This coming Saturday would have been the 94th birthday of Walt Kelly, one of the true greats of cartooning and the creator of Pogo Possum and his merry band of swampland goombahs. Would you like to know more about this extraordinary man? Well, this Friday, his extraordinary daughter Carolyn Kelly — also, a fine cartoonist — will be interviewed on Time Travel, a pop culture radio show hosted by Dan Hollis and Jeff O'Boyle and heard on WNRJ, 1510 AM on your dial in Hackettstown, New Jersey. Carolyn will be on the air live with them from 4 PM to 5 PM Eastern Time talking about her father and his work and her work and maybe even the forthcoming reprinting of The Complete Pogo from Fantagraphics Books.

Just on the slight chance that you are not within listening range of Hackettstown, you can hear the show over on the WNRJ website. And if you miss it there, all episodes of Time Travel are archived soon after on this page. There are many fine conversations there to be heard, including one with Yours Truly. But you can hear me all the time, especially on Stu Shostak's station. It will be a rare treat to hear Carolyn interviewed.

There isn't a lot of film footage of the great Tom Lehrer performing his wonderfully satiric songs. But Robert Spina, a loyal reader of this site, informed me of a couple of examples I'll be embedding this week. Here's the first one…

I don't know why this kind of thing amazes me these days but it does. A Journalism professor named Michael Skube wrote this column for the L.A. Times. The content of the column is pretty well summarized by its subtitle: "The hard-line opinions on weblogs are no substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters."

Fair enough…and more than a little obvious. I don't know anyone who thinks weblogs are a substitute for the patient fact-finding of reporters. Some of us think that they're an important adjunct, and also that not enough reporters are doing that patient fact-finding these days. But a substitute? That sounds like Straw Man territory to me. Anyway, in his piece, Skube mentions several bloggers who don't do any real reporting and one of those names is that of Josh Marshall, whose Talking Points Memo website certainly does a fair amount of reporting and has even broken a number of stories that newspaper and TV reporters later picked up on. (Two examples of many: It was Marshall's site that first flagged Trent Lott's infamous remarks at Strom Thurmond's birthday party…remarks that soon cost Lott his post as Senate Minority Leader. And Marshall's site was reporting on the "outing" of Valerie Plame long before any of the mainstream press.)

So why did Skube cite Marshall as a blogger who didn't do reporting? Answer: He didn't. Skube says he hadn't visited Marshall's site when he wrote the article. Skube's editor, he says, stuck the name in there because he thought the piece needed more examples.

Isn't that kind of shoddy Journalism? The characterization of Marshall is offered as Skube's opinion…but he really didn't have that opinion. He was unfamiliar with Marshall's work and so accepts no responsibility for that opinion the way a blogger must accept reponsibility for what's on his blog. His editor decided the article didn't have sufficient examples (i.e., Skube had not done sufficient research for a piece complaining about others not doing sufficient research) so he added Marshall in as an example of Skube's thesis. And then Mr. Skube did not do the rather simple bit of reporting that it would have taken to log into Josh Marshall's website and see if it really was an example.

You can read Josh Marshall's summary of the whole story here.

It doesn't have Groucho in it but you still might want to set your TiVo (or for you cavepeople, VCR) and snag New Faces of 1937, which runs very early Wednesday morning on Turner Classic Movies. It's a great look at what Broadway was like back in the thirties, with performances by some pretty good comedic performers including Milton Berle, Joe Penner and Harry Parke. Mr. Parke went under the character name of Parkyakarkus and is probably best recalled today as the father of Albert Brooks and Bob Einstein. (Bob Einstein follows in the family tradition by maintaining his own dual identity. You know him better as "Super" Dave Osborne.) Joe Penner was a top radio comedian who is now best known for being oft-parodied in Warner Brothers cartoons. In fact, the early version of Elmer Fudd was something of a Joe Penner burlesque before he evolved into the Fudd we know and love.

New Faces of 1937 is filled with sketches, including Berle doing "A Day at the Brokers," which was a popular comedy routine of the thirties. There are also songs — Ann Miller's in there somewhere — but there's also a plot. What is this plot, you ask? Well, it's basically The Producers but without the Nazis.

While you're setting whatever machine you set, you might also want to get one or more of the movies TCM is running later that day. Following New Faces of 1937, they have Stage Door, which features Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Lucille Ball, Ann Miller, Eve Arden and Franklin Pangborn and is based on the George S. Kaufman-Edna Ferber play. Mr. Kaufman reportedly did not like what Hollywood did to his work and suggested they rename it Screen Door but it's not that bad, and Hepburn is wonderful in the role that she didn't get to play on Broadway. (It was written with her in mind but her agent and the producer could not arrive at a workable working arrangement.)

Then comes The Life of the Party, which also stars Joe Penner, Parkyakarkus and Lucille Ball, along with Billy Gilbert and Margaret Dumont. It was written by Bert Kalmar and Harry Ruby, who wrote so many wonderful things for Broadway and the Marx Brothers, and directed by William Seiter, who directed maybe my favorite Laurel and Hardy movie, Sons of the Desert. It's not a great film but there are moments that make it worth a viewing.

This is followed — they have sort of a theme going here — by the Marx Brothers version of Room Service, which also has Lucille Ball and Ann Miller in it. Both ladies are also in the next film, Too Many Girls, which is a faithful adaptation of the Rodgers and Hart Broadway hit. Desi Arnaz was the breakout sensation of the show when it played New York, and when RKO bought the movie rights, Desi came out with most of the cast to make the movie. Lucille Ball was added to that cast, the two of them met on the first day of rehearsal and…well, we all know what happened next. It's not a very good movie, by the way — silly plot, generally unmemorable songs and much of the cast — most obviously, Lucy — was badly dubbed.

These are followed by nine more movies that have Ann Miller in them…for those of you who like to see someone doing great, strenuous tap dancing without their hair moving a hundredth of an inch. Then they start on a binge of Jane Fonda flicks.

Last February, you may recall, we had great expectations that the Boomerang cable channel was going to air the 1966 Hanna-Barbera TV special, Alice in Wonderland or What's a Nice Kid Like You Doing in a Place Like This? This was the H-B version of the classic story as adapted by Bill Dana, who wrote the script, and Lee Adams and Charles Strouse, who wrote the Broadway-quality songs. Despite rumors that it may happen soon, this show has never been available on home video.

Just to screw with us, Boomerang advertised that version but ran a different, less interesting animated Alice in Wonderland instead. Well today, they apparently decided to even up the score. They advertised that less interesting Alice in Wonderland and, Christopher Cook informs me, ran the '66 Hanna-Barbera version. Somewhere in the vast Time-Warner empire, someone is toying with us. Just because they can.

I just decided we oughta have more Groucho on this site today. Here's a five minute excerpt from an interview with the man. This is from 1961 and the interviewer is newspaper columnist Hy Gardner.

Joe Conason on the legacy of Karl Rove. It's odd how people are reacting to Rove's departure from the Bush White House. Folks who don't like Bush — Conason being a prime example — credit him with deliberately and craftily planning a lot of things that may have been, for the Republicans, happy accidents. Meanwhile, folks on that side are for the most part hailing Rove as if he did a great job of selling a lousy product, that product being George W. Bush. It's like Rove got the guy into office and Cheney's made all the key decisions since then. Isn't it possible that George Bush has had a little something to do with the things he's achieved?

Thirty years ago today, the nation was still busy mourning the death of Elvis Presley and not nearly enough attention was paid to the passing of a man who meant as much if not more to some of us. Groucho Marx may have been born in 1890 — there are still historians willing to argue the point — but there's no argument that he died on August 19, 1977. In body, at least. One could insist that he'd died a few years earlier when his brilliant mind began to fail. One might even have wished that. But the body went on 8/19/77 — and that's all that went. The spirit…the influence…the legacy of immortal TV shows and movies and oft-quoted anecdotes remain intact.

I don't have a lot to add today that isn't in this article but I did want to note here that Groucho quotes and impressions are as ubiquitous as ever. In fact, we have reached the point now where people are imitating people imitating Groucho, which I suppose is also the case with Elvis impersonators copying other Elvis impersonators. I will also note that the once-endless cascade of books on the Marx Brothers seems to have dwindled to a trickle because, I suspect, we actually managed to momentarily exhaust the topic.

We need more on them and about Groucho, especially. Actually, what we really need today is Groucho, himself. Our leaders are doing a decent job of always reminding us that those in charge usually don't know what they're doing and are in constant need of deflation. But it would be nice to have Groucho around to make it funny. Or at least as funny as it can possibly be.

The eminent musician, Dr. Teeth, performs a song written by Stan Freberg….

A quick recommendation. Not long ago, comedian Jeffrey Ross visited Iraq as part of a troupe of comedians headed by Drew Carey. Ross took along a video camera and shot footage which he edited into a diary/documentary called Patriot Act. It runs incessantly this month on Showtime and it's well worth watching. The narrative nicely eschews the attitude of "Look at the wonderful thing I'm doing" which is too often present when Show Biz folks do something like this, and Ross seems to have a nice, honest perspective on the people he's entertaining and what a tour like that means to both the audiences and the performers.

And a quick non-recommendation. Mr. Ross is also part of this year's Comedy Central Roast, which this time is of rapper Flavor Flav. I'd never heard of him before and one suspects that at least a third of the roasters hadn't, either. I have to learn to stop watching these things. (If you haven't, it airs again tonight and tomorrow night.) For some reason, the dais always includes one rather clueless non-comedian who everyone decides to dump on relentlessly…to the point where it bypasses Funny and gets into the realm of picking on someone because they can't fight back. In this one, it's actress Brigitte Nielsen who's sitting there, forcing a grin as she's called an untalented whore. She appears to not understand all the insults hurled her way — that's the real embarrassing part — but she also seems to get enough of them to be very uncomfortable.

The most interesting thing about this roast — and obviously, this isn't a lot — is that someone at Comedy Central has apparently decided that the "s" word no longer has to be bleeped but the "f" word still does. No one will object. One or two of Mr. Carlin's other verboten words have already made it and the rest will soon follow. And almost no one will object.

Alan Light's photo album of the 1982 San Diego Con has been a hit on the web with tens of thousands of hits. Here's a link to another, shorter album of pics he took in 1990 at Forrest J Ackerman's Ackermansion in Los Feliz.

For those who don't know who or what this is: Forry Ackerman is a noted personality in the worlds of science-fiction and horror movies. He was a fan, an agent, a writer, an editor, a historian and a rabid collector. He edited the magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland and is also generally credited with coining the phrase, "sci-fi." That's him on the left in the photo above, posing with Alan.

Until a few years ago when he sold off his collection and moved into smaller digs, Ackerman housed an incredible collection of s-f and horror books and artifacts in a home he nicknamed "The Ackermansion." Actually, it was two homes. The first, which I visited first in 1968, was on Sherbourne Drive in Beverly Hills. A few years later, he moved — and what a move it must have been — into a larger home on Glendower Avenue in Los Feliz.

He often welcomed fans, tourists, celebrities, strangers, werewolves and just about anybody into his home, which was kind of a museum of its subject matter. I found the place somewhat creepy in a couple of ways above and beyond the subject matter…but then, I was never as much a fan of horror movies as some of my friends. It sure made them happy to be there.

As I said, Ackerman no longer lives in such a manner. In recent years, he's alternated between a more modest bungalow and an array of nursing homes and hospital rooms. He'll turn 91 later this year and for much of the last decade, rumors have swirled that Forry is only weeks from hanging out with Bela and Boris. The rumors will eventually be true but I long ago stopped giving them any credence.

Here, from the 1957 Emmy Awards ceremony, we have Phil Silvers presenting the Best Writing award…to the writers of his own show. So we get a fast glimpse of the legendary Nat Hiken, who created the Sgt. Bilko series, produced it and directed it.

Last November, we complained that many roads in and out of L.A. International Airport had been closed now and then so that the latest Die Hard movie could film around there. We — and of course, by "we," I mean only myself — feel those are inconvenienced by such matters are way too forgiving of them. And yes, I know it's good for the economy and local businesses if filmmaking stays in Los Angeles and doesn't migrate elsewhere…but there's also the downside of people having their lives disrupted or even of some businesses being hurt. I don't think the pros and cons always measure out in favor of the movie guys.

Well, here we go again. From this morning's Los Angeles Times…

Travelers heading to Los Angeles International Airport this weekend and next should allow extra time because a section of the 105 Freeway near the airport will be closed for filming.

All eastbound lanes between Sepulveda and La Cienega boulevards will be closed from 3 a.m. to midnight the two Saturdays and Sundays to allow shooting of the action film "John Hancock," according to LAX officials. In addition, the westbound portion of the freeway between Sepulveda and the 405 Freeway will be closed intermittently between 6 a.m. and 8 p.m. both days of the weekends.

The airport will close the exit ramps from the passenger terminal areas leading to southbound Sepulveda. Departing traffic will be directed to eastbound Century Boulevard.

I assume that LAX gets some sort of use fee that makes it worth the hassle — for them, not for travellers — to allow this. But LAX doesn't own the 105 Freeway. Your tax dollars and mine paid for it and not so it could be closed to us because someone wanted to shoot a movie there.

And I'm going to assume that's a typo about closing the freeway from 3 a.m. until midnight, right? Because that's kinda like most of the day.

I should add one other note to my report on last night's Lewis Black concert. As I said, it was at the Disney Concert Hall, which is across the boulevard from the Music Center here in downtown Ell Lay. The last few years, I've refrained from attending anything at the Music Center for reasons you'd understand if you ever experienced the traffic and parking problems I endured my last few outings there. Something had to be really, really special to get me to subject myself to that again.

But getting to and from the Disney Concert Hall was rather easy. A number of downtown restaurants are now serviced by shuttle buses that will truck you to and from the Disney Concert Hall, the Music Center and other nearby venues like the Staples Center. You park for the restaurant, leave your auto there and take the shuttle. My friends and I dined at the Daily Grill and valet parking there is five bucks with a validation from the restaurant. Even adding in what I tipped the valet and the shuttle driver, that's not a bad price to pay these days to park for dinner and a show. And it was fairly simple to get to the show and back again. Just something to keep in mind if you are, as I was, reticent to brave some of those parking structures.

If you're thinking Rudy Giuliani has any credentials for dealing with international relations, read this essay that he recently wrote. And if that doesn't convince you you're wrong, read this takedown of it by Fred Kaplan.