Fred Kaplan on why the Democrats in the Senate keep opposing the Iraq War but meeting Bush's demands for more $$$ to keep it going.

Well, let's see where we are with this puppy…

There's still no news about the AMPTP returning to the bargaining table with the Writers Guild. One presumes this will occur after the first of the year and probably after the AMPTP has opened discussions with the Directors Guild on their contract. A lot of folks seem to be assuming that the DGA will rapidly make one of its quickie deals that gives it a little bump while setting up some sort of precedent that undermines other unions.

I doubt that. For one thing, the DGA is in no real hurry. Their contract doesn't expire until the end of July. Secondly, a lot of DGA members — especially those who are also writers and/or actors — have made it clear to the guild leadership that they don't want to see the DGA allow itself to be used against the other unions, nor do they want to accept a deal that concedes many of the points that the AMPTP is refusing to give the WGA. Lastly, if played right, the DGA could have a lot of leverage as a result of what's happened with the WGA. It's too good an opportunity to blow on a fast sellout.

Or so all the logic tells us. Then again, this is the Directors Guild that sometimes thinks the best way to deal with the AMPTP is to not make trouble for them.

The AMPTP is out trying to sell the idea that the current strike is all the fault of those stupid writers, not of the organization that has refused to bargain in good faith or, lately, at all. I don't see this p.r. campaign as gaining any real traction, nor do I see it weakening WGA resolve. For every one writer who begins to doubt that we're doing the right thing, another twenty get angry and more determined. But I guess Nick Counter has to say something.

David Letterman's company is about to open talks with the WGA about the possibility of an interim contract…and do take note of how many news sources were reporting last week that such a deal was close or near-certain or even already completed. It's a good reminder of how totally wrong and rumor-driven some of the news coverage of this strike has been. They commence discussions tomorrow, and the consensus in the WGA seems to be not to grant such a deal.

I know there's a respectable argument that the WGA should pact with Letterman's outfit, Worldwide Pants. Dave is likely to return with or without an interim deal, and having his writers back — and the removal of a picket line that will scare away desired guests — would give him an advantage over competition with no interim contract. If that would help Dave clobber Jay, wouldn't that put additional pressure on NBC to settle? (Answer to that: Maybe but maybe not. And CBS, which would see two of its key programs probably return to at least their old levels of profitability, might figure that they then had less reason to settle.)

There may, however, be even a better reason that the WGA will not make that deal with Letterman. According to this article in Variety…

Situation is complicated by the fact that while Worldwide Pants owns the CBS latenighters, company cannot dicker with the guild on the
central issues of new-media distribution because CBS controls most of the new-media rights on those shows.

This whole strike is about new-media distribution and if Letterman's company can't make a deal in that area, that's a contract-killer right there. We're on strike against companies that don't want to share those revenues.

So it looks like Dave will be going back to work on January 2 but without his writing staff. It seems highly appropriate that his only announced guest for that night so far is Donald Trump, a man who believes that in any dispute between employer and employee, the employer is always right.

Lastly: Folks keep asking me how long I think the strike is going to last. The other night over dinner with some writers, I made what everyone seemed to think was a strong case: All logic-based indicators would, I think, point to the AMPTP trying to make a deal on or around February 1 and not, as some have suggested, keeping the WGA out until next June or so. When I get some time, I'll write up that argument for this page…but it will have to be qualified with a reminder that so far in this strike, and many times in other labor disputes, the Alliance has not done what you'd think would be in its best interests. Sometimes, the execs involved are stubborn, much as some of our elected officials cling to strategies long after they should have course-corrected.

The AMPTP also has this "rule of one" where one of the core member companies can veto a deal that the others all want to make. In the '88 strike, there were several major studios that thought it was insane to let the thing go on as long as they did. But they were not unanimous so that strike went on longer than even some on their side wanted. This one may, too…but when I get a chance, I'll tell you why I think it would be really foolish of the AMPTP to let this one go much past Groundhog Day.

Jeannie Schulz — widow of that guy who drew Charlie Brown, plus she's also a very bright, lovely lady — has some comments on the David Michaelis book on her late hubby. I recently got a copy (free) which I'm working my way through and so far, it seems to be everything Schulz's associates have been telling me it is: A lot of good, well-researched revelations about the man interspersed with so many odd deductions about his character and personality and too many questionable factual assertions as to despoil the good parts. I think, when an author who never met you says you never hugged people, and all your friends and family are saying you did, the author is on wafer-thin ice.

Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, is quite a surprise. It's kind of an autobiography, though he says it comes close to being a biography because he feels so detached from the person he's writing about. He covers his childhood, his adolescent days working at Disneyland and Knott's Berry Farm, and then his break-in to comedy writing and performing and stardom. It stops when he makes his first movie, The Jerk, and gives up stand-up forever. Amazingly introspective — which is not to say all his self-observations ring true — he depicts his subject (himself) as not particularly gifted in the way we think a successful comedian is born funny. To Martin, it was all a matter of figuring out how to do something that, he seems to feel, did not come naturally to him.

It is not, in some ways, a particularly flattering self-portrait. I came away from the book admiring Martin's candor and willingness to display his warts but I'm less certain of how I feel about him as a comedian. In portions of Born Standing Up, he seems to be conducting a final burial for his stand-up act, drawing a hard line between that guy and the person he is today…and even the old Steve Martin, the guy in the white suit with the arrow through his head, doesn't seem to have ever been the real Steve Martin. He writes of anxiety attacks and of feeling lost in his own career…and at time, I found myself wondering why he wrote the book.

Which is not to say it's not a fascinating read. You can order it from Amazon by clicking here and I'm going to recommend you do that. It's a quick read and a good chance to get inside the brain of a very successful performer. You'll understand that stardom, especially in the area of stand-up comedy, ain't always as wonderful as it may look.

I link to this little Christmas cartoon every year and people seem to love it…

In two recent messages here, I said that The Simpsons Movie was covered by a Writers Guild contract. I said that because I'd been told as much by a couple of folks who should have known. I am now informed by one of the Simpsons writers that is not so.

On the other hand, I have it directly from Neil Gaiman, who co-wrote the recent Beowulf animated film that it was covered by the WGA. And I'll bet he's right.

2008 will mark seventy (70) years since Superman first appeared in Action Comics. Michael Sangiacomo, who writes for the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, is challenging locals to do something about it. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created one of the great figures in American popular fiction, hailed from Cleveland…and yet the city has no official recognition of this. No Siegel and Shuster Street, no statues, no plaques, nothing. Thanks to Jef Peckham for the link…and thanks to Mike Sangiacomo who at the Mid-Ohio Con last month, gave me copies of his fine graphic novel, Tales of the Starlight Drive-In.

My latest excuse for being behind in answering your e-mails is a good one: I seem to have a Toxic Waste Dump in my kitchen.

Remember that trip I took to New York, Indiana and Ohio a few weeks ago? The last Saturday night of it, I was in Ohio, leading a group of folks from the comic convention out to dinner, when I got one of those phone calls you never want to get when you're outta town: The lady who was house-sitting for me was calling to say that water was dripping out of my dining room and kitchen ceilings. As we soon discovered, the supply line carrying H2O to an upstairs toilet had burst. Fixing the toilet cost about thirty bucks. Fixing the water damage will be a little costlier…to me (a $1000 deductible) and to my insurance company (a lot more than that).

My dining room is usually lined with bookcases and piled high with boxes of "to be sorted" books. About a third of the room was seriously damaged…although, miraculously, only one box of books. Perhaps fittingly, it was a box of books that I wrote and they're easily replaceable. It was almost like the leak knew which things not to get wet.

In the kitchen…well, I now have about half a kitchen. The wall oven was destroyed, along with several cabinets and their contents. The wall behind the sink was soaked and in order to fix it, they started by ripping the walls open and leaving some huge dehumidifiers in there, running 24/7 for a week to dry things out. Then they came and ripped out almost everything in there — the cabinets, the counter, the sink, the dishwasher, the garbage disposal, etc. Before they did any of this, they put up floor-to-ceiling plastic walls to create what they call a "containment area." It contains half my kitchen and a third of my dining room. To get into it, you need to go through a little airlock, which is what you're looking at in the above photo. The black thing at right is my refrigerator. To the immediate left of it is the access into the containment area, carefully posted with warning signs in English and Spanish. The Spanish is there, I guess, for when Sergio Aragonés comes to visit me.

Monday and Tuesday, three men were in there all day, wearing respirators and full-body protective gear. They finished opening all the walls and removed all the lath and plaster. Then they carefully washed and vacuumed everything else. The enemy here is mold and it sure looks like they got all of it out. This morning, a man from another company came to by to take samplings. If the analysis shows that all the biological no-nos are gone, reconstruction work can begin. The firm that's doing it says six weeks so I figure I'll be lucky if it's done in ten. If I decide to do some remodelling in the process, as I probably will, it could run longer than an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical.

'Til then, I'll be washing dishes in the downstairs bathroom and living out of the boxes we packed of all the food and utensils that could be saved from the ailing half of the kitchen. There won't be a lot of cooking, which is fine. Even under normal conditions, my cooking leads to other kinds of biological hazards.

Still, it's a bit disconcerting, when I walk in there to get a tomato juice or a sandwich, to see health warnings posted next to my icebox. After it's all done, I may leave the signs up. Just in case my new oven looks so neat that I get the urge to bake.

Here's a short trailer for a reissue of The Music Man, which features Robert Preston doing some special lyrics just for the trailer. The longer, original version of this trailer (which I can't find) had more of this and didn't have the bad edits in it. But for now, you'll have to settle for this…

John Pekkanen on one of our country's greatest exports. We may not be good at spreading democracy but we're darn good at encouraging people to smoke cigarettes.

Hey, kids! It's Sourpuss and Gandy Goose, who were two of my favorite characters until I actually saw them in a cartoon. Even when I was six, I gave a lot of animated films the "Springtime for Hitler" look and about half the output of Paul Terry's shorts did that for me. Nevertheless, I liked a lot of Terrytoons so I'll be listening tomorrow when Animation Historian Jerry Beck discusses them and other classic cartoons on Stu's Show, the endlessly-plugged talk show that you can hear on Shokus Internet Radio. Each broadcast can be heard live on your computer on Wednesday — from 4 PM to 6 PM on the West Coast and from 7 PM to 9 PM on the East Coast and if you're somewhere else, you can probably figure out the time from that information.

Better still, I won't just be listening to the show. I'll be on it. At the top of the program, I'll be on the phone for a brief but pungent discussion of the Writers Guild strike with host Stuart Shostak. Listen to that, then stay tuned to hear Jerry talk about cartoons, including (I'm sure) some well-deserved pride at the recent animation DVDs that he's helped midwife to great sales and even greater critical acclaim. Jerry, who's also one of the Brewmasters over at Cartoon Brew, is highly responsible for getting some of your favorite animation onto DVD and getting it treated with loving care.

You can listen to Shokus Internet Radio at the appropriate time by going to that website, selecting an audio browser and clicking your way to the fun. You can actually listen right now. There's always something good on there.

The press loves a horse race and often invents them even when there's no evidence of one. If you read the coverage lately, you'd think that Mike Huckabee and Ron Paul were surging ahead with the former likely to grab the G.O.P. nomination and the latter making a stronger showing than anyone had expected…and maybe that's right. But maybe The Gallup Poll is correct when it indicates that Huckabee is more or less tied for a distant second place finish behind Giuliani…tied with McCain, Romney and Thompson. And Paul is way down at 3%, tied with Alan Keyes, who not one person on the planet thinks has a chance of being the nominee. What's more, the numbers show no momentum for either man in recent weeks. Huckabee is right where he was a month ago (with Giuliani even farther ahead of him now) and Paul is down a point from where he was a month ago.

Yet still, you read how Huckabee and Paul are coming up from behind, gaining on the others. Why do I have the feeling that neither man is even running for the Republican Presidential nomination any more? Huckabee's running for the veep slot and Paul's getting ready to make an independent bid.

Publishers Weekly has an article up about how the WGA strike is affecting folks who write both that kind of material and also comic books. And I am one of them.

A lot of folks this AM seem very happy that the Writers Guild and Screen Actors Guild are doing something that should hurt the Golden Globe Awards — the writers refusing to allow WGA talent to write it, and SAG encouraging its members to stay away. This joy is actually unrelated to the strike. It's that no one seems to really like the Golden Globe Awards very much.

The awards are voted every year by something called the Hollywood Foreign Press Association. Who are they? No one seems to know. They throw a good party and they hype the importance of their awards, especially as a precursor to the Oscars. Basically, they have tradition and a good name. If you're in charge of advertising a movie and it wins three Golden Globe Awards, you say that in all the ads, presuming (correctly) that no one is going to go, "Who the hell even votes for those?" The Golden Globes therefore become a bit more famous and people assume they must mean something.

I've heard people debate whether the Academy Awards even mean a lot, above and beyond the fact that people think they mean a lot, and they do bolster careers and box office revenues. There is a convincing argument as to whether the voters have actually seen all the nominated films or if they just handed their ballots to their maids to fill out. Some, it is assumed, vote mindlessly for everything that is connected to them in any sort of business sense or friendship. (Back when movie studios had a lot of people under contract, it was not uncommon for the studio to circulate lists of who they wanted their employees to vote for in each category…or even to say "Just give us your ballots and we'll fill them out for you!") But at least with the Oscars, we know some people are voting whose opinions mean something.

But the Golden Globes? The industry joke is that when you win one, you thank "whoever votes for these things" and don't ask questions. When you get an Oscar, you can pretend that all your peers gave it to you; that the elite of the business unanimously thinks you're swell and that, in the words of Sally Field, they really like you. With the Golden Globes, no one who gets one wants to know too much because they're afraid they'll learn (or others may learn) that their lovely trophy was voted to them by caterers and parking attendants.

Basically, it's all a starfest. America watches because famous people show up…and famous people show up because other famous people show up, especially famous people who are campaigning for Oscar votes. This year, with Boycott in the air, we may be watching to see if famous people show up…or if so, which famous people show up and if any of them use the forum to denounce those who've caused or prolonged the strike. But I think a lot of people in the industry will be watching because they've long believed that the ceremony achieves a level of Phoniness that is offensive even for a Hollywood P.R. stunt, and they'll enjoy seeing it crash and burn.

Eight years ago today, I started blogging. In fact, it wasn't even called blogging then and there was no neat software like I'm now using to post my every-day-or-so comments. Back then, I was hand-coding my messages and figured to do it once a week, if that often…but I've found it to be fun and useful. It keeps me in touch with all sorts of people I know, gets me in touch with folks I'd like to know…and you'd be amazed at how many old friendships I've renewed. Once, I asked a question here about a famous Big Name Comedian and ten minutes later, the man himself e-mailed me with what I later learned was the wrong answer.

I should thank all the people who've made this possible but I've thought it over and decided it's only me.

Well, I guess I should thank all of you who've tipped the website (hint, hint) and helped make me feel that the effort is appreciated. You've also helped me feed animals in my backyard, buy really weird stuff off eBay and tip other websites. That's all I do with that money.

And I should also thank those of you who've sent in links and comments that were worth passing on. So I guess it isn't only me.

People always ask me, "Where do you get the time?" But I'm a professional writer and to me, posting here is like what an artist does in the morning, sketching to loosen up his drawing hand for the day. It's also very comforting, when I'm in the middle of writing an assignment for someone else, to write something that is wholly mine, even if it stinks. It's like Recess.

In fact, I have to get back to an assignment right now. Thanks to everyone I just thanked and anyone else I should thank.