convenience and timing of fast food. I just don't like most of the fast food anymore. In an airport recently, I had a Burger King burger that shouldn't have made it through the metal detector and still hasn't fully made it through me.

In the last two years, two chains where I have enjoyed the "cuisine" (I'm using that word loosely) are chains that are not plentiful in Southern California. One is Five Guys, a burger dynasty based largely in the East and especially in the South. They're opening their first California outlet shortly in Carson, which is 20 miles south of me (I just Mapquested it) and…well, I'd be surprised if I ever had a reason to go there voluntarily. If you kidnapped a loved one and I had to make the ransom drop in Carson, it might get me there. But that's about what it would take.

The other chain I liked was Chick-Fil-A, which is a bit more frequent in my state but not by much. The one nearest to me is 16 miles…in Torrance, a place I'd probably only visit if I had to stop for gas on my way back from making a ransom payment in Carson.

The signature item at a Chick-Fil-A is the fried chicken sandwich — a breaded filet served on a (sorta) buttered bun with dill pickle chips. It's pretty good. The advertising seems to convey the impression that it's fresh (never frozen) chicken and I don't think that's true. But on my recent travels, I've had a couple of 'em and was quite pleased.

Lately, McDonald's has introduced its Southern-Style Chicken Sandwich — a breaded filet served on a (sorta) buttered bun with dill pickle chips. In other words, it's precise imitation of the Chick Fil-A specialty. It's not as pretty good as the original but it ain't bad at all. It also, by the way, is nowhere near as thick as the above photo and advertising promos would indicate. But if size doesn't matter to you, you might be happy with one.

Last night, I was driving home from the Book Expo, exhausted and famished, and I pulled into a McDonald's drive-thru to get the aforementioned plagiarism. The exchange with the drive-thru speaker went as follows…

HER: May I take your order, please?

ME: Yes, I'd like a chicken sandwich and a regular-sized fries.

HER: Which chicken sandwich would you like?

ME: The one that's the shameless rip-off of the Chick Fil-A sandwich.

HER: Would you like a drink with that?

ME: No, just the shameless rip-off and the fries.

HER: That'll be $4.95 at the first window.

Reminds me of the time I was in a Jack-in-the-Box and a lady ahead of me ordered a Big Mac. Without missing a beat, the counterperson called out, "One Jumbo Jack."

From now on, I think I'm going to save myself time every day by stealing at least one blog post from someone else who said something I agree with and couldn't say as well. This one is from Matthew Yglesias…

Meanwhile, people who are seriously drawn to Hillary Clinton's plans on health care, climate change but also think they might vote for John McCain in the fall rather than the candidate with plans that are very similar to Clinton's are being a bit confused. People who are seriously drawn to Clinton on feminist grounds but are considering staying home in the fall so McCain can replace John Paul Stevens with another justice in the mold of Alito or Roberts really need to think harder.

Carolyn and I spent part of the day down at Book Expo America, which is a trade show that's there to remind you how many book publishers there are in the world, how many books come out each year and how insignficant yours is in the grand scheme of things. Boy, that place is big.

The fun part of it is that the books there aren't for sale. Authors sit there autographing them and giving them away free. The convention management had to ban shopping carts from the floor, and some of the friends I encountered were making five and ten trips out to the parking lot with their freebees. I got almost none. All the authors whose books I might have wanted had long, long lines. If Vince Bugliosi stayed long enough to sign one for everyone in his line, he's still there…and will be if I go back tomorrow.

At one booth, Leonard Nimoy was autographing his book of photos of nude fat people. At another, William Shatner was autographing his about himself. Sometimes, the set-up's so good, you don't need a punch line.

I still dislike the L.A. Convention Center: Bad location, bad parking, bad layout, bad food. Traffic wasn't too bad today, perhaps because the Staples Center next door was hosting arena football and not the Lakers.

And they're adding the Nokia Theater next door to that. The premise, as I understand it, was that someone said, "Gee, the streets around the Convention Center aren't totally jammed. It's still possible for a car to occasionally move a foot or two. What can we do to really make it impossible?" And someone else said, "Hey, this is kind of a wacky idea but let's build a huge sports arena on the next block and book the biggest rock concerts and athletic events into it!"

Everyone thought that was brilliant so it was done. Next to the L.A. Convention Center (720,000 square feet of exhibit space), they put the Staples Center (20,000 seating capacity). And then a few years later, when they heard that some cars were still able to make it down Figueroa in that area at about an inch an hour, they hurriedly began erecting the Nokia (7100 seating capacity), plus they're adding a museum, a J.W. Marriott/Ritz Carlton Hotel, the West Coast headquarters of ESPN and a couple of extra office buildings.

This is all to make sure I can't drive down Figueroa to get to USC and teach my class.

Sneaking back on topic: It was just as mobbed today in parts of the Book Expo. Had I waited in the Bugliosi line, I'd have been unable to host an event I hosted — an interview of Sid Jacobson, who with artist Ernie Colón, created the graphic album version of the 9/11 Commission Report. If you haven't gotten a copy, go here and order one. Sid and Ernie did a great job of distilling a complicated report down to a form that can be read and comprehended. And then after you've digested that, pre-order their follow-up, which I'm told is even better.

I enjoyed running into old friends like Ray Zone and Lee Goldberg. Lee, by the way, has been a particular champion, opposing an industry that was out in force at the Book Expo. He often writes on his blog of the deceptions of the "vanity press" business. If you've been thinking you could finally become a successful published author by paying one of these companies to "publish" your book, go scan Lee's site for some of the postings he's done over the last few years. Under certain circumstances, self-publishing can be profitable…but the Vanity Press pirates tend to promise much they cannot deliver, and to deceive their clients that the relationship is almost like the traditional, professional relationship of a publisher and an author. Not so. And Lee's done a fine service in exposing deception.

I don't think I'm going back tomorrow — too many deadlines to meet — but that convention is a fascinating thing to visit. Even if it does mean going to the L.A. Convention Center.

A lot of science-fictiony inventions that were fantasized for James Bond books and movies have since become realities. Here's a partial list.

I decided not to tell the story here about the Howie Morris wedding. It's too long and too much of it is about me and not about Harvey Korman. That was the first time though that I (and several folks at our table) learned the sheer joy of making Harvey Korman laugh. To see him try to hold it back and finally explode was to understand why Tim Conway devoted so much of his life to making that happen. As I think I've mentioned here in a couple of obits, including Dick Martin's, I love people who can just laugh unreservedly and with the entire body and soul. When they're professional comedians — people who might feel it's their job to provoke laughter in others — it's especially wonderful. Harvey was the greatest audience.

So here's the story I will tell. I worked with Harvey on a couple of projects, including the Garfield cartoon show, which he did as a favor to me even though there was no conceivable reason for him to do me a favor. We had a set fee we paid guest voice actors…a generous one but it was below what Harvey Korman usually received. A few weeks later, I was in New York and so was Harvey. He appeared on Conan O'Brien's show one evening and then the next day, he took his family to a matinee of the Broadway show of Beauty and the Beast, which then starred Tom Bosley. Mr. Korman and Mr. Bosley had once been roommates, sharing a hovel not far from that theater, back in their starving actor days.

After visiting with Bosley, the Kormans went walking through Times Square and Harvey noticed and recognized me walking along. He introduced me to the family and while the wife and kids went off to buy something, we stood there — around Broadway and 43rd, I believe — just talking. Except Harvey wasn't talking just to me. He talked to everyone who walked past, heckling tourists and joking with passers-by…

…and a crowd started to form around us. Before long, there must have been sixty, seventy people clustered about, watching this tall, crazy person putting on a little show, doing in essence a stand-up comedy routine in the middle of Times Square.

I don't know if they all knew who he was. Odds are, some of them recognized him from Conan O'Brien the night before, some from The Carol Burnett Show or movies like Blazing Saddles. But I think to many, he was just this loud, funny person carrying on, doing street theater. It was kind of a mix of Don Rickles and Irwin Corey, rattling from topic to topic, pausing now and then to insult the audience. He had his arm around my shoulder and every so often, he'd point at me and tell them, "This man writes the Garfield cartoons. You all watch Garfield!"

So I'm standing there, laughing outrageously at Mr. Korman's spontaneous performance but also feeling rather odd, wondering what these onlookers were thinking this was all about. I also noticed that every few seconds, one of them would look up, like there was something important going on over our heads that we couldn't see.

All in all, it was one of those "I'd give anything to have had a tape recorder — or better still, a video camera — moments." I'm sure you can believe me on this: Harvey Korman was hilarious, making a whole comedy routine out of nothing at all, entertaining the hell out of seventy or so people who just happened to be walking down Broadway at that moment. If he'd put out a container to collect donations, he'd have made a couple of hundred bucks.

After maybe fifteen minutes, Mrs. Korman and the little Kormans returned, Harvey told everyone the show was over and we said our goodbyes. As we walked off in opposite directions, I looked back and up to see what the spectators had been staring at over our heads…and there, on the building above us and at least four stories high, was a giant billboard of Garfield the Cat touting the luxury of Embassy Suites. It was a coincidence, of course, but I'll bet the folks who gathered around to listen to Harvey didn't think that. They must have all figured that Harvey Korman had been hired to stand in the middle of Times Square, right under the giant picture of Garfield, and introduce everyone to the guy who wrote the Garfield cartoons.

Two months later, I ran into Harvey again in the "waiting for a table to open up" section of Nate 'n Al's delicatessen in Beverly Hills. I reminded him of the Times Square incident and told him about the huge billboard we'd been in front of, and of course he immediately started hectoring me for pay for all the wonderful promotional work he'd done that day for our show. Just then, Harvey's lunch date arrived…a fine comedy writer (he wrote for the Burnett show, in fact) named Gary Belkin. We told Gary the whole story and Gary looked at Harvey and said, "Hey, you always wanted to perform on Broadway."

Harvey fell over laughing — and I mean, just about fell over. It looked for a second there like he was having some sort of seizure.

Harvey's a guy who's going to be remembered. You'll remember him as Hedley Lamarr in Blazing Saddles. You'll remember him in the dentist's chair with Tim Conway on The Carol Burnett Show or in one their touring performances. You'll remember him in movies, on TV shows, everywhere. Me, I'll remember him staggering to keep off the floor at Nate 'n Al's. He was laughing just as hard as everyone else laughed at him.