Time Magazine is devoting its new issue to remembering John F. Kennedy. Since they apparently didn't need a couple of pages for late-breaking Paris Hilton news, they stuck in a brief debate about whether there was a conspiracy in the death of their cover boy. Given the gravity of the topic, it's an appallingly brief exchange but the "no" argument, penned by Vince Bugliosi, makes some pretty solid points. The "yes" argument, which is by David Talbot, is quite weak, putting its focus not on whether there was a conspiracy but on whether Bobby Kennedy believed there was one. Which is not the same thing.

Thanks to Michael Kelley for letting me know about this.

Or it will be soon.

I access the Internet via a Road Runner cable connection. For reasons too boring to go into, I also needed a dial-up connection so I had a subscription for $9.95 per month with a company called AllVantage that offered this…with a real nice online webmail interface and pretty good service. Recently though, AllVantage got out of this business and announced that effective July 19, they would cease offering dial-up Internet access and such, and that all our accounts would be transferred over to PeoplePC, another firm that offers much the same thing at much the same price.

Actually, PeoplePC offers a much less sophisticated webmail interface. In fact, GMail, which is free, offers a better one so the only reason I would need PeoplePC is for the dial-up connection, which I also don't need because the Road Runner people now have those available — also for free — to their cable subscribers. Which is why I don't need PeoplePC at all and decided to cancel it before they billed me. The AllVantage people not only gave them my account but also my credit card info as well, which is either a violation of some law or should be.

The trouble is that as with many such services, cancelling your account involves calling a Cancellation Department. You can't just opt out online because they want you to speak with someone whose job is to talk you out of leaving. (AllVantage does online cancellations. In fact, I don't think it's even possible to talk to a human being who works for that company, assuming there even are any.)

So I just spent an aggravating half-hour on the phone, trying to cancel a PeoplePC account I never signed up for in the first place. I always feel bad when I get annoyed with these employees who have their little script they've been ordered to follow. The lady on the phone seemed nice enough…but she was either not smart enough to realize that she couldn't keep me, or perhaps she just wasn't allowed to make that determination. She kept asking me why I wanted to cancel and what possible reasons I could have for being anything less than thrilled with PeoplePC and didn't I want to keep my account intact and give it a few more months before I did something as drastic as cancelling this account I never wanted in the first place?

I told her I didn't need a dial-up account at all. I told her I never wanted PeoplePC at all. I told her that my attempts to make telephone connection with people there had been uniformly inefficient and resulted in excrutiating hold times. I told her I didn't like their webmail interface and that it didn't serve my purposes. Somehow, she was not empowered to just write me off and close out my account then and there. She still had to put me through more questions and urge me to give them a chance to prove themselves. I kept flashing on all these guys on Fox News Channel telling us that The Surge will work if we just give it more time. And more time and more time and more time…

I think (note the boldface) I finally convinced her to close out my business with them. She gave me a 17-digit "cancellation confirmation number," which of course raises the question of why that number requires seventeen digits. Are that many people cancelling? You can write out the entire population of the planet in ten digits. Why do they need more number combinations than that?

I hope this will be my last message here about PeoplePC. And a warning to you all.

Here's a commercial for Twinkles, "the only cereal in the storybook package." Twinkles was an elephant and when you bought his cereal, which was kind of like sugary Cheerios in star shapes, there was a little storybook affixed to the back of the box. The idea was that you could read the Twinkles story while you ate the cereal. I recall neither being very nourishing. A batch of Twinkles adventures were also produced for television on the lowest-possible budgets…spots that split the difference between being cartoons and being commercials. This is one of them.

The narrator of the Twinkles spot is George S. Irving, an actor who was in most of the later Total Television cartoon shows, like Underdog. At last report, Mr. Irving was still actively performing in musical theater in and around the New York area. There's also a commercial in there with a fireman who sounds to me like either Arnold Stang with a cold, or someone doing an okay impression of Arnold Stang. I'm thinking the latter. (And speaking of Arnold Stang, check out this weblog post for a nice profile of that fine comic actor. In the next week or so, I'll try to get time to write up my one Arnold Stang anecdote and post it here.) Anyway, here's Twinkles…

And if you liked that, here's another one. This one's in color…

My friends Anthony Tollin and Will Murray recently made an amazing and important discovery about a piece of comic book history. As we all know, Batman debuted in Detective Comics #27, in a story entitled "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." It was signed by Bob Kane and much of it may even have been drawn by him. It was written, sans credit, by Bill Finger, who later acknowledged a lot of inspiration from the pulp magazine character, The Shadow. As it turns out, "inspiration" was putting it mildly.

Anthony and Will are both experts on The Shadow and are involved in the production of new facsimile editions of that pulp and also Doc Savage, which Tony is publishing. Based on some leads from Will, Tony managed to locate a Shadow story that was clearly the template for that first Batman story, even to the point of it being about a "chemical syndicate." Here's the first part of a two-part interview with Anthony all about it.

If my mail is any indication, an abnormally high percentage of folks who read this site are TiVo owners. If you are one such critter, I have a recommendation you should keep handy. If your TiVo breaks…or if you want to upgrade it to a larger harddisk…or if you just need new accessories, check out the folks at WeaKnees. I don't understand the name either, but they upgrade TiVos and they fix them and their site is full of tips and tricks.

You will be especially beholden to them if you have the HR10-250 DirecTV model and it stops working. This page will tell you what to do about that. Generally speaking, if these people can't fix your TiVo, it can't be fixed. They upgraded one of my many TiVos and it's worked flawlessly since then.

Stan Lee is interviewed by budding filmmakers on Life After Film School, tomorrow (Monday) night on Fox Movie Channel.

Whenever I've had time to read in the last week or so, I've been back in the past with two new books: The Conviction of Richard Nixon: The Untold Story of the Frost/Nixon Interviews by James Reston Jr. and Reclaiming History: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy by Vincent Bugliosi. The first is Reston's account of the famed 1977 Frost/Nixon debates which are now the subject of a hit play. He was a key member of Frost's research/support team. The second is a major work by the famed Prosecuting Attorney, making the case that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of John F. Kennedy and that there was no, repeat, no conspiracy.

The Reston book covers much of the same ground as Frost's (obviously ghost-written) 1978 book, I Gave Them A Sword: Behind the Scenes of the Nixon Interviews. The main bit of "new" info is Reston explaining in some detail how he located a previously-overlooked and highly-damning conversation in a transcript of Nixon's infamous tapes. That bit of surprise evidence in the interviews helped Frost "nail" Nixon…or at least to keep him on the ropes for much of the Watergate conversation. Another interesting revelation is that Nixon's deal with Frost specified that during the taping, the ex-president could mop sweat from his face any time Frost was asking a question, and that footage of him doing this would not be included in the broadcast. All in all though, the book didn't tell me much that I didn't already know.

The main problem with the Bugliosi book is that it's unreadable. I don't mean it's badly-written. I mean it's unreadable. The book is over 1600 pages…and it's actually even longer than that suggests because it comes with a CD that includes all the endnotes and sources, plus the book is set in a rather small, uncomfortable font. I have terrific vision and I found my eyes glazing over every 10-12 pages. This is a shame because it's an important, exhaustive book…I think. I'm basing that on as much of it as I've been able to read so far.

I am of the mind that Oswald did act alone, that the single-bullet theory is solid, that Jack Ruby was exactly what Jack Ruby seemed to be, that there was no squadron of Cuban marksmen on the grassy knoll, etc. Once upon a time, I did not believe this and thought other, craftier forces had done the deed. I read many a work that claimed this or that, and even attended a small convention of the kind of folks who write such books. Continued exposure to the "buffs," as many call themselves, drove me back towards the official answer, not because it was official but because it was the only one that made any sense at all to me. The more I've read about it, the more convinced I've become.

Bugliosi spends much of his book demolishing some of those alternate theories. I met Bugliosi a few years back and we talked about the fact that there are 8,000 versions out there of who killed JFK and how…but none of them involve two or three people. You have the scenario that it was just Oswald and then all the rest involve hundreds of co-conspirators, all of whom have done a great job keeping mum about some pretty incredible things they did, like stealing Kennedy's body for surgical alteration before the autopsy or — and this may be my favorite — bringing in and then artfully removing phony trees that were placed on the grassy knoll to hide additional shooters. Without anyone noticing.

You may not want to tackle this book and I couldn't blame you if you didn't. Between the thick spine and the thin type, it can be rough going though I intend to keep trying in spurts. This also means wading through a frequent feature of any Vince Bugliosi book, which is the frequent reference to what a great prosecutor and investigator Vince Bugliosi is. The man's very smart and I agree with just about all his conclusions in as much of his book as I've been able to manage to date. I just wish he'd tone down the self-approbation, if only because without it, he might have gotten the thing down to a trim 1200 or so pages. Just for comparison, my copy of The Warren Commission Report is a little under 900 with a much larger and more legible typeface.

Here are two commercials produced by the Jay Ward studio, both for cereals I never ate — Sugar Jets and Wheat Hearts. I'm not even sure they were sold in local markets…because I was once of an age where if Bullwinkle J. Moose told me to eat Sugar Jets, I'd have been eating Sugar Jets. Anyway, here are the spots. The voices of Bullwinkle and Mr. Peabody are from Bill Scott, the voice of Rocky is June Foray and the voice of Sherman is Walter Tetley.

Steve Billnitzer writes…

Not sure exactly why you're pointing out, however accurately, that Ron Paul and the other so-called "second tier" presidential candidates won't carry a single state in the 2008 presidential elections. Is the message that we should switch our support from someone who may represent our positions but has no chance of winning to a candidate with good odds but whose positions we deplore?

Though I'm aware of the (let's call it) "Ralph Nader effect" on the 2000 elections, I could never sanction with my vote or otherwise any candidate who opposes civil rights to the extent of the Republicans or property rights to the extent of the Democrats, even if it means the greater of two evils winds up in the White House, a la the current occupant. Morally, I believe it's worse to vote strategically than to vote your conscience.

Still curious, though: What prompted the unreferenced item?

Just watching a story on MSNBC (I think it was) that showed Ron Paul mobbed by supporters and made it sound like he has a huge groundswell of support. The guy's still polling at around 2% in polls with a margin of error of 3% so I thought the piece was misleading. One of the many downsides of this long, long primary season is that reporters have to gin up a lot of stories where there aren't any. In Paul's case, I think it's great that he's out there, saying things that will never pass the lips of anyone who thinks they have a shot at getting elected. But let's not pretend he's going anywhere. What little support he has is mostly for representing "None of the above."

I would never suggest anyone vote for a candidate whose positions they deplored. On the other hand, there's something to be said for the lesser of two evils. There'd better be because that seems to be all I can do. I'd love to vote my conscience but I haven't seen it on any ballot. Maybe I should put it down as a write-in vote.

BBC Radio 4 is doing a series of shows called U.S. Comics Confidential that profile/interview great American comedians more in the area of serious biography than entertainment. I think this link will allow you to listen to an excellent 30-minute broadcast about Jonathan Winters discussing, among other things, his bi-polar disposition. The link may not work forever so don't delay. The next broadcast, which is June 28, will be about Phyllis Diller and I'll try to link to that once it's online.

Last night, I posted this item with a photo from a new book about Chevy Chase. The photo, taken allegedly at a 1989 fund-raising event, identified a man with Chevy Chase as Marty Feldman. I asked, "What is wrong with this picture?"

As over 200 of you so far have noted, it is not Marty Feldman in the photo. It is Marty Ingels. It would have been difficult for Marty Feldman to show up at a 1989 fund-raising event since he died in 1982. (He was killed by the famed cartoonist Sergio Aragonés but that's another story.)

Of the 200, about 75 missed the headline on my posting and seemed to think I didn't know that was Marty Ingels. Of course I know it's Marty Ingels, who is probably best known for, in no particular order: Being married to Shirley Jones, appearing on The Dick Van Dyke Show, voicing the cartoon character of Pac-Man, appearing at various Hollywood-related functions, and starring in the 1962 situation comedy, I'm Dickens, He's Fenster. He was Fenster.

That was a very funny series which, alas, has not been rerun much. A DVD release is said to be imminent but I've yet to see an official announcement. When it does come out, you may be pleasantly surprised as to how good it was. I saw one recently…and while a lot of my once-favorite shows wither against the Test o' Time, this one did not disappoint at all. I still think someone is missing a big opportunity by not starting The Largely-Forgotten Sitcom Channel and programming shows like that and He and She and Car 54 and Captain Nice and The Governor and J.J. and The Danny Thomas Show. (I'm told that some of the major companies have tied up the rights to enough of those shows to prevent an independent from doing this. What I don't know is why those major companies don't do it. Yes, the demographics might skew old…but there's a place on cable for that. The folks who make Rascal Scooters have to advertise somewhere.)

Above are the covers to the two issues Dell Comics put out of I'm Dickens, He's Fenster in funnybook form. If I had more time, I would have photoshopped Marty Feldman into one of them.

Longtime followers of this here blog will recall discussions of Otto Preminger's utterly gonzo 1968 movie, Skidoo, which starred (to their eternal shame) Jackie Gleason, Mickey Rooney, Peter Lawford, Carol Channing, Frankie Avalon, most of the actors who played recurring villains on Batman, George Raft and — in his final screen appearance — Groucho Marx in the role of God. I will not claim this movie is good or bad or even that it's so bad it's good. It's just very, very strange. To watch it is to have your jaw at half-mast and to wonder aloud, "What the hell were they thinking?"

Skidoo has never been released officially on home video. Bootlegs abound but the Preminger Estate, which apparently controls the rights, seems to be trying to salvage a little of Otto's reputation by denying it a formal release. It is still eligible for theatrical exhibition however, and those of you in Los Angeles will have two opportunities next month to view it in 35mm on a big screen and with a live audience that will doubtlessly replicate the best scene in The Producers. It's all part of The Mods & Rockers Film Festival which ricochets between the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood and the Aero Theater in Santa Monica. As you'll see, they're showing a lot of odd movies. Skidoo is July 14 at the Egyptian and then on July 29, it's part of a double-bill at the Aero along with The Party, starring Peter Sellers. Blake Edwards, who directed The Party, will be present for that event.

As it happens, I won't be able to attend either screening but if you do, I'd welcome a report…especially on the audience response. My thanks to Peter Avellino, Scott Lovrine and Will Harris, all of whom wrote to alert me to this rare opportunity.

Wait a minute. What's that you say? You can't believe Skidoo is as bizarre as I say? Then just watch this scene — in which Jackie Gleason takes an L.S.D. trip — and tell me that again. This'll teach you not to doubt me.

One thing to remember when you hear Ron Paul or any of these "new, different" candidates for the presidency speaking and being mobbed by admirers and rising all the way from 1% in the polls to 2%…

These people are going to get the same number of electoral votes as you.

Douglas Wolk has an essay up at Salon about "graphic novels" (as opposed to "comic books") that's in the category of "I'm glad he wrote this so I don't have to."

Another article I hope someone will write so I don't have to is about how the word "comics" is evolving, as a Mr. Jack Kirby always predicted it would. Jack always said it would transcend things printed on paper and become a term for an entire approach to fiction and communication. Movies would be comics and vice-versa, he said. For me, the Comic-Con International has become a stark example of this. So many things in that exhibit hall — not only movies but games and Internet projects and multimedia presentations — are "comics" by association and lineage. Yes, the convention has expanded amazingly over the years…but so has the world of "comics."