Friday afternoon, I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles office to get my drivers license renewed. It's customary to make cracks about long, long lines at the D.M.V. and employees who act like Lee Majors running in slow-motion…but I was in and out in twenty minutes and it would have been ten, had it not been for an incident I'll describe in a moment.

Renewal by mail was possible but I wanted to get a new photo taken. I've lost more than 100 pounds since the last one was snapped (99+ pounds of flesh, one pound of hair) and the pic doesn't look much like me these days. I've had two hassles with T.S.A. employees at airports and one with the only sales clerk who actually looks at the photo when you pay with a credit card and the store policy is to check the customer's i.d. It's amazing how many "look" and don't notice that the picture doesn't particularly resemble the patron.

I arrive at 12:15 for a 12:20 appointment and am given a form to fill out and return to the window. When I return it, there's a man ahead of me having an emotional breakdown. He's around 65 (I'm guessing) and he works for a company not unlike Super Shuttle that drives folks to the airport…and even with eye glasses as thick as the Berlin Wall, he has just failed the vision test and been told his license will not be renewed. Amidst angry tears and yelling, he is arguing with a D.M.V. employee who is just trying to enforce the rules and hasn't the authority to do anything else.

As near as I can tell, the argument goes roughly like this: "I cannot drive without a license. If I do not drive, I do not have a job. If I do not have a job, my family cannot pay rent or purchase groceries. Therefore, you must give me a license."

The D.M.V. staffer explains very politely that the eye exam is not something that can just be ignored. It's given for a reason. He's sorry but the applicant had several cracks at it — however many are permitted — and he failed. A supervisor of some sort comes over and the conversation is moved to one side (so I can go about my business) and it is repeated. As I'm waiting for my new photo to be snapped, I can hear the supervisor saying, "The fact that you need the job doesn't change the fact that you failed the test."

All the people who are sitting around and waiting have heard the exchange. They feel sorry for the man whose livelihood has gone away with his vision. They also feel sorry for the D.M.V. employee who was screamed at as if he'd decided to starve the man's family.

Behind me in line, waiting for her picture to be taken, is a lady who I'd guess is in her eighties. "It's so sad," she says. "That poor man." The man waiting behind her says, "Why don't they just give him a license?" To which the woman replies, "Would you want to ride with a driver who can't see well enough to pass the eye test here? That's scary."

I lean over and say, "The scary thing is that he was driving people to and from the airport yesterday, maybe even this morning."

"That's not even the scary thing," the man says. "The scary thing is that he's going to drive home from here. When I'm going through the parking lot, he'll probably be going through the parking lot." Then he thinks for a second and adds, "You know, my company has jobs where you don't have to drive and good vision isn't essential." He pulls out a business card, tells the lady to save his place in line, and goes over and gives one to the man who has just lost his license.

That's all there is to this story. My picture is then taken so I leave and I can't tell you what, if anything, happened as a result. But I'd like to think it will all lead to a happy ending.

Today, I heard from three people who received an e-mail from Amazon telling them their copy of Kirby: King of Comics had just shipped…and they received the book the same day they received this e-mail. One got the book yesterday and the e-mail today. In any case, since this morning's post, Amazon has changed the listing and they now say they have it in stock. So click right here and buy your copy.

I'll be signing copies at the Wizard World Los Angeles convention March 14-16 and at the New York Comic Con April 18-20 and at a number of bookstores which I'll announce here.

Also: I should have mentioned (but didn't because I didn't know) that the photo of Jack I posted on the message before last was taken by James Van Hise. Thanks, Jim.

The last few years I've attended the Comic-Con International in San Diego, I've stayed at the Manchester Grand Hyatt, a fine hotel.

There are many things to do there. However, if I stay at the Hyatt this year, I don't think I'm going to do this.

This morning, I heard from two different folks who'd received their copies of my new book, Kirby: King of Comics. One had pre-ordered from Amazon and the other had pre-ordered from Barnes & Noble. So I guess it's out.

As of this moment, the Amazon listing still says "Usually ships within 2 to 5 weeks," which may mean they have copies on hand and no one has gotten around to changing the listing. Or it may mean that they've only received enough to fill pre-orders and are waiting for more before they switch it to say "In Stock." I am told that a second printing will be on the presses, probably early next week. For it, we're fixing two insignificant typos and one significant one (Jack did sixteen issues of The Demon, not eighteen) plus I rewrote two captions that could have been phrased better.)

But at least one person who ordered from Amazon has their copy in hand…so order with confidence. It is possible to actually receive your copy in this lifetime.

I'm pretty darned happy with how the thing came out. Naturally, there are things I wish I'd done differently — when are there not? — and with a topic as vast as Kirby, you often think of more points that should have been made, more details that should have been included. But of course. Fortunately, I have that other book on Jack in the works and I can put all that stuff in there.

Hope you like it. Hope you buy it. More importantly, I hope Jack and Roz would have liked it.

Author David Holzel wrote a real good article on one of my favorite performers, Allan Sherman.

And I'm sorry I haven't posted more lately here, folks. This "paying work" stuff gets in the way of blogging and I need to do something about it.

Today, I was over at U.S.C. teaching the class I teach there. I noticed that on a wall, someone had posted a quote from Bertrand Russell that said…

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

…but I'm not all that sure about it.

I haven't written lately about the late night TV situation. As this article in the New York Times explains, various other networks and syndicators are preparing to empty the vaults to secure the services of Jay Leno as soon as he becomes a Free Agent. Regardless of whether you like Jay or not (I do), you might get some jollies at the thought that darn near every "expert" prediction that has ever been made about this guy failing has been spectacularly wrong.

At various times since he got the job of replacing the legendary Carson, network biggies, ad agencies, TV pundits and others have forecast his demise, especially against the might of Letterman. And while it's true that Dave dominated for a while, Jay's ratings were never all that bad. The guy stayed in the game and kept at it…and he's now about to become one of the wealthiest, most powerful souls in show biz, thanks to NBC betting against him and engineering his replacement by Conan O'Brien. Not all that long ago, entertainment reporters were writing that the decision to install Leno instead of Letterman behind the Tonight Show desk was one of the dumbest moves in the history of the industry. I think it may work the other way around: Hindsight will show it as a wise notion, and the ouster of Jay will be seen as the dumbest.

Not that O'Brien won't do well in that slot. He might or might not, and the "might not" may have a lot to do with factors beyond his control. Is Jimmy Fallon really going to be going in at 12:35 after him? Lead-ins matter to some extent but so do lead-outs. There are some folks who watch Leno now because the Jay/Conan parlay interests them more than Dave/Craig. Fallon seems to me a little too low-key to command America's attention at bedtime and I'm curious as to why NBC might think otherwise.

More significantly, we may have Dave, Jay and Conan carving that 11:35 audience three ways. That was what NBC was trying to avoid when they opted to nudge Leno aside rather than allow O'Brien to hopscotch over to Fox for a competing show. If Jay winds up with an 11:35 show (or even, on Fox, an 11 PM one), NBC probably won't be very happy with the results. Not happy at all.

On February 16 on this site, we predicted that the Writers Guild contract would be approved by 93% of the voting membership.

Final vote total: 93.6%.

I didn't pay a lot of attention to the Oscars this year…and as far as I can tell, neither did anyone else. As I think we discussed here, the nominees turned out to be a lot of folks and films that might have achieved excellence but didn't generate the kind of emotional moments and issues where we really cared who or what won. To me, the biggest surprise of the evening was that they included Dabbs Greer in the "In Memoriam" montage and left out Joey Bishop. Jon Stewart, I thought, did an okay job of hosting, meaning he got some laughs and never really slowed up the proceedings. The clips from old Oscar telecasts were nice but there were times when you got the feeling someone had said, "Hmmm…we'd better remind the world what it was like to care about this event."

At least, those were my impressions after leapfrogging through the entire show in under an hour via TiVo. If you sat through every blessed minute of it, you have no one to blame but yourself.

Someone wrote to ask me what I'd do to make the Oscars interesting. Here's another one of Evanier's free brilliant ideas that no one will ever do: Leave the show exactly as it is but telecast an alternate version. Over on the ABC Family channel or some other network, run the exact same show with a live commentary track. Get together a couple of comedians — Kathy Griffin, for sure…maybe Lewis Black or Gilbert Gottfried…maybe four or five of them. Get someone who can make catty remarks about the gowns but who isn't Joan Rivers or Mr. Blackwell. Get someone like Leonard Maltin…no, on second thought, get Leonard Maltin. You need to have at least one person in this who knows about and cares about movies. Then let these people heckle the Academy Awards…or they can comment, annotate, discuss, whatever. So it's like you're watching the telecast at a real great party full of witty people.

Viewers who don't want their Academy Awards despoiled could watch the regular broadcast. Those who don't wish to see that — and they were not few in number this year — could switch over and watch the party version. I suspect there'd be a lot of them. In fact, let's find out with another one of our frighteningly unscientific polls. This one closes in one week…

This may interest someone. One of my favorite movies is The Odd Couple with Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon. One day in the early seventies, I was in a movie memorabilia shop in Hollywood browsing through several boxes of miscellaneous, unsorted old stills which they sold for something like a quarter apiece. Two of three of the boxes, as it turned out, contained not stills but proof sheets — and maybe in this day and age, I need to explain what those are.

When someone shoots 35mm negative film — which some photographers, amazingly, still do but which once was the norm — they usually have them processed and then turned into proof sheets, which are tiny prints (about an inch by an inch and a quarter) of the negatives. They're too small to use for much of anything except to figure out which shots are good enough to turn into…or at least, they used to be close to useless.

In the boxes that day, I found about twenty proof sheets from stills that were shot on the set of The Odd Couple. I didn't find the stills, themselves and they wouldn't have been in the quarter box, anyway. But I found all these proof sheets and they were of so little value that the storeowner gave them all to me for two bucks. I stuck them in a file folder and forgot about them.

This afternoon, I came across them and on a whim, had my assistant scan them at 1200 dpi, just to see how well they'd enlarge. Pretty well, it turns out. Modern technology makes it possible to get some pretty sharp images off these teensy photographs. Here's a low rez detail of the above frame…

I don't have anything in mind for them but suddenly, I have a whole mess of Odd Couple images I didn't have before. Also, somewhere in this house, there's a crate with other proof sheets. Some are ones I bought like the Odd Couple proofs but some are from my own work with a camera. I lost some negatives of photos I shot in the seventies, as well as the photos, themselves…but I may still have the proof sheets. That would sure be interesting. In the meantime, I just thought I'd mention this here because it may make someone think, "Hey, I've got old proof sheets squirreled away here. Maybe there are some images on them that can be scanned and put to some use."